Photo Courtesy of Robert C. Bain
NER staff reader Meera Vijayann speaks with contributor Ching Ching Tan about belonging, stereotypes and self-censorship, thinking critically in a non-native language, and her essay “How Do I Explain Myself?” from issue 44.2.
Meera Vijayann: In your piece “How Do I Explain Myself?” you begin with a simple but extraordinary line that bilingual readers, ESL learners, and immigrants from formerly colonized countries will identify with: “There is an impulse to explain.” Tell me more about this observation.
Ching Ching Tan: I think we explain in order to belong. I first noticed that I had the strong impulse to constantly explain myself at a writing group during the pandemic. I teach at San Jose State University and that year I had to teach more classes to build my entitlement contract, so I took a year off from the MFA program. I was deeply driven by the desire to write about what it meant to be Asian, and I was eager to find a writing community, so I joined a couple of writing groups online. I am a minority writer, and I might have been mostly shielded from this reality because I was lucky to be surrounded by different expressions of diversity in the Bay Area. But when I met writers around the country, I suddenly realized that I was the only different face in the group, and I couldn’t engage in real conversations. All I did was react to puzzled faces that said “I’m confused every time I see Chinese characters inserted in your writing. Can you do something about it?”
Can I do something about it?
Before I knew whether I could do anything about it, my mind went to other places: Do I need to, want to, and should I do anything about it? For the longest time, those were the questions that I had in mind. Then I decided to approach those verbs—“want,” “need,” “should”—and replace them with the question: “If I have to explain, and if I were to embrace all those verbs, what would I write?” and I was finally able to move forward. (I still asked myself “Why do I have to?” though.) My earlier drafts tried to answer the “why” question, but multiple drafts in, I realized there is never a right question to ask, and it was okay to have no resolution. Toni Morrison says, “Since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” I made this into an epigraph. It is one that gave me permission to allow all impossibilities to lead me. I said to myself: “If I have to explain, I want to explain fully. Here is how.” and I continued to write this way.
MV: In the section “Chicken Intestine,” you make a statement about the nature of written Chinese or “Hanzi” as it pertains to Chinese culture: “We write square characters. We are square characters.” Why do you think the literary aesthetic of a language extends to our personality and sense of place?
CCT: My discipline in communication studies taught me to always resist a fixed reality, or a fixed identity, and the large part of that resistance comes from being conscious about language and its limitations. The beauty of language, on the other hand, is that it points us to interesting places to temporarily hold on to. We grapple with “meanings” and find ways to describe things, however imperfect that might be. There are different meanings of looking at “character,” for instance. When translating the word in the Chinese written symbol “Hanzi,” it also refers to the character of a person. This drew me to exploring how stubborn stereotypes could be. For example, in my own public speaking classrooms, when I see my Chinese students behaving so similarly to the younger version of me, or how I still do today, in that they have a tendency to be silent, there is a larger implication there. Something of a pattern as a result of a collective agreed-upon submission. Writing this piece, I was curious about those behaviors that are collectively performed and then they become who we are, become our “character.” I was also curious about the connection we have with the languages we’ve inherited from birth, and in my case, Chinese. To me, the Chinese language learning process during childhood—the constant repetition and recitation—symbolized submission.
And it’s interesting you ask about “sense of place.” I keep thinking about “place” as those boxes where I practice Chinese characters, but I know you mean the larger implication of place; where we come from, geographically and culturally, and its extension temperamentally. The square-shaped symbol, the character, doesn’t explain all of it, of course, but without this focus, I couldn’t arrive at a place where deeper meaning, truer meaning, resides. In this piece, I was making sense of my process of breaking out from self-censorship, something so deeply ingrained in my upbringing and my not-so-short career as a radio DJ in China.
MV: The boundaries of language—whether to break a rule or follow it blindly—seems to be a recurring theme throughout your writing. In “Whiteboard” and “To Utter Is To Speak” you meditate on what it means to constantly be aware of what you are allowed to say and what you are not. How does this affect your writing?
CCT: I am at a point in my memoir, writing about the year 2018, where I finally feel that I “know what I am doing.” This single statement feels so ordinary, but it encompasses so much of my experience in this country for fourteen years, including my real attempt to “play” with the English language. Like I said, I graduated with a master’s in communication studies in 2015 and I’ve taught public speaking, but I did not believe I could write. My strong Chinese laboring mindset taught me to follow instructions and check boxes. I wrote but I was mostly asked to complete assignments that included papers I wrote for MA classes. They weren’t terrible, but I see today that I was on my way to cultivate an impulse. This was necessary, but my writing wasn’t able to answer this simple question: What do I really want to say?
Going back to 2018, I think a part of it is the awareness of my self-censorship to my home language. Like many immigrants, I set aside the old in order to fit into the new. Another part, possibly, is the long fomentation of my past life, being cocooned for so long, finally being given wings to fly.
I am learning. The defining moment may change, but to answer the question of what I was allowed to say and what I was not, the year 2018 was consequential. I enrolled in an MFA that year to find ways to articulate why I had this impulse.
MV: You write about how intergenerational trauma becomes deeply buried in one’s psyche. Your own family experienced hardship during the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine, and government-led re-education programs, and you talk about wanting to move on as “The past was heavy.” In some way, do you think the act of writing in a different language helps navigate that sense of loss and confinement that you felt in Cantonese?
CCT: It’s so strange to think that after thirty-two years of living in China, and eighteen years in the US, I’d prefer writing in English, considering that I spent less time with the language and that I’m constantly aware of the struggle of being a guest adopting a new tongue. One caveat here is that even when I was writing in Chinese, I was thinking in Mandarin, not in Cantonese. The written system doesn’t comply with the Cantonese expression, and we were all taught to be flexible and include both in our life. We talked to our family, neighbors, and our community in Cantonese. We watched Cantonese-speaking content on TV, and when I was working on the radio, I was able to “translate” written Chinese text to an articulable Cantonese version on air in real time. I knew I wasn’t different from my peers. That tells you a lot about our linguistic ability. (I am aware that I use past tense here to describe my “past life,” but I’m also thinking about how today China is heavily emphasizing that only Mandarin be used in media and in education. But that’s another story.)
When it comes to my own expression, the what-to or what-not-to say question isn’t in this equation. In “How Do I Explain Myself?” I hope readers can see what I implied about feeling confined when I express myself in Chinese, and by writing it all down in English it is already showing that I can express myself more freely in this new tongue.
I am answering this question with the background of the Supreme Court ruling that upended Affirmative Action, and I have been chatting with my niece in English on WeChat. My niece, an incoming senior in high school, was born in the US, but thanks to her parents, she speaks Cantonese fluently. Unfortunately, we cannot possibly discuss issues like this in Cantonese, for her and even for me. Aside from both of us reading the news in English, and English being the language we think in, to me it matters which language I use to think critically. To think for myself, which is the basic value in American education, is one that my niece thoroughly immersed herself in, and one I did not have in China and in the Chinese language.
For me, there is still a special place for Cantonese that English can never reach or replace, and I think that’s the point. Why do I want to erase it if I really don’t have an expression that captures the essence of its meaning in this new language? Why can’t I find a way to let the two tongues talk to one another, let them decide for me?
MV: Towards the end, you talk about the act of “explaining” as a means to unveil oneself. How do you situate yourself and forge literary influences from one language to another?
CCT: The more I write, the less I think about language. I hope that there isn’t a conduit between one language and another anymore when I sit down to write. I hope they transcend. This piece helped me move on from clinging too much to the act of explaining, becoming less eager, maybe. Without that, I might have still been thinking too much about it and bothered by it.
When it comes to the word “influence,” words have power, but not before we put them down on a page. The thought that words can change the world sometimes freezes us up from expressing ourselves at all. That was particularly prominent in my early writing life. I had a lot of fear. I thought it came from specifically knowing the actual consequences of speaking as a political issue, but gradually, I realized although those fears were real—and yes, I may well be in real trouble by writing about them—another fear, more constant, was about breaking out of a pattern, of a protection, of something automatic that had somehow defined me and I also believed in. I thought that really was who I was. Breaking these patterns is more threatening for me (perhaps for most writers and artists) because it leads us to places where there are no boxes to lean on anymore. There is an enormous responsibility that comes with no boundaries, but at the same time, it is exciting and liberating. I think that’s true to writing in any language.
MV: Who are some of the writers whose works have inspired you?
CCT: I am late to English reading. In MFA classes when professors ask: “Have you read this or that book?” my answer is always no. I began reading for pleasure in 2016. Before that, all I read were assigned readings at school. I read slowly too, and if I loved a book, I’d go back to it over and over again. My library is growing but you can imagine how small it still is.
There is only one good thing about starting late. I feel lucky that the literary world now is less prescriptive. There are so many inviting new voices, more than just writing by old white men, so I’m always in a state of absorbing and connecting thoughts in English.
I’m also drawn to voice. I love Ocean Vuong. Whenever I listen to him talk, I am mesmerized by his words, demeanor, and his way of creating feelings. I often go back to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and pick passages that I can read and reread. During the pandemic, I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. I found myself putting the book down to write. Her book fueled my creative energy. Mary Karr’s work has helped me navigate deeper truths. Without her, I wouldn’t have dared to begin writing a memoir. I also read Chinese philosopher and writer Lin Yutang’s work in both Chinese and English. Interestingly, the Chinese version didn’t give me that kind of resonance that English does. It might be age, though. I appreciate his work so much more today. This summer I’ve been reading Richard Wright’s Native Son and Gish Jen’s The Girl at the Baggage Claim.
Meera Vijayann, a nonfiction reader for NER, is an essayist and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is working on her debut novel as a fiction fellow at Hugo House.
Ching Ching Tan’s journey in America began with studying ESL at community colleges. Born and raised in Southern China, she writes, “At first, writing in English felt like wearing someone else’s clothes, awkward to my skin, but like a piece of kneading dough entering a cake mold, I grew to fit it over time.” She teaches public speaking for English learners at San Jose State University. An MFA candidate in creative nonfiction, she is writing her debut memoir, and her personal essays and op-eds have appeared in CNN, HuffPost, SFWP, Visible Magazine, and Canyon Voices Magazine, among others. Find her at chingchingtan.com.