Manila Days
  • Home
  • About
  • Starts and Ends here
  • American mission

epilogue

1/5/2017

Comments

 
Victoria and I took the Spring 1989 semester off from Union Seminary. On our way to India, in Bangkok, I got a letter from my father. It was an ecstatic letter written in a large generous hand.  He had just learned from an East German genealogist with whom he was corresponding that his great grandfather Seyfarth was a helmsman on a merchant ship. 

One hundred years ago, my father wrote, Chinese pirates in the South China Sea had attacked them. They had to winter in Hong Kong. The South China Sea! Where you are now, your ancestors have been before! To my father, who has worked painstakingly to recover the storyline of his East German laboring ancestors, this news held an immense significance.  His own work in Asia had been a return.  

If we track back and out far enough in any of our lives, our stories dispel the illusion of fixed boundaries, fixed national origins. We all create in some ways what Australian aborigines call "song lines", a musical cartography of the land.  By singing the story as they traverse the land, they bring it into being.  By my father's letter, I traveled with a new sense of the a kind of mixed up, mestizo history.  We are always leaving, always coming home.

Comments

    Kerry (Kathryn) Poethig

    We were "fraternal kids", Americans in the Philippines from Magsaysay to Marcos. I thought our story needed elaboration.

    Picture

    Archives

    January 2017
    November 2014
    November 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    September 2012
    February 2012

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Arrival
    Christmas
    Days Of Rage
    Dreams
    Early Years 1957 60
    Exile
    Food
    Fraternal
    Furlough
    High School
    Lesbian
    Malate
    New York
    School Days 1960 67
    Theology
    Trees

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from Jeff Kubina, digipam, Neville10