Susan Conley's Blog, page 5

Writerhead Interview

Susan Conley is interviewed on blogger Kristin Bair O'Keefe's 'Writerhead Wednesday', a weekly feature in which a brilliant, charming, remarkable author answers three questions about her/his writerhead… a precious opportunity for looky-loos around the world to sneak into the creative noggins of talented writers and (ever so gently) muck about.

1. Describe your state of writerhead (the where, the when, the how, the what, the internal, the external).

Writerhead begins while I’m in a deep sleep, and if things are zinging that day, I’m able to keep one foot in that dreamland the whole time I’m at my writing desk. It’s a morning operation for me—I surface from a REM cycle, catch the thread of a plot line or a character quirk that’s asking for attention, nurse that in bed (maybe even scratch the idea out on a notepad) until my little people wake up. Feed the boys breakfast—walk them to school. All the while nurturing the writer head and gently resisting intrepid outside forces: no internet, no telephone, no plumber.

If I can make it to my desk with the dreaminess intact (it has something to do with energy reserves—email sucks all the vigor out of me if I do it first thing and I have nothing left in my creative bank—and something to do with hope. I am more joyful as a writer if I haven’t spent lost minutes trolling New York Times.com before nine am). I am good to go for five hours. Once I’m there I am mostly a work horse. I like long stretches of time and I don’t break except to sprint to the kitchen for a hummus bagel sandwich and then back at it.

I once taught a workshop to room of burgeoning memoir writers that was about using fiction techniques in our non-fiction. The subtitle of the workshop could have been “ass in chair” because the biggest problem most of the students in the room were having was making the time to write. I had a mantra that whole workshop: if the ass is not in the chair than the writing will not occur. But I don’t always sit at my desk. My shoulders get tired and my neck hurts, and I move to a mattress I dragged up the attic stairs by myself last fall and wrangled into the corner of my tiny study. I dressed it up as a day bed, with bright cotton pillows and Indian blankets and I often move there when I feel the dark forces circling again: the internet, the telephone, the plumber. I lie back on the pillows and whether I’m writing long-hand in my notebooks (early drafts of everything I write) or plucking away at the keyboard, this mattress sometimes allows me to hold on to another hour or so of writerhead.

2. What happens if someone/something interrupts writerhead? (A spouse, a lover, a barking dog, an electrical outage, a baby’s cry, a phone call, a leg cramp, a dried-up pen, a computer crash, etc.)

All can be lost so easily—even the best laid plans of a writing day. So I maintain a kind of fierceness to guard my time and the headspace of writerhead. It can evaporate so quickly. It all looks harmless—a husband who wants to talk through our boys’ guitar lesson schedules is standing in my attic office door. Ten minutes later he has the details he needs to go retrieve our musicians and I’ve lost the voice of my narrator for the rest of the day.

I have strategies to combat this. I don’t make eye contact with my husband when he pokes his head in, and I pretend I haven’t heard him when he coughs. I never answer the front door (whatever they need to tell me or leave me I know they will come back the next day and try again) or the phone.

My husband has told me that when I’m writing, really writing and not just moving around paragraphs in an attempt to spark something, the level of focus in my office is high. Scarily high, he reported last week, because of the kitchen faucet I left on downstairs for three hours after I grabbed a glass of water. I tell him I am unaware of the focus or the faucet because I am too busy writing. I think this new word, writerhead, might do some of the work of explaining where my brain goes. I won’t need to make frown faces at my kids when they ask me what’s for dinner while I’m still on my writer’s clock. I will just say the word writerhead to them and it will soon have its own kind of currency.

3. Using a simile or metaphor, compare your writerhead to something.

Writerhead is a small wooden dory. The work is in getting to the dock, putting on my life jacket and climbing into the boat without upsetting the things in there: the oars, the water slushing in the bilge, the bow line and stern line. Once I’m in the boat, I get right to work rowing. There can be choppy seas and the oars can get heavy and awkward. But I try to keep the boat moving—every day a little further up the coast and then back home.

This post originally appeared in Writerhead

Writerhead Interview

Susan Conley is interviewed on blogger Kristin Bair O'Keefe's 'Writerhead Wednesday', a weekly feature in which a brilliant, charming, remarkable author answers three questions about her/his writerhead… a precious opportunity for looky-loos around the world to sneak into the creative noggins of talented writers and (ever so gently) muck about.

1. Describe your state of writerhead (the where, the when, the how, the what, the internal, the external).

Writerhead begins while I'm in a deep sleep, and if things are zinging that day, I'm able to keep one foot in that dreamland the whole time I'm at my writing desk. It's a morning operation for me—I surface from a REM cycle, catch the thread of a plot line or a character quirk that's asking for attention, nurse that in bed (maybe even scratch the idea out on a notepad) until my little people wake up. Feed the boys breakfast—walk them to school. All the while nurturing the writer head and gently resisting intrepid outside forces: no internet, no telephone, no plumber.

If I can make it to my desk with the dreaminess intact (it has something to do with energy reserves—email sucks all the vigor out of me if I do it first thing and I have nothing left in my creative bank—and something to do with hope. I am more joyful as a writer if I haven't spent lost minutes trolling New York Times.com before nine am) I am good to go for five hours. Once I'm there I am mostly a work horse. I like long stretches of time and I don't break except to sprint to the kitchen for a hummus bagel sandwich and then back at it.

I once taught a workshop to room of burgeoning memoir writers that was about using fiction techniques in our non-fiction. The subtitle of the workshop could have been "ass in chair" because the biggest problem most of the students in the room were having was making the time to write. I had a mantra that whole workshop: if the ass is not in the chair than the writing will not occur. But I don't always sit at my desk. My shoulders get tired and my neck hurts, and I move to a mattress I dragged up the attic stairs by myself last fall and wrangled into the corner of my tiny study. I dressed it up as a day bed, with bright cotton pillows and Indian blankets and I often move there when I feel the dark forces circling again: the internet, the telephone, the plumber. I lie back on the pillows and whether I'm writing long-hand in my notebooks (early drafts of everything I write) or plucking away at the keyboard, this mattress sometimes allows me to hold on to another hour or so of writerhead.

2. What happens if someone/something interrupts writerhead? (A spouse, a lover, a barking dog, an electrical outage, a baby's cry, a phone call, a leg cramp, a dried-up pen, a computer crash, etc.)

All can be lost so easily—even the best laid plans of a writing day. So I maintain a kind of fierceness to guard my time and the headspace of writerhead. It can evaporate so quickly. It all looks harmless—a husband who wants to talk through our boys' guitar lesson schedules is standing in my attic office door. Ten minutes later he has the details he needs to go retrieve our musicians and I've lost the voice of my narrator for the rest of the day.

I have strategies to combat this. I don't make eye contact with my husband when he pokes his head in, and I pretend I haven't heard him when he coughs. I never answer the front door (whatever they need to tell me or leave me I know they will come back the next day and try again) or the phone.

My husband has told me that when I'm writing, really writing and not just moving around paragraphs in an attempt to spark something, the level of focus in my office is high. Scarily high, he reported last week, because of the kitchen faucet I left on downstairs for three hours after I grabbed a glass of water. I tell him I am unaware of the focus or the faucet because I am too busy writing. I think this new word, writerhead, might do some of the work of explaining where my brain goes. I won't need to make frown faces at my kids when they ask me what's for dinner while I'm still on my writer's clock. I will just say the word writerhead to them and it will soon have its own kind of currency.

3. Using a simile or metaphor, compare your writerhead to something.

Writerhead is a small wooden dory. The work is in getting to the dock, putting on my life jacket and climbing into the boat without upsetting the things in there: the oars, the water slushing in the bilge, the bow line and stern line. Once I'm in the boat, I get right to work rowing. There can be choppy seas and the oars can get heavy and awkward. But I try to keep the boat moving—every day a little further up the coast and then back home.

This post originally appeared in Writerhead Photo credit: Tony Kieffer.

The Book Tour as Love Story

In San Francisco, I loved a tall African man named Devta who wore black Buddy Holly glasses and a tan waxed overcoat. He was the easiest to love. He came from the Congo and worked as a political science professor at Berkeley. He stood at the table where I signed books after the reading and talked to me about poetry and the music of non-fiction.

In Florida, I loved a woman named Jasmine, a sixty-two year-old grandmother in a green velour sweat suit with a salt and pepper pageboy. She bought my book with cash and told me that in 1975 she’d come back from the dead. She said, “I can see into people’s souls and your soul will live down here on earth for a lot longer than you might think.”

In Seattle, I loved the bookstore manager named Steffi. She was Chinese American and aloof and wouldn’t look at me while I helped set up chairs for my reading. But after I’d read the chapter about the beautiful drawing my five-year-old, Aidan, had given me of butterflies and clouds on the morning of my mastectomy, Steffi melted and confided that she’d had breast cancer too. Thirty-one-years-old and a single mom, and now she tried to forget the disease had ever called her name.

In Portland, Oregon, I loved Catherine, who came to my reading and asked me to choose between having cancer and the new self-knowledge that came with the disease, or not having cancer at all. “Which,” she asked, “Would you pick?”

I have two small boys, I wanted to say. My answer is easy. She told me she had learned so much about herself since she got cancer that she wouldn’t give her cancer away if she could. But isn’t that just the thing, I stopped myself from saying to her, we can’t give it away, even if we want to. I said none of this to Catherine. Because it was my job as an author to listen to her.

In Boston I loved George, a fifty-five year-old wooden rocking chair maker with a thin mustache and a shaved head and a sturdy build. He tapped me on the shoulder while I was signing books in the lobby of the university and asked, “Do I have permission to say something to you about cancer?”

I wanted to love George. But I paused. I said, “Are your words going to make me sad?” It was a book festival. People were buying homemade fruit smoothies and talking to all the other authors and did we really have to talk about cancer right now?

George said, “Yes. What I need to tell you might make you sad.” But he really wanted to tell me anyway, so I braced myself because I could tell George needed to be heard. And maybe this is what my public speaking coach, Harlo, had meant when he said, “Love your audience.” Maybe he meant to listen to them.

George put his hand on my shoulder again and said, “Don’t ever think the pain you feel in your back is really back pain, or that your headache is really a headache. Always suspect cancer. Your body has already grown cancer once. I lost the love of my life. She was told she had a torn muscle for years. When she died, the tumors had spread to her brain.”Hundreds of people milled about at the festival and talked and laughed and bought more books and had their photos taken with authors, but the sounds in the room slowed and the people faded. I wanted to tell George I can’t live like that. We locked eyes for a short moment and then I didn’t say anything. I just nodded, and it was just George and me in our own small lobby of grief.

My friend, Harlo, is a really good speaking coach. He has unorthodox methods. He once had me throw a nerf ball to him in my kitchen, and each time I threw it I had to say something I was afraid of about my upcoming book tour. I said, “I’m afraid to talk about my cancer to strangers,” and threw the nerf ball hard at him.

Then Harlo translated my words into what he thought I was really thinking. He said, “You’re worried about being embarrassed.” It went on like this for close to thirty minutes. I didn’t like it so much. Then we sat down in chairs across from one another knees to knees in my living room and I had to repeat, “My name is Susan Conley and I am a writer.” I liked this even less.

“Open your voice,” Harlo said then. “Open your heart.” But I had a hard time believing any of this work with him would help relax me up on the real stage. Harlo told me the first thing the audience at my readings would want to know was if they needed to take care of me up at the podium. He said if I could open to them and show them I was okay, then they’d relax and listen to the story I’d come to tell.

He said the second thing the audience would want to know was if they mattered to me. Which meant I had to look at them. Each of them. And take them in with my eyes, and this is when he said I had to love them. I cringed when he used the word love. But he explained the love wouldn’t be the kind I feel for my husband or children, but a real love all the same—a kind that didn’t need anything back. He said if I could find a way to love the rooms full of strangers, then some kind of alchemy would go down between me and the audience, and then my tour would take on a life of its own. A good life. One that wouldn’t fill me with the dread I was feeling before the tour started.

He said, “You will be giving them a story and who doesn’t like to be read to? Right now most people in the world are dying for a good story. Stay in your story. And love them.”

And so I did. Even when I got to San Diego and a woman named Sally was there with her shopping bags full of old clothes. The bookstore manager pointed her out to me and said, “Sally comes often. She’s homeless. She may ask a few hard questions but she means well.”
But Sally wasn’t my problem in San Diego. I could love Sally. The trick was in loving the deranged man who stood up near the end of the chapter, just when I’d gotten to the part about how the homing pigeon that had flown into the window of our Beijing high-rise had lived through the night. The man stood up and moved towards me and yelled, “Boring!”

It was as if he had a megaphone. “B-O-R-I-N-G!” He yelled as loud as he could possibly yell. And then two security teenagers were on him and whisked him away. I screamed. It was more like a shriek. And from surprise, not anger. Was I supposed to love this man too? Was this some kind of test?

I shrieked but then I smiled at the audience and they smiled back, and we all stayed in the scene with the homing pigeon and my mother and my boys and my cancer and how you never know when a bird or a disease is going to fly into your window. I didn’t let the man steal the reading. I finished the chapter. I won the audience back. They didn’t need to take care of me, even while we listened to the security guards scuffle with the yeller down the hall. What Harlo had said proved true. I stayed in the story and the audience relaxed. It was that alchemy I’d been hoping for, the one Harlo promised me was out there and some age-old covenant had been fulfilled: I’ll tell you my story if you will stop and listen.

The Book Tour as Love Story

In San Francisco, I loved a tall African man named Devta who wore black Buddy Holly glasses and a tan waxed overcoat. He was the easiest to love. He came from the Congo and worked as a political science professor at Berkeley. He stood at the table where I signed books after the reading and talked to me about poetry and the music of non-fiction.

In Florida, I loved a woman named Jasmine, a sixty-two year-old grandmother in a green velour sweat suit with a salt and pepper pageboy. She bought my book with cash and told me that in 1975 she'd come back from the dead. She said, "I can see into people's souls and your soul will live down here on earth for a lot longer than you might think."

In Seattle, I loved the bookstore manager named Steffi. She was Chinese American and aloof and wouldn't look at me while I helped set up chairs for my reading. But after I'd read the chapter about the beautiful drawing my five-year-old, Aidan, had given me of butterflies and clouds on the morning of my mastectomy, Steffi melted and confided that she'd had breast cancer too. Thirty-one-years-old and a single mom, and now she tried to forget the disease had ever called her name.

In Portland, Oregon, I loved Catherine, who came to my reading and asked me to choose between having cancer and the new self-knowledge that came with the disease, or not having cancer at all. "Which," she asked, "Would you pick?"

I have two small boys, I wanted to say. My answer is easy. She told me she had learned so much about herself since she got cancer that she wouldn't give her cancer away if she could. But isn't that just the thing, I stopped myself from saying to her, we can't give it away, even if we want to. I said none of this to Catherine. Because it was my job as an author to listen to her.

In Boston I loved George, a fifty-five year-old wooden rocking chair maker with a thin mustache and a shaved head and a sturdy build. He tapped me on the shoulder while I was signing books in the lobby of the university and asked, "Do I have permission to say something to you about cancer?"

I wanted to love George. But I paused. I said, "Are your words going to make me sad?" It was a book festival. People were buying homemade fruit smoothies and talking to all the other authors and did we really have to talk about cancer right now?

George said, "Yes. What I need to tell you might make you sad." But he really wanted to tell me anyway, so I braced myself because I could tell George needed to be heard. And maybe this is what my public speaking coach, Harlo, had meant when he said, "Love your audience." Maybe he meant to listen to them. 

George put his hand on my shoulder again and said, "Don't ever think the pain you feel in your back is really back pain, or that your headache is really a headache. Always suspect cancer. Your body has already grown cancer once. I lost the love of my life. She was told she had a torn muscle for years. When she died, the tumors had spread to her brain." Hundreds of people milled about at the festival and talked and laughed and bought more books and had their photos taken with authors, but the sounds in the room slowed and the people faded. I wanted to tell George I can't live like that. We locked eyes for a short moment and then I didn't say anything. I just nodded, and it was just George and me in our own small lobby of grief.

My friend, Harlo, is a really good speaking coach. He has unorthodox methods. He once had me throw a nerf ball to him in my kitchen, and each time I threw it I had to say something I was afraid of about my upcoming book tour. I said, "I'm afraid to talk about my cancer to strangers," and threw the nerf ball hard at him.

Then Harlo translated my words into what he thought I was really thinking. He said, "You're worried about being embarrassed." It went on like this for close to thirty minutes. I didn't like it so much. Then we sat down in chairs across from one another knees to knees in my living room and I had to repeat, "My name is Susan Conley and I am a writer." I liked this even less.

"Open your voice," Harlo said then. "Open your heart." But I had a hard time believing any of this work with him would help relax me up on the real stage. Harlo told me the first thing the audience at my readings would want to know was if they needed to take care of me up at the podium. He said if I could open to them and show them I was okay, then they'd relax and listen to the story I'd come to tell.

He said the second thing the audience would want to know was if they mattered to me. Which meant I had to look at them. Each of them. And take them in with my eyes, and this is when he said I had to love them. I cringed when he used the word love. But he explained the love wouldn't be the kind I feel for my husband or children, but a real love all the same—a kind that didn't need anything back. He said if I could find a way to love the rooms full of strangers, then some kind of alchemy would go down between me and the audience, and then my tour would take on a life of its own. A good life. One that wouldn't fill me with the dread I was feeling before the tour started.

He said, "You will be giving them a story and who doesn't like to be read to? Right now most people in the world are dying for a good story. Stay in your story. And love them."

And so I did. Even when I got to San Diego and a woman named Sally was there with her shopping bags full of old clothes. The bookstore manager pointed her out to me and said, "Sally comes often. She's homeless. She may ask a few hard questions but she means well." 

But Sally wasn't my problem in San Diego. I could love Sally. The trick was in loving the deranged man who stood up near the end of the chapter, just when I'd gotten to the part about how the homing pigeon that had flown into the window of our Beijing high-rise had lived through the night. The man stood up and moved towards me and yelled, "Boring!"

It was as if he had a megaphone. "B-O-R-I-N-G!" He yelled as loud as he could possibly yell. And then two security teenagers were on him and whisked him away. I screamed. It was more like a shriek. And from surprise, not anger. Was I supposed to love this man too? Was this some kind of test?

I shrieked but then I smiled at the audience and they smiled back, and we all stayed in the scene with the homing pigeon and my mother and my boys and my cancer and how you never know when a bird or a disease is going to fly into your window. I didn't let the man steal the reading. I finished the chapter. I won the audience back. They didn't need to take care of me, even while we listened to the security guards scuffle with the yeller down the hall. What Harlo had said proved true. I stayed in the story and the audience relaxed. It was that alchemy I'd been hoping for, the one Harlo promised me was out there and some age-old covenant had been fulfilled: I'll tell you my story if you will stop and listen.

 

Photo credit: Tony Kieffer.

The Beijing Train Station

When Tony and the boys and I went back to China this past June, the trip was part homecoming, part book tour and part detective work. What I wanted to uncover were the pieces of China that we’d missed the most since we moved away. Was it the food? The dumplings that were steamed or pan-fried or boiled in soups, and filled with shrimp and tofu and egg and chive? Home-made knife noodles that Mao Ayi cut with the scissors in our kitchen and served with small bowls of chili sauce? The warm baozi rolls with red bean paste? The fresh ginger tea with sugar?

Was it the long ribbon of traffic at morning rush hour? Or the curtain of air pollution? (How had we lived in that air for almost three years?) Was it the boys’ elementary school and their kind, intuitive first-grade teacher? (After three hours visiting the classroom, Thorne told me he was ready to move back to China for good).

Was it the mid-rise apartment complex where we’d lived on the 8th floor? I will only speak for myself when I say I missed the lives we led inside that apartment but not the apartment itself. I missed a four-year-old named Aidan who drew neon pink stick figures with triangular bodies and titled one, “Mommy and Daddy holding hands.” And a six-year-old named Thorne who played badminton in the hall and learned to read.

It turns out that the thing we missed most of all in China was not a thing but a real, live person named Lao Du. Our Chinese grandfather, slash driver extraordinaire of the Blue Buick Minivan, slash gourmet Chinese chef. He was our door into China. He was family. We saw him more than we saw any other person during those Beijing years. He taught us Chinese songs and Chinese recipes and he taught us about his very big heart.

The last time Thorne or Aidan or I had seen Lao Du was a year and a half ago, when he’d put on a cooking show in our Beijing kitchen, hours before we flew home to the States for good. In June we took him out for dumplings. He met us at Ding Tai Fung after he’d gotten off work driving for a Chinese family. He sat at the round table in the corner of the restaurant, put Aidan in his lap and together they recited the Chinese tongue twister about the forty stone lions.

Lao Du kept touching Thorne and Aidan’s cheeks and patting their heads during the meal to make sure they were real. When we’d moved home, we’d told Lao Du that the boys would be back to China. But I don’t think he fully believed us until they were there, eating dumplings. The news of the night was that Lao Du was a grandfather. Xiao Du and his wife had brought home a baby boy. So this was part of the new calm I could see on Lao Du’s face. He and Mrs. Du lived with the baby and cooked for the baby and held the baby and the baby seemed to be making Lao Du deeply happy.

After the dumplings, we got to see Lao Du many more times in Beijing. Tony would call him in the morning, tell him what our day looked like and then whenever he could break from his job, he’d drive over and meet us for food or talk. On our last day, we said our goodbyes to him outside our hotel. I hugged him this time, even though he is not a hugger, and he did not flinch. Maybe he’s warmed to hugging. Because then he hugged Thorne and picked him off the ground. And then he hugged Aidan and would not put him down.

It was four in the afternoon. The boys and Tony and I got in a taxi to the Westin Hotel for a book talk I was giving. Afterwards, Xiao Du drove us to the Beijing train station to catch an overnight train south to the Shaolin Temple. The Beijing station is the largest one in Asia and sits far away on a hill, and one by one Tony and Aidan and Thorne and I fell asleep in the van, heads bobbing.

After a half hour, Xiao Du slowed and pulled over on a busy side street. There were vendors selling sweet potatoes on the sidewalk and a woman with large slices of hami melons on sticks. Maybe the van was broken? Or maybe we were lost? I sat up and tried to see out the window. There was Lao Du, smiling on the curb in white tube socks, running sneakers and shorts with heavy plastic bags in both hands.

“Lao Du?” I called his name and he beamed. Then Xiao Du jumped out and pulled the van door open so Lao Du could lean inside and say in Chinese, “Did you really think I would let you go to the train station without me? I live right around the corner. You couldn’t pass by my house without stopping.”

And he’d brought snacks for us on the train ride. Lots of them—an enormous bag of apples and a bag of oranges (the little ones with green stems that the boys love), and lychees (Aidan’s favorite), plus an entire box of 100 Chinese Kit Kats and another box of something that looked like an American whoopie pie.

Lao Du, I began to say in Chinese. You didn’t have to. You shouldn’t of. But he said no, no, no and crammed himself into the back seat with Aidan and Thorne and the four black roller bags. Then he led us in a round of ‘Little Peng You’—the Chinese folk song about making friends. He seemed so much happier than our leave taking a year and a half ago when we’d all cried at the airport.

Thorne and Aidan were in China again, and I think Lao Du realized the story of himself and the two boys from Portland, Maine will have more chapters. He directed his own son to pull over to the curb outside the train station. And then he stood there in the road, traffic moving all around him and did not leave until he’d seen us inside the station door.

The Beijing Train Station

When Tony and the boys and I went back to China this past June, the trip was part homecoming, part book tour and part detective work. What I wanted to uncover were the pieces of China that we'd missed the most since we moved away. Was it the food? The dumplings that were steamed or pan-fried or boiled in soups, and filled with shrimp and tofu and egg and chive? Home-made knife noodles that Mao Ayi cut with the scissors in our kitchen and served with small bowls of chili sauce? The warm baozi rolls with red bean paste? The fresh ginger tea with sugar?

Was it the long ribbon of traffic at morning rush hour? Or the curtain of air pollution? (How had we lived in that air for almost three years?) Was it the boys' elementary school and their kind, intuitive first-grade teacher? (After three hours visiting the classroom, Thorne told me he was ready to move back to China for good).

Was it the mid-rise apartment complex where we'd lived on the 8th floor? I will only speak for myself when I say I missed the lives we led inside that apartment but not the apartment itself. I missed a four-year-old named Aidan who drew neon pink stick figures with triangular bodies and titled one, "Mommy and Daddy holding hands." And a six-year-old named Thorne who played badminton in the hall and learned to read.

It turns out that the thing we missed most of all in China was not a thing but a real, live person named Lao Du. Our Chinese grandfather, slash driver extraordinaire of the Blue Buick Minivan, slash gourmet Chinese chef. He was our door into China. He was family. We saw him more than we saw any other person during those Beijing years. He taught us Chinese songs and Chinese recipes and he taught us about his very big heart.

The last time Thorne or Aidan or I had seen Lao Du was a year and a half ago, when he'd put on a cooking show in our Beijing kitchen, hours before we flew home to the States for good. In June we took him out for dumplings. He met us at Ding Tai Fung after he'd gotten off work driving for a Chinese family. He sat at the round table in the corner of the restaurant, put Aidan in his lap and together they recited the Chinese tongue twister about the forty stone lions.

Lao Du kept touching Thorne and Aidan's cheeks and patting their heads during the meal to make sure they were real. When we'd moved home, we'd told Lao Du that the boys would be back to China. But I don't think he fully believed us until they were there, eating dumplings. The news of the night was that Lao Du was a grandfather. Xiao Du and his wife had brought home a baby boy. So this was part of the new calm I could see on Lao Du's face. He and Mrs. Du lived with the baby and cooked for the baby and held the baby and the baby seemed to be making Lao Du deeply happy.

After the dumplings, we got to see Lao Du many more times in Beijing. Tony would call him in the morning, tell him what our day looked like and then whenever he could break from his job, he'd drive over and meet us for food or talk. On our last day, we said our goodbyes to him outside our hotel. I hugged him this time, even though he is not a hugger, and he did not flinch. Maybe he's warmed to hugging. Because then he hugged Thorne and picked him off the ground. And then he hugged Aidan and would not put him down.

It was four in the afternoon. The boys and Tony and I got in a taxi to the Westin Hotel for a book talk I was giving. Afterwards, Xiao Du drove us to the Beijing train station to catch an overnight train south to the Shaolin Temple. The Beijing station is the largest one in Asia and sits far away on a hill, and one by one Tony and Aidan and Thorne and I fell asleep in the van, heads bobbing.

After a half hour, Xiao Du slowed and pulled over on a busy side street. There were vendors selling sweet potatoes on the sidewalk and a woman with large slices of hami melons on sticks. Maybe the van was broken? Or maybe we were lost? I sat up and tried to see out the window. There was Lao Du, smiling on the curb in white tube socks, running sneakers and shorts with heavy plastic bags in both hands.

"Lao Du?" I called his name and he beamed. Then Xiao Du jumped out and pulled the van door open so Lao Du could lean inside and say in Chinese, "Did you really think I would let you go to the train station without me? I live right around the corner. You couldn't pass by my house without stopping."

And he'd brought snacks for us on the train ride. Lots of them—an enormous bag of apples and a bag of oranges (the little ones with green stems that the boys love), and lychees (Aidan's favorite), plus an entire box of 100 Chinese Kit Kats and another box of something that looked like an American whoopie pie.

Lao Du, I began to say in Chinese. You didn't have to. You shouldn't of. But he said no, no, no and crammed himself into the back seat with Aidan and Thorne and the four black roller bags. Then he led us in a round of 'Little Peng You'—the Chinese folk song about making friends. He seemed so much happier than our leave taking a year and a half ago when we'd all cried at the airport.

Thorne and Aidan were in China again, and I think Lao Du realized the story of himself and the two boys from Portland, Maine will have more chapters. He directed his own son to pull over to the curb outside the train station. And then he stood there in the road, traffic moving all around him and did not leave until he'd seen us inside the station door.

Helen's Cottage

In the 1970s my parents bought a Maine summer cottage from a tiny bird of a woman named Helen. She was the type of maverick that the coast of Maine is still lucky to attract, a stalwart who loved the land and lived alone, deep in the woods, without running water or electricity every summer of her life until she died there.

Buying the camp was the biggest financial stretch any set of parents on a shoestring can make in one lifetime, but what a wondrous stretch it was for my mom and dad. There were actually three cottages in their purchase and sale agreement — all part of a boys' camp that Helen's parents built in the fishing warren of West Point, mid-way up the coast. (Her parents had fallen in love with a fish shack on their honeymoon to West Point and jumped at the chance to buy it, plus twenty acres of Norway pines the shack sat on.)

The year was 1900 when the camp opened for business and the city boys who Helen's father taught in New York began making the pilgrimage north. Helen inherited the camp and began to rename things. The dorm became the Waldorf. The house Helen lived in all those summers as a director's daughter became known as the Castle.

I can tell you all this because I got to meet Helen in a series of Sundays back in 1978 while she decided if my parents and my brother and sister and I were up to snuff. That is to say, were we the right flavor of Mainers to sell her camp to?

 

She had stipulations. We had to be Mainers, and we had to swear to never ever build condos on the land. And we had to have the right names. So far, so good, but when Helen met my mother, a tall schoolteacher from away named Thorne, we hit a roadblock. Until Helen renamed my mother, too.

"Long-stemmed American Rose" was the full name she gave my mother. Sometimes she just called my Mom, "Rose," for short. Helen explained she couldn't sell the place to a mother named Thorne. "Too prickly," she said. "Too hard."

I was eight when we took a right turn down the long dirt road for the first time and made our way to the Waldorf. It was a scorching July day and Helen, who grew more eccentric with each passing year, had recently had her pine floors painted black and had permanently closed the thick velvet curtains to keep out the heat.

On that day she served us orange sherbet in ornate, pink parfait glasses. I remember how dark the dining room seemed after the blinding light of the fat July sun. Until my eyes adjusted, I could hardly make her out in all the finery — stockings and heels, plus a mink stole. Then Helen said she wanted to see us swim. "Could we do that for her?" Why yes, we could.

There was a metal ladder bolted to the granite face of the cliff. My brother and I slowly climbed into the water and hung off the last rung, bobbing in the surge. Then Helen clapped her small hands and laughed and said, "Yes, yes, yes."

What my parents bought that year were the old cottages with their sturdy bones, and the tall, narrow outhouses like sentries in the woods. But I've come to think of the purchase as more of an open adoption. Because I'm not sure that Maine summerhouses ever really get new owners. Nor am I convinced that Helen ever left the camp — perhaps we're just on very good terms with her ghost. Call it a kind of collective stewardship, a cabal of all the past owners of the houses and cabins and camps and cottages who loved the place as much as we do.

There's a long, shallow, white porcelain sink in the Castle where I gave both my boys their summer baths. Toddlers and ten-year-olds and a posse of older cousins roam the land and launch cannonballs off the float. Every summer we pull into the drive and unpack our cars and begin a vacation of the mind. We unplug until we're grounded again and the past and future and present begin to conflate.

Helen gave us this — plus a whole lot of wicker furniture that she also rashly painted black. There are photographs that hang in the kitchen of the Waldorf, snapshots of the troupes of campers who came before us. Here is one of the boys smiling on the buckling wooden steps. Here are a half-dozen of them diving off the rocks into the glinting sea.

 

This post originally appeared in Down East Magazine.

Martial Arts

During our second week in China this past June, Tony and Thorne and Aidan and I took the overnight train from Beijing to Zhongzou and then drove in a mini-van to the small village of Song Shan in Dengfeng. We were there to visit the Shaolin Temple that sits in this valley along with dozens of Kung Fu schools. We'd come with out Beijing friends Ken and Vanessa and Eric and David to do some of our own family style martial arts training.

Ken and Vanessa are originally from Taiwan and it's always amazing to move through China with them, because even though they "look" Chinese and "speak" Chinese, they are often as perplexed by the byzantine rules and traffic patterns of China as we are. We all climbed off the overnight train at dawn. It was a local not an express train—something we'd missed in the fine print. Bleary-eyed we drove to the Temple, to a simple guesthouse up a hill across a footbridge a ten-minute walk from the Temple grounds. We unloaded the bags, paid a fee and toured the ancient temples and burial sites. But the real monastery lies beyond gates that tourists never seem to get through. The real monks live inside there. We never got closer than a camera's view away.

Shaolin is known as the birthplace of Chinese Kung Fu and enormous boarding schools prosper in the valley—each for three thousand boys or five thousand or more. What the kids seem to do all day is practice martial arts. It's like nothing I had ever imagined until I saw it. There are these vast open wheat fields and dirt plateaus where the boys go out with their spears and their swords and their whips and other devices and practice until their hands and feet are brusied and bloodied⎯all without their families. Without their mothers. Or sisters. Or grandmothers. I kept hearing from teachers and headmasters that the boys get to go home once a year.

What do you do after Kung Fu school? I kept asking Vanessa while we walked the school grounds, and she kept looking at me like she didn't understand. Lots of things she said. They can do lots of things⎯just like when you are done with vocational school or even college in the States. They can be bodyguards. They can be stars of the Chinese acrobatic troupes.

But tens of thousands of them? There are so many of these boys⎯all following a dream of being a star performer? Or maybe these schools are so much better than a farming life in the boys' empty home villages. I do not know. But what I saw was what looked like a generation of boys being brought up by themselves and by monks who walked around with long, wooden switches. I feared those switches got used for things other than posture. There were hundreds of big Chinese tour busses parked outside the temple and I kept wondering what the Chinese tourists had come to see⎯a glimpse of the real, old, Buddhist way of life? Some trace of spirituality in a culture that often seems obsessed with consumption in the big cities?

What happened on the afternoon before we left was that we sat in our van, waiting for Tony and Ken to finish talking to the headmaster at one of the bigger schools. Earlier, during the tea ceremony, Vanessa had asked this headmaster in Mandarin if the teachers at his school engaged in corporal punishment, and he had said very clearly, no. That was the afternoon our boys—Thorne and Aidan and Eric and David—were taken to "train" in Kung Fu with some of these teachers and our boys loved it—kick boxing and punching and working on postures with the long, wooden stick. But when I went to find them, a large group of the schoolboys had gathered around them smiling and laughing and watching, and Thorne and Aidan got too self-conscious so they stopped.

We said our goodbyes then and our thank-yous and we all got in the van⎯Vanessa on her cell phone, me and the boys and Eric and David. Hundreds of the boys in the school were lining up in formation in one of the fields below. The boys were subdivided into different groups⎯probably by dorm rooms, and they stood in uniform in perfect formation, with a leader at the front. I kept telling Thorne and Aidan to watch because it was great to see how the school operated. The moment seemed ceremonial.

Older leaders of the school came out in uniform too⎯all dressed in these grey pantaloons and tops. All with shaved heads. And then a boy was called up to the front of everyone. And asked to do a push up. Look I said to Thorne⎯watch. He is showing everyone how to do the perfect push up.

But then I got a bad feeling. A teacher with one of the long wooden sticks came up in front of the boy and suddenly starting beating him. He raised the stick above his head and brought it down on the boy. We were all watching. All transfixed. And then I was yelling at everyone in the van not to watch! Don't watch! I kept yelling and yet I couldn't help steal looks because I couldn't believe what I saw. The boy was hit many times and he lay on the ground in pain and then four other boys came up and positioned him flat again and held him there so he could receive more beatings. Then they carried that boy away and called up others. And one after the other these boys were beaten also. None for as long or as hard as the first.

We asked the kung fu teachers in the parking lot near us what the beatings were for⎯and they said it was because some of the boys had been caught fighting in the dormitory. Just then Ken and Tony came back from their walk with the headmaster and they watched the beatings also for a moment. Then Ken said he was raised with corporal punishment in Taiwan, and he didn't seem very surprised by the beating. I don't think the headmaster was entirely comfortable that we had chanced upon a beating. He took in the scene and then made his way back quietly to his office inside. As our van rounded the last bend in the school driveway, I looked back through the van window. The boys were still in formation. The beatings seemed over. The afternoon martial arts sessions were about to begin.

China Stories

We have been back from China a week. One short week to climb out of the jet lag and blink at the sun and the explosion of green that is this summer in Maine. Our trip to China was about seeing our old friend Lao Wu and about my boys reconnecting with their friends at school in Beijing and about my book readings and about learning Kung Fu.



We went to Shanghai and Beijing and Hong Kong for the book and I did readings and talks and high teas and workshops and interviews. One interview resonated more than the rest. It was when a Chinese reporter named Vincent picked up my book and asked me to be a guest on his popular Beijing radio show. He calls the show "China Voices" and it's English speaking, on China International Radio.



He and I did a one-hour interview that was riveting for me because it felt like I was as close as I would ever get to some kind of understanding of my book in China. What Vincent said was that there was "thinking" going on in my book: "Thinking on China and on what 'The Real China' means." We had both already agreed I was a China neophyte. I'd made sure I established that from the start—that I was no China expert and that my book was told through a very small frame: a foreign mother with two small boys and the people they meet. The things they see.



Vincent also established that there was no "real China" in the vast country we all know as the People's Republic, but that it was a treat for him to read the stories of the several Chinese people I trace in my book. He said the actual years I had spent in China gave me enough street cred to tell these stories and that together they got close to a glimpse of a moment of "real China."



I said that so many Americans I knew were hungry for China stories—for "day in the life in China" and for human faces to put on the media stereotypes. Then Vincent said, "We never see the 'thinking' American here in China. We never see thoughtful China stories. We only see the non-thinking American. The stereotype." I nodded. He added, "We are always thinking in China. We are intellectuals—and we don't know this about Americans. That they are thinking."



Not thinking? I thought to myself. What I wanted to say was, Vincent—I can't seem to get through an hour of a day without overthinking everything! And that I can't separate so many of the Americans I know—my friends, the people I work with, the people I meet on the street, from their thinking. And one thing they are thinking a whole lot on is China—where to place it on the map they keep in their mind. Because China grows so fast now it is becoming hard to keep track of. Hard to put boundary lines around.



The interview with Vincent went on and touched on other things in my book: cancer in China and honesty in memoir and on motherhood. But I was still back in that sentence Vincent had said about the thinking. I wanted to tell him that we don't see the "thinking Chinese" in our media here in the States either. We don't often see nuanced "American" stories told by Chinese. What Vincent underlined for me was a cultural standoff of sorts—a line in the sand around this notion of "thinking" in China and in the States and who did it and who didn't and how both countries have plenty of people making rash judgments, but there is also a great deal of reflection and lots of stories. Amazing stories. Thank goodness. Vincent and I got to spend an hour on Beijing radio talking about a few of my China stories—simple narratives about the good people I'd met in the capital and I was grateful for it.

Tourists in Beijing

We're going back to Beijing one week from today. China, we keep saying in our kitchen and in our driveway and in our car. We are going back to China. This time as real tourists. And as ex-pats looking to reclaim some pieces of our past life. Because Beijing is where we left first grade behind. And second grade and kindergarden too. Is there any way to get our hands around those years again?

Here is what the boys say they're excited to do in China: 

#1. See Lao Wu. He has a new job driving a Chinese family that he's happy with. We're planning to take him to dumplings on Sunday in Old Beijing—Lao Wu and hopefully his whole family. The last time Tony was in China, Lao Wu was kind enough to give him an entire smoked duck as a parting gift—head and beak and feet and all. Lao Wu packed it in a plastic bag and then Tony was able to get it through security and on to the plane and all the way to Maine where I screamed in surprise when he presented it to me in our kitchen.

#2. Hike the Great Wall and then take the metal toboggan chute down the Great Wall in the town of Mutianyu. It's fun and a little bit scary because it's fast and steep and you control your own speed. Maybe Thorne will finally be old enough to take his own sled, though I cringe at the thought of him sailing off the chute down into the green forest below.

#3. See friends. Thorne's best friend, Ji-Ho, has moved back to Korea, but we're planning to meet him for a sleepover in Beijing on Saturday after he flies in from Seoul. What an amazing thing for Ji-Ho's parents to rearrange their lives so the boys get this one day and night together. Aidan's best friend, Jinn, is still in Beijing, and Aidan will head over there as soon as we land.

#4. Swim. And this should be no problem either. Pools are big in China and I'm sure our hotel has one. It's not lost on me that my boys finessed their swimming strokes in the land-locked capital of Beijing—that there on the edge of the dry Ghobi Desert is where they learned the backstroke and the finer points of freestyle. A British friend in China told me she thought Mao loved swimming and that this is why there were so many pools in China. And so many swimmers.

#5. I'm excited to watch the boys watch China. And I'm bracing for that wild juxtaposition of old and new that goes on in every corner of the country: uber highrises stacking up one against the other while old men pedal watermelons through the streets on rickshaw bikes.

I wonder how fast the boys' Mandarin will come back. I wonder if I have any of the language left in me? I wonder if Thorne will sing once he gets to Beijing like he did the first time? And if his dislocation anxiety will be triggered again? And then if he sings, I wonder what songs he'll sing. I wonder how much Aidan will remember of his Beijing life. He was four when we moved to China. But he has a thing about holding on to the past—doesn't forget much. I wonder how much either boy will recall that our time in China was also our time in cancer. I doubt either of them will connect those dots while we're there. And I wonder how much I will connect. Or choose to think about. The mind is a funny thing. But if the boys do make the connection, I'm ready. Because we're going back to China—but not back to disease. Back to China and all that is baffling and amazing and fascinating about that vast place. It will be a kind of homecoming.