Free Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen Page A

out an identification card and handed it to me.
The researcher, Lee Lien, has duly applied to use materials in the Herbert Hoover Library.
    When I explained that I wanted to look at the Rose Wilder Lane papers he led the way over to a shelf that held the index: a row of three-ring canvas binders, nearly two dozen in all, cataloguing Rose’s diaries, letters, and mementos.
    â€œSeems like every few weeks or so someone new wants to see these,” Ron mused. “Some are fans, some are researchers.”
    â€œI’m a researcher,” I said, a little too stridently. I mentioned that I’d just gotten my doctorate.
    â€œThat’s cool,” he said. He seemed to regard me with a new respect, I thought. “So, first, take a look at these catalogs. All the Lane papers and documents are listed. See which ones you want to take a look at, then fill out a request sheet and I’ll bring them out from the back. Of course, the diaries are photocopies of the originals.”
    I thanked him, already reaching for the binder marked
1930s
. I sat down at the nearest table and turned the pages. As Ron had said, it was just a list, generated long ago on what was probably a manual typewriter, with brief descriptions of what the papers held.
    RWL diary, 1930, Jan.-Feb. Rocky Ridge, Mo.
    RWL diary, 1930, March, part I-II.
Rocky Ridge, Mo.
    I went back to the shelf to look at earlier years, marveling at how they tracked Rose’s moves—California, Missouri, Albania, New York, Texas, Connecticut. It was so overwhelming I just sat there for a few minutes: I hadn’t expected there would be so much information. Hadn’t realized how large her life had been.
    On the request sheet I asked for a few of Rose’s journals from 1930, when she and Laura would have started working on
Little House in the Big Woods
, and the diaries from 1965, when Rose visited Vietnam. Ron disappeared into the back and after a while wheeled out a cart with several boxes, like the kind used to store file folders.
    â€œHere you go,” he said. I must have looked surprised, because he said, “I know, it’s a lot. She was prolific. Take your time.”
    He left the cart next to the table I’d claimed. It was ten in the morning and as I stared at the boxes, my resolve started to slip. What was I doing here, anyway? Was this all I knew how to do—research and read? The idea of Rose at her desk, piecing together the origins of her parents’ lives, then wandering the earth to the end of her days, brought back an old anxiety: my mother and grandfather, also searching, landing, restive in the Midwest. I had to banish this—them—from the room. I remembered Alex, instead, tapping away at his laptop. I remembered Iowa City and the evening drinks, dinner, and bed that were waiting for me. Alex would want to know if I’d found anything here.
    I opened the box that held photocopies of Rose’s 1965 journals and saw that it included a pile of Vietnam souvenirs as well. Blank postcards, with faded, dreamy drawings of the old opera house in Saigon and the Hotel Caravelle. Boarding passes from Pan Am and United. Hotel bills. Her passport and visa, which displayed a photo of Rose wearing a turban and looking like the famous portraits of Laura in old age. Most of the journal entries from the trip were scattered notes about the history of the country. Her handwriting took time getting used to—sprawling, loop-filled, an old style people had stopped learning more than half a century ago. I couldn’t see where she’d written about anyone in particular in Saigon. No young man and his daughter, no Café 88.
    Instead, she mostly wrote scraps of grand abstraction—about colonization, about civilian dignity in spite of war—and travelogue remarks about weather and rice fields.
    Ao dai is the V dress.
    8 acres. Rice crop garden palms bananas. Village destroyed by V.C.
    All admire adaptability,