Abstract
This collection of short stories and short memoir, “Dust and Gold” attempts to reveal some of the problems that people of various ethnicities have endured in California as a result of its complex history. The protagonists, presented in these stories, work to sort through their lives and the obstacles created for them because of certain historical events beyond their grasp. In “Dust,” a memoir piece, the protagonist, the great-great-granddaughter of early California settlers who established gold mines during the Gold Rush, travels back through her childhood memories while on a bus tour to Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp located in southern California. In “Yellow Jacket,” a fictional work, Muata, of Miwok ancestry, attempts to kidnap her son after her release from ten years in prison. In “First Day of School,” another work of non-fiction, the protagonist, who works as an English teacher, recalls the stories of her colleagues who were held captive by a young man with a machine gun who murdered a social science teacher and two students at Lindhurst High School in 1992. The final story, “When Johnny Doesn’t Come Marching,” reveals the mental decline of a woman whose son dies in Afghanistan.