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| Me, shortly after I arrived in China and Tibet in 1999, at Namtso Lake in Tibet. |
Sometimes
I feel ashamed when people ask if I’m still
working on the same book. Yes, for almost a decade now I’ve been working on a memoir, SEARCHING FOR THE HEART RADICAL, with some periods away
from it in between. Most of the chapters originated during my time in grad school from 2004-2006, although many of the seeds of those pieces had already been planted during the years I lived and wrote in China from 1999-2002. And in some respects, you might say I’ve been working on this book since the day I was born.
This book has taught me a ton—about the process of writing
and about myself. I have grown so much as a writer over these years that I have
felt compelled to go back and rewrite most of the pieces, again and again and
again. And because it’s a book about discovering myself during my twenties—and
I started writing it while still in my twenties—it’s also a book whose deeper
meaning has been elusive and unfolding as I’ve grown as a person.
If I could do it all over again, I’m not sure what, if anything, I would do
differently. Initially, I wrote
almost every chapter as a piece that could stand alone. They came out that way,
and this also made it easier to submit stuff to writing group critiques or
literary magazines. Eventually though, and perhaps even from the beginning, I
knew I was writing a book. I then spent many years stringing the pieces
together, agonizing about whether to call it a “collection of essays” or a
“memoir”, submitting it to agents and later small presses, getting sick of it, putting
it down for months or years at a time, losing faith in it, and then finally
dusting it off, sitting down and becoming obsessed with it all over again.
It’s
been a labor of love. Of dogged stubbornness. Of moments filled with doubt (this writing is crappy and self-absorbed),
and moments filled with pride (this
is a great book that will speak to many!). Yet finally, what’s pushed me on
is simply the knowledge that, no matter how many people the book ultimately reaches,
I must get it out there, share it, find closure, move on.
In
retrospect, it would have been a whole lot easier to have conceived of it as a whole
memoir from the get-go, and mapped it out as such, not having to later convert
all the original stand-alone pieces. But, that’s not the way my process went. I
needed the writing practice, and I needed
to let it unfold organically, to just let it become what it would become.
I never imagined that it would take me almost ten years to finally get to the
point where I feel like the book is cohesive and whole, and where I’ve finally
accessed the necessary perspective that I needed in order to infuse the book with
a more seasoned perspective.
I
never was good at having an elevator speech, and maybe this should have been my
clue that I still hadn’t honed what it was about, at core. “My book is about my
travels between China and America in my
twenties,” I’d say (but it’s not a travel book). “My book is about growing up half-Chinese, and searching for my cultural and spiritual identity,” (true, but kind of vague). “My book is
about my longing for language, love, and belonging” (closer, but more vague).
Fine, then, my book is about me, I’d say, only sort of kidding. It was all of
the above. And then some. Which was it? Was it trying to be too many things?
Did I need to lose the threads about Buddhism and Tibet,
and focus more on the cultural identity theme, about growing up bilingual, then
living in China
and entering a relationship with a Chinese man?
Now,
anyone who’s taken a course in memoir can tell you that memoir is not
autobiography. Memoir is not the entire
story of your life; memoir is a story
from your life. So pick one theme, one particular thread, and tell that story
well. Leave out lots of other important stories and details if they don’t serve
the one story at hand. Trust that there will be other books in you; that you
can tell the other stories elsewhere. Find your focus.
For
a while, I feared I was not heeding this basic advice. I feared I was holding
on too tightly to wanting to tell ALL of my story-- my coming of age, self-discovery,
spiritual-heart-opening, obsession with language and China, longing for
intimacy, and searching for home story. But when I tried to cut out the
pieces about my obsession with Tibet
and my initial spiritual awakening, it still wasn’t working. Now there were
gaps in chronology I was trying to disguise, and, moreover, there were gaps
in adequately expressing what was really going on inside of me, on the most
intimate level.
My
readers/editors wanted it to be a cohesive, linear whole, not a collection of linked
pieces, because the blueprint of my story was already there. What was missing
was a deeper, seasoned thread of reflection to stitch it all together. Don’t
get me wrong, there was plenty of “telling” in the manuscript, maybe too much. But this
reflection still belonged to each piece alone and didn’t yet do much in the way
of making the pieces speak to each other as
a whole. And ironically, the book itself is about wanting to feel whole.
Finally,
about a year ago (after taking an awesome workshop with Lydia Yuknavitch on
finding your core metaphors), I was inspired to break out the dusty manuscript
again (after a mostly motherhood-driven, three-year hiatus), and write a new piece/introduction
called “Mirror Face.” In this piece, I went back to one of my original
metaphors, first unearthed in a piece I wrote in 1997 for my first college
creative writing class. It was a piece about vision, mirrors, reflections,
identity and self-consciousness. It’s central metaphor began with me, as a
child, looking in a mirror and hating the way my two eyes did not match—the way
one of my eyes was creaseless, like a Chinese eye, and the other eye had a
fold, like a Westerner’s. It was a piece about how I saw and judged myself, and
in turn feared others saw and judged me.
There
it was. A new beginning to my book. A new beginning that had existed all along, but that for some reason I’d
failed to see belonged. And from this new (old) beginning, I suddenly saw the
entire book framed anew. It wasn’t that the theme of cultural identity wasn’t
already prominent in almost every chapter, but it had never been introduced in
quite the same way. Something about sharing my childhood vulnerability and
speaking directly to my desire to overcome my early seeds of self-consciousness,
was crucial in informing the linear story at hand about living in China, and my longing to find a
spiritual path and to become fluent in Chinese as an adult. Something about
that one central metaphor helped me to tie it all together better, and see and
love the book anew. And with a new beginning, I was better able to determine
which pieces needed to stay or go, and to write a new ending that helped the
book come full circle.
So
here I am. Still editing the epilogue and waiting to get feedback from my
copyeditor/friend, before we start the process of designing, creating and
self-publishing the book. Sometimes I still get hit with pangs of, maybe I should try one last time to get a
publisher, after all, the book’s a new and improved animal now, but
something about time and motherhood has infused my life with a more urgent
perspective. I am ready to get this book out in the world NOW. I do not want to
wait again for months to hear back from agents, and even if I got one quickly
this time, it could take years more for the agent to place the book, if they
even could. And then, after that, another couple years before it would come
out. That could be another five years of my life! No, thank you. I have other
projects on the backburner, including another book I've already started and received
funding to work on, and projects that (I hope) will not take me as long to
complete as this one.
But
you never know. Maybe I am just one of those slow writers who writes long books
and takes a long time to understand what she is truly writing. It doesn’t
matter. I trust now that these things just have to take their course. You can
be as disciplined about your writing and self-imposed deadlines as you want,
but you can’t force the process, the timing, or the way in which your
book’s core insights choose to be revealed.
Who
knows, maybe I had to become a mother first, to shift my life so radically that
I could finally see my whole younger searching period with new insight. Maybe
it has nothing to do with any given age (e.g. the fact that I’ve been writing
about my twenties and now I’m in my late thirties), but more to do with
specific changes that happen in a person’s life that suddenly catapult our
perspective into a whole new realm.
In
any case, I now plan to self-publish. I will proudly join the ranks of the DIY
culture, and do everything I can to create a beautiful, professional product
and get it into the hands of as many people as I can. Because this book is
important to me. And because I believe it is good. And while
sometimes the best advice may very well be to let go of something and move on,
there are other times when you can’t bear to do this, and you just have to
keep trusting that there is more at stake here, something that you
need to see all the way through.
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| Me, before leaving China in 2002, looking out over the monk's quarters at Labarang Monastery in Xiahe, Gansu Province. |
