my life to live

Notes about writers:

To be a writer means you talk about your novel, your story, as if it were something which always already existed somewhere in the universe, as if you were an archaeologist unearthing an artifact from another world, carefully dusting off the earth away from its ancient surface. Its characters are already real people. You did not create them.
To be a writer means to always be alive. You are simply a conduit for everything going on around you. The events of the day, the strangers you encounter in your daily travels—these filter through you and emerge on the other side refined into what another might call art.

bridiequilty:

Greer Garson and Margaret O’Brien reading Eve Curie’s biography about her mother Marie, which the film Madame Curie (1943) is based on.

There is a story by Ray Bradbury, called “The Great Wide World Over There”, about an illiterate woman in the Appalachians. My initial encounter with said story may have also been the first time I ever considered the inherent privilege in being able to read, and also the role the ability to read plays in privilege. I have a memory of being three or four years old, driving through the hills of northern Texas, sitting in the passenger seat and watching the billboards flash past. Just being fixated on those billboards, looking at the letters—how did I know the shapes were letters and not just shapes? That transition in my learning I do not remember so clearly—and thinking that one day, the cloud of illiteracy obscuring the meaning of those shapes would soon part and that I, too, would know what they meant. And then not so long after, I remember those letters starting to seem less like shapes and more like words, and soon they were hardly visuals anymore, but words and sounds that appeared almost instantaneously in my head. Once this happened, I knew they would never go back to being vague letter-shapes on a billboard anymore.
I can’t imagine being an adult and surrounded by such letter-shapes and being unable to penetrate their opacity. To live in a mental darkness.
I know that this is no original, life-changing advice, but you should read to your children. Maybe they don’t need to learn to love reading, but they must learn to love what being able to read does for them.

Greer Garson and Margaret O’Brien reading Eve Curie’s biography about her mother Marie, which the film Madame Curie (1943) is based on.

There is a story by Ray Bradbury, called “The Great Wide World Over There”, about an illiterate woman in the Appalachians. My initial encounter with said story may have also been the first time I ever considered the inherent privilege in being able to read, and also the role the ability to read plays in privilege. I have a memory of being three or four years old, driving through the hills of northern Texas, sitting in the passenger seat and watching the billboards flash past. Just being fixated on those billboards, looking at the letters—how did I know the shapes were letters and not just shapes? That transition in my learning I do not remember so clearly—and thinking that one day, the cloud of illiteracy obscuring the meaning of those shapes would soon part and that I, too, would know what they meant. And then not so long after, I remember those letters starting to seem less like shapes and more like words, and soon they were hardly visuals anymore, but words and sounds that appeared almost instantaneously in my head. Once this happened, I knew they would never go back to being vague letter-shapes on a billboard anymore.

I can’t imagine being an adult and surrounded by such letter-shapes and being unable to penetrate their opacity. To live in a mental darkness.

I know that this is no original, life-changing advice, but you should read to your children. Maybe they don’t need to learn to love reading, but they must learn to love what being able to read does for them.

What if…

for every product you used or consumed, you could somehow know its entire bloody history? Really know it, not just by dint of trusting the print on the box or the information you Google. The maquiladoras which produced your clothing, the factory farm which produced your meal, the animals blinded to perfect your shampoo, the campaign money donated by your neighborhood big box store. I want to live with integrity, but I drift through life blissfully unaware of what everyday items might be tainted. Perhaps we need another Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but print is dead.
American education is an industry whose intellectually contaminated and socially irresponsible practices must be called out into the public. Perhaps we need another The Jungle, but print is dead.
we are living in another Dark Ages? Once there was nothing ignorant about being unable to read, or by solving problems by “an eye for an eye.” In our time, such a person is pitied or scorned by the cultural elite. How will ethics evolve in the new millennium? For what will our ancestors pity or scorn us?

I was thinking about this book for some reason today. I read it in college. I found it to be a surprising sort of page-turner—surprising in that it’s doesn’t exactly have a suspenseful, action-packed plot to propel you through its pages. Rather, I found its central characters oddly endearing. I wanted to know what happened to them, and I kept reading out of the same impulse that might lead you to, say, Facebook stalk that intriguing friend-of-a-friend who came to visit one weekend. The same impulse that explains why you still have that one friend’s number in your cell phone, even though you haven’t spoken to them since college and they probably don’t even have that number anymore.

The other reason I kept reading the book was because I think it helped me understand a little bit of my heritage. My family has scarcely been in this country for a century; my great-grandparents, like so many other Russian Jews, fled the Pale of Settlement in 1912 for what I’m assuming would have been a more welcoming environment. As a child, all I knew of their way of life was piecemeal—we had their samovar sitting on our coffee table, some stories from my grandfather, and some sepia-toned photos of dour-faced, swarthy individuals looking as Old World as can be in their dark, draped clothing. I used to take in these items and look at my grandfather, who loved watching game shows and drinking Seagram’s, and my father, who could not have been more Midwestern white-bread middle-class, and wonder—when did it stop being important? In that I mean, at what point along the way did all that heritage get left behind? Being Jewish was clearly something so dear to the identity of my great-grandparents that it must have partially inspired them to pack up and move halfway across the world; cut to a only few decades later, and my father can speak barely a lick of Hebrew/Yiddish/Russian. We assume we may have relatives in Russia somewhere, but we don’t even know from which town our ancestors left.

Maybe this is something which will mark a generational divide—this inability to grasp the concept of certain important pieces of information being lost to time and not being automatically archived for later use in some data cloud. Either way, I’ve always been fascinated by the assimilation process, and I think this book maybe helped me visualize how that unfolds over time.

Cleveland, TX

When I was eleven years old, I had only had sex ed the year before. During recess, I jumped rope or played foursquare with my friends. After school, I would attend play practice; I was nervous because there was a scene where I had to kiss a seventh-grader in front of everyone. When I was eleven, I began getting dropped off at the mall to window-shop with my friends but my dad still took us to Toys R Us once a month to pick something out. When I was eleven, I spent rainy weekends reading Judy Blume and Lois Lowry at the library and sunny weekends riding my bike to the park. I would watch Green Day and Sheryl Crow videos on MTV at one friend’s house and a VHS of Into the Woods, with Bernadette Peters, at another’s. My school picture that year shows me with bangs, a puffy headband, and a cardigan. My favorite snack was cherry Gushers and S’mores Pop Tarts, washed down with Coca Cola. This is what eleven years old looks like.

When I was eleven years old, adult men could be mild-mannered and cerebral, like my father; they could be affable and goofy, like my cousins; they could be quiet and artistic, like my godfather; they could be patient and intelligent, like my third-grade teacher; they could be clever and insightful, like my fifth-grade teacher; they could be generous and openhearted, like my late grandfather. At age eleven, I might have easily believed that all the boys in my class might grow up to be similarly reliable, trustworthy individuals, for the few examples with whom I had been familiar at that point in my life. This is what an adult male should look like to an eleven-year old girl. This is what an adult male should look like to a five-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, a twenty-ear-old, a 34-year-old, a ninety-year-old—male or female.

I hope people realize that what happened in Texas is not a freak isolated incident, but a symptom of everything rotten in our culture in regards to how we treat and view women. This is the whole of that big, fucking ugly beast called Rape Culture, crystallized in a one town’s incident-turned-media-circus. Something like this can happen everywhere. It’s really a slippery slope from this to that, honestly.

Damn. News like this will really make a girl wanna go all Legs Sadovsky on someone. (Incidentally, I read that book when I was eleven, too.)

When is it wiser to show vulnerability? At what point do you think setting boundaries for others becomes building walls for ourselves?

Sometimes, in dealing with a stubborn student, I used to find it more effective to model being apologetic myself than calling them out on their inappropriate behavior. Shaheed, I’m really sorry that I had to give you a consequence in front of the whole class like that. That’s pretty embarrassing, and I can see why it would make you angry. But can you see why I needed to give you a demerit?

It’s a risky move, and certainly one I rarely tried. After all, there was always the chance that the child might be the type to view this type of discipline as being “soft.” Maybe somewhere down the line, that child might remember the exchange and view it as permission to repeat his or her behavior, or at least see what else he or she could get away with. But if the goal was to get the child to admit his or her own poor choices, well, it was often a highly effective approach.

Because the longer I work in schools, the more I learn about the way we work. Anything we do, we were taught at one point, either through explicit lesson or through subconscious observation. And apology does not come to us innately, the way mothering comes instinctually to many mammals. Rather, it’s a skill to be honed and an art to be perfected.

I have great respect for people who can apologize. I don’t mean the trivial, compulsive apologizing that some silly, insecure girls do all day long because they’ve been socialized to do so. Sorry to bother you! Omigod, sorry for asking, but… Sorry, but I didn’t hear that the first time. Sorry, but can I borrow a pen? These are not true apologies; these are the needy bleats of someone desperate for approval. The best apologies are made out of the desire to make someone else feel better, and not yourself, as true apologies are selfless in their conception. It’s one person momentarily putting aside his or her own urge for self-preservation out of deference for another.

The best apologists are unafraid to lay themselves at the feet of another for the sake of their heart. You should seek them out, because they make the best friends and most cherished of partners. Because saying you are sorry means having the empathy to understand someone else’s hurt feelings and the backbone to paint yourself—sometimes even falsely—as the villain, if that’s what it takes. It means trusting someone else enough to know they will not take advantage of you. And that’s not a weakness; that is a strength.

We went to yoga in Ardmore this morning; the class was filled with Main Line matrons. In the post-class scramble for boots and shoes and coats, we found ourselves in conversation with one. She revealed that she had herself formerly worked in education, as an administrator for turnaround schools in Philadelphia. She ultimately left after realizing that the problems in the public schools were far too deeply rooted in the system for her role to be effective. ”I have a great respect for teachers and the people who stay in the profession,” she said as she laced up her boots. ”Some people just get burnt out. The demands on teachers are just so different these days, and people have so many opinions on what kids need to be learning.”

We mentioned it was controversial.

“Oh, it’s very controversial,” she said, lacing up the other boot. ”You know, I think kids need to be educated on systems, and how they work, and how to look at a system analytically and break it down, and then build it back up again. That’s everything about how our world works. And ethics. Kids need to learn ethics—not religion, per se, but ethics. How to make a decision. How to decide what is the right decision in a given circumstance.” She stood up, and added, “I think about 75% of our adults could benefit from a crash course in ethics, if you ask me. I think our world would be significantly different.”

There was more conversation, of course—of the school culture in Lower Merion’s public schools, and how it compared to other schools in the Main Line, and which brands made the best winter boots, and so on. But it’s really only that line which got me thinking about how there are wonderful people everywhere you go, and what a life you would lead if you made an effort to seek them out every day.

On living in the borderlands.

When you grow up in a multiethnic household, you have a bird’s-eye view of humanity—the boundary lines drawn between races, religions, colors are cartoonishly clear, yet you remain curiously distanced from the whole affair. Culture becomes even more of the amorphous abstraction it already is, and the irrelevance of our funny little rituals—the food we eat, the traditions we hold, the icons we worship, the clothes we wear, the rules we create—is thrown into sharp relief.

You learn to question. If, for example, I attended church with my Roman Catholic mother, I might have come away learning that Jesus Christ was our savior and that all those who failed to accept this as fact were in fact sinners. If I paid attention during Passover dinner with my aunt, I might learn that the Jews were actually the chosen people. But the Jews did not accept Jesus as a savior, so how could this be? Which parent was the right one? Was one of them lying?

You learn to see yourself as a novelty. You get introduced at parties: This is Anna; she’s half-Asian and half-Jewish, the same way some might say, This is Tom; he plays tennis and works for PwC. Perfect strangers ask you, What are you? as if you weren’t a human being, as if you might be a totally different species. They ask you what you are before they ask you what you do, what you like, what you don’t. You become your ethnicity. You are not a whole person. You are many fractured pieces stitched together. You are pixellated.

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Isn’t it heartbreaking to think about how you can never revisit childhood again? And not just anybody’s childhood—I mean, your own childhood. Yours. It’s gone, and because you were too young at the time, there are so many lost memories of the way things looked, smelled, tasted, people’s names, people’s faces, people’s voices. Perhaps that’s for the best; otherwise, maybe we wouldn’t think back so wistfully on our bygone youth.

Things I associate with my formative years: waffles and strawberries, fantasy cartoons, the smell of garlic simmering in the kitchen after coming in from a brisk and overcast November afternoon, piano lessons, 60s pop music from my mother’s record collection, old Smithsonian magazines, my father’s heavy tomes from Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, jumping into piles of brown leaves on the lawn. These things all still exist in the world, but there the intangible glue which held them all together into my childhood, long since crumbled away and gone.

Maybe that’s why, despite the simplicity and innocence of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a thread of sadness persists throughout, glinting at the listener like ancient minerals trapped in a stone wall. Maybe this is why we feel compelled to have children ourselves, so we can regain what we have lost.

I love being home.

But when I say “home” it’s because I’m not sure what else to call Chicago; every time I visit, I feel more and more like a tourist. I feel lost in the Loop, an area to which I regularly traveled for work and internships during many a college summer. No longer can I navigate the highway system; I can’t remember which stop comes next on the trains. I’m filled with a mixture of niggling helplessness and mild frustration which—as I remarked to my friends earlier today—I imagine is akin to having a slight learning disability.

Coming home, and catching up with old friends, never fails to make me wonder about the girl that might have been had I never left. I’d had plans to move into the city after graduation anyway. I interned with a film non-profit the summer before my senior year and they offered me a job; perhaps I would have taken that position and become an insufferable hipster, dating artist after musician after artist and wondering when the heck my ship would come in. Maybe I would have ended up going to some mid-tier law school anyway, and soldiered through like the good student I’ve always been, and maybe I would be engaged to a lawyer right now; I imagine that version of myself is better paid but slightly unhappy, and constantly wondering if there’s something else out there for her.

I’d like to meet these Alternate Annas. I’d probably be slightly jealous of them. Maybe one earns more money and has a nicer apartment. Maybe one has managed to actually have a healthy relationship with a decent human being for a substantial, sustained amount of time. I’m jealous of them for having spent their adult years in Chicago, which is a world-class urban playground and where I’d always seen myself living when I was younger. But, being versions of myself, I’m certain they would be slightly jealous of me, too. Because whatever decision you make in life, you invariably end up giving up something in return; being in my case, that is, a purpose. That’s pretty admirable, I guess. Some people spend a lot of their life wondering if they are meant to be doing the things they do. Some people have quarter-life crises spanning into their thirties, maybe beyond. I think mine lasted about a few months—that is, when I was between teaching jobs that one time.

So I guess I feel lucky for that.

My day in the city was lovely. The weather is crisp and agreeable; I had lunch, coffee, and dinner with old friends. I had a solo jaunt to the Art Institute in between, after far too many years away (my mother, who attended graduate school there, took us all the time as children). There was good conversation, a stint on the Great Lawn (and, serendipitously, a brief brush with Sonar, which made me think of this awesome lady), trains caught at just the right time, and whirl through the old hometown (or one of the them).

Sometimes it breaks my heart to think that I can’t live in both Philly and Chicago simultaneously; that I can’t just mash the two cities together and leave it at that. I wonder if I’ll ever make it back here. Oh Chicago; you’re the one that got away.