Dream Variations: A Journey Across Two Continents
Page 5
The road to secure myself a position in African American literature was even bumpier. I responded to every announcement of a faculty position in the field of African American literature and other related fields, but not even a phone interview materialized. After many rejections and non-replies, a painful knowledge dawned on me: I had been judged on the basis of my ethnicity, not my credentials; I had become a victim of what McKay calls “a faceless entity” that is “the [job] market” (365), and this market did not know how to categorize me, a trained African American scholar and a Chinese citizen as well. Am I the right person to teach African American literature? You bet. But when I surprised myself and others by landing a college teaching job, it was not related to African American literature.
McKay is right when she claims that “the Wheatley court remains in session” (366). The experience I have had is by no means isolated. I can easily imagine non-black scholars from other countries falling in love with African American literature, studying it in the United States, and then, like me, trying to share their love by pursuing a teaching position in this country. Likewise, scholars of many ethnicities and from various countries fall in love with, say, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American literatures. Is our profession going to use ethnicity and country of origin to dictate who teaches what literature? That would be an unfortunate mistake. I believe that it is high time we disband this biased and unjust Wheatley court. We are on the threshold of the next millennium. National societies are becoming global. Academia as a whole needs to be “on guard and to assume the responsibility of raising its voice against all attempts to misappropriate intellectual authority over any area of our discipline” (365). Western literature can be better opened up and diversified by nontraditional sources if our profession is willing and ready to respond to the supply and demand issue that is surely occurring in American educational institutions today. Modern language and literature scholars of different ethnicities and nationalities can complement one another and make learning more well rounded for our “millennium generation.”
Weihua Zhang
Savannah College of Art and Design
[Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, The Modern Language Association of America. The letter first appeared in PMLA 114 (January 1999): 100]
Taking Life in Stride
“That which does not kill you makes you stronger” and I am the living proof.
Fall 1995 found me desperate on two fronts: searching desperately for a college teaching job and trying desperately to complete my dissertation. I was in the last phase of my doctoral study in the Humanistic Studies Program at the State University of New York at Albany. My TA award had ended two years before. One would think that I would want to finish as soon as possible so I could put my high-priced knowledge into good use. However, I was deliberately prolonging my study, as the job market for humanity majors had been bleak, to say the least.
I braced myself for the uphill battle and started the job hunt. But little did I know it would take close to one hundred applications and nine long months to finally find a job. Many a day, I would search The Chronicle of Higher Education’s online job listing for possible openings, then compose cover letters accordingly and rush to the post office (that was before the online application days). What followed was pure agony and defeat. The few responses I did get were the self-addressed, self-stamped postcards of acknowledgment. Though the interdisciplinary nature of the program at SUNY Albany had prepared me well for a college teaching career in English and related disciplines, I found even a phone interview was a tall order. Still, like an Energizer bunny, I kept going and going, week after week. As the Chinese saying goes, no pie will drop from the sky; you work towards your goal, and don’t wait on it.
On the other front, my dissertation was slow going at best, if it was going at all. Many a night, I dutifully sat in front of the computer attempting to continue my dissertation “Claiming B(l)ack Manhood, Claiming Souls: Male Portraiture in Novels by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor—a Womanist Reading.” Inevitably, those same nights would turn into a series of questions: Did I make the right decision by sticking to my passion for American literature? Shouldn’t I have pursued some more pragmatic/marketable fields, as many Chinese/Asian scholars of English had done, such as Computer Science, Education, Comparative Literatures, Accounting, or even ESL? Granted I would never give up my love for American Literature; the least I could do was to write a dissertation comparing Chinese and American authors so I could position myself for a wider audience/market. Who would be looking for a Chinese woman to fill an African American literature position? These ponderings, filled with self-doubt, had no ending in cycle.
My doubts only confirmed what I had heard a year before at a job seminar while attending a conference at the University of California, San Diego. An English search committee member from the university shared her insider knowledge with a roomful of uneasy graduate students: for every opening in a university like UC San Diego, there were some five hundred applicants competing for the job; each applicant got a shot of roughly 20 seconds—that’s the time to scan through a cover letter; and if your letter failed to catch a search committee member’s eye, your file found its way to the NO pile. I remember leaving that seminar room feeling dejected and insecure. Here I was a year later, reliving that dejection and insecurity. I could just see my arduously prepared job applications tipping the balance of that ever-growing NO pile.
It turned out that my inner balance had reached its tipping point as well. In April 1996, still desperately searching for a teaching job and finishing the dissertation, I awoke one night with an unsettling dream: something terrible had happened to my mother and my family was not talking. I had last spoken with my mother in China some four months ago when I called home to wish her happy New Year. When I called again to wish her a happy Chinese New Year, on February 19, I was told that my mother was visiting my older sister in another city. Since my sister’s house had no landline phone at the time, I had not been able to speak with my mother in person. I did write her letters, but the return letters were always written by my sister on our mother’s behalf. There goes the warning sign! Unfortunately, I did not recognize it then. Troubled by the ominous dream, I quickly placed a phone call to my second brother. Sadly, my worst fear was confirmed: my mother had died of a massive heart attack on January 6, 1996, just five days after I last spoke to her on the phone. My father had made the difficult decision to keep the truth from me so I could focus on my job search and dissertation writing. The decision was made out of love. Tough love.
In the end, love did prevail. Being the youngest child of four, I grew up under my mother’s tender love and protective wings. Even death could not stop her from loving me. Just one week after I learned of the news of my mother’s sudden death, I got a phone call from the Savannah College of Art and Design, inviting me for a campus interview. The rest is history.
Looking back, I have come out of that long stretch of desperation and tragic loss a stronger person. Ever since, I have been taking life in stride.
(May 2005)
Morrison Fans Will Love Latest Novel
(a book review)
Love, Toni Morrison’s most recent novel, explores the complexity, the power, and the destruction love entails in people’s relationships. The novel centers on Bill Cosey, the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, “the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast” and his relationship with the many women in his life.
Bill Cosey is a very complex character. On the one hand, he has charisma, a big wallet, and a generous heart. Business was booming in “the teeth of the Depression . . . . Mr. Cosey was in heaven, then. He liked George Raft clothes and gangster cars, but he used his heart like Santa Claus.” On the other hand, his personal life is a failure. His first wife Julia despises him and his money—bloody money his father accumulated by serving as an informant for the white authorities—and withers herself to
death. He is spellbound by Celestial, “a sporting woman” but cannot bring her to the house. His second wife belongs heart and soul to Christine, his granddaughter, for the two are childhood playmates and best friends. Though he has had many women in his wife, he has no soul mate.
But the most beautiful and heart-breaking story in the novel is that of Christine and Heed. Coming from two entirely different families--Christine, the most wealthy and powerful, Heed, the poorest and despised—the two strike up a friendship that destines them for life at a young age. This is how L, the long-time cook and power broker of the Cosey family, describes their relationship: Heed and Christine are each other’s first chosen love. “They were the kind of children who can’t take back love, or park it.” So when Bill Cosey decides to take Heed as his wife at the tender age of twelve, readers can imagine the devastating impact this “act of love” has had on both girls: they are turned against each other and learn to hate one another. It isn’t until the very end of the story and upon Heed’s death that the two are reconciled. Listening to their final exchanges of undying love for each other, one can’t help but marvel at the complexity, the power, and the destruction of love:
--We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere.
--He was everywhere.
--We make him up?
--He made himself up.
--We must have helped.
--Uh-uh. Only a devil could think him up.
--One did.
--Hey. Celestial.
Just like all her previous novels, Love by Toni Morrison will prove to be a difficult reading, but a rewarding and thought-provoking one nonetheless.
(January 2004)
Walker Takes Readers on New Journey
(a book review)
Alice Walker’s latest book, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, centers on Kate Nelson Talkingtree, who undertakes several journeys to reconnect with Mother Earth, known in the book as Grandmother. In the process, Kate re-discovers herself, comes to terms with the past, and is poised to embrace the future.
Kate Nelson Talkingtree is a well-published author in her late fifties, whose life has been colorful, adventurous, and successful. However, Kate is at a critical juncture where life ceases to be meaningful. She is bothered by her dream “each and every night that there was a river. But it was dry. There she’d be in the middle of an ancient forest searching for her life, i.e., the river, and she would find it after a long journey, and it would be sand.” Alarmed, Kate embarks on a series of journey that take her first to the Colorado River—“that journey seemed to be more about emptying myself of the past,” then to the Amazon in South America—“Kate liked the idea of underground rivers . . . human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared used up, dusty, and dry,” and finally back to a place where Kate is Grandmother, Grandmother Earth, “We must acknowledge and reclaim our true size. Dignity is important. Self-respect. We cannot lead by pretending to be powerless. We’re not. Age is power.”
Walker considers it important and necessary for Kate to take journeys of exploration alone, not with a man or a woman partner, because “she needs to remain focused on her inner journey, needs to chart it through her dreams, musings, wistful thoughts; needs to bounce herself off the ribaldry and humor of her own age, pioneering, as she is, a new way of life.” Indeed, the character Kate Nelson Talkingtree has invited us to join her journey by opening our hearts, reconnecting ourselves with Grandmother, Grandmother Earth.
(October 2005)
PART III: RAISING A DAUGHTER
“Are you my mother?” Feifei asked me when we met again at JFK Airport after a two-year separation. She just turned five. Now Feifei works for a world-renowned magazine. How did that happen?
“Are You My Mother?”
At the JFK airport you asked,
your innocent face fastened on me.
No longer the toddler I left in China—
now five, you flew half the globe
to join me in the U.S.,
where for the past two years, two months, eleven days, and twelve hours
I had been pursuing a degree (“What degree?” you asked).
“Are you my mother?”
No wonder.
I left you at daybreak on an icy January day
to catch a plane at the airport a hundred miles away.
I last saw you as your grandma,
fighting back tears,
hurried you into the neighbor’s apartment,
before I could whisper “goodbye.”
Your lovely face blurred behind the shut door.
You knew you had to lure me back
with impressive feats—preschool, kindergarten,
ballet lessons—no matter, you aced them all.
Stuck half a world away, I observed
your third, fourth, and fifth birthdays alone,
with eyes closed,
hoping to see what colors adorned your cakes.
Feifei’s 3rd birthday
I held onto a picture of you sitting on the grass,
head tilted toward the sky.
“Is that airplane going to America to get Mom?”
scribbled on the back. Your innocent words haunted me:
“I miss you, Mom! Please come back soon!”
I longed—no—dreaded to hear from home.
Walking between your dad and me,
you held both our hands, but grasping his.
In the car ride that started our life
together in America, you asked me
again, “Are you my mother?”
Locking my misty eyes with yours,
I nodded and bear-hugged you.
I felt your body relax just a little.
Feifei dressed up as Xu Xian, a legendary
figure in classical Chinese literature and opera (1990)
Two years, two months, twelve days, and eight hours after we first separated,
we gathered again under the same roof.
Nestled against me, you felt safe to close your eyes.
Would you be dreaming of our reunion?
Would the familiar twinkles return to your eyes?
Could we make up for the eight-hundred days lost?
Was I the mother you had been looking for?
I wonder.
(October 2006; first published in Offcourse, an Online Literary Journal, Issue #28, Fall 2006)
Forever
You always feel annoyed when people tell you, “You look just like your daughter!” Silently you dispute that. “Like mother, like daughter. She looks just like me.” Secretly, though, you often wonder if the two of you really look alike and can’t seem to make up your mind. True, you both have a round face, but yours is leaning more toward oval. You both have double eyelids, but her eyes are bigger. You each sport straight, shoulder-length black hair, but hers is shinier. As for the nose comparison, hers is definitely straighter. However, the same broad foreheads, thin curved lips, and shapely chins you share are obvious. You alone like to dwell on the close bond you share with your daughter that transcends the merely physical, outward resemblance.
Since March 28, 1986, the day your daughter Feifei was born twenty-one years ago, whom she looks like has generated heated debates between you and your husband, between your two families, among your friends and colleagues, and even among strangers. You can’t help but chuckle when you recall your husband’s famous retort, “as if we had any undesirable features,” spat out at a colleague’s remark that Feifei has inherited the desirable features of you both. On that front, you stand shoulder to shoulder with your husband. What is more gratifying to you, though, is the incredible bond you and your daughter have developed over the years. As always, your thoughts go back to the pivotal years—the first six years of Feifei’s life—and what these years has meant to you.
Of course, that bond started pre-Feifei. The moment she was conceived, s
he relied on you solely to survive and grow. Gathering strength. Fighting all odds. Transforming. Waiting to be born. You realized you needed her as much as she needed you to survive those nine long months of pregnancy. Survive.
Feifei one-month old (1986)
You were teaching in Nankai University then, and lived in a dorm-converted residence hall for faculty and staff. You shared a room with two other faculty members. The fact that you were married and expecting a child did not automatically qualify you for a room of your own. Your husband was teaching in Fushun, a city some 500 miles away. All he could do was write you letters. More letters. Phone calls were impractical. Cumbersome. Expensive. Almost impossible (in 1985, landline phones were still a rarity in China; cell phones were unheard of). There was only one phone at the residence hall office downstairs. You were glad to have Feifei fill the void. Three times a day, you ate at the graduate student cafeteria, it being the closest. Years later, when friends and acquaintances commented on how smart Feifei was, your husband rolled his big eyes, “Of course! Look at what food she grew up eating. Food fit for graduate students.” Now he boasts that Feifei is Daddy’s girl. Smart. Da cong. Extremely smart.
Feifei proved to be a good camper from the beginning. She consumed whatever you gave her and caused you no morning sicknesses. Many a night, when you felt lonely and longed for your husband’s touch, it was Feifei who comforted you. Listening to your muffled sobs. Kicking you ever so gently. It was a bond only the two of you could have. Once—you were about six months pregnant with Feifei—you felt dizzy and almost fell off the chair you stood on to hang up the laundry (those were the days when washers and dryers were absolute luxuries). Feifei alone witnessed the near-disaster. She let you know this time with her panicked commotions. Scared, overwhelmed with sadness and helplessness, you crashed onto the bed, sobbing uncontrollably. Feifei was the closest and only family you had during those difficult months. The two of you breathed together, hung on to each other, determined to survive. The close bond you two have been sharing was established then.