May 2, 2023

The Light of Eternal Spring, by Angel Di Zhang

“My mother died of a broken heart, or so the letter said.”

And this is the spectacular opening line of Angel Di Zhang’s dazzlingly dreamy debut novel, The Light of Eternal Spring, a story of love and loss, a story of finding and belonging, about seeing and knowing, all the gaps between what we remember and what really happened, and the curious nature of space and time. How did we get from there to here?—a question that preoccupies Di Zhang’s protagonist, Aimee (pronounced Eye-Me), particularly after her mother dies and she travels with her American husband back to her hometown in China, the rural village of Eternal Spring, where she hasn’t been for so many years. It’s also the question the narrative sets out to answer.

Aimee, a photographer, is known as Amy in her new life in New York City, where she is now so established that she thinks in English, and her photos appear in ads on the subway, and she thinks her thoughts first in English instead of her native Mandarin. Though it’s Manchu that’s Aimee’s mother tongue—literally, her mother’s first language—and she’s forgotten it to the point when her sister’s letter arrives with news of her mother’s death, she has to have it translated by a woman in Manhattan’s Chinatown running a vegetable stall.

It’s 1999 and communication is not as instantaneous as it is today. When Aimee and her husband David set out for Eternal Spring in the hope of making it back in time for her mother’s funeral, she has no idea what to expect, and her family don’t even know to expect her. What she’ll find is a place and people who are radically different than they were when she last saw then, by virtue of the nature of memory, but also because the previous decade has been a time to radical change in the village, which has become busy and bustling, not a village at all. Because nothing ever stays fixed, both in life, and in our memories, and such understanding is a challenge for Aimee, whose photos aim to capture time, to hold it still.

How to grapple with the mutability of reality? And even more important, how to resolve her relationship with her mother now that her mother is gone? The last time mother and daughter were together led to a spectacular flame-out and they haven’t spoken since. Will there be any chance for Aimee to to reconcile with her mother’s memory? And what about reconciling the space between Aimee and Amy, between the place where she comes from and where she lives now, and possibility of belonging to both places, a kind of double exposure, not a photographic error but instead an accurate image of her psychic reality?

I loved this book, its freshness and sense of play, its curious placement outside of time, just beyond the limits of realism, about the all the possibilities of impossible things.

May 2, 2023

Gleanings

• It’s no picnic, that’s for sure: the unexamined life may not be worth living, but (as I have often thought myself in recent months) surely in many ways it is an easier way to live.
• Blue Portugal & Other Essays is a book I’ve been writing all my life, through all the years that have led to this one, stitched from scraps of beauty and difficulty and love.
• The year is now 2023. Books have been published. Regimes have changed. Children have entered and nearly completed middle school, gray hairs have sprung, betraying, and I believe — I mean, I’m absolutely utterly certain — that this is the final iteration of what I consider to be the perfect homemade hash brown patty….
• What is the relationship between nature and each of these walkers? Is there a melding of purpose and experience, a common recompense on some level? Have any of them met the soul walking upon the path? How aware is each walker, of just how interconnected they are to this woodland? In the simplest of terms, the trees give off the oxygen we breathe in, and absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale – a true symbiotic partnership that has spanned centuries.
• It is what my brain has been like this month. Just flayed, spread out and incapable. (looks like a flower, but carries a whole lot of teeth) while my body does all the things necessary: kids are mostly fed, laundry is done and even folded, sports are attended, jobs are attended, my brain has been uninvolved.
• I share my words with you. You provide me with your thoughts and wisdom. I sit with your words. And I am rewarded with more learning, insights, and additional pieces to the puzzle.
• Do I recommend it? Only if you enter into the experience of reading it with a sense of generosity and curiosity, as if you’re conducting an experiment. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad way to begin reading any book: with generosity and curiosity.
• For me, fourteen years ago when I was desperate to move on from the thing that had consumed my energy for almost a year, meeting an active, healthy person who had done the treatment and gone on to live a good life, inspired me. My hope is that my story in some way inspired them. They certainly inspired me. Out there playing pickleball when they’re still dealing with pulling gauze out of their chest. Now that’s impressive!
• I am sad to report that I have exhausted all of the available fiction by Iona Datt Sharma. But I am overjoyed to have found them in the first place.
• All day, it was like looking through a small microscope, a zoomed in experience of the world. Seeing just a piece, a small part of all of this, of all of us.

May 1, 2023

Harper Valley PTA

I had but a single reservation about the film version of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which I saw at the cinema yesterday with my daughters whose companionship for such an occasion was such a treat for me. They’ve both read (or reread) the book in the last few weeks, and were as enthusiastic about the movie as I was. We loved it, and to all be able to experience and love something together is a pleasure I appreciate so very much.

But. But. But.

And this is personal. I’ve spent the last few weeks overwhelmed by several things, not the least of which is a fundraiser for my child’s school that has ended up on my plate mostly because I was the only person who reluctantly failed to refuse it. Because I cannot bear to leave a silence or vacuum unfilled. Because while succeeding in leaving such a silence or vacuum unfilled is an act of liberation (which I’ve even managed to pull off once or twice) it only means that someone else is going to have to do it, and that’s not really liberating at all.

It’s a quandary, and I’ve come full circle, and then some. When my children started elementary school (ten years ago!), I swore off volunteering altogether…because I know myself, how it’s only ever all or nothing, and um, I think I was also still on the board of their playschool at the time. And I was also bowled over by the requests for volunteers and funds (and usually both) at my children’s school. It was too much, it was inequitable, they had galas to raise money for the galas! Okay, that last point is an exaggeration, but I put it in my first novel, Mitzi Bytes, whose protagonist was resolutely anti-school volunteering. She values her time too much to go in for any of that nonsense—and oh, I wish I was her with every fibre of my being. The way she really doesn’t care what anybody thinks or about what she should be doing. She’s not doing it, and it’s simple. What I would give for that kind of clarity.

But of course, I care what people think a lot, too much, and I overthink everything about how to be a good citizen, and a good community member (and how to be “good” in general, which my therapist and I will be continuing to unpack for the foreseeable future), and so when my book was coming out, I eagerly signed up for the school council just so now one would think that the book was autobiographical, and chaired that council for two years, taking on duties to such a ridiculous extent that I was sitting in for the secretary sometimes when I was chairing, taking my own minutes, which is nuts. I also thought a lot about the role of fundraising in public education, registering my discomfort, but by this point understanding how school staff count on these funds, which are raised entirely on the backs of moms whose labour is discounted by assholes like my protagonist and other like-minded folks (who were sometimes me).

I managed to step away from school volunteering eventually, which maybe is the way it should be—we do what we can, take a break, come back again (or not). These days I volunteer twice a month at pizza lunch, which I really like doing, and it’s nicely low key. I’m not on school council anymore, because I did my time. It’s other people’s turn—and that’s a wonderful thing to realize, by the way, when we’re feeling all disgruntled, put-upon, why do I have to do everything? When I stopped showing up, someone else took my place, which is also (sort of) to say that I gave someone else a chance to take my place (as opposed to taking my own minutes; all or nothing, remember?).

But then my elder daughter entered middle school, and it’s very small school, oh no, I saw it coming, really. This spring fundraiser that hadn’t been produced since 2019—who was going to do it. It was going to be me. It was always going to be me, even though I’m not really that good at producing events, and I do so always in the most corner-cutting, simple way possible because I’d rather get it done than do it well. Sigh.

And, truthfully, it’s not been so bad, and I’ve only cried about it once, and if the event manages to be a success (it’s the day after tomorrow), which is to say even approaches reaching our fundraising goal, I’ll be glad I did it. Even though I’ve been bothered that more people in our school community haven’t been pitching in, that such a small number of parents (moms!) are usually the ones who do everything, and so many others are content just to not be involved, to ignore my emails, to not respond to requests for help, content to let it all be somebody else’s burden, which is to say mine.

I think what bothers me so much about the situation is not just that people aren’t helping, but that their failures to help makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed. Sending out these annoying emails week after week, all peppy, and knowing such messages must be so obnoxious to receive, so I feel kind of pathetic, like a loser. And that it seems like I have nothing better to do with my time than this—what does that say about me? About who I am and what I do?

(Like I said, this is personal.)

So yes, I was conflicted about the final arc of Rachel McAdams’ character in Are You There…, a bohemian mom who moves to the suburbs and leaps right into the school community because she wants to do the right thing and because for the first time in her life she has the time to, but of course her intelligence and talents are wasted there. The company is terrible, shallow, and the labour itself is totally pointless—she’s charged with cutting out thousands of thousands of felt stars that ultimately end up on the garbage. By the end of the film, she has found better and fulfilling things do with her time, and when she’s called on again to volunteer, she declines, declaring “Because I don’t want to,” and people in the cinema cheered, and I get that, but I also hate that.

In particular during this particular week, as I find myself (metaphorically) cutting out my own felt stars, as I send just one more cheery email urging families to please sign up for the bake sale.

What do we do with this? What do we do with the vital labour of mothers that’s necessity to make up for a public education system that has been hopelessly underfunded for nearly thirty years? What do we do with the fact that it’s often other mothers who are most derisive about this labour? And what do we do that none of this ever has anything to do with the dads at all? (And we can continue—this is about class, of course. About families with the time and resources to commit to school fundraising, which many school communities can’t count on at all.)

These are the circles I’ve been thinking in for almost a decade.

But today I came to some kind of answer, or the beginning of one—at least in my own mind. First, we need schools better funded. We need fathers to be as invested as mothers are in what happens at school, which means less work for everyone. And another part of the answer, which I’ve sort of been onto already, by virtue of being lazy, is my corner cutting approach to things all along. I’m not cutting out any fucking felt stars, is what I mean. This kind of labour is essential, so use it smartly, use it well. Value people’s time. Keep meetings within limits. Respect people’s boundaries. Appreciate people’s talents and skills. Don’t take any of this for granted. And if everyone does a little, that means no one has to do it all.