It’s a defiant dance with the unimaginable.
inspiring and invigorating, a reminder that there is no one way to tell a story, nor is there, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it, “only a single story about another person or country”. Zhang’s collection with all its multifarious, profane glories affirms this. It poses the questions: why can’t we undo the cliches and cultural expectations imposed on us? Why can’t we be messy?
JEFF GOODELL
The truth is, when I was a kid, I didn’t read much. I grew up in California and was too busy racing motorcycles, skiing, surfing, chasing girls and listening to Neil Young to bother with books. I liked Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson but I thought books were about other people’s lives or, at least, lives that were very much unlike mine. That’s why if I could send one book back to my younger self, it would be William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Finnegan’s great memoir about his lifelong obsession with surfing might have helped me understand that writing is not something that’s done by a different sub-species of human or that some lives are more suited to literature than others. Finnegan finds all the mystery and profundity of nature in a wave and demonstrates that the search for meaning in our lives does not depend on choosing the right or wrong path but in paying attention to the path we’re on. As a teenager, this is the kind of wisdom I might have appreciated. If nothing else, Finnegan’s book might have helped me understand that, as I floated in the kelp beds near Santa Cruz waiting to catch the perfect wave, I was not a lost boy alone on a surfboard but a curious kid with a world to explore and story of his own to tell. revealed. “When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too,” a teacher said to the young author when she was beginning to “wake up”. When I first read this wondrous book, I was 24 but hadn’t begun to wake up. You can’t force anything on your younger self — they reject it outright. Who are you to patronise me?, they say. Some of it did reach me (“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation and that which is indestructible be found in us”) because I was well-versed in French existentialism, Nihilism, Surrealism, Dadaism. I’d read Camus, Conrad and Dostoyevsky; cerebral and driven, the ego-mind was my armour. My situation never felt friendly and I struggled to grasp Chodron’s idea of causing no harm, giving up hope, groundlessness, inhaling others’ suffering and compassion. Compassion? We are not taught kindness. A deficit of (self) compassion is perhaps the single source of all our troubles. Four reads and 20 years later, I see that things fall apart ceaselessly; I grasp the metaphor of life as a boat that you board cheerfully in the full knowledge that it’s going to sink. That there really is a love that will not die; Chodron is my tonic for this
toxic age. bounds. So I grew up reading lots of 19th century morality tales calculated to break a child’s spirit, interspersed with the nightmare-inducing works — Leon Uris’s Exodus and Mila 18 — my mother devoured in a doomed attempt to understand my father. One book that would have been useful in that regard wasn’t created yet. Dad might have banned it anyway because it’s a comic, a genre which had to be hidden in the wardrobe. American cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s parents were, like my father, Polish Holocaust survivors. Perfect material for comic strips, clearly. In an early strip about the 1968 suicide of his mother, Spiegelman draws Artie, his tormented younger self, in concentration camp uniform. The audacity. That strip became part of an even riskier enterprise: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale ,a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in which Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs. Among many impossible things, it’s a defiant dance with the unimaginable. It’s also the story of getting the story, via the tender, fraught relationship between Artie and Vladek, the sort of father who, Spiegelman writes, “bleeds history”. If I’d been able to read it earlier I might have asked more questions and taken warning that the memories and reminders of the past a parent may need to throw away in order to survive can be precisely what their child will later want to hold close. (The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman.)
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