A Serious Writer, Yes I Am!

What is a serious writer? A serious writer could be a person who quits her job and naively attempts to write a novel with no training or understanding of the medium beyond, “well, I’ve read a lot of them.” A serious writer could also be that guy working in the laundromat scribbling on pieces of scrap paper on his lunch break who turns out to be Stephen King. Or the academic who ekes out a short story or two in between theses and defenses and vying for tenure against all the other smart-asses in the department. Or some dude sitting at a Starbuck’s creating a fictional world of coffee-based organisms whose raison d’etre is to find their perfect milk-based companions. In short, a serious writer is a writer who thinks he or she is a serious writer. That’s pretty much it. Power of the mind, baby.

It took me a helluva long time to be a serious writer (though not as long as Laura Ingalls Wilder, who started at 65) and despite the job-quitting and MFA-matriculating and daily minimum of three ass-flattening hours at the keyboard, I still spend a good portion of my day reaffirming my seriousness. This is largely because, 1) being a serious writer has some equally serious downsides; 2) my self-esteem tends to wander like a cloud, coming and going as it pleases, that little bastard; and 3) serious writing can be a damn lonely vocation.

1. Downsides Illustrated Through Sample Conversations (based on true stories).

A: You don’t matter unless you’re published -

“Hi, what do you do for a living?”

“Oh, I’m a writer.”

“Really?! What do you write?”

“Fiction.”

“Cool! Where can I find your stuff?”

“On my computer.”

Silence. Looks around for someone else to talk to.

B: It’s your fault you’re not published -

“Hey, how’s your book going?”

“Not bad, good days and bad days.”

“So when are you going to get it published already?”

At this point you have a few options:

1) “When I find the right (publisher/agent) to (sleep with/bribe).”

2) “Fuck you, mother fucker.”

3) “Ah, it’s not that easy, you know.” (add nervous smile)

4) “It’s not like I’m TRYING not to get published! Fuck you, mother fucker!”

No matter which you choose, invariably the response is:

Silence. Looks around for someone else to talk to.

C: Your job isn’t really a ‘job’, per se:

“I hate my job, blah blah blah.”

“Yeah, that sounds awful.”

“How do you know, you just sit around at home and write all day.”

Silence. You look around for someone else to talk to.

2. Self Esteem, You Sneaky Minx, You.

This little minx goes hand in hand with Downside Conversation Numero, Er, C: You Don’t Matter Unless You’re Published. It’s tough to take yourself seriously as a writer when you have not yet been published. If your writer friends tell you they don’t care, they’re lying. We all care. I’ve shrugged my shoulders and said, “Ah, it’s okay if I don’t get published. I want to write for myself, you know?” I was lying. So how do you manage to maintain your self-esteem as you reach for the Holy Grail?

A: Look in the mirror once a day and lie to yourself. Any lie will do, as long as it doesn’t make you cry afterwards.

“I don’t care if I get published.”

“My pores are not abnormally large.”

“My husband will still love me if I burn through our savings.”

B: Call yourself an artiste and surround yourself with fellow artistes. They’re your people. They understand why you don’t have enough cab money to get home.

C: Surround yourself with a lot of stupid friends and slip as many Latin and French phrases as you can into conversation. Ad infinitum.

D: Drink heavily.

If you do reach that Holy Grail, ride that high as long as you can because it’s only a matter of time before you’re asked for the next manuscript. And the next. And the next. Et cetera. Q.E.D.

3. Writers Are Lonely People, or, Why We Drink Heavily (cross-reference 2.D)

Eking out genius from your subconscious is a bit like waiting for God, d’oh! Okay, that was stupid. A profession that requires you to sit alone in a room with your thoughts is a lonely one (oh, I can feel that genius!). I’m sure I’m regurgitating from the gazillion self-help for writers’ books I’ve read. It’s okay if you’re the type that likes to drink alone (and before 4pm), but for us naive folk who believe that writers can lead normal lives, too, the loneliness can get overwhelming. You wonder if sitting at home in solitude is ever going to amount to anything. The sound of your own thoughts start driving you insane. You check the clock to see if it’s 4pm already.

When things get overwhelming, I overcompensate. For example, I think I wrote a hundred correspondence emails in this past week alone, and I still feel the pressing guilt of those starred messages I still have to respond to (sorry guys, I'm working on it!). I Skype, I magicjack, I webcam, I Whatsapp, and through a considerable amount of effort I am allowed the wonders of watching my godson grow up in Bangkok, seeing my nephew smile at me from Los Angeles, reading about my best friend’s swollen pregnancy feet, and keeping up with my brave penpal as she struggles with cancer, all worlds away. I wonder if my nephew imagines me as one of those preserved celebrity heads in Futurama. My head is constantly shouting at him (because of the bad connection, not because I’m Scary Aunt) framed inside the 17-inch screen of my sister-in-law’s laptop.

I spend my day alone so I reach out, like, a lot. Then I realize I’ve pissed the day away and vow to turn off my wireless tomorrow. Always tomorrow. Did I mention, I also blog? Crap.

Life...In Focus

Last Friday I got laser eye surgery. Yes, that’s right. I had some guy slice the top of my eye open and beam a laser at my corneas. I’ve been in physical and emotional recovery ever since. Today I have four hours of “eye time,” which means I can either be on the computer, read, or watch TV for four hours. Yesterday was three hours, the day before was two, and Monday was one hour of eye time. For the rest of my waking hours, I sit around trying not to stare at anything for too long. Or I pace around the house, wearing dark sunglasses and pretending I’m a movie star in rehab. It’s been a riot.

Glasses have been a part of my identity since the fourth grade. I’ve pretty much always been “that girl over there with the glasses.” So why did I decide a few months ago to join the ranks of the lasered masses? Here were my pros and cons, by order of importance (1 being most important):

Pros:

1. In case of natural or manmade disasters, running for my life after getting my glasses knocked off by either a) shrapnel, b) fellow flee-er, or c) my own frenzied self, is not a risk I want to take. Whoops! Didn’t see that big gaping hole there!
2. If I ever bear a child, I don’t want to be rooting around during nighttime feedings and accidentally nurse Horace, my stuffed hippo, instead of my baby.
3. I would actually be able to see when I opened my eyes in the morning, without having to peel the dried contacts I’d left in the night before off of my eyeballs. Nice.

Cons:

1. Losing my glasses as part of my overall “look” could have disastrous consequences, i.e. my eyes may be way too small in proportion to my nose and it’s been the glasses saving me this whole time.
2. The surgery could go all wrong and I’d end up blinder than before, or just plain blind, before I’ve even had the chance to learn Braille.

Note: Yes, Con 1 is more important than Con 2, I am that superficial.

For those who are not considering LASIK or have a strong stomach for elective surgery (or both), keep reading. For those considering LASIK or are a bit weak in the knees (or both), I leave you with the following adage: the less you know, the better.

My journey to new vision began at Shanghai’s LASIK mecca, aptly named, New Vision Eye Clinic. “LASIK in China?!” was the response I’d gotten when I told my friends and family about my plan. But I figured a clinic that has done over 50,000 surgeries knows what it’s doing, right? Practice makes perfect. I made an appointment to get a pre-surgery consult.

The consult was pretty tame. They run you through all sorts of tests with fancy names, such as cornea topographical study, pupil dilation, pupil and cornea thickness - okay, maybe only the first name was fancy. That took about an hour and a half and at the end of it, me and my blurry self left with an A-okay for surgery...the very next day. Holy crap!

After a night of eye drops every hour and pre-surgery excitement - I was actually excited! - I arrived the next afternoon and was shuttled off to surgery with a fellow patient, Mary. Mary, also an American expatriate, and I were suited up into fairly comfortable long-sleeved gowns and surgical caps. We chatted to conceal our pre-surgery nerves as the nurse washed our eyes with some sort of magical solution. Then came the ocular nerve numbing eye drops. Mary continued to tell me about the births of her children as the feeling in our eyes began to fade. A nurse came over to tell us to stop talking because we were affecting the air in the operating room. Huh? Okay. We shut up and steeped in our own private anxieties. Then they called my name. “Me first?” I said. “Yes, you. Come.” Okay.

I was led into a large operating room that housed a formidable looking piece of equipment hovering above a bed, which was not really a bed, but a flat metal surface that I was instructed to lay down on. The doctor was behind the wheel already, masked and ready to laser. I said, “Dr. Lian?” and he grunted and shoved my head under the machinery. As he held my head in place on the cold headrest, I fought the urge to bolt. This was the moment that I would run for my life, blind. But it was too late. I was already staring into a big dish with a green light in the center surrounded by a field of red lights and Dr. Lian’s muffled voice was commanding, “Look at the green light.” I froze and stared at the green light.

You see, my tragic flaw (in this case) was research. Way too much research. I should have just stopped at “this clinic has done 54,000 laser eye surgeries since 1996,” booked my appointment and rode the steed of Ignorance all the way into the operating room. But alas, I decided to research every single part of the surgery so that I could be as well-prepared as possible. Idiot.

As the whirring began, a cache of images flashed through my mind. Vacuum suction of eyeball. Voomp! Holy crap, what did I get myself into? Look at the green light. Metal blade cuts a circle into the cornea, leaving a hinge. Wheeeeek. They just cut into my friggin’ eye! Look at the green light. Surgeon opens the flap, laying it to one side and exposing the cornea. There is a flap of my eye hanging in the wind. Look at the green light. Surgeon douses eye with magic solution. Slop. Oh, gross, this is just wrong, I think I can feel the flap. Look at the green light. Laser positioned. Silence. Oh shit, here it comes! Look at the RED light. Laser burns off layers of the corneal stroma. Zezezezeze. Oh my god, they’re burning a hole into my eye. What is that weird smell? Look at the RED light. Oh god, I really need to blink! Don’t mother-flippin’ blink!! Surgeon douses eye with magic solution, again. Slop. Eye juices are running all over my face. Look at the green light. Surgeon repositions corneal flap. Slop. Oh god, that stings. Look at the green light. F@$& THE GREEN LIGHT!!! Surgeon checks flap adhesion. Silence. Is it okay? Am I blind?! Close your eyes. Thank Christmas Jiminy Jesus. Another shove of the head, and I was out.

The nurse helped me stand up and led me out of the room. “Open your eyes.” Are you sure? “Open your eyes.” I can’t! They feel like they’ve been fused together! “Open your eyes.” Oh, wait, okay, they’re they go. Oww! My eyes stung and tears ran down my face. I grabbed the nurse’s arm and held on for dear life. She sat me down in a dark room and handed me a packet of tissue. I didn’t move, hoping the alien orbs where my eyeballs used to be would stop hurting me if I stayed really, really still. After a few minutes, the nurse returned and led me to a ridiculously bright room where patients, dressed just like me, lined the walls. Ah, yes. The locals. I’d heard that local patients were treated over ten at a time, unlike the foreigners, who had a nicer reception area and individual dark rooms. There must have been fifteen local patients in total, looking as miserable as I felt. The doctor checked my eyes through a scope of some sort and a few seconds later I was whisked away to change out of my surgery outfit.

My husband was waiting for me when they led me out of the surgical ward. “How was it?” he asked with concern. “Weird. It was weird,” was all I managed to say, clutching his hand so hard he had to ask me to relax my death grip. My eyes were not stinging as much and as I peeked out from behind my eye shields I realized that I could see. Somewhat. Mary, her companion, my husband and I shared the elevator down to the lobby and the only thing I could think to ask my fellow laseree was, “Did he shove your head, too?” “Yeah! He shoved my head around and told me off for wearing make-up, which I’m not!” “Weird.” “Yeah, weird.” We wished each other well as we parted ways, and as soon as Mary and her companion was out of earshot, I began to whimper. “Stupid elective surgery. Who does that to themselves,” I muttered as my husband led me to the crowded curbside to hail a cab. The entire way home I squeezed his hand and alternated between, “Is the taxi driver being safe? My cornea flap’s going to fly off if we get into an accident!” and “Trauma. Trauma.”

The next four hours were kind of an excruciating hell. The stinging worsened after the ocular nerve numbing drops wore off. It felt like my eyeballs were being massaged by a woolen blanket. After that awesomeness was over, I was finally able to sleep. The pain was gone by the morning after, only to be replaced by the aforementioned, brain-sucking boredom that lasted until...wait a minute. I only have half an hour of eye time left. Goddammit!

In conclusion, I am a total wimp. Elective surgery is not for me. My vision is currently “better than perfect” and I am glad I did it, but being cut into is not my strong suit. I am ecstatic, however, that I can see when I wake up in the morning and have one less thing to worry about when it comes to disaster scenarios and nocturnal nursing, and I am thankful that I wasn’t accidentally blinded. The jury’s still out on that eye to nose ratio.

Oh, and for those brave enough to still consider LASIK, a few tips:

1. Get goggles. You’ll need them to shower with for about a month.
2. Get a waterless facial cleanser such as Cetaphil. It’ll make washing your face a helluvalot easier.
3. Get audiobooks, podcasts, an AM/FM radio, whatever type of entertainment you can find that doesn’t require sight.
4. Get a small screwdriver so that you can pop out the lenses of your glasses and wear them lens-free. It’s what all the cool kids are doing these days.

The Critical Essay: The Road

In the same MFA application aforementioned, I was also asked to write a critical essay about some aspect of craft. This rather open-ended question made me tear my hair out in tiny tufts, which I then superglued to my miniature troll, who now sports Chinese dreds. Just kidding. Or am I?

In fiction, setting and character are typically defined with specific attributes that are either fictional or real. People and places have names and readers adjust their mindset based on the data provided by the author, such as “heavyset, middle-aged Caucasian, Bob Goldfarb, living in Beijing in the year 1985.” However, when authors choose to cloak their settings and characters in anonymity, a different relationship is created between the reader and the work. In this essay, I will explore how Cormac McCarthy’s use of anonymity in setting and character has a notable impact on the reader’s experience of his 2006 novel, The Road.

In The Road, McCarthy presents a post-apocalyptic journey of a man and his son struggling to survive in a barren and unforgiving world. From the beginning of the novel, the reader enters a world where time and place are not revealed. The titular “road” and its environs are described in detail, but where the road lies is never disclosed. The two main characters are referred to only as “the man” and “the boy” or “the child” throughout the novel. Suspended in a world sans bearings, the reader is plunged into an environment similar to the man’s own as described on page 11: “Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.” The breath that sustains the reader through the novel’s uncoupled world is the voice of the man, as the novel’s third person limited point of view is based on his perspective.

McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is full of gruesome details, but the unidentified locations described in a matter-of-fact tone creates distance between the reader and the macabre:

The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. (12)

Had McCarthy identified the city as an actual city, e.g. Los Angeles, the reader’s reaction would be fraught with his own feelings and associations with Los Angeles. Imagining Los Angeles “mostly burned” evokes visceral sentiments, while the desolation of an unnamed city feels remote. The reader remains as untethered as the man and the boy as the story moves from one nameless place to the next.

The nondescript leathery corpse in the quote above also garners little sympathy from the reader. Throughout the novel, the dead are part of the setting and described as objects rather than people:

They passed a metal trashdump where someone had once tried to burn bodies. The charred meat and bones under the damp ash might have been anonymous save for the shapes of the skulls. No longer any smell. (150)

This removed approach to the dead not only provides distance for the reader, but also illustrates how de-sensitized the man has become, since he is the one relating the grisly details around him. By creating an impersonal world of devastation, McCarthy channels the reader’s sympathy away from the surroundings and towards the main characters instead.

The people are just as anonymous as the places in The Road. Not only do the man and the boy remain nameless, but their physical descriptions are vague as well. In a rare instance when the man comments on the boy’s appearance, he describes how the environment has affected his son rather than pointing out distinguishing features: “The boy was so thin. [The man] watched him as he slept. Taut face and hollow eyes. A strange beauty.” This perspective is starkly realistic, since a father would hardly describe the color of his own child’s hair and eyes to himself. Without providing defining characteristics, McCarthy lets the reader fill in the details himself. However, the anonymity of the characters does not evoke detachment, but a sense of closeness and universality. The man and the boy could be anyone, including someone the reader knows or even the reader himself.

Without set identities, the distance between the reader and the man narrows as the narrative delves deeper into the man’s perspective. McCarthy reinforces this by jumping into second person at key moments, such as when the man considers shooting the boy to save him from torture at the hands of the enemy:

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? (114)

The reader imagines himself in the same circumstances, facing the same heartbreaking decisions as this “any man”, anywhere. The universality of the man’s struggle becomes even more apparent against this backdrop of anonymity.

McCarthy’s use of anonymity in The Road has a dual effect on the reader. On the one hand, it distances the reader from the horror of a post-apocalyptic world, while on the other, it draws the reader close to the man and the boy. The macabre does not take over the story and the focus stays on the internal struggles of the characters. By means of indeterminate settings and faceless characters, The Road’s underlying humanity shines in its rawest form.

Work cited:

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.

The Personal Essay

I was recently asked to write about my desire to be a writer and my creative philosophy in an application for a Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. Here's what came out of the piehole.

Ever since I was a little kid, books have held a certain magical quality for me. I grew up in a bifurcated world under strict, over-achieving immigrant parents. Inside our modest home, we were sealed in a hermetic bubble of Hong Kong urban culture, relishing the familiarity of Cantonese. Outside, we were exposed to the sprawling plash of Los Angeles suburban life, embracing the language of strangers. But for a few hours every weekend, the two worlds would intersect like circles in a Venn diagram. My mother, who barely understood any English, would bring me and my brother to the local library and release us into the wilderness of guided imagination.

On our first visit to the Chevy Chase Branch Library, my brother, five years my senior and precocious at the age of ten, milled around in the sci-fi and fantasy stacks, muttering for me to leave him alone and shooing me towards the children’s section. My mother, settled at a round wooden table with a pile of imported Hong Kong newspapers and gossip rags, pointed at a long wall of colorful spines and whispered in Cantonese, “Start with the first book on the first shelf and make your way across that wall until you’ve read every single one.” A clever woman, she was probably banking on the obsessive compulsiveness of her youngest to give her some peace. I followed her instructions to the letter with dogged enthusiasm. Each book knocked loose a brick or two from the walls of my sheltered childhood, revealing magic portals to other places, real and phantasmic. My mind bloomed with possibilities.

The allure of books followed me from that small-scale library through primary school, secondary school, university, and my first career in finance, traversing oceans, hurdling mountains, spanning continents, and even roving the occasional desert. Lurking in the fringes of consciousness was the notion that someday I would portray realms on reams of paper, preserve moments in masterful prose, fashion unforgettable characters in indelible ink. However, mediocre performance in a creative writing course in college cudgeled the notion deep into my subconscious. It remained comatose for almost a decade.

About a year and a half ago, I gathered up every frayed tassel of courage and quit a nine year career in finance to write a novel. My closest friends rejoiced; even acquaintances were not surprised. I, however, was terrified. Writing meant exposition. Vulnerability to subjective judgment. Lack of a steady income. Most petrifying of all, writing meant an attempt to do the one thing that I was most afraid of failing at. It took me six months to extricate myself from the decrepit clutches of ancient fears and compose the first sentence of my manuscript.

I did not have much to go on when I began working on the novel. The memory of that one horrendous quarter in creative writing certainly didn’t help. But I took a deep breath, determined a purpose and an ideal audience, and plunged in. The purpose: to offer a realistic account of grief as a twenty-something. The ideal audience: those suffering from grief first-hand, or those interested in how grief affects young people. Devising the plot line was not extremely difficult since the novel is based on personal experience. Devices emerged naturally and characters blossomed beyond real-life counterparts. I immersed myself fully and loved every moment of it, even the horrible headaches when the mind clamps down like a vise, refusing to cooperate, or the sleepless nights when the mind becomes possessive, refusing to release you from your fictional world, forcing you to conjure and rewrite without respite. During those nine months, I stopped reading, self-conscious that my voice would take on the inflections of other authors. I floundered and danced, capitulated and endured, crawled and ran, until one day the manuscript felt strong enough to stand on its own two feet. That was about a week ago, at the end of March.

I read through my manuscript and love the courage and hope it represents and all that it is trying to be. But I know that it could be more. That is what leads me now to pursue a creative writing degree, especially one where I can study craft under the guidance of effective storytellers, given that an effective storyteller is what I aim to be.

The storytelling capacity of books has affected me unlike any other media. Motion pictures, music, visual and performance arts stimulate my mind through the senses, but the written word accesses another part of my brain, demanding interaction. As a reader, I actively participate to form a three-dimensional world through an author’s two dimensional clues, or four-dimensional, even, if the fourth dimension is consciousness, emotion, spirit, or in one word, humanity.

The books that have impacted me the most are the ones that give a true sense of humanity. These books last beyond a season, reaching readers across generations and past cultural or physical borders. A true sense of humanity is what I seek to convey in my work, whether it be a novel about grief, a children’s book for kids with muscular dystrophy, a phantasmic tale of magic hippos, a short story about life after divorce at sixty, or even a horror/thriller featuring expatriate psychopaths in Shanghai.

There is also a part of me that is intent on giving voice to the specific experiences that I have been through as a product of diaspora and immigrant ambition. This is not because I believe that each of my experiences is unique, in fact, quite the contrary. Each fragment that has made me who I am is a link to someone else in the world whose journey has incorporated a similar fragment. The sum of these fragments makes me unique, of course, but the fragments themselves allow me to reach across oceans and hold hands with the most unexpected of kindred spirits. I may be Cantonese-American, but I am no more an Amy Tan protagonist than a Jhumpa Lahiri character. I am as interested in reading Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Collins’ The Woman In White.

That’s the beautiful thing about being made up of fragments. From shards of culture, language, heritage, and upbringing, there is an opportunity to fashion bridges instead of walls. The stories waiting to be told of our polychromatic humanity are infinite, from chronicling the grit of reality to spinning the cloud-stuff of imagination. I hope to become one of many storytellers creating magic portals that will line the shelves of that very library where the world first unfurled for me.

Glutton For Bad Karma

Every time I travel, I transform into this furious magnet for bad karma, and today is no different. It’s not a long flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and if you’re on a good airline, like Dragonair of Cathay Pacific, the two hours fly by fairly sweetly. They serve Haagen-Daaz for love of Jesus. I’m a snuggly little camper under two felt blankets, finishing Junot Diaz’s Drown and picking up Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. It’s a short story kinda day.

Then the flight rumbles to a landing, jolting me from the slumber that knocks me out as soon as the captain announces descent. Gets me every time. The plane taxis to the gate and the sardines are restless. As soon as the lights pops on and the bell goes ‘ding!’ the madness begins. First there’s a clatter of unbuckling seatbelts and the sardines rise in messy synchronization. I expect to hear the grumblers, complaining about someone in their armpit or knocking the dust off their hats as overhead baggage is yanked from above. But this particular can seems to be stuffed with fairly polite travelers. I maneuver around to grab my tiny little roller bag and manage to return to my seat unscathed.

A bumbling old man, the bellowing upright kind, rather than the muttering stooped, begins stepping all over everyone, still stationary and awaiting release, to find his luggage in the overhead compartments. He’s so polite, however, that everyone lets him by, ignoring his elbows in their ribs and his buttocks in their hips, as he chants in a singsong voice, “Wang ji le fang na li, wang ji le,” (“Don’t remember where I put it, don’t remember.”) I love the politely rude. I find them fascinatingly slick. At this point a slow fart escapes me and I make a face, pretending I don’t know who just smelt up the aisle.

We all trundle off the plane after the doors open and I beeline for the bathroom because the life of my bladder depends on it. Then a race to the immigration line, walking fast with my heels kicked up and Nocturnes sticking out of my roller bag like a tongue. I ignore the ambulators and enjoy the scuff of the carpet. Walking feels good after sitting still for a couple hours. So far, so good. No one’s getting in my face, the sun’s shining through a hazy sky in Shanghai and I’m almost home after too much time away.

I head for the China Immigration lane. As soon as I file in behind some older dude ahead of me, his buddy cuts in front of me as if I wasn’t there. Ah, here it comes. The switch under my sternum that tells the Happy Buddha hanging from a chain around my neck to back the fuck off.

“What are you doing?” I say to him, immediately embarrassed by my stupid-sounding Mandarin.

“I’m with him,” he replies, brushing me off and stepping ahead. I’m not gonna point out that he’s Chinese here, because I’ve seen plenty a white guy do the same in crowded airports.

We’re at a bend in the snake line, a perfect place for negotiating rank and file, and I sidestep him and say, “It doesn’t work like that.”

He ignores me, steps forward.

“Did you hear me?” I say.

“I’m behind you now, okay?” he responds gruffly, flickering his disdain towards me with his beady eyes. I can say that because my eyes are beady, too.

I reclaim my position and feel ambivalent. I won my little battle, haven’t I? Somehow I feel like a douche. The grumps have been introduced, however, and when the officer at the booth asks me to take my hat off I scowl. The lights blink on the electronic comment box as she hands me back my identity, and out of the five options, I press the Greatly Dissatisfied button with the unhappiest frowny face. Oh, dear, I think to myself. I’m in that mode.

I stride on to the baggage claim but now my head is full of the kind of remorse I feel after I’ve yelled at a taxi driver who’s deriding my pinyin pronunciation. I’m a big believer of karma. If you dish it out, prepare to have the shit served right back at you. Did I just spitefully press the frowny face button because the officer made me reveal my oily hat head, or because I have a fat face on my I.D. card, or because I scuffled with my mom before she saw me disappear into the Departures area?

My mom gets grumbly whenever we’re at the airport. It makes sense. She lives alone now and my visits break up otherwise long stretches of alone time. Watching her wave as I round the partition, a big, fat lemon squeezes all over my heart and I chastise myself for being less than patient. I hate these moments. They allow the latent anger at my father to rise up, and it’s takes awhile to tamp that sucker back down again.

I’ve grabbed my luggage, clearly marked with cute little ornaments by my mother, and made it to the taxi stand, which is empty. The snake line is welded in place with metal bars, however, as unrelenting as the crowds that usually bloat against them, and it takes a minute for me to wind up and down and back up to the waiting taxi. The driver gets out and helps me with the luggage and I slide into the seat, grateful to be on the last leg home. I brace myself for attitude as the driver asks me where I’m going, but there is none. I open up my laptop, and by the time I finish chronicling my own nastiness, I am finally home.

Curse of the Overly-Enthused

During this brief sojourn, I've collected a few recurring observations of Hong Kong's 'literary world.' I apply quotations to 'literary world' since surely one cannot presume to have experienced any sort of 'world' based on a two-day symposium and a flurry of random talks, but here I go, presuming anyway.

1) Introducing yourself to others is a big and scary crapshoot. The person you just introduced yourself to could be any of the following: bored rich person, executive know-it-all, celebrated author, cultural dabbler, eager young student, crusty old creep, avid reader, or just plain asshole. There goes half an hour. Guzzle, guzzle.

2) A LOT of people like to quote Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." May want to reconsider the Prufrock references in my current manuscript. ... Screw it. Keeping 'em.

3) Passing out your card to everyone may elicit mockery from time to time. Get over it. There's the off chance that someone will not turn around and bin it, but cherish it for all it's worth. $0.07 and a truckload of gumption.

4) Unabashed enthusiasm tends to make others wary, especially authors and agents. It's possible they are on the look out for potential stalkers. The wide eyes of enthusiasm are too difficult to distinguish from the wide eyes of mania.

Let's focus, for a moment, on 4. I am a ridiculously enthusiastic person. Well, most of the time. I'm the one who's shaking your hand and telling you how great you were onstage. Thing is, I actually mean it. It doesn't take a whole lot to impress me, so take what you will from it, but the enthusiasm is genuine. What I've found in the past week and change is that this enthusiasm can sometimes lead others to employ the slow back away, wondering what it is you want from them, or what it is you expect to glean from their awesomeness. I get it. I was approached by an eager member of the audience when I was the featured reader at an open mic recently and I remember being a little bit afraid of his wide eyes.

The thing is, I've never been the cool, collected type, and do not wish to be. What I do wish, however, is that I was just a tad less sensitive about being a dork.

Dialing down sensitivity is not one of my strong suits. It's not even near the closet. This leads to the following scenario, which has been happening quite often:

Jenn goes up to [insert author, artist, person with the cool hat, here]. Grins. "Hi, I'm Jenn! Can I give you my card?" (Yes, Gauche is my middle name. Right after Dork.) Subject [smiles/raises eyebrows/laughs] and accepts the 300 gsm matte with spot UV card shoved towards them. A few [seconds/minutes] of chit chat before parting ways. Fast forward to next run-in with said [author, artist, hat aficionado]. Jenn waves excitedly. "Hi, how are you?" Subject smiles uncertainly, employs slow back away. Jenn's bold, over-excitable, self-conscious slug of a soul shrinks, slumps into the safety of its shell, and replays scenes of rejection, imagined or real, until the emergency generator of reason kicks into gear. The lights turn back on.

In literary festival wonderland, the one author/VIP that has made the slug in me feel most welcome has been the Pulitzer winner, the one you'd actually expect to be stand-offish. Junot Diaz was hands-down the nicest and most unassuming. He seems to have true compassion for wanna-be writers. It's encouraging in the best way: each time I've heard him speak, I run home and write.

I Am A Writer, Goddamit

In part of my recent attempts to embrace this identity I've created for myself as a Writer/Dreamer, I am in Hong Kong attending my first writers' symposium called Writing Across Cultures at City University. Nothing more unnerving for a so-called writer to step into a room full of writers.

Identity is tricky. About two years ago I declared myself a writer. It was easier than I'd imagined in all my twenty-nine years. My wonderful friend designed me a business card and there it was: Jenn Chan Lyman, Writer. Wow. If I'd known it to be that easy, I'd have gone out and printed business cards when I was five. Owning up to myself being a writer has been much more difficult. It helps when you don't have a job and tell everyone you're writing a novel. But I wonder if I will ever truly consider myself a successful writer until something I've written (that I truly love, i.e. not random magazine articles) is published somewhere other than on A4 paper in my study. So, how to get published?

Over the past week of attending Shanghai Literary Festival events and talking to authors and writers and non-writers alike, it seems that the success of a writer in the publishing world is not solely based on writing, but the entire package of the writer herself (or himself, or itself). You want to be published? Shameless self-promotion is part of the repertoire of helpful skills. Have a business card. Have a website. Go forth and meet the world via Twitter and Facebook. Blog away like a fruitful little blogger. Then, when you have time, write. Okay, no one actually said that, but it feels like it, especially this week where I've scuttled off across the seas to attend symposiums and talks and festival opening parties. Mmm...alcohol. What about that novel of mine? Oh, right. Crap.

So far the key point I've absorbed in all these talks is that I seriously need to work harder. And harder. And harder. Wake up earlier. Develop a schedule. Finish that second draft of Frozen and start on the third. As long as my vpn continues to work, I'll be blogging more than once a week from Shanghai. I've created a public Facebook account for the writer in me. And, oh dear, Twitter. Yesterday I joined the 60 million twitterers of the world. Lord help me. Now, back to the symposium...

Glory Time - daily drivel

I've got about half an hour before I launch into glory time, just enough to throw down a few sentences. It's one of my gazillion resolutions to blog more in 2010. Not so much in the form of longwinded fragments, but a dollop here and there of the daily cream.

So what is this glory time, you may be wondering? Is it solitary pooping in the comfort of your favorite bathroom? Is it trying to balance cucumbers on your eyelids while immersing your hands into a barrel of paraffin wax? Or is it downward facing dog with a side of upward facing crow? So many glorious possibilities. But no, glory time is simply the daily three-hour (at the minimum), uninterrupted romp through the world of Frozen, the novel I've been working on for about seven months now. I am in the second major edit phase, after receiving comments from my wonderful plot readers, and now it's time to craft a novel out of a manuscript.

Writing a novel is weird. Sometimes it’s like putting your awesome pants on and going out for a stroll. Other times it’s like trying to do the running man in chainmail. Totally genius thoughts twirl like dervishes in your mind, making it impossible to fall asleep, only to disappear into the ether by morning. Totally idiotic thoughts twirl like jesters on the page, taunting your insecurities to come out and play. Those don’t disappear automatically, however. They have to be rooted out and deleted one by one.

Finding the plot and meeting the characters was the hardest part for me. There were days, weeks, months where I’d sit there and wonder why the hell I quit my day job. Then one day, my Frankenstein’s monster was suddenly whole. It got up and lumbered towards me, shocked as I was at its completion. I immediately sent my little monster off to my friends to coddle for a couple weeks, and now the monster is back in my care.

Will I be able to magically transform this little gremlin into a charming young pup to be snatched up by the thousands? Or is this little monster doomed to a life under my mattress? We’ll see. It’s glory time.

Midnight Meanderings – a fragment

Leaving the jazz club, I realize there’s something different about tonight. There is a melancholy that cramps my insides. More than your usual, everyday melancholy. So I do exactly what my eighth grade Physical Education teacher would have told me do in the event of a cramp: "Walk it off, Chan, walk it off." (Yes, Ms. Green. Yes, ma’am. By the way, ma’am, are you gay? I’ve always wondered that.) Never mind. I’m gonna go walk it off now.

Rejecting the line of cabs in front of me, I head southwest with the vague idea that home is in that general direction. I may have lived here for four years, but I remain geographically stunted and directionally challenged. I take a left turn and find myself on a completely deserted street. The air is musky with the almost-rotting leaves of autumn and the lamplight casts a sienna filter over everything. Intricate lamps under the eaves and along the walls give just enough light for me to appreciate the details of the building facades and the quaint architecture of Shanghai’s French Concession. I stop to catch a photo of a huge stack of construction bamboo abandoned on the sidewalk across the street, elegant in its own right in the amber light. This city of mine is full of contradictions. For decades, the host of speckled plane trees lining these streets have solemnly witnessed them all.

It is unbelievably quiet. Walking in the thick of this deep silence I am as insignificant as the dead leaf fluttering beside me. Only the trees are aware of my coming and going. My thoughts turn inward and I consider the melancholy that had coaxed me into this adventure to begin with. It’s strange. I love the life I have now. There’s nothing more that I want. Save the relocation of my dear friends around the world to Shanghai, that is. But I’m a reasonable girl. I’m thankful for all that life has given me. So what’s with the melancholy?

I’ve been spending a lot of time alone in jazz clubs. It’s a bit weird, I know. But, first of all, I am weird, and second of all, I’ve fallen in love with this minx and nightly it lures me into its various lairs, taunting me to listen, to learn, to live within the music. I love it for its raw energy, its spirit of change, its intellect. Yet I confess that I often feel like a complete loser as I hang out in the dark, watching, photographing, writing, keeping my ears open, open, open as I take in whatever the minx is offering onstage that night. Listening to music is not the most social event. For one, it kind of requires not talking. It also requires convincing your friends that jazz is awesome. Even if they do agree, no one in their right mind is going to accompany you on your rounds every single week. So more often than not I fly solo. Which is cool for the most part.

Except, I’m a puppy dog. Anyone who knows me, knows that well. Sometimes even a regular bitch. But past the snapping jaws there’s the fundamental need to be liked. Lately, with my frequenting of music venues and shameless self-introductions to musicians, my puppy-dog insecurities have been catching up with me. To me, with their dedication to their art and their love of music, these musicians are kindred spirits of sorts. To them, I’m some random chick who keeps turning up. Not all of them, certainly. There are those who walk past, pretending not to see me, and there are those who seem to sincerely want to be acquainted. Perhaps it’s because I’m new to living in my art, that I think everyone else who’s doing the same is going to want to chase kittens together in the neighbor’s backyard. But I forget that they are all cats themselves. Ah well. This is the life you chose, as my brother-in-law would say.

I pass the stately night guards in front of the Dutch consulate, minding their post with the shared silence of the street, and think of the shared silence of humans in general. Beneath the layers of friends and lovers, spouses and family, every single one of us are alone. As insignificant as the dead leaf fluttering beside me. Doh. I said that already, didn’t I? Now that I am no longer in the corporate world, no longer in a nine-to-five post, I am no longer surrounded by humans by default. I’ve grown accustomed to being in my own head for most of the day, writing, writing, forever writing. Living inside your head is wonderful, but it can also be daunting. Troubling, sometimes, especially when you’re attempting to mine the depths and transform cold, hard ore into gold. Probably why I have such a hankering to get out of the house after office hours.

Another corner later and the city is rustling around me. I’m in a more commercial part of town now. There’s the lady in red, red cartoon-patterned pajamas that is, stopping by the ATM. There’s the crowd around the late-night skewers guy grilling all sorts of yummy goodness atop his mound of glowing coals. There’s the faint sound of someone practicing violin at midnight. There’s a lone window draped in red and lit from within, full of secrets. There’s a barber shop glowing pink, its furtive treasures lounging half-clothed beyond the pane, waiting for the right man to pass. ‘Leg shops,’ as my husband calls them. And where is this husband of yours, you may wonder? On a plane, en route from Beijing, and landing any second now. No matter where he is or where I am, he is always the warm ember presiding in the core of my soul.

There’s a rush of water beneath the manhole to my right and suddenly I hear it. Piano music, floating in the street and buzzing along the telephone lines draped precariously above my head. I look up to find the source. And there, above a dilapidated storefront, I see a small yellow square of light, shrouded by a dingy, makeshift curtain. I cross the street to stand beneath this unlikely font. The music is beautiful. A lilting piano ballad streaming into the night, the perfect score to my dead and fluttering leaf. It touches me that some anonymous soul above is feeling the exact same way that I am feeling in this moment. I walk away reluctantly after a minute or two. I want to make sure that I’m home by the time my husband arrives at the door, exhausted from his trip, worn out from being my constant ember.

Home is just a park’s length away now. I cross the large boulevard and my heart lightens as I pass the very serviced apartment that I stayed in four years ago when I was deciding whether or not to move to Shanghai, wondering what this fickle, fabulous city had in store. I had no idea how full and fulfilling my life here would be. Of course I didn’t. My husband, my Duraflame source, was still a couple months away from entering my life then.

My heart quickens as I enter the last dark alley before home, even though rationally I know that there is no random Jack lurking in the shadows ready to jump out and steal my iPhone. It is crazy how safe Shanghai feels. I scratch at the newly formed welts from the opportunistic mosquitoes I’ve met along the way, those last irritating troops perservering until the season's end. My war wounds from tonight’s adventure. Forty-five minutes after leaving the club, the cramp has gone gently into that good night. Ms. Green was right after all. Walk it off, Chan. Walk it off.

Writing and Writhing - a fragment

Writing and writhing. The two aren’t very far from one another when you’re trying to write a novel. You write, you writhe around in self-doubt and confused tenses, then you write some more. Write, writhe, write, writhe. An endless seesaw that is the state of my mind these days.

“Hurrah! Things are making sense, I love my characters, everything is wonderful! I can almost touch the sun...Daddy!!”

“Mayday! Nothing’s right, I want to shoot my characters, everything sucks! I can almost see the color of Todd’s underwear...Mommy!!”

I’ve been writing for four months. Three straight, then a month’s hiatus ( I was travelling, gimme a break!), then another. I’ve set a schedule for myself now, much more disciplined than before, and my days start at 1:00 pm (or 1:30, sometimes 1:45, tough life, isn’t it?), and I write for hours until my eyes are blurry and my brain politely requests a hall pass. On a bad day it’s four, on a good day it’s seven. At the end of most days I sit back and think, darn, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Maybe I am a Writer after all! I relish in the words, the phrases, the lines, the paragraphs I’ve created that day, and all the dots and dashes in between.

But then there are those other days. I push away my laptop after hours of blinking cursors and Doubt creeps in. Ravenous, it wraps its long dark arms around me, sniffs my neck, rakes its bony fingers through my hair, presses the tips of its yellowed fingernails on my face, and asks me in a low but nasally hiss, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you can actually write something worthwhile? Worth reading?” A pause for breath, do these things actually breath?, and then the wraith continues, pressing closer to my face, “What makes you think you are not just another wanna-be, recycling emotions, recycling clichés, recycling garbage into garbage?”

And I am captive, I am hypnotized, I am frozen. My ego the size of a pea. The seesaw clatters to the ground with a thud. My butt hurts. Todd’s nowhere to be found. I am alone in a playground full of shadows.

Then my husband comes home, tired after a long day of work but jubilant all the same, and he looks at me with his kind, kind eyes and says, “So how did it go today?”

I tell him. He smiles and says with all the faith that has abandoned me, “You are a wonderful writer. There’s always tomorrow.”

Ignoring his compliment, I say, “Okay. I’ll work harder. I’ll work harder tomorrow.”

I dig my feet into the dirt and push off. The seesaw gives and I begin to rise again. Into the air, into the clouds. I look down and Todd’s back, grinning up at me from his perch below. Smiling feverishly, I lift my face to the sky. 

Spring - a microstory

(as read at Out Loud! The Shanghai Writers Literary Salon on April 26th, 2009)

I knew this day would come. It was clear from the start, but I disregarded the neon warning signs and charged ahead. Straight into the arms of someone else’s man. Am I a total fool? Perhaps. A self-indulgent masochist? Definitely. Damned to the cheap lace hell of adulterers? I certainly hope so, sir. Pleading guilty to all charges. Ready to go down in a flash of someone else's fireworks.

She will love him, surely. Most likely, she always has. He will play the good husband, married to the perfect lady. A couple inspiring future generations of perfect couples. They will have well-behaved, perfectly-mannered children a la Emily Post. They will attend charity galas in the spring and host fabulous dinner parties in the fall. Their earnest, acne-free children will go to Harvard and Stanford and blossom into bankers and lawyers in the footsteps of their proud, proud parents.

I, however, am single at 41. Not the best odds for chocolate Labradors and white picket fences, returning home to a full house, and retiring early in a four-bedroom Dutch Colonial located in a stellar New York school district. Whoopee. Instead, chocolate martinis and white pleather barstools, turning the lock to a silent home, and retiring early to the latest New York Times bestseller on my bedside table. At least I’ll be well-read in my old age.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Didn't make a bed, don't have one to sleep in, I get that. Father Merrin will be so pleased come confession after Christmas mass. Time to consider a few charitable donations to even out the scales beforehand. Then again, I’m not sure God is really paying attention.

I never meant to feel anything. Ah, who am I kidding? But, I never meant to fall in love. I'm no Diane Lane or Monica Belluci looking 35 at 45. I'm just me, having an affair with my 34 year old VP. Just about as classy as the 500 dollar Bloomingdales gift certificate my assistant picked up for Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Greer.

They'd planned a spring wedding because Julia wanted tulips and April was the month for tulips. So Wayne and I had given ourselves a deadline. Deadlines for affairs of the company; deadlines for affairs of the heart. It had seemed so efficient then.

And now it was spring. Neither of us said a word, but the snow had receded weeks ago and Manhattan was blooming. Wayne skipped a few meetings to attend fittings. Then another last week for rehearsal. On Monday he applied for vacation. And now, here we are, on the front steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. He's not even Catholic. Or Irish.

Walking up the steps, I rearrange my expression to one of polite joy that is expected of a boss. Wayne breaks into a smile when he sees me. He gives my arm a meaningful squeeze, except I can't be sure of the meaning. We'd never discussed the end. This could be goodbye, for all I know. I squeeze back.

"Thanks for coming, M," he says, all smiles.

I break eye contact and continue past him to make way for others, heart clenching. I didn't think it would hurt this much. Did he hurt, too? God, I’m pathetic. The lady at the reception table asks for my name.

"Matilda. Matilda Gallagher."

"Gallagher, Gallagher...ah, yes, here you are," she says, crossing my name off a list. “On the groom’s side.” I redden. "Plus one, or?"

Should really be Minus One, given the circumstances. I wonder if she detects the heavy dose of guilt mixed with the heady pulp of a mangled heart.

"Nope. Just me," I respond with a smile. Leaving the spring sunshine behind, I enter the chilly cathedral and pray for grace.