#ryansullivan

Upward Mobility?

Ryan Sullivan

 It felt like Espada really emphasized certain words or phrases by simply finishing the sentence on the next line.  This gives strength and weight to the words allowing the reader to feel what he went through.  In line 5 he writes, “stacked seven feet high / and leaning / as I slipped cardboard / between the pages,”.  When he writes ‘and leaning’ in one line we can almost see these precariously placed cardboard that looks like it is about to fall over.  This is all part of Espada telling us where he was and he later lets us know where he has gone.  His upward mobility is really show between lines twenty one and twenty two where he leaves a significant gap between his words.  This is also where he has transitioned from working in a warehouse to ten years later and going to law school.  He makes it clear that the things he had to do to get to where he is today all helped him to appreciate even the smallest aspects of his journey. He now uses the very paper that he was helping to make in his past as a present day law student.  This type of writing really takes us farther into the complexities of a person and allows us as the reader to become more invested as we begin to relate to the character on a deeper level.

 Wind in my face.  Rolling grind.  Sudden stop. Gravel in my knees.  Still air spinning.  Rob Roskopp.  Bones Brigade.  I could smell the wood of the skateboard in my dreams.  I could feel the grit of the grip tape on my calloused hands.  I could hear the roll of the well-oiled wheels as I spun them in my sleep.  Christmas was coming and all I could think about was a Rob Roskopp skateboard with the disgusting design of a mentally ill monster etched onto the bottom.  I was too old to ask Santa and my parents were reluctant to even talk about it.  They thought that when I had a board beneath my feet I was simply trying to kill myself. They looked at skateboards as little rolling pieces of death that would take me a million miles an hour straight into the grave.  It was no use trying to ask them for what I wanted most in the world.  

                “What do you want for Christmas Ryan?” asked my dad

                “I was thinking about maybe a Rob Roskopp skateboard with the                          green face on the back, I was thinking of just putting in my wall as a                    piece of art and not riding it.”  I replayed trying to soften the blow.

                “Uh huh, you know that’s not going to happen, what else do you want                  for Christmas Ryan?”

                “Awe dad…”  I said feeling incredibly downtrodden.

For years I wanted that board, even after it wasn’t in style anymore.  Even after I stopped skateboarding I still wanted that board.  Now that I’m older it sounds so silly.  The board wasn’t even that expensive and I probably could have bought one myself if I had saved some of my money.  They don’t make those boards anymore and Rob Roskopp is probably somewhere in a nursing home having the same dreams of skateboards that I was having when I was a child.  Sometimes the memories we have of the things we never had can be just as strong as or even stronger than the things that we did have.  

The Angel Island poems were very difficult to read.  They speak of sadness, sacrifice and oppression by a people who were very wrongly imprisoned.  One line that stood out to me was ‘It is only because of empty pockets I can do nothing else.’  He is talking about how jobs were so scarce for Chinese settlers that he was forced to take the grueling job of mining for gold or possibly working on the Central Pacific Railroad.  It is ironic and sad that this person who worked so hard to find gold was left with empty pockets.  He can ‘do nothing else’ only because he is not allowed to do anything else.  To work so hard and to have nothing to show for it is an incredibly despairing idea.  It also, in a way, speaks of a measure of endurance in that he knows that things are very dire, but in time if he were given the opportunity he could do much bigger and greater things.  This person clearly knew he was capable of so much more and wanted so badly to have the same freedoms that the white man was given.  

              Another line I liked was ‘Rushing about so much, smoke came out of my mouth.’  These jobs were incredibly labor intensive and would require people to move around a lot in order to lay tracks or mine.  I think what he is saying is that they had him moving so much that he felt like he was on fire.  He felt that he was so worn out that he was actually producing smoke from his mouth. This also could refer to the amount of smoke inhalation he may have had to endure while mining or laying tracks. Blasting was a common occurrence while mining for gold.  Another possibility would be that he is referring to breathing heavily in the cold conditions of Gum Sahn.