Fuzhou mopeds everywhere
One year ago, I was in Fuzhou, China. I was researching my novel, Jackpot – Fuzhou and Fujian Province figure prominently in several parts – as well as making a well-timed getaway from a particularly snowy New York winter. Little did I know that it would be cold in Fuzhou. No indoor heat, only a damp chill everywhere, and me very unprepared with only the lightest of spring jackets (the next stop was 90-degree Malaysia, followed by a beach in Thailand). I wore four shirts layered over one another for a week straight, walked myself lost, shivered.
This January, I’m home, in Brooklyn. It’s only the second east coast January I’ve had in the past ten years, and I’m taking the month to write as much as I can. No classes to teach, minimal freelance work. And a 100,000-word monster that’s taunting me to be reshaped and rebuilt. Time is running out!
Can I survive January? I’m winter adverse. I’m scared of the cold. I’m scared of the darkness, too, because I’m too good at the darkness – too much more and I’m done for. But I’ve been holding up my end of the bargain, this year.
Here’s what I’ve figured out works for me, and my writing, and my winters (after many years of figuring out what doesn’t work):
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Carnival, coffins, and a colony of lepers inhabit Tiphanie Yanique’s authoritative debut. The collection blends realism and fantasy to deploy shifting perspectives and identities, and reflects the Caribbean diaspora both in theme and structure. With an authoritative voice and a cast of memorable characters — from Deepa, the Indo-Caribbean leper in the haunting title story to “Street Man”’s Anton “Slick” Colter, a St. Croix sunglasses and drug dealer who falls for a college girl — these stories are sharp yet dreamy, tough yet sweet, diaspora tales rooted in realism and infused with modern complexities.
Reading Yanique, a native of St. Thomas now living in Brooklyn, is pleasurable because she shows that well-rendered prose and politics do not and should not have to be mutually exclusive. In these stories, colonialism is never fully forgotten, and the after-effects reverberate off the page. We see it in the form of religion, when Deepa and her friend build an altar to a Hindu god on a Catholic island, and again and again in the form of tourism, as Deepa implicates the reader in her monologue about how the leper colony has become a tourist attraction: “You will take pictures of our houses, our beds made up stiffly like war bunks… Or perhaps you will only walk along the shore and swim in our beach.” In “Kill the Rabbits,” Cooper, a petty thief desperately in love, explains the lyrics to a popular Carnival song: “Don’t try to impress the white people… just to make them feel comfortable. This is our carnival. Obey your own culture.” Here is the flipside of the tourist economy, where people’s homes and lives are viewed as nothing but playland — a carnival of a different sort.
Yanique’s stories also reveal class and racial hierarchies reflected in attempts to reconstruct identity. Xica, a young black woman in the Virgin Islands, dates Herman, the wealthy son of two white American bar owners. “He only wanted to be like me,” she says. “He did not understand how the world worked.” The French locals in St. John, themselves descendents of colonizers, say “white” doesn’t refer to them, but to tourists: “I ain no tourist. I’s a Frenchy — a island man.”
For Yanique, perspective is key. With nods to Rashomon as well as magical realism, several of the collection’s stories employ the device of telling the same event through a variety of different points of view. At times it makes for frustratingly slow storytelling, but it also allows us to inhabit the perspectives of people from vastly different backgrounds, to show that a singular event can be interpreted in so many ways. “The International Shop of Coffins,” the book’s sixty-page novella, retells a scene of two men and two schoolgirls in a coffin store through the point of view of each of the two men and one of the girls. The result is one event and three wildly varied histories that brought each of the characters to that store on that day. By unraveling three narrative threads from three different sources, Yanique uses structure and narrative to show the realities of diaspora: disparate in origin and destination, unified in source. Each point of view is valued, similar yet distinct.
How to Escape From a Leper Colony embodies diaspora not just in its themes and settings, but also in the structures and styles of the stories themselves. The result is a strong sense of collective voice, a privileging of the tradition of oral histories. One story, its title proclaims, is told by “someone’s grandfather in a corner rum shop,” while another is retold by a Catholic woman in a big hat. By situating her fiction as stories that are already worthy of being passed around, shared and retold, Yanique places them squarely in the oral tradition. This embodiment of diaspora is also echoed through Yanique’s fusion of fantasy and reality. A man builds a bridge to connect all the islands of the Caribbean. Nuns leap into the sea like “birds hunting a fish prey.”
What does it mean to mix fantasy with contemporary realism? For Yanique, it modernizes the magical real, offering up a lyrical mash-up of voices, histories, and perspectives that are as complicated and variegated as the Caribbean itself, and evocative of its post-colonial diaspora.
On his last day at the job he’s worked for twenty-two years, Sam walks downtown from his office in midtown Manhattan. He wanders into a record store in Greenwich Village, a relic from another era. Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears” is playing on the speakers. After rifling through the miscellaneous bins, he decides to buy the Laura Nyro album with her cover of “Up on the Roof,” which he remembers listening to in the late Sixties in his Brooklyn apartment, when “records were like lovers to him.”
Just finished this book. I’m a Walter Mosley fan, a sucker for some hardboiled, politicized detective of color mysteries and stories about grizzled, lonely old men who are haunted by their pasts. Also, dude can churn out books at a volume that nearly puts Joyce Carol Oates to shame.
Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old “very, very old black man” living alone in a fetid Los Angeles apartment, in the throes of senility. The woman across the street shakes him up for money every chance she’s got, so he’s stopped leaving his apartment. But then his 17-year-old niece (close enough) enters his life and begins to care for him, turning things around.
With some magical plot twists, Grey is able to buy a little time, avenge the deaths of his ancestors – and descendants – and right a couple of wrongs before he dies.
What’s interesting about this book is that it’s narrated from a close third-person point of view – but initially, Ptolemy Grey’s mind is muddled, and so is the reader’s understanding. Just like Grey has to sift through his scattered memories to piece together his reality and his goals, so do we. And the epiphany, the clarity, comes to both us and him at the same time.
I’m revising some short stories from my never-ending linked story collection in progress (new working title, “The Leavers”). It’s been a good break from the novel. Each of the stories is narrated from a different member of one family, in a different time, over a period of forty years.
Whenever I write, I like to make a playlist for the story or the chapter I’m working on. Right now, I’m working on a story narrated from the point of view of Sam, the father in the family. Here’s what I’m listening to with Sam:
Teresa Teng’s “Goodbye My Love.” If there’s any recording artist that embodies the treacly fatalism, lost dreams, and steely resolution masking the throbbing sentimentality that runs (hidden, of course) through the veins of any Chinese American immigrant family, it’s Teresa Teng. Beautiful, angel-voiced, and favoring sad love songs, her life story is more tragic than the songs themselves: she died suddenly at 42 from an asthma attack, with a funeral rivaling that of Princess Di’s. Did I mention that she was beautiful? And young? And died a tragic, sudden death? This song (and “The Moon Represents My Heart”) is so embedded in my subconscious that I nearly inadvertently tear up just hearing those first cloying synth strings. Sam would agree, and be able to sing along, but only after a few drinks. Zaijian! Zaijian!
Bee Gees, “How Deep is Your Love.” From Teng’s angel songstress to the leonine boys’ chorus of the Bee Gees: Sam once had this song on eight-track. He and his wife would play this at parties, shag carpet tickling their bare feet, along with the ABBA Spanish album. Back then, eight-track was the wave of the future, and proudly having reached something close to middle class, Sam and his family were all about the technological future. It’s why Sam still holds onto his dusty cassette tape collection (alphabetized, and in the back of a shoe closet in a series of sagging Florsheim shoeboxes), though he hasn’t owned a working tape player in years.
So last year, when I workshopped chapters of my novel which took place in an immigration detention facility, comments from my classmates included shock and disbelief: “I don’t believe that facilities like this exist in America nowadays.” “You need to be careful about writing these detention center scenes because they don’t seem real to me.” “This can’t possibly be based on an actual prison. Be sure to do your research.” Even though the abuses detailed in the novel were based on reports I’d read of real-life abuses at the Willacy Detention Center in Texas (on which I based my fictional prison), I toned down some of the horrors in subsequent drafts, so they wouldn’t seem overwhelming.
Yesterday, I finally watched Frontline’s excellent Lost in Detention documentary, which features extensive interviews with former Willacy detainees and employees. The physical and sexual abuses they spoke about were even more horrifying than the ones I’d written about, the ones most Americans remain ignorant of.
In another example of real life reflecting fiction reflecting real life, the Applied Research Center just released a report about the rising number of children who are separated from detained or deported parents. More than 5,100 children of detainees are currently in foster care, and many will be adopted by American families after their parents are deported. It’s just the latest in a centuries-long history of state-enforced separation of Native, immigrant, and parents of color from their children, and in my novel, I’m hoping to get into the psychological fallout of such a rift.
Who knew that outside the city, it’s been autumn for weeks?
A few weeks ago, I installed internet in the apartment I’ve been living and working in for three years. You may ask, “How can you live and work as a writer without internet for three years?” It’s been both easy and difficult.
I resisted internet because I am easily addicted. For the same reason, I haven’t had a working television since 1999. I can’t have junk food in my apartment. (I’m haunted by memories of spending my childhood glassy-eyed in front of my sixth viewing of Cannonball Run 2, shoving fistfuls of E.L. Fudge cookies and Teddy Grahams in my mouth.) I avoid entire neighborhoods in Manhattan so I won’t be tempted to spend money I don’t have on clothes I don’t need.
I’m also prone to procrastination. Who isn’t? I can spend hours and hours refreshing my email and Facebook, reading articles, catching up on news, looking up forgotten songs. Meanwhile, my novel or whatever essay or story I’m working on languishes in its empty Word document, obstructed by three or four browser windows. Meanwhile, other writers I know are finishing their books and submitting to agents and editors, and I’m recreating seventh-grade mix tapes on YouTube.
I’ve tried all kinds of tactics. I tried to set up limitations: No internet before ten AM! No internet before you’ve written at least five hundred words! I remember reading an interview with an author who had his wife hide the wireless router and change its password before she left for work each morning. He’d write in the apartment for several hours, then call her at work for the location and password. I don’t have a wife, but in a former apartment I used Leechblock and other web-blocking tools. Still, I’d manually restart the computer after a while just to regain access. Like a rebellious child, I hated restrictions, even when I’d imposed them on myself. (“Don’t tell me what to do!”)
The simplest solution, then, was to not have internet at all. I’ve done the most writing at residencies where there wasn’t internet access. In my apartment, I used to use a neighbor’s open wi-fi signal that would come and go without warning, but last year the neighbor moved away. Earlier this year I worked a contract job that put me in an office two days a week; I took care of paying bills online there. On other days, I’d find myself running to a local café with internet access in order to email an Excel file to a client. I’d scramble for an available electrical outlet before my laptop’s battery called it quits, and set up camp with my coffee only to find the wi-fi wasn’t working that day.
I was happier. I couldn’t resort to a two-hour detour online in order to temporarily avoid writing a difficult scene. I left the house more. But I couldn’t get my freelance work done easily. I felt out of touch with the world. I’d stopped reading the news. So with a mix of excitement and dread, I made an appointment for cable internet installation. I plugged the ethernet into my laptop and I was online. Again.
A month later, my habits have reverted a little. I stay up too late, my eyes forced wide open at the laptop’s glow. I’ve written some things, and I haven’t written others. I do leave the house. I’m slightly better at stepping away and shutting down than I’ve been in the past. I worry, though, at my constant lack of discipline. I wonder if there are people I know who are disciplined, who don’t do everything last minute, who never procrastinate. What are their secrets? How can I learn from them? The sense of urgency to hurry up and create seems to increase each year. But the thought of wasting my hard-won free time on watching cat videos scares me straight.
I’ve dusted off this old web project for your viewing pleasure: the places I have lived, circa 2003. Forgive the ancient HTML and hazy nostalgia; I was young(er) once.
Hello
I write: short stories, long stories, a novel-in-progress, essays, articles, websites. I've kept a diary since I was five years old. This is where I share photos and dispatches from the writing life. More about me.
