Once upon a time, you couldn’t tell a story straight.
The problem might be that you began as a poet. That focus on a moment, an image, that impulse to seize a scene and squeeze it dry, or spend days with it under a microscope, or live with it for hours in a vanity mirror, ring light fully on. If it’s not clear by now: you will ride a metaphor into the sunset, on repeat.
The problem might be that you like to play. You like to wander, shake containers up. You walk around genres as if structures were a playground: This slide? This sandbox? This set of bars to climb? This tunnel to hide in?
I say problem because when it comes to writing long-form narrative with a story arc, or an argumentative thread, you flail. Your dissertation suffered from this lack of storytelling stamina, too: each chapter made of an examination of small analytical moments, few of the moments or analyses leading to a larger point.
The problems are doubled, quadrupled, when it comes to writing your memoir. A memoir that includes multiple timelines, multiple narrative arcs, multiple main characters—or perhaps just two: you and your dad.
You are, improbably, a brown girl Goldilocks, lost in the woods, trying to find the right structure for a story that’s never been told quite the way that you want to hear it.
He died when you were ten years old. When he was ten years old, he was a Japanese American boy during World War II. Incarcerated with his five siblings and parents along with more than 125,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and Hawai’i for being Japanese. About 20 years after the war ends, he will write the story of his imprisonment. He will type close to 300 pages of a memoir that he’ll never be able to publish, despite repeated attempts. He is writing and trying to publish his story in a darkened theater.
There are very few other Japanese Americans telling their wartime stories to the public in the 1960s. Most have buried their concentration camp stories in attics and basements and trash cans and boxes. Most said nothing and kept everything, leaving their children to wonder about remnants—the origins of a bird made from dried-up lake bed shells, or a black-and-white photograph taken in the desert of people standing in front of the entrance to a tar paper barrack.
When he dies in 1984, a librarian at a public university, he leaves a typed manuscript. Your mother stores it for decades and finally brings it to you when you are a professor. During a long year of appeals and arbitrations as you are losing that job, you think about his book. You know you want to honor his story and bring it to the public. You want to hear his voice again. Eventually, you travel with your family and other descendants and community members on a pilgrimage to the site of their incarceration in Northern California: Tule Lake.
But now you have a problem: you can’t tell a story straight.
When you set out on your journey to write your story and your father’s you wander into a deep green forest, where you remain for almost fifteen years. You are, improbably, a brown girl Goldilocks, lost in the woods, trying to find the right structure for a story that’s never been told quite the way that you want to hear it.
A fairy tale might be the way you write the story of structuring this book.
*
Even though this is a grief story about losing your father, about losing your job, about feeling the larger collective losses of your community, you reject the five stages of grief structure. Too many people have used it already, and you haven’t experienced grief in clearly defined and linear stages. It’s said that even the creator of these stages, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, cautioned against linear thinking.
You try another recognizable, time-honored container: the quest narrative. The pilgrimage journey you undertake already has elements of the quest built in: departure, arrival, return. Maybe you can thread in flashbacks along the way but keep the “real time” clock of the narrative moving forward.
At some point you realize that the arcs of the hero’s/heroine’s journey and the five stages of grief echo each other. You try plugging in story beats dutifully, but it becomes a boring series of “and then”s. The book is a mess of vignettes, a carousel of slides that’s been overturned.
*
Your book club is reading The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It has multiple timelines and plots. Before long, you think about a braided narrative. You admire how Atwood advances one narrative by using three. One of the tricks, it seems, is to show how each strand starts to integrate with the others: a side character appearing in one strand might be the main character in another. The beauty and skill of the braid is in the twists where the strands come together.
Note: you, of course, are no Margaret Atwood.
You don’t know if you should include your dad’s full book in your own. You’re still committed to telling his story, but you want it to be a dialogue with his book, an intergenerational conversation. You try to tell the story in three threads. You split yourself into three parts: the ten-year-old daughter who lost her father; the descendant who rereads his manuscript; the writer who has lost her teaching job and must find a new career. You become so enamored with this concept, and you’re so used to compartmentalization, that you write a one-act play between the three strands. The upshot is this exchange:
Descendant (yelling): How can we not include the whole book in here?!
Daughter: You want the book to be a museum. Well, a museum is only as alive as the people who visit it. And I knew him best. And I know this: my dad would not want me to make my story small.
Note: you are not a playwright, either.
You start to think, maybe a symphony would be a better container, labeling each larger section of the book as a “movement.” Your husband’s a composer, after all. But you are clear on one thing: the title pages of each section will essentially establish a certain tone or play a certain chord for the reader that resonates for the rest of the section.
At this point the book is still filled with vignettes, patchworked together loosely, but it’s too much.
*
The first hundred pages of the book are finished enough to land you coagents and a publisher. They start to look at the manuscript, ask for more pages. With your breath held, you give them the rest of the patchworked book. The agents have questions and notes and edits. The editors at your press are enthusiastic, and they also make suggestions. One of the strands of the braid, they suggest, the teacher-to-writer strand, should come out.
You realize that you are not a little brown girl Goldilocks. You are the baby bear, and this is your porridge, this is your bed. This is your home. Everything is just right.
You wrestle with this suggestion for a little while. You had struggled with this strand anyway, wondering if it should go with the rest. Ultimately you agree to cut the strand, about 20,000 words. You comb through the manuscript—“movements” now taken apart. What’s left?
A couple of months of remixing the vignettes, deciding what should stay. Then you’re on a co-writing call with two other Filipina American writers. One of them is also an editor. You lament the state of your book, whose structure seems to have eluded you once again. The editor thinks for a minute and asks, “How does the book want to be structured?” You feel that question in your chest, and your hand flies up to press into your heart. “It wants to be a library,” you say. Few things in your life have felt this certain.
You look at the sections that are left in the book, and you retitle everything in just a few minutes. It is a case of the map finding its geography, not the other way around. Your dad was a librarian. You think about sections in your hometown public library, add on imaginary sections from a research library.
Sections that contain childhood memories are “Children’s Room.”
Sections that contain your father’s book you call “Archives.”
Sections that describe your pilgrimage trip are “Travel.”
To pay homage to the analog library of your childhood, you call a section with questions “Card Catalog.”
You think about what it feels like to walk into a library with a question and where you begin: “Reference.” The piece that clicks satisfyingly into place is where you end, where the book ends. The place where you check out your books, the place where your dad was a supervising librarian: “Circulation.”
Not too hot, not too cold, not too big, not too small. You realize that you are not a little brown girl Goldilocks. You are the baby bear, and this is your porridge, this is your bed. This is your home. Everything is just right.
____________________________
A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake by Tamiko Nimura is available from University of Washington Press.
Leave a Reply