Goose Hollow

1960-ish

My mother and her siblings, Portland, 1960-something.

I’m struck by how American this picture feels. Almost Americana. A tangle of teenagers, dancing to the music of the decade, gathered around the TV set, consumed by the intensity, self-consciousness and longing that seem to belong so acutely to adolescence.

Only a handful of years earlier, their family had fled China for Taiwan. Some were smuggled into Hong Kong, where they eventually reunited before finding their way to Portland.

My mother describes their arrival in Portland as landing on another planet. The feeling only intensified at Lincoln High School in Goose Hollow, a school 2,500 strong. She recalls a sea of white faces, save for one brother and a sister. She arrived at Lincoln without English and was placed directly into regular classes, sitting through lessons she couldn’t understand. She remembers the strange humiliation of understanding nothing, and mistaking it for a measure of her own intelligence. At lunch, every day, she sat alone. One time a girl—Nancy, or was it Debbie?—seemed to notice her.

But she had her siblings. Her parents. Among them, the familiar remained.