How to Talk Socialism with Your Fictionalized Parents

To write about my socialist family in a capitalist society necessarily means truth and lies are mixed up.

I. When to Keep a Secret

I was eleven when my parents asked me to give up my bed for a visiting friend. It was an unusual request, and it felt like a little game to put away the toys scattered around the floor, fold out the TV-room futon, and go to sleep under that unfamiliar ceiling. I woke the next morning to a strange woman with long white hair talking loudly and familiarly with my parents, even though I’d never seen or heard about her. My parents simply introduced her as “an old friend,” and I didn’t have the nerve or awareness to ask for more details.

Years later, I read this passage in Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon:

“Signor Paolo Ferrari was in the dining room drinking tea and when I saw him I immediately recognized Turati who had once come to visit us while we were living on via Pastrengo. But since they told me his name was Paolo Ferrari, I obediently believed he was both Ferrari and Turati; once again truth and lies were mixed up for me.”

By the time I read this, I knew who the woman who stayed in my bed was. She’d come to town to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre. A group of young organizers had gone down to Greensboro to organize workers, mostly Black, which attracted threats from the KKK. The organizers staged a rally and challenged the KKK to show themselves. The Klan did—they drove up with a caravan, took rifles out of their trunks, and opened fire. They killed five people that day, all young, all leaders of the movement. My parents knew those five because they were all part of the same organization; one of the murdered men, Dr. Michael Nathan, was the husband of the woman who stayed with us, Dr. Marty Nathan.

The entire massacre was caught on videotape, in the middle of the day, but none of the killers were brought to justice. Another detail caught on tape: a member of the Greensboro Police Department riding in the caravan with the Klansmen, showing them where the rally was taking place.

In Family Lexicon, the young Natalia doesn’t understand why she must call this man Ferrari, but she understands she must continue the lie:

“Offhandedly, Lucio said to me, ‘There’s a man in your apartment with a beard who rushes out of the living room whenever I go in.’

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s Paolo Ferrari!’

“I wanted him to ask me more questions but Lucio didn’t ask me anything else.”

Ginzburg the narrator has the ironic distance of the intervening years; she understands that her parents were leftists, and the man is the anti-fascist politician Filippo Turati, who is fleeing Italy before Mussolini can kill him. Even though the child Natalia doesn’t know what’s happening, she sees the absurdity of a grown man running away from a child and senses that this man’s life rests in her keeping the lie. She wants to share this burden with her friend Lucio even though she doesn’t have the words for it; and he, perhaps also sensing danger, doesn’t ask.

Ginzburg writes in the introduction to the book: “Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer.” Facts and lies, for her, become mixed up in those early memories from childhood, when she realizes that sometimes it is right to lie, and that the adult world asks her to.

I’ve always struggled with when and how to discuss why Dr. Marty Nathan visited us and what happened in Greensboro. I must have sensed, as a child, that there was something about this woman and her visit that I wasn’t ready to understand and that my parents weren’t ready to tell me. Even now, I wonder whether to mention that my parents were communists, along with the five who were murdered, because their politics led the mainstream media to discredit the incident as a “shootout” between “extremists.” Certain facts were—and are—dangerous, because we live in a country that claims freedom of expression but in fact values some expressions over others.

II. How to Educate Your Parents

I was in my early twenties when I started researching what happened in Greensboro. I was trying to understand who I was as a political being, and this was also when I started reading books and following Twitter accounts that showed me how backward my parents’ politics were. They didn’t understand why our generation of activists introduced ourselves with gender pronouns; they only vaguely understood how social media worked. I’d explain to them how electoral politics are a waste of time, and I’d scoff at them for not recycling.

Then I read Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. Though she was writing about leftists in London before I was born, I felt she’d peered into my mind and transcribed my thoughts:

“‘Alice, I know it is no use my saying this. But I shall say it. Again, I have to leave here. Do you understand? Your father won’t pay the bills any longer. I can’t afford to live here. I’ll have trouble paying my own bills. Do you understand, Alice?’

“Alice then, in a full, maternal, kindly, lecturing voice, began, ‘Mum, why aren’t you like us? We share what we have. We help each other out when we’re in trouble. Don’t you see that your world is finished? The day of the rich selfish bourgeoisie is over. You are doomed . . .’”

I realized, with embarrassment, that the surface content of Alice’s words might be different, but the feelings and even cadences of those critiques were the same—new lyrics to a decades-old melody.

I recognized Alice’s middle-class hypocrisy when she admires a group of workers until she sees the greasy food they’re eating and the conservative newspapers they’re reading: “Only lumpens, thought Alice, relieved there was no obligation to admire them . . . it wasn’t these men who would save Britain from itself!” I recognized her apoplectic outbursts against “the shitty fucking fascist swine” who destroyed Council housing to prevent squatters like her. I recognized her bypassing emotion in favor of “hard” politics: “Communes. Squats. If you don’t take care, that’s what they become—people sitting around discussing their shitty childhoods. Never again. We’re not here for that.”

Here was someone smart and educated and utterly at a loss to meet and hold the fullness of others’ humanities, let alone her own, someone quick to criticism and slow to compassion.

I also sensed, underneath all that, an earnest conscience and a desire to care for others: Alice puts her ingenuity into refurbishing the Council flat so she and her comrades can live there, she supports and admires her friends, she gives herself fully to the cause. I wanted the best for her character, and that made me wonder what it meant to want the best for myself.

III. How to Hear About Your Parents’ Pasts

One day, as my mother drove me home from the airport, I started to tell her what a time-saver TSA PreCheck was, how skipping that line was totally worth the devil’s bargain with the scary surveillance apparatus. She went quiet in a way that set off my sixth sense, like the crisp air before a heavy rain. At home, she showed me her paperwork for TSA Global Entry—it cited a previous arrest, and her application was denied. She also brought out some documents from thirty-five years ago and explained how, in the desperation to get justice for those slain at Greensboro, she and her comrades went around the city spray-painting slogans. She was spray-painting, of all things, a hot dog stand, when cops caught her and arrested her—an arrest that’s stayed on her record ever since.

Soon after, I read this passage in Grace Paley’s “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age”:

“Yes, but I’m supposed to tell you a few things, give advice, a few last words. Of course, the fact is I am obliged because you are always getting yourself mixed up in politics. Because your mother and I were such radical kids—socialists—in constant trouble with the police—it was 1904, 5. You have the idea it’s O.K. for you and it is not O.K. in this country, which is a democracy. And you’re running in the street like a fool. Your cousin saw you a few years ago in school, suspended. Sitting with other children in the auditorium, not allowed to go to class. You thought Mama and I didn’t know.

“Pa, that was thirty-five years ago, in high school.”

I understood how someone who confronted the police in their youth would never want that for their own child. That trauma can collapse thirty-five years, creating its own time, because even a parent’s long memory is nothing compared to the memory of state bureaucracy.

Paley’s narrator and her father collide like bumper cars: It seems the momentum of their worldviews might bring them together, until that very force sends them shuddering in opposite directions. It happens again when the father offers his view of literature:

“Of course, most were anti-Semites. Dostoyevsky. It was natural, it seems. Ach, why is it we read them with such interest and they don’t return the favor?

“That’s what women writers say about men writers.

“Please don’t start in. I’m in the middle of telling you some things you don’t know.”

I saw how this father could both share wisdom openly and remain stubbornly closed, and that what felt like irreconcilable dualities between me and my parents were all true. It is true that their politics are shaped by communism; it is also true that they want me to have a stable, middle-class life. It is true that they have a lot of wisdom to share; it is also true that they might learn from my generations’ analysis. It is true that I am my own person with a politics and worldview; it is also true that I will always be their child.

IV. Why You’ll Fictionalize All This

To write about my socialist family in a capitalist society necessarily means truth and lies are mixed up. If I believe one story, my parents’ friends were misguided and careless extremists; if I believe another, they were freedom fighters murdered by the state. If I believe one story, my mother is a criminal; if I believe another, she was a young idealist speaking truth the only way available to her.

These three—Ginzburg, Lessing, and Paley, all women—know that we must navigate those truths and lies in intimate spaces where politics isn’t meant to disrupt but of course does. They know because they went to rallies and meetings but also raised children and cared for homes; they had to decide, as their own parents did, what to tell their children and when. Two of these authors are Jewish and surely came to socialism for similar reasons as my Asian American parents: Being immigrants and racialized others, they’re forced to see the brute force of authoritarianism and policing and the wage. Having left the old countries, they want to know if they can offer something better and fairer to the next generation.

It makes sense that these women bring us into the small everyday interactions where a quieter but deeper political change takes place. A political figure is inspiring; a parent’s truth is foundational. A rally is energizing; a vulnerable conversation is transformative.

Fiction is a realm where one can put aside, for a moment, the contested archives and histories determining what happened and who is accountable; in the realm of fiction, truth is measured by the human heart. That must be why Ginzburg asked readers to approach her book as a novel: For those of us coming from people or communities treated as marginal or irrelevant, a trial by heart, by human recognition, is the only chance we have.