November 5, 2016 - 15:37
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, is 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 these two characters think and differently, they often end up acting in alignment with each other’s beliefs rather than with their own.
Lloyd 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 in their Spudnick. When Yumi went through a phase similar to the lifestyle to these young people, he resented her for it, and yet he ends up appreciating this group of kids for it, 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 my father’s frail limbs as he gazed adoringly at the face of the stranger” who have appeared on his land (138). He grows to “tolerate them, Melvin and his friends,” and eventually this toleration grows to become love (144). Although Yumi, who 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 once did, responds by telling her that “’They are respectful…They listen,’” (147) putting his foot down that he appreciates what the group of youngsters are doing. Eventually, on his deathbed, Lloyd refers to the Seeds as one would his children, telling Yumi how much he loves them, showing a sharp change from how he is initially described in the novel. When it comes to the Seeds, Lloyd’s supposedly closed, conservative mind opens up 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 of the fathers of her children, showing that Lloyd takes a page out of her book and uses it in his.
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. In this way, he uses Yumi’s long-running ideology of making the best of any situation 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,” showing extreme amounts of love and affection for the little girl, despite her lineage or upbringing, putting all of that aside for love, just as Yumi was once known for doing (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. 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 (Ozecki 238). This situation, in which a child is dealing with something very difficult and only tells his or her parent after the fact, is similar to Lloyd and Yumi’s relationship when she was younger. Lloyd, clearly, is not into talking much, and allows Yumi to do what she wants, not chiming in until after the fact, and Yumi puts this in practice with her own children, even though this tactic did not work out for her and her father’s relationship in the long run. After Phoenix explains what happened and goes upstairs to bed, Yumi follows him and breaks down, clearly regretting 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. Instead of learning from this mistake, which caused Yumi to run away, Yumi falls into the trap of using it with her own children, utilizing Lloyd’s obviously failed parenting method on the next generation of Fullers.
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 of 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.
Although it may seem impossible for two people to be any more different, the underlying similarities in how they behave may prove otherwise. This is clearly true in the case of Lloyd and Yumi, who cannot see eye-to-eye since the core values they each hold do not match up. However, actions speak louder than words, and these two often act in similar ways, despite their different beliefs. This shows that 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. 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, whether either of them like, or even realize, this fact.
Works Cited
Ozeki, Ruth L. All Over Creation. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.