Selections from the Immigrant Writing Workshops: “Reflection,” “A Poem and a Pal,” and “Clinging to a language”

Since 2018, Restless Books has partnered with the New York Public Library and other public libraries to offer three-session workshops for immigrant writers. Hundreds of participants from around the world have joined in person and via Zoom. They engage with international immigrant literature published by Restless and produce short pieces—fiction, memoir, poetry—that are workshopped among all the participants. A few have been published in magazines, anthologies, and other places. Here are three selected pieces by participants in a recent workshop held at the New York Public Library, edited by Kalidas Shanti.

—Ilan Stavans

 

Reflection

by Tweety Hsiao

“An Asian father was brutally attacked today while walking with his one-year-old toddler. Police say they are investigating it as a hate crime…” The latest breaking news comes from the radio. “Another one?” Ying mumbles agitatedly, holding the steering wheel tighter with her trembling hands while driving in Forest Hills, New York. After parking her car in a highly visible area that she feels is “relatively safe,” Ying meticulously puts on her protective gear—two surgical masks, a pair of disposable gloves, and a bucket hat. She tucks her black hair into the hat, trying to cover every inch of her skin, except for her eyes.

“God damn slanted eyes,” she exclaims at her reflection on the sun visor mirror.

When she was little, she hated her single-eyelid slanted eyes, or “phoenix eyes” in her country of origin. “You look like the fearless Mulan who joined the army for her father in the Disney animated movie. Isn’t that great?” Ying’s mother used to compare her to the Chinese legendary warrior, but she never liked it. For her, she would rather have her mother’s almond eyes with double eyelids that symbolize beauty in her country.

Ying had a boyfriend once in college, but it only lasted for a month. “You should invest more in your appearance,” her boyfriend commented one day, “Haven’t you heard of the Chinese saying that one white complexion hides three flaws? Where is the umbrella I bought you? And—”

BANG! She patted the table hard, “In the Western countries, umbrellas are used for rain, not sun. I’m neither like other Asian girls nor do I want to become one of them.” That was her first time throwing a tantrum and that was their last conversation. Of course, she knew this proverb. She just couldn’t fathom the myth of Asian girls pursuing fair skin tones without any reason.   

After graduation, Ying headed for New York to pursue a master’s degree in law and planned to never go back home. The moment she got on the plane, with her new shoulder-length hairstyle, she was reborn like a phoenix. Oddly enough, she started to love her appearance, because she knew that the country she was heading for would appreciate any kind of beauty. With her new identity and resolution to put down roots, she was determined to refrain from hanging out with people who speak Mandarin. While other international students were hungry for knowledge, Ying seemed more interested in something else.

“May I sit here?” a man asked politely inside the Starbucks on West 4th Street of New York in the first month after her arrival. Ying tilted her head, surprised at the sight of the stranger, but she soon found herself drawn to it. She knew that her piercing phoenix eyes, accentuated by dark silky hair, made her glamorous in some ways, but she didn’t realize that this attractiveness could be at her disposal without any effort! “There might be ulterior desires hidden behind this cute guy,” her senses told her as the man kept showing off the few Chinese words he knew. But she didn’t mind, because her mood at this moment was like a red balloon being let go. Soon, he became her boyfriend, followed by the second, the third, and the fourth, who finally became her husband.

“Look how lovely she is. She will be as pretty as you are,” Ying’s husband beamed with joy after their baby was born. Their daughter, now three years old, also has a pair of phoenix eyes. “My genes are too strong,” Ying likes to joke with excessive pride in front of her mother-in-law. Recently, however, her pride has collapsed amid the spike of hate crimes. She knows the bias against race exists in this country, but she has never suffered any unfair discrimination herself. Why would a country we once worshipped suddenly become so terrifying? Ying’s oriental appearance, which used to attract attention and symbolize her unique identity in this melting pot of culture, has become a tag she wants to get rid of.

Flipping the sun visor up, Ying gets out of the car.

“Pay attention to your surroundings,” her husband’s reminders keep repeating in her ears. Were it not for the fact that her husband is out of town, she wouldn’t have to shop alone. Ying grasps her wallet, as if squeezing a lemon, and rushes into the Chinese supermarket. Strangely, as she steps inside the store that she usually disdains, she unexpectedly feels a huge sense of relief.

“You also like this brand of spicy sauce?” the cashier asks, “My favorite as well. While people are hoarding toilet paper, I’m hoarding this sauce,” he continues with laughter. “By the way, do you have senior family members who need escorting services? We’ve organized a group of volunteers to combat the hate crimes,” the man explains, passing her a receipt and a flyer.

Mulling over what the man just said, Ying walks absentmindedly toward her car, where she opens the trunk and starts to load the groceries. When she turns around to fetch the last bag, a man in a black uniform scurries toward her, his right fist clenched, his body twice her size. A surge of adrenaline grips her, and her throat is swelling up. Just as she closes the trunk, the man rushes in front of her. She shrieks and pushes the cart hard toward him, like a weapon.

 “Hey! Take it easy!” The man takes a step back. “I just want to recycle the cart.”

Without waiting for her to respond, he yanks the cart that makes annoying squeaky sounds and walks away, leaving her standing there blushing.

Ying returns to the driver’s seat, trying to decipher her reaction caused by a series of fears. What if the attack had really happened? Will a passerby walk away leaving me beaten to death? What if I’m the passerby? Will I intervene when witnessing such despicable violence? Tons of thoughts churn in her head. While she takes off the masks and sees her own reflection from the mirror, her mother’s words flash through her mind, “You are like invincible Mulan, both externally and internally.”

At this moment, she seems to understand her mother’s compliment. The reason why she resembles Mulan isn’t just because of appearance, but because of her courage, her refusal to be anyone but herself. But where’s all the courage gone?

Knowing that she needs to fight for herself and to protect her daughter, just like what Mulan did for her family, she decisively takes out the flyer that she has crumpled and calls the number.

“Hi, I’d like to sign up as a volunteer. I’m an attorney,” she says in a firm voice. She, a person who for a decade seldom cared for Asian affairs, suddenly realizes that no one can stay out of the matter. For the first time, she enjoys being called a warrior, a legendary one.  

 
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Tweety Hsiao lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a M.S. in taxation from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She loves reading & writing as she believes that reading can take her anywhere and writing can unlock her imagination, an unknown yet beautiful journey.

 

 A Poem and a Pal

by Li Ruan

Last year, like the whole world during the COVID, I was trapped at home, feeling sorrow for everything. To fill the emptiness in my soul and schedule (if there was one), I wondered if writing and reading, including navigating online, would be a wise solution to soothe my isolation.   

One day, Xinyu, my artsy and talented old college classmate living in Arizona, told me she was busy consolidating her years of artwork and literary writings in Chinese, and transferring them to a new location—her freshly opened blog. I immediately paid a visit to the novel site and immersed myself in an ocean of her creations. One of the prose pieces, “A Roommate’s Past, When You Are Old,” written about four years ago, instantly captured my heart and made my eyes swell. The more I read it, the more my face was soaked in salty tears. That roommate is me. And Xinyu’s composition is about our innocent college life in our native country, China, in the last century.

Her beautiful story brought me back to the past—our youth in a village town off the Yangtze River in Hubei Province. Our class had spent about two weeks there for a senior-year research project of the nation’s countryside reform. During the day, Xinyu and I, along with a few other students, walked past the farmlands to visit peasants’ households. At night, she and I shared a tiny and dark, but cozy and humble room. She carried with her a “Collection of Famous Western Poems” translated into our mother tongue. Under the gloomy light, she read them to me while I was half lying in bed, staring at the low and jet black celling, and trying to digest every word she recited. Exquisite and peaceful feelings filled the air in our small space. “What a luxury life I have!” I romanticized that rural but intellectual life. Once she finished reading “When You Are Old” by Ye Zhi (a Chinese name probably given by the translator), I could not help saying, “this is my favorite.”  And her reply was, “this is my favorite, too.” She then read it to me again.

In some way, getting old appeared as an invisible future to me, like centuries distant from my school year. Nevertheless, “And nodding by the fire … And bending down beside the glowing bars … amid a crowd of stars” flashing and flowing in the poem froze our lifestyle at that particular point under the dim kerosene lamp in the cultivated land. All looked far, far away from the reality in the big cities where we are from and from the capital where we went to college. All felt so pure, relaxed, natural, and raw.

The poet’s work whispered in my ears with a subtle hint: there was an exceptional bond between Xinyu and me in that bigger universe beyond the ploughed fields. We were more than just classmates. Our thoughts and views were rooted in much deeper and richer soil. Reciting and appreciating Ye Zhi’s poem in the little bitty house near the riverbank of the Yangtze played a special role in our youth and later in our life. 

As good friends on campus, Xinyu and I often talked about Chinese and Western writers and artists although we knew little about the latter, as China had been closed to the West when we grew up. But we felt like we understood so much. I guess when you are young and fresh, you can afford to act like experienced and knowledgeable experts, comprehending the entire planet. Sometimes on weekends, we rode bicycles to a few existing art galleries and museums in the capital. We must have been one of the rare college kids, familiar with most of the art institutions in the city.  Art and literature connected us, and we knew dearly each other’s interest and taste in both.

Almost two years after our memorable weeks in the countryside, I was on my way to the United States. Xinyu came to bid farewell and brought me some special presents. They were all her self-made works of art, including a pretty painting on a porcelain plate. She also gave me a thin paper where she had handwritten our favorite poem, Ye Zhi’s “When You Are Old.” The treasured gifts traveled with me to the New World. In my adopted country, I have moved a million times, among the states and within the boroughs of New York City. Wherever I relocate to, the poem, dressed in different frames from time to time, follows me forever. For more than three decades, the thin paper has turned yellow and fragile, but has always kept me company.

It was 1992, the second year after I settled down in New York City. One day after work, like any other weekday, I stood in a crowded subway train feeling tired and weird. After a major stop, a few seats became available, and I was lucky to find one to rest. While I was ready to close my eyes, my sight locked onto a “commercial” poster on the inside wall of the cart. It is Poetry in Motion staring right at me. I started reading each line, and it all sounded so familiar that my heart began racing faster. Like an epiphany, I realized this is the original English poem of “When You Are Old.” According to the poster’s description, the poet is an Irish man named William Butler Yeats, not Ye Zhi as I had recalled. Nearly ten years passed since Xinyu had read to me the translation of this poem in that remote region of the homeland.

I later found out that New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Poetry Society of America launched Poetry in Motion that year. They present works of poets from various backgrounds—different nations and times—to passengers riding the city’s public transportation. “When You Are Old” was one of the debut poems displayed on the buses and in the subway. By chance and more by fate, I finally met and read the original poem, and learned the poet’s true name and identity, unexpectedly on a moving train. I was not prepared for that unforeseen and unrepeated moment. My eyes began moistening and the old, old memories erupted.

I could not wait to share my discovery with Xinyu, our first phone call happening upon her arrival in the US two decades after me.  We kept talking and talking and agreeing the translation of the gem that we had enjoyed in the farmland is the best version, although there are many types and styles of interpretations by numerous well-known writer-translators. That special one explicitly gives us feelings, sense, images, motions, sentiment, and time. We even believe that the Chinese translation is more graceful and poignant than the original. The translator elevates the masterpiece to the crown jewel in our language, appealing to us as a deep and moving tale closer to our body and soul. The translation also exhibits how easy for us foreigners to understand and appreciate the two-centuries-old Irish poet’s mind and work. How funny and rebellious that we challenged the great poet, Yeats, like naïve college kids.

We filled each other in across the gap of twenty-plus years in our separation. Our youth to near midlife flew by quickly like thunder and lightning, in a mute and quiet way. The forever busyness kept us detached for this long. I blame myself for the most part but had many excuses for it, legitimate or illegitimate—expensive international phone calls (before the high-tech communication era), procrastination to write and respond to letters, craziness in the graduate program, frequent relocations and searching for jobs, and non-stop work, work and more work. They are all nonsense and irrational when I look back now. 

Xinyu shared with me why as a virtually middle-aged mom, she had decided to leave her secure career in China and come to America. There were two folds. One was to help her son escape the extremely competitive pressure at a Beijing’s junior high school. She would like him to grow up in a happy and healthy environment, instead of somewhere dull, cutthroat, and with endless testing. The other one was for herself. She is passionate about art, and even volunteered to downgrade her position of a book editor to that of an art designer at a renowned publishing house.  The self-selected “demotion” offered her more time and access to the art world and enabled her to utilize her creativity to draw, paint and write.   The transition satisfied her for a while. But she still felt she was at a crossroad, and desperate to improve her knowledge, skills, techniques, and innovation in the field of art. Her dream was to pursue an MFA program in Fine Arts. Unfortunately, she was not eligible to apply to top graduate art schools at home, because she had not had undergraduate training in fine arts although she created many covers, illustrations, and drawings of published books as a proud product of nation’s best university. Her designs garnered some country’s prestigious awards, including the National Book Award and China Book Award.  In spite of her success, she had to go abroad for the MFA. Her art portfolio and admission qualifications earned her a scholarship at the University of Arizona, Tucson.  In the meantime, she continues to write prose and poetry filled with the freshness, genuineness, luminescence, and youthfulness I always remember and admire. 

Our first long telephone conversation in the US led Xinyu to nurture her creative thinking, and approximately four years ago, she crafted “A Roommate’s Past, When You Are Old.” Her narrative of our time in the country and my subway encounter is well-written, elegant, and sentimental. For this special piece, she illustrated two girls reading together at a table. They are drawn in white against a big dark background like a blackboard. With their heads down, their faces are near the books highlighted in yellow. The artwork looks like an aerial-shot photo, leaving people with an impression that the girls are really engaged in their reading.  Obviously, they are Xinyu and I, reading poetry. Savoring her lighthearted prose of our good old days electrified my emotions just like the very minute I had embraced Yeats’s poem inside of the moving subway cart.

I shared Xinyu’s lovely writing and charming drawing in my WeChat account with a brief explanation. (WeChat is a popular social media platform like a combination of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and many other functions, and popular among Chinese.)  Xiaoshuang, aka Charlotte, also a dear old college friend, residing in California read my posting. She asked me to expand my explanation into a story for her blog. She had seen the framed poem in my place, but never known the full details, as she had thought that must have come from my former boyfriend. This seems to be an initial reaction for Chinese when they see the poem.

Last fall, I completed my essay for Charlotte’s blog. I wrote that Xinyu’s refined composition colorfully painted my experience and affected me more than my own writing. 

In my essay, I revealed my internal turmoil at the point my vision and the poem met and interacted. That brought me the earthquake-like shocks of how much I had changed—the happy school days in my home country versus the diaspora’s struggles in a newly established home far away from home; the pure enjoyment of literature and poetry versus the hard work to stay alive without a second to eye a book; the simple style of life in the underdeveloped village versus the plenty of living in the wealthy sleepless metropolis; closeness of friendship versus loneliness among countless strangers; the youth and the past versus the old and present, and on and on. A hodgepodge confined my nostalgia, sadness, weariness, desire, dream, and other mixed sensations. The struggling emotions were so overwhelming that poor words could hardly describe them, and truthfully, even a rich vocabulary would not aid a bit. I realized that my intellectual life had long departed me, and I had survived on scarce food for the mind.

With hindsight, the incident was a delighted surprise and pleasant awakening, helping me gather myself and fix my system. 

Who would imagine a twelve-line poem could cause such a magical effect, bringing me inside out, connecting contrasting continents and countries crossing decades’ span, alluring the international students to glue to poetry, holding the youth’s memories in depth, and keeping the friendship well intact, and….?

The poem stays eternally while the thin paper grows older day by day, and the printed words gradually fade. The framed masterpiece is standing next to the frames of my husband’s pictures. I took a photo of them and sent it to Xinyu to show that her hand-written poem has taken on a new definition and dimension in my life. She must have the same intuition as our minds likely think alike.

A year-long lasting pandemic has intrigued people to reflect, review, and rethink the next turn in their direction and their relationships with everything on earth and beyond. It has also affected me, motivating me to get back to my student interest in reading and to pick up a new habit of wobbling through writing. The busier activities indeed fill my daily life and timetable in a more meaningful way. Sampling poetry naturally brings back the past joyful memories, accompanying the friendship.

Prior to COVID, I was thrilled, with my husband, to attend Xinyu’s first solo show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Her creative mind and artwork always entice me and touch my heart. I wish I had her talents to make art and write poems. In the end, I have to give it up and stay happy in her league as a pal. Let her be the smart creator, and let me be the laid-back “connoisseur,” just like in the village where she recited the poetry, and I enjoyed listening.

We now communicate with each other more often. Every time we speak or text, in my greeting, I call her GMA, which stands for the Grand Master Artist ,nicknamed by me, her old classmate and admirer. Our girly talks center on arts, poetry, and other literary works, plus some gossip, of course, like back in the college days. These help us keep our distance from the convoluted world, calm us with some tranquility, and provide us with a sense of grace.

In her prose of “A Roommate’s Past, When You Are Old,” Xinyu writes, “we both love Yeats’s ‘When You Are Old.’ This must be because of the unusual time and special space we were in.” My thinking is like this: the special poem, special space and special time in that faraway place strengthened the everlasting friendship between her and me. Our relationship will certainly be more unique as it follows the path along our next stage of life. Throughout the decades, our understandings of Yeats’s poem have also evolved, or more accurately, advanced. As we get older and our experience of time moves ever faster, the verse holds a more significant denotation to us. This must be what a perpetual poem means, and the power it possesses over us.

 
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Born and raised in Beijing, China, Li Ruan is an educational consultant based in Manhattan, New York City. She worked in student admissions and services in US colleges and universities for more than two decades. She holds a Bachelor of Law Degree from Peking University and a Master of Arts in Education from East Carolina University. She started writing in Chinese and English, inspired during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Clinging to a language

by Viktoriya Zhuravleva

How many languages does it take
before you start to lose your first?
Apparently just one—or is it two?
Five years of “privyet” to greet the neighbors,
twenty-two years of “hello.”
Thirteen years of living with the difference:
“varenyky,” “smetana,” and “borshch”
inside my parents’ home.
“Dumplings,” “sour cream,” and “stew”
to describe our food at school.

Now my mom notices mistakes in my Ukrainian —
Nine years since I moved.
At first four hours from home, and
now a plane ride away.
Using my first language only
once a week, I call home
to say everything-
’s fine.
— I notice it slipping away from me too.

Because I speak like my parents,
when I visit the city where
I was a toddler, my
half-Russian half-Ukrainian
sounds like I’m from a different era.
Does it matter
that English appears faster
in my mind
when Ukraine is also losing a language?
Casting off Russian
with only 30 years of independence:
My first language,
that mix of two, is nearly obsolete.
I already sound like a foreigner.

I see my parents’ struggle too.
Living with discomfort,
trying to find the right
English words
to ask for basic needs.
Until they get to take a
vacation to visit a country that’s
different from how they remember.
New buildings each time,
the ones they grew up in need repairs.
Everyone at the market is using old words —
Ukrainian words. But they’re new to us —
we’d learned them in Russian.
Sometimes Ukrainian words come back to
my parents, a long-forgotten memory.
I have no hope of resurrecting
what I never knew. 

My dialect,
mixed up,
“Surzhik”
like “Surgery,”
all cut up and put back together.
Everyone understands.
We all drift easily
from Ukrainian to Russian
and back again.
Still, I feel I’m
not evolving with Ukraine.

 
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Viktoriya Zhuravleva (Ukraine) was raised in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and currently lives in New York City, where she earned a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Columbia University. When not exploring the city, Viktoriya enjoys volunteering with high schoolers and traveling to new places around the world.