It was my privilege to celebrate the release of my debut novel Living Treasures, first at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, then at the San Francisco Public Library, with my old and new friends.
My friend Tong Acken's sketch took my breath away. My children exclaimed, "This is the BEST!" Thank you, Tong. How did you do that?
It was surreal to see my talk featured on the San Francisco Public Library Home Page:
I gave a bilingual talk to a room full of people. Don't be fooled by their looks. About half of the people asked me questions in English, while the other half in Chinese. Some questions made me think, and others made me smile.
Here is my speech:
Friends, thank you for coming out to see me today. Make sure you get a raffle ticket from my little helpers: 9-year-old Oliver and 11-year-old Victor. Here are the prizes: a porcelain panda mug, its cute print makes you want to drink more beverages. This is a recycled cotton bag, almost weightless but very useful. It has the embroidery of my book cover. The panda, chicken, and girl are playing together. After reading the novel, you’ll understand the symbolism. This embroidery has about 8000 stitches, a tiny fraction of the work I put into my book.
I want to thank Doris for inviting me. She worked tirelessly to publicize and organize this event. I am grateful for her hard work, resourcefulness, and generosity. You may borrow my novel: Living Treasures from the library. Here is the form, if you need to apply for a library card. You may buy a book after the event. I’ll autograph your book. As an author, I appreciate your support.
It’s a special event, because my family is here with me. I invited my mother. My boys love to play baseball and guitars. Thanks to their awesome teacher, Hassan El-Tayyab, over there. Hassan is the leading man in the band: American Nomad. Very cool band, you should check them out.
Here is a quote:
“Their original music is rooted in Americana and folk/swing traditions. American Nomad draws from the spirit of travel and authentic life experience.”
Inspired by their musician teacher, Oliver and Victor will sing a song: Take Me out to the Library.
BTW. I paid for them to perform, so they are paid musicians, way ahead of their mother. They also read Living Treasures. It took Oliver two afternoons to finish it, so it’s a quick read.
I have a day job, working as a computer engineer at UC Berkeley. As a writer I have a rather optimistic worldview. I like to tackle big social problems in my fiction, put my characters under the test, let them suffer, and in their darkest and most despairing hours, let them use their ingenuity (much like an engineer), and find some sort of relief or solution, not a cure-all, but a way out, so that they can move forward to rebuild their lives.
Before I talk about my book, I want to tell you the inspirations for my story.
First, it was the panda. Who could resist a face like this? But do you know its secrets? Panda is bear, with the digestive system of a carnivore, thus derives little energy and protein from consuming bamboo, which is 99% of its diet. Pandas in the wild occasionally eat birds, mice, or fish if they can catch them.
To make up for the inefficient digestion, a panda needs to consume 20 to 40 pounds of bamboo every day. This affects its behavior. A panda must spend 10 to 16 hours a day foraging and eating. The rest of its time is spent mostly sleeping and resting.
Bamboo species flower periodically, every 30 - 120 years or so. All plants in a particular species mass flower worldwide over a several-year period. Flowering produces seeds, and bamboos die after flowering. The seeds will give rise to a new generation of bamboos, but it can take years to replenish the food supply for pandas.
When I was in middle school, we donated money to rescue the pandas from starvation, as bamboos mass flowered over large areas of the Min Mountains. It was one of the few fund raising events I ever had in China. The plight of cuddly pandas touched many young hearts. We wrote letters, essays, drew pictures, and told stories about these national treasures.
My book begins with a mother panda eating a chicken, so that she could survive the winter and nurse her cub.
Here we see the resilience of panda, and the girl who witnesses it.
My second inspiration is the student movement of 1989.
My heroine, Miss Gu Bao, her name sounding like “national treasure” in Chinese, grows up in the 80s.
It was a hopeful time, a liberal time. After the dark ages of brutal prosecution and censorship in the Cultural Revolution, many western thoughts were introduced and flourished in China. For the young people, it was sexy to be in a debate salon and wrangle over ideological issues. Before long, people began to demand human rights, freedom, and democracy.
This is Qin, my better half, during the heyday of the 1989 student movement. I didn’t have a picture, because people were still afraid of retaliation. Students began their protests at night, wearing facial masks to avoid being recognized or photographed. This might be mid-May, when the movement had gained so much support throughout China. It was “safe” to be seen as a “patriotic youth” rather than condemned as “a traitor conspiring to overthrow the government.”
Soon the situation escalated. The Tiananmen Square massacre came as a complete shock. To this day, we don’t know how many were killed on the dawn of June 4th. The official story was that no one died in the square. The propaganda machine in China wiped out every evidence of the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown. My poor parents were grateful that I wasn’t in the Square that night. They told me to never speak of it. What good does it do, for the dead and living? My classmate, a hunger striker, dropped out of the university afterwards. I never heard from him again. Dr. Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, is still imprisoned for speaking up about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The student movement in 1989 was a defining moment of my generation. We experienced the hope, joy, and heartbreak of losing a historical opportunity. I reflected on the tragedy for more than twenty years. I would write a story about the students’ fight but with a more meaningful arc. There were many things leading up to the massacre and following after that, but that night, inevitably the focus of my story is just a starting point, a central metaphor for Bao’s tragedy. I didn’t want it to end on Tiananmen Square. It needed to be in rural China, where a lot of the injustice happened.
My third inspiration is the one-child policy.
May I see a show of hands? It doesn’t matter where you were born. Would those of you not firstborns please raise your hands? You wouldn’t have been born in China after 1976, if your parents hadn’t fought hard to save your lives.
Here is a little bit of history. In the 1950s, Chairman Mao, with a typical peasant mentality, banned family planning and encouraged women to have as many children as possible. The population grew from 540 million in 1949 to 969 million in 1979, nearly 80% of population increase within three decades. In the seventies the government tried to solve the population crisis by enforcing strict controls to slow down the birth rate. Aside from some minority groups, every couple could only have one child.
The problem is: local governments all had their own rules and regulations to enforce the policy. Some people lost their jobs after having a second child. Others were fined. Like many policies in China, there was abuse of power and corruption was rampant. In some villages, one-child policy worker team hired thugs to threaten and beat up people, force collect the fines, and even kidnap the women and their relatives. Some women had their full-term babies aborted. If the drugs couldn’t kill, a nurse injected medicine on the baby’s temple when the mother was pushing. Some women died from the brutal procedures, while others were forced into sterilization.
My fourth inspiration is a blind lawyer, Mr. Chen Guangchen.
While revising Living Treasures, I learned about Mr. Chen, a civil rights activist who worked on human rights issues in rural China. Blind from an early age and self-taught in the law, Chen is a “barefoot lawyer” who advocates for women’s rights, land rights, and the welfare of the poor. That was the career path that I planned for Bao, that she would mature into a grassroots activist.
To make a real change, even a small one, you cannot expect it to be passed down from the government, but rather, it needs to start with you and your actions. The victory isn’t achieved by the talks on Tiananmen Square but in every action you do, every person you help, and every sacrifice you make for the common good.
The students in 1989 appealed to the ruling class to change the corrupt system. It ended in the massacre. That’s no reason to give up. What if we don’t fight, but live our lives to the fullest?
Every person thinks s/he is free, despite what the government tells them, and live their lives like free people, take charge of their social responsibilities, and reach out to the less fortunate.
I know Bao could do this, because Mr. Chen did it with some success. In 2005, Chen organized a landmark class action lawsuit against authorities in Shandong province, for the excessive enforcement of the one-child policy. What an amazing achievement for a courageous blind lawyer!
In Living Treasures, village woman Mrs. Orchid already has a daughter. The one-child policy worker team forced her to have two abortions. When she gets pregnant again, she hides in a cave. There she meets Bao, who ended her pregnancy in order to continue her career as a law student. Bao is not impressed with Orchid at first, but she learns to admire Orchid’s strength and resolve to have her child. She ends up risking her own life to protect Orchid.
The ensuing violence is a metaphor for the Tiananmen Square massacre. But Bao is more fortunate than the students in the Square. With the help of her soldier boyfriend, she is able to rise from her tragedy and becomes a human rights activist. Her journey will not be easy, and she will suffer a great deal for her choice, but she has taken an important first step, not only for herself, but for 1.35 billion Chinese people who don’t have the political power.
You may ask why I wrote the story of a Chinese woman in English. There were several reasons. When I was a teenager, I was enthralled by the French writers, novels by Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas. Those stories from the faraway land seemed more realistic, vivid, and inspirational than the Chinese novels about the suffering in the Cultural Revolution. When I managed (believe me, it was hard) to put down the book and walked to the school, I no longer saw the tractors and oxcarts, motorcycles and bicycles in bright daylight but felt as if I were running down the dimly lit alleyways in Paris during the French Revolution.
Then I was able to rise above the peer pressure and self-consciousness, that I wasn’t pretty, intelligent, or popular at a prestigious high school. I was just a captivated reader. The story of French people translated into Chinese was devoid of clichés yet colored by passion. I grew up and named my first child Victor, after my idol Victor Hugo.
My 2nd reason was the censorship. My book would be banned, before it was even written in Chinese. I kept a blog in mainland China and learned many tricks to circumvent the internet censorship. Even worse is the self-censorship. A famous writer once said, “If you want to write honestly, you should write like an orphan.” I didn’t like being an orphan, so I’d say, “If you want to write honestly, write in a foreign language that your parents cannot understand.”
I came to the U.S. at the age of nineteen, graduated from college at twenty-one, and became a computer engineer. At twenty-three, I had a midlife crisis. I went back to school, while working full time, and studied literature and writing. It was very hard work. From day one I knew I would support my writing life by working as an engineer. What got me through two decades of apprenticeship was not the prospect of being published, though it was nice that I finally got published, but the firm belief that I was doing something worthwhile. Having a job is to earn my keep from the society, but writing is to give back to the community my soul, my struggle, and my faith in humanity and future.
Here is my 3rd reason to write in English: to communicate with people different from me—to educate them, entertain them, and affirm the values that we all hold dear: truth, love, courage, and selflessness. In a small way I was emulating the masters: Victor Hugo, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas. Likewise, I wanted to tell stories of the faraway land that make people forget the trouble in their own lives, just for an instant, look up and see a bigger world full of people, who look like strangers, as you look more closely, you’ll find they are just like you, with the same longings, fears, and ambitions. Their children and your children will inherit the same world after you are gone.
I got a lot of friendly advice over the years. They told me: You’re the first generation immigrant, and you’re a woman. You have to work and raise a family. You don’t have the luxury of chasing a dream. Wait until you are retired, your children in college, and then take your time to write. I didn’t take the sensible advice. Life is short. I’d rather multitask and fail, than wait and discover that my time has run out. If my life were a baseball game, I want to strike out swinging rather than strike out looking.
I never argued with the wise people who warned me that I might fell. I had nothing to prove. Just do it.
Writing is a lonely task. I found support in friends and my family. Just do it.
It didn’t matter if I failed or succeeded. I am only limited by my timidity, my prejudice, and my own imagination.
I told myself: Just do it. Keep doing it. And do more of it. Predictably, the wise people left me alone.
I got a BA, an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. My life got more hectic after I graduated, but I kept on writing. I had children, and they slowed me down. I used to write a book in a year and half, but Living Treasures took me five years to write and five more years to get it published. If I were a hare before, now I am a turtle. I plug away patiently and take in beautiful sceneries on my journey. As I grow older, I have less time to write. I focus on the essentials, the emotions, and no longer cringe to cut my favorite passages in order to advance the story.
I learned much from watching my heroine develop and mature in the course of a novel. A young woman who wants to become a lawyer, Bao has so much to lose at the beginning: her virginity, her baby, and her career. When she’s confronted with evil, her conscience wakens. She takes a stand for what she believes in and risks everything in her life.
Do we have the courage to fight for our true believes? If we look deep inside, we’ll find a hero or heroine buried under the layers of politeness, the mundane, and the compromises. If we are true to ourselves, that hero or heroine will awaken, summon their courage, elicit help, and open doors to new careers, new relationships, and creativities. Life is not merely a thing to be tolerated but celebrated. We become free even as we are trapped inside this transient shell, this small building, and this unjust world.
Thank you.
If you like, I’ll read a scene from my book.
Listen! My heroine Bao is going to free a panda mother from the poacher's snare.
With my dear friends of more than 12 years.
What a group of fine ladies we are!
The room is filling up. Wish I had taken the picture of people standing and sitting on the floor. FYI. I didn't put the gentlemen to sleep. They were listening and concentrating. All of them asked me good questions.
You could see that I enjoyed my talk. Thanks to Jose for the picture.
Oliver handed out raffle tickets for the gifts. The handsome gentleman is Hassan El-Tayyab, the lead singer in the band American Nomad.
I was so fortunate to meet Doris and Yiping. They were wise, graceful, and funny. We talked like old friends.
With Manfred and Vesna. My friend Cristina came to talk with me.
With my family, Doris, and Tanya. It was a very happy day!