deanna’s blog

The Real Lesson of “Linsanity”

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:42:38 -0500

One year ago, a very different scene was unfolding at Madison Square Garden, one that in retrospect shows how badly we needed Jeremy Lin way before we’d ever heard of him. And by "we," I don't just mean Knicks fans.

At yet another dull game in the midst of another dreary season, three Asian American men, one with his young son, were sitting near my husband. (I was pregnant with my now 5-month-old and home on my own couch eating cake instead of wasting my time.) Two loud, burly white guys stood in front of the Asian guys, blocking their view. The Asian guys genially asked the white guys to sit. They refused. Except they didn’t just refuse. They yelled “Asian bitches!” and soon let loose with their fists.
 When my husband got home, he was a little shaken. Not by the violence he’d seen, but because the incident crystallized for him, as the soon-to-be (non-Asian) father of an Asian American boy, what our son might be up against, like too many before him: a world where “Asian” was still wielded instinctually as a dirty word—and as a synonym for being the opposite of a man.

Not long before, upon learning the gender of our baby, we’d playfully discussed how we would handle our future boy when he threw a ball indoors, stole candy bars, got in a fistfight. That last scenario was where we hit a snag. I agreed with my husband in principle that violence wasn’t the answer—but in practice, I said, if anyone picked on our son, I didn’t want him to back down. When pressed, I explained, “He’ll be Asian.”

After that night at the Garden, my husband understood what I meant.

It’s not that those two white guys represented broad swaths of the population. It’s that their attitude was only an extreme manifestation of how, in American pop culture, Asian American males have long suffered the indignity, as Ky Phong Paul Tran writes, of “never being depicted and thus never existing OR being depicted in the most humiliating and emasculating light possible.”

Dare I add: Until now?
 Nearly two weeks in, Linsanity is raging for anyone who takes even a passing interest in the game, or identifies as one of the billions of Asians around the globe, or who simply relishes an unlikely hero. And yes, Jeremy Lin’s breakout success is a moment of cultural pride for Asian Americans similar to what we’ve felt in the past with luminaries from Michelle Kwan to Maxine Hong Kingston.

But it also feels very different.

Because what’s most undeniable about Lin—what screamed to anyone who saw his game-winning, buzzer-beating three-pointer Tuesday night—is that the guy has balls.

Which obviously has always been true of other Asian males. But now Lin is demonstrating it in a way that even the most racist douchebag would be hard-pressed to refute.

And the effect is only magnified by his relatively low-key yet evident swagger, his self-aware nerdy cool, his substantial yet unfreakish build, the fact that on TV he pretty much looks and sounds like your brother or your cousin or a kid who rode the same bus in high school. Amid all the hoopla, he’s utterly unafraid to be himself—which, in the end, is the only form of masculinity a mother truly wants for her son.

So today, as I scour the web for an infant-sized #17 jersey, I can’t help picturing those two white guys showing up at the Garden this year. And I have to think that this time, if they’re tempted to pick on some Asian guys they assume won’t fight back, and if their own memories aren’t sufficient—did I mention that they got their asses beat before they got hauled out (i.e., rescued) by security?—then all the Jeremy Lin posters, chants, and masks surrounding them as they take in the grand spectacle of the man himself on the floor will make them think again.

This essay (with graphics) originally appeared at the Huffington Post, 2/16/2012.

Battle Plan of a Tiger Daughter (and Mother-To-Be)

Fri, 13 May 2011 10:28:33 -0400

On the same day that Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother went viral, I learned I was pregnant with my first child. And while talk shows, op-ed pages, parenting blogs, email inboxes, and Facebook and Twitter feeds across the nation began to flood with outraged invocations of damaged self-esteem, elevated suicide rates, Asian automatons, “Yellow Peril,” and even child abuse, I stayed in bed reading Chua’s story, feeling strangely sentimental.

It wasn’t just my hormones. Chua’s tale of extreme parenting—including those infamous scenes of calling her daughters “garbage” for imperfect piano playing and rejecting their birthday cards for being sloppy—made me profoundly grateful for my own Tiger Mother.

Like Chua, my mother was a Chinese mother who directed an iron will toward her daughters’ success. Growing up, whenever people remarked upon my grades or awards, I almost wanted to tell them I hadn’t had any choice in the matter.

Because I had the kind of mother who, if I brought home a test score of 98, would demand an explanation for how those two points had escaped me. If I scored 100, she’d demand to know why I’d failed to earn extra credit. Explanation was futile. As my mother would say, “There’s no Chinese word for try.”

I generally resist simplistic East/West dichotomies, but this is true. In Chinese, you can try something out—as in sampling, tasting, taking a turn—but you can’t say, “I tried my best” or “But I tried.” In any case, I knew better than to attempt such excuses in English.

I had a duty to excel because, as the daughter of immigrants, I was privileged: privileged to grow up in a land of peace and prosperity—with a Chinese mother. With privilege came responsibility: responsibility to validate her sacrifices and avail myself of opportunities that, by her implication, might otherwise fall to Americans who were lazier, dumber, or more self-entitled than me.

So I tried to fulfill that duty—but, like Chua’s daughters, I wasn’t always happy about it. There were times when I disappointed my mother, intentionally and not; when I raged and rebelled, doctored report cards and forged signatures. There were times when we fought like animals; when she screamed that I was ruining her life and I screamed back much the same.

The moment I got into the college of her choice, I figured I’d satisfied enough of my mother’s expectations. I partied, slacked off, had boyfriends who dismayed her. I self-indulgently pursued a degree in creative writing. I spent most of my twenties abroad, far away from her.

And I worked on a novel in which a family of strong-willed Chinese American women reunite for a tour of China in the wake of tragedy. I wrote about family secrets, hidden political history, what we seek when we travel—and the lifelong pressure to be extraordinary. I wrote about the tolls exacted on these women’s relationships with their own mothers and daughters, and the difficulty of reconnecting when we lack a common language for failure or weakness—for what makes us human, as opposed to, say, tigers.

So my own sentimental reaction to Chua’s book caught me off-guard. That same day, I sent Battle Hymn to my mother, along with a note expressing my gratitude. And then I had my husband read it, as a primer.

Because I’d just had another realization: According to the Chinese calendar, our baby would be born in the year of the rabbit. Not a tiger like Chua, not a boar like my mother, not a horse like me, but a bunny. Cuddly, cute, and—the adjective Chua deploys with the greatest disgust—soft.

I decided we needed a battle plan.

My husband was game. He hadn’t grown up with a Chinese mother, but he sometimes wishes he had. Once, strolling Prospect Park, we watched a little kid point out his shadow to applause and cheers of “Great job!” from his parents. My husband muttered, “‘Great job?’ More like, ‘Correct.’” Here was a sign of a soon-to-be Tiger Dad.

We started strategizing how to raise our kids—by Chua’s definition—Chinese. Self-esteem built upon hard-won skills and achievements, not mindless praise. Discipline and obedience. Respect for elders—i.e., us. Regimented chores. Academic drills, Mandarin lessons, and practice tests after school. That’s when my husband asked what school our kids should attend (here in New York, an issue often raised before conception). I said they would simply attend the local elementary, like me, then test into the elite city school from which I’d graduated.

My husband looked worried. “What if they don’t get in?”

Without hesitating, I said, “We’ll beat them.”

Right about then, I received a reply from my mother: a correspondingly loving message, along with a declaration that Amy Chua’s depiction of Chinese mothers was “totally distorted” and that Chua herself was “a hysterical control freak.”

Of course, in many ways, she was right.

I’d gotten a little carried away with Chua’s manifesto. After living in China for four years, I’m well aware that her characterization of “Chinese mothers” would perplex most of those one-point-three-billion masses, from the impoverished villages where toddlers often wander unsupervised amid livestock and littered streams to the booming cities where overweight “little emperors” (the spawn of China’s one-child policy) often tyrannize their doting parents and grandparents. During my time there, I was continually struck by how my homegrown notion of “Chinese mothers” bore almost no relation to the realities on Chinese ground.

And as Chua acknowledges, the traits she attributes to Chinese mothers are also found among “Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents.” In fact, this parenting style would much more accurately be described as common to striving immigrants—in other words, to those whose life trajectories are “uniquely American,” as a Time article astutely observed. But that doesn’t have the same ring as “Chinese mothers.” Neither does it play to the current national fear of losing to China on the global stage nor to long-held xenophobic views of Asian kids as “hypercompetitive robots,” as Ken Chen noted at CNN.

Finally, for me to call my mother a Chinese mother diminishes not only her American-ness, but her individuality. Unlike Chua, my mother never outlawed school plays or TV or sleepovers. She wanted her daughters to engage in society, rather than hold ourselves above it; to develop social skills, independent minds, a strong sense of personal responsibility and civic duty. That was more important to her than raising the “math whizzes and music prodigies” that Chua (perhaps self-mockingly) promises.

And whereas Chua tells her daughters that hard work is what differentiates them from the school janitor, my mother never indulged the temptation to overlook social inequality. A former journalist and social worker who earned a law degree while I was in college, she enforced academic success not as an end in itself, but as a necessary foundation for the power to challenge the status quo and the freedom to pursue the passions that can’t be decreed, that can only spring from our individuality.

Maybe it’s no accident that I became a novelist, in the same way that one of my sisters now heads a nonprofit defending immigrants' rights while the other teaches public school—careers that Chua might not consider “stereotypically successful” but have made my mother very proud.

Which is not to say that my mother is superior to other mothers. I can attest that her daughters are as deeply flawed as anyone—and that we all carry battle scars. To be honest, I have no idea whether my mother represents “Chinese mothers” any more than Amy Chua. All I know is that the central way she raised us—holding us to the highest standards and refusing to settle for less—is how I want to raise my own children. And while my mother might loathe the term “Tiger Mother,” as far as labels go, I like it—with a few caveats.

My husband and I made some modifications to our battle plan. We’ll emphasize basic diligence and rigor, along with personal choice. We’ll probably deploy my mother’s line about the word “try,” but only if our kids bring home a grade below, say, 92. We won’t care if our kids can’t play piano for their lives, as long as they pursue some kind of passion. And, lest anyone worry, I can’t imagine any scenario in which I would beat my children, not a failing test score, not even a crappy birthday card.

Most importantly, I realize there’s no right way to be a Chinese mother or a Tiger Mother or any kind of mother. Every mother is only human. The best-laid of battle plans will always be works-in-progress, like our children, like ourselves.

Still, I remain grateful for Chua’s call to arms. Her manifesto might be reckless on some counts, but what’s undeniable is that parenting will often feel like war. And to fight that war, whatever our ethnicity, we need to cultivate a certain fierce spirit residing in each of us. That includes the little creature now growing inside me, these days better known in our house as “Tiger Cub.”

This essay originally appeared at the Huffington Post, 5/8/11

Seven Books on Writing for Every Writer

Mon, 4 Apr 2011 12:34:39 -0400

A few years ago, a draft of my first novel received a sweeping round of rejections, all complimentary yet unyielding, a devastating combination. After that, I could no longer look at the document titled "novel" that I'd virtually lived inside for three years. I couldn't imagine writing again without getting a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that's probably familiar to most writers at some point in their careers.
I couldn't talk about writing without invoking the ultimate futility of life. And, for the first time I could remember, no work of fiction gave me solace. I'm not proud of this, but every time I picked up a novel, all I could contemplate was the plain fact that it was what my own wasn't: published.
Then I stumbled upon a copy of The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. It had been assigned to me in graduate school, back when I was too engrossed in my writing to read it. Now, when I opened the slender, yellowed volume, it seemed to have been written for me at this precise moment.
“When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.”

Dillard goes on to describe the writer's task as that of an inchworm climbing a blade of grass; as "cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair"; as alligator wrestling and lion taming; as "life at its most free"; as the sensation, at its best, of "unmerited grace."
 She captured so precisely the place of writing in my own life that, beneath my cloud of self-pity and self-doubt, I knew I needed to write again. Not that day, or that week, or even that month, but soon. And not in agonized pursuit of a book deal, but to see my characters through their journeys by digging a path the only way I knew how: a line of words.
My story has a happy ending in that, after another year or so of writing and revising, hundreds of discarded pages, a falling-out with my agent, a dozen queries to prospective agents, and who can remember what else, my novel was published -- in hardcover last year and in paperback this week. Still, what gives me infinitely more satisfaction than seeing my novel as a finished product -- though I couldn't have imagined this a few years back -- is my own knowledge that I was true to the process.
I would like to think I would've arrived here under any circumstance, but the truth is, we're all liable to lose our way on this uncertain journey. So I thought it might be a worthwhile project to comb my bookshelves and poll writer friends to compile this list of books on writing that have guided us in the right direction at the right time.
First, a few caveats. There are no guarantees in writing -- and certainly not from any book on writing. As Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia and How This Night Is Different, cautions, the best way to learn how to write is by "reading and rereading good books" -- not only books on writing, of course. And (this always bears repeating, even to myself) to write: every day, at the center of your life.
And yes, the entire enterprise of writers recommending books about writing by other writers might seem self-indulgent and self-regarding, another illustration of how badly us literary types need to get out more. Trust me, we castigate ourselves for that all the time -- and question our purpose on this earth. For the obverse of the freedom one finds in the writing life is the sense that, to quote Dillard again:
“Your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever... Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already -- worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones... Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?”

Though we might not always have the answer -- and though our manuscripts might be far from excellent at the moment -- sometimes all we need to know is that writers wiser than ourselves have asked themselves the same question.
Here, in no particular order, are seven books on writing for every writer.
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard I've stopped clutching this book like a security blanket, but I still like to keep it close -- for practical comfort ("It takes years to write a book -- between two and ten years... Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks... Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms"), for inspiring exhortations ("Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case"), and for the poetry on every page.
Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry When I was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Frank Conroy strode into the classroom one afternoon and, instead of launching into a critique of that week's story, handed each of us a copy of this book. After I delved into it (it does require delving), I understood why. It's a truly unique synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, and cognitive psychology that illuminates the particular challenges of the literary arts, which, "unlike painting, music, sculpture, theater, and film -- are almost wholly devoid of actual sensory content" -- and that details precisely how great writers work the miracle of evoking images more vivid than our own daydreams.
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner Gardner's stern edicts on such aspects of craft as psychic distance, sentence rhythm, the structural units of a novel -- and how to avoid sins ranging from accidental rhyme to sentimentality -- are enough to shake the dreamiest writer out of complacency, all under the imperative of maintaining the only dream that matters, "the vivid and continuous fictional dream" that a writer creates for a reader.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott Kate Levin, a contributor to Fiction Writers Review and the Nation, speaks for many when she says, "I first read Bird by Bird during my first year of college, and it was revelatory to me to read a book on writing that was so unpretentious, funny, and wise. She seemed to speak to my exact anxieties about writing, and in doing so helped me to understand that this is just the stuff one has to go through to get the words down on the page. I return to the lessons of her 'Shitty First Drafts' section again and again." I also love Lamott's description of what it feels like the day your book comes out -- essentially, visions of lush bouquets and blaring trumpets collapsing into one phone call, if you're lucky.
Story by Robert McKee Most of us who come through writing workshops hone our craft on short stories and find ourselves bewildered when we attempt to tackle our first novel, a form that, in many ways, is more akin to film, particularly in terms of scope, structure, and plotting. That's where this bible of screenwriting has much wisdom to offer, starting with McKee's first principle: "Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form."
Mysteries and Manners by Flannery O'Connor Jon Tribble, managing editor of the Crab Orchard Review, cites this as one of his favorite quotes from O'Connor:
“There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful -- the myth of the "lonely writer"... supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him... Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts... Unless the novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication, and communication suggests talking inside a community.”

Personally, I love that inimitable, cranky brilliance of O'Connor's in sections like this:

“People have a habit of saying, "What is the theme of your story?" and they expect you to give them a statement: "The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class" -- or some such absurdity. And when they've got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story.... But for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”
 Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us and The Weight of Heaven, puts her love for this book very simply: "I love the passion in it and the intensity of the language." Here's a sample: "Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question."
What are your favorite books on writing? What do you love (or loathe) about the books on this list? Post your suggestions in the comments below.
This essay originally appeared at the Huffington Post, 3/31/11.

Lunch with Ha Jin in Flushing

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:37:53 -0400

After reading Ha Jin’s story collection A Good Fall and conducting a Q&A with him via email, I met the National Book Award-winning author last week on the steps of the Flushing library. We knew each other only by our author photos, but there was an instant sense of warm recognition as we greeted each other and, at his suggestion, headed next door for lunch at what happens to be my dad’s favorite spot: No. 1 East Restaurant, better known as “Ren Ren” (literally translated, People People).
With his wire-rimmed glasses and rumpled gray hair, Ha Jin didn’t seem to trigger any recognition from passersby on Main Street, let alone our waitress. She seemed baffled and a bit irritated by how long it took us to order. To be fair, it took us a very long time to order.

First, there was plenty of thanks and admiration to be expressed, along with basic background information to exchange, before I felt like I could get down to eating. So while we held our menus, we discussed how much I enjoyed reading about my hometown of Flushing in his stories, what had brought him to New York from Boston this time (a talk at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus), and why he chooses to stay in Flushing every time he visits (in brief, he enjoys it, especially the bookstores and the food).

Then we stared at our menus and spiraled into a cycle of Chinese-style politeness that we both seemed unable to break. It went something like this:

“What would you like to order?”

“What looks good to you?”

“I eat everything.”

“They have lots of seafood.”

“I like seafood.”

“So you would like to order seafood?”

“Sure, if you would.”

(A long pause, during which neither of us is able to name a seafood dish.)

“Is there something else you’d like to order?”

“How about … soup?”

“Soup is good. Which soup?”

“Which soup would you like?”

After a few more minutes of this, Ha Jin suggested hot-and-sour soup. I cheerfully agreed while my thoughts churned. Was Ha Jin suggesting hot-and-sour soup because he figured it was the kind of thing an ignorant, American-born kid like me would eat? Of course, plenty of Chinese people enjoy hot-and-sour soup, including me, my dad, and maybe Ha Jin. In that case, was Ha Jin ordering it for himself or did he mean for us to share it? If the former, was that because he figured I practiced that crude American custom, or because he actually wanted it for himself? Either way, what was I supposed to order to accompany hot-and-sour soup?

To read the rest of this post, please visit Open City: Blogging Urban Change.

Finding Flushing in the Stories of Ha Jin

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:09:58 -0500

As a Chinese American novelist, I tend to resist treating literature as sociological texts. I’ve answered my share of those questions: What does your book tell us about China/China versus America/Asian American women/immigrant families/etc.? And while I always appreciate the intent behind those queries (truly!), I try not to impose that framework on other authors, particularly when their characters are people of color, female, working-class, or otherwise “other.” I don’t want their creations to carry the burden of being representative. I want to let them live and breathe, to simply showcase the art of a writer.
But this week, as I started to read Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, I found myself unable to stop taking mental notes on what this book reveals about the neighborhood of Flushing. Of course, it’s become almost compulsory for the Times and New York magazine to rhapsodize over Flushing restaurants—often with a Columbus-style tone of discovery. But A Good Fall is the first book I’ve read that delves straight into the inner lives of its inhabitants, a group so often invisible in mainstream culture, not to mention literature, that I can completely understand the temptation for readers—myself included—to view these stories as sociological documents.
All of Ha Jin’s characters are recent Chinese immigrants: a sushi restaurant waitress whose sister in Sichuan harasses her to send money so that she can buy a car; a male sweatshop worker who becomes a driver for three prostitutes; an English professor who has a nervous breakdown when he signs off his tenure application letter with “Respectly yours”; a young monk left penniless and undocumented by his temple master, who secretly keeps a wife and a BMW on Long Island.
As I read their stories, as much as I’m admiring Ha Jin’s surprising turns of phrase, the sympathy and insight he extends to even minor characters, the plain honesty of every detail and feeling, it’s almost impossible not to draw conclusions about the hopes and struggles of the population his characters seem to embody—which I’ll explore in more detail in a following post.
For today, I wanted to explore a reaction that seems still more primal—maybe even primitive. I grew up in Flushing, and I have to admit that my first, most basic reaction to the book went something like, Hey, Taipan Café on Roosevelt Avenue—I know that place! Obviously, I’m not the only individual who has sampled Taipan’s coconut tarts and pork buns. But for those of us who’ve grown accustomed to rarely seeing our worlds depicted in print, there’s a deeply personal quality to that jolt of recognition, almost as if the author is directing that reference straight at us.
To read the rest of this post, please visit Open City: Blogging Urban Change.
Photo courtesy of Ha Jin

A Few Incidentals

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:43:29 -0500

One recent morning, I went to Kissena Park with my dad and my little sister to explore the tai chi scene. We met up with Teacher Du and two of his students, both middle-aged women with sweet, open demeanors. (They treat him with deep respect and perform tai chi under his guidance, but there’s no payment for instruction.) Several routines were practiced, one that Teacher Du himself had choreographed. But, in retrospect, it’s the incidental moments, the little things that happened off to the side, that seem central to the intimate serenity of that morning.
Gathering pu gong ying
(above photo)
When we arrived, the trio were crouched in the grass, gathering leaves from the ground, their manner lightly absorbed, unhurried. They were gathering, I was told, pu gong ying—which, if Google serves, translates as dandelion leaves—into plastic bags. They were careful to snap them off by the stems, rather than pulling them up by the roots, so that the leaves would soon grow back. According to Teacher Du, the leaves aren’t meant to be eaten; one of the women, Auntie Huang, would brew them briefly and drink the liquid. Auntie Huang has short, slightly graying hair and a beautifully smooth, gentle face. In traditional Chinese medicine, pu gong ying is said to treat such various conditions as cancer, diabetes, and heartburn.
It was only later, when Teacher Du made a reference to Auntie Huang’s hair having grown back nicely, that I learned she has just undergone extensive treatment for breast cancer.

A Depressed Turtle Named Turtle
When the pu gong ying had been gathered, Auntie Huang reached into her bag and plucked out a turtle. She’d brought him out to get some sun. When Teacher Du asked if the turtle had a name, she said, “You can call him Turtle.” (In Chinese, the pronoun is gender-neutral; I’m assigning the maleness.) Every now and then, between routines, Auntie Huang would check on Turtle. He never seemed to have moved, but the sunlight did, through the willow trees, so she’d pick him up from his newly shady spot and set him down again in a patch of sun. I mentioned that he must be happy. Actually, she said, she thinks he’s depressed; he hasn’t been eating, drinking, or moving. Indeed, even when a big, unleashed dog bounded nearby, Turtle stayed still.
To read the rest of this post, please visit Open City: Blogging Urban Change.
Photos by Jessica Fei

Translating Tai Chi from Beijing to Flushing

Fri, 3 Dec 2010 10:23:14 -0500

I’ve just begun to explore the tai chi scene in Flushing for Open City: visiting my dad’s regular class on Northern Boulevard and an impromptu trio in Kissena Park, talking to a master named Teacher Du and some of his students (who include a number of cancer survivors), and meeting a turtle named Turtle, who sits on a sunny patch of grass while his owner practices under a willow tree, all of which will figure in future posts. But what keeps coming to mind right now are my own memories of studying tai chi in Beijing, more than ten years ago.

I was a complete newcomer to tai chi then, and my fellow students were, like me, language students in China, newly arrived from the US and the UK. For us, learning tai chi was akin to practicing our character strokes, eating local street food, sleeping on the wooden planks in our dorm, taking fifty-five hour train rides during school holidays to the southern provinces: one more way to immerse ourselves in the country we’d come to study.
Our teacher was a compact, wiry, baby-faced 25-year-old local who had us call him Willy. A nationally ranked kung-fu champion, he now made a living appearing as an extra in martial arts soap operas—and teaching clumsy foreigners, for whom nothing was too basic: how to bend our knees, how to balance, how to breathe.
I was the only person of Chinese descent in the class, and I seemed to have a little bit of innate facility. After a lifetime of straining to reach subway handrails, my height was an asset. Willy sometimes likened tai chi movements to a cat’s: tensile, artful, close to the earth, ready to spring. When he explained the proverbs behind certain movements—white cranes, horses’ manes, cloud hands, a needle at the bottom of the sea—my body seemed to comprehend.
As the weeks went by, most of my classmates fell away, and some mornings, it was just Willy and me, each a little embarrassed for the other, practicing in a little cracked courtyard where the university staff hung their laundry. One of my favorite ways to explore Beijing became watching groups of elderly men and women performing tai chi routines in perfect unison and silence, with exquisite slowness and grace, on random squares of pavement while the city roared around them.
By the end of the year, I felt I’d learned at least one routine, the 24-form, the way other kids learn to ride a bike: the body remembers. Back at my parents’ house in Flushing, I decided to teach it to my dad.
He was nearing sixty, and long days of driving a van and delivering florist supplies were taking a toll on his joints. No one in my family had ever been a regular practitioner of American-style exercise; running, hiking, swimming, weightlifting, not for fun but as a form of working out one’s body, had always seemed vaguely absurd to us. Tai chi, by contrast, now felt deeply elemental to me. A tradition that had passed from masters to schoolchildren for centuries, an ancestral thread that broke off at my father’s generation—until I traveled to Beijing and picked it up again.
To read the rest of this post, please visit Open City: Blogging Urban Change.

Finding Serenity in Flushing

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I'm participating in a new blog, Open City, just launched by the AsianAmerican WritersWorkshop, to explore gentrification and urban change. In my first post, I find serenity in an unexpected place: alongside my dad, practicing tai chi, in my hometown of Flushing.

When most people think of Flushing, they tend to think of hectic traffic, overflowing street markets, noisy crowds slurping authentically mouth-numbing food. (Unless they think primarily of the Mets, in which case I’m not terribly interested.)
It’s true that anyone stepping out of the Main Street station is likely to stumble upon images like the one above.
But, as I recently discovered, there are also scenes like these unfolding every morning just blocks away:

I was born and raised in Flushing, and it wasn’t until I moved to Beijing about ten years ago that I became familiar with the sight of flocks of casually dressed, middle-aged locals practicing tai chi in perfect unison in ancient parks, in the Temple of Heaven, in parking lots, on street corners—on seemingly any square of pavement, so many of which appeared and disappeared and appeared again in those days of urban development at warp speed. I decided to learn the discipline, and I found that amid the tumult of life in a city of twenty-million-plus, there was nothing like focusing on a movement like “cloud hands” for a few minutes in the morning.
To read the rest of the post, please visit Open City: Blogging Urban Change.
Photos by Jessica Fei

Why Every Writer Should Watch Jersey Shore

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:06:15 -0400

I used to think of my trashy-TV viewing as a necessary but guilty habit. I spend my days reading fine literature and knocking my skull trying to write it. I've long taught in public schools, and I'm married to an economics reporter, and I come from a family of activists, so dinner conversation tends to not be so light. When I curl up to watch TV, I can do without substance. I prefer gossip, hookups, catfights. I want to gawk at clothes, hair, implants.  Lots of reality shows have satisfied these requirements over the years: Rock of Love, Real Housewives, The Millionaire Matchmaker (even though Patti Stanger is kind of a hideous person). As does MTV's Jersey Shore, which completes its second season tonight and has already bestowed on our culture such iconic images as Jwoww's physics-defying halter tops, Snooki getting punched out by a Queens gym teacher, and Mike sitting down with an egg sandwich to watch Pauly get it on with a girl who's "DTF" (uncomfortably, my initials) at six in the morning.  But this week, as I started to anticipate Jersey Shore withdrawal, it occurred to me that the show isn't just great trashy-TV. Or even just great TV. It's some pretty great storytelling, and it holds some valuable lessons for literary folks like me. (I realize I'm running the risk of sounding archly hip, in the way that Gawker appends to every mention of the show the tagline, "the most important sociological experiment of our time." But I'm serious.)  Take character development. Initially, we might've tuned in just to snicker at those orange-skinned, big-haired, self-proclaimed Guidos and Guidettes, but the show has cumulatively revealed each of these kids as fully, gloriously human. Every episode contains scenes that define the fundamental character of each cast member--as well as scenes that complicate that picture. Each of them is given space to be shape-shifting, to surprise us, to alternate between self-awareness and self-delusion.
Thus, we know Mike as a reptilian predator--and as someone who hankers for peaceful group dinners, who gives us surprisingly dead-on commentary. We can't help feeling invested in their travails, whether involving a gelato scoop or a cheating boyfriend. By now, we intuit the differing nuances each time Snooki flounces off in her fuzzy slippers or Sammi tells Ronnie to "do you." Even the widely despised Angelina, who comes closest to a flat character, exhibits something almost endearing in her dating moxie, her amazing ability to be totally bitchy while preserving not a shred of dignity, even the way she incessantly yanks at the hem of the dress her mother sent (which is indeed, as her mother feared, too small).
Entwined with all this are issues of gender and ethnicity--depicted more honestly than in much of today's fiction. As is oft-noted, some of the cast members aren't Italian; they claim the Guido/Guidette identity as a lifestyle, a culture. Snooki, who was adopted from Chile, simply calls herself tan. These traits are part of the continuum of their characters, not plot points, not symbols, and not all-defining. Similarly, in terms of gender, the girls declare their man-eating abilities, yet find themselves calling Angelina a whore--and acknowledging the double standard. They engage in talk of female empowerment and solidarity, take pride in not cooking and cleaning, and freely pick fights and smack guys in the face--secure in the knowledge that those guys won't "do something about it." Which isn't to say that's progress--only that it captures the complicated, often contradictory, and generally fluid ways in which these aspects of our identities are actually lived.
Then, the show is viscerally funny, inducing cringes, guffaws, and dropped jaws in roughly equal measure, in the way that few books seem to be. As in that indelible hot tub scene where a visitor's "chicken cutlet" floats out of her bra and up to the surface. Maybe my sense of humor is unevolved, but too often, I pick up a novel that's been described as hilarious, only to find that the laughs are mostly located in the author mocking his own creations for being less clever than he and his reader. Jersey Shore is funny in the way life is funny, accidentally and intentionally, with sudden bursts and slow buildups, with someone in on the joke or getting the joke right along with us.
Perhaps most of all, I'm struck by how much material must have been gathered for the show's editors to cull what they did. Nearly every scene depicts at least one line of tension, and the following scenes advance each tension until the conflicts break open, one after another, with suitable lulls in between: meticulously choreographed fireworks. Some of this is due simply to the casting and premise--but much of it is due to the editors, who were obviously ruthless in their selection. They cut the dull scenes that went nowhere and, likely, some hugely entertaining scenes that didn't advance the story. Similarly, a writer's craft involves wading through no end of sludge in order to gather our pearls. It's only when we find each pearl that we realize the rest is sludge. And by then, the sludge is hard to shake -- but that's our duty. There's no other way to arrive at the economy and clarity that mark good literature -- and Jersey Shore.
Finally, there's a difference between that kind of ruthless editing and the fake, icky staging that taints other shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Similarly, writers often navigate a tricky path between manipulating our characters through the machinations of our plots and leaving them to muddle through a story that's ill-defined and fuzzy. Some of us like to call that ambiguity -- but it isn't. Real ambiguity, the right kind of ambiguity, is when there's absolute clarity about what happened -- and very little about what it all means. That's up to the reader.
The people behind Jersey Shore get that. As viewers, we're shown every event that led, for instance, to Sammi and Jwoww's brawl, from the three-way kiss to the unfortunate letter--but the debate rages on over who won, who was right, and how the hell Ronnie emerged unscathed.
And for that, I thank them. Seriously.

“Find a Chinese Wife Now,” Thanks to Ads by Google

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 12:24:27 -0400

After I wrote my first blog entry at the Huffington Post ("I Called Amy Tan a Dirty Word -- And Then She Friended Me"), I felt a certain sense of satisfaction. I felt like I'd excavated something difficult about ethnicity and gender and literature and identity. In my small way, I'd complicated the picture of Asian American women. And readers had responded. Together, we'd added to a much larger conversation.

That's what I was thinking, anyway, when I scrolled down my article to respond to the latest comments and saw this ad wedged between my own earnest sentences about fetishization and pigeonholing:

Ads by Google
Find A Chinese Wife Now Find Your Someone Special With Us Beautiful Chinese Women. Join Free!  www.ChnLove.asia

Like most Asian American women, I'm familiar with depictions of us as exotic objects for sale. But somehow it seems like there should be some mechanism -- automated shame? irony-overload protection software? -- to keep my own name and photo from aiding in that promotion.

No such luck. When I revisited a few other blogs that had posted author Q&As or reviews of my novel, I saw ads for "Hottest Orient Girls," "Asian Women Best Price," and so on. Of course, if you google some variation of "Chinese/Asian women," nine results out of ten will offer more of the same (and the tenth probably refers to foot-binding). Maybe you'll get one of these offers by the time you scroll to the bottom of this page.

I wish this were just a quirk of the Web, but I think it underscores the fact that contending with these images is still, for most Asian American women, an everyday reality. No matter where we work or how we dress, we're prone to getting mistaken for subservient brides, masseuses and hookers. Usually, of course, it's more subtle -- say, a certain leer or a knowing wink in referring to so-and-so's "Asian girlfriend."

This isn't a novel observation -- and it's taken me weeks to write this post partly because a voice in my own head keeps scoffing, Oh, come on, not this again. But it's one that seems to bear reexamining.

The disconnect between that enduring stereotype of submissive sex objects and the Asian women I know in real life was partly what impelled me to write my novel A Thread of Sky, the story of a family of six Chinese American women, each strong-willed and independent-minded to a fault, who reunite for a tour of China. When I spoke about this during my recent book tour, some readers expressed surprise that stereotyping is still an issue for us. I should probably mention that none of these readers were Asian. They'd had Asian female colleagues, friends and significant others who were so the opposite of the stereotype that they'd assumed we were over this already.

I can understand the assumption, but I'd venture to guess that at least some of those Asian females were like me and many of my peers and the characters in my novel: We're driven to embody the opposite of that stereotype precisely because it still surrounds us. Until we defy it, it defines us by default.

Which isn't to say that all Asian American women spend our days agonizing over being stereotyped. It's more like a background noise, a persistent buzzing. Mostly we ignore it. Sometimes we laugh it off or forget about it. Sometimes we decide it's worth a fight. And every now and then we wonder if we're the only ones who hear it. We're almost relieved when something like Google Adsense makes it explicit, because at least that shows we're not crazy.

The three American-born daughters in A Thread of Sky are more attuned to that buzzing than most because they've been raised to view their personal lives through the lens of political struggle and to strive to "make a difference by being different." While the struggle was overt for their grandmother, a former revolutionary and feminist leader in China, their battles are more abstract: getting compared to "Hotorientalbabes.com" by a coworker, getting mistaken for a Beijing prostitute, worrying whether a boyfriend has "yellow fever."

You could call them hypersensitive, and they probably wouldn't disagree. In the course of the novel, they come to see how, in constantly striving to demonstrate their strength and independence, they "forfeit a measure of their humanity," as one reviewer put it. They learn that sometimes they need to stop proving themselves and simply be.

Like them, I've learned to pick my battles. The reality is that anytime I write about myself, my peers, or my characters in a space that can be monetized, my own words are liable to become a platform for advertising Asian women like discounted designer watches. Maybe this speaks to the limits of literature. Or of Google Adsense. Maybe it's just something to laugh off. I'm still not sure, but I fear this reality is here to stay.

I Called Amy Tan a Dirty Word--And Then She Friended Me

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:30:04 -0400

The day that a review of my first novel ran in the New York Times, I received a Facebook friend request from Amy Tan. It seemed she was welcoming me into the club—of novelists, Chinese American novelists, Chinese American female novelists reviewed in the Times. I was about to eagerly accept when I remembered that during my first radio interview a few days earlier—an interview I’d posted to my website, Twitter, and Facebook—I’d called her a dirty word.
Well, I hadn’t called her a dirty word. I’d said that among a younger generation of Asian Americans, her name had become a dirty word. Let me explain.
While Amy Tan had just become marginally aware of my existence, I’d already had a long and complicated relationship with her. I was ten when she published The Joy Luck Club. My mother, my sisters, and I took turns devouring it. At a time when Publishers Weekly thought it seemly to praise the novel’s “Oriental orientation,” when my New York City public school still circulated a social studies textbook that described the Chinese as a yellow-skinned and slanty-eyed people, those vibrant, complex portraits of present-day Chinese Americans were revelatory.
But by the time I was a high school senior, a teacher’s mention of Amy Tan unleashed vitriol from every Asian American in the classroom. We were sick of having our personal essays, our anecdotes about our mothers, our every mention of Asian travels, customs, or dishes, summarily compared to The Joy Luck Club. There was something too easy, too knowing, about white Americans’ embrace of the story.
“Is that Amy Tan’s fault?” the teacher asked. This mostly silenced us, but if there was a general, inarticulate feeling, it was: Well, yeah.
We had no idea that this feeling had already mutated into a rancorous debate, notably led by Frank Chin, who attributed the acclaim and popularity of The Joy Luck Club to its depictions of Chinese culture as cruel, backwards, and misogynistic—depictions that, according to him, not only play to racist assumptions but also lack authenticity.
The caveats and counterarguments here could (and should) fill entire books. But for my generation of Asian Americans, widespread ardor for Amy Tan dovetailed with the fetishization of Asian women, the denigration of Asian men, essentialist ideas about Asian cultures, the abiding preference for preconceived notions of who we are. Whether or not we bought Chin’s argument, whether or not we’d even heard it, we knew the feeling behind it.
So we formed a backlash—and what a backlash. Until now, I’ve never publicly admitted to being moved by Amy Tan’s work. Few of my peers would be caught dead with one of her books. I can’t recall the last time I heard an Asian American mention her name without a grimace, a smirk, a rolling of the eyes. And I’ve never felt bad about this, until now.
More than twenty years after I first read The Joy Luck Club, I’ve just published my first novel, A Thread of Sky. The story of a family of six strong-willed Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home, uncovering political history and family secrets that have shaped each of their lives, it was inspired by a trip that I took through China with the women in my own family.
The moment I conceived of the idea—perhaps while I was still on that trip—I worried about being compared to Amy Tan. But this was my story, and I needed to write it. For more than five years, I immersed myself in the work—moving to China, viewing the landmarks through the eyes of my characters, researching contemporary Chinese history, revising and writing and revising.
I eventually wrote a scene in which my characters reference The Joy Luck Club because they feel the weight of those expectations on their own journey, but I didn’t think of myself as writing in Amy Tan’s shadow. Other people sometimes invoked her name to me, but it was usually ironic. I thought that maybe, as a society, we could finally allow for plurality.
When the time came to market my novel, my publisher finally mentioned The Joy Luck Club as a comparison title. Of course: Chinese American women, mothers and daughters, a return to the homeland. I couldn’t argue with the comparison as long as it wasn’t meant to be all-encompassing. I hoped readers, once reached, would see that in my novel, setting foot in China is the beginning of a complicated story, not the end; that a major storyline is how the American-born daughters, having assumed their strength and independence are the result of their Westernization, now learn about a Chinese tradition of female heroism and their own grandmother’s buried past as a feminist leader and revolutionary; that, all in all, my story was my own.
Then the reviews started to come in. Library Journal: “This novel will appeal to fans of Amy Tan.” Booklist: “Fei stakes a claim in Amy Tan territory.” Even the local publications simply listing my events couldn’t resist—the Portland Mercury, for instance: “Somewhere, Amy Tan’s ears are burning.”
As a debut novelist, I was in no position to scorn any review, any mention, any attention at all. And it was some consolation that the reviewers allotted more than a paragraph read the novel on its own terms (the Times, the Chicago Tribune) or tackled the Amy Tan thing head-on (Feminist Review).
But it wasn’t just that I was being pigeonholed. I feared that white Americans would assume they already knew the story, while my own cohort wouldn’t go near it. A few reader comments bore out that fear: an Amy Tan fan complaining that my novel wasn’t what she’d expected, an Asian American wondering if I was “a sellout.” The latter accusation might’ve been easier to swallow if my novel was actually selling out.
So when I was invited for that radio interview, I was grateful for the opportunity to speak for myself. I read an excerpt, discussed my characters, described my process. Then, with about one minute left, my interviewer—a young, incisive Asian American—asked me about those Amy Tan comparisons, which she called “obnoxious.” At last, I was being given the chance to defend myself—by sneering at Amy Tan.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to say that I knew where my interviewer was coming from, but that in blaming Amy Tan for how we get pigeonholed, we also pigeonhole her. We impose on her the burden we loathe: that of being representative. And my hope was that we’d soon reach a place where each work of literature would be read on its own terms, just as we as individuals would like to be known.
When I said that “Amy Tan” had become a dirty word, I meant it in the full sense: a taboo, a line drawn in the sand, a barrier to understanding. I don’t know if that came through.
As for Amy Tan’s friend request, I accepted it, of course. The truth is, I felt honored. And while I occasionally worry that someday she’ll listen to that interview and hate me, I know she has much better things to do—writing her novels, simply being herself. May we all avail ourselves of that privilege.
(Originally published at the Huffington Post, 6/14/2010).

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

Sun, 6 Jun 2010 20:05:49 -0400

I’ve never thought of myself as much of a blogger (as evidenced by the number of entries you’ve seen here, thus far), but here’s a bit of exciting news: I’m about to start blogging about my novel—and lots more—at the Huffington Post! Look out for my first piece this week, in which I discuss the many hazards of Amy Tan comparisons for younger Asian American writers—specifically, yours truly.

If you prefer to visit this website, have no fear: my entries will continue to be posted here as well.

In the meantime, since I’ve so badly neglected this blog over the last weeks, I’ve compiled a sampling of what I’ve been up to:

‣ A feature about the songs that inspired me during the writing of A Thread of Sky on Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes”
‣ An essay, “A Different Species: A Chinese American Writer in China,” up at The Millions
‣ An interview with editor Sam Tanenhaus on the New York Times Book Review podcast
‣ A short story, “Born Again,” at Five Chapters
‣ A video interview on the Fulbright YouTube channel
‣ A feature on “The Page 69 Test”
‣ An interview on WBAI 99.5 FM’s Asia Pacific Forum
‣ Q&As at The Oregonian, Danwei, The Apopcalypse, and Adoption. Et Cetera.

By the way, the photo above was taken at the last stop on my book tour: the great Powell’s in downtown Portland, OR, on May 27th. As you can see, the podium was probably built for someone a little taller. Not until after I had finished my final book talk, reading, and Q&A did anyone mention that they couldn’t actually see my face.

I’m pretty sure there’s a metaphor in there for what it’s like to be a debut literary novelist.

As always, feel free to leave a comment, submit a question for my FAQ page, or just say hello. And please visit again for more, very soon!

Publication Eve

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:51:10 -0400

I’ve never enjoyed eves—Christmas, birthdays, New Year’s. I don’t do well with build-up; my version of excitement mostly consists of waiting to be bludgeoned by disappointment. So I either try to pretend the event isn’t happening, or I expect the worst while secretly praying to be slightly, pleasantly surprised. Even as a child, I preferred nightmares to wish-fulfillment dreams, because at least I’d wake up relieved.

Maybe this seems like a terrible attitude to have about a book launch. On some level, I feel fortunate, and grateful, and proud. But I’ll let Anne Lamott back me up: “The months before a book comes out of the chute are, for most writers, right up there with the worst life has to offer.” This could be partly because writers are a whiny lot, but it also seems to be an inevitable part of the process.

In Bird by Bird, Lamott writes about her students imagining that publication will bring them “financial security, peace of mind, and even joy,” and how she tries to explain that “It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.”

Earlier today, I felt so thoroughly like one of those dogs that when the doorbell rang and I was told I had a delivery, I sighed into the intercom. I trudged down the stairs. I think I frowned at the deliveryman. I’m not proud of this, but I was thinking that one of my sweet, supportive family members or friends had sent flowers, and I would have to call them and feign excitement.

The delivery was a gorgeous fruit basket. (I’m a believer in the potency of fruit, along with tea, to nourish and cleanse; and perhaps tellingly, I have eaten very little fruit in the last weeks.) Attached to the basket was a note from my dear friend Frances. She had written, among other lovely words, a quote from John Currin—“There is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making”—and an exhortation to keep saying yes. Reading this, I felt human again.

Then I thought of wise words I heard last week from two other writers, Sonya Chung and Nami Mun, who were unlucky enough to meet me in my lab-dog state.

I should mention that I don’t hang out much with other writers. My close writer friends number exactly two. My husband happens to be a journalist, and very early in our relationship—our first date, I think—I told him that if he ever decided to pursue fiction, we would not work out. I believe that writers tend to keep to themselves for a good reason, and that when we manage to talk to other people, those people should have fewer, or at least different, neuroses.

Also, writers can’t help getting jealous every now and then. As Lamott writes, in an entire chapter titled “Jealousy,” “some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you... Those writers will get the place on the best-seller list, the movie sales, the huge advances, and the nice big glossy pictures in the national magazines where the photo editors have airbrushed out the excessively long eyeteeth, the wrinkles, and the horns.”

So last week when I lurched, lab dog-style, to Nami and Sonya’s reading at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, I wasn’t expecting them to offer me anything but their writing, which was as beautiful as I’d hoped. (Maybe I imagined, for a millisecond, that they’d have horns. Needless to say, they didn’t; if anything, they had the opposite.) When they learned I was bracing for my own book launch, they each gave me—until then, a stranger—the equivalent of a basket of fruit.

Sonya quoted one of my own favorite teachers, Marilynne Robinson, who recently said, “You are a ‘writer’ only when you are writing.” Which is not only very true, but also captures the weirdness of this moment, when we’re suddenly authors being asked to talk about writing, though all we really know to do is to write.

And Nami said something that made me give myself a good shake. She reminded me that the book is now out of my hands, that all I can do is ride this thing out. “But I don’t mean ride it,” she said. “I mean, RIDE it!”

Starting tonight, I intend to try.

A Poem: “The Modernist Impulse/On My Birthday”

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 14:34:01 -0500

Today, the first of March, is the sunniest, warmest day we’ve had in months, I think, with the snow from last week’s storm pooling on the sidewalks and cascading from the scaffolding, and I’m reminded of a poem that I read during the writing of A THREAD OF SKY.

The poem, “The Modernist Impulse/On My Birthday,” is written by Melanie Rehak. It’s the only poem of hers I’ve managed to turn up (I can’t say I’ve done exhaustive research). It appeared in the New Yorker about six years ago, when I was living in Shanghai and depending on my dad to send me batches of the magazine a few times a year. To save postage, he would remove the ad pages and inserts, one by one. Somewhere between those torn edges, I came upon this poem.

The photo above is of West Lake in Hangzhou, China, one of the “must-sees” in A THREAD OF SKY. It’s the famed setting for the legend of Bai She (the white snake goddess), a legend that, in the book, gets retold by the characters, setting off a vicious argument about whether it’s a feminist parable or a tale of eternal love—and about everything else. To this day, West Lake is known to inspire romance—and, accordingly, fits of longing, bitterness, and heartache. Strolling around the lake, the six women, in all their fiercely maintained independence, find themselves as vulnerable as anyone to this.

All of the above is related to the poem only in the way that everything gets tangled in a novelist’s brain. And none of it is meant to shed light on the poem; I think the poem does that on its own.

Here it is:

The Modernist Impulse/On My Birthday

Has it ever been absent, this desire
for every moment to stand in relief,
the unending row of them set
like solitaires into what passes,
burnished to unbearable depths?

The park here is going green and all at once
its expanse is a moment of its own great making,
a flare in the midst of so much shattered.
The trees are certain their time has come.

I have never once been able to say yes,
now, this is the instant in which
I should begin to live again,
in which this love is the only love
worth having, the richest of all possible shining arts

to hold forth: Here,
I was here and I knew it.

In this neighborhood the slate
sidewalk piles up on itself all winter,
as it has for hundreds of winters,
cracked by the cold and heaving
into crazed shelter for the dirt below.

I roll back the stone from my life.
Oh my near-miss, return to me
now when I need you most. Come
and tell me that ages pass, that effort
is rewarded at the very least after we die.
I loved you as well as this sweet green park
coming into focus across the street,
all in delicate arrogance.

—Melanie Rehak

About Writing

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:15:44 -0500

In launching my first blog, I’ve decided not to chronicle the ups and downs of the launch of my first novel—for the sake of my own sanity, and thus the sanity of those around me, and maybe yours as well. All I’ll say is that it’s both exciting and extremely nerve-racking; that working on my next novel would probably be more productive than pondering marketing strategies for this one; and that the comparisons to Amy Tan, however complimentary, are getting a tad worn out. And, of course, that connecting with readers like you makes everything worthwhile.

Instead, I want to take myself back in time, to my college years—1998, to be exact—when my dream was to “be a writer,” and the impossibility of this seemed matched only by the impossibility of finding anything else I loved more. Around this time, a writing professor, Jill Dawson, had us each gather ten statements about writing. About writing—what about it? Anything about it, as long as each statement spoke to us, to what writing meant to us.

I don’t remember how I culled my statements; I think I stole a few from Jill; good quotes weren’t so easily turned up online back then. And actually, when I dug up the old document just now, I counted eight, not ten, so maybe I never completed the assignment.

The photo above shows me poking my head out of the ceiling of my dorm room, which was essentially carved out of the attic of an old mansion. The ceiling sloped so low that my roommate and I were always knocking our heads against it. We tried pinning up bubble wrap, which had only the slightest mitigating effect. My next solution was to cover the ceiling with posters, photos, printouts—anything that would catch my eye, and remind me to duck. These “Statements About Writing” went up, too. I’m not sure if they saved me from any concussions, but they were always the last words I saw when I went to bed and the first words I saw when I woke.

Some of these statements don’t seem quite as profound to me now as they might have back then, and if I redid this exercise today, I’d probably revise the list substantially. But every one of them still speaks to me, very clearly, in at least one way: They’re about writing. Not about “being a writer,” but about writing. And—it’s not always easy to remember—writing is what it’s all about. Nothing else.

Statements About Writing

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.... Let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.
—Sylvia Plath

The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.
—D.H. Lawrence

Use either no ornament or good ornament.
—Ezra Pound

The work itself, you know—sentence by sentence, page by page—it’s much too intimate, much too private, to come from anywhere but deep within the writer himself. It comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and, in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming.
—Don DeLillo

The point about music and song is that theirs is the sound of sheer feeling—as opposed to that of sense, verbal sense. To combine the two is always worth dreaming about.
—James Merrill

Form is never more than an extension of content.
—Charles Olson

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
—Sylvia Plath

Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.

Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms
shielding a candle’s tongue, it is the language’s
desire to enclose the loved one in its arms ...
—Derek Walcott