Love Imagined E-Book

Sherry Quan Lee

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 186

Beschreibung

Love Imagined is an American woman's unique struggle for identity.
"Joining the long history of women of color fighting to claim literary space to tell our stories, Sherry Quan Lee shares her truth with fierce courage and strength in Love Imagined. ... Quan Lee crafts a riveting tale of Minnesota life set within the backdrop of racial segregation, the Cold War, the sexual revolution while navigating it all through the lens of her multi-layered identities. A true demonstration of the power of an intersectional perspective."
--Kandace Creel Falcon, Ph.D., Director of Women's and Gender Studies, Minnesota State University, Moorhead
"Love Imagined: this fascinating, delightful, important book. This imagining love, this longing for love. This poverty of No Love, this persistent racism, sexism, classism, ageism. The pain these evils cause the soul...This is an important document of a mixed-race contemporary woman, a memoir about her family lineages back to slavery, back to China, back to early Minneapolis, and about the struggle of finding herself in all of these."
--Sharon Doubiago, author of My Father's Love
"When I read Sherry's story [Love Imagined], I recognized feelings and meanings that mirrored mine. I felt a sense of release, an exhale, and I knew I could be understood by her in a way that some of my family and friends are unable to grasp, through no fault of their own. It's the Mixed experience. Sherry Lee's voice, her story, will no doubt touch and heal many who read it."
--Lola Osunkoya, MA Founder of Neither/Both LLC, Mixed-Race Community Building and Counseling
BIO002000 Biography & Autobiography: Cultural Heritage
SOC028000 Social Science: Women's Studies - General
SOC043000 Social Science: Ethnic Studies - Asian American Studies

Leseprobe

LOVE IMAGINED:

a mixed race memoir

Sherry Quan Lee

Modern History Press

LOVE IMAGINED: a mixed race memoir

Copyright © 2014 by Sherry Quan Lee. All Rights Reserved.

From the Reflections of America Series

2nd Printing - June 2015

Learn more at http://blog.sherryquanlee.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948-

Love imagined : a mixed race memoir / by Sherry Quan Lee.

pages cm. -- (World voices)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61599-233-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61599-234-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61599-235-5 (ebook)

1. Lee, Sherry Quan, 1948- 2. Poets, American--Biography. 3. Racially mixed people--United States--Biography. I. Title.

PS3562.E3644Z46 2014

811’.54--dc23

[B]

2014011837

Modern History Press is an imprint of

Loving Healing Press

5145 Pontiac Trail

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

USA

Tollfree (USA/CAN): 888-761-6268

Fax: [phone]

[email protected]

www.ModernHistoryPress.com

Distributed by Ingram Book Group (USA/CAN), Bertrams Books (UK/EU).

Praise for Love Imagined: a mixed race memoir

Love Imagined: this fascinating, delightful, important book. This imagining love, this longing for love. This poverty of No Love, this persistent racism, sexism, classism, ageism. The pain these evils cause the soul. Sherry Lee “tiptoe[s] between a poverty of and a generosity of spirit,” is a spirit of love that survives and infuses everything, even the doubts, fear and shame. This is an important document of a mixed-race contemporary woman, a memoir about her family lineages back to slavery, back to China, back to early Minneapolis, and about the struggle of finding herself in all of these.

“Who am I? I’m the great-grandchild of Black female slaves and white men. I’m the great American Narrative.” And she’s the daughter of a man native to China. “I can easily say I am Black, just as I can easily say I am Asian… Rarely do I say I’m white, but genetically and culturally I am that too…” “I am each of these, yet all of these.” “Racism and its dangers caused my mother to pass for white. I refuse to lie, but history has made it safer for me not to.” Most simply I love reading this sassy, serious woman. Sherry Quan Lee is love imagined.

Sharon Doubiago, Hard Country, The Book of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Love on the Streets, My Father’s Love, etc.

To borrow a word from Toni Morrison, Sherry Quan Lee’s beautiful and urgent book is an act of sovereignty. Transgressing through and disrupting multiple margins and in/visibilities, Quan Lee’s words, especially the heartbreaking repetition of the word Shame, come searing through, page after page. This book is a voice in the wilderness. Quan Lee’s bold, unapologetic, intimate, wise voice is an essential one.

Sun Yung Shin, author of Rough, and Savage and Skirt Full of Black.

In Love Imagined Sherry Quan Lee explores her family’s mixed racial heritage and her own life with great courage and compelling honesty. She makes her deeply moving story our story as a country. She reveals her past as our past. This is an important and essential book.

David Mura, author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire,The Last Incantations, etc.

Love Imagined is an important book because we, as Mixed-Race people (and the people who love us!) need to hear these stories. Because we are inherently not like the people from whom we came, it is vitally important that we connect and share our stories with one another. To be understood in an effortless way. When I read Sherry’s story, I recognized feelings and meanings that mirrored mine. I felt a sense of release, an exhale, and I knew I could be understood by her in a way that some of my family and friends are unable to grasp, through no fault of their own. It’s the Mixed experience. Sherry Lee’s voice, her story, will no doubt touch and heal many who read it.

Lola Osunkoya

MA in Adlerian Counseling and Psychotherapy

Founder of Neither/Both LLC

Mixed-Race Community Building and Counseling

Joining the long history of women of color fighting to claim literary space to tell our stories, Sherry Quan Lee shares her truth with fierce courage and strength in Love Imagined. Weaving together the impact of geographic space, and a rich sense of temporal realities through her lens as a mixed-race, Chinese, Black woman, Quan Lee crafts a riveting tale of Minnesota life set within the backdrop of racial segregation, the Cold War, the sexual revolution while navigating it all through the lens of her multi-layered identities. A true demonstration of the power of an intersectional perspective, Quan Lee’s memoir braids together the fragments of racialized, gendered, and sexual identities. In the spirit of the foremothers and those who will continue behind, through her poetic frame; a stirring tale that asks us to think about our assumptions and recognize the social constructs that shape and confine us all.

Kandace Creel Falcón, Ph.D.

Director of Women’s and Gender Studies

Minnesota State University Moorhead

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.

–The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Dedicated to my cousin, Jay Sandvik

Contents

Disclaimer

Foreword

Introduction

Acknowledgements

South Scandinavian Minneapolis

North Minneapolis

The Personal is Political

Write About Your Chinese Father

Mother (1913-1999)

God the Father

If You Want to Sing, Open Your Mouth

Hunger

Puberty: Under the Sheets

Aha! She’s Not White

Mama’s Mother Was a Brown Skinned Girl of Fifteen...

HAIR: not about the hair, but the color of the skin

A House in the Suburbs and a Two Car Garage, Hallelujah

Sons

LOVE IMAGINED another frog, and another frog

Fear

MENTOR but David Mura will be teaching in the spring

A MASTER’S EDUCATION or because she was a nigger

THE GIRL WHO CRIED UNCLE if it walks like a duck

All of the Above

CONSTIPATION Beauty and the Beast(s)

Nomad No More

Fractions

Present Tense

I DON’T UNDERSTAND, he says

Life After Death

Humility

Afterword

Acknowledgements for Permission

About the Author

STUDY GUIDE: things to consider

Index

Disclaimer

Love Imagined is memoir. It is the truth of my life as I remember it; others may remember it differently, but this is my story, my identity—my life influenced by people and places and my own conscious and unconscious relationship to historical events.

Family members and others named in Love Imagined have chosen to read it or not; various individuals have given verbal permission to include stories that involve them and to use their names or not.

I have changed or used generic names as needed for privacy. Also, because I write under a last name different from any of my siblings or children or ex-husbands, privacy is respected as much as possible. Sister is often used generically to respect the identity of my three older sisters. I have only one brother.

Love Imagined is but a blip in a lifetime of skirmishes looking for love. Much has been deleted, much added, more deleted, more added. It is difficult to be succinct, to write memoir versus autobiography. Memoir is more than memory; it’s memory unleashed, memory named, memory diagnosed, memory organized and reorganized—and brought to healthy conclusions.

I am a poet; this is my first attempt to write book-length prose; an attempt to reveal my story in depth, leaving less to metaphor, and to the imagination. Yet, to imagine is what my story strives to do, to see beyond what was and what is—not only to witness, but to attempt to decipher.

Foreword

In Love Imagined, Sherry Lee very openly and courageously tells her story. Yet only some of us will understand on a base level how courageous an act this is. In my personal experience as a Biracial woman, through my research, and in my experience working in the mental health field, I’ve come to understand how lonely and isolating an experience it can be to grow up as a Mixed-Race person. We are inherently not like our mother or father, and can have completely different phenotypes and experiences of race than our siblings. Depending on a number of factors—the attitudes about race of our family members and friends, our childhood and later life experiences, the types of racism and micro aggressions we experience, and how the people we care about react to us—the Mixed experience can fall anywhere on the range of positive to negative, and can include large portions of silent shame.

Sherry Lee does a beautiful job of bringing her experience to life. She paints a colorful, detailed, and poetic picture of her life that is brutally honest. She invites the reader in to experience how she made sense of her life, and the ways that shame began to permeate her sense of identity. Feelings of shame mixed with deep desire for love and acceptance mixed with a courageous, imaginative, persevering spirit are all intertwined in this beautiful story. A story that ultimately illustrates a road to self-acceptance.

Love Imagined is an important book because we, as Mixed-Race people (and the people who love us!) need to hear these stories. Because we are inherently not like the people from whom we came, it is vitally important that we connect and share our stories with one another. To be understood in an effortless way. When I read Sherry’s story, I recognized feelings and meanings that mirrored mine. I felt a sense of release, an exhale, and I knew I could be understood by her in a way that some of my family and friends are unable to grasp, through no fault of their own. It’s the Mixed experience. Sherry Lee’s voice, her story, will no doubt touch and heal many who read it.

Lola Osunkoya

MA in Adlerian Counseling and Psychotherapy

Founder of Neither/Both LLC

Mixed-Race Community Building and Counseling

Introduction

Who am I? Who do I think I am? Am I the only real liar in my family? Am I the only one who didn’t understand my mother’s warning, “don’t go near the water, you might drown”? Am I merely the white girl I was culturally raised to be?

Love Imagined is a glimpse into my life. It is my story, not the story of my mother, my father, my siblings, or of relatives known or unknown. However my story makes mention of stories that belong to others where needed because lives and history intersect.

My story is unique, just as your story is unique. Even though we may have DNA alike or similar to someone else, many factors affect who we are such as who we know, where we live, our education, our politics, our religion, whether we have children or not, what age we are, our gender, our sexuality, and what color our skin is.

Thus, as your read Love Imagined be prepared to set aside your prejudices. Be prepared to understand that memoir is not myth, but truth. If you think, as you read, I am a “tragic mulatto,” know that I am not. My life is not tragic. Traumatic at times certainly, but well-lived, and no regrets.

“Tragic mulatto” is a literary myth that goes back to slavery times. It refers to mixed-race Black and white people, especially women, who are unable to fit into society because whites don’t want them and Blacks don’t want them--nobody wants them--but, truly, they were desired, and often raped. According to myth, many became despondent and some attempted suicide.

Mulatto is a derogatory term. I am not mulatto (I am not a mule, not the child of a horse and a donkey). I detest labels, yet sometimes we are forced to self-identify. I have used biracial, mixed-race, African American, Black, Chinese, Chinese and Black, and Other; as well as lesbian, bisexual—fem; as well as mother, wife, divorced, single; as well as mother-in-law, and grandmother; as well as writer, teacher, mentor. My identity is a wealth of adjectives and nouns claiming who I am.

Yes, it’s true, I have been rejected by suitors because of their parents’ prejudices, and or their own—or I’ve rejected them. And, yes, I have been despondent. And, yes, I have attempted suicide. However, I am more than myth. I have never kept my identity a secret, except when my mother told me I had to, and that was before I even understood what my identity was. I have challenged myth by acting and reacting, by writing and speaking. However, I am not fiction, perhaps not even literature. Perhaps I am not even a writer. But, I have a story to tell. And, when the suffering is unbearable, and I do suffer (who doesn’t), I have many options and allies to help me get through it. The truth is I am still alive.

Whites like me, Asians like me, Blacks like me; I am each of these, yet all of these. I can easily say I am Black, just as I can easily say I am Asian without having to say I am Black and Asian, because I am. Rarely do I say I’m white, but genetically and culturally I am that too. But the construct of race and the one-drop rule relegated me to Black, even though one could argue that my father is more Chinese than my mother is Black, and if there weren’t that one-drop rule, that would be true.

Racism and its dangers caused my mother to pass for white. I refuse to lie, but recent history has made it safer for me not to.

Acknowledgements

A lifetime of thanks to the many people who have contributed, or will contribute, to my understanding of who I am, some whom I’ve never met including authors and singers who have influenced me. Some of you have come in and out of my life so quickly, a whisper, a gentle breeze; others have been faithful friends for decades. You are all remembered and appreciated. Thank you for contributing to my survival.

Thank you Victor R. Volkman, publisher, for continuing to have faith in me, even as I ventured into prose. Sharon Doubiago, editor, your enthusiasm for Love Imagined from its infancy, and throughout its growth pains, has been a blessing; thank you so much. I especially appreciate that you believed in my story, my American narrative, and insisted I keep writing.

Thanks to Sun Yung Shin and Lori Young-Williams for taking the time out of your busy professional and personal lives to read and comment on Love Imagined. Charissa Uemura, thanks for supporting me over the years; thank you for taking photos of me and reformatting photographs from my past—and thanks for sharing stories and cinnamon rolls over the years. Patricia Holter Ronken, how you surprised me; thank you for volunteering to do a final copy edit the day the final manuscript was due, but most of all thank you for remembering stories from our childhood that I didn’t remember.

Thank you Jay Sandvik (my cousin, my mother’s sister’s son), your insistence that I write my story, even though or maybe because it intersects with your story, has kept me writing, especially in times of my most agonizing uncertainty. Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on several drafts of Love Imagined over the years, and filling in blanks about our mothers’ family.

And to my cousin’s daughter, I will be ever grateful for your encouraging words that have given me reason to keep on writing over the years despite my anxiety and fears:

I also extend thanks to my siblings and my sons who may have had concerns about the personal nature of Love Imagined, but didn’t ask me to stop writing. I tried to keep my story my story, but you are family, there’s no denying it.

Thank you Mother for all you gave and gave up. The tough choices you made to keep your children safe.

Aunt Grace, thank you for the legacy you left me of your words in poetry and prose. Father, thank you for your legacy, your handwritten journal given to me a few months before you died. Without the written work of family, my story would be greatly left to imagination, as is love.

South Scandinavian Minneapolis

The bones of Chinese girls’ feet, as young as two years old, were broken and bound in lengths of cloth to stop their growth. Three-inch feet were deemed sexy, thus poor women with lotus feet could possibly marry into a wealthy family.

The practice of footbinding ended in 1949 (although it had been outlawed as early as 1912), the year the People’s Republic of China was founded by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China—I was one year old.

Once upon a very long time ago there was a princess, Quan Lee, born 1948. She was no ordinary princess. Her kingdom was a house on a hill with a white picket fence in South Scandinavian Minneapolis. She lived in a world of make believe.

I am dressed in Chinese silk pajamas with tiny frog closures. The Mandarin collar is choking my smile. I am looking away from the camera. Down the street. Past the Lutheran church. Past the homes of the little blonde girls who attend the Lutheran church Sunday school with me. Past the family I don’t know. The family that does not recognize me. My family.

–Black White Chinese Women Got the Beat, performance by Sherry Quan Lee and Lori Young-Williams

She was Cinderella awaiting her prince. She loved her shoes. She sang to them. Hugged them. Loved them. Loved every pair of fake Capezio flats her dollar a week allowance allowed her to buy. Maybe it was the black patent leather shoes her mother, raising her on welfare, managed to buy for her every Easter that began her obsession for pretty footwear. Maybe she knew that beauty was bound in binding a young girl’s feet, that somehow history had whispered to her it’s always about finding the prince, no matter how painful the journey, no matter how many pairs of shoes it would take.

Recently my friend Carolyn challenged me about my use of the term South Scandinavian Minneapolis, where I grew up. As a writer, I know it’s important to be specific. Specifically, I grew up in a house on a hill on 26th Avenue and 39th Street, two blocks west of Roosevelt High School, the Roosevelt Public Library, Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, The Ritz Grocery Store, and Herman’s grocery store.

East of Roosevelt High School, on Hiawatha Avenue, was Beek’s, “the king of pizza.” South of Roosevelt High School was Scott’s Pharmacy. A couple blocks farther south is Lake Hiawatha Park.

North and west of where I lived was Folwell Junior High School. My sister, various neighborhood friends, and I walked the mile to school every day even in frigid Minnesota weather. On the way home from school we would pass the Nile Theater on 23rd Avenue, then walk down 38th Street where we sometimes stopped at the soda fountain in the Nile Pharmacy, or stopped at Little Tony’s Italian Restaurant for french fries and a cherry coke. Sometimes we ran past the shoe shop to Harper’s Variety Store on the corner to buy trading cards.

Five blocks west of where I lived was Miles Standish Elementary School. We walked to school, home for lunch, back to school, and home again. Two blocks west of Standish is Sibley Park where, in junior high school, we went to the Friday night dances (my sister was Sibley Park Snow Queen one year; I was never a queen, only a wallflower).

According to the City of Minneapolis I lived in the Standish Neighborhood:

The Standish neighborhood on Minneapolis’ south side, is bound on the north by 36th Street, on the east by Hiawatha Avenue, on the south by 42nd and 43rd streets and on the west by Cedar Avenue. This neighborhood was named after an area elementary school, which had been called Miles Standish after a work by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The area was considered the outskirts of the city until immigrants, mostly Swedish and Norwegian, began building their homes here early in the 1900s.

My grandparents and my mother and her siblings grew up east of where I grew up, bordering the Longfellow neighborhood on 25th Street, near Snelling Avenue (not the Snelling Avenue in St. Paul). From what I know they attended Longfellow grade school. The railroads in the area provided employment for Black men; Grandpa was a porter for one of the railroad lines running into Chicago.

Aunt Grace wrote: “We did not live in a Black ghetto. Our home was the lower left apartment on East 25th Street. It was rented, at that time, to colored tenants only.” She also wrote that her mama and papa were “highly respected by [their] white neighbors. The only trouble that I can remember, we had at the hands of the Black people in the tenement.” This was because a neighbor had told their friends they were “passing for white.” They weren’t. But later, my mother and her children living in South Scandinavian Minneapolis, were.

My friend, Carolyn, was right. Carolyn, a Black woman, lived in South Minneapolis too. She went to Central High School. My cousin, both parents Black, went to Central High School. Carolyn had a crush on my cousin. (Other cousins went to North High School.)

My friend, Carolyn, my Aunt Marion (my mother’s youngest sister) and her son (my cousin), lived in South Minneapolis, but they lived with Black folk, unlike me who lived east of whatever line divided us.

I didn’t know much about geography when I was little, but I did know my mother’s family could only visit at night, when it was dark, and our neighbors couldn’t see them.

MPLS Area Map by Andy Sturdevant

North Minneapolis