What It Is Like

Essay collections, allegories, road rage, another class.

Plate 9: Allegory of Temperance with a unicorn, from "Barberinae aulae fornix", ca 1677, courtesy of the MOMA Open Access Collection, or, the controlled chaos of reading the news and making art or even writing this newsletter update.

Going to the gym was among the errands I had for myself when I set out yesterday in my car, listening to the last of Cathy Park Hong’s essays in Minor Feelings¹, a part of making sure of my sense of the book’s structure before I write one more time to my essay collection class students. I like to listen to books on audiobook, especially when I am analyzing them, because hearing them aloud in the air helps me think about them, and so I have been able to use the time I’d otherwise lose on a commute back and forth to classes to instead have these kinds of thoughts. And as I drove the first ten miles of my trip I found myself in a bizarre rivalry on the highway with a large and menacing pickup truck driven by a young white man that kept speeding up to pass me and then slowing down once it did, and then angrily passing me again if I then passed the driver again, who seemed to be taking it personally that my new Prius was somehow a faster car, or maybe it was just that I wasn’t letting him be the fastest even if he was slowing down, and it all felt very much like he was trying to punish me, to get me to drive more slowly, and behind him, no matter the speed. He never tried to stop me but I kept waiting for that to happen. This was not the first time this has happened to me either, but in the moment, it was an unsubtle metaphor for this entire episode of American history. Hong’s voice, reading her closing essay, made all of this even more overt.

I know Cathy, have known her for years through the Asian American Writer’s Workshop and The New Republic and literary New York. I think of her as among the writers around me who were coming up when I was coming up. Reading the collection again to teach it in my essay collection class, it struck me again how it describes her teaching herself how to talk about race, with each essay expanding on what she describes as the effort to undo the mix of learned silences and the way she and so many of us are taught to participate in our own self-erasure. And as it does this it also looks at her attempts to find an art form that would carry her visions, her sense of the world, her voice, as well as her search for other artists as teachers, as community, as heroes. The essays are deeply felt examinations of culture, autobiography, art, film, literature, gender, Asian American activism, poetry, criticism—she feels very free on the page, not in a careless way but in a way she chooses, a consistent liberatory push against impulses and ideas, challenging herself and others. She talks about the writing of the collection here with the essayist Sejal Shah at Guernica, in ways I found profound to contemplate after rereading the collection. And the last essay, “The Indebted,” is powerful in part for the way it feels like a summing up of all of the essays.

The part I was listening to as this man tried to repeatedly to pull in front of me with his truck and slow me down on the highway was near the end, when she imagines what would happen if the Americans who thought we—immigrants, people of color—should go back to “where we came from,” what if somehow the racists got their wish, magically? She imagines first some accidental dislocations not so unlike the way the US is trafficking immigrants to countries that are not their home countries now, and then imagines being forcibly returned to Seoul.

It felt prescient, her imagined dislocations alongside the ones happening now.

In my last letter I wrote about fighting the impulse to go quiet in the face of the kind of news that stuns you into silence, and Hong’s essays, especially the audiobook, were not just a reminder of why it matters but also a pleasure, as were all of the collections I taught for the class. In addition to Minor Feelings, there was Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabakov, An Image Of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives, Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland, The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, Brown Neon by Raquel Gutierrez, White Girls by Hilton Als, and Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz.

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Last week on the flight to Philadelphia for my talk about The Stories You’ve Never Seen Before (still available for a few weeks as a video) I sat down for the flight in a window seat—rare for me—and in the middle seat was a young white man who nodded to me as he sat and then took out his Dorthe Nors book of stories—Karate Chop, if you’re wondering—and read for a bit.

Shortly after take-off, he asked me, “Is your name Alexander?” He and I were both masked and I was impressed that he could recognize me under my mask. He told me he read my first novel, Edinburgh, every year in December, and I was moved to learn this. He asked for a selfie, saying his family would never believe it, and I said yes, and we snapped it. Anyway, my thanks to that young man, and if the family wants even more proof, here is this anecdote.

I’d noticed him because I’ve been seeing young people reading books on every trip I’ve taken lately, and so I try to mention it on social media as I remain a skeptic about the decline of reading think pieces I see, which are often written out of anecdata, as this letter is. A kind of “what I see is all there is” approach to societal trends, this sort of essay is too popular, I think, because it is easy to write and easy to take as the truth if it confirms your best or worst sense of the world.

I’m not saying these essays are wrong exactly but I find it odd that as they appeared I kept seeing all these young people reading. Just yesterday for example I saw a young woman looking at her novel in the way I’ve seen people look at their phones, but during a video chat. She looked as if she was having fun listening to an old friend I couldn’t hear. The book was The Ministry of Time. I said nothing to her and tried not to disturb her, as it is important to just let a woman read in public unbothered.

The trip to Philly was too short for my taste but when the people at Blue Stoop and Asian Arts Initiative reached out to ask if I could do this talk I said yes as they threw me the best Philadelphia reading for my own essay collection in 2018. A chance to give back. I also got to fit in a lunch at Chengdu’s Famous Foods and get a hotel room at The Study, over by Drexel, where each room has the increasingly rare to find desk and reading chair with side table and foot rest, all of which left me wanting to stay longer. I used to check into hotels by myself if they had discounted deals, a kind of stolen moment away like in The Hours. In any case, that room, and the talk, which went well, and then after a dinner with my friends Che Yeun and

Hunter Mclendon

post-talk, I left as content as I could be, back to Vermont.

This Sunday is the last of my summer teaching events, an online one-session class on Description and Setting called What It Was Like, if you’d like to join. Sign language interpreters are available and scholarships also.

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The journalists I spoke of who were starving in Gaza last time have now been murdered. The need there is so extreme. So I will close this with a quote from

Sarah Thankam Mathews

’ excellent newsletter:

The Sameer Project’s South Gaza campaign for food, water, and tents is ongoing. So is their medical campaign, which is about $65,000 short of their goal. W.A.W.O.G.’s Flood the Newsrooms campaign is smart and good, in my opinion. Multiple actions, both arrestable and non-arrestable, are being planned by organizations from Within Our Lifetime to the People’s Forum to Jewish Voice for Peace in the coming days. In general actions that target lawmakers, the White House, news organizations, and bodies like the UN seem worth joining onto to me. It can feel cliché to say contact your elected officials and yell at them or occupy their offices and/or join an organization, but most people do not do either, and it contributes to Congress thinking that their constituencies are more right-wing than they actually are.

My tip about arrest is, if you need medication daily for what you are dealing with to stay healthy and alive, do not get arrested. The police won’t give you your medications, in my experience. Maybe find another kind of activist role and be as safe as you can.

1. This is a link to her essay “Broken English,” still up at BuzzFeed Reader. If you want to buy the book directly, you can do that here.