November 11, 2016 - 20:22
No two characters could appear more different than Lloyd and Yumi, Ruth Ozecki’s father-daughter duo at the center of her novel All Over Creation. Lloyd, a small-town Idaho farmer, holds very strong conservative views and religious beliefs, while his daughter, a runaway at fourteen and now the mother of three children, all with different fathers, prides herself on being incredibly progressive and open in her values and way of life. When Yumi returns to her hometown upon news that her father is ill, it becomes evident that although she and her father claim to maintain their different beliefs, they increasingly think and act in alignment with each other’s beliefs rather than with their own leading up to Lloyd’s death, suggesting that Yumi takes on the role of a seed of continuation when it becomes apparent that her family’s legacy is dying out.
Lloyd, a classic all-American farmer, surprises readers when he takes an instant liking to the group of scrappy, hippie-type activists, The Seeds of Resistance, who clatter onto his land once reading one of his flyers. When Yumi went through a phase similar to the lifestyle to these young people, he resented her for it, choosing to only acknowledge the parts of his daughter he liked. Yet, when these young people show up, dressed as his daughter used to dress when she was their age, and holding progressive ideologies, he ends up appreciating this group of kids for who they proudly are, adopting Yumi’s progressive, go-with-the-flow attitude to do so. When he first meets the Seeds, Yumi “watched the last remaining strength drain from [her] father’s frail limbs as he gazed adoringly at the face of the stranger[s]” who have suddenly entered his life (138). He initially “tolerate[s] them,” all while reinforcing his pro-life, conservative, religious views to his daughter, and eventually this toleration grows to become love and intense mutual respect (144).
Yumi, who, since the Seeds arrived, has adopted Lloyd’s conservative, anti-progress views regarding the Seeds, attempts to squash his burgeoning positive feelings, by telling him the “band of anarchists…the caravan of gypsies” (350) are dirty, unable to be trusted, and have a hidden political agenda, Lloyd, keeping an open mind and seeing the good in them, as Yumi claims she has always practiced, separating herself from her father (350). Here, however, what she believes to value contradicts her actions against the Seeds, while her father thinks that the Seeds “’are respectful…They listen’” (147). While Yumi berates her father for not giving her a chance when she was a rebellious, hippie teen, she doesn’t give the Seeds, kids very much like she was back then, a chance and discourages him from accepting them. On the other end of the spectrum, Lloyd puts his foot down that he appreciates what the group of youngsters are doing, reversing how he acted when his daughter acted in that fashion. Eventually, on his deathbed, Lloyd refers to the Seeds as if they were his children, telling Yumi how much he loves them, showing a sharp change from how he is initially described in the novel as a man who separates himself from progressive movements. When it comes to the Seeds, Lloyd’s supposedly closed, conservative mind opens to the possibility of coexisting, even thriving, with people who are different from him. This is the exact chance Yumi once gave Elliot, and gave all the fathers of her children, and the chance that Lloyd once failed to give his own daughter, showing that when Yumi comes back, Lloyd learns from her and shows this in his relationship with the Seeds.
Lloyd’s love for Yumi’s daughter, Ocean, also shows Lloyd’s newfound tendency to give new kinds of people a chance, despite the circumstances. He observes Ocean when she first arrives with Yumi, appreciating that she “was different…she was more interested in what was going on inside a person’s body than what the person word on it” (148). Like he does with the Seeds, Lloyd uses Ocean’s uniqueness in her favor, not at her disadvantage, when making initial judgements of her. While he often gets impatient with the spunky little six-year-old, he is touched by her kind, “warm and light” nature (149). This appreciation eventually grows to something comparable to love as be becomes “amazed at the size of his pride” in this little girl he once wrote off as another little girl who would break his heart like his daughter did (297). By giving Ocean a chance to be different from her mother, he was able to form a bond with one of his grandchildren, despite his strained relationship with his daughter. While Lloyd saw Yumi, when she was a child, as something he wanted to see and ignores the aspects of her he disapproves of, he does not inflict this upon Ocean, and instead takes her for what she is. In this way, he uses Yumi’s long-running ideology of acceptance despite circumstances to his advantage, and dies not just as a father and a husband, but as a loving and accepting grandfather. On his deathbed, when Ocean brings him her baby chick’s first egg, Lloyd spends all of his energy thanking her for the gesture, as he “touched her cheek, patting her as gently as if she were an eggshell” (355). By doing this, he shows extreme amounts of love and affection for the little girl, despite her lineage and upbringing, putting all of that aside for love, just as Yumi was once known for practicing (355).
Yumi’s mode of parenting often reflects Lloyd’s views on the topic, beginning with the amount of worry Yumi increasingly shows as the novel goes on. In the beginning of the novel, it is clear that Yumi is not present for her children much of the time, while her father was too present in her life, leading to her running away; while she resents him for this, as she spends more time in her homework, she begins to change as a parent. Just as Lloyd worried when he did not know where Yumi was the night she received her abortion, Yumi becomes increasingly worried about Phoenix, her eldest son, after he is put in jail for defending himself in school. When he explains what happened to her, recalling events from weeks prior, Yumi asks her son why he didn’t tell her about it earlier. His response is “‘Oh, Yummy. Figure it out,’” implying that he did not see her as open to listening to him (238). After Phoenix explains what happened and goes upstairs to bed, Yumi, in a surprising change of character from a mother who is detached from her children to a devoted figure in their lives, follows him and breaks down, expressing her regret of how she handled the situation. As Yumi later laments, “time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful” (405). Yumi comes to the realization that she has failed to internalize the fact that her son, now fourteen, is not a baby anymore, and does not need to be monitored as such, just as Lloyd failed to internalize, when Yumi was the same age, that he could not control her or her decisions anymore. Unlike her father, Yumi clearly learns from this mistake and uses it as motivation for becoming more connected to all aspects, the good and the bad, of her children, just as Lloyd does at the end of the novel, when he finally admits how much he loves her.
When Yumi is tasked with putting her father on life support, she clearly adopts her dying father’s ideologies on life and death. Lloyd, throughout his life, has maintained a strong pro-life stance, which causes a rift between Yumi and Lloyd because she got an abortion as a teenager, but in this difficult time, Yumi is the one putting life before suffering. When the doctor tells Yumi his thoughts on taking Lloyd off life support, Yumi responds indignantly, “’well, then, good luck. Last I heard, he likes being alive, and he’s planning on continuing awhile longer’” (348). She takes on Lloyd’s pro-life-no-matter-what philosophy when his life is the one in jeopardy, although at the same time she insists that they hold different beliefs on the subject. When the doctor tells Yumi to ask for her father’s wishes, she scoffs, claiming that “’my father and I don’t exactly see eye to eye when it comes to making life-and-death decisions,’” although, in this case, they really do (349). Subconsciously, Yumi has adopted her father’s spirit of maintaining every life possible, no matter what the cost, adamantly refusing to take him off life support, citing such a decision as inhumane and wrong, reversing the more progressive, choice-oriented view of life she has maintained throughout the novel.
The changes documented in this essay lie in Yumi’s realization that her father is dying and that her mother has Alzheimer’s. Since she is an only child, Yumi realizes that with her parents in this state, the Fuller legacy will soon die off. This offers a reason for why Yumi subconsciously adopts her father’s ideas and practices to continue his legacy: Yumi, as Momoko and Lloyd’s only daughter, and the fact that the Fuller’s farm is in complete control of another family, is the seed that the family’s memory depends on. In this way, Ozecki is sending the message that life must continue despite change and death, shown by Lloyd and Yumi coming together with the common desire to be important to each other despite tensions at the end of Lloyd’s life. This idea of interbeing, the notion that nothing exists independently of anything else, is such an important message to send to readers in order to emphasize how each person, as individual and unique as one might be, is intricately connected to all other beings. The way Ozecki cuts back and forth from Yumi to Lloyd illustrates this ‘inter-being’ of individuals who appear to be so different from each other, and through this she reminds readers that while we all work so hard to and pride ourselves on being different, at the end of the day, we are all part of the same human family, and are all interconnected because of this.
Although it may seem impossible for two people to be any more different, when closely analyzed, two personalities often can develop hidden similarities that in turn bring them closer. This is clearly true in the case of Lloyd and Yumi, who initially cannot see eye-to-eye, but, when they spend time together, they adopt each other’s ideas and mannerisms, Lloyd in a subconscious attempt to connect with his daughter before his death, and Yumi in one final push to continue her parents’ uncertain legacy. As hard as a daughter or son may try, the apple truly does not fall far from the tree – or, rather, the child potato does not grow far from the parent potato, in the end. While Yumi spends the entirety of the novel trying to separate herself from her father’s conservative ways, she ends up unconsciously reinforcing these same values in her own actions, showing that, in the end, Lloyd’s values did have an influence on Yumi, and vice versa, as Lloyd’s disgust at Yumi’s way of life turns into love for the Seeds of Resistance and for Yumi’s daughter, Ocean. One’s children, thus, can have just as much an impact on the parent as the parent has on their children because of the fact that they both innately ‘inter-are,’ whether either of them like, or even realize, this fact.
Works Cited
Ozeki, Ruth L. All Over Creation. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.