 |
SEGMENTS |
"I cried and cried, but I made myself forget." The mother looked straight into her youngest child's eyes. Lifting her hand, she said, "I made myself forget how many brothers I have." She ticked off her index finger. "How many sisters," the next finger crumpled to her palm. "Their names, ages, whether they were younger or older." Her hand was a fist. "Everything."
These are the words of the mother in SEGMENTS. Sold by her parents and brought to America at age 8, she erases from memory the names of her father and his village, names tying her to a family and an identity. Married off at 14 to a man twice her age, she invests past and future in her six children, forging a family circle and a lifeline of her own. For her, family is all.
Told in 80 episodes, SEGMENTS captures telling moments in the life of this woman known only as the mother, her own name lost in determined disremembering and false papers. Born to a generation of faceless women whose only worth was measured in sons, she learns to make her own way, using her hands and her force of will to withstand the deprivations of the Depression and widowhood to raise her family of six.
But her American dream is not the one of her children schooled in the values of personal freedom and self-determination. For them, tradition is a tyrant. For the mother, tradition is the thread to the past and to the future. In some way, each of her children leaves. Yet, in some way, each of them remains within the circle of her making.
SEGMENTS spans a changing landscape of time and place from rural China to the rural Midwest of the '20s to the isolation of condo life in the '80s as this immigrant woman travels from maidenhood to motherhood to widowhood.
 |
SEGMENTS
by Lum Franco Paperback, 127 pages, $12 For inquiries, contact:
|
