The Cooked Seed: A Memoir

by Anchee Min

  Suicide remained the very first word I learned from Dr. Guenther.

  Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, E. B. White, Lewis Thomas, James Baldwin, Edward Hoagland, Joan Didion, Alice Walker: I had never heard of these names, but I was fascinated. Dr. Guenther introduced them. I remembered Joan Didion the most, because Dr. Guenther said that Didion was her favorite. The book she used as text was entitled Eight Modern Essayists.

  One of my fellow students complained about Dr. Guenther’s strictness. I didn’t understand her expectations. How could a teacher behave otherwise? Years later I concluded that the students regarded themselves as mature artists who needed no improvement, especially with their English writing skills.

  The only times I ever missed lessons in Dr. Guenther’s class were when they conflicted with my job schedule. I had made paying off my debt my priority. My politeness and the fact that I was Dr. Guenther’s favorite international student didn’t count: She failed me. Dr. Guenther was determined to do her job. The students expected her to do what other professors did and “go easy” with grades. Dr. Guenther made it clear that everyone had to work for their grades in her class. She issued warning letters, made phone calls, and failed students.

  Dr. Guenther didn’t care about being evaluated negatively by her students. She was passionate about teaching and was loved by her class. She didn’t hesitate to show her feelings toward those she considered lazy or spoiled. Open-minded and liberal as she was, she refused to put up with nonsense. “My job is to teach, not to please!” she said.

  I never told Dr. Guenther that her failing me was the reason I so wanted to study under her. I respected her sense of responsibility toward her students. I signed up for more of her classes. By then I had received a scholarship grant from an Asia foundation that covered my tuition. Although I still had to earn living expenses, the tremendous pressure was lifted. I could now afford to focus on my studies. I was determined not to disappoint Dr. Guenther, since she was the one who admitted me without a passing TOEFL score. I felt that I owed her that decency.

  Reading for me at this point was extremely difficult, if not impossible. Each page of my textbook had around twenty lines and about thirteen words per line. Yet ten out of the thirteen words I did not know. This meant I had to open up my dictionary two hundred times for each page. By the time I advanced to the third page, I was mentally exhausted.

  I would cry on bad days. I sprayed ice water on my face, slapped my cheeks, and pinched my thighs in order to stay awake. By accident I found a good strategy. I would read the end of the story first so that I might be able to guess the plot and the words I didn’t know. My dictionary was so worn that the corners melted away and pages started to fall out.

  Each day I survived in the classroom I regarded as a triumph. I dragged the composition topics into my own territory, against the backdrop of Chinese culture and history, where I could make comparisons and comment intelligently. One of my first successes was a reflection on Edward Hoagland’s “City Rat.” I described the lives of a different kind of “city rats,” the Chinese poor. I wrote slowly with my baby English, but it worked.

  I began to repeat my success. When asked to copy the writing style of Virginia Woolf and convey a woman’s inner struggle, I wrote about my grandmother. She had had bound feet but still survived the Japanese invasion, China’s civil war, and the Communist liberation. To imitate Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, I told a story about my fellow comrade Little Green at the labor camp. She was driven mad and died because she fell in love with a boy, and the two paid a price for carrying out the affair. To echo George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” I described my experience being pressured to denounce my favorite teacher during the Cultural Revolution. For “Portrait of a Family Member,” I described how my mother survived under Mao’s dictatorship. For a character sketch, I used my father as a subject. I depicted his passion for astronomy and told the story of how he was denounced for teaching about sun spots. Mao was regarded as the brightest sun in the universe and my father was accused of attacking Mao by pointing out his “spots,” which might be interpreted as imperfections.

  { Chapter 10 }

  Professor Stalin was a large, tall man of Russian descent. I nicknamed him Stalin because I was unable to pronounce his last name. He had deep-set eyes, a prominent forehead with a grand nose, a mustache, and wavy brown hair piled up in the shape of a bird’s nest. Professor Stalin taught Introduction to Filmmaking. I took the class not because I was interested but because I had some experience back in the Shanghai Film Studio. I hoped to glide through Professor Stalin’s class.

  I took the last seat by the door and avoided eye contact. After the first class, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t understand 75 percent of what Professor Stalin said. I wanted to transfer to another class but found none that was easier.

  I got nervous when Professor Stalin kept staring in my direction. He had a suspicious look in his eyes the moment he saw me. I ducked behind a tall male student pretending to take notes. I was afraid that Professor Stalin was going to call on me.

  There was no narration in the films showed in class. The style of filmmaking Professor Stalin taught was called “experimental filmmaking.” Professor Stalin pointed out the technique. A cinematographer tied a cord to his camera and swung it in the air as he shot the footage. The purpose was to “break” the viewers’ “viewing habits.” The concept was “abstract expressionism.”

  I looked up words in my dictionary as Professor Stalin lectured. My brain was busy translating English to Chinese. I took notes in Chinese writing as fast as I could. The Chinese translations were “quantitatively,” “qualitatively,” “embodiment,” “whereby,” “resonance,” “tangible,” “symphony,” “eliminate,” “illuminate,” “dualistic,” “cosmic,” “manifest,” “transparency,” “duplicate,” “triplicate” …

  I was stuck at the word f-stop. There was no translation for it in my dictionary. I decided to come back to it later. During the class break, I visited the ladies’ room. When I returned, I found that someone had written on my notebook. “Sex” was next to my “f-stop.” The handwriting was childlike.

  I looked around. A male student who sat behind me had a smirk on his face. As I crossed out sex he began to laugh, and this distracted Professor Stalin. He turned toward me.

  Professor Stalin spoke, but his words failed to register in my ear. He repeated himself while looking directly at me. The class was quiet. I could barely breathe. Professor Stalin repeated himself again. I lowered my head and looked at his feet. I heard him say, “Miss Min, please answer my question. What is the definition of a circle?”

  Chinese filled up my head. I knew the definition of a circle. I opened my mouth but lost my English.

  A girl who sat next to me tried to help. She whispered to me, “The definition of a circle is—”

  Professor Stalin raised his hand. “I am asking Miss Min, please.”

  I shook my head in shame.

  Professor Stalin gave a cold laugh. “What did you do in school when you were growing up?”

  Would it make sense to Professor Stalin if I told him what I had done in school when I was growing up? I was first drilled to defend my country from Americans who were already in Vietnam. Then I was assigned to a labor camp to grow rice and cotton to support Vietnam. I wished that I could tell Professor Stalin that I might not be able to describe the definition of a circle in English, but I could certainly demonstrate a combat move that would take down an American his size.

  The class observed in silence when the professor walked toward me. I could hear the sound of Stalin’s breathing above my head. Speaking with controlled anger, he said, “This is not a language school!”

  I shut my dictionary and rushed out of the classroom. I didn’t blame Professor Stalin. I was guilty of wasting the class’s time, and he had every reason to be upset. I had no right to do this to him and the class. It seemed that there was no way I could avoid being a burden. I fear
ed that Professor Stalin might report me to the admissions office, and that Dr. Guenther would be punished for admitting me.

  A girl followed me out after the class. She had been sitting next to me and had tried to help me answer Stalin’s question. She had a petite figure with smooth ivory skin and shoulder-length brown hair. Her eyes were filled with sympathy.

  “The school should be embarrassed by the way he treats you!” she said. “I’ll go with you if you want to file a complaint. He is such a jerk. Makes me sick!”

  Wiping my tears, I asked what jerk meant.

  She explained. I opened my dictionary. “How do you spell jerk?”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Don’t bother to look up the word. You don’t want to learn this. By the way, I’m Irene.”

  This was how I met Irene. We quickly became friends. Irene taught me about the relationship between modern art and experimental filmmaking, which she explained was her passion. I had yet to know the extraordinary filmmaker in her, the talent that in the future would land her highest honors as an artist. Fifteen years later, Irene Smith would exhibit her films at Lincoln Center in New York. I’d be in the audience when she would show her films at the prestigious Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles.

  She was barely eighteen when we first met. She painstakingly tried to make me understand that narrative storytelling was not the only way to make films. In addition to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Irene introduced me to Sargent, Renoir, Picasso, Dalí, and Matisse. Art was no longer regarded as a tool that pleased, entertained, and belonged to the rich and powerful. Art had become accessible to any human individual as a means of self-expression.

  Irene showed me her “work in progress.” The film was a stream of composed, decomposed, and recomposed images taken from seemingly unrelated bits of found footage. Although I didn’t understand what I saw, I felt her passion. Watching what she was doing forced me to reconsider my old ways of thinking and viewing. New senses opened to me.

  It was not that I didn’t have a desire to express myself. I was burdened by the pressure to survive. All I dreamed of was to earn citizenship and make a living. Yet it seemed unreachable. It was painful for me to sit among young American art students and pretend to be interested in their discussions about self-expression.

  I worked until eight P.M. every Tuesday at the student gallery. There were few visitors after six P.M. Irene would come and sit by me. One day, my friend brought me a book as a gift to help me improve my vocabulary. Its title was Abnormal Psychology. Irene told me to keep the book. She said that she had had enough of it. Her family had made her see a “shrink” since she was seven, and she had been in therapy for years. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  I opened my dictionary and tried to locate the word shrink. Irene told me that I wouldn’t find it, because the proper word would be psychiatrist. I was confused. My dictionary translated psychiatrist as a doctor for the mentally ill. My friend didn’t seem mentally ill to me, or was I misjudging?

  I asked how much a shrink would cost. Irene wanted to know why I asked. I told her that I felt like a mental patient.

  “You are not alone. Look around us. Everybody is pathetic!” Irene said.

  I agreed. Looking at the artwork I guarded, which was a freshman exhibition entitled Self-Portrait, I was shocked by the way my schoolmates expressed themselves. The self-portraits demonstrated nothing but agony, pain, and self-hatred. One artist painted his head into a hairy monster, another a vagina, and next to it was a penis head. In one self-portrait, the head was drowning in water, and the one next to it was a knife-toothed vampire.

  Strangely, however, what touched me was not only the work’s honesty but also the freedom behind it.

  I went to the job-placement office for an interview. The lady asked me if I knew how to type. I said I would be willing to learn.

  “You mean you are not good at typing?” the lady asked.

  “I … am a fast learner.” I smiled. “How about no pay until I get good?”

  The lady explained that “it doesn’t work that way in America.”

  I visited the Dumpster behind a Payless shoe store and found a throwaway shoe box. I drew a picture of a typewriter keyboard with circles. I took it to the school admissions office and observed the secretary typing. At her lunch break, I asked her to tell me which fingers touch which keys. I practiced typing on my shoebox keyboard whenever possible: on the subway, bus, or as I sat on a curb waiting for a bus.

  Two weeks later I returned to the job-placement office. I told the lady that I was ready. She sat me in front of her typewriter and handed me a page of newspaper to copy from.

  The lady glanced at her watch and said, “Ready? Go!”

  I charged forward. My fingers didn’t feel like mine. The English characters in front of me became blurred. Before I could finish a sentence, the lady announced that the test was over. I scored a negative 13.

  By the time I got a job painting on fabric, I had worked as a delivery person for the school film center, a checkout person at the equipment booth, an attendant for the gallery, and a mail sorter at the admissions office.

  I left early one morning and headed to the northeast side of Chicago for the fabric-painting job. I had to transfer subways twice, from the A train to the B train, then take a bus, and finally walk for forty minutes. It was ten o’clock when I found myself in a pleasant neighborhood in front of a big house. I was surprised to be greeted by an Asian lady. She told me to call her Mrs. Lueng.

  “Are you Chinese?” I asked.

  The lady said she was Chinese but spoke only Cantonese, which meant we had to communicate in English.

  Mrs. Lueng led me to her basement, where rolls of silk were piled high. A large cloth-covered table stood in the middle. Mrs. Lueng told me that she made women’s underwear, sleepwear, and gowns. My job was to paint flowers on her merchandise. She gave me a basket filled with tubes of fabric paint.

  I thanked Mrs. Lueng for hiring me. Mrs. Lueng kept her face straight and said that she didn’t want me to get any wrong ideas.

  “I want to be honest with you,” she said. “I had a bad experience with a Korean girl before you. I paid her four dollars per hour. She painted too slow, one flower per hour. And she had to take cigarette breaks. I didn’t want to pay for cigarette breaks. You don’t smoke, do you?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t smoke.”

  “Good, I will pay you by the piece, not by the hour. Do you understand? I will pay you three dollars per piece. I hope you will paint a bit faster than the Korean girl.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “By the way, no coffee, phone, or lunch breaks. You may go to the toilet.”

  “Of course.”

  I painted flowers in an impressionistic style. It was not that difficult for me since I used the Chinese brush-painting technique. It allowed me to mix colors in the brush instead of on the canvas. Mrs. Lueng was impressed. Besides roses, she requested lilies, camellias, peonies, wisteria, and bamboo leaves in various compositions. I made my flowers follow the contours of the merchandise.

  Standing next to me, Mrs. Lueng said, “The Korean girl painted in the Western style, one stroke at a time, and that was why she was slow. You mix the paints in the brush as you go. How do you do that?”

  I told Mrs. Lueng that before dipping my brush in the color jars, my mind already knew the effect the strokes would have on the silk.

  By the time I said good-bye, I had earned twenty-four dollars. I was thrilled. Mrs. Lueng asked if I wanted to take work home. She would pay fifty cents for each piece of underwear. Gladly, I accepted her offer and took a stack of fabric with me.

  It was midnight by the time I returned to my shared apartment. I stayed up and painted until my eyes refused to stay open, around four in the morning.

  Once I knew what Mrs. Lueng liked, I applied my skill with full force. I was so motivated by the income that I skipped drinking water so that I could save toilet time. I was able to pro
duce six pieces per hour, which meant eighteen dollars.

  Mrs. Lueng asked me to paint a wedding gown. She later made a 300 percent profit on it. I was happy that I pleased Mrs. Lueng. I earned ninety dollars a day, not counting my travel time, which took three hours. After my train and bus fare, I still profited seventy dollars. On average, I made fourteen dollars per hour.

  Unfortunately, my happiness didn’t last. A week later, Mrs. Lueng wanted to cut my pay. She said that she had made a mistake. She would no longer pay me by the piece. Instead she wanted to switch to paying me by the hour.

  “Four dollars per hour. The same as I paid the Korean girl.”

  “Do you expect me to paint one flower for each hour?” I was upset.

  “No,” she replied. “I expect the same productivity. Six pieces or more per hour.”

  “For four dollars instead of fourteen dollars per hour?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But—”

  “Take it or leave it,” Mrs. Lueng said coldly.

  This was the first time I had witnessed capitalism at work. “You expect me to produce six pieces for four dollars, which comes out to only sixty-six cents per piece. You told me that the Korean girl made one piece per hour. She got paid four dollars, and me only sixty-six cents?”

  “You are faster. You still earn four dollars per hour by painting six pieces.”

  I argued that transportation cost me time and money. It would not be worth it at the end of the day, since I would only have five dollars left.

  Mrs. Lueng said that it was not her trouble, and that she had no intention of making my trouble hers.

  For the rest of the day I painted six pieces an hour for four dollars an hour. I netted $8.50 total for that day. I tried not to feel disappointed as I sat on the last subway train returning to Chicago, but I couldn’t help myself. I was exhausted and hungry. My hand clenched the eight one-dollar bills and two quarters.