How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Page 16
The trip to Sweetbriar, Virginia, is a long but simple one. I arrive to a town with fields full of giant wild roses. They climb up trees, spill down the other side, filling the grounds of the colony, where I find rose bushes the size of cottages, bristling with thorns and buds. Sweetbriar, I learn, is named such for the roses planted by cattle ranchers who tried to save on cow fencing. It didn’t work—the cows ignored the roses—but the town is surely the proof of what my aunt said about how much roses love cow manure.
I am here to work on my first novel, and I do well. I spend five weeks among these enormous roses, and write 120 pages.
On the morning of my departure, I discover a black-snake skin, shed whole and without a tear. Its former owner had spent the previous week sunning itself on the fence near my studio and left its coat across the walkway to my door. I imagine the snake using the thorns to shed its skin, but I see no holes in it anywhere when I hold it up to the light. Instead, it glows in the sun, the scales light up, and blue sky shows through the holes for its mouth and eyes.
I climb into the car of the man giving me a ride back to New York, and show it to him. He laughs and tells me he has been writing about the traditions of the area’s indigenous people, and that according to them, this would be a powerful omen of good luck. The snake, he tells me, leaves the skin with you as a sign of its respect and good wishes. I am awed, but can’t imagine living with it, so I give it to him to give to his son, as payment for my ride.
When I return to my garden, the roses I feared would be dead or dying are instead huge, the canes thick and new, the leaves a sturdy dark, and the buds firm to the touch. I can feel them surging under the surface. My cutting them back by two thirds would seem to have made them more powerful than ever.
Perhaps it was the gift of the snake. The lesson for me at least—and this I think of as the gift of the garden, learned every year I lived in that apartment: you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined.
I STAY FIVE YEARS more past that spring.
In those years, I take roses with me to dinner parties, usually the Voodoo roses, as the plant seems able to provide the vast amounts of roses needed to make such gifts. A flower shop opens next door, and when I go by with some, the owner is shocked, and asks me where I got them. Soon I am providing her with a bucket of them to sell.
I throw my own parties, and the garden fills with people drinking around the roses. I have affairs, boyfriends. One summer I learn about garden feng shui, and map my body onto the garden. Shortly after, an outbreak of cane borer seems to predict exactly a case of crabs. The feng shui map like a fetish doll drawn onto the garden, one that had mapped its problems onto me. Or vice versa.
I eventually take pity on the sea roses and remove them. In an unscientific gesture that I also feel very sure of, I take them to the beach in Maine and leave them out on the rocks to fend for themselves.
After I finish and publish my first novel, I become restless, and when I talk about moving, I mention taking the roses with me, because people say, What about your garden? They arrived by truck, I tell those people. They can leave that way as well. In the end, though, when I do move, I leave the garden there with the rest of its mysterious contents, deciding they belong to the place and not to me.
I had come to this garden much like what I found in it. I was a mess, a disaster in need of a reckoning. That backyard was my perfect mirror, and the dream of the garden was in its own way a dream of myself. I arrived there after many years of self-abandonment, sure only that I did not know myself, but certain that I needed to believe I had a future. I did not know what the garden could do, and I did not know what I could do. If my garden was a messenger, the message was in the silent moments when I was sure I could hear it growing toward me through the earth. That more was coming. But I did not know this then. I knew only that it was time for me to leave. I had done what I came to do.
Whenever I am back in the neighborhood, I sometimes pass my apartment from the street. I like to believe, stupidly, that if I were to open the front door again, in the back I would find my roses, huge from their seaweed tea and the many days of six hours’ sunlight, perhaps growing legs, ready to push down the building and walk out to the street, striking cars out of their way and slicing the blacktop to ribbons. I want to think that they would miss me, their erstwhile tormentor, the one who pushed them so hard to grow, cutting and soaking them in the blazing sun from spring to winter. From the street, from across the river, where I live now without them, I can feel them still, the sap pulsing in their veins, pushing their way to the sky.
But the creature that grew legs and walked away from the garden was me. I was not their gardener. They were mine.
Inheritance
IN 2000, I BECAME, somewhat by accident, the director of All Souls Unitarian Church’s Monday Night hospitality program for the homeless, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The former director had a medical emergency and had to leave her responsibilities immediately, and so the next week when I went in for my volunteer shift, I was asked if I would consider running the program, at least until someone else could be found. I would be acting director for three years.
On my first day, I went to Western Beef, a low-cost butcher shop and grocery store where the program did its shopping, the week’s dinner budget in an envelope of cash. And even though I had previously gone along with the director, as her assistant, I was nervous that first day on my own. The program fed one hundred guests on a first-come, first-served basis—more, if more showed up. Some diners even took leftovers back to their shelters for those who couldn’t leave. This was a big responsibility. I planned the meal, bought the food under budget, and returned to the church, and I did the job for three years. Gradually the program expanded, especially after September 11, 2001. I was proud of the work we did.
The calm with which I did this every week was not visible in the rest of my life. In the apartment I returned to after those volunteer shifts, my closet was full of stacks of boxes of files and receipts going back fifteen years. Many were unpaid bills, missed payments, or collection notices. Letters from the IRS. A personal organizer I had hired a few years before had said, looking them over, “Oh, wow, you don’t need these,” then she laughed and told me to throw all the papers away. But I could not. When I eventually moved out in 2004, I moved with those boxes.
In some way I wasn’t quite aware of, I had imagined the problem was receipts. But I did not feel that pain when I shopped for the church’s program and put the receipts in an envelope before turning them over to the office. The more I kept a steady hand on the program, the more I was aware I was in the presence of a revelation about myself. The ordinary transactions contrasted with the pain I faced, almost supernatural, every time the money was mine.
THE PAIN WAS THERE in every transaction. Whenever the question came, “Would you like a receipt?” I never wanted it. But I took it, knowing I should, and would put it quickly in my wallet instead, until the wallet bulged like a smuggler’s sack.
I had no system for the next steps. The receipts stayed in there, usually too long, sometimes fading to meaninglessness. Or I emptied the wallet into the pocket of a backpack, or I stuffed them into an envelope, always with the promise of getting to them later. Then I put them in the boxes. There they fluttered around like some awful confetti, saved for a celebration that never came.
I knew they represented, in part, money that could come back to me, but for me they mostly represented money lost. Pain is information, as I would say to my yoga students at the time, and my writing students also. Pain has a story to tell you. But you have to listen to it. As is often the case, I was teaching what I also needed to learn.
THE PAIN THESE RECEIPTS represented was not particularly mysterious to me then. I had just never examined it. I hadn’t even felt I could. I simply thought everyone had these difficulties. But this was a lie I told myself, a way of accommodating the pain instead of facing it.
Asking my younger sister to write and ask me to send the tax form was my mother’s way of communicating, off-kilter and indirect. To this day, she will ask one of us to communicate something to the other, though she could just as easily call directly. I have tried my whole life to change this in her, as I have tried to change my own relationship to money and pain, which are forever twinned in my mind. The anxiety about receipts was anxiety about money, but also much more than that.
Underneath that anxiety was the belief that there would be an accounting demanded of me, one that I would fail. After reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, where she describes keeping her late husband’s things as if he might return for them, I understood it a little better: I imagined someday having to tell my father about everything I had bought with the trust fund I received after his death. And having to explain how I’d failed him.
MY FATHER WAS SO young when he died, forty-three years old, that he hadn’t made a will, due in part to the faith the young have that a will can be written and notarized at some later date, because surely death is far away. As a result, the State of Maine divided my father’s estate four ways, among my mother, myself, my brother, and my sister—my mother receiving, by law, the majority. I was given a trust that would be vested to me when I reached the age of eighteen.
Just three years earlier, at the time of his death, three years after the car accident had rendered him paralyzed on the left side of his body, my mother had confessed to me she was repaying his medical bills, which totaled more than a million dollars, and this was after what was paid for by medical insurance. He’d had repeated surgeries over those three years, home care, physical therapy, and experimental treatments. My father’s family was wealthy enough to have helped us out, and for one year they had, but they’d held the cruelly contradictory belief that my mother should both be able to pay the bills and also not have to work—to stay home and take care of my father. I can only think they believed the money would magically appear out of my father’s business, a mistaken notion born of a mix of sexism and parochial privilege so extreme as to be laughable, if the price of it were not so steep. My father’s father had worked very hard, but his family had mostly never worked, or if they had, they did not understand the structure of my parents’ financial lives. My father’s family have been, in my experience, people who believe something is wrong if the world is not the way they imagine it to be. And so they treated us as if my mother was lying, or deceitful.
This was unexpected and difficult. My mother did the only thing she could do. She put in fifteen-hour days to turn the assets of the business, now the assets of the estate, into something that could meet the scope of the problem, leaving me to cook for my siblings, to drive them to sports practices, to grocery shop, and even to shop for her clothes while she did this. She was soon able to pay off my father’s medical debts, and did.
And now we had arrived here.
My mother told me the trust was, first and foremost, for my education and anything related to it, and I should spend it wisely. “Your education is the one thing you can buy that no one can take away from you,” she said portentously. Also: “I wouldn’t have given you control over that much money at age eighteen.” But the state had decided it, and she had to allow it. I rankled at the thought, but it was also true that for me to be presented with money enough for college after years of worry over mortgages and my father’s medical bills felt like an unearned luxury at best.
As a result, the first thing I did with my money was part rebellion, part panegyric. My father had loved fast cars and expensive ones, both, and so I bought what I thought he’d want for me, a black Alfa Romeo—a Milano, the first year they were available in the United States—a sort of cubist Jetta with a sports car’s heart.
I drove off to college with my younger brother literally along for the ride—he wanted to see how fast it could go. He was the king of auto shop in high school, and had saved up the regular gifts of money given to him by our relatives over the years until he could buy the cars he rehabbed in autoshop, and then he sold them for more money. He has always had a gift for making more out of what he was given. He had taught me how to drive stick shift on his red 1974 Corvette 454, a car so beautiful the police would pull him over just so they could look at it.
My brother had been reading the Alfa Romeo manual, and after he looked at the speedometer, he said, “It says this car tops out at 130 mph,” and he gave me a little smirk.
I nodded. The highway ahead of us was oddly empty, and so I floored it. For a brief moment on the Massachusetts Turnpike, we flew, pushing the speed as far as I dared, a 130 mph salute to our father.
I DROVE THE CAR for the nine years the trust lasted, except for when I lived in California, during which time my mother, despite her objections to the purchase of the Alfa Romeo, drove the car and enjoyed it, in what amounted to a truce on the subject. I used that money not just for my tuition costs, but to turn myself from a student into a writer. I paid for my college and left with no debts—an extraordinary gift. This gave me the freedom to intern at a magazine that published my first cover story, and to take a job at an LGBT bookstore that let me read while at work, meet authors, and even help with the planning of the first LGBT writers’ conference, OutWrite. And while I went to graduate school on a fellowship with a tuition waiver, I had no health insurance, and so the trust money paid for my regular dental work and a trip to the hospital back in New York, where I lived before and after grad school. I know this freedom looks ordinary to many, but I also know all too well that it is rare when the children of Korean immigrants are given this kind of latitude from their family to pursue the arts.
Besides the car, what I thought of as my excesses at the time now seem more or less pragmatic to me. My clothes were usually secondhand, my books also, or purchased with an employee discount. I bought a used Yamaha 550 motorcycle, which I drove while I lived in San Francisco, where there were four cars for every parking space. I made a trip to Europe in the fall of 1990, to Berlin, London, and Edinburgh, which I took to investigate whether I could live somewhere other than the United States. And while I ended up staying in America after all, the trip was its own education. My greatest indulgences were probably during a long-distance relationship while in Iowa: phone bills that regularly cost as much as the plane tickets for said relationship, not otherwise affordable on a graduate student’s budget.
For those nine years, I felt both invulnerable and doomed, under the protection of a spell that I knew to be dwindling in power. The Alfa broke down finally while I was driving from Iowa to New York City. I left it where it stopped, in Poughkeepsie, on a block in front of a friend’s apartment. That summer, newly released from graduate school, with no job and no prospects, I had no money to repair it or move it. Eventually the car, covered in unpaid tickets, was impounded and sold by the state to cover the towing and storage costs. My money gone, I surrendered to life without either the trust’s protections or the car. I know it was all stupid, and I was ashamed, and felt powerless in the face of the problem and ashamed of that powerlessness. But I was also tired of being mistaken for someone who was rich when I felt I had less than nothing.
I had believed I would feel lighter without the money, free of the awful feeling of having it but not having my father. And yet spending the last of it was not just like failing my father. It was like losing him again.
; WE LEARN OUR FIRST lessons about money as children, and these shape much of our ideas about it. We learn these lessons from our parents, but from others also. But I feel as if I have always been taught about money by everyone, every day of my life a lesson, whether I want it or not, in what money is and does.
The lessons my life had provided until the point I describe were that money is conflict, strife, grief, blood. Money is necessary. Money divides families. Even the promise of it, hinted at. And that nothing destroys a family like an inheritance.
My mother likes to tell a story of me at age two. We were living in my grandparents’ home in Seoul in 1968, and three of my father’s siblings were still of school age—two uncles and an aunt. The three-story house was surrounded by a high wall, covered with nails, barbed wire, and broken glass, that I would later come to expect on houses like this all over the world—the homes of the rich, living amid great poverty. The house is near the Blue House in Seoul, the presidential residence, and the Secret Garden, formerly a palace where the king kept his concubines, is visible from the third floor. For years it was one of the most privileged of neighborhoods, exempt from development.
The reason we were living in Seoul at the time this story happened is that my parents could not afford me on their own. When I was born, my father was a graduate student in oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. A favorite photo I have of him from that time shows him posing with his URI classmates, holding a whale rib. My mother taught home economics at the local public school, and since women were not allowed to teach while pregnant, married or not, when she started to show, she was dismissed, and the economic crisis that I was began. My birth was unplanned; my parents were not financially ready to start a family. In the first photos of my father holding me in his arms, he looks tired and dazed, and the expression on his face is one of amazement, love, and frustration. He seems ready to agree to his father’s offer of a job back in Korea, which came soon enough.