I’ve been struggling with how to begin this one. Saying “Happy New Year” seems, well, wildly inaccurate, but I also understand that you’re not here for a random Canadian’s take on U.S. politics (arrest every single one of them, I say, starting at the top). To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if I should send out a Closet Dispatch until after the inauguration, ”to be safe.” But when is it ever safe, really?
Then last night, I watched The Wind Rises by Hayao Miyazaki, and the Paul Valéry quote referenced throughout the film stayed with me: “Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre. / The wind is rising, we must try to live." No matter the circumstances, we must try to live. And I hate to admit it, but a big part of living for me is obsessing over inconsequential things.
Shall we, then?
The last time we talked, I told you about how some TV and movie characters have influenced my fashion choices over the years, but I neglected to mention my OG style influence: the book Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was the first book I ever owned, given to me for my eighth birthday by my best friend Sonia. A real book—with chapters, illustrations, a hard cover and dust jacket—it was my most treasured possession for many years and I pored over it, soaking in all the details of life in the big woods with Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura and baby Carrie.
I suspect my love of long skirts (of which I have many) began with Laura’s descriptions of her mother’s various dresses, from the simple everyday calicos to the famous delaine, worn only on special occasions:
Ma was beautiful, too, in her dark green delaine, with the little leaves that looked like strawberries scattered over it. The skirt was ruffled and flounced and draped and trimmed with knots of dark green ribbon, and nestling at her throat was a gold pin. The pin was flat, as long and as wide as Laura’s two biggest fingers, and it was carved all over, and scalloped on the edges. Ma looked so rich and fine that Laura was afraid to touch her.
Little House in the Big Woods is probably why I spent a good 20 minutes last week of my one and only life wondering if I should break my shopping fast to buy this ruffled collar:
It is also the reason I spent hours deliberating over the purchase of an actual bonnet two summers ago in Lancaster, PA, the heart of Amish Country. It was the day after I gave my first-ever book reading, and I was cruising the Lancaster Central Market when I spotted the bonnet cheerfully on display at a booth run by Amish teenagers.
“Where else can I get a bonafide handmade bonnet for $9?” I asked myself as I circled the booth multiple times and again later that afternoon as I walked around downtown Lancaster, doubling back towards the market. But I had other questions too, including, “Where would I actually wear a bonnet?” and “Is it cultural appropriation?” (My answers were, respectively, “while gardening” and “maybe?”)
In the end, I couldn’t get past the biggest question, which was, “Am I being ridiculous?” Because I was. Because, even though I was born and raised on the prairies and could definitely use the sun protection, I would never be able to pull off a bonnet alluding to a past that did not include people like me—in fact, that past actively worked to exclude people like me, both in the U.S. and in Canada.
Truth is, the great and glorious past of Little House on the Prairie didn’t exist for most people, white or otherwise. It wasn’t even that great for Laura Ingalls Wilder herself, whose family struggled in poverty, mostly on the brink of starvation. They barely got by. And the people who want to “return” our society to any version of some “great” past need to realize it never existed: it was always a fiction.
I will forever love the Little House books—it helps that Jia Tolentino and Roxane Gay do, too—but I don’t want to venerate the past as a simpler, better time. I once heard an interview on the CBC with some dude who was an expert on something (a totally reliable source, I know), talking about how, as a human race, we are improving, but it’s difficult to notice because it’s so incremental. He said, however, when you look at it in terms of centuries, it becomes pretty clear. A person in the 1920s would never want to go back to the 1820s. A person in the Renaissance would not want to live in the Dark Ages. And while we have plenty to learn from the past, our hope is in looking forward, not back.
Will the world be better in 2121? It’s hard to say, especially since we’ve done so little about climate change. But as I watch the prairie sunrise light the sky on fire over my corner of the world right now, I feel a bit of hope rising. So I’m gonna try to live.
:) Teresa
What is happening even?? Closet Dispatch is a free, limited-run weekly newsletter by Teresa Wong, who still thinks about that bonnet occasionally.