Pauline A. Chen's Blog
September 6, 2012
Surviving Cancer and Writing The Red Chamber
Two weeks after giving birth to my first child Leo, I was forced to confront the realization that I was not recovering as I should. I was struggling with the ordinary challenges of caring for a newborn: the bleeding nipples, the sore bottom, the four a.m. feedings. My husband Oliver and I were both on research leave from the small liberal arts college in Ohio where we taught. I was supposed to be working on a book about ninth century Chinese poetry for tenure, but found myself too tired to turn on my computer. I complained to my doctor of diarrhea, abdominal pain, and low appetite, but she assured me that these were not unusual symptoms after giving birth (Much later, I learned from reading the medical report that she had dismissed my complaints as “post-partum depression.”) The thirty pounds that I had put on during pregnancy melted effortlessly away, but I was too frightened to be pleased. Even though I had not grown up reading the Bible, unbidden a barely remembered quote sounded in my mind: “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...” I had read about heroines in nineteenth century novels going into fatal “declines” after childbirth. Could this be happening to me?
It was almost a relief to learn, when I was at last given an ultrasound, that a seven-inch mass was growing where my left ovary should have been, its presence masked by my pregnancy. It was a primitive germ cell tumor, a highly aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Within twenty-four hours I was on an oncology ward being prepped for emergency surgery. What followed was a descent into a maelstrom: a forty-hour-a-week chemo regimen, multiple surgeries and hospitalizations, all with a three-week-old who was still waking three or four times in a single night.
While Oliver orchestrated my medical care, it was my mother who stepped into the breach, moving from New York to Ohio to stay with us. On top of caring for Leo, she shopped, did the laundry, cooked and cleaned for the whole family, while devising special meals that I, nauseated from chemo, could manage to get down. When I was forced to go to a hospital in another state for more advanced treatment, she followed me with Leo, at age sixty setting up a new apartment and adapting to the life of a single mother in an unfamiliar town. My mother was no stranger to medical emergencies. She had left Taiwan for the United States in her early twenties to enter a Ph.D. program in Pharmacology, but dropped out after her master’s degree when my older sister was born with congenital defects in the kidneys requiring numerous hospitalizations. Although my sister’s condition stabilized, my mother continued to stay at home after I, and then my brother, were born. It was the most idyllic period of our childhood. My mother read and sang to us, taught us piano, making clothes and knitting us ponchos in her spare time. I remember returning home from kindergarten for lunch and luxuriating in the privilege of having my mother all to myself (my sister was still at school, my brother napping.) Her kitchen was equipped with only the most basic necessities, so she would make my favorite lunch, American cheese melted on bread, by turning the toaster on its side. When my brother reached school age, my mother qualified for her pharmacist’s license and spent the next thirty years working in hospitals. Although the work was challenging, it did not offer the same scope for her creativity and elan, and I remember her coming home frazzled and exhausted, dropping into a chair to kick off her heels and strip her hose the moment she walked in. Unlike my father, a professor of engineering, my mother did not especially enjoy her job, and had retired to be available for babysitting as soon as her first grandchild was born.
At the beginning of my treatment I did chemo as an outpatient at the euphemistically named “Infusion Suite,” which looked at first glance like an old-fashioned beauty parlor, with women reading magazines on fake-leather loungers, until you saw that everyone was hooked up to IV’s. As I began to suffer from complications, I began to be drawn more and more into the strange netherworld of the hospital. I remember waiting for an emergency X-ray at 1 a.m., in line behind a young black man, apparently the victim of a gunshot wound, who lay moaning on his gurney unable to move. In the hospital, distinctions between people—race, age, class--were reduced to one: sick, or well. Those who were sick wanted nothing but to become the other kind, while those who were not sick armed themselves with a sort of bull-headed insistence that they would never become the weak, ailing people whom they cared for.
At first, I would go stir-crazy after weeks spent in the hospital, and would explore the furthest reaches of the medical compound. I would watch interns and visitors in the hospital cafeteria, envying their ability to eat (I was suffering from intestinal blockages that prevented me from digesting food.) I would drag my IV pole down little-frequented corridors of administrative offices and labs. As I grew weaker, my world contracted to just my ward (9 West, Gynecological Oncology), and then eventually my room, and then my bed. Later, when scans seemed to show that my tumor was not responding to chemo, I felt that the entire focus of my vision was narrowing to a single sliver: the razor edge between life and death. I’ve come to think that in the course of life-threatening illness, many cancer patients must cross over that line. Our arteries are connected to tubes, which pour rivers of poison into our flaccid, unresisting bodies. We lie naked and unconscious on metal tables, cut open with sharp metal, our heart rates and body temperatures plummeting; and then we lie immobile as our consciousness and senses slowly return to us, wondering whether we will ever be able to attract someone’s attention, or whether we will be forgotten forever.
When I was sick, I whittled myself down to only what was essential. With a tube down my throat to drain my blocked stomach, I spoke only when necessary. I didn’t see friends, wanting to conserve my energy to fight the disease. I stopped wearing contacts or earrings for fear of introducing bacteria into my immuno-suppressed system, and almost never showered or bathed. One reason was that, from the loss of red blood cells and body fat, I was so cold that I couldn’t bear to take off my numerous layers of clothes. The other reason was that my body, regressing to pre-adolescence from the stress of chemo (I no longer had my period or underarm or pubic hair) no longer produced any odors.
Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering what would happen if the chemo wasn’t working, how many more treatments, with slighter chances of success, I would have to undergo; but I always knew that I would fight to the bloody end. I wanted Leo not merely to have the essentials, the necessities of life, but the luxuries. I knew if I died he would be fed and clothed and educated, but what of the extras that had enriched my own childhood? Without me, whose face would light up when he got off the bus coming home from school? Who would make his favorite food for lunch? Perhaps because my own life had been stripped of ordinary pleasures in the hospital, I realized how precious were the little, intangible things. I feared how barren Leo’s life would be without the excess of care and attention that characterizes love, especially a mother’s love.
After four months of treatment, I was scheduled for another surgery. Before the operation, my doctor asked me to sign a form agreeing to the removal of my uterus and remaining ovary if, as was feared, the cancer should be found to have spread. In addition I agreed to the implantation of a tube directly into my abdominal cavity in order to facilitate a new, second-line chemo regimen. This time, I woke from anesthesia to a glorious surprise: the mass that had persisted so ominously on scans was only filled with blood, and the biopsies taken from various organs showed no sign of the cancer’s spread. With the same dizzying rapidity that I had been diagnosed with cancer, I now found I was well. I was given another round of chemo, scheduled for monthly checkups against recurrences, and told that I could return to normal life.
Despite the joy and relief that flooded me, the truth was, however, that I could not simply return to my old life. Its patterns and assumptions had been shattered beyond recall. The first priority was to let my mother return home to recuperate from the long strain, and to learn, despite my fatigue and low blood counts, how to be Leo’s mother. Oliver returned to work, a nanny came to watch Leo while I rested and eased myself back into my research. Within days, I was chafing at the nanny’s brisk impersonality, her tendency to try to quiet Leo by sticking a bottle into his mouth. I reduced her hours until she quit to look for a full time position. Suddenly it was just Leo and me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I did not spend the bulk of my days reading and writing. Instead I strolled Leo to the park, holding him in my lap on the swings. I sang to him and spoke to him and tried in vain to get him to eat and sleep at regular times, attempting to re-forge that fragile bond that had, I feared, been broken when I disappeared to the hospital before he was a month old.
In the meantime, my tenure clock, which had so long governed my life, was ticking, but I found myself reluctant to re-immerse myself in my files and manuscripts. What had come over me? I could not remember a time when I had not planned to pursue a demanding career that would allow me to prove my abilities and achieve financial independence. Only then, I believed, would I escape the contempt with which my father treated my mother. In the Taiwan where they had grown up, women were not deemed worthy of education—both of my grandmothers were illiterate—while the resources of the family were concentrated on the males. In the traditional formulation, what was given to daughters would only be wasted because they would be married off and serve their husbands’ families. Although my mother increasingly resented such a mindset the longer she lived in the States, in practice she found it difficult to depart from her sense that she should serve others. She brought out cut fruit every night while the rest of the family watched TV. Even though she worked longer hours than my father it was assumed that she would still do most of the housework (although I have since discovered that this assumption was by no means unique to our household.)
Growing up, I rarely thought about getting married or starting a family. Although I had a string of boyfriends through my twenties, I married late, in my mid-thirties. It was no coincidence, I suspect, that I began to “look” seriously only after finishing my Ph.D. and landing a tenure track job, meeting Oliver, one of the few unattached men in our small community, at faculty orientation.
Now why was I throwing away all that I had worked so hard for? A part of it was a visceral resistance to being parted from Leo after the enforced separation we had already endured. Another part was a new understanding of my mother. Determined to escape the dynamics of my family, I had ignored all the ways in which my mother’s sacrifices had enriched my childhood, but now I saw that her generosity and talents had enabled me to survive. If not for her I would have worn myself out worrying about Leo. Her resourcefulness and endurance had smoothed away all logistical difficulties so I could concentrate on getting well, and have the leisure to research treatment options and consult experts in my disease. But I had always failed to give her credit for her talents, for the very reason that she had chosen to devote them to the service of those she loved, rather than to the professional realm.
When my leave ended and it was time for me to return to teaching, I sent in my resignation. Without the crutch of my professional identity, I felt like I was embarking on a journey into an unknown and disorienting land. When people asked me, as they inevitably would, what I “did,” I found myself blushing and stuttering painfully, so ingrained in me was the idea that taking care of children and keeping house was doing “nothing.” I was someone who had expected a lecture hall to fall silent when I stepped to the podium to share my insights on Chinese literature. Now I neither expected nor received the same attention when I talked about taking care of Leo. Far worse was the isolation. All my friends from college and graduate school, all my former colleagues, continued to work after having children. Despite my efforts to join playgroups, despite our visits to local parks, most days Leo and I saw no one but each other until Oliver came home at dinner time. Oliver and I, once equals, colleagues on the faculty, continued to talk about his teaching, his students, his department; he also seemed to assume that I spent my days doing “nothing.”
Although a year ago I would have imagined that staying home with a baby would have left me practically brain-dead, in fact I found it stimulating to know and interact with another human not through the spoken word but through a subtler system of touch and facial expression. Learning to comfort Leo when he was disconsolate, soothing him to sleep, required as much dogged persistence as mastering classical Chinese. My new life had a different rhythm. Previously I had secretly considered all hours I spent away from work a waste of time, and would grow impatient if a social commitment dragged on too long. Now that I no longer considered “work” the central piece of my existence, I began to cherish time spent with family and friends. For the first time it occurred to me how sterile my life had been before Leo: spending hours at a desk dividing my attention between sheets of paper and a computer screen. Staying at home with Leo, and then Somiya, who was miraculously born four years later from my single, scarred ovary, was richly sensual: the sweet, sweaty warmth of Leo’s and Somiya’s fingers, the plash of soapy water when I did the dishes, the dry crackle of cotton fresh from the dryer, the stale but homey scent of a thousand meals when we came in from playing outside.
It was those things I had missed in the no man’s land of the hospital: the texture of life, the gossamer cobwebs that clung in the interstices between recorded events and accomplishments. My mother had safeguarded those things, making our childhood home a temple to the quiet joys of peace and routine, of togetherness and physical contentment, but I had been blind to their beauty until I got sick. We as a society, despite our fondness for Nike-style exhortations to seize the day, despite the runaway success of such “life-affirming” bromides as Tuesdays with Morrie, are also blind to them; perhaps that is why we value motherhood so little. For instance, in a recent New York Times article, leading economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers recommend that parents “outsource” childcare to have more time for leisure and “economically worthwhile pursuits.”
I began to get up early, before Leo and Somiya woke, to write fiction, first a children’s novel about a Taiwanese immigrant family, and then a much longer novel about three women in an eighteenth-century Chinese household. Unlike the frigid abstractions of academic writing, fiction celebrated the daily texture of private lives, the thousands of negotiations and shifts of power that occur within the intimacy of families. When I was younger I had been extremely judgmental, feeling sorry for girls who had babies as teenagers instead of having abortions, marveling at classmates who got married right after college. Now, although the three heroines of my book were very different, I tried to write about them without taking sides or pitting them against each other. Instead, I tried to illuminate the strategies each woman adopted to survive, to reveal the price each woman had paid for whatever status or security she enjoyed. I re-read Chinese novels not as a scholar but with a more personal eye. While China was undoubtedly a culture that relegated women to a subordinate position, it was also a tradition that celebrated women’s talents and social contributions. The works of female poets had been preserved through the ages, more so, I believe, than in Europe. A famous story tells how the mother of the great sage Mencius instilled him with his love of his wisdom. In the classic Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, which was the inspiration for my own book, the matron Xifeng runs a household of three hundred bickering servants with skill and aplomb, her methods resembling nothing so much as a modern-day CEO’s.
Eight years after my treatment my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I moved back to my parents’ house with my children to help my father take care of her. As is so often the case with pancreatic cancer, it had already spread to her lungs and liver by the time it was discovered. I settled in to cook and clean for her, as she had done for me years before, but the course of her disease was quick and inexorable. Towards the end, only two pleasures remained to her: touching Somiya’s hands when playing counting games, and the ripe strawberries my sister’s in-laws overnighted from California.
After she died, I returned to Ohio and began to teach again, scheduling my classes so I could pick up Somiya from preschool to have lunch with her. In the eight years since I had last taught my economic and professional prospects had changed immeasurably. As a visiting professor, my inflation-adjusted income was less than I had made straight out of graduate school, and I would have opportunities to teach only when someone else on the Chinese faculty went on leave. Oliver and I had been fighting for years over his lack of support for my writing, which he regarded as a “hobby,” and my marriage had foundered.
Had quitting my job been the right decision? In the end it had been an impulsive choice, one that I could not have made in cold blood. I had done what I needed to do: take care of Leo and Somiya through their early childhoods, undistracted by career demands, like my mother savoring and helping them savor the texture, the little sweetnesses of life. At the same time I had never felt so powerless and lonely as at that period. I was ashamed at what a relief it was to put on my work clothes and call myself a professor again. Nevertheless the time when I was “just a housewife” had irrevocably defined who I was as a woman, as a writer, as a mother. The book that I wrote, The Red Chamber, is a testament to the soul searching of that time.
It was almost a relief to learn, when I was at last given an ultrasound, that a seven-inch mass was growing where my left ovary should have been, its presence masked by my pregnancy. It was a primitive germ cell tumor, a highly aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Within twenty-four hours I was on an oncology ward being prepped for emergency surgery. What followed was a descent into a maelstrom: a forty-hour-a-week chemo regimen, multiple surgeries and hospitalizations, all with a three-week-old who was still waking three or four times in a single night.
While Oliver orchestrated my medical care, it was my mother who stepped into the breach, moving from New York to Ohio to stay with us. On top of caring for Leo, she shopped, did the laundry, cooked and cleaned for the whole family, while devising special meals that I, nauseated from chemo, could manage to get down. When I was forced to go to a hospital in another state for more advanced treatment, she followed me with Leo, at age sixty setting up a new apartment and adapting to the life of a single mother in an unfamiliar town. My mother was no stranger to medical emergencies. She had left Taiwan for the United States in her early twenties to enter a Ph.D. program in Pharmacology, but dropped out after her master’s degree when my older sister was born with congenital defects in the kidneys requiring numerous hospitalizations. Although my sister’s condition stabilized, my mother continued to stay at home after I, and then my brother, were born. It was the most idyllic period of our childhood. My mother read and sang to us, taught us piano, making clothes and knitting us ponchos in her spare time. I remember returning home from kindergarten for lunch and luxuriating in the privilege of having my mother all to myself (my sister was still at school, my brother napping.) Her kitchen was equipped with only the most basic necessities, so she would make my favorite lunch, American cheese melted on bread, by turning the toaster on its side. When my brother reached school age, my mother qualified for her pharmacist’s license and spent the next thirty years working in hospitals. Although the work was challenging, it did not offer the same scope for her creativity and elan, and I remember her coming home frazzled and exhausted, dropping into a chair to kick off her heels and strip her hose the moment she walked in. Unlike my father, a professor of engineering, my mother did not especially enjoy her job, and had retired to be available for babysitting as soon as her first grandchild was born.
At the beginning of my treatment I did chemo as an outpatient at the euphemistically named “Infusion Suite,” which looked at first glance like an old-fashioned beauty parlor, with women reading magazines on fake-leather loungers, until you saw that everyone was hooked up to IV’s. As I began to suffer from complications, I began to be drawn more and more into the strange netherworld of the hospital. I remember waiting for an emergency X-ray at 1 a.m., in line behind a young black man, apparently the victim of a gunshot wound, who lay moaning on his gurney unable to move. In the hospital, distinctions between people—race, age, class--were reduced to one: sick, or well. Those who were sick wanted nothing but to become the other kind, while those who were not sick armed themselves with a sort of bull-headed insistence that they would never become the weak, ailing people whom they cared for.
At first, I would go stir-crazy after weeks spent in the hospital, and would explore the furthest reaches of the medical compound. I would watch interns and visitors in the hospital cafeteria, envying their ability to eat (I was suffering from intestinal blockages that prevented me from digesting food.) I would drag my IV pole down little-frequented corridors of administrative offices and labs. As I grew weaker, my world contracted to just my ward (9 West, Gynecological Oncology), and then eventually my room, and then my bed. Later, when scans seemed to show that my tumor was not responding to chemo, I felt that the entire focus of my vision was narrowing to a single sliver: the razor edge between life and death. I’ve come to think that in the course of life-threatening illness, many cancer patients must cross over that line. Our arteries are connected to tubes, which pour rivers of poison into our flaccid, unresisting bodies. We lie naked and unconscious on metal tables, cut open with sharp metal, our heart rates and body temperatures plummeting; and then we lie immobile as our consciousness and senses slowly return to us, wondering whether we will ever be able to attract someone’s attention, or whether we will be forgotten forever.
When I was sick, I whittled myself down to only what was essential. With a tube down my throat to drain my blocked stomach, I spoke only when necessary. I didn’t see friends, wanting to conserve my energy to fight the disease. I stopped wearing contacts or earrings for fear of introducing bacteria into my immuno-suppressed system, and almost never showered or bathed. One reason was that, from the loss of red blood cells and body fat, I was so cold that I couldn’t bear to take off my numerous layers of clothes. The other reason was that my body, regressing to pre-adolescence from the stress of chemo (I no longer had my period or underarm or pubic hair) no longer produced any odors.
Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering what would happen if the chemo wasn’t working, how many more treatments, with slighter chances of success, I would have to undergo; but I always knew that I would fight to the bloody end. I wanted Leo not merely to have the essentials, the necessities of life, but the luxuries. I knew if I died he would be fed and clothed and educated, but what of the extras that had enriched my own childhood? Without me, whose face would light up when he got off the bus coming home from school? Who would make his favorite food for lunch? Perhaps because my own life had been stripped of ordinary pleasures in the hospital, I realized how precious were the little, intangible things. I feared how barren Leo’s life would be without the excess of care and attention that characterizes love, especially a mother’s love.
After four months of treatment, I was scheduled for another surgery. Before the operation, my doctor asked me to sign a form agreeing to the removal of my uterus and remaining ovary if, as was feared, the cancer should be found to have spread. In addition I agreed to the implantation of a tube directly into my abdominal cavity in order to facilitate a new, second-line chemo regimen. This time, I woke from anesthesia to a glorious surprise: the mass that had persisted so ominously on scans was only filled with blood, and the biopsies taken from various organs showed no sign of the cancer’s spread. With the same dizzying rapidity that I had been diagnosed with cancer, I now found I was well. I was given another round of chemo, scheduled for monthly checkups against recurrences, and told that I could return to normal life.
Despite the joy and relief that flooded me, the truth was, however, that I could not simply return to my old life. Its patterns and assumptions had been shattered beyond recall. The first priority was to let my mother return home to recuperate from the long strain, and to learn, despite my fatigue and low blood counts, how to be Leo’s mother. Oliver returned to work, a nanny came to watch Leo while I rested and eased myself back into my research. Within days, I was chafing at the nanny’s brisk impersonality, her tendency to try to quiet Leo by sticking a bottle into his mouth. I reduced her hours until she quit to look for a full time position. Suddenly it was just Leo and me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I did not spend the bulk of my days reading and writing. Instead I strolled Leo to the park, holding him in my lap on the swings. I sang to him and spoke to him and tried in vain to get him to eat and sleep at regular times, attempting to re-forge that fragile bond that had, I feared, been broken when I disappeared to the hospital before he was a month old.
In the meantime, my tenure clock, which had so long governed my life, was ticking, but I found myself reluctant to re-immerse myself in my files and manuscripts. What had come over me? I could not remember a time when I had not planned to pursue a demanding career that would allow me to prove my abilities and achieve financial independence. Only then, I believed, would I escape the contempt with which my father treated my mother. In the Taiwan where they had grown up, women were not deemed worthy of education—both of my grandmothers were illiterate—while the resources of the family were concentrated on the males. In the traditional formulation, what was given to daughters would only be wasted because they would be married off and serve their husbands’ families. Although my mother increasingly resented such a mindset the longer she lived in the States, in practice she found it difficult to depart from her sense that she should serve others. She brought out cut fruit every night while the rest of the family watched TV. Even though she worked longer hours than my father it was assumed that she would still do most of the housework (although I have since discovered that this assumption was by no means unique to our household.)
Growing up, I rarely thought about getting married or starting a family. Although I had a string of boyfriends through my twenties, I married late, in my mid-thirties. It was no coincidence, I suspect, that I began to “look” seriously only after finishing my Ph.D. and landing a tenure track job, meeting Oliver, one of the few unattached men in our small community, at faculty orientation.
Now why was I throwing away all that I had worked so hard for? A part of it was a visceral resistance to being parted from Leo after the enforced separation we had already endured. Another part was a new understanding of my mother. Determined to escape the dynamics of my family, I had ignored all the ways in which my mother’s sacrifices had enriched my childhood, but now I saw that her generosity and talents had enabled me to survive. If not for her I would have worn myself out worrying about Leo. Her resourcefulness and endurance had smoothed away all logistical difficulties so I could concentrate on getting well, and have the leisure to research treatment options and consult experts in my disease. But I had always failed to give her credit for her talents, for the very reason that she had chosen to devote them to the service of those she loved, rather than to the professional realm.
When my leave ended and it was time for me to return to teaching, I sent in my resignation. Without the crutch of my professional identity, I felt like I was embarking on a journey into an unknown and disorienting land. When people asked me, as they inevitably would, what I “did,” I found myself blushing and stuttering painfully, so ingrained in me was the idea that taking care of children and keeping house was doing “nothing.” I was someone who had expected a lecture hall to fall silent when I stepped to the podium to share my insights on Chinese literature. Now I neither expected nor received the same attention when I talked about taking care of Leo. Far worse was the isolation. All my friends from college and graduate school, all my former colleagues, continued to work after having children. Despite my efforts to join playgroups, despite our visits to local parks, most days Leo and I saw no one but each other until Oliver came home at dinner time. Oliver and I, once equals, colleagues on the faculty, continued to talk about his teaching, his students, his department; he also seemed to assume that I spent my days doing “nothing.”
Although a year ago I would have imagined that staying home with a baby would have left me practically brain-dead, in fact I found it stimulating to know and interact with another human not through the spoken word but through a subtler system of touch and facial expression. Learning to comfort Leo when he was disconsolate, soothing him to sleep, required as much dogged persistence as mastering classical Chinese. My new life had a different rhythm. Previously I had secretly considered all hours I spent away from work a waste of time, and would grow impatient if a social commitment dragged on too long. Now that I no longer considered “work” the central piece of my existence, I began to cherish time spent with family and friends. For the first time it occurred to me how sterile my life had been before Leo: spending hours at a desk dividing my attention between sheets of paper and a computer screen. Staying at home with Leo, and then Somiya, who was miraculously born four years later from my single, scarred ovary, was richly sensual: the sweet, sweaty warmth of Leo’s and Somiya’s fingers, the plash of soapy water when I did the dishes, the dry crackle of cotton fresh from the dryer, the stale but homey scent of a thousand meals when we came in from playing outside.
It was those things I had missed in the no man’s land of the hospital: the texture of life, the gossamer cobwebs that clung in the interstices between recorded events and accomplishments. My mother had safeguarded those things, making our childhood home a temple to the quiet joys of peace and routine, of togetherness and physical contentment, but I had been blind to their beauty until I got sick. We as a society, despite our fondness for Nike-style exhortations to seize the day, despite the runaway success of such “life-affirming” bromides as Tuesdays with Morrie, are also blind to them; perhaps that is why we value motherhood so little. For instance, in a recent New York Times article, leading economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers recommend that parents “outsource” childcare to have more time for leisure and “economically worthwhile pursuits.”
I began to get up early, before Leo and Somiya woke, to write fiction, first a children’s novel about a Taiwanese immigrant family, and then a much longer novel about three women in an eighteenth-century Chinese household. Unlike the frigid abstractions of academic writing, fiction celebrated the daily texture of private lives, the thousands of negotiations and shifts of power that occur within the intimacy of families. When I was younger I had been extremely judgmental, feeling sorry for girls who had babies as teenagers instead of having abortions, marveling at classmates who got married right after college. Now, although the three heroines of my book were very different, I tried to write about them without taking sides or pitting them against each other. Instead, I tried to illuminate the strategies each woman adopted to survive, to reveal the price each woman had paid for whatever status or security she enjoyed. I re-read Chinese novels not as a scholar but with a more personal eye. While China was undoubtedly a culture that relegated women to a subordinate position, it was also a tradition that celebrated women’s talents and social contributions. The works of female poets had been preserved through the ages, more so, I believe, than in Europe. A famous story tells how the mother of the great sage Mencius instilled him with his love of his wisdom. In the classic Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, which was the inspiration for my own book, the matron Xifeng runs a household of three hundred bickering servants with skill and aplomb, her methods resembling nothing so much as a modern-day CEO’s.
Eight years after my treatment my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I moved back to my parents’ house with my children to help my father take care of her. As is so often the case with pancreatic cancer, it had already spread to her lungs and liver by the time it was discovered. I settled in to cook and clean for her, as she had done for me years before, but the course of her disease was quick and inexorable. Towards the end, only two pleasures remained to her: touching Somiya’s hands when playing counting games, and the ripe strawberries my sister’s in-laws overnighted from California.
After she died, I returned to Ohio and began to teach again, scheduling my classes so I could pick up Somiya from preschool to have lunch with her. In the eight years since I had last taught my economic and professional prospects had changed immeasurably. As a visiting professor, my inflation-adjusted income was less than I had made straight out of graduate school, and I would have opportunities to teach only when someone else on the Chinese faculty went on leave. Oliver and I had been fighting for years over his lack of support for my writing, which he regarded as a “hobby,” and my marriage had foundered.
Had quitting my job been the right decision? In the end it had been an impulsive choice, one that I could not have made in cold blood. I had done what I needed to do: take care of Leo and Somiya through their early childhoods, undistracted by career demands, like my mother savoring and helping them savor the texture, the little sweetnesses of life. At the same time I had never felt so powerless and lonely as at that period. I was ashamed at what a relief it was to put on my work clothes and call myself a professor again. Nevertheless the time when I was “just a housewife” had irrevocably defined who I was as a woman, as a writer, as a mother. The book that I wrote, The Red Chamber, is a testament to the soul searching of that time.
August 24, 2012
present tense and modern language
A few of the reviewers here and on Amazon have commented on the use of present tense and modern language in my novel The Red Chamber--and I wanted to shed a little light on my choices. Dream of the Red Chamber, the eighteenth-century Chinese novel which inspired my book, is written in a lively, almost slangy, vernacular Chinese. I wanted to capture this by having my characters speak more informally; moreover many of my characters are teenagers!
And generally speaking Chinese verbs do not have tenses. So in "translating" (even very loosely) a Chinese novel, it makes reasonable sense to render verbs in present tense, especially since Chinese novels ultimately derive from the tradition of oral storytelling, in which a storyteller seeks to make a story present for his listeners.
I think that historical novels set in Europe may often utilize the past tense and more formal language, but The Red Chamber springs from a very different literary tradition.
And generally speaking Chinese verbs do not have tenses. So in "translating" (even very loosely) a Chinese novel, it makes reasonable sense to render verbs in present tense, especially since Chinese novels ultimately derive from the tradition of oral storytelling, in which a storyteller seeks to make a story present for his listeners.
I think that historical novels set in Europe may often utilize the past tense and more formal language, but The Red Chamber springs from a very different literary tradition.
