How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  I wished I had asked more questions. On the nights at the disco, or at home later, in my room, I often found myself thinking of Uriel. Did he sleep in the house also, and if not, where? Where did he go home to, and what was his life like? And, of course, what was he thinking about? Which was only a way of hoping he thought about me.

  THE FIELD TRIP I remember best was the one to Palenque. At the time, it was an archeological site, according to our guide, still very remote, full of scorpions, and surrounded by what the guide said were cannibal tribes. For several hours our bus took countless hairpin turns through the mountains, and I remember the electric fear of feeling close to death as I looked out the bus window and down a cliff. All along the roads were crosses and candles marking where people had died in accidents.

  Palenque was a Mayan ruin in the center of the Mexican rainforest. This location, we learned, was thought to be strategic. The stones were the color of the white summer sky. We exited the bus, and I was in awe of the dense rainforest jungle as the guide led us into the single excavated temple cellar. There the other American students took pictures, the light bouncing off the plexiglass erected between us and the discoveries, an aurora of camera flash. “We know so little about the Maya,” I remember the guide kept saying, a litany of a kind. Palenque then was a sliver of what it is now, which is a sliver of what it once was—it is estimated that what we see of the ruin is just 10 percent of what is still there, buried in the jungle. It was, for me, both thrillingly new and ancient at the same time. I was young and impatient upon learning that the world had not, in fact, been completely charted yet. Why did we not yet know more about the Maya when they had been around for so long?

  The entire summer’s program seemed like an education conducted through gestalt experiences: take kids to a place where they don’t understand anything, and then take them on tours with other people who understand only a little more than they do. I was growing bored of these field trips, and I was still the only group member with any fluency. Being around the Americans, as I now thought of them, wore on me on that trip. Spanish, to me, was quieter, with a different tone and volume level, and their English rang in my head, discordant and forceful.

  On the trip back to Tuxtla, Nick was gluey with sleep, his head tipped over, lips apart. I sat next to him, awake with the thrill of being close to him, and the knowledge I had of his body from all of those hours of swimming. I wanted nothing more than to slip a kiss on his mouth right then, but it was only pure lust, not affection, and the imagined scene of it turned in my mind like a worry stone as we passed again along the road’s dangerous curves.

  It was a summer of wanting impossible things.

  THE STUDENT I WAS then was puzzled by the lack of classes, but in truth the program was so effective it almost recommended itself as a method. I learned Spanish well enough to become fluent. The stories I was writing, which I did to entertain myself when I ran out of things to read, were their own kind of milestone, visible to me only much later: they were the first time I wrote for myself, for my own pleasure. There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing. I think of this as one of the most important parts of my writer’s education—that when left alone with nothing else to read, I began to tell myself the stories I wanted to read.

  And there was the story I was living. Whatever I thought I was doing through my experiments in observation, I can see I was a boy losing himself as a way to find himself in the shapes of others. The classmates on this trip were kids I had grown up with since moving to town in the first grade. I longed to be rid of them, but also to be rid of me, or of the problem of me. This was not possible, but I tried.

  Here, then, is that summer’s last lesson.

  THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE celebration at summer’s end were strenuous. A three-day party, the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of my host family’s closest friends. I’ll call them the Márquez family. Guests were flying in from all over the world for the big event, and Cela, my host mother, would jump into spontaneous dances in front of me as she described it. She taught salsa and merengue, and now and then over the summer I would be drawn into dancing with her; I remember the delight in her eyes at the prospect of dancing. She had elegant legs, and her hips’ quick movement surprised me, which made her laugh. “Merengue, salsa, merengue, salsa,” she would chant, like a little girl asking to bake a cake, her hips shaking as she circled the dining room table, her heels ringing on the tile floor. Miguel always blushed, and at some point her husband would raise his hands and reach for his wife’s waist.

  She gave me a few lessons, insisting I would have to dance at the party.

  The day of the party, we arrived at the Márquez house to find a white Jaguar parked in the driveway, a red bow on top. It was so clearly the señor’s present to the señora that it needed no explanation: Mr. Márquez owned a luxury car dealership in town. I arrived with Miguel, and we were greeted by his friend Javier, the son of the celebrating couple. Javier wore a dry expression on his face, one I now know is common to those children who parent their parents. His mother chose that moment to come outside, and her diamond ring, the biggest I’d ever seen, flashed as she covered her mouth and screamed in joy. It was the sort of ring you could use to signal for help if you were ever lost on a desert island.

  ¿Qué onda? Miguel and Javier said to each other, and I said it too, the greeting the boys all used with one another, and as I did so, Miguel gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. You’re ready, he said. You’re ready. Javier’s eyes glinted as Miguel set out the terms: I was to try to fool their friends, who had come in from Oaxaca, into thinking I was Mexican. And if I succeeded, I would win a case of beer.

  Javier laughed. Yes, he said, you could be mestizo.

  I knew what this word meant as soon as I heard it. Mixed. I think of it as a Mexican word, a word for the Americas—the secret self of the whole continent, north and south. And to me, it felt like the word for what I was. In the United States, if I said I was mixed, it meant too many things I didn’t feel. Mixed feelings were confusing feelings, and I didn’t feel confused except as to why it was so hard for everyone to understand that I existed. Living this way felt like discovering your shoe was nailed to the floor, but only one of them, so that you paced, always, a circle of possibility, defined by the limited imaginations of others.

  I stared at Javier with love. His round head, his bowl-cut black hair, his sly little smile. He led us through the house to the friends in question.

  They were a brother and sister, blond-haired, green-eyed, pure Spanish Mexican, as Miguel explained. They looked more American than I did. I don’t remember their names, but we shook hands, were introduced, and began speaking.

  I invented a past in Tijuana. Close to America but not quite. I don’t remember the conversations that followed over the next three days. I remember only the way my accent stood up to scrutiny. They suspected nothing. When Miguel finally revealed the truth, their laughter and genuine astonishment were my real prize. Miguel and I took the case of beer and drank it with the boys, all of them there at the party also, and that was that. I may have had one beer.

  For those days, “Alejandro from Tijuana” was real and happy. He was like me but more at ease in the world. Lighter. He didn’t spend his days waiting to be caught out for not being whoever someone else thought he was, though that was sincerely the condition of the bet; it had nothing like the stakes of the life I lived back in the States. In Maine, my background—half white, half Korean—was constantly made to seem alien, or exotic, or somehow inhuman. In Mexico, I was only mestizo, ordinary at first glance. When people looked at me, they saw me, and they didn’t stare at me as if at an object, the way my fellow American classmates did, all of whom were white and from the same small town in Maine.

  After I won my bet with Miguel, the summer seemed to go away, the trip ending in a week’s stay with my family in Mexico City, where, after a summer spent eating everything from fresh fruit to street tacos in Tuxtla,
I finally got sick. I could only lie in bed, wishing that we’d skipped Mexico City, that we’d left the country before this had happened. This last evidence of my American constitution was a final reminder, not just that I was leaving, but that I was not from there. I really was only an impostor. I would never have this life. No life but the one I had. America now the exile of me.

  The Querent

  IN 1980, THE PARAPSYCHOLOGIST Dr. Alex Tanous tested my seventh-grade class for psychic abilities, an event so clear in my mind, and so important to me, that I have questioned whether this actually happened, or whether I simply invented him. Tanous was very real, though, as real as the town I grew up in, a conservative Maine town of extraordinary beauty with a population of about eleven thousand. I once heard Cape Elizabeth called a semirural suburb, which seemed a good way to describe it while still also misunderstanding it. This mix of public and private beaches, two lighthouses, farms, a golf course, a tiny museum of shipwrecks, and empty, decommissioned naval-base buildings together made the town feel at once prosperous and haunted.

  Our public schools were good, and we excelled at swimming and theater, competing regularly in the state championships for each. And, at least during this period, we also excelled in psychic research. When I asked my former classmates if they remembered these tests, not only did they recall them, they described other tests I’d never heard about, earlier ones, different from mine.

  Tanous had just published a book of his research titled Is Your Child Psychic? And it seems he had been using my middle school to test out his theories for some time. I still don’t know whose idea it was. This was a period, I would learn later, when psychic abilities enjoyed a certain level of respectability with Republicans, due to the CIA’s involvement in trying to develop them as a military tool, but this still doesn’t explain it. My memory of the day begins only with the announcement that the doctor was coming, and the level of seriousness with which the visit was proposed to the class. “Dr. Tanous believes that all children are psychic naturally,” my teacher said. “That it is just a matter of training your abilities. Tests and games that anyone can do.”

  For me, it was like a dream come true. My own private belief—and my long-held dream, in fact—was that I was psychic. The idea that we all were, and that some of us were just more aware of it than others, was news I greeted gladly: I was already good at studying. All morning long, as we waited for Dr. Tanous, I dreamed of being discovered as a prodigy and led from the classroom as a valued psychic asset, to join a team of psychics who would train me to use my powers, like in my X-Men comics. Together we would fight crime, of course. Or maybe, because my psychic powers were so overwhelmingly strong, I would be taken away, studied, for the protection of the town, as in my favorite Stephen King novel, Firestarter.

  I was ready to be discovered, in other words, and for my story to begin.

  Most of my fantasies then were of having to leave. Or they were fantasies of secret power. I felt trapped in this town, tired of my all-white classmates, who couldn’t pronounce “Guam,” where we’d moved from six years before. I still hoped someday we would move back.

  Tanous, when he arrived, was a handsome man—friendly, charismatic, yet strangely, utterly ordinary in his carriage. He wore a blazer and tie, the knot a little too big, and looked like any of our teachers. But he was not.

  THE TEST I REMEMBER best was a guided meditation in which we were asked to close our eyes and imagine sinking through water, deeper and deeper, and then rising out of the water into the sunlight, before sending our consciousness under a magazine he had flipped open and laid out flat without our being able to see what was on the facing pages.

  He asked each of us what we saw—I saw people in a canoe, on a river, with massive white columns rising behind them—and then he flipped the page over. A cigarette ad. The white columns I had seen were cigarettes, massive and rising above a canoe on a river.

  The class turned and looked at me, suspicious. I was the only one who’d gotten it right. And my vision hadn’t just been a close call; it was pretty precise. Dr. Tanous was pleased, and smiling. He turned to another magazine and asked that we all do it again.

  My memory of the day is that I did well: I passed two of the three magazine tests, well enough to believe that I should have been rewarded with immediate admission into a government-funded psychic warfare program. Or anything more interesting than the seventh grade. Instead, Tanous left. But before he did, he taught us a game with cards to improve our psychic abilities. He asked us to think of a playing card and then run our fingers along the side of the deck, pulling the deck apart when it felt hot. Was that the card we had envisioned? It often was. I did this for years, until I lost interest in the game.

  THE BEGINNING OF THE story I had hoped for did not happen. Another beginning did.

  I was, after all, a child. And like many children, I had wanted to be more powerful than the world around me. I had read novels of wizards and sorceresses, dragon-riding heroes and lost kings, hidden from their enemies, raised as commoners to protect them, and I had imagined becoming one of them. I had consumed first the mythology section of the town and school libraries, and soon found myself checking out The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, a famous anthropological work on magic. I’d hoped it was a spell book. What I found seemed like instructions on how druids whistled up a wind, and any skill I have now at whistling began then.

  After Dr. Tanous’s visit, I began taking out books on parapsychology as well. I developed a plan to go to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where I would study parapsychology. The idea of studying grandmothers who felt they had “the sight” was the best thing I could think of for my life. And, of course, I would study me.

  And then my world flew apart in just about every direction. My father was severely injured in a car accident, the safety-glass windshield blowing in instead of out during a head-on collision. The accident left him paralyzed on one side of his body, with internal injuries. The man driving the car he was in was injured less severely, but he died.

  I was trying, I can see now, to hold on. I was prepared to declare allegiance to any other reality. I was thirteen at the time of the accident, sixteen when my father died of complications related to his injuries. When I ask myself why, of all the forms of the occult I’d found, the one that appealed to me most then was the Tarot, I know why. After my father’s accident, I wanted to know how to tell the future. I never wanted to be surprised by misfortune again. I wanted one of those mirrors that could be used to see around corners, and for my whole life that’s what I believed the Tarot could be. Given the results of my parapsychology tests, the next step seemed as simple as getting a Tarot deck—Tanous’s card game, but with more features. And so I did.

  MY FAMILY HAD GIVEN me what I think of as a whimsical approach to fortunes at best, which is to say they were not something to be taken seriously, or they were taken seriously in ways that seemed comic. I remember my father, for example, reading palms while dressed as a gypsy for a Rotary Club fundraiser: he stuck his head out of a tent—wrapped in a ridiculous bandanna, an earring dangling off his ear—and winked at me. Or his sister, my aunt, who wept in fury when her North Korean inventor husband quit his highly paid chemical engineering job to try, unsuccessfully, to perfect a fortune-cookie-making machine. On their visits, my uncle brought us trash bags full of trial cookies, some with three fortunes inside, some with none. At first my friends loved eating them, but we wearied of them as they grew stale, and eventually used the trash bags they came in to throw them away.

  Funny costumes aside, my father really did read palms, though he never read mine. I wonder if he ever read his own. He didn’t live long enough to teach me what he knew or for me to even ask him. When I took to fortune-telling myself, in any case, I was serious. Too serious, in the way that makes you foolish.

  I did not go to the University of Edinburgh in the end, but to Wesleyan University, a few hours south of Maine in the Connecticut River vall
ey. I could not major in parapsychology there, but it didn’t feel necessary. Wesleyan was full of people who read Tarot cards, for example, because it was full of people who believed everything. You could, in one week, attend Mass and a Seder, stay up all night consulting a Ouija board, get a Tarot reading, go to a Wiccan moon ritual, wake up and take Communion, and if anyone looked askance, shrug it off. Contradictions were defended proudly, and I joined in. I had left for college bristling still with grief after the death of my father—the numbness and shock had worn off and I could feel everything at once. The first thing I did with the trust fund that had been set up for me by the state—my father had left no will—was go to an Alfa Romeo dealership, pay for a new sedan with a check, and drive the car to college, where I called it my Italian lighter. I affected a lighthearted disregard for money, as if I was a character in Brideshead Revisited, even as I took a job, almost immediately, privately contrite, making sandwiches at 7 a.m. twice a week at a deli near my campus apartment. If some Wesleyan student ever looked at my car and told me I was privileged, in the class harrowing that passed for hazing there, I would shrug and say, “You’re right. I’m privileged. I’m so privileged that my father is dead.” And then whoever it was would run away.