Dear Daughter,
Sometimes I wish I didn’t try and fix everything from your childhood. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t tried so hard to help you memorize your math facts when you weren’t ready. Sometimes I wonder how many mistakes I am making now that will become clearer only later.
When I was in high school in Michigan, all the Chinese parents would compare what colleges their children had gotten into. She’s going to Stanford, boasted my mother about my sister. How about this one, an unrelated auntie pointed to me. This one, my mother said, and shook her head.
In my dreams, I always made my mother proud. When she died, all my dreams disappeared. They flew away like forty-four birds into the sky. When she died, I also felt a dark sheet lift up over my head. When I looked up, the forty-four birds each had a section in their beaks that they carried away.
I have spent a lifetime believing that the only thing that mattered was being smart. I have spent your lifetime, just 12 years, finding an exit within this corridor.
Dad has incredible moments of lucidity, said my sister last week. He said your kids are very smart and I said, ‘yup, they are.’ The pride in my sister’s voice fluffed like a feather from a dead bird.
Yesterday, I heard a noise in the sky and saw birds fighting—two crows against one. And I wondered, does the smarter crow always win? Did you know that crows can count to three. Parrots can count up to six. Would a parrot win against a crow?
Did you know that Chinese fishermen allowed cormorants to eat every eighth fish the birds caught? Once the cormorants caught seven, they ignored an order to dive and refused to move, as if they were waiting for their reward, the eighth fish. As if they were counting.
Daughter, each day I am exhausted thinking about intelligence. Each day I am exhausted worrying about intelligence. And I hate myself for worrying. I hate my obsession with intelligence. You have to do better than Americans, than men, my mother always said.
Sitting in the sports bar in Zion National Park seemed so easy, didn’t it? At the moment, the staring seemed so simple, as men in orange wounded each other. Wounding seems so much simpler than striving for more intelligence.
There are a lot of TVs here, I said. It’s a sports bar, that’s the point, someone said. That’s the point. The point is sharp though. Incidentally, sharpness is another word for intelligence. Susan Sontag once said: I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.” I agree.
Agreeing with something isn’t the same as believing it though. I agree that I am American, but I do not believe it. I agree that I am a writer, but I do not always believe it. I agree that the man in the white building shuffling around on the second floor is my father, but I no longer believe it.
Recently at breakfast at an arts colony, some American artists who live abroad said, you don’t feel American until you leave America. I thought of all my trips to Taiwan to try to be amongst my people and how everyone just emphatically called me American. Does this mean I won’t feel alive until I am dead?
Dear daughter, yesterday, the facility called about your grandfather again. They gave him a stack of papers and made him a badge that said he was the head of the walking club. There’s a shadow of intelligence in him still. The shadow is in pursuit of the body but the body has gone overseas. I chase the shadow with my scissors, try to cut the shadow from its body once and for all—so that we can all finally be free, free from a country none of us know, free from intelligence.
Dear Linda,
You were the most rigorous teacher I’ve ever had—did you know that I imagine this is something you have heard before. At the time, your intelligence seemed a bit like an outpost, perhaps in a different century. Have you ever noticed that century and country share all the same letters but one?
Not being an English major or having native English-speaking parents, I was challenged by your words. You threw hardcover books at my words. Your letters, I read and re-read, underlined, circled, double underlined, starred, put question marks next to them. Your words seemed so much older than mine. So much bigger than mine. Could this be possible? Could the same words you use and I use be that different?
In your very first letter, you wrote:
The issue of plotted meaning is a broader one I’d love to hear your thoughts on. You’re so smart, Victoria, and have such a broad range of experience and understanding that you’re sometimes in danger of outsmarting the poems, i.e., of writing them to illustrate an understanding of which you are already possessed.
Susan Sontag said something similar: I think I am ready to learn to write. Think with words, not with ideas. Similarly, Gertrude Stein once wrote: You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.
Louise Glück also wrote: At the heart of that work will be a question, a problem. And we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome. The poems themselves are like experiments, which the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind. Those poets who claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response prematurely advertise the deficiencies of the chosen particulars, as though without strenuous guidance the reader might not reach an intended conclusion.
Dear Linda and Susan and Gertrude and Louise, what you were saying to me in beautiful language was that I shaped and molded the poems into a meaning I already possessed.That my poems lacked discovery and wildness. The house was already built and I took your hand and led you through the finished rooms where we marveled at the chandeliers which were pre-conceived thought.
I like the idea of the writing to stay slightly ahead of thought. The way the moon always seems to be chasing a whale.
Later you wrote:
I’d love to see you go on to tackle the question of poetic shape and poetic process, making sure you launch each poem at a vital moment and pursue it as a vital trail of discovery.
Dearest Linda, I don’t think I was able to find that vital trail of discovery in the short time I worked with you, but I promise you that I tried. And I am still trying. Now I think I start at the bottom of a road, wander away from the road, and often end up in the sea. Is that what you meant? That I took all the power away from the poem because I thought words were thought. Now I understand. Words are light. What they illuminate and how they illuminate the small beak of a lark isn’t up to the writer. It’s up to the lark and the lark will go where it goes.
In another letter, you wrote: Stylistically: I’ve marked some misplaced modifiers, ambiguous pronouns, inaccurate punctuation, split infinitives. I know this isn’t writing for publication, but I think you’d get a lot more out of the annotations if you also used them as an opportunity to make your prose a more responsive instrument for speaking about poetry.
Dearest Linda, you were the first teacher to uncover my grammatical mistakes. Until then, I had no idea. How slanted my words may have seemed to you. Each misplaced modifier, a hot poker in your eye.
After my father had a stroke, I packed up his books. Nearly all the books had markings on each page in red pen, some much more than others, depending on the book.
Father far left in Taiwan
My father had circled words he didn’t know and written their definitions in the margins in Chinese. The little circles were jagged, as if zigzagging a circle might somehow will words into meaning.
Sometimes I wonder how much grammar my parents didn’t pass onto me. How could I know? On the other hand, I can speak another language, Mandarin, modestly. What would it be like to grow up in a family where everyone spoke English as a first language or even just the same language? Growing up, I held a tin can to my ear and the string crossed oceans.
I kept one of my father’s books, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I read it and paused at the words my father didn’t know. Pelted was circled in red. Then a light red line to the margin and tiny Chinese characters I couldn’t read. Appendage, intricate, wrought-iron, tapestry...and then there were all the circled phrases. The first time I had read The Kite Runner, I raced through it because the narrative moved so quickly. This time I got to see how slowly my father read the book. I had always thought he knew everything.
After a while, coming upon a circled word became an excitement, what word didn’t my father know next, I wondered. Occasionally, the words in the margin were in English. I became enamored at how the mind folds one language into another. Not what is lost, but what is gained.
Last week, we took my father out to eat at a local noodle shop. Lately, it’s as if he has forgotten how to eat. With his right hand, he picked up his chopsticks, grabbed some noodles, and with his left hand, picked up a napkin and transferred the noodles onto the napkin. I wondered about this long after watching him. He never ate anything in the end.
As we left, the other mostly Chinese people in the restaurant stared at him as he shuffled to the door, hair too long, nose hairs rebellious, pants partially unbuttoned. As everyone stared, I became aware that I had gotten used to his disheveled appearance and odd behaviors.
As I pulled his sweatshirt forward, I thought to myself, my father can no longer read. All that work circling English words in all those books over all those decades—gone. That was the last time we took my father out to eat.
Dearest Linda, once fifteen years ago, I asked you if a writer needs to suffer. I wasn’t yet convinced that I had suffered enough compared to other writers that I knew. My mother had not committed suicide. My mother had not abandoned me. My nephews did not die in a car crash. My father was not an alcoholic. Or homeless. He didn’t beat me (unless he thought I truly deserved it). You wrote this:
Suffering. Suffering can indeed deepen and enlarge a poet’s work. Suffering can put such pressure on a human being that she has no choice but to become a poet. But suffering is distributed by the fates. If you look closely at the world around you, if you care for other people, if you do not hide from the terrors and tediums and ordinary setbacks of the world, if you read with real hunger, if you age, if you encounter illness, if life is not lost on you, you will find ways to deepen and enlarge your writing. What you do in the meantime is develop your craft as best you can and also your capacity for attention.
Dearest Linda, I’ve never thanked you for being so hard on me, for being so honest. I have found ways, I hope, to deepen and enlarge my writing. I have tried to look closely at the world around me. I have cared and care deeply for other people, I try and read with real hunger, I have aged, I have encountered illness and death. I hope life has not been lost on me. And I hope my grammar has improved in the process.
Dear Daughters,
One summer I worked at a large company that made colored food. Remade food into different sweet shapes of cartoon characters, called them fruit snacks, and told parents they were healthy. I had beat out a lot of people for the job because I said things I knew that they wanted to hear. Saying things others want to hear is easy for an immigrant’s child because language is theatrical.
That summer, I left behind a boyfriend and packed a few suitcases to Minneapolis. Those days everything seemed scathed. Everything had holes but nothing leaked out.
That boyfriend liked telling stories. Stories that made him more desired by others. His favorite story was about his team making it to the College World Series. That boyfriend glowed like only the wounded could. He was always moving. He was a shortstop.
I found a nice apartment but was unhoused. I rented a small car but couldn’t move. None of those meadows inherited me. My hands tapped on spreadsheets that calculated how many fruit snacks we could sell. I remember an older man on the team who said impatiently, just make the decision and stop asking us what we think. I wanted to tell the man that I had no idea what I was doing.
The boyfriend came to visit me once and we watched Rent. He fell asleep a few times. I thought about what new shapes of fruit and chemicals I would make out of his breath the next day. I thought about how many children I was slowly killing.
I followed the other interns to happy hours, to meetings, but everything remained interior. Have you ever stared at a painting and known that there was more to it but you couldn’t get inside? One very tall woman was moving that weekend and I offered to help her because I had made no friends. She said no thanks.
Dearest daughters, in your lives, you will sometimes be the glove and sometimes the hand. But on some cold nights, you won’t be able to see your hands at all. On some nights, you might feel like you have no hands.
On some nights, people will seem to be speaking your language, but you will have no idea what they are saying. On some nights, you will have a camera around your neck, unwanted, which is also my camera which is also your grandmother’s camera and your great-great-great grandmother’s camera. And you cannot escape our eyes. But you also won’t be able to find us. Daughters, there will be times when everyone sounds like you, but no one looks like you and everyone around you looks like an executioner. It’s okay though because those without history are difficult to harm. Because we are always moving.
That summer, I used up all the right words to get the job, but then I had no words left. I was a house with rooms but no frame. A shadow without a body. Partial. A fake.
That summer would be the beginning of my quitting. I quit that job earlier than all the other interns. The nice man from the Midwest who gave me the job later asked me why. I told him that no one helped me. What I should have said was, I don’t know how to interact with white people. I couldn’t learn that in a summer. But I tried really hard. And that I was sorry he hired me based on my words. Because under those six hundred and forty-three words were masses of flies.
It took me a long time to find my people: writers, creatives, artists, inventors. My people didn’t sit in cubicles and calculate fruit snack sales forecasts. It took me a long time to know my people existed and even longer for me to seek them out.
Daughters, I have felt incomplete my entire life. Please don’t follow me. What I worry about most is that you have already started following me. That you are me. You both have my freckles. What else have I passed on?
Then through the door, I hear you playing a game on the computer with an American friend. I listen to your perfect English and am bewildered by it, the beauty of the words, the precision of each pause, each curve. Then I hear you laughing so loudly the door shakes a little. And I put my head in my hands and weep.
Victoria Chang’s new book of poems, OBIT, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2020. Love, Love, a middle grade verse novel will be published by Sterling Publishing in April 2020. Her book of essays, The Terrible Crystals, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Barbie Chang, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. The Boss (McSweeney's, 2013) won a PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Other books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She serves on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle. She serves as the program chair for Antioch’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com.
Photo by fdecomite on Foter.com / CC BY