If I couldn’t trace my fish back to the source, what could I learn if I switched directions? Could I follow a salmon from net to plate?
Hoping for traceability, I scanned a QR code on a package of “Responsible Choice” frozen sockeye. It opened the grocery store’s home page.
Flummoxed, I bought chicken. And vowed to learn more.
Hong Kong, 1941. Newly-wed Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn floated into Victoria Harbor on a Pan-Am clipper. She was to cover the Sino-Japanese War for “Colliers Magazine,” and he was the unwilling companion, or U.C., lovingly nicknamed by Gellhorn. Though she noted in her memoir, “Travels with Myself and Another,” that he was also “better at the glamorous East” than she, “flexible and undismayed.” Hemingway was fresh off selling the movie rights to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” At the height of his fame, money in his hand, and ripe to live like royalty. The Prince of Hong Kong, as it were, albeit for a couple of months.
We come to this Pearl City with his footprints in our pocket, ready to discover where he planted them.
“All history is contested,” Tessa Hulls writes early in her extraordinary graphic novel/memoir, “Feeding Ghosts.” “Evidence exists as a field of dots. And we connect them according to what lenses we employ to examine the past.” To this she appends, “But there are unequivocal facts.”
The line captures the story that Juneau resident Hulls, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category, deftly and beautifully weaves in this story of how histories, both global and within families, shape how we are formed and what we become.