S11.E3: Stranger Than Fiction

[Yeah No]

Episode premieres on PBS: 8 p.m. ET, Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Quote

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. maps the roots of two award-winning writers: novelist Amy Tan and poet Rita Dove, tracing lineages that run from a plantation in Maryland to a speakeasy in Washington, DC to a village in central China. Along the way, Amy and Rita reimagine themselves as they learn the true stories of the people who laid the groundwork for their success—and inspired their art.

 

[PRgal]

Wrong thread.

Edited January 23 by PRgal

[Driad]

Do those Chinese genealogies list just the male ancestors, or the women too?

[PRgal]

On 1/23/2025 at 2:11 PM, Driad said:

Do those Chinese genealogies list just the male ancestors, or the women too?

It's based on male lineage.

https://www.chineseancestor.org/culture/zupu/#:~:text=A zupu (simplified Chinese%3A 族谱,also called jaipu (家谱).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_kin#Zupu—the_genealogy_book

 

ETA:  More information on Chinese kinship

Edited January 24 by PRgal

[shapeshifter]

Episode link: pbs.org/video/stranger-than-fiction-pleuzj

I really appreciated how the 2 guests were thematically linked as award-winning minority women writers, but then how their histories were so different, but also with key similarities due to the oppression of women. 

My mother, who read at least a book every week into her 80s (mostly best sellers) and was a devoted fan of Amy Tan, would have loved this, perhaps especially Amy Tan's summation of the experience:

• “It just shows you how deeply connected we are to the past…
  It also makes me want to write more stories about my family.…
  You have unleashed the best storytelling ever. Tracing, you know, a story as a narrative and you don't know everything that's going to happen at each turn. And what you've done has revealed the turns for me, and revealed the human nature, the people behind that, that led to my story, and I'm so appreciative.
  (episode transcript: https://ga.pbs-video.pbs.org/captions/finding-your-roots/72cf8c1e-9e2e-430d-809e-99dfd9ddd57c/captions/i50k2D_caption_en.txt)

 

There was the census that listed Rita Dove's grandmother as "mulatto," which on this show often leads to revealing the identities of white ancestors, in part because their records are generally more accessible, but, for whatever reason, that was not included this time — maybe because they were deemed individually irrelevant? Or for time?

And when they mentioned the census showed Rita Dove's grandmother Lucy was living with a maternal uncle and grandmother after Lucy's mother died and her father remarried, that didn't seem to me like she was necessarily abandoned.
But then we learn from Rita that her grandmother was "married off" at 14 to an older man with a drinking problem, which implied Lucy was not wanted.
However, Rita is relaying what she heard her grandmother Lucy say about marrying at 14 to a 23-year-old. It's possible young Lucy initially was not opposed to the idea of marrying him. We aren't told anything about how Rita's grandfather happened to meet and marry her grandmother Lucy in 1911 when young teenage girls often married. 

 

They made no mention of DNA findings beside's showing the admixture charts at the end.

 

 

Edited January 26 by shapeshifter

[Driad]

Since they must usually have more material than they can use in an episode, I wish they would put the extra information on a website (with the permission of the guests).

[Gizkok]

I don't know why they left out the part about the children that Amy's mother had with her first husband. Were we to think that she didn't have any children? Granted, it's not our business, but they made such a big deal about the abuse she suffered; were those children not abused, even when abandoned by their mother? All that was needed would be one sentence of 'explanation.'