I’m reading two memoirs—one about the daughter of a Mexican immigrant to the US, the other about the daughter of a Korean immigrant—and both deal with the pain and frustration of being outsiders, outcasts in a culture that doesn’t “see” them, a society which doesn’t allow them full access to its riches or its opportunities.
In a way they’re the same story of the immigrant experience. But since two different people from two very different cultures and backgrounds are telling these stories, there are some subtle (and not so subtle) differences.
Listen to Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning describe her father:
On paper, my father is the so-called model immigrant. Upon meeting him, strangers have called my father a gentleman for his quiet charisma and kindness, a personality he cultivated from years of selling life insurance and dry-cleaning supplies to Americans of all manner of race and class. But like many model immigrants, he can be angry.
Hong describes her father as “highly sensitive about his own racial identity to the point where everything came down to race.”
Here, listen again to Hong:
If we were waiting for a table, and someone was seated before us, he pointed out that it was because we were Asian. If he was seated way in the back of the plane, he said it was because he was Asian. When my parents moved me into my dorm room during the first week at Oberlin in Ohio, my father shook my roommate’s father’s hand, who then asked him where he was from. When my father said South Korea, my roommate’s father eagerly replied that he fought in the Korean War.
My father smiled tightly and said nothing.
Now listen to Maria Hinojosa writing in her memoir, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, about her father:
Once Raúl got to the Brownsville bus stop he immediately boarded and off they went on the flat, brown roads of southern Texas. Dad had never traveled this way in the US and had never traveled through Texas by land, so he was at first excited to see the landscape, but then bored by the sameness of the view outside his window. Hours later the bus made its first stop on the US side of the border, still in Texas. When Raúl got off and made his way to the bathroom off to the side of the gray gas pumps, he was suddenly confronted with the original sin of this country.
In the back of the small station there were two bathroom doors, but it wasn’t one for men and one for women. Here, above each rickety door, was a sign painted on a wooden panel hanging by a rusty nail. One sign said WHITE. The other said COLORED.
Raúl sighed. Was he white or colored? And if he wasn’t one or the other did he even exist in this country?
The question humiliated and disgusted him.
In both examples you can “hear” and “feel” the texture of the language. Some might call it the voice of each writer, how each writer, just as each person, sounds different and speaks with a different voice unique to that person. And it is voice. But it’s the texture of their voices, the way it feels to read the words each writer puts on the page, that strikes me as so different—not because the authors have had different experiences or view those experiences through different lenses (Mexican, Korean), but because the words they choose, the way each writer arranges the words on the page (with Spanish scatted throughout or a Korean word appearing on the page) gives each story a different feel.
It’s like touching different fabric. Silk feels different from wool, and both feel different from cotton or nylon. Some fabric feels smooth, other fabric rough. It’s the same with language, as if the writer is knitting a story, and the fabric of the story is what the reader can feel, can touch—though we don’t really touch it, we “hear” the texture—if you can think of it this way—in our inner ear, the space where our senses absorb words, where language has the power to spark and touch us, where we “feel” the emotional impact of the words a writer chooses to put on the page the same way a weaver or knitter chooses which pattern to use.
Texture conveys the heart of the writer. It lets you feel the words flowing from the writer’s heart to yours. It lets you wrap yourself in words the way you might wrap yourself in a blanket to feel its warmth, to hold someone else in your arms, to lose yourself inside another person’s way of being in the world.
I’m not sure texture is something you think about as you write any more than you can think about voice. It’s part of you, like a fingerprint, and it identifies you as you each time you set words on paper, each time you choose a word and place that word in a sentence... the way only you can place it.
If you’re interested in reading more about Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, visit:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605371/minor-feelings-by-cathy-park-hong/
And if you’d like to read more about Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You, visit:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Once-I-Was-You/Maria-Hinojosa/9781982128654
https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a34305279/maria-hinojosa-once-i-was-you/
https://bookpage.com/reviews/25444-maria-hinojosa-once-i-was-you-nonfiction#.YN8jPC1h2CQ
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