From Manifest to Manifesto

A funny video of two dogs eating at a restaurant on YouTube started it all. I sent the link to my son, Ren, who forwarded it to his friend, Mark. This was Mark’s reply and the attachment.

From: Mark
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 4:22 AM
To: Ren
Subject: passenger list
Hi Ren -- I noticed that it was your mother that sent the dog movie link to you. Somehow this year, I've been doing a lot of ancestry tracing on the web. For instance, I was able to find out the long lost names of my great grandfather and family in Hawaii. So, I put your mother's name into the site, and came up with this -- a passenger list on a boat for a 12 year old named Tung Yeh sailing from Bombay landing in Los Angeles on January 30, 1945 (her name is second from the bottom)...

Yeh Edna, 37 years 9 months, female, married, housewife, able to read English&Chinese, write yes, nationality Chinese, race Chinese, bornTientsien, visa V34P2891 issued Chungking 11/3/44, last permanent residence Chungking, China

Yeh Max, 7yrs 5 months, male, single, student, able to read Chinese, write yes, nationality Chinese, race Chinese, born Peking, visa V34 R2891 issued Chungking 11/3/44, last permanent residence Chungking, China

Yeh Tung, 12 yrs 3months, female, single, student, able to read Chinese&English, write yes, nationality Chinese,race Chinese,born Peking,visa R2891V34,issued Chungking 11/3/44,last permanent residence Chungking, China

Ren replied to Mark’s email and its attachment with

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Ren wrote:
This is very cool.   Her brother max and mom are on this too…
Ren

It’s hard to explain why it was such a thrill to zoom into that marked up, old document– the Manifest of the USS General George Marshall Randall, the Alien Passenger List and see there at the bottom of the page our names. As if it, somehow, validated our existence.

On top of that, there was the matter of its timing: when Ren’s email arrived on my computer I happened to have been translating the diary that I had written on that very voyage.

Slowly and sporadically I was translating the childish characters scrawled sixty six years ago on official US Naval Stationery–sometimes with the help of a Chinese-English Dictionary. How odd to have to use a dictionary to help me decipher my twelve year old self. I had started to write the diary when our ship, in its long loop south to avoid the fighting in the Pacific, stopped in Australia. Eight days later I quit which was pretty typical of all the diaries I had ever kept. I ‘d always been far too busy living to stop and record it.

Now at the end of my seventies, running out of excuses, out of time, I have finally committed to writing about my life. There is so much material, I should have been scrambling to get it all down, come what may.  Instead I dawdled, falling into one distraction after another.

Truth was, the thought of putting in writing stories that I have already told innumerable times of a life already lived was worse than boring, it spooked me– too much like writing my own obituary.

Then came the timely Alien Passenger List, ricocheting from dog video to my son’s old college roommate’s ancestry research to my desktop. This is the kind of madcap sequence that gets my attention. Serendipity sprung me out of the trap of my own deadly constructions, showing me a pattern quite different than the one I was committed to.

The appearance of the Alien Passenger List informs me that stories are still happening.  Somehow I have, once more, blundered into the right place at the right time. The memoir project is wiggling again and flashing its quirky but familiar colors. It’s alive with philosophy. I’m looking forward to looking back. And all because two dogs ate at a restaurant.

 

http://youtubehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwlMVYqMu4?rel=0&w=560&h=315

Thanks to Kristian Septimius Krogh for video.