The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life Read online

  And my American mind says, See, those engineering students weren’t able to say no to their parents’ demands. But then my Chinese mind remembers: Ah, but those parents all wanted their sons and daughters to be pre-med.

  Having listened to both Chinese and English, I tend to be suspicious of any comparisons made between the two languages. Typically, one language—that of the person who is doing the comparing—is used as the standard, the benchmark for a logical form of expression. And so the other language is in danger of being judged by comparison deficient or superfluous, simplistic or unnecessarily complex, melodious or cacophonous. English speakers point out that Chinese is extremely difficult because it relies on variations in tone barely discernible to the human ear. By the same token, Chinese speakers tell me English is extremely difficult because it is inconsistent, a language of too many broken rules, of Mickey Mice and Donald Ducks.

  Even more dangerous, in my view, is the temptation to compare both language and behavior in translation. To listen to my mother speak English, one might think she has no concept of past or future, that she doesn’t see the difference between singular and plural, that she is gender blind because she refers to my husband as “she.” If one were not careful, one might also generalize, from how my mother talks, that all Chinese people take a circumlocutory route to get to the point. It is, rather, my mother’s idiosyncratic behavior to ramble a bit.

  I worry that the dominant society may see Chinese people from a limited—and limiting—perspective. I worry that seemingly benign stereotypes may be part of the reason there are few Chinese in top management positions, in mainstream political roles. I worry about the power of language: that if one says anything enough times—in any language—it might come true.

  Could this be why Chinese friends of my parents’ generation are willing to accept the generalizations?

  “Why are you complaining?” one of them said to me. “If people think we are modest and polite, let them think that. Wouldn’t Americans be pleased to be thought of as polite?”

  And I do believe that anyone would take the description as a compliment—at first. But after a while, it annoys, as if the only things that people heard one say were phatic remarks: I’m so pleased to meet you. I’ve heard many wonderful things about you. For me? You shouldn’t have!

  These remarks are not representative of new ideas, honest emotions, or considered thought. They are what is said from the polite distance of social contexts: greetings, farewells, wedding thank-you notes, convenient excuses, and the like.

  I wonder, though. How many anthropologists, how many sociologists, how many travel journalists have documented so-called natural interactions in foreign lands, all observed with spiral notebook in hand? How many cases are there of long-lost “primitive” tribes, people who turned out to be sophisticated enough to put on the stone-age show that ethnologists had come to see?

  And how many tourists fresh off the bus have wandered into Chinatown expecting the self-effacing shopkeeper to admit under duress that the goods are not worth the price asked? I have witnessed it:

  “I don’t know,” a tourist told the shopkeeper, a Cantonese woman perhaps in her fifties. “It doesn’t look genuine to me. I’ll give you three dollars.”

  “You don’t like my price, go somewhere else,” answered the shopkeeper.

  “You are not a nice person,” cried the shocked tourist, “not a nice person at all!”

  “Who say I have to be nice,” snapped the shopkeeper.

  So how does one say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in Chinese?” my friends ask a bit warily.

  And here I do agree in part with the New York Times Magazine article. There is no one word for “yes” or “no”—but not out of necessity to be discreet. If anything, I would say the Chinese equivalent of answering “yes” or “no” is discrete, that is, specific to what is asked.

  Ask a Chinese person if he or she has eaten, and he or she might say chrle (eaten already) or meiyou (have not).

  Ask, “So you had insurance at the time of the accident?” and the response would be dwei (correct) or meiyou (did not have).

  Ask, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” and the answer refers directly to the proposition being asserted or denied: stopped already, still have not, never beat, have no wife.

  What could be clearer?

  As for people who are still wondering how to translate the language of discretion, I offer this personal example.

  My aunt and uncle were about to return to Beijing after a three-month visit to the United States. On their last night I announced I wanted to take them out to dinner.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked in Chinese.

  “Not hungry,” my uncle said promptly—the same response he once gave me ten minutes before suffering a low-blood-sugar attack.

  “Not too hungry,” said my aunt. “Perhaps you’re hungry?”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “We can eat, we can eat, then,” they both consented.

  “What kind of food?” I asked.

  “Oh, doesn’t matter. Anything will do. Nothing fancy, just some simple food is fine.”

  “Do you like Japanese food?” I suggested. “We haven’t had that yet.”

  They looked at each other.

  “We can eat it,” said my uncle bravely, this survivor of the Long March.

  “We have eaten it before,” added my aunt. “Raw fish.”

  “Oh, you don’t like it?” I said. “Don’t be polite. We can go somewhere else.”

  “We are not being polite. We can eat it,” my aunt insisted.

  So I drove them to Japantown and we walked past several restaurants featuring colorful displays of plastic sushi in the windows.

  “Not this one, not this one either,” I continued to say, as if searching for a certain Japanese restaurant. “Here it is,” I finally said, in front of a Chinese restaurant famous for its fish dishes from Shandong Province.

  “Oh, Chinese food!” cried my aunt, obviously relieved.

  My uncle patted my arm. “You think like a Chinese.”

  “It’s your last night here in America,” I said. “So don’t be polite. Act like an American.”

  And that night we ate a banquet.

  • five writing tips •

  This is an edited version of a speech given as a commencement address at Simmons College, in Boston, in 2003.

  Members of the Board of Trustees, President Cheever and faculty, distinguished honorees, graduating students, and their family and loved ones who helped make today possible with their patience, hope, good faith, and low-interest loans, thank you for your kind welcome. What a delight that we meet on this glorious day at the historic and beautiful Simmons College parking lot.

  Soon you, the Class of 2003, will have your degrees conferred upon you, your names called, President Cheever’s hand sweeping over your anointed heads, and in elation and near-loss of consciousness from joy you will toss those mortarboards in the air. And when that moment comes, I want you to remember one of the truly great and moving moments in the history of the conferring of degrees: it is when the Scarecrow receives his honorary doctorate in thinkology from the Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow instantly possesses his long-cherished brain. He points to his head and recites: “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.” Well, guess what? He got it wrong, and everybody else did too, because they clapped and were very impressed. Oh, for years I got it wrong too, because I never really thought about what he said, that what he should have said was: “The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is . . .” Of course, it didn’t really matter what gibberish the Scarecrow spoke, because what he was demonstrating was that he had the credentials and the confidence, and he could now BS his way through life and stay on in Oz as a politician.

  But you folks won’t need to rely on BS, I know that, because you are graduating from Simmons College, not Wizard School, and you not only ar
e well educated but also possess certain principles that have been a large part of your immersion in this school’s fine tradition of higher education. I am honored that you wish to give me a doctorate from Simmons, a doctorate in letters. I have been promised by President Cheever that I will have rights, privileges, and dignities that I did not previously hold, which include a free parking space in this glorious lot before me, that is, when it is not otherwise occupied for more important matters, such as ceremonies like today’s. I believe that with my doctorate I will also enjoy the investiture of prodigious powers, including the ability to envision your future.

  What I see in fact is a dream you will all share. Of course you may each dream it on different nights, but the dream goes like this: You are sitting in Java City, having a coffee mocha, when suddenly you realize you are late for class. The trouble is, you don’t remember which class, because you haven’t been to that class once since you registered for it. Mercifully, you see other students you recognize and you follow them. With great relief to you, things begin to look familiar as you make your way through the Main Campus Building, noting the same old books sewn into the walls. At last you seem to be in the right class, and you sit down toward the back, where you won’t be noticed. Unfortunately, you realize, the person in the front of the room is Professor Gregory, and that means this class is the dreaded Philosophy 300, jolly times with Freddy Nietzsche. A second later, you realize as you watch Professor Gregory pass out some papers, the final exam is today. You look at your watch, five hours to go, and then read the first page of the test. It is written in Old German, in tiny type, a single question taking up the entire page, no margins. You skip to the next page. It is completely black, and you must discern the philosophical argument about your own existential identity contained within that blackness and answer it in the form of a Jeopardy! question. I have been a Jeopardy! question myself, so I know how difficult this is. The last page is a list of all the religions of the world in ancient dead languages, which you must put into the order in which Nietzsche might have despised them.

  Although most of you are women, you begin to sweat profusely. But because many of you are women, you will be resourceful and wing it anyway. I’ve done that. Some of you, despite being women, will weep with despair, knowing the jig is up. A few of you, being men, also will cry, but you will know that it’s okay to do so, because, as Simmons grads, you know this is the sign of a sensitive male. And some of you will have an incredible epiphany: “Wait a minute!” you will shout, and leap up and point to Professor Gregory, whose mouth drops open in surprise as you announce: “I don’t have to take this class or this test, because I already have my degree from Simmons College!”

  So there you have it: my prediction of your future, the dream you will all share. When it happens, I hope you will think of me. Having had versions of this dream so often myself, I can offer you useful advice. Frame your diploma. A scanned copy of it will suffice should you wish to hang the original on your front door, where guests are certain to see it. But frame at least one copy and hang it next to your bed. When you have this dream, open your eyes, look at your diploma, congratulate yourself, then go back to sleep.

  For years and years, I had variations on this nightmare. I suppose the meaning is obvious: No matter how much we’ve accomplished, we still feel inadequate, unprepared. It’s not surprising. Many of the greatest moments we experience are moments we cannot adequately prepare for, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one.

  Nowadays I have a new version of this dream. I am no longer taking a final exam. I am about to give a speech to a lot of people who expect me to transmit the wisdom of the ages, for instance, the best way to find a literary agent. But in my dream, when I look for the prepared notes I have brought to the lectern, I see that I have grabbed by mistake the lyrics to Madonna’s “Material Girl.” Today, I am pleased to say, I did bring the right notes. Don’t worry—it just looks like a twelve-hour speech, but that’s because I printed it in twenty-four-point type, ten words to a page.

  So what can I as a writer tell you today that might be useful as you leave this period of your life and enter the next? One possibility was a list of my five favorite Chinese restaurants. This would enrich your lives and your stomachs enormously.

  What I ultimately decided on, instead, are five writing tips, which you may find useful in areas other than writing, perhaps even in thinking about life, how you might conduct it in a manner that is interesting and worthwhile. Here is my list:

  1. Avoid clichés. They are all around us, and they are anathema to original thought. Take these, all having to do with an acceptance of fate: “That’s how it was meant to be.” Or “That’s our lot in life.” Or “History is doomed to repeat itself.” Or “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And how about: “Some things were just meant to be,” and “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” a cliché brilliantly parodied by Gilda Radner. And what about that great chestnut some say can be attributed to Nietzsche himself: “Shit happens.”

  When you are told, “It was meant to be,” ask, “Who meant it? What does it really mean?” Is someone trying to make you accept an undesirable situation or one in which you have doubts? When you are told, “Shit happens,” remember that plenty of other things happen as well, such as generosity, forgiveness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. When you are told, “It’s simply fate,” ask yourself, “What is simple about it? What are the alternatives of fate? What is fate’s opposite?”

  If you hear others using clichés, stop to think whether you’re being lulled into inaction or the wrong action. If you hear overused expressions on the news, stop to think whether they are really meaningful. The spectrum of meaning is endless and fascinating and filled with humanity. Clichés are static, the emotion behind them long spent. If you are tempted to use them, here is a saying of my mother’s: Fang pi bu-cho, cho pi bu-fang. Basically that translates to: “Loud farts don’t stink, and the really smelly ones don’t make a sound.” In other words: When you’re full of beans, you just blow a lot of hot air. If you want to have real impact, be deadly but silent.

  Oh, also recognize the difference between a bad cliché and a good quotation. My mother’s saying is a good quotation. You should use it often.

  2. Avoid generalizations. As a fiction writer, I distrust absolute truths, homilies, bromides, sound bites, and also shorthand advice of the sort I am giving. I like specifics, the longhand version of a story in which it takes four hundred pages to answer a single question about a person’s character. Literary writers, unless they are writing fairy tales, learn early never to have characters who are polar opposites, one “good,” the other “evil.” That’s not believable. People are more than just good and evil. Intelligent readers will demand that you not reduce people to such simplistic terms, or resolve situations with “Good always conquers evil,” “Might is always right,” and so forth. And while such resolutions are common in murder mysteries and action stories, they are feeble in literary fiction, which is supposed to reflect subtle truths about the world. Better to be subtle rather than overbearing, subversive rather than didactic.

  3. Find your own voice. As college graduates, you have a good start. Your own voice is one that seeks a personal truth, one that only you can obtain. That truth comes from your own experiences, your own observations, and when you find it, if it really is true and specific to you, you may be surprised that others find it to be true as well. In searching for your own voice, be aware of the difference between emulation and imitation, inspiration and intimidation.

  4. Show compassion. Many beginning writers think sarcasm is a clever way to show intelligence. But more mature writers know that mean-spiritedness is wearying and limited in its one-dimensional point of view. A more successful story is one in which the narrator can treat human foibles, even serious flaws, with depth and hence compassion. Imagination brings you close to compassion. Practice imagining yourself living the life of someone whose situation differs entirely fr
om yours—living in another country, having another religion—and the more deeply you can do so, the more you become that character as you write. You cannot help being compassionate.

  5. Ask the important questions. What makes a story worthwhile is the question or questions it poses. The questions might be: What is love? What is loss? What is hope? Those three could take a lifetime to answer. My story is one answer. Your story is another.

  Another question posed in literature concerns intentions. What are people’s intentions, particularly as they relate to the well-being of others? What if their intentions lead to unexpected and undesirable consequences for other people? Who bears the consequences? Who should be responsible? How long do those responsibilities extend? The ultimate answers are found not just at the Supreme Court, or even among our leaders. We need personal answers, all the stories, as many as we can get. But to find them, you first must ask the questions. You need to ask yourself: What is important? What is at stake? In knowing what questions you are asking, you also know your individual voice, your own morality.

  Those are the five writing tips: Avoid clichés, avoid generalizations, find your own voice, show compassion, and ask the important questions. I hope that you find them useful, if not for writing the next Great American Novel, then for thinking about your life and the world around you. What you do with your careers will be only one part of the whole of your lives. Your thoughts, your evolving answers to the important questions, are what will give you interesting lives, make you interesting people capable of changing the world.

  And later in life, as more interesting answers come to you, you may look back with deep gratitude to Professor Gregory, and all those other dedicated teachers at Simmons College, who gave you nightmares but also the basis for thinking about the world and your role in it. Perhaps one day you will even think that Nietzsche was one of the most useful classes you took. You will have that dream in which you have to take the test, but you will not feel at all unprepared. You will be able to see the questions and say, “I’ve been thinking about the answers for a very long time, and here they are.”