Deanna Fei

After reading Ha Jin’s story collection A Good Fall and conducting a Q&A with him via email, I met the National Book Award-winning author last week on the steps of the Flushing library. We knew each other only by our author photos, but there was an instant sense of warm recognition as we greeted each other and, at his suggestion, headed next door for lunch at what happens to be my dad’s favorite spot: No. 1 East Restaurant, better known as “Ren Ren” (literally translated, People People).

With his wire-rimmed glasses and rumpled gray hair, Ha Jin didn’t seem to trigger any recognition from passersby on Main Street, let alone our waitress. She seemed baffled and a bit irritated by how long it took us to order. To be fair, it took us a very long time to order.

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

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

“What would you like to order?”

“What looks good to you?”

“I eat everything.”

“They have lots of seafood.”

“I like seafood.”

“So you would like to order seafood?”

“Sure, if you would.”

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

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

“How about … soup?”

“Soup is good. Which soup?”

“Which soup would you like?”

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

At last, the waitress stood over us with her pen raised, unsmiling. Ha Jin ordered the hot-and-sour soup. In a panic, I blurted out a couple of the dishes I always order with my dad: sweet soybean milk and a fried leek pancake.

At this, Ha Jin chuckled. “That sounds good,” he said.

“Oh.” I smiled in relief. “Well, then—” I rattled off the rest of the list: steamed vegetable dumplings and thin-sliced beef rolled in a sesame pancake. It was understood: we’d share everything.

Now we relaxed, and ate, and talked. We talked about how, in my lifetime, the Chinese population has shifted from Taiwan-bred émigrés like my parents to the mainlanders filling the streets today. We talked about a few of his favorite Flushing spots, including the Little Lamb hotpot restaurant and the World Journal bookstore, both of which appear in A Good Fall. And we talked about the tendency of both Chinese and American readers (and the American publishing industry) to prefer books about “real Chinese people” or “real Americans”—that is, to shrug off stories about Chinese Americans, American-born or immigrants. Unfortunately, there is a generally sound business rationale behind this bias, but, as Ha Jin said, “This is a moral issue.”

We talked about our mutual love of Chekhov, and how he influenced Ha Jin’s own writing. We compared the philosophies of Boston University’s MFA program with those of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which I attended. We discovered a mutual affection for Sigrid Nunez, who is about to become a teaching colleague of Ha Jin’s at BU. And we plumbed our mutual distaste for the current fashion of celebrating certain authors who seem to prioritize cleverness, irony, and experimentalism for their own sake over sentence-level craft, character, and real feeling.

We couldn’t finish everything we ordered, though we did a pretty good job with the hot-and-sour soup. Ha Jin was headed to the Port Authority to catch a bus back to Boston; I was headed to my publisher’s to sign a batch of paperbacks, though I figured I might try to meet up with my dad for a little while. Ha Jin (himself the father of a grown son) said I should definitely call my dad, so after we hugged goodbye, I did.

My dad was a trifle annoyed that I hadn’t called earlier, because twenty minutes before, he’d had an ideal parking spot on Main Street. Still, unaware of where I’d just eaten with Ha Jin, he told me to meet him for lunch at “Ren Ren.”

Originally published at Open City: Blogging for Urban Change

One recent morning, I went to Kissena Park with my dad and my little sister to explore the tai chi scene. We met up with Teacher Du and two of his students, both middle-aged women with sweet, open demeanors. (They treat him with deep respect and perform tai chi under his guidance, but there’s no payment for instruction.) Several routines were practiced, one that Teacher Du himself had choreographed. But, in retrospect, it’s the incidental moments, the little things that happened off to the side, that  seem central to the intimate serenity of that morning.

Gathering pu gong ying

When we arrived, the trio were crouched in the grass, gathering leaves from the ground, their manner lightly absorbed, unhurried. They were gathering, I was told, pu gong ying—which, if Google serves, translates as dandelion leaves—into plastic bags. They were careful to snap them off by the stems, rather than pulling them up by the roots, so that the leaves would soon grow back. According to Teacher Du, the leaves aren’t meant to be eaten; one of the women, Auntie Huang, would brew them briefly and drink the liquid. Auntie Huang has short, slightly graying hair and a beautifully smooth, gentle face. In traditional Chinese medicine, pu gong ying is said to treat such various conditions as cancer, diabetes, and heartburn.

It was only later, when Teacher Du made a reference to Auntie Huang’s hair having grown back nicely, that I learned she has just undergone extensive treatment for breast cancer.

A Depressed Turtle Named Turtle

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

Feeding Swans

The reason the group was practicing in Kissena Park that week, rather than in the Queens Botanical Gardens, where they’d first met one another nearly ten years ago, was that “the swans are back.” When practice was over and my father, my sister, and I took our leave, Teacher Du insisted on giving us a bag of bread crusts. As soon as we stepped to the edge of the pond, two large swans swam up, snorting, along with a few deferential ducks. It occurred to me that you’re not supposed to feed wildlife, but the moment was hard to resist.

Teacher  Du had told us the swans would feed right out of our hands, but I thought they had mean faces. (The animals that have bitten me include a horse, a dog, and a duck.) I tossed a few scraps of bread (once, accidentally hitting a swan in the neck) and let my dad hand out the rest. The birds gulped the pieces of bread that were tossed close to their beaks, though they didn’t expend much energy in swimming after the scraps. They seemed well-fed—probably by Teacher Du.

The three of us, on the other hand, were starving. We emptied the bag, then headed off to Fay Da Bakery to pick up curry pastries and pineapple buns for our own breakfast.

Originally published at Open City: Blogging for Urban Change

Kissena Park, Flushing

When most people think of Flushing, they tend to think of hectic traffic, overflowing street markets, noisy crowds slurping authentically mouth-numbing food. (Unless they think primarily of the Mets, in which case I’m not terribly interested.)

But, as I recently discovered, there are also scenes like the one above unfolding every morning just blocks away.

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

When I returned home to New York, I feared I’d lose my tai chi forever. Partly to keep my own memory fresh, I tried to teach it to my dad, who was skeptical. It was a badly conceived plan, quickly abandoned—and soon, amid the daily grind of long work hours and long commute times, I gave up trying to keep up my own practice, too.

But in the years since, tai chi groups seem to have sprung up all across Flushing—out in the open, in Kissena Park, the Queens Botanical Gardens, even the tiny playground where my sisters and I used to seesaw, as well as inside numerous church basements and nondescript buildings along Northern Boulevard. I’m sure there have long been a few practitioners of tai chi in the area, but it seems that now they have burgeoned into a great, kaleidoscopic community—one that now includes my father. He’s pictured above, in the blue track pants, alongside Teacher Du, a tai chi master from China who has become one of his closest friends.

Now, for Open City, I plan to have my father guide me through the places where tai chi is flourishing across Flushing, from the public parks to the hidden interiors, from formal classes to impromptu gatherings. In spending time with members of these communities, I plan to explore how they arrived at the discipline; whether they came to it fresh or carried childhood memories of, say, gym class in China; how it might have shifted their use and definitions of public and private space; how tai chi might figure in their own sense of themselves as immigrants and as citizens.

And how all of this might open a new window for me onto a neighborhood I thought I knew.

Originally publshed at Open City: Blogging for Urban Change

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

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

Ads by Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published at the Huffington Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting tonight, I intend to try.