by Matt Weiland
I moved to Georgia in the summer of 1993 to take a job at Emory University. In the beginning I lived in an apartment in Atlanta, with my wife and ten-year-old son, but soon we found that houses were quite affordable in some of the suburbs, and the schools were safer and better. So we bought a small home in Lilburn, fifteen miles east of the city. The house was a solid brick ranch on a third of an acre of sloping land, with a ten-acre lake at the back. At first sight, somehow, I felt the house had good feng shui, though I had never been interested in that occult system. The lake was inhabited by a lot of waterfowl: Canada geese, mallards, Russian swans, domestic ducks. Sometimes an angler or two would fish on the opposite shore; they caught bass, bullheads, perch, carp. Adding to the feeling of home was the fact that about half a mile east of our house flowed a brook named Yellow River. But, of course, Georgia was nothing like China. We were the only Asian family in the subdivision; another family was black, and a third was mixed race, black and Filipino; the rest of the thirty-odd households were white. But our neighbors were friendly. The day after we had moved in, a vase of orange dahlias appeared on our doormat with a note that read, “Welcome to the neighborhood—Mrs. Locke.” The author of the note was a widow of seventy living alone a few houses down the street. The flowers touched us. Soon word spread that a doctor’s family had moved into the subdivision. A few people, after learning of my employment at Emory, asked me if I was a doctor. Put to it, I said, “I’m a doctor who doesn’t make money.”
We paid $84,000 for our home, which had three small bedrooms, two bathrooms, a half-finished basement, and a carport. With few exceptions, my colleagues all lived in bigger houses closer to Emory. We bought such a modest place because I wasn’t sure if I could hold my job for long, and didn’t want to take out a big mortgage. I was hired to teach poetry writing, which was a position I felt I had gotten by luck. I had never attended a poetry workshop and had no idea how to fulfill my role as a poet in residence. Poets in other parts of the country often asked me, “Who’s the poet at Emory?” They could not imagine it was me. I felt I might lose my job at any time. Once, I even blurted out to my boss, Frank Manley, a tall, flat-shouldered man in his early sixties, who was the director of our creative writing program, “I will stay in Georgia even if I don’t get tenure.”
“Why?” He smiled, narrowing his eyes.
“Because life is easier down here.”
“Indeed it is.”
Frank drove a pickup truck and owned a small farm, where he didn’t grow anything. He went there every week just to write.
My misgivings about my job security were not totally unfounded. Later Frank revealed that some people in our department had doubted my qualifications. As a friend, he always stuck up for me. When I was naturalized in the fall of 1997, he went to the department the next morning and told everybody that I had become a citizen. He must have believed that my brand-new citizenship would add to my qualifications.
But the main reason I planned to live in Georgia, even if I lost my job, was not the easy life. It was that I loved my house, the first real home I had ever had. In my backyard the land stretched two hundred feet to the waterside. Soon after we had moved in, we noticed that when it rained the lake would rise and submerge the shore. The result was severe erosion, and I began to fear that we might eventually lose a good part of the yard. To stop this, I started to gather rocks and lay them down along the waterside. At the time, fire hydrants were being installed in the neighborhood, and boulders were dug out and left beside the road. I would collect them with a hand truck. It was hard work, and usually I could only ship back one at a time. Some weighed more than a hundred pounds. If a boulder was too big, I would try to break it with a sledgehammer. Whenever I took a rest from writing or reading, I would set out with my hand truck, wearing cowhide gloves, work boots, and a Chicago Bulls cap. Sometimes I would bring a pickaxe to dig out the ones that were still half buried. The work involved my family, too. If my son came across a sizable rock, he would tell me so that I could go fetch it. If a load was too heavy, my wife would give me a hand. It took us almost two months to finish the rock bank, which was about 150 feet long and came up a foot above the water. I enjoyed the labor very much, because, at last, on this tiny piece of land, I could arrange my own nest. The happy experience inspired poetry, and I wrote my first poem set in the state, “Lilburn, Georgia,” in which I imagined that the result of this labor would last forever.
Our rock bank impressed the neighbors so much that a few families around the lake soon started building imitations. The soil erosion must have bedeviled them for years, as some of them had used wood boards to stop it, but in vain. Now they saw my way as a permanent solution.
“Smart idea, man,” observed a neighbor as I was removing mud from my boots with a twig. He was a small man called Harold with graying whiskers. He waved at the lakeside. “But a tough job.”
Harold worked at the General Motors plant in Doraville. Unlike the other neighbors, he wouldn’t bother about his shore.
By then the roadside construction was over, so the other homeowners had to buy rocks for their projects. Truckloads of granite were shipped to their yards, and soon their watersides turned bluish. My shore was variegated brown, built of scavenged boulders and mismatched rocks. To everyone’s amazement, these small new banks not only stopped the erosion but also brightened the appearance of the lake, especially when viewed from the opposite shore.
Back in China, I had been a college instructor and had never had decent housing; my wife and I had lived in a room in a dorm belonging to a food research institute where my father worked after he retired from the army. That confining experience instilled in us an obsession with houses. Even though we had just bought ours, we kept looking at others. At the time, the whole of Georgia had only four million inhabitants and there was plenty of land. Home construction was going on everywhere, even in the wintertime. Once a week my wife and I would drive around and look at new homes. “Those are cheap,” she would say about a group of frame houses with wood siding. To us, a brick house was always superior to a wood one. We inspected the materials used for the homes and discovered that the blood-red Georgian bricks were harder and heavier than those made in the Northeast, thanks to the native red clay.
We would also go inside some of the houses, since they were never locked. What is the good of that? we often wondered about the cathedral-ceilinged living rooms. What a waste of space. Instead of such a big fancy room, it would be much better to have two extra bedrooms upstairs. I couldn’t figure out why the first floors were supported by plywood box girders and the second floors by solid wood. My wife, a mathematician, said the plywood box girders were actually stronger, but I was not convinced. Most of the houses, priced under $200,000, were well built, with four bedrooms, a large living room, a two-car garage, and a brick façade. Some people purchased their own lots and customized their mansions. Even those usually cost less than $250,000.
On the way back to our house we would stop at one or two farmers’ markets, which sold all kinds of produce. This was the first time I ever saw fingered citrons, donut peaches, purslanes, sea mushrooms, amaranth, wild chives, and even cactus pads for sale. Near our neighborhood, on Law-renceville Highway, there was a small Cherokee farmers’ market, selling mainly local produce, and we often went there to buy boiled peanuts and green corn, fresh and hot from the pot. Nearby were other small shops: a family-owned hardware store, a barbecue shack, a one-man barbershop. When there was no hair to cut, the barber, a taciturn, stalwart figure, would sit in a chair outside the door, smoking a pipe and watching traffic. I liked shopping at those small stores, whose owners, while handing back change, would say, “Appreciate your business, sir. Come back again.”
Another obsession that had grown out of my childhood privation was bibliomania. Soon after I came to the United States, as a graduate student, in 1985,I decided to bring back to China a personal library, partly because I had never had access to a public library growing up. So I
began buying books, and in two years I had collected more than forty boxes. Having no room for them in the small apartment where my wife and I had landed in Somerville, Massachusetts, I persuaded my landlord to rent me, for sixty-five dollars a month, an attic storage room. But after the Tiananmen massacre, my wife and I decided to stay in the United States, and my project for a personal library was abandoned. We didn’t even know where we would live in the future, so my wife urged me to get rid of the books. I took a few boxes to local stores and libraries, but nobody wanted them. They were too specialized. Who among general readers could read Pindar’s Victory Songs in the Greek or Akhmatova’s Complete Poems in the Russian? I couldn’t (and still cannot), but I dreamed of someday having the leisure to learn the languages. No way out, I began to throw my library away, two or three boxes a week. For a long time afterward I felt as miserable as if I were ill.
Even so, I didn’t stop collecting books. By 1993,I had two dozen boxes, most of which I stored in a garage and later took to Georgia with me.
Now that we had our own house and I was teaching full time, my bibliomania raged beyond bounds. I bought bookshelves and set them up—more than a dozen against two walls in the living room, six in my study, five in the pantry. New books were expensive; still, I bought a lot of them for my teaching and writing. The public libraries in Gwinnett County had an odd custom of discarding any book that had not been checked out for a year. They would ship these books to a warehouse on Five Forks Trickum Road (which connects the old mail-stop Five Forks and the Mountain Park area, formerly known as Trickum) and hold an annual sale, letting them go for a dime a copy. The first time I went to the book sale I bought four boxes.
On my way to work, a sixteen-mile drive, I would pass five Goodwill stores, all run by churches, and each the size of a supermarket. They all had book sections. I never came across a yard sale or garage sale in Georgia. Instead, people would donate what they could no longer use to Goodwill. They had sections for furniture, clothing, appliances, books, toys, artworks, even jewelry. I would stop at one or two of those stores on my way home and search through the stacks of books. Over the years I got many windfalls, among them The Word Finder, the best reference book for English collocations but long out of print, and first editions of For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Heart of the Matter, and Beloved. I cared more about usefulness than rarity, so a useful book, bought for a quarter, would thrill me more than a first edition.
My wife often complained that I was cluttering our house, but I simply couldn’t stop building my library. I told her I needed the books for teaching.
Churches were a major power in Georgia. Advertisements for Bible studies were everywhere. Some of them were just a large portrait of Jesus Christ, occasionally with words on them, such as, “What Have You Told Others About Me?” or, “Come, Now Is the Time to Follow My Path.” Every week, seminarians in black suits and ties would show up at our door to read out a few verses from the New Testament and try to convert us. Some of them were black teenage boys. They would carry the Bible and say, “Can I share some of our Lord’s words with you, sir?” I would listen to them read, but couldn’t yield to their persuasions.
On my way to work, I would also pass two Christian bookstores, both of which carried thousands of titles, including various concordances to the major translations of the Bible. My friend Bruce Covey managed a religious bookstore on the Emory campus, which was part of a chain owned by the Methodist church. He agreed to help me find work at one of these Methodist bookstores if I was denied tenure.
The Bible was vital to my writing in those years. I was isolated, and had to figure out how to proceed as a writer. As an English professor, I dared not ask my colleagues about English usage, styles, and idioms; and I wouldn’t share my writing with others, afraid it might be marred by solecisms. I had to learn to be self-sufficient. I began to dip into the Bible, and found that the prose differed from version to version, stylistically. I liked the fluidity of the New International Version, the rigor of the New King James Version, the lucidity of Today’s English Version, the freshness of the New Century Version. I also bought the exhaustive concordances to the major versions of the Bible—well-bound tomes, eleven by nine inches in size, each more than a thousand pages thick. Whenever I was unsure of a phrase or a collocation, I would look it up in the concordances to see how it was used in the Scriptures.
Every day when I was at work on my second short story collection, Under the Red Flag, I read the New International Version of the Bible, which, as a supreme model of neutral English, contributed to the fluidity of the prose in that collection. I sent the manuscript to the University of Georgia Press, in 1996, and it won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Soon after being informed of the award, I received the edited manuscript from Charles East, an accomplished short story writer and the series editor. He had written two and a half pages of suggestions for changes and corrections. I felt so embarrassed that I called him to apologize, saying I had done my best to polish the manuscript and was sorry there were still so many things to be fixed.
He chuckled. “To tell you the truth, this is the first time I’ve given less than ten pages of suggestions for a book in the series.” For me that was a turning point, as I realized that I could produce a presentable book manuscript on my own. This step toward self-sufficiency came because my life in Georgia had made me turn to the Bible.
In retrospect, my nine years in Georgia were crucial to me as a beginning writer. Isolation forced me to be detached and to concentrate, and kept my mind sensitive to things around me. Every day, when taking a break from writing, I would stroll alone around the lake with a cane to keep away aggressive dogs. The subdivision had no sidewalks, so I always walked on the left-hand side of the streets, facing traffic. Occasionally I would stop to watch some older men fishing on the opposite shore. Some of them were Eastern European immigrants and couldn’t speak a word of English. On weekdays the neighborhood was very quiet, as children had gone to school and their parents to work, and I ambled alone. Many ideas and plans for my later books were thought out on those walks, and many confusions were clarified after long reflections. Before moving to Georgia, I had never understood why Robert Bly once said that poets needed loneliness to nourish their art. Now, in this small town in the Peach State, I had finally learned to be alone and accept solitude as my working condition.
I no longer live there now. Since 2002 I’ve been back in Massachusetts. But not long ago my wife and I drove down to our first real home. To our dismay, our former neighborhood had changed, becoming subdued, as if in a torpor; even the waterfowl in the lake were no longer loud and lusty, and the water was greenish, not as clear as before. Perhaps there had been a long drought, or perhaps our feelings for this place had changed. Deep down I felt as if there was a barrier between me and that little piece of land where we had once lived. We stood at the lakeside for a long time, gazing from a distance at the rock bank, the tall maples and sweet gums, the clumps of elephant ears, and the sloping backyard planted with two half circles of monkey grass. All of it had once belonged to us, but now the place felt drab and exhausted. Maybe this was due, in part, to the Wal-Mart that had recently opened nearby. With the appearance of the big department store, many small businesses had disappeared—the one-man barbershop, the family-owned hardware store, the barbecue shack, the Cherokee farmers’ market, even one of the Goodwill stores, all were gone.
I realized that we might have left our former abode in time. For my family, home can be built anywhere.
HAWAII
CAPITAL Honolulu (on O’ahu)
ENTERED UNION 1959 (50th)
ORIGIN OF NAME Uncertain. The islands may have been named by Hawai’i Loa, their traditional discoverer. Or they may have been named after Hawai’i or Hawaiki, the traditional home of the Polynesians.
NICKNAME Aloha State
MOTTO Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ‘A-ina i ka Pono (“The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness”)
RE
SIDENTS Hawaiian, also kama ‘a-ina (native-born nonethnic Hawaiian), and malihini (newcomer)
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 2
STATE BIRD ne-ne- (Hawaiian goose)
STATE FLOWER hibiscus (yellow)
STATE TREE kukui (candlenut)
STATE SONG “Hawai’i Pono’i”
LAND AREA 6,423sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER Between islands of Hawai’i and Maui
POPULATION 1,275,194
WHITE 24.3%
BLACK 1.8%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%
ASIAN 41.6%;
NATIVE HAWAIIAN AND OTHER PACIFIC ISLANDER 9.4%
HISPANIC/LATINO 7.2%
UNDER 18 24.4%
65 AND OVER 13.3%
MEDIAN AGE 36.2
HAWAII
Tara Bray Smith
I could see it when I looked west from Polihale beach at sunset, curtained by golden—pink clouds: the forbidden island. Eighteen miles across the Kaulakahi Channel from Kaua’i, seventeen miles long and six wide, dry, low-lying, and—except for the Native Hawaiians who lived there and the Robinson brothers who owned it—completely off-limits to visitors. The island of Ni’ihau was forbidden, the Robinsons owned it, and they were my cousins. Sort of. My mother was the wayward daughter of a plantation family that both hated and prided itself on being haole—white—and once-important, and while we still had some land, it was on the dry, west side of Kaua’i, without a good beach. So we claimed other families as our own. The Robinsons were cousins through marriage. My mother must have told me this, and I repeated it as often as I could.
Once I told a teacher’s aide. We were on a school bus, on a field trip to Salt Pond, which was dry and historical but had nice sand. (Hawaiians made ‘alae, red sea salt, here, the kind that Cook traded iron for when he first anchored off nearby Waimea in 1778.)