[stylist] Creative nonfiction lesson repost

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Jackie and others,

I'm reposting what I wrote for January's lesson, which was on creative
nonfiction.

Stylist and the Writers division have seen a growth in nonfiction
writers in the few years I've been involved. Likewise, creative
nonfiction is a growing and expanding genre. It is often a confusing
genre though, and despite the fact many of us read creative nonfiction
pieces frequently, we are not always aware of the genre itself.

I have my bachelors of fine arts from the University of Nebraska Omaha
where I studied creative writing in the Writer's Workshop program. My
concentration was in creative nonfiction. I was invited to pursue the
senior thesis in the Writers Workshop before graduating. For more
information about UNO's creative writing program, visit:
http://www.unomaha.edu/creativewriting/.

I have had a couple of personal essays published in small literary
publications, and I have written a blog for the Omaha World Herald for
two years now, and often my blogs are featured on sister websites and
the Herald paper as well.

In an attempt to unveil the so-called fourth genre and hopefully shed
some new understanding of it, I will provide a brief over-view of
creative nonfiction. I will also include a couple of essays from
respected practitioners of the genre at the conclusion.

Simply put, creative nonfiction is A branch of writing that employs the
literary techniques usually associated with fiction or poetry to report
on actual persons, places, or events, as defined by About.com.
http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/creatnonfiction.htm

For material to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be based in
fact but written with attention to literary style and technique. The
ultimate goal of creative nonfiction writers is to communicate
information, just like a reporter, but shaping it in a way that reads
like fiction.

Patricia Hampl writes:

Memoir seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where
they can live together. I persist in believing the event has value-after
all, I remember it-but in writing the memoir I did not simply relive the
experience. Rather, I explored the mysterious relationship between all
the images I could round up and the even more impacted feelings that
caused me to store the images safely away in memory. Stalking the
relationship, seeking the congruence between stored image and hidden
emotion-that's the real job of memoir (I Could Tell You Stories, 30).

Often referred to as literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction,
nonfiction art  and the fourth genre,  Forms within this genre include,
but are not limited too:

.	biography
.	food writing
.	literary journalism
.	memoirs
.	personal essays
.	travel writing
.	other hybrid essays

Creative nonfiction is currently defined by its lack of established
conventions. The genre is structured like traditional fictional
narratives, but the content is based on real-life.

Creative nonfiction elements include:

.	Braiding narrative story-telling with fictional and poetical
techniques
.	Based on actual people, places and events
.	Uses tools of literary realism: scene-by-scene construction,
dialogue, point of view details
.	May rely on lyrical or poetical language, conjecture, metaphor
and other fictional techniques
.	Provides a sense of place and time
.	Can use framing devices

Writers of creative nonfiction use standard elements of fiction to write
about real-life events. Each reads as if it is fiction with vivid
setting, character details, imagery and figurative language. The authors
arrange details to keep their readers attention, like a gripping plot
would do. But the source of all of these works is real life, according
to mshogue.com. http://www.mshogue.com/English_11/cnf.htm

Some creative nonfiction writers stick to more traditional forms and
techniques, while others are edgy and experimental.

The genre has been met with confusion especially when not given an
accurate description of the form. In the past decade, manuscripts have
been published and advertised as nonfiction when in reality, so-called
facts have been widely exaggerated and even completely falsified. These
books should not be considered legitimate creative nonfiction
manuscripst. A writer of this genre should not be making false claims
and lying.

The "creative" in the title is not a word allowing writers to
fictionalize material. Creative only affords one the ability to
construct nonfiction using techniques like scenic development, imagery
and metaphor, creative language, literary devices, conjecture, dialogue,
etc.

Rules to follow:
.	All material should be as truthful and reliable as possible.
.	Dialogue should be remembered to the best of your ability and
not completely fabricated.
.	Do not exaggerate real-life events in which to create a
compelling narrative.
.	Be fair with all subject matter and people used in the telling
of your story.

Having said all that, the problem of any nonfiction writer is too
accurately portray the truth. When it comes to memoirs and personal
essays (I use these two terms to cover all forms of creative nonfiction)
we are writing from memory, and we capture memories to the best of our
abilities. Likewise, when writing about events and people not personal
to us, we take research, interviews and any other information used to
learn about a subject, and we create a narrative as accurately as
possible.

In creative nonfiction, there's a bit more room for a grey understanding
of reality as opposed to black-and-white forms of nonfiction such as
journalism and history books.

Melanie McGrath, author of Silvertown, which is written in a novelist's
idiom, says that the known facts of her stories are:

the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have
slipped through the holes - we no longer know them nor have any means of
verifying them - and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or
reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the
scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived
through it. To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more
profound truth of the story (Wikipedia.com).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_nonfiction

It's the job of the creative nonfiction writer to portray the truth, but
that truth is based off of our own collective knowledge, values and
understanding of any given situation. Creative nonfiction provides us
the opportunity to explore individual truths.

Hampl writes, "Instinctively, we go to our store of private associations
for our authority to speak of these weighty issues. We find, in our
details and broken, obscured images, the language of symbol. Here memory
impulsively reaches out and embraces imagination. That is the resort to
invention. It isn't a lie, but an act of necessity, as the innate urge
to locate truth always is," (I Could Tell You Stories, 31).

When writing about events and people outside our personal world,
creative nonfiction allows us to ponder potential truths. We rely on
research and existing information in order to relay facts, but we can
delve into potentials; we can use conjecture and create "perhaps" or
"what-if" moments.

Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, authors of The Sugar Girls, a novelistic
story based on interviews with former sugar-factory workers, make a
similar point:

Although we have tried to remain faithful to what our interviewees have
told us, at a distance of over half a century many memories are
understandably incomplete, and where necessary we have used our own
research, and our imaginations, to fill in the gaps. However, the
essence of the stories related here is true, as they were told to us by
those who experienced them at first hand (Wikipedia.com).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_nonfiction

Another distinguishable difference noted in creative nonfiction is the
universal truth. The genre seeks to find a thread connecting the world
through specific events in daily life. Whether personal or not, you
write to ignite a spark in the reader. You are not necessarily writing
in order to tell your story, but to tell your story in an attempt to
find a universal meaning. It's the camera moving away from the close-up,
the canvas employing more color the further away the eye moves from a
singular object.

Hampl writes:

Some people think of autobiographical writing as the precious occupation
of the unusually self-absorbed. Couldn't the same accusation is hurled
at a lyric poet, at a novelist-at anyone with the audacity to present a
personal point of view? True memoir is written, like all literature, in
an attempt to find not only a self but a world. The self-absorption that
seems to be the impetus and embarrassment of autobiography turns into
(or perhaps always was) a hunger for the world. Actually, it begins as
hunger for a world, one gone or lost, effaced by time or a more sudden
brutality. But in the act of remembering, the personal environment
expands, resonates beyond itself, beyond its "subject," into the endless
and tragic recollection that is history, (I Could Tell You Stories, 36).

Creative nonfiction often draws upon the past in order to make sense of
the present. Employing fictional techniques and literary devices give us
tools to transpose fact into a compelling, gripping format. It's one
thing to watch television in black-and-white, and another to watch it in
color. Creative nonfiction is the bridge connecting true stories to
creative means in which to relay these stories. Hampl says, "We seek a
means of exchange, a language which will renew these ancient concerns
and make them wholly, pulsingly ours," (I Could Tell You Stories, 31).

Creative nonfiction is not a new style of nonfiction writing, but it's
becoming a more widely accepted form. Universities have entire
departments solely dedicated to the genre; more publications prefer
creative nonfiction pieces; writers are being recognized for
contributing to this style of writing, and many are experimenting with
the genre.

The following are just a few well-known publications publishing creative
nonfiction:

.	The New Yorker
.	Harper's Magazine
.	Tin House
.	Threepenny Review
.	The Iowa Review

And new publications have cropped up publishing creative nonfiction.
Many newer publications accept edgier, experimental pieces though
appreciate traditional creative nonfiction as well. These publications
have gained credibility and praise within the literary community. To
name a few:

.	Identity Theory
.	Revolution House
.	South 85
.	Timber
.	Mixed Fruit

In conclusion, I leave you with examples of creative nonfiction writing.
I will also attach them to this post. There's no better way in which to
learn about writing than to read the work of published writers in any
given genre. These are of course some of my favorite pieces.

"Ashes" by David Sedaris is an exerpt from his book Naked.

Sedaris was born in New York state but grew up in North Carolina. He's
the second oldest of six. One of his sisters is the actress Amy Sedaris.

While in his teens and early twenties, Sedaris was involved in the
performing arts, which he has written about in several essays.

He graduated from Chicago's Art Institute in 1987 and has been published
in prestigious literary magazines like the New Yorker and Esquire.

After a successful reading of his essay "Santaland Diaries" on NPR in
1992, Sedaris has continued to have a presence on NPR.

Along with nonfiction, Sedaris writes fiction and plays.

He lives with his long-time partner Hugh Hamrick.
16
ashes
The moment I realized I would be a homosexual for the rest of my life, I
forced my brother and sisters to sign a contract swearing they'd never
get married. There was a clause allowing them to live with anyone of
their choice, just so long as they never made it official.
"What about children?" my sister Gretchen asked, slipping a tab of acid
under her tongue. "Can I not marry and still have a baby?"
I imagined the child, his fifteen hands batting at the mobile hanging
over the crib. "Sure, you can still have kids. Now just pick up your
eyebrow pencil and sign on the dotted line."
My fear was that, once married, my sisters would turn their backs on the
family, choosing to spend their vacations and holidays with their
husbands. One by one they would abandon us until it was just me and my
parents, eating our turkey and stuffing off TV trays. It wasn't
difficult getting the signatures. The girls in my family didn't play
house, they played reformatory. They might one day have a relation
 
235
ship - if it happened, it happened; but they saw no reason to get bent
out of shape about it. My father thought otherwise. He saw marriage as
their best possible vocation, something they should train for and
visualize as a goal. One of my sisters would be stooped before the open
refrigerator, dressed in a bathing suit, and my father would weigh her
with his eyes. "It looks like you've gained a few pounds," he'd say.
"Keep that up and you'll never find a husband." Find. He said it as
though men were exotic mushrooms growing in the forest and it took a
keen eye to spot one.
"Don't listen to him," I'd say. "I think the weight looks good on you.
Here, have another bowl of potato chips."
Marriage meant a great deal to our neighbors, and we saw that as another
good reason to avoid it. "Well, we finally got Kim married off." This
was always said with such a sense of relief, you'd think the Kim in
question was not a twenty-year-old girl but the last remaining puppy of
an unwanted litter. Our mother couldn't make it to the grocery store and
back without having to examine wallet-size photos of someone's
dribbling, popeyed grandbaby.
"Now that's different," she'd say. "A living baby. All my grandchildren
have been ground up for fertilizer or whatever it is they do with the
aborted fetuses. It puts them under my feet but keeps them out of my
hair, which is just the way I like it. Here's your picture back. You
tell that daughter of yours to keep up the good work."
Unlike our father, it pleased her that none of her children had
reproduced. She used the fact as part of a routine she delivered on a
regular basis. "Six children and none of them are married. I've taken
the money we saved on the weddings and am using it to build my daughters
a whorehouse."
After living with her boyfriend, Bob, for close to ten years, my sister
Lisa nullified our contract when she agreed to marry him. Adding insult
to injury, they decided the wed-
 
236
ding would take place not at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas but on
a mountaintop in western North Carolina.
"That's nice," my mother said. "Now all I need is a pair of navy blue
hiking boots to match my new dress and I'll be all set."
The first time I met my future brother-in-law, he was visiting my
parents' home and had his head deep in the oven. I walked into the
kitchen and, mistaking him for one of my sisters, grabbed his plump,
denim-clad bottom and proceeded to knead it with both hands. He
panicked, smacking his head against the oven's crusty ceiling. "Oh,
golly," I said, "I'm sorry. I thought you were Lisa."
It was the truth, but for whatever reason, it failed to comfort him. At
the time Bob was working as a gravedigger, a career choice that
suggested a refreshing lack of ambition. These were not fresh graves,
but old ones, slotted for relocation in order to make room for a new
highway or shopping center. "How are you going to support my daughter on
that?" my father asked.
"Oh, Lou," my mother said, "nobody's asking him to support anyone;
they're just sleeping together. Let him be."
We liked Bob because he was both different and unapologetic. "You take a
day-old pork chop, stab it with a fork, and soak it in some vinegar and
you've got yourself some good eatin'," he'd say, fingering the feathery
tip of his waist-length braid. Because of his upbringing and countless
allergies, Bob's apartment was a testament to order and cleanliness. We
figured that someone who carefully shampooed the lining of his work
boots might briefly date our sister but would never go so far as to
marry her. Lisa couldn't be trained to scoot the food scraps off her
soiled sheets, much less shake out the blanket and actually make the
bed. I underestimated both his will and his patience. They had lived
together for close to three years when I dropped by unannounced 
 
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 and found my sister standing at the sink with a sponge in one hand and
a plate in the other. She still hadn't realized the all-important role
of detergent, but she was learning. Bob eventually cut his hair and
returned to college, abandoning his shovel for a career in corporate
real estate. He was a likable guy; it was the marrying part that got to
me. "My sister's wedding" was right up there with "my recent colostomy"
in terms of three-word phrases I hoped never to use.
Three weeks before the wedding, my mother called to say she had cancer.
She'd gone to a doctor complaining about a ringing in her ear, and the
resulting tests revealed a substantial tumor in her lung. "They tell me
it's the size of a lemon," she said. "Not a tiny fist or an egg, but a
lemon. I think they describe it in terms of fruit so as not to scare
you, but come on, who wants a lemon in their lung? They're hoping to
catch it before it becomes a peach or a grapefruit, but who knows? I
sure as hell don't. Twenty-odd tests and they still haven't figured out
what's wrong with my ear. I'm just hoping that whatever it is, it isn't
much larger than a grape. This cancer, though, I realize it's my own
fault. I'm just sorry your father's still around to remind me of that
fact every fifteen goddamned seconds."
My sister Amy was with me when my mother called. We passed the phone
back and forth across my tiny New York kitchen and then spent the rest
of the evening lying in bed, trying to convince each other that our
mother would get better but never quite believing it. I'd heard of
people who had survived cancer, but most of them claimed to get through
it with the aid of whole grains and spiritual publications that
encouraged them to sit quietly in a lotus position. They envisioned
their tumors and tried to reason with them. Our mother was not the type
to greet the dawn or cook with oats and barley. She didn't reason, she
threatened; and if that
 
238
didn't work, she chose to ignore the problem. We couldn't picture her
joining a support group or trotting through the mall in a warm-up suit.
Sixty-two years old and none of us had ever seen her in a pair of
slacks. I'm not certain why, but it seemed to me that a person needed a
pair of pants in order to defeat cancer. Just as important, they needed
a plan. They needed to accept the idea of a new and different future,
free of crowded ashtrays and five-gallon jugs of wine and scotch. They
needed to believe that such a life might be worth living. I didn't know
that I'd be able to embrace such an unrewarding future, but I hoped that
she could. My brother, sisters, and I undertook a campaign to bolster
her spirits and suggest new and exciting hobbies she might explore once
she was cured and back on her feet.
"It'll be great," I said. "You could, I don't know, maybe you could
learn to pilot small planes or volunteer to hold crack babies. There are
a lot of things an older person can do with her time rather than smoke
and drink."
"Please don't call me stoned on pot and tell me there are lots of things
I can do with my life," she said. "I just got off the phone with your
brother, who suggested I open up a petting zoo. If that's what being
high does for a person, then what I really need to do is start smoking
marijuana, which would be a bit difficult, for me since the last time I
saw my right lung it was lying in the bottom of a pan."
In truth, her lungs were right where they'd always been. The cancer was
too far advanced and she was too weak to survive an operation. The
doctor decided to send her home while he devised a plan. The very word
sounded hopeful to us, a plan. "The doctor has a plan!" my sisters and I
crowed to one another.
"Right," my mother said. "He plans to golf on Saturday, sail on Sunday,
and ask for my eyes, kidneys, and what's left of my liver on that
following Monday. That's his plan."
 
239
We viewed it as a bad sign when she canceled her subscription to People
magazine and took to buying her cigarettes in packs rather than cartons.
She went through her jewelry box, calling my sisters to ask if they
preferred pearls or gems. "Right now, the rubies are in a brooch shaped
like a candy cane, but you can probably get more money if you have them
removed and just sell the stones." In her own way she had already begun
to check out, giving up on the plan before it was even announced. But
what about us? I wanted to say. Aren't we reason enough to carry on? I
thought of the unrelenting grief we had caused her over the years and
answered the question myself. It was her hope to die before one of us
landed in jail.
"What's Amy planning on wearing to this little Pepsi commercial," my
mother asked, referring to the mountaintop ceremony. "Tell me it's not
that wedding dress, please."
Lisa had decided to be married in a simple cream-colored suit, the sort
of thing one might wear to work on the day of their employee evaluation.
Figuring that at least somebody ought to look the part, Amy had the idea
to attend the ceremony dressed in a floor-length wedding gown, complete
with veil and train. In the end, she wound up wearing something my
mother hated even more, a pink cocktail dress outfitted with detachable
leg-o'-mutton sleeves. It wasn't like her to care what anyone wore, but
she used the topic to divert attention from what we came to refer to as
her "situation." If she'd had it her way, we would never have known
about the cancer. It was our father's idea to tell us, and she had
fought it, agreeing only when he threatened to tell us himself. Our
mother worried that once we found out, we would treat her differently,
delicately. We might feel obliged to compliment her cooking and laugh at
all her jokes, thinking always of the tumor she was trying so hard to
forget. And that is exactly what we did. The knowledge of her illness
forced everything
 
240
into the spotlight and demanded that it be memorable. We were no longer
calling our mother. Now we were picking up the telephone to call our
mother with cancer. Bad day at work? All you had to do was say, "I'm
sorry I forgot to vacuum beneath the cushions of your very lovely, very
expensive Empire sofa, Mrs. Walman. I know how much it means to you. I
guess I should be thinking of more important things than my mother's
inoperable cancer."
We weren't the ones who were sick, but still, the temptation was so
great. Here we could get the sympathy without enduring any of the
symptoms. And we deserved sympathy, didn't we?
Speaking to our mother, we realized that any conversation might be our
last, and because of that, we wanted to say something important. What
could one say that hadn't already been printed on millions of greeting
cards and helium balloons?
"I love you," I said at the end of one of our late-night phone calls.
"I am going to pretend I didn't hear that," she said. I heard a match
strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes in a raised glass.
And then she hung up. I had never said such a thing to my mother, and if
I had it to do over again, I would probably take it back. Nobody ever
spoke that way except Lisa. It was queer to say such a thing to someone
unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed, our mother
had taught that when we were no taller than pony kegs. I had known
people who said such things to their parents, "I love you," but it
always translated to mean "I'd love to get off the phone with you."
We gathered together for the wedding, which took place on a clear, crisp
October afternoon. The ceremony was held upon
 
241
a grassy precipice that afforded magnificent views of the surrounding
peaks, their trees resplendent in fiery red and orange. It was easy to
imagine, looking out over the horizon, that we were it, the last
remaining people on the face of the earth. The others had been wiped out
by disease and famine, and we had been chosen to fashion a new and
better world. It was a pleasant thought until I pictured us foraging for
berries and having to bathe in ice-cold streams. Bob's family, hearty
and robust, could probably pull it off, but the rest of us would wither
and die shortly after we'd run out of shampoo.
My father wept openly during the ceremony. The rest of us studied his
crumpled face and fought hard not to follow his example. What was this
emotion? My sister was getting married to a kind and thoughtful man who
had seen her through a great many hardships. Together they shared a deep
commitment to Mexican food and were responsible card-carrying members of
the North American Caged Bird Society. The tacos and parrots were
strictly between Lisa and Bob, but the rest of her belonged to us.
Standing in a semicircle on top of that mountain, it became clear that
while Lisa might take on a different last name, she could never escape
the pull of our family. Marriage wouldn't let her off the hook, even if
she wanted it to. She could move to Antarctica, setting up house in an
underground bunker, but still we would track her down. It was senseless
to run. Ignore our letters and phone calls, and we would invade your
dreams. I'd spent so many years thinking marriage was the enemy that
when the true danger entered our lives, 1 was caught completely off
guard. The ceremony inspired a sense of loss directed not at Lisa, but
at our mother.
"No booze?" she moaned. My mother staggered toward the buffet table, its
retractable legs trembling beneath the
 
242
weight of sparkling waters, sausage biscuits, and decaffeinated coffee.
"No booze," Lisa had announced a week before the ceremony. "Bob and I
have decided we don't want that kind of a wedding."
"Which kind?" my mother asked. "The happy kind? You and Bob might be
thrilled to death, but the rest of us will need some help working up the
proper spirit."
She didn't look much different than she had the last time I'd seen her.
The chemotherapy had just begun, and she'd lost - at most - maybe five
pounds. A casual acquaintance might not have noticed any change at all.
We did only because we knew, everyone on that mountaintop knew, that she
had cancer. That she was going to die. The ceremony was relatively
small, attended by both families and an assortment of Lisa's friends,
most of whom we had never met but could easily identify These were the
guests who never once complained about the absence of alcohol.
"I just want you to know that Colleen and I both love your sister Lisa
so much," the woman said, her eyes moist with tears. "I know we've never
been formally introduced, but would you mind if I gave you a big fat
hug?"
With the exception of Lisa, we were not a hugging people. In terms of
emotional comfort, it was our belief that no amount of physical contact
could match the healing powers of a well-made cocktail.
"Hey, wait a minute. Where's my hug?" Colleen asked, rolling up her
sleeves and moving in for the kill. I looked over my attacker's shoulder
and watched as a woman in a floor-length corduroy skirt wrestled my
mother into an affectionate headlock.
"I heard what you're going through and I know that you're frightened,"
the woman said, looking down at the
 
243
head of thinning gray hair she held clasped between her powerful arms.
"You're frightened because you think you're alone."
"I'm frightened," my mother wheezed, "because I'm not alone and because
you're crushing what's left of my goddamned lungs."
The scariest thing about these people was that they were sober. You
could excuse that kind of behavior from someone tanked up on booze, but
most of them hadn't taken a drink since the Carter administration. I
took my mother's arm and led her to a bench beyond the range of the
other guests. The thin mountain air made it difficult for her to
breathe, and she moved slowly, pausing every few moments. The families
had taken a walk to a nearby glen, and we sat in the shade, eating
sausage biscuits and speaking to each other like well-mannered
strangers.
"The sausage is good," she said. "It's flavorful but not too greasy."
"Not greasy at all. Still, though, it isn't dry."
"Neither are the biscuits," she said. "They're light and crisp, very
buttery."
"Very. These are some very buttery biscuits. They're flaky but not too
flaky."
"Not too flaky at all," she said.
We watched the path, awkwardly waiting for someone to release us from
the torture of our stiff and meaningless conversation. I'd always been
afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn't that we feared
catching their brain aneurysm or accidently ripping out their IV. I
think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us
not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded
petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and
without our complaints, there was
 
244
nothing to say. My mother and 1 had been fine over the telephone, but
now, face to face, the rules had changed. If she were to complain, she
risked being seen as a sick complainer, the worst kind of all. If I were
to do it, I might come off sounding even more selfish than I actually
was. This sudden turn of events had robbed us of our common language,
leaving us to exchange the same innocuous pleasantries we'd always made
fun of. I wanted to stop it and so, I think, did she, but neither of us
knew how.
After all the gifts had been opened, we returned to our rooms at the
Econolodge, the reservations having been made by my father. We looked
out the windows, past the freeway and into the distance, squinting at
the charming hotel huddled at the base of other, finer mountains. This
would be the last time our family was all together. It's so rare when
one knowingly does something for the last time: the last time you take a
bath, the last time you have sex or trim your toenails. If you know
you'll never do it again, it might be nice to really make a show of it.
This would be it as far as my family was concerned, and it ticked me off
that our final meeting would take place in such a sorry excuse for a
hotel. My father had taken the liberty of ordering nonsmoking rooms,
leaving the rest of us to rifle through the Dumpster in search of cans
we might use as ashtrays.
"What more do you want out of a hotel?" he shouted, stepping out onto
the patio in his underpants. "It's clean, they've got a couple of snack
machines in the lobby, the TVs work, and it's near the interstate. Who
cares if you don't like the damned wallpaper? You know what your problem
is, don't you?"
" We're spoiled," we shouted in unison.
We were not, however, cheap. We would have gladly paid for something
better. No one was asking for room service or a heated swimming pool,
just for something with a little more
 
245
character: maybe a motel with an Indian theme or one of the many
secluded lodges that as a courtesy posted instructions on how to behave
should a bear interrupt your picnic. Traveling with our father meant
always having to stay at nationally known motor lodges and take our
meals only in fast-food restaurants. "What?" he'd ask. "Are you telling
me you'd rather sit down at a table and order food you've never tasted
before?"
Well, yes, that was exactly what we wanted. Other people did it all the
time, and most of them had lived to talk about it.
"Bullshit," he'd shout. "That's not what you want." When arguing, it was
always his tactic to deny the validity of our requests. If you wanted,
say, a stack of pancakes, he would tell you not that you couldn't have
them but that you never really wanted them in the first place. "I know
what I want" was always met with "No you don't."
My mother never shared his enthusiasm for corporate culture, and as a
result, they had long since decided to take separate vacations. She
usually traveled with her sister, returning from Santa Fe or Martha's
Vineyard with a deep tan, while my father tended to fish or golf with
friends we had never met.
The night before the wedding, we had gone to a charming lodge and eaten
dinner with Bob's parents. The dining room had the feel of someone's
home. Upon the walls hung pictures of deceased relatives, and the mantel
supported aged trophies and a procession of hand-carved decoys. The
night of the wedding, Lisa and Bob having left for their honeymoon, we
were left on our own. My sisters, stuffed with sausage, chose to remain
in their rooms, so I went with my parents and brother to a chain
restaurant located on a brightly lit strip of highway near the outskirts
of town. Along the way we passed dozens of more attractive options:
 
246
steak houses boasting firelit dining rooms and clapboard cottages lit
with discreet signs reading HOME COOKING and NONE BETTER!
"What about that place?" my brother said. "I've never tasted squirrel
before. Hey, that sounds nice."
"Ha!" my father said. "You won't think it's so nice at three A.M. when
you're hunched over the John, crapping out the lining of your stomach."
We couldn't go to any of the curious places, because they might not have
a sneeze guard over the salad bar. They might not have clean restrooms
or a properly anesthetized staff. A person couldn't take chances with a
thing like that. My mother had always been willing to try anything. Had
there been an Eskimo restaurant, she would have been happy to crawl into
the igloo and eat raw seal with her bare hands, but my father was
driving, which meant it was his decision. Having arrived at the
restaurant of his choice, he lowered his glasses to examine the menu
board. "What can you tell me about your boneless Pick O' the Chix
combination platter?" he asked the counter girl, a Cherokee teenager
wearing a burnt orange synthetic jumper.
"Well, sir, there isn't much to say except that it doesn't got any bones
and comes with fries and a half-gallon 'Thirsty Man' soda."
My father shouted as if her dusky complexion had somehow affected her
hearing. "But the chicken itself, how is it prepared?"
"I put it on a tray," the girl said.
"Oh, I see," my father said. "That explains it all. Golly, you're a
bright one, aren't you? IQ just zooming right off the charts. You put it
on a tray, do you? I guess that means the chicken is in no position to
put itself on the tray, which tells me that it's probably been killed in
some fashion. Am I correct? All right, now we're getting somewhere."
This continued
 
247
 until the girl was in tears and we returned empty-handed to the car, my
father muttering, "Jesus, did you hear that? She could probably tell you
everything you needed to know about trapping a possum, but when it comes
to chicken, she 'puts it on a tray'"
Under normal circumstances my mother would have worked overtime to
protect the waitress or counter help, but tonight she was simply too
tired. She wanted to go somewhere that served drinks. "The Italian
place, let's go there."
My brother and I backed her up, and a short time later we found
ourselves seated in a dimly lit restaurant, my father looking up at the
waitress to shout, "Rare, do you know what that means? It means I want
my steak the color of your gums."
"Oh, Lou, give it a rest." My mother filled her wine glass and lit a
cigarette.
"What are you doing?" He followed his question with an answer. "You're
killing yourself is what you're doing."
My mother lifted her glass in salute. "You got that right, baby."
"1 don't believe this. You might as well just put a gun to your head.
No, I take that back, you can't blow your brains out because you haven't
got any."
"You should have known that when I agreed to marry you," she said.
"Sharon, you haven't got a clue." He shook his head in disgust. "You
open your mouth and the crap just flies."
My mother had stopped listening years ago, but it was almost a comfort
that my father insisted on business as usual, despite the circumstances.
In him, she had found someone whose behavior would never vary. He had
made a commitment to make her life miserable, and no amount of sickness
or bad fortune would sway him from that task. My last meal with my
parents would be no different than the first. Had we
 
248
been at home, my mother would have fed him at seven and then waited
until ten or eleven, at which time she and I would broil steaks. We
would have put away several drinks by then, and if by chance the steaks
were overcooked, she would throw them to the dog and start all over
again. Before moving to New York, I had spent two months in Raleigh,
painting one of my father's rental units near the university, and during
that time our schedule never varied. Sometimes we'd eat in front of the
television, and other nights we would set a place for ourselves at the
table. I try recalling a single one of those evenings, wanting to take
comfort in the details, but they are lost to me. Even my diary tells me
nothing: "Ate steaks with Mom." But which steaks, porterhouse or New
York strip? What had we talked about and why hadn't I paid attention?
We returned to the motor lodge, where my parents retired to their room
and the rest of us hiked to a nearby cemetery, a once ideal spot that
now afforded an excellent view of the newly built Pizza Hut. Over the
years our mother had repeatedly voiced her desire to be cremated. We
would drive past a small forest fire or observe the pillars of smoke
rising from a neighbor's chimney, and she would crush her cigarette,
saying, "That's what I want, right there. Do whatever you like with the
remains; sprinkle them into the ashtrays of a fine hotel, give them to
smart-assed children for Christmas, hand them over to the Catholics to
rub into their foreheads, just make sure I'm cremated."
"Oh, Sharon," my father would groan. "You don't know what you want."
He'd say it as though he himself had been cremated several times in the
past but had finally wised up and accepted burial as the only sensible
option.
We laid our Econolodge bedspreads over the dewy grass of the cemetery,
smoking joints and trying to imagine a life without our mother. If there
was a heaven, we probably
 
249
shouldn't expect to find her there. Neither did she deserve to roam the
fiery tar pits of hell, surrounded for all eternity by the same
shitheads who brought us strip malls and theme restaurants. There must
exist some middle ground, a place where one was tortured on a daily
basis but still allowed a few moments of pleasure, taken wherever one
could find it. That place seemed to be Raleigh, North Carolina, so why
the big fuss? Why couldn't she just stay where she was and not have
cancer? That was always our solution, to go back in time. We discussed
it the way others spoke of bone marrow transplants and radiation. We
discussed it as though it were a viable option. A time machine, that
would solve everything. I could almost see its panel of blinking lights,
the control board marked with etched renderings of lumbering dinosaurs
and ending with Lisa's wedding. We could turn it back and view our
mother as a young girl, befriend her then, before her father's drinking
turned her wary and suspicious. See her working in the greeting-card
section of the drugstore and warn her not to drop out of school. Her
lack of education would make her vulnerable, causing her to overuse the
phrase "Well, what do I know" or "I'm just an idiot, but. . ." We could
turn it back and see ourselves as babies, our mother stuck out in the
country with no driver's license, wondering whom to call should someone
swallow another quarter or safety pin. The dial was ours, and she would
be at our mercy, just as she had always been, only this time we would
pay attention and keep her safe. Ever since arriving at the motor lodge,
we'd gone back and forth from one room to another, holding secret
meetings and exchanging private bits of information. We hoped that by
preparing ourselves for the worst, we might be able to endure the
inevitable with some degree of courage or grace.
Anything we forecasted was puny compared to the future that awaited us.
You can't brace yourself for famine if you've
 
250
never known hunger; it is foolish even to try. The most you can do is
eat up while you still can, stuffing yourself, shoveling it in with both
hands and licking clean the plates, recalling every course in vivid
detail. Our mother was back in her room and very much alive, probably
watching a detective program on television. Maybe that was her light in
the window, her figure stepping out onto the patio to light a cigarette.
We told ourselves she probably wanted to be left alone, that's how
stoned we were. We'd think of this later, each in our own separate way.
1 myself tend to dwell on the stupidity of pacing a cemetery while she
sat, frightened and alone, staring at the tip of her cigarette and
envisioning her self, clearly now, in ashes.

Clan of the One-breasted Women is an essay by Terry Tempest Williams.

Williams writes about environmental and social issues believing humans
are connected to the world around them mentally and physically.

William's is a naturalist and advocates for freedome of speech. She has
testified before congress on women's health issues, been a guest at the
White House, has camped in the remote wilderness of Utah and Alaska and
worked as a "barefoot" artist in Rowanda.

She writes with passion and often in a lyrical style. She's the author
of: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken
Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and
Passion in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy; and Finding Beauty
in a Broken World. Williams has written two childrens books; The Secret
Language of Snow, and Between Cattails. She's a columnist for the
magazine The Progressive.

Her work has appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, Orion, The
New York Times and the Iowa Review.

Among other awards, Williams has been the recipient of the Distinguished
Achievment Award from Western American Literature Association; the
Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim  Fellowship in
creative nonfiction. She's also received awards for her environmental
work  and activism.

Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner scholar in environmental
humanities at the University of Utah.

Williams and her husband, Brook Williams, spend their time between Utah
and Wyoming.

The Clan of the One-Breasted Women
Terry Tempest Williams
426
I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers,
and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who
survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.
I've had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small
tumor between my ribs diagnosed as a ''borderline malignancy."
This is my family history.
Most statistics tell us breast cancer is genetic, hereditary, with
rising percentages attached to fatty diets, childlessness, or becoming
pregnant after thirty. What they don't say is living in Utah may be the
greatest hazard of all.
We are a Mormon family with roots in Utah since 1847. The "word of
wisdom" in my family aligned us with good foods-no coffee, no tea,
tobacco, or alcohol. For the most part, our women were finished having
their babies by the time they were thirty. And only one faced

  
The Clan of One-Breasted Women         427

breast cancer prior to I960. Traditionally, as a group of people,
Mormons have a low rate of cancer.
Is our family a cultural anomaly? The truth is, we didn't think about
it. Those who did, usually the men, simply said, "bad genes." The
women's attitude was stoic. Cancer was part of life. On February 16,
19^1. the eve of my mother's surgery. I accidently picked up the
telephone and overheard her ask my grandmother what she could expect.
"Diane, it is one of the most spiritual experiences you will ever
encounter."
1 quietly put down the receiver.
Two clays later, my father took my brothers and me to the hospital to
visit her. She met us in the lobby in a wheelchair. No bandages were
visible. I'll never forget her radiance, the way she held herself in a
purple velvet robe and how she gathered us around her.
"Children, I am fine. I want you to know I felt the arms of God around
me."
We believed her. My father cried. Our mother, his wife, was thirty-
eight years old.
A little over a year after Mother's death. Dad and I were having dinner
together. He had just returned from St. George, where the Tempest
Company was completing the gas lines that would service southern Utah.
He spoke of his love for the country, the sandstoned landscape,
bare-boned and beautiful. He had just finished hiking the Kolob trail in
Zion National Park. We got caught up in reminiscing, recalling with
fondness our walk up Angel's Landing on his fiftieth birthday and the
years our family had vacationed there.
Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine. I told my father that
for years, as long as I could remember. I saw this flash of light in the
night in the desert-that this image had so permeated my being that I
could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon,
illuminating buttes and mesas.
"You did see it." he said.
"Saw what?"
"The bomb. The cloud. We were driving home from Riverside, California.
You were sitting on Diane's lap. She was pregnant. In fact. I remember
the day, September 7, 1957. We had just gotten out of the Service. We
were driving north, past Las Vegas. It was an hour or so before dawn,
when this explosion went off. We not only heard it. but felt it. 1
thought the oil tanker in front of us had blown up. We pulled over and
suddenly, rising from the desert floor, we saw it. clearly, this
golden-stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The sky seemed to vibrate with an
eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the
car."

 
428	PART IV   Anthology

I stared at my father.
"I thought you knew that," he said. "It was a common occurrence in the
fifties."
It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living
under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking
contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated
breasts of their mothers, my mother-members, years later, of the Clan of
One-Breasted Women.
It is a well-known story in the Desert West, "The Day We Bombed Utah."
or more accurately, the years we bombed Utah: above ground atomic
testing in Nevada took place from January 27. 1951 through July 11,
1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering ''low- use segments
of the population'1 with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks,
but the climate was right. The United States of the 1950s was red,
white, and blue. The Korean War was raging. McCarthyism  was rampant.
Ike was it, and the cold war was hot. If you were against nuclear
testing, you were for a communist regime.
Much has been written about this "American nuclear tragedy." Public
health was secondary to national security. The Atomic Energy
Commissioner, Thomas Murray, said, "Gentlemen, we must not let anything
interfere with the series of tests, nothing."
 Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in
spite of burns, blisters, and nausea, "It has been found that the tests
may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions
prevailing at the bombing reservations." Assuaging public fears was
simply a matter of public relations. "Your best action," an Atomic
Energy Commission booklet read, "is not to be worried about fallout." A
news release typical of the times stated. "We find no basis for
concluding that harm to any individual has resulted from radioactive
fallout."
On August 30, 1979, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, a suit was filed,
Irene Allen v. The United States of America. Mrs. Allen's case was the
first on an alphabetical list of twenty-four test cases, representative
of nearly twelve hundred plaintiffs seeking compensation from the United
States government for cancers caused by nuclear testing in Nevada.
Irene Allen lived in Hurricane, Utah. She was the mother of five
children and had been widowed twice. Her first husband, with their two
oldest boys, had watched the tests from the roof of the local high
school. He died of leukemia in 1956. Her second husband died of
pancreatic cancer in 1978.
In a town meeting conducted by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, shortly before
the suit was filed, Mrs. Allen said, "I am not blaming the government, I
want you to know that. Senator Hatch. But I thought if

 
The Clan of One-Breasted Women         429

my testimony could help in any way so this wouldn't happen again to any
of the generations coming up after us ... I am happy to be here this day
to bear testimony of this."
God-fearing people. This is just one story in an anthology of thousands.
On May 10. 1984, Judge Bruce S. Jenkins handed down his opinion. Ten of
the plaintiffs were awarded damages. It was the first time a federal
court had determined that nuclear tests had been the cause of cancers.
For the remaining fourteen test cases, the proof of causation was not
sufficient. In spite of the split decision, it was considered a landmark
ruling. It was not to remain so for long.
In April 1987, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge
Jenkins's ruling on the ground that the United States was protected from
suit by the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, a centuries-old idea
from England in the days of absolute monarchs.
In January 1988, the Supreme Court refused to review the Appeals Court
decision. To our court system it does not matter whether the United
States government was irresponsible, whether it lied to its citizens, or
even that citizens died from the fallout of nuclear testing. What
matters is that our government is immune: "The King can do no wrong."
In Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and
independent thinking is not. I was taught as a young girl not to ''make
waves'' or ''rock the boat."
"Just let it go," Mother would say. "You know how you feel, that's what
counts."
For many years, I have done just that-listened, observed, and quietly
formed my own opinions, in a culture that rarely asks questions because
it has all the answers. But one by one, I have watched the women in my
family die common, heroic deaths. We sat in waiting rooms hoping for
good news, but always receiving the bad. I cared for them, bathed their
scarred bodies, and kept their secrets. I watched beautiful women become
bald as Cytoxan, cisplatin, and Adriamycin were injected into their
veins. I held their foreheads as they vomited green-black bile, and I
shot them with morphine when the pain became inhuman. In the end. I
witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth
of their souls.
 The price of obedience has become too high.
The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed
rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons
is the same fear I saw in my mother's body. Sheep. Dead sheep. The
evidence is buried.
I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers,
Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest,

 
430	PART IV   Anthology

along with my aunts developed cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I
can't prove they didn't.
My father's memory was correct. The September blast we drove through in
1957 was part of Operation Plumbbob, one of the most intensive series of
bomb tests to be initiated. The flash of light in the night in the
desert, which I had always thought was a dream, developed into a family
nightmare. It took fourteen years, from 1957 to 1971, for cancer to
manifest in my mother-the same time, Howard L. Andrews, an authority in
radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation
cancer requires to become evident. The more I learn about what it means
to be a "downwinder," the more questions I drown in.
What I do know, however, is that as a Mormon woman of the fifth
generation of Latter-day Saints, I must question everything, even if it
means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a member of a border
tribe among my own people. Tolerating blind obedience in the name of
patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the
Nevada Test Site as "virtually uninhabited desert terrain,'' my family
and the birds at Great Salt Lake were some of the "virtual
uninhabitants." 

One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing
fire in the desert. They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in
their bellies and wax and wane with its phases. They mocked the
presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that they would
never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as
sparks broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.
And they sang a song given to them by Shoshone grandmothers:

Ah ne nah, nah	Consider the rabbits
nin nah nah-	How gently they walk on the earth-
ah ne nah, nah	Consider the rabbits
nin nah nah-	How gently they walk on the earth-
Nyaga mutzi	We remember them
oh ne nay-	We can walk gently also-
A'yaga mutzi	We remember them
oh ne nay-	We can walk gently also-

The women danced and drummed and sang for wreeks, preparing themselves
for what was to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of
their children, for the sake of the land.


 
The Clan of One-Breasted Women         431

A few miles downwind from the fire circle, bombs were being tested.
Rabbits felt the tremors. Their soft leather pads on paws and feet
recognized the shaking sands, while the roots of mesquite and sage were
smoldering. Rocks were hot from the inside out and dust devils hummed
unnaturally. And each time there was another nuclear test, ravens
watched the desert heave. Stretch marks appeared. The land was losing
its muscle.
The women couldn't bear it any longer. They were mothers. They had
suffered labor pains but always under the promise of birth. The red hot
pains beneath the desert promised death only, as each bomb became a
stillborn. A contract had been made and broken between human beings and
the land. A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood
the fate of the earth as their own.
Under the cover of darkness, ten women slipped under a barbed- wire
fence and entered the contaminated country. They were trespassing. They
walked toward the town of Mercury, in moonlight, taking their cues from
coyote, kit fox, antelope squirrel, and quail. They moved quietly and
deliberately through the maze of Joshua trees. When a hint of daylight
appeared they rested, drinking tea and sharing their rations of food.
The women closed their eyes. The time had come to protest writh the
heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason
against one's soul.
At dawn, the women draped themselves in mylar, wrapping long streamers
of silver plastic around their arms to blow in the breeze. They wore
clear masks, that became the faces of humanity. And when they arrived at
edge of Mercury, they carried all the butterflies of a summer day in
their wombs. They paused to allow their courage to settle.
The town that forbids pregnant women and children to enter because of
radiation risks was asleep. The women moved through the streets as
winged messengers, twirling around each other in slow motion, peeking
inside homes and watching the easy sleep of men and women. They were
astonished by such stillness and periodically would utter a shrill note
or low cry just to verify life.
The residents finally awoke to these strange apparitions. Some simply
stared. Others called authorities, and in time, the women were
apprehended by wary soldiers dressed in desert fatigues. They were taken
to a white, square building on the other edge of Mercury. When asked who
they were and why they were there, the women replied, "We are mothers
and we have come to reclaim the desert for our children."
The soldiers arrested them. As the ten women were blindfolded and
handcuffed, they began singing:

 
432	PART IV   Anthology

You can't forbid us eveiything You can't forbid us to think- You can't
forbid our tears to flow And you can't stop the songs that we

The women continued to sing louder and louder, until they heard the
voices of their sisters moving across the mesa:

Ah ne nah, nah nin nah nah- Ah ne nah, nah nin nah nah- Nyaga mutzi oh
ne nav- Nyaga mutzi oh ne nay-

"Call for reinforcements," one soldier said. 
"We have," interrupted one woman, "we have-and you have no idea of our
numbers."

I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine
other Utahns for trespassing on military lands. They are still
conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours was an act of civil
disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the clan of
One-Breasted Women.
As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked
my body. She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
"And these?" she asked sternly.
"Weapons," I replied.
Our eyes met. I smiled. She pulled the leg of my trousers back over my
boot.
"Step forward, please," she said as she took my arm.
We were booked under an afternoon sun and bused to Tonopah, Nevada. It
was a two-hour ride. This was familiar country. The Joshua trees
standing their ground had been named by my ancestors, who believed they
looked like prophets pointing west to the Promised Land. These were the
same trees that bloomed each spring, flowers appearing like white flames
in the Mojave. And I recalled a full moon

 
The Clan of One-Breasted Women         433

in May, when Mother and I had walked among them, flushing out mourning
doves and owls.
The bus stopped short of town. We were released.
The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the
desert with no way to get home. What they didn't realize was that we
were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet
smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.

Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" is from her book, Woman Warrior:
Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghost.

Kingston was born in California to Chinese immigrants. She explores her
unique heritage along with being female in most of her writing.

She studied engineering before switching to English at Berkley in
Calfornia. She married Earl Kingston and taught high school English upon
graduating.

After relocating to Hawaii, Kingston finished and published The Woman
Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghost, which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award.

A documentary, Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story, was released in
1990.

Along with various other awards, She has been the recipient of the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1980; was awarded the National
Humanaties Metal in 1997, and in 2007, she won the Northern California
Book Award Special Award in publishing for Veterans of War, Veterans of
Peace (2006) an anthology she edited.

A few of her other works include, China Men; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake
Book; and The Fifth Book of Peace.

No-Name  Woman
By Maxine Hong Kingston

"You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell
you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped
into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because
it is as if she had never been born.
"In 1924 just a few days after our village celebrated seventeen hurry-up
weddings - to make sure that every young man who went 'out on the road'
would responsibly come home - your father and his brothers and your
grandfather and his brothers and your aunt's new husband sailed for
America, the Gold Mountain. It was your grandfather's last trip. Those
lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye from the decks. They fed and
guarded the stowaways and helped them off in Cuba, New York, Bali,
Hawaii. 'We'll meet in California next year,' they said. All of them
sent money home.
"I remember looking at your aunt one day when she and I were dressing; I
had not noticed before that she had such a protruding melon of a
stomach. But I did not think, 'She's pregnant,' until she began to look
like other pregnant women, her shirt pulling and the white tops of her
black pants showing. She could not have been pregnant, you see, because
her husband had been gone for years. No one said anything. We did not
discuss it. In early summer she was ready to have the child, long after
the time when it could have been possible.
"The village had also been counting. On the night the baby was to be
born the villagers raided our house. Some were crying. Like a great saw,
teeth strung with lights, files of people walked zigzag across our land,
tearing the rice. Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water,
 
384
which drained away through the broken bunds. As the villagers closed in,
we could see that some of them, probably men and women we knew well,
wore white masks. The people with long hair hung it over their faces.
Women with short hair made it stand up on end. Some had tied white bands
around their foreheads, arms, and legs.
"At first they threw mud and rocks at the house. Then they threw eggs
and began slaughtering our stock. We could hear the animals scream their
deaths - the roosters, the pigs, a last great roar from the ox. Familiar
wild heads flared in our night windows; the villagers encircled us. Some
of the faces stopped to peer at us, their eyes rushing like
searchlights. The hands flattened against the panes, framed heads, and
left red prints.
"The villagers broke in the front and the back doors at the same time,
even though we had not locked the doors against them. Their knives
dripped with the blood of our animals. They smeared blood on the doors
and walls. One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit,
splattering blood in red arcs about her. We stood together in the middle
of our house, in the family hall with the pictures and tables of the
ancestors around us, and looked straight ahead.
"At that time the house had only two wings. When the men came back, we
would build two more to enclose our courtyard and a third one to begin a
second courtyard. The villagers pushed through both wings, even your
grandparents' rooms, to find your aunt's, which was also mine until the
men returned. From this room a new wing for one of the younger families
would grow. They ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs,
grinding them underfoot. They tore her work from the loom. They
scattered the cooking fire and rolled the new weaving in it. We could
hear them in the kitchen breaking our bowls and banging the pots. They
overturned the great waist-high earthenware jugs; duck eggs, pickled
fruits, vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents. The old woman
from the next field swept a broom through the air and loosed the
spirits-of-the-broom over our heads. 'Pig.' 'Ghost.' 'Pig,' they sobbed
and scolded while they ruined our house.
"When they left, they took sugar and oranges to bless themselves. They
cut pieces from the dead animals. Some of them took bowls that were not
broken and clothes that were not torn. Afterward we swept up the rice
and sewed it back up into sacks. But the smells from the spilled
preserves lasted. Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The
next
 
morning when I went for the water, I found her and the baby plugging up
the family well.
"Don't let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you
have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you.
Don't humiliate us. You wouldn't like to be forgotten as if you had
never been born. The villagers are watchful."
Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran
like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to
establish realities. Those in the emigrant generations who could not
reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the
first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible
world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading
them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse
their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways -
always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the
unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new
names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.
Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are
Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty,
insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with
stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the
movies?
If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or
ordinary, I would have to begin, "Remember Father's drowned-in-the-well
sister?" I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the
useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a
river-bank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather
than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and
eats food left for the gods.
Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we flew high kites.
We children came up off the ground over the melting cones our parents
brought home from work and the American movie on New Year's Day - Oh,
You Beautiful Doll with Betty Grable one year, and She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon with John Wayne another year. After the one carnival ride each,
we paid in guilt; our tired father counted his change on the dark walk
home.
Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their own chicks
 
386
and eat the embryos and the heads for delicacies and boil the feet in
vinegar for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard
lining - could such people engender a prodigal aunt? To be a woman, to
have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough. My aunt could not
have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the
old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and
be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined
the raid on her family.
Perhaps she had encountered him in the fields or on the mountain where
the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps he first noticed her in
the marketplace. He was not a stranger because the village housed no
strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he
worked an adjoining field, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she
sewed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She
obeyed him; she always did as she was told.
When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband,
she had stood tractably beside the best rooster, his proxy, and promised
before they met that she would be his forever. She was lucky that he was
her age and she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now. The
night she first saw him, he had sex with her. Then he left for America.
She had almost forgotten what he looked like. When she tried to envision
him, she only saw the black and white face in the group photograph the
men had had taken before leaving.
The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They
both gave orders: she followed. "If you tell your family, I'll beat you.
I'll kill you. Be here again next week." No one talked sex, ever. And
she might have separated the rapes from the rest of living if only she
did not have to buy her oil from him or gather wood in the same forest.
I want her fear to have lasted just as long as rape lasted so that the
fear could have been contained. No drawn-out fear. But women at sex
hazarded birth and hence lifetimes. The fear did not stop but permeated
everywhere. She told the man, "I think I'm pregnant." He organized the
raid against her.
On nights when my mother and father talked about their life back home,
sometimes they mentioned an "outcast table" whose business they still
seemed to be settling, their voices tight. In a commensal tradition,
where food is precious, the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat
alone. Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the
Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese family,
faces averted but eyes glowering sideways, hung on to the offenders
 
and fed them leftovers. My aunt must have lived in the same house as my
parents and eaten at an outcast table. My mother spoke about the raid as
if she had seen it, when she and my aunt, a daughter-in-law to a
different household, should not have been living together at all.
Daughters-in-law lived with their husbands' parents, not their own; a
synonym for marriage in Chinese is "taking a daughter-in-law." Her
husband's parents could have sold her, mortgaged her, stoned her. But
they had sent her back to her own mother and father, a mysterious act
hinting at disgraces not told me. Perhaps they had thrown her out to
deflect the avengers.
She was the only daughter; her four brothers went with her father,
husband, and uncles "out on the road" and for some years became western
men. When the goods were divided among the family, three of the brothers
took land, and the youngest, my father, chose an education. After my
grandparents gave their daughter away to her husband's family, they had
dispensed all the adventure and all the property. They expected her
alone to keep the traditional ways, which her brothers, now among the
barbarians, could fumble without detection. The heavy, deep-rooted women
were to maintain the past against the flood, safe for returning. But the
rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed
boundaries not delineated in space.
The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in
one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like
cherry blossoms. But perhaps my aunt, my forerunner, caught in a slow
life, let dreams grow and fade and after some months or years went
toward what persisted. Fear at the enormities of the forbidden kept her
desires delicate, wire and bone. She looked at a man because she liked
the way the hair was tucked behind his ears, or she liked the
question-mark line of a long torso curving at the shoulder and straight
at the hip. For warm eyes or a soft voice or a slow walk - that's all -
a few hairs, a line, a brightness, a sound, a pace, she gave up family.
She offered us up for a charm that vanished with tiredness, a pigtail
that didn't toss when the wind died. Why, the wrong lighting could erase
the dearest thing about him.
It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle
enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman, kept rollicking company.
Imagining her free with sex doesn't fit, though. I don't know any women
like that, or men either. Unless I see her life branching into mine, she
gives me no ancestral help.
To sustain her being in love, she often worked at herself in the mirror,
 
388
guessing at the colors and shapes that would interest him, changing them
frequently in order to hit on the right combination. She wanted him to
look back.
On a farm near the sea, a woman who tended her appearance reaped a
reputation for eccentricity. All the married women blunt-cut their hair
in flaps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns. No nonsense.
Neither style blew easily into heart-catching tangles. And at their
weddings they displayed themselves in their long hair for the last time.
"It brushed the backs of my knees," my mother tells me. "It was braided,
and even so, it brushed the backs of my knees."
At the mirror my aunt combed individuality into her bob. A bun could
have been contrived to escape into black streamers blowing in the wind
or in quiet wisps about her face, but only the older women in our
picture album wear buns. She brushed her hair back from her forehead,
tucking the flaps behind her ears. She looped a piece of thread, knotted
into a circle between her index fingers and thumbs, and ran the double
strand across her forehead. When she closed her fingers as if she were
making a pair of shadow geese bite, the string twisted together catching
the little hairs. Then she pulled the thread away from her skin, ripping
the hairs out neatly, her eyes watering from the needles of pain.
Opening her fingers, she cleaned the thread, then rolled it along her
hairline and the tops of her eyebrows. My mother did the same to me and
my sisters and herself. I used to believe that the expression "caught by
the short hairs" meant a captive held with a depilatory string. It
especially hurt at the temples, but my mother said we were lucky we
didn't have to have our feet bound when we were seven. Sisters used to
sit on their beds and cry together, she said, as their mothers or their
slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the
blood gush back into their veins. I hope that the man my aunt loved
appreciated a smooth brow, that he wasn't just a tits-and-ass man.
Once my aunt found a freckle on her chin, at a spot that the almanac
said predestined her for unhappiness. She dug it out with a hot needle
and washed the wound with peroxide.
More attention to her looks than these pullings of hairs and pickings at
spots would have caused gossip among the villagers. They owned work
clothes and good clothes, and they wore good clothes for feasting the
new seasons. But since a woman combing her hair hexes beginnings, my
aunt rarely found an occasion to look her best. Women looked like great
sea snails - the corded wood, babies, and laundry they carried were the
whorls on their backs. The Chinese did not admire a
 
bent back; goddesses and warriors stood straight. Still there must have
been a marvelous freeing of beauty when a worker laid down her burden
and stretched and arched.
Such commonplace loveliness, however, was not enough for my aunt. She
dreamed of a lover for the fifteen days of New Year's, the time for
families to exchange visits, money, and food. She plied her secret comb.
And sure enough she cursed the year, the family, the village, and
herself.
Even as her hair lured her imminent lover, many other men looked at her.
Uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers would have looked, too, had they been
home between journeys. Perhaps they had already been restraining their
curiosity, and they left, fearful that their glances, like a field of
nesting birds, might be startled and caught. Poverty hurt, and that was
their first reason for leaving. But another, final reason for leaving
the crowded house was the never-said.
She may have been unusually beloved, the precious only daughter, spoiled
and mirror gazing because of the affection the family lavished on her.
When her husband left, they welcomed the chance to take her back from
the in-laws; she could live like the little daughter for just a while
longer. There are stories that my grandfather was different from other
people, "crazy ever since the little Jap bayoneted him in the head." He
used to put his naked penis on the dinner table, laughing. And one day
he brought home a baby girl, wrapped up inside his brown western-style
greatcoat. He had traded one of his sons, probably my father, the
youngest, for her. My grandmother made him trade back. When he finally
got a daughter of his own, he doted on her. They must have all loved
her, except perhaps my father, the only brother who never went back to
China, having once been traded for a girl.
Brothers and sisters, newly men and women, had to efface their sexual
color and present plain miens. Disturbing hair and eyes, a smile like no
other, threatened the ideal of five generations living under one roof.
To focus blurs, people shouted face to face and yelled from room to
room. The immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American
tones even after years away from the village where they called their
friendships out across the fields. I have not been able to stop my
mother's screams in public libraries or over telephones. Walking erect
(knees straight, toes pointed forward, not pigeon-toed, which is
Chinese-feminine) and speaking in an inaudible voice, I have tried to
turn myself American-feminine. Chinese communication was loud, public.
Only sick people had to whisper. But at the dinner table, where the
family members came nearest one another, no one could talk, not the out
 
390
casts nor any eaters. Every word that falls from the mouth is a coin
lost. Silently they gave and accepted food with both hands. A
preoccupied child who took his bowl with one hand got a sideways glare.
A complete moment of total attention is due everyone alike. Children and
lovers have no singularity here, but my aunt used a secret voice, a
separate attentiveness.
She kept the man's name to herself throughout her labor and dying; she
did not accuse him that he be punished with her. To save her
inseminator's name she gave silent birth.
He may have been somebody in her own household, but intercourse with a
man outside the family would have been no less abhorrent. All the
village were kinsmen, and the titles shouted in loud country voices
never let kinship be forgotten. Any man within visiting distance would
have been neutralized as a lover - "brother," "younger brother," "older
brother" - one hundred and fifteen relationship titles. Parents
researched birth charts probably not so much to assure good fortune as
to circumvent incest in a population that has but one hundred surnames.
Everybody has eight million relatives. How useless then sexual
mannerisms, how dangerous.
As if it came from an atavism deeper than fear, I used to add "brother"
silently to boys' names. It hexed the boys, who would or would not ask
me to dance, and made them less scary and as familiar and deserving of
benevolence as girls.
But, of course, I hexed myself also - no dates. I should have stood up,
both arms waving, and shouted out across libraries, "Hey, you! Love me
back." I had no idea, though, how to make attraction selective, how to
control its direction and magnitude. If I made myself American-pretty so
that the five or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with me,
everyone else - the Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese boys - would too.
Sisterliness, dignified and honorable, made much more sense.
Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to
organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when
they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together.
Among the very poor and the wealthy, brothers married their adopted
sisters, like doves. Our family allowed some romance, paying adult
brides' prices and providing dowries so that their sons and daughters
could marry strangers. Marriage promises to turn strangers into friendly
relatives - a nation of siblings.
In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures,
balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land. But one human being
 
flaring up into violence could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that
pulled in the sky. The frightened villagers, who depended on one another
to maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal, physical
representation of the break she had made in the "roundness." Misallying
couples snapped off the future, which was to be embodied in true
offspring. The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a
private life, secret and apart from them.
If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and
peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many
houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment. But the
men -hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil -had been forced to
leave the village in order to send food-money home. There were ghost
plagues, bandit plagues, wars with the Japanese, floods. My Chinese
brother and sister had died of an unknown sickness. Adultery, perhaps
only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed
food.
The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated
sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice
bowls - these talismans had lost their power to warn this family of the
law: a family must be whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by
having sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the
family. The villagers came to show my aunt and her lover-in-hiding a
broken house. The villagers were speeding up the circling of events
because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already
harmed the village, that waves of consequences would return
unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This
roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its
circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the
inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small
resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from
the stars.
After the villagers left, their lanterns now scattering in various
directions toward home, the family broke their silence and cursed her.
"Aiaa, we're going to die. Death is coming. Death is coming. Look what
you've done. You've killed us. Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You've never
been born." She ran out into the fields, far enough from the house so
that she could no longer hear their voices, and pressed herself against
the earth, her own land no more. When she felt the birth coming, she
thought that she had been hurt. Her body seized together. "They've hurt
me too much," she thought. "This is gall, and it will kill me." With
forehead and knees against the earth, her body convulsed and then
relaxed. She
 
392
turned on her back, lay on the ground. The black well of sky and stars
went out and out and out forever; her body and her complexity seemed to
disappear. She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without
home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence. An agoraphobia
rose in her, speeding higher and higher, bigger and bigger; she would
not be able to contain it; there would be no end to fear.
Flayed, unprotected against space, she felt pain return, focusing her
body. This pain chilled her - a cold, steady kind of surface pain.
Inside, spasmodically, the other pain, the pain of the child, heated
her. For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space.
Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality: she saw the
family in the evening gambling at the dinner table, the young people
massaging their elders' backs. She saw them congratulating one another,
high joy on the mornings the rice shoots came up. When these pictures
burst, the stars drew yet further apart. Black space opened.
She got to her feet to fight better and remembered that old-fashioned
women gave birth in their pigsties to fool the jealous, pain-dealing
gods, who do not snatch piglets. Before the next spasms could stop her,
she ran to the pigsty, each step a rushing out into emptiness. She
climbed over the fence and knelt in the dirt. It was good to have a
fence enclosing her, a tribal person alone.
Laboring, this woman who had carried her child as a foreign growth that
sickened her every day, expelled it at last. She reached down to touch
the hot, wet, moving mass, surely smaller than anything human, and could
feel that it was human after all - fingers, toes, nails, nose. She
pulled it up on to her belly, and it lay curled there, butt in the air,
feet precisely tucked one under the other. She opened her loose shirt
and buttoned the child inside. After resting, it squirmed and thrashed
and she pushed it up to her breast. It turned its head this way and that
until it found her nipple. There, it made little snuffling noises. She
clenched her teeth at its preciousness, lovely as a young calf, a
piglet, a little dog.
She may have gone to the pigsty as a last act of responsibility: she
would protect this child as she had protected its father. It would look
after her soul, leaving supplies on her grave. But how would this tiny
child without family find her grave when there would be no marker for
her anywhere, neither in the earth nor the family hall? No one would
give her a family hall name. She had taken the child with her into the
wastes. At its birth the two of them had felt the same raw pain of
separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight could close. A
child with no
 
descent line would not soften her life but only trail after her,
ghostlike, begging her to give it purpose. At dawn the villagers on
their way to the fields would stand around the fence and look.
Full of milk, the little ghost slept. When it awoke, she hardened her
breasts against the milk that crying loosens. Toward morning she picked
up the baby and walked to the well.
Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise abandon it. Turn
its face into the mud. Mothers who love their children take them along.
It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys.
"Don't tell anyone you had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear
her name. She has never been born." I have believed that sex was
unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that "aunt" would
do my father mysterious harm. I have thought that my family, having
settled among immigrants who had also been their neighbors in the
ancestral land, needed to clean their name, and a wrong word would
incite the kinspeople even here. But there is more to this silence: they
want me to participate in her punishment. And I have.
In the twenty years since I heard this story I have not asked for
details nor said my aunt's name; I do not know it. People who can
comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further - a
reverse ancestor worship. The real punishment was not the raid swiftly
inflicted by the villagers, but the family's deliberately forgetting
her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer
forever, even after death. Always hungry, always needing, she would have
to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose
living descendants give them gifts. She would have to fight the ghosts
massed at crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave to
decoy her away from village and home so that the ancestral spirits could
feast unharassed. At peace, they could act like gods, not ghosts, their
descent lines providing them with paper suits and dresses, spirit money,
paper houses, paper automobiles, chicken, meat, and rice into eternity -
essences delivered up in smoke and flames, steam and incense rising from
each rice bowl. In an attempt to make the Chinese care for people
outside the family, Chairman Mao encourages us now to give our paper
replicas to the spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter
whose ancestors they may be. My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are
not distributed evenly among the dead.
My aunt haunts me - her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty
 
394
years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not
origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me
well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself
in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the
drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated,
waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute. 
Message: 13
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:51:51 -0700
From: "Jacqueline Williams" <jackieleepoet at cox.net>
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] creative non-fiction prompt
Message-ID: <EC02971838714A5CAC2CA53697ABF53B at JackiLeePoet>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

Chris,
I love your creative fiction for several reasons. The content is
fascinating to me. It is my experience with small variations. It should
appeal to anyone, blind, or of normal vision, who has a spark of
curiosity in them about how it is to live blind. It must be very well
written, because, not once did I get jarred by anything in the
smoothness of the piece. 
I could not find Bridgit's article, so I am "flying blind" as far as the
definition and principles of what makes a good creative non-fiction
piece. 
I can only say that, whatever its genre, I feel it should be published.
It is an eye-opener. Thank you for your good work. Jackie