Why Write Your Family’s Story
For much of my childhood in the 1980s, my mother served up Chinese fast food from a stand in a second-rate suburban mall. Her customers were mostly teens from the local high school and elderly regulars who mall-walked throughout winter, which, in Calgary, lasts about five months out of the year.
(5 Tips on Writing From Your Own Family History.)
I’m sure that to those customers, she was unremarkable and maybe even invisible. But as her daughter, I knew what she had gone through to get there—the extraordinary circumstances that had brought her to this ordinary life—and it bothered me that nobody else could appreciate her strength and bravery.
You see, my mother came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China, which had started in the 1960s and created chaos across that country. A city kid with a high-school education, she was sent to a commune in the countryside for “re-education” by peasant farmers, forced to labor in rice paddies and sugarcane fields. In 1971, she decided to escape, by making her way to the coast through dense mountain forests, then attempting to swim five miles across Mirs Bay to Hong Kong with only a basketball to stay afloat.
It pained me to think that her story might go unknown, that strangers would only ever see her as a minimum-wage worker with broken English, and that entire lives could be so easily overlooked. It’s why I became a writer: to tell the stories of ordinary people like my mother. They existed. They struggled. They found in themselves a courage that could not be extinguished. And they survived.
Every family’s story is worth telling, whether it’s epic, like my mom’s, or not. And if, like me, you believe that the purpose of great literature is to reveal what it feels like to be a person in the world—how wonderful, bewildering, and devastating life can be—then your family history, however boring it might seem, likely contains the seeds of a story that will be meaningful to others.
Do it for those who came before
I originally wrote and drew my graphic memoir All Our Ordinary Stories to honor my parents by detailing their daring escapes from communes, but it also forced me to dig more deeply into my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ stories. Everything that happened to my family was shaped by historical forces, both in China and in Canada, and it soon became apparent that to tell the full story of my parents’ journeys, I would need to learn about everyone who came before them as well.
This led to a deep dive into the life of my father’s maternal grandfather, who arrived in Canada in 1912 as a teenager and forever changed the trajectory of my family. I learned about the racism he faced in this country, how the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923 made it impossible to bring his wife and children here, but also about his resilience and resourcefulness.
While trying to locate my great-grandfather’s documents in our national archives, I hit a dead end. Digital records of Chinese Canadian documents were difficult to sift through and also incomplete, so I gave up. Later, I published a short memoir piece online about my disappointing search. One genealogist responded to my story and said she was sure I would find my great-grandfather’s records one day. “The ancestors want to be found,” she wrote.
The ancestors want to be found. And I believe they want their stories told, especially if they were historically silenced.
I did eventually find the records I was looking for—months after my book had already gone to press—and now I have four documents featuring photographs of my great-grandfather. My eyes look like his eyes. And although they’re just grainy scans, I make a promise to his face: “I will tell your story, ah gong. You will not be forgotten.”
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Do it for future generations
If you have children and they are anything like mine, they will show zero interest in hearing about your family history, even if you’ve been working on a book about it for years. Even if you’ve presented it in a graphic novel format, their favorite medium. But I have faith that one day, when my kids are older, they will begin to think about their identities beyond the present and get curious about where they came from. They will want to place their own lives into context, to learn about their people, and when that happens, the family stories I have written will be ready for them.
Even if you don’t have biological children, your family stories arise from a community, and that community may be served by your work. Those who have lived through similar experiences or had similar family dynamics will see themselves in the specifics of your story, and those who haven’t will get a glimpse into what family means from a different perspective.
Also, let’s not forget your artistic descendants. I could not have imagined there being space in the world for a book like mine if Maxine Hong Kingston hadn’t written her seminal Asian American memoir, The Woman Warrior, in 1976, the year I was born. A well-written family story can speak across decades, across centuries, even, and inspire generations of writers to come.
Do it for yourself
Writing your family story helps you ground your identity in history, connecting your individual life to something bigger: a lineage. And writing about those who paved the way for your existence can give you a greater sense of continuity, purpose, and belonging.
It can also be a healing experience. My relationship with my parents has always been fraught, but writing their stories helped me see them more fully—their desires, their sorrows, and their limitations. The time I put into interviewing them and attempting to bring their stories to life gave me insight into how hard their lives have been. It helped me understand the roots of our disconnection and softened my heart toward them.
The author Steve Almond once wrote, “Writing is an attention racket. But it’s also a forgiveness racket […] Remember that your goal is to forgive everyone involved, yourself foremost.” Memoir is never about punishing those who’ve wronged you. That typically results in a flat and lifeless draft. But if you’re writing from a place of curiosity and openness, you will find a truer story and, I think, a better perspective on your life in general.
Writing my family story hasn’t solved my family issues, but it has given me a wider view into my parents and myself and helped me appreciate the fullness of my inheritance, as well as my own capacity to learn and grow and change.
I began my book years ago with the intention of sharing my mother’s story. But I soon realized that I was actually telling the story of myself to myself—and, in a way, writing myself into being. Partway through the writing process, it no longer mattered whether strangers would ever read it. It was enough to do it just for me.
Check out Teresa Wong’s All Our Ordinary Stories here:
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