TAIPEI STORY and laughing at yourself

on ben lerner, elif batuman, xiaolu guo, david sedaris, and doris sommer. and me!

Dear reader,

I’ve written a new novel called Taipei Story and it comes out in September. It’s about a freshman girl studying Chinese abroad in Taipei when her grandfather dies, which ruins her summer, because she was only studying Chinese to learn about her grandfather’s past, and now there is no point, because you can’t get answers from someone who is dead. The novel is written from a place of insufficiency, regret, and shame – feelings I’ve been steeped in as I’ve been mourning, and feelings I think are familiar to anyone in a diaspora family web. Someone once wrote that I wear my stylistic influences on my sleeve (I don’t think it was a compliment, but they are right!) and when writing this novel I kept turning to Ben Lerner, Elif Batuman, and Xiaolu Guo – writers who’ve successfully made the case that being bad at a language, at least coming to terms with your lack of fluency – can make you better at being a person.

Claims to fluency are fraught for Asian Americans because language is the easiest shorthand for authority — it’s the sword of blunt-force ethnic credibility with which you prove your exotic cultural knowledge, and the sword on which you fall if you use the wrong characters, quote the wrong classic, or utter anything that suggests the language you’re wielding like a membership badge isn’t actually the language you grew up speaking around the dinner table. Sau-Ling Wong famously (famously, within the field of Asian American literary criticism) took Amy Tan to task for this in her essay “Sugar Sisterhood.” In Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife, the character Winnie explains to her daughter that she considers her cousin Peanut as close to her as a sister: she calls her 堂姐 (tángjiě), a term for a patrilineal older cousin, which Tan glosses also as “sugar sister,” apparently confusing the homophones 堂 (táng, “patrilineal relation”) and 糖 (táng, “sugar”). Tan’s mistranslations and inaccurate cultural descriptions, Wong argues, work as little “‘markers of authenticity,’ whose function is to create an “Oriental effect” by signaling a reassuring affinity between the given work and American preconceptions of what the Orient is/should be.” The upshot: Tan doesn’t know as much about China as she claims, and Tan’s readers are suckers for thinking she does, and we should all feel bad about how the publishing industry (still) peddles ignorance as ethnography. (Though what if Tan knew full well those characters were homophones, and was making a deliberate pun?)

But then, poking fun at the gaps between claimed and deserved authority makes for great fiction. We love re-tellings of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” especially when we’re in on the joke. Adam Gordon, the protagonist of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, is an asshole, an American in Madrid on a poetry fellowship he doesn’t deserve, who claims his Spanish is either worse or better than it is depending on what gets him the most social capital in any given setting. In one scene he is punched in the face because he’s sitting by a campfire with a group of new friends, nodding with that idiot smile one uses when one is trying to pretend they understand an ambient conversation, and it turns out the person speaking was confessing something traumatic. Through the rest of the novel Adam offers up obscure pronouncements and unconjugated or half-finished sentences in hopes his interlocutor will assume, then invent, his side of the conversation, all to disguise the fact that he doesn’t know anything about the Spanish Civil War, or Spanish history, or current Spanish politics. His default reaction to a burst of rapid Spanish: “I blinked a few times and said claro.” Because Adam is a gringo, we don’t expect him to be good at Spanish, and so we just feel a nice old-fashioned schadenfreude watching this drunk American idiot trying to get laid with Spanish girls. But when a culture is your own – or when you’ve been going around claiming a culture is your own – then it’s hard to get in on the joke. When your grandmother is asking how you are, you can’t just blink your eyes and say 對，對對對. Here’s a silly bit in Taipei Story where I narrate that all-too-familiar shame for Chinese Americans who have tried to order in shaky Mandarin at a Chinese restaurant:

The waiter would come by, and I would smoothly rattle off our order, even ask for a pot of jasmine tea and rice bowls all around. This won me such admiration! The waiter spoke only to me. I was the conduit here, and my friends gazed wonderingly as I carried out the exchange. But then came the modifications. Someone wanted to know if the cabbage was cooked in chicken broth, or if it was vegetarian. Someone wanted to modify the spice level of the kung pao chicken. Disaster – now I had to go off script, and everyone watched as I scrambled for the words, patching them into imperfect sentences. Someone was allergic to peanuts, but I forgot the word for “peanuts.” Does this have, um…um. The closest thing I could think of was the word for “almonds,” because almond jelly was one of my favorite desserts. And I did not know the word for allergy. I knew it was related to the word for “sensitive,” but calling my friend sensitive would not clarify things. Peanuts were a matter of life and death; I could not approximate. The moment I switched back to English, the waiter gave me a knowing look. Then the rest of the order would proceed in English, and I would sink back in my chair, my authority diminished. 花生, I would remember, too late. Peanuts were 花生, fucking duh. I could switch back to Chinese for things like water, more tea, or the check. But there would be no point. They had already seen through me.

I have already written a novel making fun of self-aggrandizing experts in cultural authenticity so I promise this novel does not spend too long mucking around in diaspora self-loathing. I think we’re all pretty tired of Asian American cultural production that only frames distance as guilt, and lack of fluency as moral deficiency. Diaspora folks love to feel sorry for ourselves and repeated use of tropes in which we feel sorry for ourselves has made for fairly boring fiction. Where’s the humor! Recently I’ve been reading Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004) while pretending to work on my dissertation. I like Sommer because she is, like me, interested not in valorizing the bilingual speaker as more human, more cosmopolitan, but in celebrating the little bursts of negative affect at the borders between languages – that is, the moments when you don’t get the joke, when you use the wrong term, when you try to signal inclusion in an in group and it doesn’t work, and everyone just rolls their eyes at you. Sommer is interested in the ways that feeling bad can be good for us (as moral agents, as relational creatures, and as participants in democratic society), and here I especially like what she says about what is proved by the vulnerability involved in contact across languages (emphasis mine):

Since most things have more than one name there’s no mistaking the signifier for the signified, no forgetting that precarious meanings and relationships can fail you. On the other hand, the overload of symbolic systems underlines a reality that might seem illusory in one code. The world is real, and dear, because things and people exist beyond any one word that tries to capture them. And on yet another—third—hand (excess is the issue here) the risks—sometimes the anticipation—of failure make communication thrilling. Ordinary contact is close to the aesthetic experience. Running the risk of misrepresentation and misrecognition shows a kind of breathtaking vulnerability, a social death wish at the limit of bi-language games. Will addressing a stranger in Spanish be an invitation to intimacy or an offense to someone who prefers to pass? Will it reveal mistaken assumptions about someone who speaks Arabic or Hindi, but not Spanish? The question may not sound important to people who don’t make these decisions daily and don’t worry about the risk. Perhaps they counsel us to get over the complication and simply speak English (‘‘This is how we do things here,’’ is Brian Barry’s bottom line), as if worrying about which language to use were not an exercise in the interpersonal delicacy and caution that amount to civic behavior. Am I making any sense in English, to people who may be assessing what I say without offering to asesorar?

So if Taipei Story follows any ethical directive, it is Sommer’s call for humility and humor over rigid claims to authority. No to caution and judgment; yes to embarrassment and incompetence. No to self-righteous identity politics, yes to imperfect democratic engagements. Sommer writes: “Losing control, being the butt of a joke, worrying where the border is and whether you’ve crossed it, these are aesthetic responses to the artful devices for gatekeeping on a multicultural map.”

It’s good to be the butt of a joke. And what’s funnier than the language classroom? Almost every exercise undermines your respectable, adult self. You lose total control of the identity you’ve worked so hard to build. For the sake of reference you have to role-play, or invent a version of yourself that doesn’t exist. Sometimes I am an eight-year-old Japanese girl; sometimes I am a farmer in ancient Rome. To gain the muscle memory of Chinese radicals, you must make chicken-scratch into little printed boxes. Your characters will never have the right proportions. You must work your tongue into patterns you didn’t learn as a child, so that for the first few weeks, and also maybe forever, you sound like you’re trying to vomit. Your understanding of the world regresses back to building blocks: it is hard to be arrogant in a room of adults repeating laboriously, “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.” This week colors; the next, months of the year. Your thoughts are constrained by the grammar patterns you have access to, and the world shrinks to match. In Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, the protagonist – a freshman girl named Selin – reads from “Nina in Siberia,” a Russian primer for beginner students, which is “ingeniously written” using only the grammar they have mastered that week. The effect is surreal:

“The story had a stilted feel, yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no “went” or “sent,” no intention or causality – just unexplained appearances and disappearances.”

That tees up my favorite recurring gag in the novel: Selin treats the character Nina’s confusion about her vanished lover, Ivan, as prophetic of Selin’s own romantic confusion about her Russian language classmate, a tall Hungarian also named Ivan – a confusion made worse by the way Selin and Ivan email each other role-playing as Nina and Ivan (of Siberia). Where has Ivan disappeared to? Why will he not respond to Nina’s letters? Who is Galina, this other woman that Ivan professes to love? The primer’s grammatically-enforced inexplicability mirrors the inexplicability of college love. Selin feels a “terrible betrayal” when “Nina in Sibera” resolves neatly, with all characters involved happily paired off to new partners: “Of everything I had read that semester it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between language and the world.” But the neatly packaged interactions of language primers leave us so woefully unprepared for a real encounter in another language, where you can’t slow down the audio or look at subtitles, and the cast of characters exceeds four. Who’s ever dealt with a real life Parisian waiter?

It’s all so uncomfortable! In his essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris compares his French class to joining a gang, with a “long and intensive period of hazing.” He writes, “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of my classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards, where, no matter how hard I tried, there was no escaping the feeling of terror I felt whenever anyone asked me a question.” Our response to the sting of humiliation is often to jerk away, to throw up our defenses. At the end of Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner’s protagonist embarrasses himself on a panel about Spanish literature. First he can’t remember the name of any major Spanish poets, and then he mashes two poets’ names together – Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado become “Ramón Machado Jiménez,” which is like saying your favorite Anglophone author is “Whitman Dickinson Walt.” You’ll be gone in six weeks, he thinks. Madrid has ceased to exist for him even as he sits surrounded by friends and colleagues, many of whom are congratulating him in good faith. You will never see any of these people again…None of this matters…None of this is real. But to get better at a language you must expose yourself everyday to this same embarrassment. Discomfort is part of the pedagogy; in a language classroom, you stay stretched out on a limb. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, how long your pauses linger. You must see these people again; all of it matters; things outside English are still real, and there’s nothing to do but to go back, clear your throat, try again. David Sedaris, again: “Talk me more, plus, please, plus.”

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s good for us to spend a few hours every week feeling like a fool. We might stop taking ourselves so seriously. We might learn to turn our resentment at being excluded from a joke into curiosity about others. We might turn our embarrassment into humility – it might inspire more compassion, certainly admiration, for our neighbors making a new life in a language they didn’t grow up with. We might feel less entitled to a land – a citizenship – we didn’t earn. Feeling the fool might help us understand that proper speech isn’t a good indicator of intelligence, or education, or goodness. As Sommers argues, all this is good training for participating in a democracy: “In any case, it will certainly be more fun to appreciate the jokes and the wily moments of disconnection than to flinch at foreigners.”

Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, in which a Chinese woman – Zhuang Xiao Qiao – moves to London for her English education, is narrated in a “broken” syntax which only improves with the protagonist’s English ability. A good chunk of the novel is just a list of observations about things Zhuang doesn’t understand – why afternoon tea is something to eat, how cream can be whipped, the difference between tap and “filthy” water. (She’s misheard “fizzy” – and I still giggle when I hear, in Spanish, “con gas.”) Her lover tells her he’s a vegetarian, and she exclaims, “What that word? Word describe a people fall asleep for long long time, like living dying?” (She thinks he means he’s in a vegetative state.) The novel is an exercise in constant confusion, constant vulnerability. Zhuang is the butt of every joke, and this achieves two things.

First, it defamiliarizes the practices we find obvious, and expect everyone to follow. Zhuang wonders: why are the British obsessed with old buildings and old clothing, she wonders, when civilization means building the new? Why are they “always talking about mans, no womans!” Mankind, manmade, the history of man. And why are their standards for good English so arbitrary? “Even Shakespeare write bad English,” she points out. “For example, he says, “Where go thou?” If I speak like that Mrs. Margaret will tell me wrongly.”

Second, it detaches perception from fluency: Zhuang’s confusion itself is the insight. Here’s what I mean. Zhuang reflects, on her first week in language school: “She also telling me I disorder when speaking English. Chinese we starting sentence from concept of time or place. Order like this: Last autumn on the Great Wall we eat barbecue. So time and space always bigger than little human in our country. Is not order in English sentence, “I,” or “Jake” or “Mary”. By front of everything, supposing be most important thing to whole sentence.” Zhuang doesn’t understand less just because English sentence order doesn’t come intuitively to her; rather, she observes more because she doesn’t take it for granted. And it’s true – Chinese sentences typically place time and location information before the verb, as opposed to English sentences, which typically put time and place at the end. So Guo’s novel is three hundred pages proving Sofia Vergara’s iconic line in Modern Family: “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”

We’re so anxious about seeming smart – at least, not coming off as stupid. But perhaps if we took ourselves less seriously, we might respect others more – and we might find goodwill where we expected hostility. There’s a scene in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers where Zhuang goes alone to the pub, and she’s the lone foreigner among a bunch of working-class British men. “The way I am talking in English make everybody laugh.” From this she concludes: “They must like me.” In Taipei Story, the protagonist – and I, by extension – are the butt of every joke, and I think we’re in good company.

By the way, I can’t speak any Spanish. Last fall during a literary festival in San Miguel de Allende, my husband and I stood in line at a popular brunch restaurant. My husband went to the bathroom, and the hostess asked me to confirm if there were two of us - our table was almost ready. Then she asked (I thought), “Tu hombre?” Ah! She wanted to know where my man was. “El baño,” I declared. She blinked. She’d asked, “Tu nombre.” She’d asked me my name.

Love,

Rebecca

PS: I gave versions of this talk at Yale and Boston University earlier this month. Thanks very much to folks who offered suggestions and recommendations.

PPS: The third season of Merve Emre’s podcast, “The Critic and Her Publics,” has a great episode on translators discussing how their shame and scars from feeling out of place can be generative. I couldn’t think of a way to work it organically into this essay but it is a great listen.

PPPS: Am reading and enjoying Nina Bouraoui’s All Men Want to Know, A.S. Byatt’s collection Elementals, and Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation.