Darned Detours

So what happened? I swear that I'm going to speed this up and instead I stop for almost two months. First, I decided to work on a long short story that turned out to be emotionally exhausting. I couldn't work on the draft at the same time for some reason. The second reason is in the realm of the strange. My mother is 78 years old. For whatever reason (I can make sense of them, I just can't talk about them in a public forum), shes decided to tell me something that's pretty significant about my life that I knew nothing about. Her own memory of the events is very hazy and yeah there are bits of this story that draw on real life, though far less than most people assume or think. In any case, there's probably a psychological reason that I've been so slow with this novel - at some level there was an important part of the story missing.

Way back when, I kept running into what I thought was a huge handicap in taking on this subject matter: I simply didn't know a lot about the incidents. In particular, a lot of the people only spoke Chinese or in some cases Tagalog or Spanish. I had no idea what they were talking about and thus thought I couldn't possibly understand what they thought or felt. A haze of languages I couldn't understand or speak surrounded the core of my story. Over time, I've come to see the haze as the most interesting aspect of the story itself. Memory is never clean or perfect. Feelings are often complicated and difficult even impossible to understand. At the same time, that doesn't make them any less valuable.

The weird thing is that for the last couple weeks I've been faced with the fact that the things I thought I knew and that we're in a language I understood weren't quite as clear as I'd assumed. My Grandfather's generation was always the mystery generation for me, but the older I get and the more I find out it strikes me that my parents' generation is much more complicated than I could have imagined. No doubt, I'll learn the same thing about my own or at least my daughter might come to realize that.

My writer's group often reminds me that the “town” around which the novel revolves, Paperson, California, is based on what for most readers is an inside joke. They ask “Are you going to explain that somewhere in the book?” I haven't yet. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese coming into the US had to show that they were the son of a merchant, scholar, etc. After the San Francisco earthquake destroyed most of the immigration records, a sizeable business grew up in forging identities for young men who wanted to come to America. These folk were called “Papersons”. Almost all of the Chinese coming through the town were “Papersons” and they often came to the countryside to avoid immigration officials.

I've always had two models in mind for the town in the novel. One was Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The other was Sutpen's Hundred from Abaslom Absalom. Over the last week, I've been listening to Absalom via book on mp3. It's been interesting to see how much I'd misapprehended the book and how much I'd forgotten, but it's helped to go back there.

I think the hardest thing in this process has been knowing when to “push forward” and when to “sit back and consider”. So, I spent a bit longer doing the latter once again, something that I've spent far too much time doing in this process. Hopefully, it gets me closer to not further from my goal.