How much do you know about your family? For example, do you know where your grandparents grew up? Or how your parents met? Do you know what your mom or dad was like in high school? Do you know of any setbacks, illnesses or tragedies in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?
What aspects of your family’s life, past or present, would you like to know about? Is there a family member, in particular, whom you would love to open up and tell you about their life? If so, what would you want to ask?
In the Letter of Recommendation essay “How Interviewing Your Own Family Can Change Your Life,” Kevin Nguyen shares how a recorded family history revealed many surprises and solved some longstanding mysteries:
My father sent the recordings by email. He gave me no heads-up — a Dropbox folder of MP3s arrived in my inbox without explanation, and I mostly wondered who taught him how to use cloud storage. I opened “Nguyen Family Oral History” and discovered audio files neatly labeled with the names of my uncles and aunt. My dad had interviewed his siblings — who are all now in their 50s and 60s — about their life in Vietnam, and what it was like to flee the country when they were children.
He started the project around the time his mother, Bà Nội, became sick. She had written down her story by hand in Vietnamese, then my father typed it up in English and emailed it to the rest of the family, attached as “MyStory.pdf.” It was a detailed but restrained account of her life — losing her mother as a teenager, surviving the bubonic plague, living through the fall of French colonialism, the American war and the rise of Communism — an incredible saga, chronicled with the unsentimental distance of a Wikipedia entry.
After she passed, my father felt an urge to preserve more of our family’s history. Because he left Vietnam before his siblings did, he knew only the rough sketches of their journeys to the United States. My family is not big on heirlooms, as anything material that could have been passed down was abandoned when they fled 50 years ago, but at least my father could keep an archive of our stories. There had been very few reasons to revisit these memories. This project, he thought, could give him one.
The essay continues:
To my father’s surprise, the experience of interviewing his brothers and sister opened up a new kind of conversation. In the recordings, formality made space for his siblings to tell their stories in detail, from beginning to end. For the first time I heard them tell their stories in the first person: My grandmother, aunt and youngest uncle set out on a boat the size of a twin bed and were picked up by a U.S. Navy vessel, only to end up at a refugee camp in Indonesia for an entire year before arriving in America; another uncle had to fake documentation claiming he was a Chinese boy, which allowed him to board a boat that was later attacked by Malaysian pirates.
Students, read the entire article and then tell us:
What is your reaction to Mr. Nguyen’s essay and the story of his father’s oral history project? What lines or details were most memorable, fascinating or moving?
Does reading the essay inspire you to learn more about your family? Or to conduct an oral history? Why?
How much do you already know about your family? Would you say you know a lot of its history and lore? Or are there big gaps and mysteries? How forthcoming are your relatives? Do they like sharing stories about their pasts? Or, like Mr. Nguyen’s loved ones, does your family tend to “recount its history only in broad strokes”?
Whom in your family would you like to interview? Tell us briefly about this person, your relationship and what aspects of this relative’s life you already find captivating or intriguing.
What would you like to find out about this family member and why? What questions would you ask? Would you ask about childhood? Travel? Loves and losses?
Mr. Nguyen concludes his essay, “The most meaningful part of his recordings, to me, is the effort — the decision that he should pass something down, and that maybe his children could take a lesson from it.” What do you hope to pass down to children or future generations about your life? What lessons do you hope they might learn?
And finally … what are you waiting for? Go interview a family member! It will be meaningful for both of you.
Interested interviewing family members or conducting an oral history? Consider sharing your project with others and submit to our annual Student Podcast Contest that runs until May 14.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
