Ruth Asawa Lanier

Ruth Asawa, 1980

Ruth Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California to a family of Japanese truck farmers. The middle child of seven, everyone in the family had to work hard. By age 10, Ruth wanted to be an artist. In 1942, her father was pulled out of his strawberry field and taken away to detention. The rest of the family was ordered to report to a relocation center at the Santa Anita racetrack. 

They stayed six months, during which Ruth studied drawing with several Disney animators who had also been detained. They were moved to a camp in Rohwer, Arkansas. Ruth wrote letters and collected testimonials on behalf of her father, requesting authorities to let him join the family.

When she finished high school, Ruth attended Milwaukee State Teachers College, hoping to become an art teacher. She was not allowed, however, because of her Japanese ancestry, and so did not finish her degree. Instead she joined other artists at the experimental Black Mountain college in North Carolina. At Black Mountain, Ruth found in Joseph Albers, a German artist trained at the Bauhaus, a life-long mentor. Albers gave out design problems: “Draw what you see, not what you know.” Empty space was as important as the drawing's content.

The school was chronically poor and chaotic, but Ruth thrived. She did heavy work in the dairy and in the fields, keeping farmer’s hours. In 1947, she was given an opportunity to teach for the summer in Mexico by the American Friends Service. Traveling there with Joseph and Anni Albers, she reveled in the bold, saturated colors and learned a basket-making technique using twists of wire. When she returned to Black Mountain, she focused on this, mounting an exhibition of baskets in 1948.

That year, Ruth met a young architect, Albert Lanier. He had come to Black Mountain seeking creative freedom, a modern experimental approach. Soon, he and Ruth were inseparable. They began planning and dreaming of life together, but the road was not easy. Both of their parents were set against a marriage, and only two states in 1949 allowed it. Others considered inter-racial marriage “miscegenation.”

Albert went to San Francisco and became a carpenter’s apprentice. Ruth stayed at Black Mountain, becoming a student leader when it exploded into conflict. Absence increased their determination to marry and they did in 1949 in a loft in the produce district of San Francisco which Albert had found as a live-in studio. Buckminster Fuller made their rings, and friends made a dress for Ruth. 

Ruth wanted six children. Their first came that year, Aiko, plus they adopted a baby of about the same age, Xavier. Ruth nursed them both, amid her work of making wire sculptures and cooking abundant meals for all of them. By 1952, Albert’s parents came around, Ruth’s sister Kimiko came to help, and a third child, Hudson, was born.

It was a time of great productivity for Ruth. Her work was showing at the Peridot Gallery in New York, plus in exhibitions and magazines. Her wire sculptures were growing bigger, translucent shapes in light and shadow.  Time magazine noted her “economy of means, simple shapes.” In 1956 Adam was adopted, and two more babies were born, Addie in 1958 and Paul in 1959, to bring the number of children to six. A friend said, “anything Ruth touches becomes art. She could make art of a mud puddle if she wished.”

Albert was also busy, especially interested in the preservation of old buildings. In 1960, he opened his own office, Lanier and Sherrill. The family moved into several rented apartments before Albert built them a large house organized around space and light, with a big, sunny garden in Noe Valley.

Ruth had a solo show at the de Young museum in San Francisco, becoming an advocate and trustee. She didn’t like selling her work, but as a working artist, she became good at balancing life and art. When her children brought home depressing handouts from school to be colored in, she and others from the Noe Valley PTA began a summer arts program staffed by artists and volunteers. In time their project fanned out through all the schools in the city. A new federal program, CETA, created public service jobs and Ruth’s group applied for funds. They also developed a depot for art supplies.

Ruth became known to developers in San Francisco. She was asked to create a fountain for the revitalized Ghirardelli Square. Her fanciful design included sea turtles, frogs and mermaids, one modeled on her neighbor. The landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, hated it. There was a fight, but Ruth stood her ground and the developer supported her. Installed at night, in 1968, the fountain is beloved. The mayor put Ruth on the Arts Commission.

Ruth also made a fountain near Union Square of figures and scenes from around the city, molded in baker’s clay by many hands, and cast in bronze. She had many other commissions and had begun to campaign for a dedicated arts high school in the city.

In 1984, Ruth was 57. She and Albert went to Europe where a museum for the Albers was being dedicated. They had a wonderful month, but Ruth was having odd symptoms. She was diagnosed with lupus, and underwent treatment. Eventually she began to get better, though the lupus waxed and waned over the next years. It didn’t slow Ruth down much, though. In 1985, she toured Japan’s art and gardens.

Reparations for Japanese who had been interned came in 1988. Ruth worked on a large memorial wall in San Jose which she said was “very personal, but also very generic.” She started speaking about her war time experience and the healing power of art. She got an honorary doctorate from San Francisco State, and was finally given her bachelor’s degree by the University of Wisconsin. At San Francisco State she made a peaceful garden of remembrance with ten boulders, one for each of the war-time relocation camps.

When discussions began about rebuilding the de Young Museum, Ruth was full of ideas. She thought it should be located where it had always been, in Golden Gate park, and that it should have an education tower. Ruth attended the 2006 opening, in a wheelchair. A permanent exhibition of Ruth’s wire sculptures hangs in the tower lobby.

Albert died in 2008 and Ruth’s own fragile health kept her from attending the funeral. When her children broached the sale of a painting for the sake of Ruth’s home care, she came once again to the notice of New York’s art market. One of her early works sold for $1.4 million and Ruth was recognized as an important mid-century modern artist. She died in her sleep in 2013.

At a memorial service, her son Xavier said his mother was known for “patience, passion, talking eyes, no complaints.” In an interview, her daughter Addie said, “her true legacy is the art of living … the highest art is the art of living well and she managed to do that.”

Ruth’s story is well-told by Marilyn Chase in Everything She Touched [published 2020]. I have lived around Ruth Asawa’s art for years, as I consider San Francisco home. My sister and I recently reminded each other of the delightful mermaid fountain in Ghirardelli Square. And I am completely in agreement with Ruth’s methods of making an art of your own life.

Mary Garth Vincy

Rachel Power, Middlemarch 1994

Most people who read Middlemarch [published in 1871-1872 by George Eliot] assume that Dorothea Brooke is the main character. But Middlemarch, a provincial town in the English Midlands, is full of characters. I liked Mary Garth best.

Mary grew up a little hoyden, a boisterous tomboy, playing especially with her neighbor Fred Vincy. We first meet her at 22, when she has grown up short, plain and nut-brown. She is working at Stone Court as a companion and nurse to old Mr. Featherstone, a wealthy landlord at the end of his life. Mr. Featherstone has always favored Fred, but Fred is idle, spoiled and hoping to inherit some of Featherstone's money.

We are treated to the delightful picture of Mary’s parents’ home, where her mother is teaching her youngest children their letters, while also making pies and doing some washing. Mary’s father is a very capable farm and land manager who works for others, but is too kind, not always getting paid, thus making his family “live in a small way.” 

Fred begs Mary to marry him, based on their long friendship. But Mary is “shrewdly bitter. Honesty was her reigning virtue.” “How can you stand to be so idle?” She asks Fred. “I will give you no encouragement.” In fact Mr. Garth stands surety on a debt Fred has incurred, and when Fred cannot pay, Mrs. Garth and Mary’s small savings must be used to pay it.

As Mr. Featherstone is dying, he begs Mary to take his keys and burn one of the wills he has made. She will not touch any of it. After Featherstone’s death, when the wills are read, it is found that Fred was to inherit £10,000, but this bequest has been superseded by a later will. Fred is in despair and falls ill.

Mary feels she must take another situation, a teaching job, but when her father gets more work, he tells her she may stay home and help her mother. Fred goes back to school and finishes, but he doesn’t want to become a cleric. He is afraid to ask Mary again about marriage, but asks his friend Farebrother to find out for him if there is any hope. In the process, Fred finds that Farebrother himself had some hope of marrying Mary. Mary says Fred must do something worthy, but she has a strong feeling for him. “You are too delightfully ridiculous,” she mocks.

Mr. Garth finds he has too much work and begins to train Fred to help him. Fred loves to be outdoors and promises to work hard. Mrs. Garth is not convinced, but she will wait and see. We find the Garth children under the apple tree, reading Ivanhoe! Mary is happy about Fred’s work. “I have a very secular mind,” she says, amusement in her glance. She cannot see that Fred would have been a good churchman.

Later, as a result of his own folly, the banker Bullstrode must leave Middlemarch. He wants to do something for his loyal wife’s family and she and Mr. Garth agree to place Fred on Bullstrode’s farm at Stone Court. Fred will manage it and he and Mary can marry. Mr. Garth finds Mary in a pink kerchief in the garden, swinging her little sister. She says her feelings for Fred haven’t changed. Fred can hardly believe it when Mary tells him about the plan.

Fred and Mary do marry and live in solid, mutual happiness. Fred becomes a good farmer and eventually can purchase stock of his own. He remains interested in horses, but when taking dangerous jumps at a hunt, sees Mary and their three sons in his mind and moderates his actions. Mary writes a small book on education. They maintain a bright hearth at Stone Court until they are both white-haired.

Middlemarch is full of the most delicate and intricate relations between the characters’ inner lives, their aspirations and their feelings for one another. For instance, Mary’s mother would rather Mary align herself with good Mr. Farebrother, but she accepts Mary’s choice. And Farebrother steps out to preserve Fred from sliding back into idle ways. Mary is staunch. She likes Fred best.

Our main characters are often related. Mr. Garth refuses to work for Bullstrode once he understands the banker’s shady past and ill-gotten gains. But Bullstrode’s wife is Fred’s aunt, and she sets out to do something for Fred’s family. Mary’s path does not cross with Dorothea’s, but Fred’s sister Rosamund makes an important revelation to Dorothea.

Essentially the book is a morality tale, describing the relations of people in one town. I did not find it very scenic or atmospheric, and in fact the most charming scenes all involve Mary and her family! Middlemarch has been looming for a long time in my mind, as a book I should have read. Somehow I kept putting it off! But I am happy to now understand its indelible characters, the lofty ideas of Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, the regret with which Lydgate gives in to his pretty wife’s need for money and status, and the inexorable way Bullstrode’s early grasping at money cannot be excused by his later Christian justifications.

There is more to the book: politics and reform, medical advances, farming practices and art are all glancingly brought in. It is set in 1828 and the question of whether change can happen without violent revolution hangs over it. The reforms in England of 1832 seem to indicate that yes, they can. And the high principles of some of the characters, including Mary and Dorothea, show some of how this can happen.

Teoh Yun Ling

Angelica Lee Sin-je in “The Garden of Evening Mists”

Yun Ling is born in 1923 to a Chinese trader in rubber, in Penang, Malaysia. Her family speaks English. She has a sister, Yun Hong, and a brother. Though the family have moved up into the hills when the Japanese invade in 1940, Yun Ling and her sister are taken to a prison camp in the jungle. Yun Hong, considered the more beautiful, is chosen as a “comfort woman” and imprisoned in a separate hut. Yun Ling is made to work in the mines, until she becomes a cook in the officers’ mess.

As a cook, Yun Ling has more privilege. She sneaks out to talk to her sister through a window. Yun Hong reminds Yun Ling of the beautiful gardens they once saw in Kyoto, and together they imagine a garden they will build. When Yun Ling is caught stealing food, the camp director cuts off two of her fingers. A doctor helps her survive, and she begins to learn Japanese. 

Yun Ling is chosen as an interpreter and when the war is over, a Japanese director blindfolds her and drives her out of the camp, telling her to forget everything. Yun Ling tries to go back to get her sister, but she gets lost and from a high peak, she watches the Japanese detonate the mine with the prisoners inside. No trace of the camp is left.

After the war, Yun Ling works for a war crimes tribunal, trying to determine where the camp was. She is sacked after a few months, but then goes to Girton College in England to study law. At loose ends when she returns, she goes to visit a tea estate in the highlands, run by a Boer, Magnus Praetorius, a friend of her family. Magnus points out the garden of Nakamura Aritomo below. Aritomo had been a gardener for the emperor of Japan, but exiled himself after a dispute. Visiting the garden, Yun Ling asks Aritomo to design a memorial garden for her sister. He refuses, but suggests she apprentice to him to learn how to do it herself.

Yun Ling works hard on the garden, Yugiri, learning much and becoming more than an apprentice to Aritomo. It is the time of the “Malayan emergency” when communists are trying to take over. Yun Ling has several encounters with terrorists, and when she recovers, her father asks her to come home to Kuala Lumpur. She refuses and moves into Aritomo’s house in the garden.

Aritomo also creates woodblock prints. When the rains begin and they can no longer work in the garden, he tells Yun Ling he wants to make a horimono, a full-body tattoo, on her. “Only on my back,” she says. He works on it, an hour at a time. Yun Ling finds that when she is feeling the pain of the needles, the clamor in her mind is deadened.

The “emergency” continues. Terrorists come to the house and tear the place apart. They drive Aritomo and Yun Ling up to the tea plantation, where they harass Magnus and his wife. They believe the Japanese buried treasure somewhere in the hills and want to know where it is. Magnus says he knows and the terrorists take him with them, leaving the others. His body is found a few days later.

The horimono finished, Aritomo practices archery in the evening. He and Yun Ling go for evening walks. One evening he says he wants to be alone. He turns back to look at the garden, but disappears. No trace of him is ever found.

Yun Ling goes to Kuala Lumpur and becomes a barrister and then a judge. She cannot bear to think of the garden, Yugiri. It becomes neglected. But after many years, Yun Ling finds she has aphasia. She will lose her language abilities within a year. She retires from her position and moves back to Yugiri, where she thinks about her life and begins writing a memoir of the time she spent with Aritomo.

She also entertains the art dealer Yoshikawa Tatsuji, who is writing a book about Aritomo. He wants to include the woodblock prints Aritomo has created. He is also entranced when Yun Ling shows him the horimono on her back. He produces a contract in which he agrees to collect it upon her death. Yun Ling realizes that Aritomo must have known about the prison camp, about the treasure the Japanese hid there and that he has made a map of the location on her back.

Yun Ling decides that Yugiri is the memorial garden she must keep for her sister. She also decides that she must make sure that no one gets their hands on her horimono.

Beautifully told in The Garden of Evening Mists [2011] by Tan Twan Eng, the story of Yun Ling and Aritomo is rich with complexity and mystery. Taoist teachings are threaded throughout. Making a Japanese garden using the principles of Zen in the midst of a jungle does not seem easy, but Aritomo is equal to the art. We also get a sense of the peoples who have made Malaysia their home, the folk cultures which sustain them and the violent history of the 20th century in Southeast Asia.

An angry young woman, Yun Ling never keeps her feelings to herself, expressing them in the crisp, precise English she has been taught. She dissembles while a prisoner, of course, but after the war does what she can to seek justice. And she comes to a kind of peace in the presence of the artist, Nakamura Aritomo. It is a satisfying journey, told in the first person so that we are always privy to Yun Ling’s inner life. My simple retelling only points to the exquisite experience of this wonderful novel.

Silvia

Tea Obreht

Eleven-year-old Silvia comes with her mother to live in Island City, reminiscent of Manhattan in the not too distant future. They move into The Morningside, a luxury high-rise hotel, with Silvia’s Aunt Ena, the building’s supervisor. Arriving from somewhere in the Balkans, they are part of a repopulation program aiming to balance the thinning density of the ruined city.

Silvia is put on a long wait list for a place in school. In the meantime, she helps her mother and aunt and listens to Ena’s tales of what “back home” was like, and the magical world beneath everyday reality. She is especially intrigued with a woman who lives in the penthouse, Bezi Duras, a painter who goes out at night with her three large, black dogs. Aunt Ena believes she is a Vila, an enchantress, also from “back home.”

Because her mother will tell her nothing about her origins, Silvia listens to Aunt Ena’s stories and is thrilled with the photographs and scrapbooks Ena keeps. She makes “protections” from three meaningful items and tries to live within the “rules” Ena, as well as her mother, set out. Ena dies suddenly, while working, and Silvia’s mother quietly takes over as the building supervisor.

When skulking around the base of the elevator to the penthouse, Silvia meets Louis May who offers her a key in exchange for letters which may have accumulated in the building for him. Silvia, who wants to discover whether the Vila’s dogs turn into men during the day so she can prove it to her mother, takes him up on it. When she does take the elevator, she finds herself in a courtyard, not in the building.

Silvia is thrilled when a girl about her own age moves into the building with her parents. Mila is a rude, brazen girl, however, uninterested in the careful rituals Silvia has built to investigate the world beneath the everyday world. Together they follow Ms. Duras and her three dogs one night, but this does not result in any certainties other than frightening Silvia’s mother.

To make ends meet, Silvia’s mother takes a job diving for building reclamation projects. At this time, people are given rations each day. They have generally agreed not to eat meat and everyone in the city listens to a radio program relaying local news called “The Dispatch.” Silvia mops floors and takes requests from building residents. She also helps cater a meeting and a party at the penthouse, scandalized by the lavish platters of meat that emerge from a basement warehouse.

When a building collapses that Silvia’s mother is working in, Silvia is certain she isn’t dead, though it takes three days for rescuers to find her in an air pocket. During this time, Silvia stays with Mila’s parents and is befriended by Mila’s father. After her recovery, Silvia’s mother wants to thank them. She bakes a small cake and takes it to them. When she sees Mila’s father, however, she is horrified and demands that Silvia come away with her.

They escape in Ena’s small, battered car, but don’t get far. Silvia remembers Louis May, and they take refuge in his apartment. He turns out to be the dispatcher and Silvia’s mother tells all of Island City that Mila’s father is the war criminal who sent refugees, including Silvia’s father, in buses to “work,” though they were never heard from again. How could Island City allow such a man to live there?

The tables are turned, however, when Mila disappears and her father insists that Silvia’s mother has something to do with her kidnapping, holding up her photo to television cameras. Silvia and her mother cut and bleach their hair, hiding out at Louis May’s. Silvia is certain that Mila is not dead, though she does not return.

Years later, when she is 18, Silvia has moved out west, living in a cabin where there are still elk and eagles to be seen. Silvia’s mother visits from her home on the southern coast and they finally talk about the past. Her mother didn’t want Silvia to listen to Ena’s folkloric “nonsense,” telling Silvia that her family had grown up in a beautiful place of community and peace. But when it collapsed during the war, she couldn’t bear to think of it. She accepts the fact she can’t give Silvia what she has had, and that Silvia won’t be able to give her children what she has had either.

The sun shone, however, despite the fires in the west and the rising seas, and the night sky was full of an infinity of stars. Louis May, who also lives in the west, has caught some trout and is making them a beautiful dinner.

Silvia’s story is told in The Morningside [published 2024], Tea Obreht’s third novel. Obreht’s prose is rich and realistic with such a sense of wholeness that Silvia’s endless anxieties are at the same time grounded in the certainty that she will be taken care of. Obreht gives ample evidence to show us how refugees come in at the bottom of the pecking order, and are often duped. Without a strong sense of home, this makes things difficult. But Obreht’s powerful human values stand behind Silvia’s tenuous hold on the world, and we are rooting for her!

Catherine Kemble Hudson

Woman Standing 1840-1850, Jean Baptiste Corot

Catherine Hudson, of English and Irish stock, came from New England to Patagonia with her husband Daniel in the 1830’s. At first they lived on a small ranch with a herd of cattle. In 1846, when her son William Hudson was five years old, the family moved further south near the Chascomús lake and established a pulperia. This was a general store where people met to eat and drink and also stay. We learn of Hudson’s parents from his book Far Away and Long Ago, published in 1918.

The new place felt vast to Hudson, set on the perfectly flat pampas among trees, which included 400-500 peach trees and a few quince. He doesn’t tell us exactly how many brothers and sisters he had, but it seemed they grew up together. “Our parents seldom or never punished us, and never, unless we went too far in our domestic dissensions or tricks, chided us. This, I am convinced, is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that nature is wiser than they are and to let their little ones follow, as far as possible, the bent of their own minds.”

As a child Hudson raptly studied the creatures around him, especially the birds. Catherine noticed that he often went off by himself and worried, until she secretly followed him and found that he was only absorbed in study of some insect or bird. “And as she loved all living things herself, she was quite satisfied I was not going queer in my head.” When Hudson, at six, first confronted the death of his dog, Catherine comforted him with her own strong belief that death was not the end.

Hudson tells us that Catherine was “clever and thrifty,” making peach preserves which lasted all winter. She also made peach pickles, which were unusual. Even in a country where hospitality was practiced everywhere, Hudson never found an equal to what his parents laid out for their guests, both humble and great.

Hudson tells us of a particular evening, when a young gentleman joined them from Spain. After dinner he played the guitar as everyone gathered in front of the fire. He told them he was reminded of his own family’s evenings, and that he was surprised that this feeling should come to him so far from home, on the “great, naked pampas, sparsely inhabited, where life was so rough, so primitive.” Catherine listened raptly. The evening was, for Hudson, an example of the harmonious home his mother and father had made for him.

The family made occasional trips to Buenos Ayres, but Hudson does not tell us much about his mother’s activities in town. It was ruled in Hudson’s early years by Juan Manuel de Rosas, a powerful dictator who had, at least, kept the lawless territory relatively peaceful.

Hudson’s father was fearless, but also believed in the goodness of those around him. This led to him losing the large estate with its pulperia. The family had to return to their original ranch. Hudson himself had typhoid, a long illness through which his mother nursed him, but then rheumatic fever. He was afraid he would not live long, afraid he would not be able to enjoy the natural world, which meant so much to him. He was about sixteen, and in fact had many years left to him. His mother did not, however. She died shortly after his illnesses, in 1859.

Hudson found that their neighbors also missed his mother greatly. Though she was a Protestant and they were Catholic and strange to her, she would sit with them, “at ease in their lowliest ranchos, interesting herself in their affairs as if they belonged to her. This sympathy and freedom endeared her to them.”

Hudson regained his strength and began publishing his work on ornithology. He left for England at age 33, and remained there, writing prolifically. He wrote of his early life, the world of nature and is especially known for his novel Green Mansions. 

I first read Long Ago and Far Away perhaps fifty years ago. I was charmed by Hudson’s picturesque story of life in Argentina and the idyllic life of his family. After this, I had trouble finding the book. Recently I found both a digital copy and an audio version by LibriVox readers, available here. Hudson wrote of his mother many years after her death and perhaps gives us an idealized version, but his childhood memories sustained him while living many years in London and I don’t doubt their substantial truth.