This first story is of Jami Miyamoto and her adopted daughter, Daily. Daily was born in the midst of China’s “One Child Policy”, meaning that her parents could not keep her. Jami came to her rescue when she was ten months old, and here the pair recount the story in a heartwarming exchange.
The audio segment begins with a lilting guitar piece. The simple notes segue into a narrator’s direct voice. The voice is imposed over the guitar and feels closer to the audience. The guitar is made to fade out rather than ending abruptly, such that the transition is smooth. The guitar may be sampled, and if not it was a very clean take. When the narrator stops speaking, Daily takes the reigns of the conversation, with no dead space due to the last remnants of the guitar piece. The layering used is very clever here – there is at least one audio element playing at all times.
The pair’s voices are very clear. There’s no background noise or interference, which allows for each inflection of voice to be registered clearly. One can more readily intuit the emotions of each speaker through this crispness, especially when paired with Jami and Daily’s narrations. Their conversation, to me, had a “more real than real” feeling, as though I could feel deeper into their voices through singular vocal recognition as opposed to the multilayer processing present in a live conversation.
While I’m not gay myself, this story really spoke to me as an expression of family and intergenerational understanding. Hearing the close connection between grandfather and grandson gives me hope for my own future, where I hope to have a family and ultimately grandchildren. These two men were connected by their shared identity and struggle, and that allowed them to connect even deeper than before, strengthening the bond of family beyond just blood.
Hearing the disparate voices of these two men – one young man who had yet to experience all of life and one old who has seen its twists and turns – indicated to me that mutual understanding can go beyond age. It’s about the shared experience, the sense that someone else understands what you’ve been through. That’s the foundation, I think, of community. There are other people out there in the world who understand what you’re dealing with. That’s reassuring.