Background

As a child growing up in California I ate Chinese food, more or less daily, and Swedish food on special occasions, such as Christmas Eve and Easter. Sometimes my mother alternated our usual routine with a modified Mexican taco or burrito. After all we were living in California which has a strong Mexican and Spanish influence. That this culture would rub off on us to some extent was natural.

English was spoken at home unless relatives visited or my mother was speaking to family on the phone. We had cousins living in California who we saw once or twice a year. John Rinell is my mother's first cousin. When he and his family visited John and my mother spoke a combination of English, Swedish and Chinese.Very occasionally family who were living in other parts of the world traveled through the United States on their way to or from Sweden or Asia. Their visits were brief, but always an exciting hodgepodge of languages, foods and personalities. As a child I often heard the stories of the family in China and Sweden and I saw family photos taken at places that were definitely not California. In time I realized that I was not a normal American kid. Other kids did not hear English, Swedish and Chinese spoken all in one paragraph and often all in one sentence. Other white American kids, at least in our area of California, did not grown up on rice, and foods accentuated with soy sauce, garlic and ginger.My friends did not open their gifts on Christmas Eve, did not have blue and yellow paper Swedish flags draped on the branches of their Christmas tree or eat pickled herring, Swedish meatballs, knäkebröd (hardtack), limpa, and lingonberries, and listen to Christmas music in Swedish.

As time went on and I grew older the stories of the 'old countries', for we had two 'old countries', China and Sweden, started to coalesce in my brain though there were certainly a lot of gaps in my knowledge. The stories were disarticulated bones, many missing, with not much by way of muscle or tendon holding the remaining bones together. When still a child I started asking my mother questions to fill in the gaps. A body of a story began to take on form.

Just after college I had a chance to visit family in Sweden which helped give a fuller picture of who I had become during those years growing up in California. After finishing graduate school I started working at Apple Computer. Personal computers were new to the world. It was obvious that they would have a big impact on society, and how we all would work with information. For instance personal computesr made the collecting and manipulating of information much easier. For writers this would have a big impact. Unlike the old days, which were just a few months or years previous, a writer would either write draft after draft in long hand or tap away on a manual typewriter through reams of paper. A personal computer took much of the chore and drudgery out of writing. I reasoned I had no good excuse not to write. And I had a subject to write about. I started asking more questions, asking family members to identify photographs, and when I had a little time, started to write.

Actually, much history is lost because it is not written down. The source material is eventually destroyed either dramatically by fire or flood or more likely, simply thrown away because someone who had possession of it through inheritance or happenstance thought the material of little or no value. You can see a dramatic example of this quite easily. When you visit nearly any antique store you can find family photo albums. The photos with images of families past, usually unidentified, are bodies without souls. They have lost their providence, their history, the stories that made these images significant, that told a tale of a generation's time on earth. A important part of a family history and perhaps world history is gone forever.

I thought I should try to preserve this history not only for myself and my family, but also for history before it was lost to both. And, with my personal computer, scanner, word processessing software and eventually the web, I had the tools to do so.

The Rinell family story is significant for it tells not only the personal tales of a family, but a story of an interesting time and place, of war and revolution and social upheaval, and a story of a family who for three generations tried to do good in a society that eventually took their land, their possessions, their social structure and relationships, and dispossessed them. This book records this tale.

[Acknowledgements][Table of Contents][Forward]

Footnotes