Why Write Your Family’s Story

For much of my childhood in the 1980s, my mother served up Chinese fast food from a stand in a second-rate suburban mall. Her customers were mostly teens from the local high school and elderly regulars who mall-walked throughout winter, which, in Calgary, lasts about five months out of the year. ( 5 Tips on Writing From Your Own Family History .) I’m sure that to those customers, she was unremarkable and maybe even invisible. But as her daughter, I knew what she had gone through to get there—the extraordinary circumstances that had brought her to this ordinary life—and it bothered me that nobody else could appreciate her strength and bravery. You see, my mother came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China, which had started in the 1960s and created chaos across that country. A city kid with a high-school education, she was sent to a commune in the countryside for “re-education” by peasant farmers, forced to labor in rice paddies and sugarcane fields. In 1971, she decided to escape, by making her way to the coast through dense mountain forests, then attempting to swim five miles across Mirs Bay to Hong Kong with only a basketball to stay afloat. It pained me to think that her story might go unknown, that strangers would only ever see her as a minimum-wage worker with broken English, and that entire lives could be so easily overlooked. It’s why I became a writer: to tell the stories of ordinary people like my mother. They existed. They struggled. They found in themselves a courage that could not be extinguished. And they survived. Every family’s story is worth telling, whether it’s epic, like my mom’s, or not. And if, like me, you believe that the purpose of great literature is to reveal what it feels like to be a person in the world—how wonderful, bewildering, and devastating life can be—then your family history, however boring it might seem, likely contains the seeds of a story that will be meaningful to others. Do it for those who came before I originally wrote and […]

Click here to view original page at Why Write Your Family’s Story

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.