Driving Questions

The research question driving Looking For Zora is “What can be found as evidence in the place where Zora grew up for who she was as a person rather than who she was as an author?” The purpose was to get to know her on a more personal level, and maybe more solidly, by finding her home town and the people she knew, rather than just going off of what was read in her books. In No Name Woman, the question driving the research, even though the story is primarily about her aunt, “who am I in relation to my American present and Chinese past?” The two different cultures make a strange kind of pull on her existence, and I think at this point, as she is fearful of her aunt, she is fearful of her Chinese past, because it makes her have less American “normalcy.”