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Jan. 28th, 2010 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSo a certain household in Boston and I seem to have created a kind of unofficial mutual lending library; most recently, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
genarti lent me Mary Paik Lee's autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America.
Mary Paik Lee and her family were part of a relatively small group of Koreans who came to America answering a call for farm laborers in Hawaii in 1905, before the anti-Asian immigration laws that shut that option down; her family spent the next several years wandering from place to place trying to make a living and support themselves through various depressions and in spite of the fact that they were very often made unwelcome. The most incredible thing about her autobiography is just how much history it spans - it was published in 1990 when Lee was ninety years old, and, uh, not to belabor the obvious, but eighty-five years covers a LOT of time and changes in society. As always, even if you know about the history abstractly, it is very different reading a first-person account of it. (I have a vague memory ofschiarire reading this book a while ago and remarking that Mary Paik Lee was extremely nice about everyone she encountered. This is true! However, every once in a while she does write about standing up and spitting a piece of injustice in somebody's face, and every time she did I wanted to cheer.)
I will say, I felt sort of uncomfortable reading the appendix in the back where the editor, scholar Sucheng Chan, carefully recounts every change she made to the manuscript. I don't know the conventions of scholarly historiography; maybe every editor of an autobiography that is meant to be used as a historical record goes through afterwards and takes out all mentions of things that seem to be incompatible with recorded facts. I'm an English major, not a historian, and I kept having this instinctive cringe reaction: "Stop altering the text! THAT IS WHAT FOOTNOTES ARE FOR!"
genarti lent me Mary Paik Lee's autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America. Mary Paik Lee and her family were part of a relatively small group of Koreans who came to America answering a call for farm laborers in Hawaii in 1905, before the anti-Asian immigration laws that shut that option down; her family spent the next several years wandering from place to place trying to make a living and support themselves through various depressions and in spite of the fact that they were very often made unwelcome. The most incredible thing about her autobiography is just how much history it spans - it was published in 1990 when Lee was ninety years old, and, uh, not to belabor the obvious, but eighty-five years covers a LOT of time and changes in society. As always, even if you know about the history abstractly, it is very different reading a first-person account of it. (I have a vague memory of
schiarire reading this book a while ago and remarking that Mary Paik Lee was extremely nice about everyone she encountered. This is true! However, every once in a while she does write about standing up and spitting a piece of injustice in somebody's face, and every time she did I wanted to cheer.)I will say, I felt sort of uncomfortable reading the appendix in the back where the editor, scholar Sucheng Chan, carefully recounts every change she made to the manuscript. I don't know the conventions of scholarly historiography; maybe every editor of an autobiography that is meant to be used as a historical record goes through afterwards and takes out all mentions of things that seem to be incompatible with recorded facts. I'm an English major, not a historian, and I kept having this instinctive cringe reaction: "Stop altering the text! THAT IS WHAT FOOTNOTES ARE FOR!"
