New England Review

Behind the Byline

Lucien Darjeun Meadows

We are where we are, much more than we are when we are. There is no when without a where. There is no we without a here.

NER staff reader Simone Kraus talks to Lucien Darjeun Meadows—author of the essay “Circling Eloh: A Meditation“—about his love of running, the meaning of the Cherokee word “eloh,” his identity as a writer-translator, and the linguistic kaleidoscope in his life. Lucien’s essay appeared in NER 41.4.

Simone Kraus: You are a long-distance trail runner. How does running inform your thinking, how does it affect your writing?

Lucien Darjeun Meadows: Strangely, it wasn’t until after running the Never Summer 100K in 2019 that I began to write—in poetry and prose—about running. That said, the rhythms of running feel essential to my thinking and writing, with different sequences mirroring the sprint up a hill, or a long rolling stretch, the pause between breaths or strides that feels like an endless suspension, or the breathless careening toward the finish. I spend a lot of time on my feet as a long-distance runner, and with the reservoir and associated trails minutes from home, I often run the same segments numerous times per week. Sounds like a metaphor for thinking! I appreciate runners like Haruki Murakami who describe how they “don’t think” during running—and I’d agree. Rarely do I follow a languagable train of thought on the trail or road. But it is while running that many of my insights happen—sudden “aha!” moments while picking a line through rocks, or while watching a cloud system slowly changing—and it was on a run that I came to the concept of my essay, with other runs showing me how to move through a number of the essay’s moments.

SK: When or why did you decide to write about the Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C‑BT)—one of the largest water diversion projects initiated in the 1930s and supervised by the US Bureau of Reclamation?

LDM: Curiosity! I am a relative newcomer to Northern Colorado (moved here in 2015), still learning how to be with this land, these ecological inhabitants, and these historical legacies. From my first days here, my eyes kept being pulled to the Dixon Canyon Dam outside my window. To the skeleton at the museum. To a sign at the reservoir’s south end—Stout, pop. 47 1/2—as well as, perhaps one mile later, the overlook sign I mention in the essay—Horsetooth Reservoir constructed in 1949 by the Bureau of Reclamation. As an Indigenous person, I found the concept of a “Bureau of Reclamation” intriguing, to say the least. As a Cherokee person, I was curious about this spectral history of exile, trauma, and “reclamation.” This essay was an opportunity to learn more—and the reverberations into my personal and ancestral history, into Appalachia, were surprising and also evidence of this eloh, this interconnectedness.

SK: In your essay, you combine your love of running and your family history with painful chapters linked to the C‑BT Project. Your piece is framed by images of you running; at the same time, I think, running is a synonym for writing. With every step you take, with every mile you run, you tell a story. There is one passage that I find particularly powerful and personal. You write “Running toward Dixon Canyon Dam and the trails into the foothills on either side of the dam, I sometimes have to stop and look at the grasses, the bark of a tree, and breathe. I cannot stop seeing the breaking. The flood’s coming now what do you do? my family game. The flood’s coming now what do you do? my dreaming now. I need a name for this. I need beyond name.”

LDM: Thank you, Simone! That passage is meaningful to me, too. Working on this essay, surfacing these legacies of environmental trauma and survival, was challenging. Going to Monster Mountain, again and again, for hill repeats or longer-run segments, knowing this road and the Dixon Dam that the hill rises from were created to flood a town—to bring water—to submerge ancestral land—to benefit Fort Collins—and more, generated a sense of complicity that, even as I was writing to make visible, to invoke lost ecological and human voices, left me breathless. What is our responsibility to our subject? What if the subject does not “speak back” in ways the majority might recognize? How can we honor and center when the literal center is a drowning? And how is this complicated by being raised, as I was, with the constant awareness of the potential for sudden flood? Toward the end of the writing process, looking for a way to turn toward closure, I went running and this moment happened, just as described in the passage you quoted. And I realized, This is it. This is how we end without ending.

SK: You are of English, German, and Cherokee descent—another aspect that you address in your essay. You explore it against the background of the C‑BT Project. At one point, you mention the year 1893, and you describe it as the year “two of my great-great-great-grandparents forget their first names, become Margaret Victoria and Granville Taylor, and marry in what has become Virginia, like good Baptists.” And later, you explain how your family is “emerging, choosing names.”

LDM: Naming, and re-naming, fascinates me. Both in my own history—as with these two ancestors—and also in shared community history. How I now live in what is now called Colorado, in what is now called the United States, adjacent to the Horsetooth Reservoir who was once a town called Stout who was once a town called Petra who was once ancestral land known by names more resonant than any of these. (And these towns are more “who” to me, entities with autonomy and identity and existence, instead of “which,” entities existing as non-sentient beings or objects.) How my Cherokee ancestors were taken from homelands that were themselves taken and re-named as part of that quite literal taking. And we can often use assigned names without thinking, even as many of those assigned names carry legacies of erasure, particularly the erasure of BIPOC communities and histories. 

SK: The title of your essay automatically leads to the question “What is eloh?” The reader learns that “eloh” is the Cherokee word for land, religion, law, history, and culture. At the same time, the word “land” is the origin, the starting point. You rephrase it beautifully by saying “We are where we are, much more than we are when we are. There is no when without a where. There is no we without a here.” When your essay begins, you ask “How can we reclaim when name and place are lost?”

LDM: Eloh (pronounced “e-lo” with “e” like “echo,” “lo” like “hello“) is a central, vital concept and means of being with the world. Cherokee scholar Rose Gubele has written that “eloh is arguably the most important word in the Cherokee lexicon.” I agree. Eloh is just one syllable away from elohi, the Cherokee word for earth; yet, eloh is the land, the histories, and the sacred through and with which earth emerges. There is no we without a here, just as there is no here without a we. I don’t see the separation—so apparent in the English language—between “land” and “history,” or “land” and “religion,” for example. I appreciate efforts to re-integrate these cleft disciplines, particularly by Indigenous scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer. To reclaim would be to return to eloh, to a more integrated existence where we see how our relationship to the land—and land as an active co-creator and co-existent—is simultaneously charged with sacred, political, historical, and cultural reverberation. 

SK: The word “eloh” is about memory and identity. When I read the paragraph that begins with “Ancestral memory of flood. Generational memory,” it reminds me of another concept of memory, i.e., the Hebrew word “zakhar.” Elaine M. Kauvar, an American-Jewish scholar, once wrote: “The enduring importance of memory originates in the Hebrew Bible, where remembrance is pivotal, where the command to remember is absolute, and where various declensions of the verb zakhar (“to remember”) appear at least one hundred and sixty-nine times.” Do you see parallels between this approach and the concept of memory in “eloh”?

LDM: Absolutely. To observe eloh is to remember, to sidestep the Euro-western hegemony of linear time, and to be in a place that is a sacred, ceremonial, regenerative space. How do we remember? We remember in place. There is no when without a where. How do we remember? We remember through story. And stories rekindle, and also make, shared memories of both when and where. I can’t often tell you when I learned something, but I almost always can say where I was. To quote Rose Gubele again, she writes, “The connection to land is linked to memory,” and, “The land may not be referred to directly, but it is always present, because the memories of the Nation are connected to the land.” 

SK: We have realized that we both attended the Bread Loaf Conferences in 2017. Our paths must have crossed, at some point, that week! Now, we get the chance to talk. Your first visit to the Bread Loaf campus was in 2017 for the Environmental Writers’ Conference, and you returned for the Translators’ Conference in 2019. I did it the other way round. I attended the Translators’ Conference twice before I returned to the Writers’ Conference in 2017. Having participated in both conferences, I realize how intriguing the overlapping of the two identities is: translator-writer/writer-translator. How did you experience the Bread Loaf campus? What was your writing project? What did you translate? What brought you to translation?

LDM: I wonder if we shared a meal together—I often ate with the translators! I’m so glad we have this chance now to connect. Both Bread Loaf experiences were more transformative than I ever could have imagined. In 2017, at the Environmental Writers’ Conference, my workshop leader Camille Dungy inspired me to honor my environmental and emerging dual-language poetry, and to consider a PhD—which I had not imagined as an option, being a first-generation college graduate. Now, I’m three years into my PhD journey at the University of Denver! As my Cherokee-English poems, and my Dutch-English translations, moved forward, I began serving as Translations Editor for Denver Quarterly. At the 2019 Translators’ Conference, I was grateful to focus on my work on the first-known Dutch-to-English translation of a 1919 poetry collection published under a pseudonym due to its queer content, and to dialogue with BIPOC scholars about dual-language writing. Bread Loaf’s concurrent environmental and translation conferences deeply resonate with and inspire my writing. I’m currently completing a poetry manuscript engaging place, community, and identity through my running of that Never Summer 100K. I’m using the linear mile-marker-based progression of the 64-mile race to open a nonlinear exploration of being Cherokee and queer in such a white-heterosexual-male sport often focused on dominance and individual glory. These poems work across both the Cherokee and English languages, and I’m grateful for models like Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning and Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Hyperboreal, and to the Bread Loaf community of environmental writers and translators, for a supportive space for this work to begin to emerge.

SK: Another thing we share is our interest in the significance of language. I would like to specify this. Because of my family background and profession, there are different systems of communication in my life, i.e., mother tongue, native language, first foreign language, second foreign language. I live with and in German, Czech, English, and French. As for English, it is not my mother tongue, not my native language, but it is a language that gives me a sense of belonging. What about the different languages in your life and your family history? What does the term “mother tongue” mean to you? 

LDM: I love all the languages we bring to this conversation, Simone! This reminds me of my workshop at the Translators’ Conference, where there were ten students representing at least seven languages at the table. Several generations back, my ancestors communicated in Cherokee, German, and English, with German openly spoken by some great grandparents, and English as the dominant language for my grandparents, parents, and siblings. I am working with elders and mentors to connect with proficiency in Cherokee, and I have been studying Dutch for some time. Cherokee differs from other (Euro-western) languages I have spent time with in many ways (e.g., there are at least six ways of expressing “we”). Even though it is my slowest learning process, it is the most rewarding and exciting. I am grateful to bring this language more fully back into my immediate family. Because of this distance between this ancestral mother tongue and my own upbringing, complicated by issues of passing, in some ways, no language feels like “mother tongue” or “native language.” Or, perhaps this tongue, this language is more to be found, for me, in ceremony, in sensory and somatic communion with the land.

SK: You say “no language feels like mother tongue or native language.” Your words feel so resonant. And it reminds me of something Jhumpa Lahiri describes in In Other Words—a book she wrote in Italian. “I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language.” I like this observation very much. I think, for Lahiri—or you or me—it feels natural and, I’d say, good to live in a kind of linguistic exile. No, “linguistic exile” is not the expression I’m looking for. Shall I say “linguistic kaleidoscope”?

LDM: I might always opt for kaleidoscope over exile! Linguistic kaleidoscope feels fitting, to me. Writing and thinking in several languages, I realize how each defamiliarizes the other. While some languages feel more resonant than others, I can gain a distance from all and see how these words, any words, are not the things, the beings. Cherokee scholar Ellen Cushman writes about the importance of “language perseverance,” rather than “preservation,” in translation, and the importance of seeing language and texts as processes that continue to emerge even when printed. Linearity is such a construct. Acknowledging the continual unfolding of language, and identity, time, and place, feels very kaleidoscopic—again, a circle and spiral.

SK: Lucien, earlier you explained that, for you, remembering and learning is linked to place or to being in a particular place. My impression is this is also linked to the image of languages as places. With each language in my life, I enter a different room with corridors leading to different people, memories, and hopes. And, to a certain extent, to a different “I.” When I participated in Idra Novey’s translation workshop at Bread Loaf in 2017, everyone in the group—representing German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese—was asked to read the piece they had translated for the workshop in the original language first. It was an amazing experience, because every participant turned into a different person with a different voice. The body language changed. I saw the deeply human component of translation.

LDM: Absolutely. I’m grateful for the work of Indigenous translators, of queer translators, of translators working in languages beyond western Europe, of translators working with silenced or marginalized texts and authors, of translators opening doors through their methods and choices toward showing the real bodies, individual humans, behind and through the work. Vincente Rafael wrote that the “American notion of translation” is “assimilation,” and this practice is directly connected to what he calls “America’s imperial presence in the world.” While not quite translation, I think of a dear friend in graduate school, who, like me, had consciously erased her Southern accent for academia. But, unlike me, when she read her poetry, she would return to her home voice, and her entire demeanor straightened, grew, glowed. Language is physical. When I read one of my Cherokee-English poems at Bread Loaf in 2019, I felt—similar to how, when entering a new space, I like to introduce myself in Cherokee—like in this kaleidoscopic space-between, here was a way to welcome and make visible both places, both fields of rooms.

SK: With this interview, we realized that we are writing about writing. Writing is hard. Writing about writing can be harder sometimes. But it can be a liberating experience. It helps me understand what kind of writer and translator I am.

LDM: It might be the hardest part, for me, of most applications, but I always appreciate the chance (the task!) to write a personal statement, especially with a strict length limit. What do we say about our creative identities and processes when we have just two pages? How about just one page? How about just fifty words? Sometimes, I am surprised, and always, it is a learning experience. Last week, I was helping a poet find examples of ars poetica poems—and we both realized that, perhaps, almost any poem could be called an ars poetica. Almost any process of making could be. We’re making a making, a poem of sorts, together in this dialogue, Simone!

SK: We are doing this interview in a time of crisis, turmoil, and chaos. We witnessed historic events last year. With the beginning of the new year, this hasn’t changed. Lucien, I cannot let you go without addressing the coronavirus pandemic and the latest developments in the US. What has given you comfort over the last months? What has made you happy? What are your hopes for the future?

LDM: As we’re talking, Simone, more than 26 million coronavirus cases have been recorded in the United States, and over 439,000 have died. COVID-19 infection and death rates among Indigenous people in the US are disproportionately much higher, as they are for other Black and Brown peoples, exacerbated by entrenched systems of injustice and erasure. Last year was frightening. But also hopeful. I’m grateful for the large-scale support of Black Lives Matter over the summer and hope to see continued national advocacy as this important justice work continues. I’m grateful for the nomination of Rep. Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo to the position of US Secretary of the Interior. I’m grateful for the journals and presses who are working to recognize and dismantle their systems of oppression, and to genuinely welcome BIPOC writers and readers. I’m grateful for the inauguration in January 2021 and look forward to national leadership that works toward greater equality and inclusion even while acknowledging there is still so, so far still to go.

SK: Thank you, Lucien.

LDM: Thank you so much, Simone!

Lucien Darjeun Meadows is a writer of English, German, and Cherokee ancestry, born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains. An AWP Intro Journals Project winner, he has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, Colorado Creative Industries, National Association for Interpretation, and University of Denver, where he is working toward his PhD.

Simone Kraus, a NER nonfiction reader, is an experienced translator living in Germany and the Czech Republic. In 2016, she received a Katharine Bakeless Nason grant for emerging writers from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. She holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from the Translation School of Mainz University, Germany, where she taught courses in the translation studies program for nine years. She is the author of Prag in der amerikanischen Literatur: Cynthia Ozick und Philip Roth (Peter Lang, 2016), a book focusing on the literary representation of Prague in the works of Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth.

Behind the Byline

Victoria Chang

Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence.

Photo credit: Margaret Molloy

Victoria Chang, author of the “Marfa, Texas” (NER 41.4) and “Obit” series (NER 38.3) talks to NER reader Sabrina Islam about meditations on loss and grief, and on finally writing her truth: “I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.”

Sabrina Islam: Your meditation on loss and grief in Obit is incredible. In “Grief” you write, “A picture of / oblivion is not the same as oblivion. / My grief is not the same as my pain. My / mother was a mathematician so I tried / to calculate my grief. My father was an / engineer so I tried to build a box around / my grief, along with a small wooden / bed that grief could lie down on. The / texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing / me to speak about nothing.” How has grief become an obsession for you and what particular value is present in thinking and writing about the subject of grief?

Victoria Chang: I think why write about anything really? Why write at all? I don’t think we can choose to be writers. I also don’t think we can choose what we write about, at least for some things. Obviously, you can be given assignments or prompts, but even then, our own obsessions seem to creep out. Grief just is. We can’t choose when someone dies (or when we die ourselves), but those left behind grieve. As a writer, I write from deep wells of thinking and feeling, like most writers probably.

SI: Grief continues. In the newer series, “Marfa, Texas,” you write, “Is it // possible to stop loving / everything? The owl. The / hawk. Every person I meet. To / see everyone as my mother. To / have a heart // like this is to be made of / midnight.” You’ve poured your grief into Obit, then into “Marfa, Texas.” Do the poems ever speak back to you? How is your grief evolving and changing you?

VC: Poems always speak to us! Most of the time, we don’t listen very well. Writing, but mostly revising feels a lot like listening to the poems. Sometimes I want to shake the paper and scream at it because sometimes whatever I’m working on is giving me the silent treatment. What I’ve learned is to lean into that silence. It’s ignoring me for a reason. Usually that means to let it sit or go read something else in a different genre or something entirely different. But given my stubborn personality, I usually just keep reading a manuscript again and again and even if I change one word, I think of it as a miracle and thank my manuscript. Right now, I’m reading academic articles. Sometimes I read philosophy. I actually enjoy reading literary criticism textbooks. I don’t watch movies but I love reading movie criticism.

SI: Your words become increasingly charged and powerful in the sequence “Marfa, Texas.” The last poem in the series ends, “To love so much is to live / within birds. // I have been waiting for / this heart to fade or at / least to kneel. Maybe the / heart is not inside me but I / am inside it.” You frequently write sequences: why are you drawn to this form?

VC: I think the obsessive person can be drawn into sequences. It’s the form of relentless pursuit. The trouble is that there’s always a gap so the obsessive person is running on a treadmill within that gap. I like to call that gap the gap of estrangement. That’s where I reside. That’s my address. I used to make apologies for being so obsessive, but now I just embrace that disposition and personality. My father was/is a lot like this. It feels chemical in the brain actually. I also think obsessiveness has something to do with immigration, estrangement from a country and white supremacist institutions. The chasing is a part of obsession because the gap of estrangement can never be filled. I can never be white or American. I’m actually writing about these things now.

SI: Circles often appear in your poetry collections. In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” How does the form of a circle stimulate your thinking process?

VC: As sloppy a person as I am, I am always surprised at how I can make patterns, see patterns, or think in patterns. My brain often feels like a pinball machine. But then I can be exceptionally organized and linear when necessary. I love how malleable and unfixed the brain is/can be. It’s important (to me at least) not to stereotype myself, if that makes sense. We’re all multitudinous. We are exceptionally flexible. My attitude has always been “why not?” and this has gotten me into all sorts of trouble in the past, but in art-making at least, I would say it is my governing principle (if I even have one consciously). Experimentation is very important to me as a person, trying new things, the new, the fresh.

SI: Your new book Love, Love is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse about a girl who slowly solves the mystery of her sister’s strange illness, which we learn is trichotillomania. The protagonist, Frances, is also dealing with bullying and grappling with her developing identity. Growing up in an immigrant Chinese American family, why was it important for you to write this story?

VC: I’ve tried to write that story so many times (and just wrote another essay on this material). Sometimes we are at the center of our own narratives. Other times, we are not main characters. In my sister’s struggles, I was not the protagonist but a side character. I have begun to recognize that this doesn’t mean I wasn’t impacted (or implicated) by our family’s trauma surrounding this mysterious illness. There are a lot of unspoken traumas in our family, mostly centered around my mother, that only now, after she has passed, can I even properly or adequately reflect on. I have a whole book exploring these things that I am working hard on at this very moment. As an immigrant’s child, there’s also a reckoning with my parents’ trauma and my mother’s trauma and I am writing about all of this now.

SI: Realist painter Edward Hopper’s work prominently features in your earlier collection The Boss, which explores, among other things, American corporate life and power structures. How does visual art inspire poetry for you?

VC: I am very interested in visual art, the visual, aesthetics. How things look matters to me a lot. I am very interested in design, architecture, sculpture. I think this is pretty common amongst poets who spend a lot of time “seeing” things in their minds and in real life. I am working on some visual elements for a new book right now as well. If I could be any other kind of artist, I would be a visual artist. I took a lot of art classes growing up, but then somewhere along the way, switched over more to writing.

SI: Which poets and writers have shaped your understanding of language and poetry?

VC: So many! Too many to name here. Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth Bishop. Tranströmer, Glück, Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Larry Levis, Plath of course, Eliot, Stevens, Lee. So many contemporary poets and writers I admire too. I could list them here, but I fear I would leave too many people out. We are in a rich time of poetry.

SI: In your poem “Instinct” you ask, “What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, / even their own?” Writing about war and genocide, your work often wrestles with the truly vile parts of human history. In “Ode to Iris Chang” you consider, “How // to trust humans. // How to trust the earth / when all that is there is a // derivative of mud.” What motivates you as a writer to continually return to the page and still explore humanity?

VC: As a writer, I’ve always tried to honor my own truth, whether that truth went against the grain or with the grain. I can’t and won’t be anyone else. I used to feel a lot of shame for not being like other people, but now I try harder to write what feels true to me. I used to think I was supposed to sound like other writers, but I think perhaps starting with my third book, I gave up on that. I just began to write what rang true to me instead of trying to be like everyone else. This wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened. I think I grew up a little bit (finally). This doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback, though. I listen really closely to feedback from close friends who are kind enough to read my work. Sometimes, depending on what I’m working on, I need more feedback than other times. I think a writer needs many things, but persistence and a doggedness are two qualities that can be important. If I didn’t have these qualities, I don’t think I would have been able to survive the brutal literary world. I also think a writer needs to simply love writing. I do and always have. If I have nothing else, I know that I really like writing. As I get older and older, I am less afraid of writing about those harder things. The fear, though, is usually how others will perceive the writing or me. At some point, I have just accepted that poets in particular can be very harsh and judgmental. They won’t like hardly anything anyone writes anyway, so why bother trying to please them? I am more interested in pleasing myself.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Victoria.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, is from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She spent her early childhood in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the Minnesota Review.

 

Behind the Byline

May-lee Chai

Imagine if my grandmother had given up when the Japanese invaded, or when she had to flee her hometown, or when there was nothing to eat, or when the Civil War raged on. I wouldn’t be here but for her faith that the future could be better.

Bob Hsiang Photography

May-lee Chai, author of the essay “Women of Nanjing” (NER 41.3), talks to nonfiction staff reader Belinda Huang about the determined strength of women, from those she has seen in passing in Nanjing to her very own grandmother. Their stories assure her that she, and we, will get through this current moment in history because, as she says, “I have resources and tools and I can fight.”

Belinda Huang: Part of what drew me to this essay is how you situate yourself as an observer, even though you have visited Nanjing many times and have a family connection through your grandmother. Your focus seems to be on presenting these women to the reader without embellishment, creating a kind of patchwork portrait of the women of Nanjing. Why did you choose to write this essay in this way, instead of centering your own experiences?

May-lee Chai: I’ve written other essays that did center my experiences, so for this particular essay it really began with my memory of the middle-aged woman in the fabulous yellow chiffon outfit carrying her fluffy white dog across a busy street in Nanjing. Something about this image really struck a chord with me and moved me quite deeply. I wanted to unpack that, unpack my feelings and memories and try to understand why I felt I had witnessed something special. Growing up in the US, I saw so few images of Chinese women, and historically the American media has typically portrayed Chinese women as victims, as weak and subservient and oppressed creatures who need to be saved. And here was this woman on a street in Nanjing who looked like she’d lived through some things and yet here she was decked out in yellow chiffon, and I was just so happy to see her. I decided to start the essay with this memory and see where I could move from there.

BH: You move between women of different generations, who have had varying experiences at the intersection of gender and history. But to me, many of the women do share a kind of strength, determination, and perhaps even a sense of humor when reacting to unexpected or difficult situations. How do you approach the tension between the universal and the particular when writing about Chinese history, culture, and people?

MLC: I was very aware of writing about the passage of time and generational shifts in this essay. I wanted to pick examples from women whom I had met in Nanjing that I felt could illustrate these very great changes that had occurred in the span of a little over 100 years. For me those changes are most visible in particular examples, in the specific women I’ve known or encountered or who are family and friends. The “strength, determination, and . . . sense of humor” are there because that’s how these women really are!

BH: In this essay, you touch briefly on the history of the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women, but what we really see is how quickly the past can fade into museum pieces—quite literally. While your grandmother grieved the family and home she was exiled from, many of the women who grew up during the Cultural Revolution have now adapted to a modern China, and though they may be driven by their history, they do not seem weighed down by it. How do you think our relationship with history changes? What draws you to continue examining your family’s history through essay and memoir?

MLC: In the US, “The Rape of Nanking” is still the one thing that Americans might associate with Nanjing, but other than that, there may not be any reason for most Americans to think of the city. But for me, the city was always my grandmother’s hometown. It was the home she was never able to see again after she left China in 1949 at the end of the Civil War. I grew up with her sorrow and her pain. I witnessed that at every family dinner which erupted into an argument about the past. History wasn’t just a series of dates in a textbook, something dead and finished and knowable; history was family, was pain, was memory, was very much a living, changing, omnipresent relationship to the past. Chinese history isn’t something that my teachers talked about at all when I was growing up. I had to seek out this history in college and then by returning to live and study in Nanjing. By engaging with Nanjing in the present, I could try to come to an understanding of how this history lived in my own family and in me and how this personal family history differed from how other Chinese people and families experienced it.

BH: Your Nai-nai is such a strong presence in this piece, and I can imagine she was in life as well. You write that “her faith in the future was surely not rational, but it was essential, and it was ultimately effective.” Faith as a necessary, active state of mind seems as applicable to the challenges of today as it was to surviving revolution in China. How does this notion of faith hold true for you when thinking of the women in your essay, and in your own life?

MLC: Well, 2020 has been a year that required all of us to have a lot of faith that a better future was possible. Without that kind of faith, hope is impossible, and without hope, activism seems futile. In the present things have been pretty awful from week to week; the increase in anti-Asian and anti-Chinese racism and violence is scary. And the rising appeal of fascism in the US has been a very ugly thing to witness. It’s easy for me to get depressed if I just look rationally at the state of affairs. However, I have to give myself the pep talk: imagine if my grandmother had given up when the Japanese invaded, or when she had to flee her hometown, or when there was nothing to eat, or when the Civil War raged on. I wouldn’t be here but for her faith that the future could be better. Despair is easy but we have to keep making decisions and work for the best, and that requires hope and faith. And I’ve never had to live through an invasion, as she did, so I remind myself that I can get through this moment. I have resources and tools and I can fight.

BH: Your essay takes us up to the present day, highlighting the resilience Chinese women continue to demonstrate in the face of racism and worsening US–China relations. We are corresponding in the week after the 2020 US election, with Joe Biden as president-elect. Does that change how you feel about the way Asian and Chinese immigrants are being seen and treated? How do you see this essay, and/or your work, in this context?

MLC: My writing is definitely one tool that I use to fight against stereotypes and to fight the anti-Chinese/anti-Asian racism. It’s one way that I can center my humanity. So much of this election season has been a painful reminder that we Asian Americans are still seen as eternal foreigners in our own country and as threats to the US. President Trump kept calling the COVID-19 virus the “China virus” or the “Kung flu.” When Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail, various Republican officials made fun of her name, calling her “Kamala-mala” or deliberately mispronouncing her very easy-to-pronounce name. It’s so juvenile, but it’s also effective racist rhetoric to Other her, to demean her, and to make her seem threatening because of her Asian first name. This racism is familiar and exhausting but, at least this time, it did not work. Biden/Harris won. Their win won’t be enough to end the racism. I have no illusions about that, but it gives me hope and energy. I will keep fighting, I will keep writing.

May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), a Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and others.

Belinda Huang is a writer, editor, and NER nonfiction reader living on Darug land in Sydney, Australia. She holds a BFA from Emerson College, Boston, and previously worked at Ploughshares. Her work appears in Story Cities: A City Guide for the Imagination.

Behind the Byline

Kate Petersen

She said: that’s the first line to something you should write. And she was right.

Kate Petersen, author of “This event occurs in the past: an aubade,” talks with NER editorial panel member Evgeniya Dame about form and character in fiction, the troubadour song that inspired her story, and the importance of “staying naïve to aspects of craft.” 

Evgeniya Dame: Could we start by talking about this word, aubade? At what point did the word (and what it stands for) make it into “This event occurs in the past: an aubade” (NER 41.3), and its title?

Kate Petersen: I thought of this as an aubade fairly early. The aubade, or song to a lover departing at dawn, has a long poetic tradition stretching back to the troubadours of the Middle Ages. And while I, a mere fiction writer, must step into such a tradition with some winkingness (or at least a sense of humor), the story’s concerns align with many elements of aubades as I understand them: not just the ache of parting, but the sense that one has overstayed, missed or overslept a warning. I was interested in the narrative spark embedded in the form: that parting is always a decision, and morning requires it.

ED: A story that admits to traveling “in rough reverse” presents a challenge: was there a particular entry point? Did you play with the structure, reordering, as you went along?

KP: The door to this story was the first line, which I carried around until I said it to a friend; she deserves the credit. She said: that’s the first line to something you should write. And she was right.

To the rest of your question, yes: order and structure were paramount, and I revised toward them. Asking the reader to move across so many lanes of time in quick succession required a structure that would make this easy for them, or at least not too harrowing. Refrain is a kind of guardrail, I suppose.

ED: “No one wants to put their people in peril,” the protagonist comments, “but they must.” How do you define peril for your own characters? What are they most likely to suffer from?

KP: That’s an excellent question. I don’t know if I can generalize about all my characters. But certainly a large subset of female characters I have written suffer from taking a picture of the book instead of taking the book. They discover, too late, that they have been a polite observer to a chapter of their own life that required further action. This is not unrelated to a social conditioning I believe is gendered: the pressure to be “a good person with a second-hand coffee table”—often at the cost of one’s own desires.

The peril for these characters, and the rest of us, is that the clock is running down. We each hear or see the clock differently at different points in our life, and I think figuring out what clocks a character is attuned to—and which ones she’s not—is one of the central ways I come to understand what a character’s story is about.

ED: The fiction writing students are another sort of character here, their unspoken practices, habits, concerns forming a part of this story. Did your teaching experience affect your own writing, and if so, in what way?

KP: Yes. How could it not? Teaching young writers was such a big part of my life for such a long time, I can’t imagine it not getting in. And I’m grateful for that.

Teaching has probably affected me in all sorts of ways that I can’t recognize. But among those I can: teaching invited me to articulate why we believe the things we do about how stories operate, to try to shape those ideas into questions that are relevant and pressing to students who begin as strangers to me, and then to challenge those “rules” or customs together (“What if we’re wrong, and fiction doesn’t have to do this?”).

Away from the classroom, I’ve found myself engaging in this sequence alone, writing stories that could fairly be labeled “grumpy pedagogy” tales. This is one.

ED: Your fiction appears to alternate points of view, including working in third-person omniscient. Do you often write in first person? What are the rewards and considerations you usually think about when settling on a point of view in the story?

KP: As a teacher of fiction and a member of a writing workshop, I’m acutely aware of point of view strategy: how it’s shaping or torqueing the story, serving it or not. But when I’m writing, I try to stay naïve to aspects of craft. Then, I am just listening to my narrator’s voice, trying to stay close enough for long enough to channel them faithfully.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t ever changed the point of view of a story in the course of a workshop or revision. But I think of such moves as etudes, lessons one undertakes to strengthen some muscle.

ED: The quarantine, and the general lack of stability people have experienced this year, have affected so many aspects of writing, reading, and publishing. Could you talk a little about your daily routine, your writing practice and whether it has been changed?

KP: Well, there’s what we came to call quarantine which, for many, is effectively over: movie theaters and restaurants near me in Arizona have re-opened, college football is being played against all public health recommendations. And then there’s the pandemic, which still rages on in the US and is worsening elsewhere in the world. The week I e-mailed this to you, the US hit a new record of reported COVID-19 infections: more than 83,000 new cases in one day. But to listen to the news, leading with clips of maskless blather from various stumps, one understands that science writer Ed Yong’s ninth error of intuition that will keep us locked in a pandemic loop—habituation to horror—has, in many places, come to pass. “The US might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is,” he warned. “Daily tragedy might become ambient noise.” I worry that to put my writing practice up against this daily tragedy is to participate in that habituation.

I finished a book (of epidemiology fiction, oddly enough) that was sent out before the pandemic, so my writing practice this year has operated in various states of suspension—first, waiting to hear about the book, then, in the suspension of life-as-planned that occurred for many of us in the US in March. I manage communications and outreach for an ecosystem science research center, and I am grateful for work, and for work that feels urgent. The writing goes on, though it is not what the moment calls for.

Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Paris Review Daily, Epoch, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former Jones Lecturer at Stanford, she has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota and lives in Arizona, where she writes about the science of our changing climate for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Evgeniya Dame is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020–2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her fiction appears in Southern Review and Joyland. Her nonfiction and interviews have been published in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She grew up in Samara, Russia, and currently lives in Northern California. 

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Categories