As an aspiring audio documentary producer, I’m at the halfway point with this intensive training program in Maine.
For the rest of the semester, we’re required to produce a 7-12 minute piece for our final project. I chose to focus on a Chinese-American family that was based in Portland in the 1920s to 1950s. The matriarch and the center of the story is Toy Len Goon, a widowed mother of eight who ran a hand laundry business and managed to send her children off to prestigious universities. She ended up winning American Mother of the Year in 1952.
Toy passed away in 1993, so I interviewed her daughter and granddaughters who are living in the Portland area. Her daughter conjured vivid memories of how she grew up in the hand laundry, with her and her family’s bedrooms on the top floors and the partitioned from the laundry business. She would play poker with her brothers in the living quarters of the laundry, and how the kids would stop eating Chinese breakfasts in favor of corn flakes and cocoa. The granddaughters, who grew up in Boston, told me equally compelling stories about their grandmother hosting sleepovers every Sunday. She would make coffee from scratch every morning with just a little eggshell to get rid of the grind!
As the family grows and scatters across the country, they return to Toy, whom they view as the start to their American story. Plus, that’s how they connect with each other – they carefully document her story so they can pass it on to future generations. Even Toy’s great-grandchildren, some of whom haven’t met Toy, can tell stories about her because that’s how strong the storytelling tradition lives in this family.
I thought about my own family story, and how little I know about it.
My mom’s dad passed away before I was born. My mom’s mom always lived in India, so I infrequently saw her. My dad’s parents did live in the States, but they were always in Tennessee, where their daughter lived, so I would only see them occasionally. At this point, all my grandparents have passed away.
My older cousins tell stories about my grandparents when they were younger, and they tell stories just like Toy’s grandchildren do. For instance, my dad’s mom was pulled out of school when she would have entered 3rd grade, so taught herself how to read and write in English and Telugu. When I hear a story like that, I’m mostly proud, but a little jealous too. Why wasn’t I born at a time when my grandmother could have told me that? She started losing her memory while I was in middle school when my interest in her stories really started to form.
I’m meeting with my dad’s side of the family for Christmas this year. I may pay for an extra carry-on to bring my field kit so that I can interview my cousins about my grandparents. I think sorting through their memories and creating a storytelling arc would help me learn about them a bit more.