Are You Writing Your Family History As Baggage or As Luggage?

The Conversation Continues, Part 3

Photo by the NY Public Library on Unsplash

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Hi Everyone,

This is the third installment of my mid-week series, The Conversation Continues: Reflections on my evening with authors Percival Everett and David Mas Masumoto.

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If you’re a paid subscriber and you missed the first two installments of “The Conversation Continues”, you can read them here:

Where Does Writing Fit in Your Hierarchy of Needs?

Wake Up to The Code-Switching In Your Written World

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At one point during my evening with Percival and Mas, I read out the following passage from Mas’s memoir Secret Harvests , which deeply resonated with me:

“WE ARE BONDED BY A SHARED BAGGAGE OF HISTORY WE CANNOT ESCAPE; MANY WILL PRESS ON AND CARRY THIS BURDEN. WE HAVE AN ATTACHMENT TO THE DREAMS OF OUR IMMIGRANT PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS YET SENSE THEY ARE DESTINED TO BE BROKEN. A NEW PRECARIOUSNESS SLIPS INTO OUR LIVES. OUR PLANS AND HOPES ENDURE ALONGSIDE THE FANTASY OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.”

I felt this passage spoke to an essential tension that animates the work of both these writers. For Mas, the history of his Japanese-American family’s persecution and internment during WWII runs indelibly through the stories he tells of forbearance and deep love for the land and fruit (both literal and metaphoric) of America. For Percival, the “fantasy of what might have been” is explicitly what he set out to write in James, his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s companion, the fugitive slave Jim/James.

Our conversation naturally focused on these two books, but I found this notion of “baggage of history” rolling around in my head afterwards. All of my own work has been deeply seated in my own family’s history, but only recently have I begun to recognize this history as “baggage.” Before, if asked, I’d have qualified it instead as “luggage”. What’s the difference? Well, that’s the subject of this post.

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