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Leadership Academy

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Victor Yang | Longreads | January 2020 | 16 minutes (4,128 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

To my mother; Wendy; and all my teachers

I locked my rickety bike in Boston Common. My dress clothes were stained with sweat. In the park’s public bathrooms, I maneuvered my armpits against the hand dryer. A block over, I shivered in the conference room’s AC.

“Tell me about yourself,” asked the woman across the table. I told her about my family. My father’s mother was killed in a fight with her neighbors in rural China. My mother still struggled forming a sentence in correct English. For the past decade, she had been making $14 per hour as a lab tech and cleaner.

“Her fight is my fight,” I said. “It is the fight of all the workers in your union.” My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour. The year after I came on staff, we would win a contract to bring them up to $20 per hour.

My future boss nodded. “What was it like going to Harvard?” She was holding my résumé in her hands. Her smile was curious. She didn’t question my intentions, unlike two prior interviewers who pointed to my Ph.D. from Oxford. They wondered out loud if their job was a twentysomething idealist’s version of a tour stop in fighting poverty.

She hired me as an organizer for the janitors’ union. I was the son of a working-class immigrant and a graduate of two of the most elite universities in the world. I sold myself as candidates do in their stump speeches. Vote for me, and I will bring every American into the middle class. Those politicians may have graduated from Yale and Stanford, but they always mentioned family hardships. Their mother had been laid off, or their grandfather became homeless. As if the steps on the class ladder were like colors on an artist’s palette. Mix enough of them, and you can dull the shine of your Ivy League degree and the gold in your bank account. A humble gray in America’s melting pot.

We get jobs for many reasons other than pure merit: the people we know, the schools we attended, the stories we tell. I told the story of my mother’s failure.

* * *

Wendy wielded a knife with the same scary proficiency as my mother. With a plantain in the palm of her left hand, she’d flick her right wrist. Chunks fell in rapid succession from the peel into the sizzling oil. I hovered in her kitchen or just outside of it. We both wiped sweat off our brows. Her apartment boasted a view of brownstones and sidewalk cafés, but the management company had sealed the windows half shut.


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“What is it like to live in the world of the one percent?” I asked. Wendy laughed, the bulge of her belly shaking, the part of her body she called a colchón. Her mattress. Rents in Boston’s South End had climbed to $3,000 for a one-bedroom like Wendy’s. But she had government-subsidized housing. She was the only person in Boston I knew who could afford to live alone. Rent was proportional to her salary, so she only paid a few hundred a month. She didn’t make much as a part-time janitor.

My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour.

On the first shelf of her TV stand, she showed me her ceramic sandals with the fat pink thongs, watermelon slices painted an artificial red, and the miniature pigs with etched-in parentheses for noses. Each set in her collection came in twos, with little dots on top. “Salt and pepper shakers,” she explained. “We resort to simple joys as poor people, no?” I cringed. At the union, I made $50,000 a year, double my mother’s salary, and almost quadruple Wendy’s. Like all union members, she paid two percent of her salary in dues. Every last cent of my paycheck came from their pockets.

I didn’t say this. Instead, on my visits to Wendy’s house, we took turns guessing at and delighting over how little we spent on our respective outfits from Goodwill. I had been shopping at thrift stores for years because of my mother. “We’re not poor anymore,” my mother said. But she still scoured Macy’s racks for clearance deals, and I still got my clothes secondhand. Thanks to a lifetime of learning from my working-class mother, I could grow close to working-class Wendy.

* * *

My mother blamed Harvard. “They made your head too big,” she said. In her words, I was “wasting my education to help poor people.” As a kid, I promised to win enough scholarships to earn back the money she had forsaken as a stay-at-home mom. On a trip back to China when I was in fifth grade, she brandished a bestseller in the bookstore: 哈佛女, Harvard Girl. Not in her worst nightmares would I use my Harvard education to become a labor organizer.

Members of our labor union cleaned toilet bowls and office floors. Union staff like me were called organizers, charged to clean up social injustice. I worked in the union’s political division. During my time there, I led our union’s workers to become the major force behind a historic upset on the Boston City Council, electing the first-ever woman of color to a conservative seat. We won millions of dollars for affordable housing on the state ballot and passed pro-immigrant legislation in a Trump-esque city. To achieve the American Dream together, we said.

“So you’re just 造反,” my mother said. The first character is the verb to make, the second is to turn over. Together, they denote rebellion. In Chinese, it means you’re up to no good.

I want to do right by you, I wanted to tell her. Others shouldn’t have to suffer the way you have. Instead, I said, “I’m not a troublemaker.” I struggled to describe the job in my limited Mandarin. “Think of me as a teacher.”

I was a teacher. I served as the lead educator for the 18,000 workers in our union. The vast majority were Spanish-speaking janitors, many of them immigrants my mother’s age. My boss charged me with launching a yearlong education program called the Social Justice Leadership Academy. I ran workshops to educate our members on campaigns we were pursuing for economic and immigrant justice.

The first step was to recruit a cohort of 30 students. My boss gave me a name to start with. “Wendy,” she said. “She’ll do the program.” A few days later, a tall woman took a seat across from me in the same overly air-conditioned room where I had my first interview. Wendy was about my height, almost six feet. With her small-rimmed glasses and collared shirts, she could have passed as my teacher. “I just want to learn,” she said. Unlike the version of me who had sat in that same interview seat, she wasn’t claiming to want to change the world, nor rewrite a history that had befallen her mother. She didn’t harbor grand illusions.

I had been in the job for a month and was playing gatekeeper to people who had fought in the union for decades. They had gone on strike, survived civil wars, and raised kids older than me, but somehow I managed to gather up 20-some sheets of paper: 20-some students who signed contracts to attend every session. The Academy consisted of one Saturday class every month from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Many of our workers were trying to cobble together rent money and legal status. The union had answers, we told them. We were on the road to win a $15 minimum wage and laws to protect undocumented immigrants.

Wendy attended every single session, but she was the exception. In the first year of the program, the union hall was so empty, it looked more like a warehouse than a classroom. The few windows were in an offset part of the room, facing high-rises that blocked out the sun. From the ceiling, exposed wires and strip lighting glared onto us. People rolled in hours late, if at all. I’m sick. I took an overtime shift. I have to cook for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow. I didn’t blame them. Nothing could replace time spent with family, I believed, even though I moved away from my parents 10 years prior.

Every month, I stood up and opened class in my amateur Spanish. Everyone else in the room was a native speaker. They were the ones who had snuck children across the border and battled abusive husbands. Yet I was supposed to teach them about immigrant and gender justice.

Officially, the Leadership Academy intended to equip janitors with the skills to lobby politicians, rally coworkers to action, and win campaigns for immigrant rights and economic equality. I had my own agenda, too. I wanted our union members to feel human, to learn and dream beyond their day-to-day work. It was jarring to bump into them on the job — say, at the airport on my trips out of Boston. In the terminal bathrooms, I was a vacationer with disposable income, and they were blue uniforms scrubbing toilets and pushing trash carts. In the tight aisle between the urinals and sinks, everyone rushed past them. I, too, avoided saying hi. I didn’t want to acknowledge how my workers spent their waking hours, invisible. It reminded me of seeing my own mother on the clock. In uniform, she was not the intelligent woman who raised me, but a faceless low-wage worker.

I made myself a pledge for the Leadership Academy. In my class, janitors would be teachers. I divided up the workshop content like slabs of pork, preparing word-by-word scripts for them. America’s borders exclude people based on their nationality and skin color. Sanctuary cities prohibit cooperation between immigration authorities and local police. I gave workers private lessons in the history of redlining in the U.S. and the process for bills to become law. My boss thought it’d be too much material for them to handle. But I took on the responsibility. I wanted to show that low-wage workers were capable.

I had seen my workers hold their own in political debate about Colombian politics and U.S. elections. But in front of our classroom, they stumbled over the awkward Spanish I had written for them. “Isn’t this your job?” they asked. They were janitors, and I was their teacher. School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

* * *

My mother was brilliant. When I was in middle school, she was a two-kid parent, a two-job holder, a four-course Chinese dinner cook, and a community college student taking eight classes a semester. Sometimes I’d sit next to her after school, just outside the kitchen. She could slice onions, keep her eyes on my geometry homework, and arrange car pools on the phone, all at the same time.

School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

I used to apply to jobs on my mother’s behalf. On her résumé, I dropped her degree in electrical engineering and a decade of work in the ’80s as a programmer in Beijing. On her new résumé in the New World, she read as a younger woman, if also a poorer one. She vacuumed hotel rooms; she decorated cakes; she mixed chemical solutions. Jobs that didn’t require English. Her bosses were demanding; her pay was too little. She quit. She got laid off.

English was key to her dreams in America. I didn’t help her. When she tried practicing, my hands flew up to either side of my face, like earmuffs. “You’ll never learn,” I told her. I picked up more of the language in my first few months of primary school than she would her entire life. On my trips back home as an adult, I read her Amelia Bedelia books, and she’d stare dumb at the puns before giving up. It made me imagine a rubber band tied to her tongue, pulling her back at the slightest stretch of progress.

I could have become a dedicated teacher for my mother like I did for my workers. I could have taken time off from my schooling or my job. But it was easier to write her off. It was easier to wonder if what everyone thought about my mother and her broken English and pitiful salary were true. She was brilliant and stupid. She could do anything, and she could do nothing.

* * *

Wendy didn’t believe in excuses. Once, she offered to make reminder calls for the Academy. I refused. I was getting paid for this work; she was not. She insisted, sitting down in the empty cubicle next to mine. Some of her classmates were taking their kids to the park. “So what if the weather’s nice?” she asked them on the phone. Her face was a cross between a scowl and a laugh, her chuckles like rocks tumbling off a cliff. “La lucha sigue.” The fight continues.

She pushed people, as organizers should. During discussions in the Academy, her hands made swiping gestures to interrupt the same old men gabbing on about their glory days. A few members looked up at me hopefully, but I was never brave enough to cut people off. One time Wendy got up and tapped me on the shoulder. When I shook my head, she interrupted the man herself. “We have to give room for everyone to talk,” she said as the room breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m radical,” she said, sidling up to me. “I don’t care what other people think of me.” I nodded. But her attitude wasn’t radical. It felt familiar and right. In her broken English, my mother never left a government office or customer service desk without getting her point across. I saw Wendy do the same. They were kindred spirits.

“You’re a leader of leaders,” I told Wendy. She responded with a half howl, half giggle. But I knew it to be true. She believed in the brilliance of other people, and she demanded they show it.

* * *

The next year I ran the Leadership Academy, I stopped giving them scripts. “Write your own,” I said. They looked at me with wide eyes, bewildered.

“What do I know about immigrant justice?” they asked.

“Everything,” I said.

A week later, they came to the workshop with pages of handwritten notes. “I threw up the night before,” several of them confessed. One of them gave a survey of the history of American capitalism, from Columbus in 1492 to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar post–World War II. Gladys’s explanation of historical economy was the best I had ever heard, better than any lecture from my Harvard professors.

On paper, I taught a new group of workers each year of the Academy. But after each cohort graduated, the alumni still insisted on attending. In the third year, they demanded sessions twice a month. “If you do the work,” I told them. So they did. They ran interviews to recruit the new cohort. They organized the turnout calls Wendy and I used to do. They assigned every student a role: photographer, moderator, cleanup captain. Wendy and the other workers took over. The problem hadn’t been that they couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

* * *

“Stop biking,” Wendy ordered when I arrived at the office with shoes covered in salt and snow slush, pebbles grating the floor with each step. Like my mother, she fretted over my safety. “Only in America do rich people choose to ride bikes,” Wendy said. We chuckled at the $250 green contraption I referred to as my spouse. The union members named it my luxury car.

Biking was my one daily pleasure. For an hour or two a day, I could take my mind off of my workers who had gotten harassed, fired, and deported. I zipped between the Financial District and the Latino neighborhoods, past rear bumper lights and stalled subway cars. The city shrunk under my tires. Leg down, pedal up, an effortless momentum: the tread of my tires marked a line forward I often struggled to envision in my activist work.

The problem hadn’t been that they [my workers] couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

Wendy checked on me more than my mother. At the end of her afternoon hospital shift, she walked the few blocks between her worksite and mine. There she hovered next to my cubicle until I told her how I was doing. I’m tired. Overwhelmed. I didn’t share such feelings with my mother. “What could be so hard about your job,” my mother often asked. But Wendy didn’t judge. I showed Wendy the to-do lists I wrote on the back of deconstructed cereal boxes, the cardboard big enough to fit most of the day’s tasks. When I fell ill, she texted me every few hours. Don’t work so hard. You should take a break. Before joining the union, I used to get a cold every two years. In this job, it was every two months.

Among the Spanish expressions she taught me — bad words, slang, and proverbs included — one phrase she repeats to this day: de los buenos quedamos pocos. There are only a few of us good ones left. I nodded as I coughed. “I’m dying.” This half joke was the closest truth I gave her. Between long hours, endless meetings, and Trump’s tweets, I was drowning in discouragement.

The Academy was successful, but it didn’t feel like enough. It was only a part of my job. The part the rest of the union often overlooked. I had to joust with my colleagues to keep the room reservations and dates for workshops that my workers had scheduled months in advance. I often lost. There were always more pressing matters the union needed workers to attend to: layoffs, labor violations, and legislative votes. In my last year of the job, the union slashed the program’s budget. The implicit message: Education was good and fun, but what good were workshops if people were still going to be stuck in low-wage jobs, or worse, without any work at all?

Wendy was trying to get her GED, because her school in the Dominican Republic had yet to produce the high school diploma she earned two decades ago. “Check back later,” they said. I helped her look into high school equivalency classes in Spanish. There were none in Boston, a city of hundreds of thousands of Latinos. The closest classes a town and river away. “I don’t want to be a janitor forever,” she said.

I cringed when Wendy tripped over the easiest of English words. When she sat in the spare cubicle next to mine, her fingers pecked at the keyboard, like a chicken’s beak in slow motion. As she tried logging into her Hotmail account, I turned back to my screen to distract myself, shooting off five emails.

There’s a story I never shared with Wendy. My mother got an associate’s degree in this country. When I was in middle school, I translated her assignments from Chinese to English. No one responded to the 200-plus job applications we sent out, the extra line on her résumé never changed her job prospects. She made far less than those workers of mine who never finished middle school, as she liked to remind me. If an accredited degree didn’t do her any good, what could a ragtag Academy promise my members?

* * *

One day, two-and-a-half years into the job, I left the office after 8 p.m. and rode over to the South End. It was late April. The first flowers were popping out, the last dredges of orange-gray rays of dusk soaking the petals. As much as I dreaded it, Wendy needed to hear it from me face-to-face. “¡Ya estoy!” I yelled into her apartment buzzer. She placed a large rag on the ground of her apartment for my bike. The length of my bike was longer than the width of her hallway, so she left the door ajar. “I can’t stay long,” I told her, even though I never managed to get out of her house in less than an hour. She giggled that I had stunned yet another one of her neighbors with my Spanish. “You look handsome,” she said, even though I was in just a T-shirt and black shorts that day and most days. She handed me as many heads of broccoli and cabbage as my backpack could fit. They were leftover produce from the $2-a-bag truck that stopped every week outside her apartment building.

I interrupted her gossip about another worker: “I have to tell you. I’m leaving.” She asked me to repeat myself, her face blank. We were close on the couch, my head almost backing into the right handlebar of my bicycle. Silence followed. I didn’t want her to think that I was tired of her. That wasn’t it. I was tired of what her story meant, that someone so smart could end up with a job that society thought was for dumb people. I was tired of what I couldn’t change.

“You can’t change your moving date?” she finally asked. “I’ll buy you a ticket to leave later.” I didn’t chuckle. She wasn’t joking. Before I dragged my bike out of the doorway, she stopped me to reveal two potatoes in the palm of her hand. They were smooth and eerily white, the latest installment in her collection of salt and pepper shakers. We had a last laugh.

The next session of the Academy — and my last — Wendy was absent. She had already booked a trip to see family in Philly. I didn’t expect to see her Skype face on Gladys’s phone when my members ushered me into another room, the glass windows covered with red tissue paper. Gladys had revised the workshop agenda to include a “guest speaker” part. The guest speaker was actually four smuggled bottles of champagne, one big rice cake, and a mountain of pupusas Daisy finished making at 1:00 that morning. They flashed cameras. Amanda, a Dominican grandmother in her 60s, stepped forward from the circle, in front of the yellow streamers and orange balloons. She hadn’t been politically active before we met. Over the past few years, she had inched her body from the corner of the room into the center, with sweaty pits and wide smiles. “There was something inside of me,” she said, putting her right hand on her heart, “that I didn’t know was there until I met you.” My chest swelled, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever hear such words from my mother.

In the months since, members call and WhatsApp me. They share stories of sticking up for their coworkers, demanding the sick time they deserve, and applying lessons from the Academy. Because they are trying to fill my shoes at the union, they laugh and say, “We’ll have to ride around town on bicycles.”

I left Boston to return home to my family in Kentucky. This year, I have spent more time with my mother than I have in the past decade. I wish I could tell a noble story that swept full circle: that I had gone to the union to avoid doing the work I should have done with my mother, and that I left the union to come back to her. The reality is, I returned because my parents offered me a free roof and a sunny place to write.

With time, the victories are starting to sink in. My workers remind me not of the times that our work made headlines, but the moments I felt most alive, when my workers felt most alive. Amanda wrapping her arms around my chest, or Wendy crying as she read the Spanish translation of this essay. I remember when Gladys gave her speech on the history of capitalism, or when Wilson, a soft-spoken man, presented a survey of feminism from the Middle Ages to the present, or when all of us took the train to a conference, laughing together like long-time friends. We upturned what society said about their jobs and their intelligence. We were able to 造反. Our little revolution.

From my parents’ house, I complain to Wendy. My mother and I bicker over things a world away from deportations and labor strikes: the size of the bowls I choose for our family dinner, the width of my onion slices in the pan. We fight with a ferocity every night that Wendy and I never had in her kitchen. Wendy texts me that this is just right. This is the labor of family.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez

* * *

Victor Yang is a writer, educator, and organizer. His writing has been published in Fourth GenreGulf CoastThe RumpusThe Tahoma Literary Review, and The Boston Globe. He was the 2018 Chertkov Fellow at the Blue Mountain Center. The proud son of Chinese immigrants, he has been fighting for immigrant and racial justice for a decade.

Editor: Vanessa Mártir

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Disease of Deceit

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | January 2020 | 38 minutes (9,656 words)

In June, I woke to an alert from Facebook, a notification of a memory from five years ago. It was a photo of a woman in a park, leaning over, kissing the top of my dog’s head. The woman’s face was partially hidden but I immediately knew who it was — Chaya. Read more…

A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

Read more…

Thumbing a Ride: What I Learned from Siskel and Ebert

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dipti S. Barot | Longreads | November 2019 | 11 minutes (2,634 words)

When I was a teenager, I made the unusual decision to switch schools midway through high school. I kept having the distinct, nagging feeling that there was much more to explore beyond the comfortable bubble of my tiny private school, and if I didn’t leave, then my growth would be stunted forever. One of my best friends at the time wrote me a lovely metaphorical story as my farewell gift. It was about two beautiful bird friends who lived in a gorgeous garden surrounded by tall walls, one of whom wants to fly outside to discover new worlds. And fly away I did. I transferred to a large public school shortly thereafter and immediately realized that I needed to find friends, and fast. Fate intervened in the form of two middle aged white gentlemen who soon became my constant weekly companions during this rough transition. Their names were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

Times were financially topsy turvy for our family then, and television provided an escape from that. I don’t specifically remember stumbling upon Siskel and Ebert the first time, but it likely happened when I was surfing the limited number of local TV channels that our antenna could catch for free. It was a half-hour movie review show, where two critics who wrote for rival newspapers in Chicago would get together and talk shop and share their opinions on the movies of the day.

This 16-year-old brown girl was likely an outlier in the target demographic for two white men from the Midwest around my Dad’s age. Undoubtedly it was one of their classic, boisterous back and forth bickerings that must have given me enough pause to stay on their channel rather than continue surfing, the sheer magnetism of their bursts of antagonism drawing me in. But once I discovered them, I was hooked. There was no going back.

I had one date and one date alone every Saturday evening at 6:30pm, and I would make sure that no other commitments would stand in the way of my special time with my guys. Of course, there were no other plans to cancel or reshuffle, because the reality of having no close friends during your junior year of high school had paved the way for many an empty weekend. And thus began the tradition of Siskel and Ebert Saturday nights with my dudes. I relished their repartee, their intelligent banter, their expressions of disgust and contempt towards disappointing movies, and oftentimes towards each other.

This last category was what I imagine hooked the most fans, and certainly the reason I got lured. When do you get to see intelligent people who actually respect each other disagree so passionately that it’s as if sparks are ricocheting off the screen? There was chubby Roger Ebert, often the meaner of the two, with his barbed complaints about his partner’s latest opinions, and there was the tall, balding Gene Siskel, the gentler and kinder one, more likely to throw up his hands in exasperation. With Siskel and Ebert, you got to peek into the unvarnished moments where they wanted to throttle each other, and it was an intellectual exercise in rhetorical gymnastics, layered with the antics and drama of World Wrestling Federation. It was a bedazzling polemical display.
Read more…

Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

Read more…

Learning from Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol

Illustration by Jackie Ferrentino

Wendy Gan | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (4,746 words)

If anyone had told me five years ago that I would become a Kpop fan, I would have laughed in their face. If anyone had told me I would be actually be learning life lessons from a Kpop idol, I would have been even more incredulous. I am in my mid-40s, 20 years into an academic career, a responsible mortgage-payer, and a survivor of a dysfunctional family. I am also in perimenopause, which might help explain why life has taken such a strange turn.

***

I had never heard of perimenopause before, but when a nexus of rather odd physical symptoms from arthritis to sleeplessness to abnormal spikes of anxiety began to plague me, I started to wonder if a new rhythm to my monthly cycle was to blame. Some research revealed potential connections, and the rather sobering piece of information that this shaky run-up to full-blown menopause could very well last up to eight years. If 52 is the average age when most women reach menopause, I would have, quite likely, a good seven years more of this hormonal instability and its physical repercussions to both endure and manage. While I am sure there are worse cases out there, I often do not feel quite myself, and it is disconcerting to say the least. The body that you used to take for granted begins to call attention to itself with various aches and pains, or with strange happenings, like a sudden rush of adrenalin that keeps you awake at night wondering why your heart is pumping with such fury. A work meeting that you would normally take in your stride begins to cause an unusual amount of consternation. Even meeting an old friend for a catch-up can leave you feeling nervous and on edge. Then there are the weeping fits. A sweet animal rescue video as you scroll through Twitter makes you keen in despair. A soppy ending to a television drama makes you sob as if it were the end of your life. And in the midst of the crying, something dislodges, sadness surges and sweeps over you, and it really does feel like the end of your life.

Did I say perimenopause was disconcerting? To be frank, it has been maddening. And hormone-induced depressions (thank you, perimenopause) that hit me unpredictably each month do little to help. Only Kpop keeps me sane.
Read more…

Frenzied Woman

Illustration by Homestead Studio, based on a photo by Morgan Petroski

Cinelle Barnes | Longreads | excerpted from Malaya: Essays on Freedom | October 2019 | 15 minutes (3,929 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

We had everything, then we had nothing. But I always had books and dance. This was my shorthand response to anyone who asked about my distant past, my pre-America. I say distant because the past happened in the Philippines, thousands of miles away, before the internet was as routine as checking the time or eating breakfast. The past had no online footprint. The past lived in recesses of my brain that had been walled off by art history facts, sewing techniques, and memorable World Cup plays. I had found a place for the past and there I kept it. The past was so distant, I could tell it like the summary of a fairy tale. Once upon a time, and I lived happily ever after. The shorthand was enough for years, for over a decade spent in New York, Georgia, and South Carolina, until I got a therapist who liked to read. She understood words, therefore she understood what I used them for, and how. My sentences were never too short nor too long for her—she liked to break down both. When you said this, what did you mean? An English major before she was a licensed trauma specialist, she saw my every anecdote as a scene, every verb a cause or effect, and every subject or object a motif.

Today’s motif: Tell me more about dance.

What about it?

Tell me about it as if you were describing a ritual, something you religiously do. Your memories of it. You do it religiously, don’t you?

I suppose. I’ve been dancing since I was three.

We start there. I was three. Or, more precisely, I was turning three and as I was turning numbers, growing, growing up, my baby brother died. I was going and he was stopping—these were the verbs I used for myself and him then. I’d been in ballet class that year because Mama thought first position could cure my pigeon-toe, and a tendu could fix my bowleggedness. The ballet did work, if we’re talking about returns on my mother’s investment. But it also worked in that it introduced me to a space that allowed for nothing but the movement of limbs, sashaying across floors, routines to go with the music, and outfits (always in aqua—en vogue at the time) to go with the routines. My body was not detested at the dance studio, like my mother detested my body, so long as I could plié and tiptoe to the beat. One, two, three. Two, two, three. Three, two, three. And four. I was lucky, too, to not have the kind of ballet teacher I saw in movies. My teacher, Ms. Anna, had a dimple on one cheek that always showed because she always smiled. My mother, on the other hand, stopped smiling when my brother stopped going. We buried my brother, his body, in our garden the night of my third birthday, and from that point on, my mother obsessed over what my body was doing—was it expanding, stretching, bowlegging, pigeon-toeing, making room for hives, scabs, and scars? She watched the end of every ballet class, when we would run through the entire routine learned that day, to assure herself, I understand now, that my body was plié-ing, tendu-ing, sashaying, tiptoeing, going. Dancing was going, an effect of my mother’s grief. This is the physics of our relationship.

Did you keep dancing? my therapist asks.

I tell her yes but not in the studio. We lost our money sometime in 1990. There was a war and a flood, and together they caused an avalanche — Mama became erratic and unruly, even violent, and would disappear for a string of nights, and Papa left to salvage what he could of his business from the war. My older brother entered into a sad and angry mood that eventually led to frequent drug use. But even with the mood, my brother managed to take on the role of parent, and he found ways to make money so we could eat. There were days when we’d go without food until sundown, and the only way to ignore our hunger was to inflict pain another way. We would play with the flame of a candle, pinching it with thumb and index finger until it went out.

My body was not detested at the dance studio, like my mother detested my body, so long as I could plié and tiptoe to the beat.

One way my brother made food money was to run a taxi service with the van our father left us. He was a high school junior, old enough to get a driver’s license in Manila. We shuttled fellow students to and from our schools, charging them enough for a meal each way. My brother, who took piano lessons during the time I was in ballet, hadn’t lost his love of music even when we had lost everything. If anything, the poverty and our family’s version of orphanhood intensified his love — need — of music. The van he drove was popular among commuters because he outfitted it with cassette jackets, Super Orange car fresheners, and cases of tapes: hip-hop A-sides and B-sides. My brother was a muso—we all knew that the first day he laid fingers on a keyboard. He read notes as though he could sense them from the air; life with sound was a constant osmose for him. So he chose hip-hop, and only hip-hop, for the van and his passengers, as a way to subtract, to home in, to detract from the chaos of Manila noise, a belligerent and negligent mother, and the deafening sound of silence after one’s father leaves. Hip-hop made sense to him and to me because the top tracks of the day were as angry and angsty as we were, and were cadenced lyrics from the mouths of ’90s justice seekers. It felt apt. And because it felt apt, I danced to it. I popped and locked, tutted, ticked. I carried over the muscle control I developed in ballet and used it to isolate rib cage from neck and rib cage from hip, and I was as high as someone could get without the help of drugs. But my brother needed the help of drugs, even more so when Mama stole the van service from us and operated it with her lover. Without the van, without the music — what was a boy supposed to do? There was no rhythm now, not even the grumm of an engine, so my brother — my personal DJ — went from sad to sullen to resentfully silent. His vibrations changed. When I was in a room with him, all I could feel was the antipathy emanating from his body. And bodies communicate, so I shuffled as far away from him as I could, taking his muteness as a warning.

And you stopped dancing then? my therapist assumes. She is wrong for the first time in the months I’d been seeing her. I feel a sense of pride. Maybe I am finally the enigma she can’t decode. Maybe I like to be a mystery. What child of trauma doesn’t?

You’d think. But I danced in front of the mirror a lot. I had nobody, so my reflection was my company.

She writes on her clipboard and bites her lip. She is silent for a minute before she asks, Did your reflection talk?

My reflection didn’t talk as much as she echoed. I sang a song to her and she sang it back to me. I sang a line from a song about things being gone before you knew it, first like Joni, then Janet, because at that point I was a preteen sliding on a scale of bemoaning to bewildered. Everything was equally irritating and intriguing, and add to that the fact that my brother was sent off to live with his biological father (after years of our mother keeping him away), my mother had turned into a con artist who sold nonexistent real estate, and her lover had turned the house into a breeding and fighting space for gamecocks. There were also strange men coming through the house, some of whom visited me while I slept. I woke up to memories of dreams of memories of even deeper dreams. So Joni’s brooding and Janet’s sultry sounds fit—ranges that both went over octaves, but one came out sounding strangulated and the other, sexed. The dance moves that I paired with their songs involved swaying, a whole lot of it, mostly with my eyes closed, at tempo with my breathing, and just briskly enough to lift the hem of my shirt or skirt into a parachute. There was joy in seeing my shirt or skirt let air come in and through the fabric. There was a soothing quality to it — that I could be touched without being touched; that something could be close but safe. Later, in college, I would see my preteen reflection in the Martha Graham dancers I watched in New York City — dancers trained in Graham’s style of contraction and release, which went directly against the illusion of weightlessness given off by classical ballet. Her technique involved meaningful, cumbersome steps — the dancers leapt only to be on the ground again, gravitropic. The gold border of the hallway mirror outside my bedroom framed these steps well. It was taller than it was wide, and much of the upper portion of it served as negative space — most of the moving was done so my body would end up crouched or folded or splatted on the floor. This was laborious, and I liked it. Sweat begets sweat.

Did you ever feel separated from your reflection? Was she watching you or were you watching her?

Neither. I was watching me. I know what you’re trying to get at. But I am not my mother.

My mother lived as two — at least two — people. I had described her/them in my book and in therapy as Tiger Mama and Orchid Mama. Tiger Mama had a gun in her purse; Orchid Mama hummed while she brushed her hair or did her makeup. Mama split in two after my baby brother died, and she kept splitting, or kept going deeper into her two personalities—I lost track: Was it multiplication or division or addition?—and became scarier to us with each year. By the time I was eleven, she had habitually forgotten to feed us, had assisted her lover in multiple embezzlement scams, had flailed and shot a gun in the air, and had bathed in the rain with one breast hanging out. I had told all this to my therapist, probably by our second session, and by our fourth, she had asked permission to share an observation she’d made: Can I tell you what I think your mother has, why she acted the way she did? I had wanted this answer since I was three. I think your mother is dissociated—dissociative identity disorder.

I have read plenty about dissociative identity disorder, and I know I don’t have it. I could have had it — it was right for my therapist to take note of eleven-year-old me speaking to her reflection in the mirror. But I had never been splintered. My joy was always enmeshed with my sadness, my levity with my pain. I could cry and laugh at the same time, and still do. And I have never entered amnesiac fugues. I have the opposite problem, a gift and a burden — I remember everything. Is that not why I write memoir? And is the essay not a form of uniting the multitudes within us, within me? Everything connects. I follow my body’s and brain’s lead.

That’s not what I’m saying, my therapist says. I know you are not your mother, and I don’t think you are dissociated. I just want to know where the point was.

What point?

When you could have dissociated. Look, you’re very strong. I really don’t know how you’ve held up as well as you have. I am not worried about you at all. In fact, I’m fascinated by you.

By what?

By how you’ve survived and thrived. You are more high functioning than most patients I have who’ve never been through the amount of trauma you have. I was just interested to know how you came out of all that this way, and I think I know now.

I popped and locked, tutted, ticked. I carried over the muscle control I developed in ballet and used it to isolate rib cage from neck and rib cage from hip, and I was as high as someone could get without the help of drugs.

I give her the time to explain. She tells me about dance/movement therapy, the importance of paying attention to our breath, and the physicality of psychology. That muscle is memory, too— contractions and expansions of tissue that have emotional and mental provenance. That a human being is an anatomical organism, a whole made up of many smaller wholes, or systems. She asks if I kept dancing through my teen years and college, and I say yes. Bingo, her smile tells me. Last time she asked me to imagine my happy place, I started crying. I imagined my bed, my head on my pillow, my hands clasped in prayer. She told me to stop and open my eyes, because what I had been considering my happy place was obviously a sad place. Prayer at bedtime, she said, although sacred and important to me, might have been tinged with lonely and fearful memories. She asked me at that same session to imagine another place, and I couldn’t produce one. Let’s try doing happy place again, she says today. Imagine yourself dancing. Four, three, two, one.

It is my first college dance performance, and before me is an audience of two hundred. I am a spider creeping to stage left, the spotlight following me. My arms are two of eight limbs, shooting into the air like daggers, and my feet are ball-heeling in rickety syncopation; I must be frenzied. And frenzied I am. I am a black widow orbiting my mate. I luxuriate in leg movements — the tendu I had practiced since childhood, the full and demi-pliés that make me more insect than pigeon. My arm extensions are to part the web I had spooled around him, biceps and triceps and trapezius activated and in sync. Which should I devour first, head or heart? I say to myself, thinking back to the strangers that visited my bedside when I was asleep. The lights dim, the stage goes black. Applause.

I am scooping air out of air, my pelvis is dipping in sequential Us while my legs bring me forward and back. I do this, with some variation in head and hand flicks for every verse, to M.I.A.’s “Bamboo Banga.” I am at the end of my college dance career; it is the last performance, in fact, and I have just decided to drop dance as a second major. I didn’t want to major in dance, I just wanted to enjoy it. I am giving the routine all my power — or as the song says, “Powah! Powah!”— and when the techno-tribal-world track introduces the sound of dogs barking as an interjection to the chorus, my mouth opens to let out an inaudible howl, then a very loud laugh. I am standing over my prey, paws heavy on the carcass of a mammal who didn’t know that my body was not their body, but mine. I am a pack leader, I belong to a tribe. I am no longer a sad, abandoned, hungry child. I just fed on the meat of someone who now knows they’re weak. The song ends, I am a frozen wolf, and the class and teacher are staring with their jaws hanging.

I am a young bride of twenty-four, newly unveiled from under polyester tulle and dressed in an empire-waist sheath with a lace overlay, as light as the day’s atmosphere. My groom is twirling me next to a koi pond in Central Park, while two sparrows play in a birdbath next to us. I think of us as the two sparrows, washing off trauma from our opposite but parallel pasts. My groom spins me, and my quadriceps and gluteal muscles ground my standing leg so the rest of me is ethereal, and the hem of my dress parachutes up, just like when I was little, and he keeps spinning me around until we make our exit—the hand-holding, snickering, shy little dance our recessional.

One, two, three, four. You can come back now.

I hesitate to come back but know that I have to. It is what dance has taught me to begin with: being present. I open my eyes.

Looks like you found your happy place. My therapist and I are both smiling; we have been rewarded for our work. She tells me that I should dance again, maybe find a local studio or a gym offering dance classes, and tells me that since I was diagnosed with complex PTSD, my body has likely been longing for rhythmic movement, for an excuse to be frenzied. She reminds me that I started seeing her after I had a baby, because having a baby is equal parts physical and spiritual experience. Like dance, childbirth shifts your inside and outside, and nothing is the same after. Like dance, emotions surface once dormant muscles are put to use, once your body learns it can do painful, incredible things. It tests reality, it grounds you. You reach otherwise lost positive body memories. It reclaims your body piece by piece.

 

* * *

I find a local dance studio and a gym offering cardio-dance workouts. I pay for memberships, now that I can afford them. My therapist has released me from under her care. You have your tools now. I feel broken up with, but also ready to move on — now that she’s found me out, where’s the fun? I feel like my brother when he had just been discharged from rehab, like I’m buying a new plant, unsure if I can, as the rehab counselor had instructed him, keep a plant alive. I plan on showing up for Beginner Contemporary and Beginner Hip-Hop at the dance studio, and Afro-Caribbean Cardio at the gym. I consider whether this is my new shorthand, talk therapy as once upon a time, dance as ever after.

I go every week, and I get my husband to take classes with me. It is my happy place — I can see his reflection in the studio mirror, and it is wiggling and jiggling and getting down harder than I will allow myself. He is over six feet of musculoskeletal joy reclaiming memory. Sometimes I stop in a deep squat, immobilized, my face in my hands, because the laughter is paralyzing. When we pick up our daughter from the gym day care, a woman from our class who is also picking up her child says, Your mama and daddy like to shake it, and bless them, they bring me joy! And we are happy to be someone else’s therapy.

But then I go to a community service and prayer meeting with a bunch of old White ladies, ladies who lunch, and not only do I feel out of place in my sports tank and leggings, the “praises” I share from my week are scrutinized and compel the ladies to ask if they can lay hands on me. I say thanks but no thanks, there is no need to pray — Afro-Caribbean dance is not voodoo. They say that it is tribal, therefore pagan, and I must cancel my gym membership at once. Someone suggests I switch over to the very technical, mechanical routine of Pilates. Pilates?! I say, disgusted at the thought of muscle control without magic—of fixing my body without using my body to fix the rest of me. A woman says I am in dire need of prayer, for I might have summoned unwanted spirits into my life. Dance as a curse. But I don’t believe her; there is nothing visible nor invisible that proves her point. My form of dance — the arm throwing, gyrating, backbending, toes reaching into pockets of air — is the visible and invisible me: reflection and person, laughter and tears, spider, wolf, woman. I get up and leave without saying goodbye, and I don’t come back. I find spiritual people with leanings toward the charismatic. If dance is a summoning, it is only summoning mental health, physical strength, and deep relationships for me. I have my unlikeness to my mother to prove it. And I have a daughter watching. I see her snap and bob her head.

My form of dance — the arm throwing, gyrating, backbending, toes reaching into pockets of air — is the visible and invisible me: reflection and person, laughter and tears, spider, wolf, woman.

I become an evangelist for dance. I proselytize one woman and family after another. It is that point in the Carolina summer when even the pool isn’t refreshing — the water is as warm as air in a parked car. I entice moms with an air-conditioned dance studio and a summer activity that will wear out the kids. I also text them things like AND GREAT FOR THOSE EXPERIENCING DEPRESSION OR ANXIETY! TRUST ME! I organize an inaugural Family Hip-Hop and Creative Movement class, fifteen dollars per family. No prior experience necessary, just bring your body and your memories, and we provide the rhythm and routine. It is my mission today to make everyone crazy. Tribal crazy. Just as all of our ancestors, no matter where we hail from, used to do—gather round, pull out the lute and drum, and circle the blazing pit while flitting and frolicking. I tell everyone, Don’t be nervous. Your body just wants to tell you things. I don’t tell them we might travel in space and time, because we will come back to the present. That is the point, anyway.

Five, six, seven, eight. And—

The routine starts with two steps forward, a cross of the arms, and a nod. Step two is a whiz of the right hand to the left knee, as if we’re washing a big window, and we come back to standing position by clapping our way up. From that point, there are jumps, slides across the floor, swiveling on one hand, and marking the air with punches, cutting it with leg hikes, and clutching at it as if to collect all the oxygen for later use. At water break, everyone tries to catch their breath and everyone is talking at once, but nobody is talking to one person in particular. We are all saying, That was so hard! My legs are on fire! My arms feel like twisted noodles! I am more exhausted now than after a marathon! But everyone is saying these things and smiling. This is painful, incredible work.

We all get back in front of the mirror, to our respective spots on the floor, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers. The music starts. One of the moms commits to her body roll, and it is the most sensual I’ve ever seen her. Another mom is looser than I’ve ever known her to be — she organizes homes and offices — and is breathing deep, breathing slow, breathing into her muscles. My daughter, who is an achiever and rule follower, is lying on the floor and doing the same moves as the rest of us but on her own lateral plane. I have succeeded, I think, because everyone is moving through time and space like their pituitary glands are regulated: thyroid is stimulated, oxytocin is high, and there’s nary a trace of cortisol. The only fight-or-flight reaction here is flying en pointe to the ceiling and fighting for stability when balancing on one foot. I watched my mother dance in the rain once — she had both feet on the ground but could not maintain her balance.

I look at myself in the mirror, my reflection looking back at me. We are sweating, our clothes clinging to my/her skin, my/her sweat smells and tastes salty, like the ocean between here and there, then and now, and we are one with ourselves in this frenzy.

She is. I am.

 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez

* * *

Cinelle Barnes a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, HYPHEN, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College and was a WILLA: Women Writing the American West Awards screener and a 2018-19 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards juror, and is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. She lives in Charleston, SC, with her family.

* * *

Breaking the Family Silence on Alcoholism

Photo by Ozgur Donmaz / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Alicia Lutes | Longreads | October 2019 | 18 minutes (4,426 words)

I remember turning around, but I don’t remember why. It was sometime in 1996 or 1997; maybe 1995? I was small, sitting on the couch in our living room, probably watching a cartoon on the comically large television my father had insisted upon, when something moved me to turn around. When I did, I saw my mother, her rapidly shrinking frame surrounded by the rays of a setting sun, her wafer-thinness outlined in fiery gold, a woman on fire. I watched her through the back porch as she cried on the phone, studying the slight way she swayed, how her emotions physically moved her, and how despite her lessening weight, her body moved so forcefully, the white wine in her glass twinkling in the near-twilight — but never spilling — as she moved. She slugged gulps between sobs and unremembered utterances to who-even-knows. It was tragic and beautiful, the way wine made her anorexic form seem to languish in the misery around her.

It also made her mean.
Read more…

Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler

Penguin Press

In the fall of 2011, Peter Hessler arrived in Egypt, with his family — twin toddlers, and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang. The two had met in China, where Hessler first landed as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, details his two years teaching English. Two other books, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, followed. After leaving China in 2007, the family settled in southwestern Colorado, where they are now based. A few years later, they decided to wipe the slate clean and move to Egypt. But just as they planning their move, the Egyptian Arab Spring started, sending the country down the chaotic path it has followed until today.

Hessler’s latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, chronicles both the revolution itself, and the lives of the people they met during their five years in Cairo. It’s a deep look at what is, in some ways, the oldest country in the world, and it bears the hallmarks of Hessler’s work: vivid scenes, elegant narrative arcs, and a long lens that examines the links and gaps between Egypt’s troubled present and its ancient past.

Today, Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a National Magazine Award for his 2007 National Geographic story, “Instant Cities,” and in 2006, Oracle Bones was a National Book Award finalist. In 2011 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. After leaving Egypt, his family returned to Colorado again, before decamping this year for another stint in China, where Hessler plans to teach at Sichuan University, 20 years after he first taught at Fuling Teachers College. Frank Bures spoke to him about the value of language, learning from John McPhee, and what your garbage man can teach you.

***

Frank Bures: You built your career writing about China, but how did you start writing in the first place?

Peter Hessler: My first interest was in 10th grade. I had an English teacher in high school who thought that I had some talent at it, and encouraged me. She was the one who made me think seriously about becoming a writer. That was one of the reasons I ended up at Princeton, because they had a good creative writing program. I was encouraged there by Russell Banks, who was my teacher and a thesis advisor, and also John McPhee.

I originally was interested in fiction. I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication. Later, after I took McPhee’s class, I started doing a little freelancing. In grad school overseas I started shifting towards nonfiction, partly because I couldn’t sell short stories. It was hard to publish them, whereas I could publish my travel pieces and essays and get paid for them, and that was encouraging. But I was still unsure when I joined the Peace Corps at age 27. I’d published a lot of travel pieces, but I’d never held a job in journalism, and the kind of stuff I published wasn’t enough for me to support myself.

I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication.

FB: What kind of travel pieces had you done?

PH: The New York Times used to have these essays. The first one I wrote for them was about taking the Trans-Siberian train. Because after I finished grad school at Oxford I traveled for six months, and I consciously researched stories along the way, thinking that when I got home I would write pieces, and possibly write a travel book. I wrote the train essay, and just sent it to a name on the masthead at the Times, and by some miracle they read it and published it. After that I started doing some stuff for them as a freelancer.

FB: When did you start thinking about books?

PH: When I joined the Peace Corps, I wanted to learn Chinese and become a better writer. But I didn’t think I was going to write a book about that experience. I felt I was too young, and I really was. I didn’t have the maturity to write a book, nor did I really have the material at that point. But I did take a lot of notes. It was my way of processing what was going on. I would write about experiences I had, or encounters with people, things on campus, but just in a diary format. And I tracked a lot of my students’ writing because they were such beautiful writers, and I thought they were fascinating people.

Then with six months to go, we got Internet for the first time, and I got back in touch with people. If it had been any earlier, it probably would’ve been a distraction, but at that point it was good to start thinking about the future.

He said, ‘It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.’

I had written to John McPhee throughout my time there, and he had written back often. But now we were on email, and I remember writing to him because I was thinking about applying for journalism jobs, and applying for an internship at Newsweek in Beijing. John wrote me a long letter, telling me: “You should write a book about Fuling.” Because he’d read these letters. He said, “It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.”

That was a powerful moment, because I hadn’t thought about it. Once I got that email and started thinking, it immediately made sense. When I went back through all my notes in my diaries, I realized, “I’ve really got a lot of stuff here.” But I could also see what I needed: more detailed descriptions of the landscape, and some deeper observation of the community and of the city.

FB: Did you write the book then?

PH: No, I didn’t write the book until I left. I went back to my parents’ home in Missouri, and I decided I would take about half a year. I was 29 years old and I had never held a job. I had college debt, so I felt a lot of pressure. I was applying for journalism jobs at the same time, sending out resumes to The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time, pretty much anybody who had a China bureau, and I got form rejections across the board.

When I finished the book, I sent a resume to Amazon, because they had sent me a recruiting thing when I was in Fuling. I had no idea what it was. I guess my life could’ve been pretty different. I sent them a resume, but they never wrote back.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else. After a couple weeks of this sort of thinking, I finally sent the book out to agents, and a couple of agents were interested. I went to New York and met with them, and I ended up signing with a young agent named William Clark. He sold the book to HarperCollins, and it happened very quickly. It wouldn’t be considered a big advance, but it was enough to pay off all my college loans, and suddenly I realized, “I can just go back to China on my own. I don’t need a job. I’ll just go and figure it out.” And that’s where Oracle Bones starts, in that I was just showing up, and I had a part-time assistant position at The Wall Street Journal, for $500 a month, and that gave me a base.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else.

It took a while for River Town to come out, because I took a long time editing it. But there was a lot of stuff going on that year and people were starting to get interested in China. So I very quickly had a lot of work. After about a year I got a break with National Geographic and The New Yorker. I was on the ground there for just a little more than a year when I sold my first story to The New Yorker in 2000. Then a week later I sold my second story to them, and we were pretty much off and running.

FB: It was a great time to be writing about China.

PH: Yeah, I was very lucky. I was at the right place in the right time. But it did take some faith, because it was very discouraging earlier, when I was rejected for those jobs and living at my parents’ house. I didn’t grow up with any money, so I couldn’t rely on anything else. And the college debt weighed on me.

FB: Was there anything you learned from John McPhee that influenced the way you write, or think about writing?

PH: There were huge numbers of things that I learned from him. There’s technical stuff. Probably one of the best examples is a “set piece.” He’d teach us that in his course, and show us an example from his writing. It’s something, actually, that a lot of journalists don’t learn, because you only do it in long-form writing, but it makes you think differently about the structure and organization, and that was a really useful lesson to have as a young writer. The example he gave came from his Alaska book, where he’s on his trip through the Alaska back country, and they see a bear. The thing shifts to maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words about bears, and it’s no longer in his experience. It talks about the nature of bears, things they do, and their size. There’s all this, of course beautifully written, but it’s a way of getting background information in an interesting way. It also allows you to step away so the voice doesn’t get stale.

McPhee had a lot of technical lessons, but I think the most important thing was the deeper ways of thinking about writing. One of them, for me, was that you can do fascinating creative writing as a nonfiction writer. I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing. My parents didn’t get The New Yorker, so I didn’t realize there were these other ways of writing nonfiction, and that it could be just as dynamic and fascinating as fiction, and just as artistic.

FB: How did you and Leslie choose Egypt?

PH: There are a couple things. We wanted something different from China. We wanted a different kind of challenge, and something that would give us a new perspective. We wanted to study a language that would be fascinating and rich. I like the idea of a place with a long history, and especially with ancient history because I like archeology. But we also needed it to be a place that would interest The New Yorker. I couldn’t go to Portugal, right? I mean, how many stories about Portugal are you going to write for The New Yorker? I had to be able to support my family.

We thought about India, but I didn’t like the way that there wasn’t one language that unified it, and it seemed like maybe it was too close to China in some sense. So we eventually settled on the Middle East. It was going to be Damascus or Cairo, because those are good places to study Arabic. We were leaning toward Damascus for a while, but once the Arab Spring started it was clear that Cairo was the place. But we’d never been there. We showed up in Cairo with these kids, and neither Leslie nor I had ever been to Egypt.


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FB: Having kids myself, I can’t imagine a move like that.

PH: When I look back, it’s totally crazy. Leslie and I, maybe we’re delusional or something, but we’re also pretty calm people. It helps, too, if you’re doing this with somebody else who’s totally on board. It was definitely a hard first year. I mean, I think the whole thing was hard, because it’s hard with little kids to do something like that, and it’s hard to be in the midst of this chaotic political period. It was very intense. But it’s an engaging place. The people are likable, even though Egypt has problems on a level that we had not experienced in China. There’s serious dysfunction in many aspects of Egyptian society. But it was a phenomenal experience, and I was also fortunate in that I did get to know individuals who brought some light to what was going on, and not just in the sense of understanding. They were engaging, positive people that I liked to spend time with. Sayyid, and Manu and Rifaat, our teacher. We loved it.

FB: What’s your feeling about the importance of learning the language of a place where you’re writing about or living?

PH: To me, it was fundamental. I’m not interested in writing in-depth about a place where I’m not at least doing my best to learn the language. In Egypt I didn’t become fluent like I was in Chinese, but I was very conversant, comfortable with somebody like Sayyid. I could spend a lot of time with him and his family and understand what’s going on, and that was really important to me.

FB: With Egyptian Arabic, what did you learn about Egypt that you wouldn’t have learned without that?

PH: There’s the deep religious nature of the language, and the impact of religion on the language itself. It’s fundamental to that language. I think that that’s pretty rare in the world. There aren’t that many cultures where you have the religion so deeply embedded in the language. It’s a huge part of what you’re saying when you’re using these terms all the time.

I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing.

The language also makes you think a lot about the Pharaonic world, and the ways in which it lasted or didn’t last. There are remarkably few Pharaonic words in Egyptian Arabic. It’s quite striking. There are probably more Turkic words than there are Pharaonic words. But it’s also striking that a lot of those Pharaonic words are very foundational, like the vocabulary for agriculture has a lot of Pharaonic stuff in it, and the word for women, the word for water, the word for land, the Nile, the river. These are things that have deep roots, and those survived the adoption of Arabic.

FB: I love how in both The Buried and Oracle Bones, you’re writing about the distant past and the present, and finding connections and divergences. Do you think that was one of the reasons that you were attracted to Egypt?

PH: I definitely liked the idea of this place with an incredibly rich ancient history. I think there are always some people who say, “Well, that’s not really relevant to what’s going on today.” But I don’t believe it disappears. There are too many echoes that you can see. Also, it’s not just whether things stay the same. I’m not saying that everything is static, but more what I’m saying is that the ancient Egyptians were brilliant politicians, and a lot of what they did politically we see echoes of. For example, their use of nostalgia. Even 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they were already writing nostalgically about the past, and the perfect political world of the past. That’s an effective political strategy. It’s what Trump does now. People do this all over the world.

FB: What’s your sense of the difference between how people in China and Egypt relate to that distant past?

PH: It was a huge difference. The Chinese are much more comfortable with it, and there are a couple reasons for this. The main one, of course, is they see their history as an unbroken line. It’s a very powerful thing to have that link. Egypt does not have that. The other huge difference is that the last Egyptian to declare himself Pharaoh was somewhere in the second century BC, and from that point until 1952. there was not a single Egyptian leader.

FB: What was the biggest challenge as a writer in Egypt?

PH: It was getting enough language, and being able to do that while the revolution was going on and while I had small children. I couldn’t study all the time the way I had in Fuling. In Egypt I was having to go report on stuff, and I had kids to take care of.

FB: In Oracle Bones you say that in writing narrative nonfiction stories, you’re collecting fragments and organizing them into stories. Some of your stories have arcs that span years. How do you know when a fragment, or something that you’ve collected, is part of that story?

PH: It’s an instinct you develop over time. It took me a while to get there, but by the time I left China I had a pretty good sense of this. When I was in Colorado, for example, and I was reporting on the uranium industry in my corner of the state, and I ran into a town where everybody was telling me to talk to the pharmacist, because he knew everything. That confused me, because why would a pharmacist be somebody who knows a lot? Then I talked to him and realized, well, there’s no medic, there’s no hospital anywhere near here, so he’s basically like a doctor.

I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start.

He also mentioned the story of some loner in town who died and left him half a million dollars, and at that point my instinct kicked in and I thought, “There’s something going on here.” So I left him out of the uranium story, with the idea that I was going to pursue this. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but I thought there was something there. You get those instincts over years of writing stories and books. The same thing in Egypt when the garbageman, Sayyid, kept bringing me stuff from the neighborhood and he knww so much about people.

FB: Do you typically start with an idea?

PH: It’s usually either a person or a place. It’s almost never an idea. I don’t start with themes or issues. Partly that’s my instinct, but partly it’s also deliberate because I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start. Maybe you’re fitting them into a larger narrative or idea that isn’t appropriate. So I tend to start either with a place or a person, and then the issues and the themes are secondary. They come in as I get to know the person or the place.

So I get to know Sayyid. Then I start to learn about him. Then that leads me into the informality of Cairo and the self-organization of those communities. Then it also leads me into gender relations, because I start to get to see how him and his wife interact. It leads me to issues of education, because I realize that this incredibly intelligent person is illiterate, and I get to know what his children are doing in school, and educate me in new perspectives. But it all starts with him.

FB: And now you guys are going back to China. Where are you going to be?

PH: We’re going to Chengdu. I’m going to teach for a year at Sichuan University. It’s been 20 years since I taught in Fuling.

FB: Is Chengdu near Fuling?

PH: It’s close. I wanted to teach in Fuling, but I wasn’t allowed for political reasons. I could do it in Chengdu. I’ll also be tracking down my former students and seeing what they’re up to, and revisiting Fuling.

FB: Are you going to write a sequel to River Town?

PH: I suspect some kind of follow-up book. But, I don’t know. I always wait until I’m into it before I really know what form it’s going to take. I do want to build on that experience, and I want to try to write something about how this place has changed and what it feels like on the ground, both for the people involved and for me as an observer. I’m also interested in my former students, who were a remarkable generation, because they were born around the time that Mao died, and they grew up with the changes. I’m curious to know more about their perspective on what they’ve seen and what they’ve lived through, because they’re middle-aged now.

FB: Is your plan to be there for a year?

PH: Right now, I think we’ll be there for five years. I’ll do one year of teaching, and then transition to writing full-time and reporting. Leslie is finishing her Egypt book, and then she’ll transition to writing. We also want our children to learn Chinese.

FB: How did you guys meet?

PH: I was working at The Wall Street Journal as an assistant, and she was a journalist, or a correspondent for them in China. I was the lowest guy on The Journal totem pole, and she had a real job, back in ’99. But we didn’t date then. We were in the same circle of friends, and then in 2003 we started dating.

FB: Can you say what Leslie’s Egypt book is about?

PH: It’s about women factory workers in Egypt. She reported on the factory in Alexandria. She has really good stuff, and she’s partway through it now.

FB: That will sit nicely on the shelf next to Factory Girls.

I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it.

PH: I think the two books will be interesting. My book and her book also will be interesting because we’re looking at Egypt from slightly different angles. There are some cross-themes, and it was fun to have these projects being researched at the same time. It helps, I think, both of us to have all these conversations while we’re doing research.

FB: Do you guys read each other’s work, like Joan Didion and John Dunne?

PH: Pretty late in the game. We don’t do it as we’re working. I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it. Actually, for this last book, she didn’t read it until pretty late in the process because I think she was feeling a lot of pressure for her book and trying to get it going, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to throw it on to her. She needed to focus on her thing, but I think that was a little bit of an unusual time, just part of the whole challenge of doing these projects with young children. We’re both very supportive, and it helps a lot in terms of the reporting, because each of us is learning things that help the other person.

FB: With two writers in the family, how do you balance your life and work?

PH: I guess that develops kind of naturally. It’s all we ever knew together, because both of us were writing from the time we met. The hardest thing about having two writers is probably financial, and lack of stability. Neither of us have a steady paycheck, but we had kids so late, and then both of us had the good fortune to start in China, which was a good place to get established. Though we would never write together. We have no interest in that. We are not a team of writers. It’s an individual sport, like running.

***

Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness and editor of Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology. He writes about travel, culture, language, science, outdoors, narrative, and belief for publications such as Harper’sAeonLapham’s QuarterlyThe Washington Post MagazineOutside, and the Best American Travel Writing

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

We All Die In the End, But Our Skin Looks Great: A Reading List

Image by Ben Rose (CC-BY-2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories

I am as superficial and vain as anyone who wants to look hot, fun, and flirty 900% of the time (and who achieves it maybe 20% of the time). But for 35 years of my life, my vanity was missing a piece. Then, sometime in 2016, the internet let me know that I needed to pay more attention to the largest organ in my body. Obsessive attention, in fact. I found it impossible to care that much about my skin, but my vanity did permit a certain amount of heightened interest in my birthday suit. So while I have not yet gone for diamond microdermabrasion, a fruit acid facial, a full-body salt scrub and seaweed wrap, gua sha, cupping, or a ritual beating with branches by a woman of Eastern European extraction, I have considered all of these! But why?

The answer, of course, is so that someone will love me. No one told me, specifically, that I must engage in one or all of these things or else risk a lifetime of loneliness, but the message that skin-care marketing sends is: Do this, or wither in isolation. It is demonstrably true that one can live happily and healthily with wrinkles, blemishes, dry skin, dark spots, light spots, inflammation, and visible pores on one’s epidermis. But digital marketing, that most seductive form of storytelling, got married to social media and found even more insidious ways to invade our brains. Look at enough of those headlines, subject lines, Instagram ads, sponsored tweets, and carefully crafted hashtags and calls to action and you, too, will fall into the abyss.

I had a great deal of fun researching the topic and I made it out without buying any goop from Goop, a website primarily known for selling pussy eggs to white women, which is surely some kind of tiny victory. So enjoy this array of skin-care research, stunt reportage, and opining from around the web.

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