Where I grew up, Winter, c. 1998?

In my first novel, Empire of Glass, I quote one of China’s greatest short story writers, Lu Xun, who wrote:

The old home I remembered was not in the least like this. My old home was much better. But if you asked me to recall its peculiar charm or describe its beautifies, I had no clear impression, no words to describe it. And now it seemed this was all there was to it. Then I rationalized the matter to myself, saying: Home was always like this, and although it had not improved, still it is not so depressing as I imagine; it is only my mood that has changed, because I am coming back to the country this time with no illusions. This time I had come with the sole object of saying goodbye.

Headstones at South Street Cemetery, courtesy of gravematter.com

Yesterday, my mother and I ‘accidentally’ (one could say my mother has a plan for everything, like all mothers) walked through one of New Hampshire’s oldest burying grounds, Portsmouth’s South Street Cemetery. The names on the mostly-toppled headstones read like the Mayflower’s list of passengers: Mary Blagdon, William Button, Joseph Penhallow.

The path through the centuries-old grave sites was worn enough for walking as we headed down the hill toward the Piscataqua’s riverbanks. There was an eerie silence around us, as one encounters in all cemeteries. We did not pass another living soul during our walk, but mused over the names of the dead, noting the stones simply marked ‘baby’ and the numerous family plots with etchings like ‘Beloved Father and Mother’ and their children spread below them and grandchildren scattered around the edges.

Rudimentary grave markers at the cemetery for the Brackett Massacre’s casualties (off Brackett Lane in Rye, New Hampshire)

My parents currently live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the small city (of 20,000 residents) is a fifteen minute drive from my coastal hometown of Rye, New Hampshire (of 5,000 residents). Both towns have a long, colonial-era history—I grew up thinking that most homes had plaques on their doors that said ‘Built c. 1695.’ In fact, the histories are more wounded than I’d realized as a child: the Brackett Massacre of 1691 killed both settlers and natives—the graves are in a marshy, mostly-unmarked cemetery off one of Rye’s main roads; in Portsmouth, hangings regularly took place at the gallows at South Street Cemetery, including that of Ruth Blay, a schoolteacher who buried her stillborn child beneath her classroom floorboards and was accused of murdering the baby.

The strange thing about living in Los Angeles, as I do now, is that history, its architecture and stories, is relative. As anywhere, history is that which is the ‘oldest’ thing around—an historic home in Los Angeles may only be a century old, whereas the same in China would obviously have much deeper roots.

That said, growing up in a place like New England, despite its shallower history than that of Europe and Asia, somehow feels more rooted to me because of its connection to America’s founding. As a child, I heard stories about the pirates on the Isles of Shoals (there are rumors that Blackbeard’s widow still haunts the islands), of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Bunker Hill, and of the Underground Railroad that ran through Portsmouth.

Yesterday, driving with my father around my hometown, I noted that what’s lovely about the area is that although I haven’t lived here in over a decade, not much has changed. In comparison with my second hometown of Beijing, where even after a few months away I return to a disorienting landscape, the coast of New Hampshire still retains most of its old landmarks, such as Strawberry Banke (which I featured in an earlier post), the Wentworth by the Sea, Rye Harbor, and local cemeteries like South Street and Brackett.

Rye Beach, New Hampshire

Beyond that, I’m realizing that I must be getting older, because I’m starting to hear myself (and generationally similar friends) saying things like ‘Remember when.’ But walking around the silent South Street cemetery I didn’t hear any voices. There was the rustling of maple leaves in the thicket by the river, the slow hum of industrious mosquitoes readying for summer, my mother’s and my footsteps on the sandy path. Thousands of dead rested around us and while this should have been a deeply disturbing fact, while their names were not of the new world immigrant type as my own and while the names of those natives who died in numerous massacres were no where to be seen, I took comfort in the knowledge that these dead, named and unnamed, rested here in the grounds they’d known for all their lives and that, strangely, it was a home I shared with them.

From the Brackett Family geneology:

I have observed that old people live much in the past. As I grow older I find myself turning oftener to the days in the old home. I hear the patter and the prattle of childish feet and voice; light step of youth and maid; sober footfall and serious word of man and matron; the slowing step and failing voice of age. All, all are gone! I alone am left of . . .

The dear home faces whereupon
The fitful firelight paled and shown.
Hence forward, listen as I will
The voices of that hearth are still.
How strange it seems with so much gone
Of life and love to still live on.
Mrs. Silence J. Soule.

*For those visiting the area and interested in travel suggestions, see this prior post.

The reading is part of the Dirty Laundry Lit Reading Series curated by the amazing Natashia Deon.

Hope to see you there!

In the film, he muses honestly about what it means to conduct one’s life, as well as one’s life’s work, with both candor and purpose. Yet, lingering above it all, is the menacing, inevitable threat of death, and how transitory and impermanent one’s life and work ultimately are. He cites his relationships with his siblings—a brother and sister—as the reason for his belief in his ability to write children’s stories. Sendak’s relationship with his brother molded his life from an early age, particularly his brother’s artistic talent and mentorship.

May 8, the day of Sendak’s death, also happened to be my own brother’s birthday, and I was fortunate enough to spend the day with him as he was visiting me from Singapore.

My brother and me, Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, 1988

The funny thing about having only one sibling is that you tend to simultaneously love and hate one another with equal amounts of vigor. Perhaps it all goes back to that evolutionary impulse to be the sole recipient of one’s parents’ resources, but I can nonetheless say that I am deeply grateful to have a sibling—especially knowing several friends who are only children. Even as adults, these only children are the sole recipients of their parents’ affection, but this also comes with its own perils: just imagine being an only child to divorced parents.

That said, my childhood was idyllic (as one’s childhood in New England with a stable family life is likely to be in retrospect). My brother and I spent our summers dragging sand pails to the beach, searching for hermit crabs and building mini-ecosystems at the bottom of our pails, only to find floating, dead creatures on the surfaces the following morning. We once rescued a dying baby mouse from the backyard (little did we know that the mouse had been severely battered by our cat, Smokey). We spent a week nursing it back to health with tiny droppers of warmed milk. Finally, the mouse, who we’d named Harvey (one should teach children not to name rescued animals) succumbed to its injuries—on my brother’s recent visit to Los Angeles, we still blamed my parents for Harvey’s death (we had left the mouse in the care of our parents while we visited a lake for the weekend and returned home to find it dead).

Hiking with my brother on his birthday, I mused that we are the most similar of any two people on earth—that is to say, one’s sibling not only most closely matches one’s genetic makeup, but also shares the experience of a nearly-similar childhood. My brother side-eyed me, partly grimacing, partly grinning, and said ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. That’s cool. And weird.’ Cool and weird indeed.

A slightly-dated (2006) Time Magazine article on the ‘New Science of Siblings’ highlights this very fact:

From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales. They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counselors, sources of envy, objects of pride. They teach us how to resolve conflicts and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys. Our spouses arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents eventually leave us. Our siblings may be the only people we’ll ever know who truly qualify as partners for life. “Siblings,” says family sociologist Katherine Conger of the University of California, Davis, “are with us for the whole journey.”

An image from The Juniper Tree’s ‘Little Brother, Little Sister’ as illustrated by Sendak

Sendak, more than anyone, understood the power of siblings. When he was just six years old, he and his 11-year-old brother Jack wrote a dark story illuminating their love for each other, as well as their sister, that they called ‘They Were Inseparable.’ He illustrated a collection of tales of The Brothers Grimm, including the story ‘Little Brother, Little Sister.’ Now, while I can’t say that my brother, a mere 2 1/2 years my younger, and I were ‘inseparable’ as siblings, I can say that there is something deeply powerful in exploring a childhood alongside someone else. As Sendak said in in the acceptance speech he gave upon receiving the 1964 Caldecott Medal (and as quoted in a Rolling Stone article from 1976):

[There are] games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate, frustration – all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction.

I cannot imagine anyone better to act as a conspirator in the mastering of ‘these forces,’ than a sibling. We are lucky that most of our most threatening forces were imaginary—the gypsies my mother and Godmother threatened to sell us to when we were naughty; the pirates lurking off the shores of the Isles of Shoals that our father told us about at bath time; the ghosts wandering the old colonial-era stone walls lining our home’s property. There is something deeply present about childhood, the exploration of worlds beyond worlds, the new experience of places, tastes, smells, and sounds.

How Not To Take Oneself Seriously: Let Your Older Sister Dress You as a Clown

For Sendak, he rediscovered an appreciation of the present moment in old age; in his words (as quoted in the below clip from the HBO documentary), I am reminded of my brother, of traipsing together through knee-deep fallen leaves in the forests behind our home, scooping tadpoles into our bare palms in the ponds near the golf course, singing Otis Redding on our walks home from the beach, crabs still eagerly scratching at the plastic walls of pails, still alive, still unaware of tomorrow’s untimely deaths, and yet, if anything, we were still in awe of it all. I’m grateful to my brother for reminding me of this, for re-instilling my faith in the mastering of ‘dangerous forces,’ and for believing, still, that we alone could have saved Harvey, that he’d now be a vibrant, healthy mouse traversing the fields behind a childhood home that is not ours anymore, but some other family’s, some new pair of siblings rescuing mice there and nursing them back to health then setting them free into the world beyond, wishing them the best.

“I’m trying very hard to concentrate on what is here. What I can see. What I can smell. What I can feel. Making that the important business of life…. I’m learning how not to take myself so seriously.” – Maurice Sendak

If only WordPress weren’t blocked in China, I would have posted this last week, but here goes. My Beijing room with a slightly-dusty view. Magic.

From Paulo Coehlo’s Blog:

No one will realistically think that you can make a living out of literature in Brazil. I faced many difficulties. When I was young, my parents in a desperate act of love, as they cared for me, sent me to a mental institution. They thought I was mad, as I wanted to be a writer. However, I was absolutely convinced about what I wanted to be.

The fact that you know your dreams is not enough. It is not good, living with the fact that you have it in you. You have to think of measures to manifest your dreams and be brave enough to pay the price of it. In a way, I postponed my dreams, as it took me many years to write my first book — a journey book.

There are times when you do not succeed in something you believe in. That stage is what you call a nightmare. Initially with The Alchemist, I could not find a publisher. I felt hurt.

If you are hurt about something that is meaningless to you, you can blame anybody else for it. But it is quite complicated to be hurt about something that is meaningful to you. Then you get confused, as you know the dream is there. And the dream is not going to leave you as long as you live. When you die, there is a small child within you, who will ask, why didn’t you follow me? And you have to explain. Therefore, it is better to take the risk, to be hurt, to go through some nightmare to fulfill you dreams.

From Cha: An Asian Literary Journal:

THE INVENTION OF DRAWING

Joseph-Benoit Suvee's "The Invention of Drawing" (c. 1791)

“Shadow is the stuff that art is made on, according to one legend about the origin of painting. The first portrait was created when ‘the Corinthian maid’, called Dibutades, saw the image formed by her young man in the shadow of his profile cast on the wall by a lamp; she then traced it, because he was going away on a journey and she wanted it for a memento during his absence. Her father, a potter, finding her drawing later, ‘pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery’.” — Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria, p. 159.
 

Last month, Guillermo Fernández, a 79 year old Mexican poet and translator of Italian literature was murdered in Toluca. John Gibler writes on the City Lights Bookstore blog that the local newspaper in Toluca published a story on April 1 with the headline “They kill a poet,”

Guillermo Fernandez, Photo by Arturo Campos Cedillo

“Asesinan a poeta.”  The article begins with this sentence: “With hands and feet bound in cables, face wrapped in tape, and with a shot to the head, the body of a Toluca-based poet was found inside his home.” (“Amarrado con cables de pies y manos, envuelto del rostro con cinta canela y con un tiro en la cabeza, fue localizado el cuerpo de un poeta toluqueño en el interior de su hogar.”)

Gibson reminds us:

To honor a poet, read that poet. And share the poetry. In this spirit, I would like to offer here two translations (or translation attempts) of Fernández’s poems.

CONCLUSIÓN

Lo sé examigo mío: 
entre el corazón y la mano 
se sigue abriendo 
el hondón del barranco; 
entre lo que pensamos y decimos 
la palabra tropieza 
con la cola del diablo 
y la amistad laudada 
es un pastel barato 
que ni una mosca verde aceptaría.

Así pues, lo mejor 
será mirar la luz del día 
con lentes tan obscuros 
para seguir dudando 
si mierdas o personas son 
las cosas con que andamos resbalando.

CONCLUSION

I know, my exfriend:
between the heart and the hand
the depth of the ravine
keeps opening;
between what we think and what we say
words stumble
over the devil’s tail
and the much-praised friendship
is a cheap cake
that not even a green fly would accept.

And so, the best thing
would be to view the light of day
through lenses so dark
that we may continue to doubt
whether they be shit or people
these things we keep slipping on.

And here, a poem from the 1965 book La palabra a solas (The word on its own), reprinted in his 2006 selected poems:

SARABANDE

Tus manos se han quedado distraídas…

Yo no quiero saber lo que es morir. Yo no quiero morir.

Te he mirado rozar un borde del espanto,
tocar la púa del remordimiento.
Dime. Algo oculto se queja detrás de tu risa
y una umbela de sombra desliza su muro.

Están tus ojos no sé donde, como ropas caídas.

¿Como llamarte?
¿Cómo llamarte cuando tocas aquel o este silencio
y todas las cosas cercanas
hacen tus ojos los más largos horizontes?

En el aire nos deja tiernamente heridos.

No es tiempo de llorar. Ven. MIra ese árbol.
En nuestras horas hay hojas que no conocen el río.
Un dios ha puesto en nuestras manos un fruto de alegría.

Que nada cante más allá ni más acá de la vida.

SARABANDE

Your hands have become distracted…

I do not want to know what it is to die. I do not want to die.

I have seen you scrape against an edge of dread,
touch the spike of regret.
Tell me. Something hidden complains behind your laughter
and a screen of shadow slips out its wall.

Your eyes are I don’t no where, like fallen clothes.

How should I address you?
How should I address you when you touch that or this silence
and everything near
makes your eyes the longest horizons?

In the air we are left gently wounded.

Now is not the time to cry. Come. Look at this tree.
In our hours there are leaves that have never been to the river.
A god has placed in our hands a fruit of joy.

May nothing sing further away nor further near of life.

*A short anthology of Fernández’s poetry in Spanish is also available online here.

*Thank you to John Pluecker for alerting me as to Fernández’s death and the City Lights post.

A view of Datong, 1996. I have a feeling the city looks nothing like this anymore....

When I returned from that four month stay in China in the pre-Internet, pre-iPhone days, I told my then-boyfriend (keyword: ‘then‘) that I wanted to write a book about China. He said, “No one will want to read your book about China.” I suppose I am tenacious as hell because 16 years later I have finally finished that book, and although it looks much different from the writing I began after my first visit to China (mostly in journals and poetic verse), the spirit remains intact: to tell the story of a modernizing China through the lens of an American teenager invited to live with a Chinese family.

Coal workers in Datong, China, 1996. I'd love to one day return to Datong to find these two men and write the story of their lives...

In a letter from Key West in 1934, Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that the most important thing is to “for Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what.”

I suppose I could have used this advice 16 years ago, but, then again, I managed to ignore the naysayers such as that (ex!)-boyfriend as well as several English teachers who found my prose too ‘florid.’ Driven by something bordering on maniacal devotion, I wrote on… (if anything, writing should be considered a psychosis, especially at the earliest, most lonely stages). I attempted a career as a media writer, then a public relations writer, then an ethnographer. None of this felt right. Finally, around 2004-2005, I began the first etchings of my first novel, Empire of Glass (then called The Soap Tree) in the form of a chronicle of my time living with a Chinese family. In 2006, some amazing (half-drunk?) fool on the committee of the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Association awarded me a creative grant to spend the year in China researching my Chinese family’s history.

The research formed the basis of my novel and, six years later, I eventually finished a manuscript, Empire of Glass, that will soon be sent down the birth canal and out into the harsh light of the publishing world. Like a baby freshly birthed, I expect there will be much screaming, crying, and blinking into the blinding white. Will there be more naysayers? Absolutely. But I feel exceptionally grateful that I’ve never let this fact deter my desire to tell a certain story, a story I felt was important nearly two decades ago and still do today.

I saw this photo last week and it cracked me up. Definitely worth spending a minute perusing the rest of photographer Jason Lee’s collection of shots of his two daughters.

In the meantime, as someone constantly fixated on the ‘problems’ in the world (both global and local), I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to ‘let go.’ For me, somehow I think less about the past and more about the future (there’s nothing sexier to me than a Filofax Daily planner). Perhaps this isn’t a terrible thing as we cannot fix the past—but at the same time, I need to realize that we cannot control the future either! We can do things in the present that may positively or negatively impact the future, but we cannot change the future any more than we can the past.

As my fiction writing often requires me to ‘fantasize’ about events, moments, and characters that have never existed, it is difficult to shut off this process when I am not sitting at my writing desk. I have even found myself driving in my car alone holding conversations with myself aloud—and in Chinese nonetheless! This cannot look healthy to passing motorists.

Recently, when my mind loses its way, I have been practicing returning it to the present moment, to the fact that this ‘moment’ is, in reality, a series of unstoppable moments moving into a future which will at once feel like a ‘present’ and then just as quickly slip into a ‘past.’ Insane, right? (This is the kind of ‘bong talk’ about which I often find myself in conversation with myself that also makes my husband laugh). Yet this thought for me is soothing.

Equally soothing was seeing the DisneyNature movie Chimpanzee yesterday. Despite the blatant anthropomorphizing (think ‘March of the Penguins’ but with chimps), I walked out of the theater looking at everyone jaunting about their daily lives on the Santa Monica promenade and thought: ‘Wow, we’re just fancy chimps! Much in the way squirrels are just fancy rats.’ The removal of the ‘human’ experience as something unique was incredibly pacifying for me. It also helped return me to the present in a way that was filled with awe and gratitude. Somehow it is reassuring to think that the chimpanzees featured in the film are sitting around the same nut groves as their ancestors did 4000 years ago. And we humans are asking the same unanswerable questions as the Chinese poet Han Shan did over a thousand years ago—’Go tell families with silverware and cars: What’s the use of all that noise and money?’

Which brings me back to these adorable photos.

And also this film:

Reblogged from Ink Chromatography:

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From left to right, Biruté Galdikas, Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey (image from National Geographic)

Ok, we are going to do something a little different. Over the next three Sundays, Scientist Sunday will feature three scientists that comprise a group known as “Leakey’s Angels”. These three scientists are all incredible women who devoted themselves to studying apes; collectively they comprise Leakey’s Angels, so named because they all worked with archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey.

Read more… 1,135 more words

So excited to see the Chimpanzees movie this weekend (and if you can, try to see it soon as opening week ticket sales will benefit the Jane Goodall Institute).

From today’s China Daily report about the environmental damages caused by China’s textile industry (a report cites massive abuses by brands such as Levi Strauss, Burberry, Polo Ralph Lauren, Guess and Zara):

The textile industry uses large amounts of water in its operations, from the washing of fibers to bleaching, dyeing and washing of the finished products. Moreover, the industry in China uses as much as three times the global average of clean water to produce the same amount of fabric, because of a lack of advanced technologies, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

[and]

While it comes as little surprise that the country is registering such high levels of pollution, the findings have prompted renewed concern about whether the high price it is paying, in terms of the environment and health, is worth it, especially now that China is the world’s second-largest economy and could provide more funding for environmental protection.

This Chinese river dolphin, the baiji, is already extinct. This photograph is of one of the last of its kind. Now the finless porpoise is equally threatened.

The effects of climate change are clearly widespread, as is the over consumption of the human population and overpopulation of the earth. Until we recognize the impact of our daily decisions, I am pessimistic about the ability for us to reverse the process already set into motion. Unfortunately, even environmental pioneers like Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, are pessimistic about the idea of ‘sustainability’ and state that we have to minimize our impact, but that we, as a species, will never be entirely impact-free. He spoke of this to Kai Ryssdal during yesterday’s Marketplace report on NPR.

The story can be heard here:
http://www.marketplace.org/node/53393/player/storyplayer

In general, these are the problems and questions that plague me. Recently, I’ve been working on a new fiction writing project that tackles these concerns and will hopefully, at the very least, provide me with a catharsis for all the angst these problems create. I suppose the best we can all do is be aware of the widespread impacts of our consumerism.

One of the best decisions you can make if you ‘need’ something is to opt for higher-quality goods, which also, fortunately, have a longer shelf life. Sure, recycling is great, but it’s a lot better to buy something you’ll never throw away and can pass down to your kids or friends. The eco lighting maker Bocci notes that in pre-industrial societies, individuals would only ‘own’ 100 objects in their lives, thereby making each object ‘practical, beautiful, particular, inherited, and well made’. Americans probably own 100 objects in a year, if not more. Although initially more expensive, the cost-per-use ratio of well made products is both good for the environment and your wallet. The Utility Collective is also on the cutting edge of this, allowing customers to access the design process of their sustainably-made products so that you will know exactly how each object is made (and all in U.S. factories).

Essentially, I suppose, this all comes down to the gap between ‘need’ and ‘want.’ And until we, as a global society, recognize that wanting does not ultimately fulfill us, there will be consequences galore, as evidenced by the alarming deaths of the finless porpoises.