Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from the essay "Touring Home" by Susan Power (1996 by Susan Power). Passage B is adapted from the memoir Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America by Leslie Chang (1999 by Leslie Chang)

Passage A by Susan Power

My mother tells me stories every day: while she cleans, while she cooks, on our way to library, standing in the checkout line at the supermarket. I like to share her stories with other people and chatter away when I am able to commend adult attention.

“She left the reservation when she was 16 years old,” I tell my audience. Sixteen sounds very old to me, but I always state the number because it seems integral to my recitation. “She had never been on a train before or use a telephone. She left standing Rock to take a job in Chicago so she could help out the family during the War. She was so petrified of the new surroundings, she stayed in her seat all the way from McLaughlin, South Dakota, to Chicago, Illinois, and didn't move once.”

I usually laugh after seeing this because I cannot imagine my mother being afraid of anything. She is so tall, a true Dakota woman; she rises against the sun like a skyscraper, and when I draw her picture in my notebook, she takes up the entire page. She talks politics and attends sit-ins and says what's on her mind.

I am her small shadow and witness. I am the timid daughter who can rage only on paper.

We don't have much money, but Mom takes me from one end of the city to the other, on foot, on buses. I will grow up believing that Chicago belongs to me, because it was given to me by my mother.

Some days we haunt the Art Institute, and my mother pauses before a Picasso. "He did this during his blue period," She tells me.

I squint at the blue man holding a blue guitar. "Was he very sad?" I ask.

"Yes, I think he was." My mother takes my hand and looks away from the painting. I can see a story developing behind her eyes, and I tug on her arm to release the words. She will tell me why Picasso was blue, what his thoughts were as he painted this canvas. She relates anecdotes I will never find in books, never see footnoted in a biography of the master artist. I don't even bother to check these references because I like my mother's version best.

Passage B by Leslie Chang

Water belongs to everyone and to no one. For this reason, I have always had a particular affinity for it, which may strike some as mysterious. Westerners ask me where my parents were born, as though the answer will enable them to glean some knowledge. The answer is Beijing And Louyang. The truth is that this response signifies nothing. The meaningful question would be to ask where my ancestors lived. The answer to that is inland. My father's people came from Wuhan, birthplace of the Chinese republic and the capital of Hubei, that sweltering province sandwiched between Sichuan and Anhui. My mother's father was from inner Mongolia, land of desert and grassy plains.

Yet water calls to me. I remain convinced that I would find peace if I could only have a house by the ocean. I insisted on being married near the sea. This bond, I know, comes from my mother.

She longs for a view more than anything else. Once, staying at a hotel in San Francisco, She insisted on seeing three different rooms before she found one with which she was satisfied. It was on a floor so high it made me dizzy, with a corner window overlooking the bay. Even so, my mother spent most of her time on the bridge linking the elevator bank to our wing. The bridge consisted almost entirely of windows. It offered a view in either direction that was brilliant and blinding. If there had been a chair, she could have sat forever, letting the gold sun and blue sea overwhelm her through the glass.

My mother may have descended from inland people, but they were also nomads. Her father once rode his horse practically the length of China, from Inner Mongolia to Guangzhou, a distance of some twelve hundred miles. My mother could only become a nomad herself- forever moving, changing and going, yet always retaining some essential part of her being, recognizable and intact in spite of all the places she has been. In this, she Is like water, not dead water but fearsomely alive. When she gazes out on its shimmering expanse, she sees her own reflection. When I gaze out, I see her, my mother, always pulling away, returning and pulling away again. I drink from her, and she ships between my fingertips. She has borne me all this way. I cannot decide whether I want her to stay or go. When she is here, I wish she would leave. When she is gone, I wish she would return. She pulls away again, a force as elemental as the ebbing tide. I remain a child on the shore, eagerly collecting the sea glass and driftwood she has left behind.