Photo of Ben Ren courtesy of the author
NER staff reader Meera Vijayann talks with contributor Ben Ren (45.3) about writing impressionistically, exercising free will in an increasingly bitter world, and reading travel humor.
Meera Vijayann: You gently capture the trepidation and dread that Asian Americans felt in a post-COVID world in your essay “Before/After Paris.” It is almost as if there’s something in the air but you can’t quite pin it down. The subtleties of navigating a racially charged world—the social distancing, the hypervigilance around sick people, the rise in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans—feel so real to the reader. What compelled you to write about the “/”?
Ben Ren: I desperately wanted to hold on to my moment with Monet’s Water Lilies. This essay could have easily been titled Before/After Monet. It really was a transcendental moment: sitting alone in the l’Orangerie, surrounded by all that beauty and silence, and feeling all that had been weighing me down suddenly melt away like spring snow.
But how does one go about capturing that moment and conveying its significance?
So I had to go back to the before, and share all that had happened prior: the pandemic, the racism, the anxiety. Because when we travel, we bring more than just the physical objects in our suitcases with us; we carry a host of intangible items inside of us, too.
I’m glad you noticed the slightly hazy feel of the essay. It was my attempt to write an impressionism essay: using broad pen strokes to sketch out my ephemeral impressions of Paris. Like in a painting, I tried to leverage the light (the travel, the architecture of Paris, Rodin’s sculptures) and the dark (my insomnia, the virus/anti-Asian hate, writer’s block), all lathered in coats of my emotions.
Like an impressionist painting, if you stand up close, you’ll notice how messy and incomprehensible it can look in small sections. I ask a lot of the reader: to jump from one messy, disparate topic to the next. Only upon reaching the end, when you can stand all the way back, will the piece hopefully coalesce into a complete and beautiful impressionistic essay.
And the “/” symbol: it reminds me of a single Monet brushstroke.
MV: There is a stunning line in your essay that captures how we think of acceptance in the world: “If one would just swallow enough bitterness, then one would be protected against the vicissitudes of life.” You later examine the emotions behind this line when you see Monet’s Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie. In the middle of (yet another) ugly election season, what do you hope your readers understand about bitterness and hatred?
BR: That they have control over how much bitterness and hatred they ingest. Every morning when you wake up, you have a choice to make: do I stay in bed and doom scroll until I’m late for work? Or do I get up, make my bed and some coffee, and use that same time to go for a quick walk or read a book?
The term ‘doom scroll’ did not exist until 2020, a consequence of both the pandemic and the presidential election and its subsequent events. During that period, I was overdosing on election updates and all the (negative) news, consuming every alarming headline and article indiscriminately, and not realizing how much damage it was doing to my health. Like the coronavirus, bitterness and hatred is invisible and floats in the (digital) ether; you don’t know you’ve been infected until you get sick.
Now I know to put on my mental N95 mask too. I’ve canceled cable. I actively avoid the news. This is not to say I’m blind to the happenings of the world, but I decide when I want to take it in. I’ve deleted Instagram. I drink lots of green tea. I play lots of tennis (not pickleball).
As for eating bitterness, I see it now as a fear response, and a hope that it will spare you from further pain and suffering. But I don’t agree with it anymore because life doesn’t work that way. Rather, I think we can be more French about how we live. Their palate for life is sweet, not bitter. So go eat that macaron, be a flâneur, take a long lunch, drink that apéro, and say non to unsweetened things.
Because the only ‘pain’ the French swallow on a daily is a pain au chocolat.
MV: Then there is your insomnia. You also capture, rather beautifully, the struggle to recover from writer’s block and illness. I know you carried your notebook with you throughout your tour of Paris, but what was your process for writing this piece? Did you sit with your observations at the the end of each day?
BR: I really wish I could say I was just like Hemingway in A Moveable Feast: sitting discreetly inside a warm, quiet, cozy Parisian café somewhere near Place St. Michel, sipping on a café au lait—or a rum St. James if you’re Ernest—while jotting down my impressions of the city after a day of exploring. In reality, I did very little writing in Paris—partly because I was still creatively blocked, partly because I was too busy sightseeing, but mostly because I find it difficult to write about any place, not just Paris, in the immediacy.
There’s a travel poem by Su Shi (苏轼) from the Song dynasty (960–1279), of which the last two lines are famous and captures this sentiment perfectly:
不识庐山真面目
只缘身在此山中
Why can’t Mount Lu’s true face be seen?
Because you are standing in its midst.
To see the mountain, we need to stand a certain distance away—both physically and temporally—to appreciate its craggy, majestic silhouette. So sadly, I didn’t sit at Musée de l’Orangerie to make notes. But even if I did, I’m not sure that I would have had the words then. Instead, I wrote this essay after I was back on American soil. But in a way, I think it was the departure, the separation, the distance that gave me the bifocal lens of introspection and retrospection necessary for me to see Paris’s “true face.”
Speaking of Hemingway, I believe he relied on that same distance for A Moveable Feast. While the travel memoir focuses on his time in Paris in the 1920s, he didn’t actually start composing it until 1957, when he had already moved to Cuba/Ketchum, Idaho. I recently reread the first chapter (A Good Café on the Place St. Michel) and nearly fell off my bed when I came across the line, “maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris.”
Hemingway knew he had to leave Paris to see Paris, too.
MV: What are you reading now? Tell me a bit about a writer whose work has influenced you.
BR: Currently topping my teetering nightstand stack is The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. For those unfamiliar, he’s an American humor/travel writer who wrote the 1995 bestseller Notes from a Small Island about taking one final trip around Great Britain before moving back to the US after two decades of residence. Little Dribbling (2015) is its sequel: a hilarious travelogue about retracing his British footsteps while noting his new/old impressions of the UK after another twenty years away.
Like Little Dribbling, “Before/After Paris” is about going back to a place you’ve been to before, and comparing/contrasting the then with the now. Because Paris is such a familiar and touristed city in both literature and real life, it can be a very difficult place to write about. But this book gave me the idea that I could perhaps reframe it from the perspective of a revisit, a retracing, which hopefully, offers readers a fresh port of entry (back) into the city.
Secondly, all my writing prior to this essay has actually been Bryson-esque travel humor. I think my natural voice is less Hemingway and more Emily in Paris—a mix of Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians) and David Sedaris with a dash of P. G. Wodehouse. In fact, “The Asian Vacation,” my novel-length work briefly mentioned in the essay, is kind of an Asian remake of National Lampoon’s Vacation whereby a tireless, hardworking Asian American family somehow manages to turn their relaxing, all-expenses-paid Eurotrip into a hardship assignment from the Department of State.
But everything I know about craft I learned from reading/writing travel humor. The prose mechanics are the same, just pointed at a different body part. There, the punchline goes for the funny bone; here, it’s aimed at the heart.
Meera Vijayann, a nonfiction reader for NER, is an essayist and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is currently working on her debut novel.
Ben Ren studied computer engineering and creative writing at the University of Minnesota. The winner of the 2023 Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, his work has previously been published in IMPACT magazine. He was the 2022–2023 creative nonfiction fellow at the Loft Literary Center, and his literary musings can be found on actionischaracter.substack.com.