7/23/2023 0 Comments Manuscript pen set![]() “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I think to myself, as my essays stare back, unfamiliar, like a stranger. Other days, I feel like I have never written anything satisfactory at all. Some days, I feel seamless in my command of the letters, words, and sounds and their connection to my identity. My affinity to the English language flickers on a day-to-day basis. But your English is so good! People sometimes confuse my ability to use English with my willingness to express myself in this language. For me, English has been a language of practicality, business and work, travel, and even reading, but I still doubt whether it is the language of literature in my life. Perhaps, I don’t want to believe I can write in English for the purpose of making art. I didn’t show anyone my prose writing for the first ten years I lived in the United States because I didn’t believe in the legitimacy of my use of the English language. I’m crafting a voice: who do I want to sound like? Who can I imagine sounding like? What does it mean to have an authentic voice when I know it will never be authentic if we take the word for its literal meaning, original and genuine? I’m writing in English in the United States. I’m no longer writing in Chinese in China. I wrote on Chinese manuscript paper like my mother did, filling each red or green square with a carefully chosen word. I liked taking a book to bed, reading it before sleep, and waking up in the morning to read it first thing. Growing up, I read through the modern Chinese literary canon, remembering the searing social commentaries by Lu Xun, tender familial memories by Zhu Ziqing, or the romantic, global perspective in San Mao’s twelve volumes of memoir, only one of which was translated into English in 2019. …literature meant Chinese literature and dedicating your life to the Chinese language meant a life of limitations. ![]() She dissuaded me from getting tethered to this language she loved like her own house I uttered poetry while knowing that one day, I might live in a place where no one will appreciate its meaning. My mother said, once she became a Chinese major, she knew she’d be tied to China forever. Choose Chinese and you choose a Chinese life. People who studied other subjects could, with hard work, transition into the field of their study in another language. People who studied English literature could easily go abroad. But in our life, literature meant Chinese literature and dedicating your life to the Chinese language meant a life of limitations. I wanted to write and teach literature like my mother did. She said she loved literature because literature allowed the understanding of love. A lover of literature, she seemed to have a joke or a poem to go with any occasion. “Zuo jia, zuo zai jia.” My mother joked, that a writer (zuo jia) sat(zuo) at home (jia). It was around then, in China, I learned the word wen xue, literature in English, from the stacks and stacks of books that seemed to spill out of every corner of our house. ![]() With a fountain pen with her name carved in its teal body, on green and red lined manuscript paper, she wrote her first book. In this beam of light, my mother sat at the desk wearing fingerless gloves that protected her hands from the cold. For instance, I do remember this being true: waking up in the first house I lived in, the one my father and mother built with their friends, and seeing the specs of dust moving through the beam of light that came through the wooden-framed window. And yet, I feel the constellation of letters tickle at my senses, rebuilding a life reimagined in English. I am making up every waking thought I had since childhood, in a language that I did not grow up dreaming in. I feel the recognition in my bones when I read the opening line of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” When I write in English, I feel like I’m lying. We’re almost there! Please give what you can today. We’ve set a goal of raising $10,000 by the end of June. Electric Literature recently launched a new creative nonfiction program, and received 500 submissions in just 36 hours! Now we need your help to grow our team, carefully and efficiently review submitted work, and further establish EL as a home for artful and urgent nonfiction.
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