family

Assignment D

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Part 1.
I will describe both my current family (me and my husband who I have lived with for five years) and my family that I grew up with (myself and my grandmother). Me and my husband are photographers and we end up taking a lot of artistic photos and photos of ourselves while we are traveling. These photos are digital and we also use film cameras. Like many people, a lot of our digital photos sit in computer files and we only look at the every so often. The photos we take that get developed or are Polaroid photos end up getting put on the wall. I am usually the one that makes scrapbooks out of the photos and my husband is the one who will tape them on to the wall. Most often we look through the digital photos while we are looking for a specific photo in the digital files. Then we might start looking at images and remembering vacations. The photos we had when I was growing up were usually put away in the attic and my grandmother look care of those. Usually the photos were only accessed when I was purposefully looking through them for something specific (like the digital photos). The oldest photos I can remember is from the 1940s but there could be some that are much older. Me and my grandmother might only look at photos when we are in the attic for some other reason. So in both situations (digital and film) I only end up looking for photos when there is some other reason I would be going through them, like looking for something in a box or looking for a specific image for a project. Typically, in my family growing up we would only remember people and events in the context of a certain event. So while having a holiday dinner we might remember something that happened at a previous holiday dinner. Thinking back I’m not sure we connected stories or events to specific objects or had many photos up around the house.
Part 2.


I posted four photos. One is a photo of me and my husband when we got married at the Oregon coast and a landscape photo from the same day. The second set of photos is from a road trip we took to explore central Oregon and northern California. The picture was taken on a hike by a waterfall outside of Bend, Oregon and I included a photo of the waterfall the photo was taken in front of as well. When I was examining the photos we have I found that since it was just the two of us together a lot of the time when we were taking photos, most of the photos are of landscapes or just one of us. These were one of only a few photos I could find of the two of us together. Both of us remembered the photos being taken at different times during the course of each of the events. I thought the photo of us on our wedding day was taken before the ceremony and he thought it was taken afterward. Even though this is just a small difference in time, it does seem to represent that photos will recall events differently for people who have set up the time-line for an event differently in their mind even though we sometimes think of photos as fixed images. The same is true of the photograph by the waterfall which I thought took place at the start of the road trip, but Adam was able to demonstrate with the time stamp on the image that it took place at the end of the road trip thus demonstrating one of the benefits of digital.
Part 3.
Grandma Grunthaner’s Peanut Butter Cookies
Sift: ½ cup brown sugar and ½ cup granulated sugar
beat until soft: ½ cup butter
Add in the sugar gradually and blend these ingredients until they are creamy.
Beat in: 1 egg, 1 cup peanut butter*, ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp baking soda
sift before measuring: 1 ½ cups bread flour (I just use all purpose)
add the flour to the batter and: ½ tsp vanilla
Roll the dough into small balls. Place them on a greased (I use ungreased) tin. Press them flat with a fork. Bake them in a moderate oven, 375 degrees, for about 15 minutes.
*Do not use the natural peanut butter that is good for you. THE COOKIES WON’T TASTE RIGHT. Skippy Crunchy works best. The easiest way to measure the peanut butter is to put, say ½ cup of water in a Pyrex measuring cup and then add peanut butter until the water reaches the marker for the amount of peanut butter PLUS ½ cup. Pour out the water before you add the peanut butter!!

This is a recipe from my great-grandmother. My aunt sent it out at the holidays with a letter about the recipe. One part of her letter read “Also, while you may be wondering why I am passing this recipe on to you, it is because it is the only Worland family recipe worth passing on.” She goes on to comment on recipes made with cold hotdogs and Velveeta cheese etc. I personally never got to experience any of the recipes with Velveeta and grew up eating a very different type of diet since my grandmother I lived with cooked differently and when my father would cook he was very health conscious. After I got this letter in the mail I made a batch of the cookies and shared them with co-workers. I also sent the aunt that sent me the recipe a Polaroid of the finished product. I don’t have much interaction with this aunt who lives in Virginia so it was a way to communicate with her about a family recipe which she thought I would be interested in because I bake quite a bit. When I am cooking with my husband, especially for larger holidays, he always cooks the main course and side dishes and I make the dessert. We usually are alternating who is in the kitchen working on the different parts of the meal. Typically whenever I have been in a living situation where we cook a lot I am responsible for the dessert and so I am in the kitchen by myself either before, during or after the main preparations and eating of the meal getting that ready. Before thinking about this exercise I had never really noticed that before, but there is usually a large group of people involved in the preparations for the main meal while I am engaged in a different routine preparing the dessert.

Part 4.
I would be interested in making a documentary about the recipe I shared above that my aunt sent out to several family members including me. I would look in to exactly how many people she sent it out to and choose maybe ten of them to follow in their process of making the cookies. The characters would be these ten people in an extended family living in all different parts of the United States and possibly elsewhere depending on how far out in the family her mailings extended. I would show all the steps each person would take gathering the materials, baking and then sharing this family recipe in the respective places they were living. This would highlight not just the individual differences but the differences in the process of making the same recipe in all the different regions the people were living in. I might also interview at least two family members that remember eating Grandma Grunthaner’s cookies. During what situations did they eat the cookies, when did she usually make them and who did she share them with and what did the people I was interviewing like most about the cookies or those events? Most likely I would not interview the people actually making the cookies but rather I would let the process of baking the cookies speak for itself. I would focus on using minimal music and narration. I would think that I would focus on the different tools used in the baking process when filming the baking shots. I would also try and get some outdoor shots of the places the people making the cookies were living to enhance the context. Since the cookie recipe was taken from the 1943 version of The Joy of Cooking I might include some historical background and information about that book and the role it played in shaping the tradition and history of cooking in America.

Assignment D: Orientation to Field Work

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The easiest form of keeping memories in my family is definitely photos. My family documents our lives, the places we’ve visited, and things that intrigue us by taking lots of photos. I think many things in my house has a story connected to it. Just like the main idea in our article, “Art” in the Journal of American Folklore, culture is connected to art. All the paintings and jewelry were mainly brought over from China or passed down from generation to generation. My family’s culture and and beliefs were connected to those objects. My parents lost a lot of their pictures when they immigrated from China so we only have a few pictures of when they were young. The oldest photo our family still has is probably when my dad was a teenager swimming in a lake with his friends. Usually on family vacations, I’m the one that takes the pictures because I’m the only one in the family that understands how to work with the many confusing technological devices. However, my mom is the one that organizes the pictures after they have been developed. We keep them in photo albums in a cupboard in our garage. It’s sad because everyone is just so busy and no one ever has time to look at those memories. I’ve probably looked at those photo albums once or twice a year and now that I’m in college, it’s even harder to look at them. If I just had the time, I would go through all of the photo albums and have my mom tell me the story that comes with each picture.

 

My sister is disabled and so we had to teach her many things when I was young. I found a few pictures of me learning sign language with her and this picture shows us eating noodles with chopsticks. There isn’t really a story to this photo but it represents a lot of things. We had to learn how to use chopsticks because that is the Asian culture. My parents weren’t hard on me for learning like my other friends. It came naturally to me and I use chopsticks to eat food all the time. It was harder for my sister to learn how to use chopsticks because she had a much slower learning process. My mom tells me she’s very lenient on many things because of my sister. Since it’s much harder and takes much longer for my sister to learn, my family has to spend a lot of time helping her. For my sister, she doesn’t understand our culture or values, she doesn’t comprehend those ideas. However, for me, I learned about my culture when I was young and I still portray the values and culture I was taught. Religion was a different subject. They believed in Buddah and praying to the ancestors but my parents never pushed any religion on me. They sent me to a Christian private school when I was younger and then I went to a Catholic high school. I always considered myself as a Christian, but when I went into high school, I found I didn’t really believe in anyone anymore. The only thing my parents were hard on me was about praying to the ancestors. It was more of the respect aspect and I only had to do it on special occasions. In the picture the table and chairs in the background is an old traditional Chinese table. My mom’s family used to have it in China and she told me that it was a very expensive piece of art. The painting in the background is, in mandarin, called shanshui (山水) which used to be placed in wealthier peoples houses in older dynasties. My parents said those are there just because of the Chinese tradition.

My parents cook the same foods as what my grandparents cooked them. We eat Chinese food almost everyday, but once in a while my family will make spaghetti or order pizza. Our dinners usually consist of soup, steamed rice, stir-fried vegetables with sliced meat that can be chicken, pork, or beef. Once in a while when my mom has time or when I come home from college, my mom will cook me her most special foods and my most favorite foods. Her specials are vegetable spring rolls, potstisckers, and hot and sour soup and my most favorite dish of hers is taro with pork.

Taro with pork recipe:

Ingredients:

2 lbs taro, peel skin and cut it to approx. 2″ long and 1″ wide
Pork (with skin) 1 1/2 lbs
1 tbls soy sauce
1 tbls oyster sauce
1 tbls seafood sauce
2 tsp corn starch
1 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp cooking wine
1/4 tsp white and black pepper powder
1 square of FUYU(soil been tofu cheese)
1/4 cup water

Steps:
Put all ingredients into a big bowl and mix them. Put pork and taro into the sauce. Make sure each one has the sauce on it.
Layer them by order: (Taro)(Pork)(Taro)(Pork)(etc.) into a plate to steam 1 1/2 hours. Test to see if the taro is soft enough or not before serving. If not, steam until the taro is soft. Serve and enjoy!

I’m usually not in the house when food is being made because I work until 7. From what I remember of when I was younger, my dad would start preparing dinner at around 6 or so and my mom would be helping him. My dad does the cooking mostly on the weekdays and on Friday and during the weekends, my mom does the cooking. My sister and I would set the table up when they are cooking and my mom would let us know when dinner is ready. My mom usually does the dishes after dinner and sometimes I will do the dishes when she is too tired or when I don’t have much homework. What makes it a good meal is when everyone in the family is sitting at the table. It’s always nice to eat with your family and for us, dinner is the only time when my whole family is together. It’s when we have time to all come together at night and talk about our day. I was always brought up that way, that during dinner, we have to eat at the dinner table. When I was younger, my friends would always talk about how they would be able to watch tv when they were eating or bring their food into their own room and I was ALWAYS jealous. However, now that I think about it, I’m glad I was raised this way.

My story would probably be about the culture of my family and how I was brought up. Chapter 3 of our reading Visual Storytelling tells us to choose a broad theme. Culture can be a pretty broad theme. The characters in the documentary would be me, my mom, dad, sister, and my grandparents. I would film a day of each of our lives but cut it into parts and put them together to show how similar and different we all are. I would probably interview my parents and grandparents by asking them how they were brought up. I think I would definitely include some photographs of memories because there shouldn’t be talking the whole movie. There also should be old videos with the pictures of probably childhood memories. I don’t think there should be much narration but maybe on some old videos describing something that is unclear. I would definitely include some music because I think music is what brings out feelings in a lot of documentaries. I would play some traditional Chinese music, but definitely instrumentals depending on the mood and feeling in the clips and scenes.