History, Truth, and Story: Finding a Way Through This

I was sixteen when I learned the truth about history: that history is not the truth. My high school World History class had completed the unit on World War II. The chapter had ended in our textbook. There was even half a page left blank, the ultimate “That’s all, folks.” But this wasn’t the end of a cartoon. This was a war, and half the planet fighting in it barely appears. Japan appears suddenly. First on December 8, 1942 then again on August 6 and 9, 1945. No reason given really.

“What about the Japances concentration camps in China?” I raised my hand and asked.

“There weren’t any,” said my teacher. All my classmates already thought I was weird, but in this instance, I saw genuine interest when they all looked at me after Mr. Lee’s reply. I had asked a weird question, but the question was only weird if Mr. Lee has pounced on it as a puzzle to solve and engage us in. That kind of weird followed me through the vast and populated open-air corridors of Riverview High School in Sarasota, Florida. Nerd weird was my style. This wasn’t nerd weird though. This also wasn’t show-off weird. It wasn’t like my ten page essay on symbolism in The Metamorphosis when the teacher’d assigned a page-and-a-half. It was a question with nothing to gain. We’d all gained it. I could feel it in them, this “Wait. What just happened?”

The teacher lied. That was one scenario. But what are the chances that Mr. Lee, History Teacher and Aikido Teacher, had been told never to speak of Japanese Concentration Camps in China? I could go on about how Aikido could possibly form a logical bridge, but that wasn’t it.

The teacher didn’t lie. The teacher did not know. In six year, a book would be published in December that would address this gap in Mr. Lee’s exhaustive knowledge of World History. Iris Chang would reconstruct in The Rape of Nanking Japan’s invasion of China, the soldier-civilian death toll would equal that of all the European deaths combined, including the concentration camps.

I grew up hearing the word “camp” at family gatherings and visits with my father’s parents. I envisioned camp in terms of the day camps and overnight camps I attended.

“Before the camp. . . .”

“In the camp . . . .”

“After the camp. . . .”

These were time periods, lenses through which conversation and memory directed its light.

I remember the precise moment I stood in Granny’s kitchen as she reached into a cabinet to retrieve Stella D’Oro biscuits and understood that her camp and my camp where not the not the same kind of camp. I’d spend my adolescent years listening and asking questions about jade boats and the ivory fan and the finely embroidered silk robes inside the wooden truck adorned with carvings of wilderness and courts, a weighty inquiry into balance among the laws of man and nature. I’d attend college close to her home in Orlando so I could record and attempt to write her story.

This has taken me three decades. I only recently started to tell the stories, although I have taken many runs at writing them. I could not get far. Reporting and storytelling are not the same thing. Knowing something happened doesn’t convey how it felt for the ones it happened to. Anyone can report anything. It’s easy. You make it up, and you provide the sufficient amount of details, but not too much or you’ll get flagged. This is what 91% of American textbooks did with the other half of the world in World War II. They said, “Between December 8, 1942 and August 6 and 9, 1945, nothing of interest happened in Japan and China.” This happens in history all the time. This happens to history all the time. When it does, it’s weird for everybody.

When someone tells you that something you know is true is false, as in gaslighting, a fissure occurs in the self. Wants, needs, power-structures, pheromones, atmosphere, phases of the moon come into play, much as the devil comes into the post-sneeze body before the sneezer inhales again, hence the bless you. You need only peruse the True Crime category on your streaming stick to see how tragically true that statement is. We are easily lied to, and once we buy into one lie, we continue on its trajectory. Reality bifurcates like train tracks. Get on the wrong train, you wake up with no way back. No easy way, at least. That distance is so daunting that we will almost want to stay.

The authority of Mr. Lee may not seem an impressive burden now, but for a truly good girl and student he was important. He represented the facts of the world. Hell, he represented the facts of time. And who was I? I had one fact. It was a fact I was born of. raised within, and fascinated by, if in a mournful way, and I carried that fact into the classroom as we all attained the blank, lower half the last page of the war. I had tenderly attempted to share it with my classmates in a proud show-and-tell kind of way, and Mr. Lee had without missing a tap of his pencil on the podium dismissed it. My fact did not inhabit the same world as his facts did. And who was I? An is it any wonder that that fact has shaped me.

Well, not the fact itself, but the adventure, the journey, the obsessive and global quality of which facilitated my transformation of a non-fact in Mr. Lee’s World of World History into not merely a fact in mine, but something much much stronger: a story. A story with hearts and words and names and wounds. A true story about something that happened to people. A story that, as with all stories, has to be told, even if it is told to just one person: me. That’s all a story has to do, but it works better if someone’s there to listen.

The process has turned me into a kind of tracker, more the falcon than the falconer. If something is unsaid, I will maneuver amid the things of this world and elicit from their shadows echoes clear enough to slake my search. If something is untrue, I will read the truth amid the pages of this kind of perception that spins the whirligigs of reality which poetry trains or describes or merely but necessarily names. Poetry trains me to hand over control to another voice within me and beyond me. The owner of this voice is writing this with me now. Anything smashingly brilliant, trust me, is not mine. In Mr. Lee’s class that day, I chose my world. It wouldn’t be the one with empty half pages. It wouldn’t be the one with a timeline.

At the gross level of matter, time moves forward, while at the subtle levels, time moves backward. This is one of the many delightful reports from the physics world where neither wars nor concentration camps occur. It is then in one’s best interest to cultivate the subtle self, as one does with meditation, creativity, and reflection. I’ll add kindness and generosity to this as well. I seldom see these traits mentioned in the energetic ads for transformative practices on Instagram. I read of a “secret chord” that is apparently the frequency of the universe, which sounds fantastic. I read of mantras, also fantastic, and foods and arrays of practices that will spark transformation. They should be first and foremost, else how will you be broken?

Being broken, we find the language breaks open, too. Even the most rigid and serious typeface opens up releasing countless butterflies and birds. The language shows us the world as it truly is, as Blake the Poet says, infinite, and John Donne’s word for it, super-infinite. Love someone with your entire heart, the Poets taught us, so you surrender every bit of your power. That unhealthy, entirely lopsided relationship you’ve seen your friends go headlong into is the kind of thing that trains them for the ultimate of lettings-go, the ego-death. Maybe we all know that without knowing it is something we can possibly know. Maybe it’s our instinct, and maybe we’re all trackers in an equally primeval way. We just don’t know that this is a viable pastime so reach for whatever book is going to chase us back into our cages.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That is who was born that day. A writer who could bear the story. A poet who could listen so deeply to the story as to draw it into echoic resonance. A child who only trusts a world told in story, before the lies can get in. And the adult unwilling to let a lie go told without a fight.