The first words I ever spoke were Chinese. I was eight months old and had taken to throwing my stuffed rabbit out of my crib. My mother – who, like my father, had grown up in Taiwan before moving to the United States to study, where they met, married, settled in a small house in northern California and had me – would pick up the rabbit and hand it back to me, saying in Mandarin, ‘your bunny fell.’ On the day of my first words, as she bent over once again to return my rabbit, she asked, ‘where’s your bunny?’ ‘It fell,’ I answered, in grammatically perfect Mandarin. My mother nearly fainted.
I don’t remember this, of course, and growing up I didn’t like sharing it, fearing that it would mark me as a transplant. By the time I started school I was speaking English exclusively; in fact, I don’t remember ever not speaking English. For a brief time, my parents sent me to weekend classes to learn how to speak, read and write in Chinese, but I fought them so incessantly they let me stop. Like many children of immigrants, I was more interested in assimilating, perhaps even more so once my family moved to Utah, where I grew up Asian and non-Mormon in a state that voted against Barack Obama by the largest margin in the country. I rejected anything I perceived to be Chinese and that would further prevent me from dissolving into the cultural melting pot that America promised. Maybe this was what made me so receptive to the allure of the English language; there was a lot of space to fill.
As I got older, my parents seemed increasingly alien to me – a regular feature of adolescence, which for me felt sharpened by the lack of common ground. We didn’t have trouble understanding the words we spoke (always in English), and I don’t remember consciously modifying what I said (in fact, I probably strained the limits of my vocabulary trying to show that I was smarter than them). But while we might have had a common language, the rootstock on which it was grafted had altered. For my parents, English was the atmosphere that enveloped an unfamiliar and often inhospitable planet. They stumbled over a landscape of sleepovers, high school sports, prom and the terra incognita of Mormon culture. And as desirous as I was of these features of American life, I also couldn’t help experiencing them with a certain detachment; having immigrant parents engenders the self-consciousness of an ethnographer.
Just as I can’t remember not speaking English, I can’t remember not being interested in writing. In fifth grade, I’d not yet read a novel but decided to write one. Mostly, I thought it would be impressive to fill a spiral-bound notebook with words. After five pages of barely disguised autobiography – involving two boys bearing an uncanny resemblance to me and my best friend, meeting two girls bearing an uncanny resemblance to the two prettiest girls in my class – I stopped. Maybe my ten-year-old mind, bereft of any real experience to draw from, couldn’t imagine what might happen next. But despite my ambition exceeding my ability, I did glimpse the creative possibilities of the act of writing itself on the person doing it; to engage in writing was to be a writer in that moment.
While my writing in the following years was not the most praised (and certainly wasn’t deserving of it), nobody laughed at it or suggested I try something else. At the same time, nobody suggested that writing was something that I could keep doing, much less professionally. The philosophy of the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop is that writers cannot be taught but can be encouraged. What marked my early forays into writing was mostly a lack of discouragement.
After college, a combination of early-twenties hubris and wanderlust led me to Boston. I had two jobs, no friends and no internet at home, so I spent much of my time at the local library reading whatever caught my eye. I re-read classics that finally made sense, discovered literary journals, and became acquainted with writers who made writing seem easy and possible. Though I learned that, while possible, writing certainly wasn’t easy. I’d sit before a page or keyboard in mute frustration, preverbal urges bubbling inside me, coming to the verge of coalescing into language and then retreating to an ever-distant horizon. As with many young writers, I felt a burning desire to say something, but didn’t know what to say or how to say it.
One winter, I received a catalogue advertising adult education classes offered at a nearby high school. These are common in US cities, sometimes through a university’s extension programme, other times local government initiatives. The classes run the gamut, from horseback riding to computer coding. I registered for a memoir-writing class, and this time translated the absence of discouragement as encouragement. At the end of the class, I asked the instructor what I could do if I wanted to keep writing, and he told me about something called MFAs.
I wound up at a programme in Washington, DC, or, more accurately, near Washington, DC. At one of the first gatherings of the year, a first-year poet asked me what my favourite animal was. After some thought, I said ‘a panda,’ the face of charismatic megafauna (and Chinese soft power) and possessor of a whole lot of evolutionarily undesirable traits. Biologically carnivores, they somehow rely almost exclusively on a single non-meat food source, bamboo, which has so little nutritional content that they have to eat literal shitloads of it. When they’re not eating, they’re usually, well, shitting – up to 50 times a day. Perhaps these two preoccupations explain why they hardly ever have sex. And when they do, it’s often unsuccessful (at least in terms of reproduction; who knows if the occasional frottage satisfies panda sex drives).
The animalistic frenzy of the three-year MFA was the most exciting educational experience of my life. Everyone hungered to say something. Language flowed in torrents, all of us desperate to find the most felicitous turn of phrase, on the page and IRL. Everyone could write, and most had the requisite confidence; like many endeavours – tennis, job interviews, sex – writers needed confidence to be good at it. Perhaps it wasn’t coincidental that I didn’t start having real intimate relationships until I starting thinking of myself as a writer.
In class, we often read our work aloud, a harrowing exercise meant to underscore that writing, though mediated by the page, is always ‘heard.’ And only by hearing ourselves could we develop our voice, that ineffable quality of how someone’s writing sounds and the real currency of literary endeavours (more than an MFA degree, at least, which was more like a union card). It wasn’t uncommon for one particularly acerbic professor to stop a student mid-sentence; just being able to read a complete section was a sign of approval from him, and a head nod could sustain me for weeks. Outside of class he was kind and generous, and if his door was open for office hours I would stop in to talk, except that I usually didn’t know what to say. I would sit across from him, knowing this was an opportunity, trying to form questions until he started making sounds suggesting the encounter should end.
But even the most confident, freshest voices among us couldn’t fake their way into a good piece. Taking risks was admirable, and probably instructive, but your utterances still had to coalesce into something. During this time, I read a description of writing fiction that I’ve never forgotten: composing a short story is like trying to describe the contents of a dark room, and only once you describe it exactly do the lights turn on.
In my essays, I wrote mostly about Mormon culture, but not my place in it. All the characters in my fiction were of unspecified ethnicity, which is to say they were all white. I wrote about everything but being Chinese, apparently to the chagrin of my classmates. During one workshop, the point was addressed explicitly. ‘What about all the women you couldn’t date?’ one woman remarked. ‘You could write about all the weird food you ate!’ (She was trying to be helpful.) There were mainstream Asian American writers by then. I remember feeling shaken when I encountered characters who looked and spoke like my
family in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989); I didn’t know it was possible to capture the universal Chinese exclamation aii-ya! on the page. Shawn Wong’s American Knees (1995) was adapted into a feature film that Roger Ebert gave three and a half stars. Gish Jen’s stories felt as if they were ripped from my own life, and expanded my conceptions of what could constitute a great American novel, but also seemed like the final word – what else could I possibly add? Besides, I was still fumbling around the dark room of America itself. My classmates were pointing out mirrors in that room, but what good were they to me when I couldn’t yet see them?
In my second year, I took a literary journalism course. When I registered, I asked the professor if that meant journalism about literature or journalism done in a literary way. ‘Both,’ he said. We were all assigned to profile a local author, and the professor suggested I submit my profile to one of the local newspapers known for its arts coverage. The arts editor bit, and patiently walked me through a thorough and necessary revision. When the piece was published, I grabbed a stack of copies and went to the printing shop to scan it for a clip book that I stopped keeping almost immediately – the news industry digitised so quickly. But you never forget your first time, and that profile remains one of my proudest accomplishments. A couple of months later, the editor sent me another assignment. Soon, I was writing for him regularly, and when a staff writer position opened up during my last year of school, he suggested I apply for it.
The year I was hired at the paper, a giant panda was born at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Tai Shan, the son of Sichuanese parents, was the zoo’s first baby panda to survive more than a few days. He became known as Butterstick, after the zoo’s press described his size at birth as about the size of a stick of butter, and webcams broadcast his every move (no, Tai Shan is not Chinese for Truman).
When I started as a journalist, I often felt as helpless as a baby panda. I was lucky to have worked for that newspaper at that moment, to learn from editors who not only knew what they were doing but also took the time to teach a clueless neophyte who could write pretty well but didn’t know a thing about a field where, yes, there are stupid questions. And in journalism that old ethnographer’s detachment came in handy, the form privileging those who could position themselves as the storyteller but not the protagonist. I found ways to write about Chinese people without the expectation to write about being Chinese myself. Fast forward a few years, and an assignment to write about an object in the Seattle Art Museum led to a conversation with my father, who told me about a family legend of the antique porcelain collection that my great-great grandfather was said to have buried in China during World War II. Nobody knew what had become of it, so I went to China to find out.
Salmon return to the streams of their birth because those waters have proven to be hospitable to spawning. My one earlier visit to China was characterised by an extreme inhospitality – unbearable heat and humidity; offensive sights, sounds and smells; different sanitation standards, I was ill for most of the time. But it was perhaps this very inhospitality that made going to China such a potentially rich creative opportunity. Anyone who has ever spent time there quickly realises that life for foreigners is full of frustration, or flustration, an unwitting but apt neologism produced by the Chinese tongue. But maybe I was finally ready for that flustration, and in fact sought to be flustrated, because this was the Chinese American experience that I could say something new about. By then, I had learned of the riches of storytelling that awaited the curious and peripatetic, exemplified by Herodotus or, as I later learned, Xu Xiake.
I could no longer ignore the tension of being Chinese but knowing little about it. Even if nothing came of the treasure hunt, I was prepared to explore the particular flustration of being Chinese American in China. Plus, there were pandas.
In Shanghai, I took language lessons once again (at an outfit called Panda Chinese), and was quickly able to understand most of what was said around me, eventually becoming proficient enough not only to conduct interviews in Mandarin but also do so in a manner that felt like my authentic voice. I saw time and again how speaking Chinese allowed me to make connections with people that non-Chinese speakers could not. But even with the mainland’s simplified characters, part of Chairman Mao’s lifelong campaign to lift the peasantry, literacy remained out of reach for me, and I regretted the outbursts that led to my parents cancelling Chinese lessons all those years earlier.
Writing a book about my own life required the adoption of a second perspective that could feel unmoored from lived experience, and I sometimes questioned whether my motivation for seeking out experiences stemmed from a genuine interest or from the suspicion that it might yield useful material. But it also offered the chance to reflect on what it meant to be both American and Chinese. One Chinese colloquialism for American-born Chinese, or ABCs, is hua qiao; qiao is a homonym for ‘bridge.’ It’s like being stretched across the Pacific while being trampled on by people from both countries. I once read about a Mexican American government official who described himself as 100% Mexican and 100% American. To me, such identities seem more fluid, their dominance waxing and waning according to context. Eventually, I came to see being Chinese and American as a privilege. I could move between various communities without being noticed if I felt like it. I got to decide what I was, and when. And I finally figured out how to say something about it.
In 2010, the Chinese government reclaimed Tai Shan from the National Zoo in Washington, DC. The panda became another American-born Chinese returning to China for the first time; he now lives in a conservation and research centre in his ancestral province. That same year, I moved to the Netherlands. When I arrived in Amsterdam, I registered for the free Dutch lessons offered by the municipality. To my intake officer’s disbelief, I answered enough reading comprehension questions correctly to be placed at an advanced-beginner level. ‘I can’t figure out how,’ he said, ‘but you must be gaming the test.’ I wasn’t; I was just looking for patterns and employing other crude strategies that would probably make a linguist cringe. The programme ended before I could make use of it, a casualty of shifting political winds.
In Amsterdam, I find myself mute again. When people ask me if – after a decade in the Netherlands – I can speak Dutch, I reply that if I was dropped into a village where nobody spoke English, I could get by. The joke is that such a village doesn’t exist, the English proficiency here being so high. But getting by isn’t the same as being a full participant. I’m clever enough to stretch my vocabulary to get points – however infelicitous – across, but my comprehension is quickly taxed beyond its limits. To really participate in a conversation, my interlocutors would have to slow down and simplify their diction, and most Dutch seem to prefer speaking English to an adult than Dutch to a baby. I cannot be myself in Dutch, and I’ve begun to wonder what effect my expatriation, first to China, then to Europe, has had on my writing, on my saying something. Pandas reproduce even less successfully in zoos.
Now I mostly teach writing, guiding students through the same learning curves I followed, helping create conditions for them to discover and refine their voices. My students come from across the world and speak English at a level that’s on par with their native languages. Most are from Western Europe, coming of age in a post-Schengen era that perhaps accelerated the spread of English across the continent. (And which might have further cemented Anglo popular and internet culture as aesthetic and narrative influences.) They’re bright, urbane, ambitious and eager to say something – in English – and perhaps naturally tend to get caught up in translation: how does one say this or that in English? Ironically, these students should know better than most that ideas and meaning don’t always map directly
onto English. A popular example in the Netherlands is gezellig, a Dutch word often translated to ‘cosy,’ but that actually occupies an entire spectrum of positive descriptors including convivial, lovely, sociable and welcoming. (A fellow American writer here told me that when she first started dating her Dutch now-husband, he complimented her as being gezellig and translated it as ‘homely.’) It makes me think of the Chinese word renao, which carries similar connotations. But if someone asked me to translate renao, I’d describe a scene rather than try to look for an equivalent word. Yet the urge to write ‘good’ English is so strong that it can make my students forget about the folly of trying to find direct translations.
English may be the lingua franca for inter-national creative writing, but it’s worth contemplating the cost of having to write in it. Given how fundamental a writer’s language is to both the experience and portrayal of their world, what happens during the negotiation between a ‘home’ language and a writing language? Would it be possible to recognise and accommodate the plurality of linguistic – and ontological – backgrounds in my classrooms? And might this even aid the development of what I hope my students could produce, the same as what my professors were looking for decades ago: new voices offering fresh, surprising language? However, using a ‘home’ language can come with baggage, not only housing unpleasant memories of past traumas but also placing restrictions on the user. Chinese isn’t the only language that maintains power dynamics and formal expectations for, say, how a younger person ought to speak to an elder. Just as two natives of a non-anglophone country might greet each other and converse in English, writing in English can feel safe, egalitarian and even liberating.
Diaspora writers are all too familiar with the expectation to represent their culture, even if their own relationship with that culture might be tenuous, superficial or even non-existent. And the patronising, essentialising remarks I got in graduate school aren’t unusual. It doesn’t help that publishing markets currently value ‘immigrant’ voices. In fact, some of the comments I heard in graduate school seemed to be driven by frustration that I was sabotaging my chances of getting published, as if I was refusing some kind of gift. ‘If I could write about being non-white, I sure wouldn’t waste it like you are,’ they seemed to be saying. I resisted at the time, as leaning too far into identity-affirming stereotypes risks perhaps the greatest literary sin of all: being boring. But now I wish I could activate the language backgrounds of my students in a way that makes it possible for identity to be essential to their work without bleeding into their aesthetic. Or is it wrong to assume that people feel stifled by having to write in English? The search for my Dutch voice has complicated my ideas of freedom and captivity.
English isn’t just a lingua franca. It has its own gravity, associations and connotations that can eclipse other languages. For students who come to my university from national secondary school systems, they’re largely interrupting or pausing their intellectual development in their home languages. When they graduate, it can feel as if they’re being kicked out of a shiny cosmopolitan environment and returned to a semi-familiar backwater where they must figure out how to be reabsorbed into a linguistic culture that did not wait for them. One of my former students, a poet from the Netherlands with an active professional practice, had to use Google to translate the poem she wrote in university back into Dutch. The supranational and often elitist (consider the conditions for a non-English speaker to become adept enough to write as effectively in English as native speakers) nature of international schooling and communities can divorce writers from one of the most important wellsprings of their voice: their sense of place. The vicissitudes of language have vexed far more accomplished writers than me. As I puzzle over how my students can engage with languages, I can’t help wondering what it means for me. Could I write a story set in the United States right now? Or China? Or Europe? Since I began writing seriously, I have always wondered if the thing I had just published would be my last, if I had exhausted everything that I had to say. What if the lights turned on and I saw that I had merely rearranged the same furniture?
This feels like yet another layer of the world that could be peeled back. If I want to have a voice in my adopted country, I will have to learn a new language. It will be necessary to maintain intimacy with my Dutch-born wife and child. It took years for me to notice that my mother is almost a different person when she speaks Chinese, and to realise that despite our ability to communicate in a common language, despite my years in China and Taiwan, a gulf between me and my parents remains unbridged. And after decades of expansion, the internationalisation of Dutch higher education has come under scrutiny, with some seeking to puncture the English-language bubble of universities. Perhaps, after all this time, I have not learned to say anything at all.
There was once a Marvel superhero, Cypher, whose power was his ability to speak any language he encountered. In a universe that favoured dynamic offensive powers, he stood apart, literally. ‘He wasn’t fun to draw,’ the series writer once recalled. ‘He just stood around and hid behind a tree during a fight.’ After four years, the writers killed him off. If you had asked me as a kid what my preferred ability would be, I would have said flying or breathing underwater or invisibility – typical choices that transcend time and place. But more and more, in a world where the increasing frailty of physical borders creates the fiction that cultural and personal borders have also disappeared, I think Cypher’s gift would be the greatest superpower.