21 Days Until Submission

Let's just say that this paper is not going the way I thought it would.

I am down to the last three weeks until deadline and I can honestly say that at this moment I have a very limited view of how this is all going to turn out.

I've been reading and writing, transcribing, translating, and checking out books from my sister's university with her ID because they are the only free hard copy books available to me. However to be fair, I am in extreme doubt that SOAS would have, even in their incredible library, some of the texts that I needed that focused specifically on the U.S. southern border, U.S. census data, and all that other lovely stuff.

So I guess what I am saying is that it is good to be home.

Bagheera has gotten relatively huge in comparison to where he was just a few short months ago. Shane and I are honestly blown away by how lucky we got with this cat. Let's just say he has a lot of personality.

In terms of wedding planning everything has kinda been on hold for the last month and a half to let Shane prepare for the school year and to let me just focus on my paper. This plan to put off some key planning I think is distressing to a few people but I am of the mindset that there is nothing that can't be fixed or planned in 8 months. (So I hope).

I unfortunately have not been to a Rotary meeting since June but I am hopeful that once my paper is complete and after I finish my final report for Rotary International that I will be able to look into joining a club in my area.

In other news I have begun to learn Chinese which is a crazy process and I honestly can say it is one of the most self-serving things I have ever done. I've been heading up a lot of genealogical research for my family, particularly on my mother's side. Through this process I am hoping to discover who my grandfather's father is. The little information we have to go on is from fragments of my grandfather's memory, a genetic profile test that my grandfather took this spring, and very little else. Through that genetic test we found that my great-grandfather was most certainly Chinese and may have been the son of a Chinese man and a Korean woman.

Through the very intermediary research I've begun, I realized fairly quickly that I was probably going to need to learn at least basic Chinese and likely Cantonese.

So that brings us to today, and the start of this really neat non-academically affiliated project of learning a new language.

I have always loved history and the stories that come with it. It is really exciting to get to uncover my own families and to tell as story that in many ways has been brushed aside in not only my family but in American History.

The reality is that my great-grandmother Dorothy Van Etta likely married a man of Chinese descent in the 1920's and had two children. Then for an unknown reason, they separated, my great-grandmother, still a young woman, married a man named Robin Soderberg and had another child. Dorothy then proceeded to burn her children's birth certificates and swore herself to secrecy as well as her oldest daughter.

While I'm not sure that what I am going to find will be 'good', I believe that Dorothy's story and the unknown man's is one worth investigating and telling. Not only because it is their history that led to my grandfather and inevitably led to me but because it seems that stories like their's don't get a fair shake in history. I think it is important to change that.

I cannot deny the unknown man in my genetic heritage. It would be like trying to deny my known great-grandfather Kenneth Shepardson. I suppose what I mean is that I am excited to get to know him, even if I find something I might not like, he deserves to have a name.

Well enough chit chat from me. Back to my paper and my awesome cat :)

-K