Transcript:
I came to understand that I had really grown up in a family with a secret. Now that is not saying that not all families have secrets; that is part of the pathology of families, that we have secrets, and at a certain point, kids get old enough to go to that closet and open it and see the dark skeletons in it, and learn the really bigger things about what has brought them to where they are in the world. I came to understand that the most profound secret in my family, the thing that no one could speak about openly—and I want to underscore the word “openly”—was the experience of the Armenian genocide. That inferno through which every Armenian on the planet passed through in one way or another in the second decade of the twentieth century. In one way or another. The trauma of the event and its aftermath remained repressed deeply in the outer narrative of my family life. And yet I also came to understand that no matter how hard people tried to presses the past, they can’t. That even there in the affluent sunlight of Tenafly, New Jersey, circa 1960, the darkness of the past leaked through in certain ways. And I came to understand that I was receiving messages, like messages in a bottle, like hieroglyphs. And they were in fact encoded, and I could do with them what I could, but for the most part, I stored them up. And at a certain point in my life I came to want to decode them as much as I could. And so much of my book is about decoding that world.

My class of seniors debated the issue of stereotyping. One student said that most stereotypes are, for the most part, based on truth, like that Asian Americans are inherently more harder working than members of other cultures. Another student agreed, and added that a stereotype such as that one is positive, so therefore, why question it? It seemed to me that these students were blind to the vast majority of stereotypes which are negative.

That night, I wrote the following in the journal I keep for my Facing History class. My great-great grandfather was born in Germany and immigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a teen. His grandson, my grandfather, battled as a fighter pilot in World War II against the Nazis. He won a Purple Heart for his bravery fighting for his nation, the United States of America. But in seventh grade, when I came to Belmont Hill and my classmates realized from my last name that I was German, a few responded by calling me a Nazi. And, though the comment was made in jest, I didn’t find it at all funny. It wasn’t true, and it did hurt.

As we continued to talk about stereotypes to learn what happened during the Holocaust, I think everyone began to understand better how harmful stereotypes can be. From my parents and from some of my own experiences, I’ve learned to respect other people for who they are. As we’ve studied Facing History in my class, I think we’ve all realized how important this really is. We must stop taking each other for granted, stop the useless degradation of classifying each other, and put stereotypes aside so we can come together on more peaceful, common ground.