Defining the Meaning of Life: Open Mindedness, Travel, and Connection

Joanna’s Story

Joanna Biggar grew up in South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, where she spent her entire youth. She initially lived with her mother and both sets of grandparents who lived nearby. Her father, a WWII Navy veteran, returned home when Joanna was four years old. Joanna moved houses twice, once in elementary school and once in middle school, as each of her baby brothers arrived and a bigger house became necessary. Despite these changes, Joanna’s childhood was characterized by homogeneous places and a very stable family dynamic.

“By the time I got to finishing high school, I was done and couldn’t wait to bust out of here. By that time, it was the 50s and it was all pretty locked down. I had interests in a much wider world, so I was very eager to get out of high school and start college.”

Joanna obtained her first degree in Chinese language and literature from Pomona College in 1964. Inspired by a teacher, Joanna became interested in Chinese poetry in high school and decided to pursue the field in college. She originally wished to be a Chinese translator, but travel to China at the time proved impossible. Joanna did travel to Paris, however, to study at the Sorbonne, which later became the topic of her first novel. With a passion for reading, stories, and travel, Joanna quickly made her goal to explore the world outside of Los Angeles a reality.

“Books open up all the worlds to us… Books take us to the realms of imagination and put us in other people’s places. To experience what someone else has lived is very powerful. My grandfather always supplied us with books growing up, they were always a part of my life…I personally don’t think you can be a great writer if you’re not a reader.”

Joanna moved to Houston, Texas in 1965 with her husband, where she began her doctorate in French literature at Rice University. She finished the degree in 1970, with hopes of being a professor at a small women’s college. However, by the time she graduated, there weren’t any jobs in languages as colleges had stopped requiring them. With a lack of employment and now three young children, Joanna and her family embarked on what would become one of the most significant adventures of her life (featuring a story to be told later on).

“I married a man who was studying medicine and who was very interested in working in underdeveloped countries. I lived with him and our three very young children in Africa for many years. It certainly widened my vision of everything. At that time I really started my life as a writer. It was a very mind-broadening experience living in Ghana — wonderful people, warm and welcoming. It was a wonderful atmosphere to be in, living amongst them. Africa is a huge continent and there are certainly differences amongst them, and we were very lucky to have landed there.”

Joanna and her family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1979, where she began her career as a journalist. Having gained an interest in the stories of women who had traveled to Africa, she did lots of research on the topic and soon got published. She dialed in her writing to focus on what women had done and the parameters by which one sees the world from a woman’s perspective.

In 1983 Joanna went on another big trip, this time to China, at the invitation of the Chinese-American medical society to research the life of Dr. C.P. Li, an early friend of Chairman Mao Zedong and a political activist. The group of Chinese doctors that invited Joanna wanted her to write his life story.

“They had stayed in touch with him. The man had become a big political player. He was a doctor but worked for Americans during and after the war. They wanted me to write his life story, so I went to China to do that. That was another amazing adventure because I ended up traveling in all these forbidden places on my own and having an extraordinary time.”

Joanna returned to Washington D.C. and C.P. Li’s biography was published in 1984. She went on to write and publish multiple books and articles for a variety of publications, including The Washington Post. She continued her writing career for several years, eventually moving to Oakland in 1992.

Later on, in 2006, Joanna went on foreign writing instructor trip down the Canal du Midi in Provence, a project that would become Wanderland Writers, which has published many award-winning travel books. As for Joanna’s own published novels, the first of the trilogy That Paris Year was published in 2010, Melanie’s Song was published in 2017, and To End All Wars, the third volume, is still under construction.

Joanna’s Meaning of Life

“From that period on (living in Africa) I got very interested in traveling in rather extreme ways. I had read a book by a Frenchman, The Strong Brown God: A Story of the Niger River, and his trip down the river. He had gotten in this old boat that carried people for thousands of miles down this river. He had all these stories and I was so intrigued that I decided I was gonna do that trip. I engaged my former sister-in-law and a close friend, and the three of us took off on this journey; we went 2,000 miles down the river, by bush taxi, sometimes with nomads, often canoes — we often ended up on the same boat the guy had taken. We almost got incarcerated by a warlord in the Mali desert — we had quite the extraordinary adventure…

After all the travels I’ve done and the places I’ve lived, over time I’ve come to understand that probably in a major way one of our strengths as Americans is the sense of ‘I can do this’ — individuality and taking initiative — but I think it comes at a great cost: the sense of community. I think we’ve gone way off the deep end in terms of individual lives and not being connected to others and having a sense of loyalty to them. Probably post-COVID more than any time, there’s a kind of despair among people who are so isolated, lonely living in a vast country with all kinds of resources. A huge population but not connected with each other.

I’ve come to see other countries and cultures have done a much better job in keeping that sense of community and belonging. That is extremely important — a sense of connectedness and a sense of love. Two things that life has brought me that I’ve continued to carry.

I’ve done some of these kinds of out there trips on my own, but a very large part of my life is that I am very much a believer in family. I have kids, grandkids — I think that profoundly affects who you are and how you see the world. I was with a group of friends recently, sort of looking to the future with climate change and so on. For people who have young people in the family, it puts a whole different kind of aspect of anxiety and despair if you let it, thinking about what their lives will be. There’s a lot to learn from the kids, kind of living this future and having their own perspectives and takes on it. We have to be open-minded to that as well.

One kind of truism I learned was that being abroad in other cultures certainly makes me understand what it is to be an American. It helps you find what it is and how it is the same or different from other cultures. I have found the same about being a Californian. Roots so deep and that affect many generations, some of those basic things I’ve always carried with me and I was very happy to return to California after 30 years. Three of my grandchildren have lived in California and were brought up here. Others who have lived overseas thinking they’d like to come here or live here, they feel connected to this place because it’s a very special place.

The guy who wrote the book I was so taken with — his name under which he wrote the book was Sanche de Gramont. I learned that years after that, he gave up his title and his Frenchness and fell in love with a California girl and came to California. It’s an American name: Ted Morgan. He took the same letters and switched them around. I’m always amused by that.”