Straight Through to China (2)

A Valentine for Anna

Anna Lung, Staten Island, NY, 9/26/10. Portrait by A. D. Coleman.

So many things I could tell you about my wife. Here are a few:

Anna’s father, Dr. Long Yu Qian of Liuzhou, Guangxi Province, in the People’s Republic of China, was a cadre in the Agricultural Sector of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as a self-taught practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). His wife, Anna’s mother, Liu Rong Jiao, worked as a librarian.

Mainland China’s librarians under Mao Zedong, and later under Deng Xiaoping, had a different job description than their counterparts in the west. They were charged not with providing access to books but with keeping people away from them ― not unlike Jorge of Burgos, the blind librarian in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. This was especially true during the years prior to and up through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-76.

Cultural Revolution poster

Anna was born in 1968. Her mother was tasked with ensuring that visitors to the library read what they were supposed to read ― a limited menu at the time for most, restricted to what was published by the government publishing houses: the collected works of Mao, the collected works of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha (China’s only ally in Communist Eastern Europe), the official party magazines and newspapers, and such.

Anna learned to read early, on her own, and often accompanied her mother to work. The library had a gated and locked section containing books to which access was restricted, requiring official standing of a certain level and/or special permission. But the bottom of the gate was just high enough off the ground that Anna, small for her age, could crawl under it. Which she would do while her mother handled the front desk.

There she found shelves of books translated into Chinese from other languages, all of them stamped “Poison.” Everything western was suspect during that era, but acquaintance with some of it proved necessary for some privileged adults, so, under lock and key, the library held western reference works and western literature. Which Anna devoured ― an entire encyclopedia, classics like Alice in Wonderland and Huckleberry Finn. Even Moby Dick. Many of them were over her head, but she read them nonetheless. And indeed they were, from a Maoist standpoint, poison ― in that they converted her, at a very young age, from a prospective Party functionary to an independent thinker and an incipient citizen of the world.

Herman Melville

I participate regularly in a local literary project, Staten Island OutLOUD, which brings residents of Staten Island ― not necessarily experienced performers, just neighbors ― together in public to read out loud notable written works from around the world, presented free to all who choose to join us. (In fact, I gave the project its name, though it runs on the energies of the indefatigable Beth Gorrie, who conceived it.) For example, we do Bloomsday every year, reading sections of James Joyce’s Ulysses on June 16th. And every year we do a reading of a truncated version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, on August 1 (or as close as possible thereto). We do this at a site called Fort Wadsworth, right below the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (see picture), because Melville had a Staten Island connection, visited periodically, and mentioned this fort in Redburn, an early novel. And we do it on August 1 because that was Melville’s birthday.

Coincidentally, that’s also Anna’s birthday. So, by great good fortune, on August 1, 2009, I got to read the role of Starbuck in OutLOUD’s yearly rendering of Moby Dick, with Anna present in the audience for the first time, and to dedicate my share of the program to her. (That’s me in the middle of the photo, in the blue shirt.) As I did, I held in my mind that image of her as a precocious girlchild, sneaking under the locked gate to read this book in Chinese and hearing it now for the first time in English, read by her husband. I felt part of some great circle of connectedness.

Staten Island outLOUD, "Moby Dick" cast, August 1, 2009. Photo by Beth Gorrie.

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When we began courting, online, in the last days of 2003, Anna told me that my profile at the internet dating service through which we met had attracted her in large part because I’d identified myself as a writer. She was looking for a pen pal with whom to practice her English, because she imagined herself a writer in the future. Our 18-month online courtship, from then until the summer of 2005, took the forms mainly of emails and instant messaging. So she started to do more writing, on a daily basis, than she’d ever done before ― though, of course, not in her native language.

Anna Lung, Staten Island, NY 9/26/10. Portrait by A. D. Coleman.

And even after we met in real time in June ’05, even after we got engaged in the fall of that year ― indeed, even after we got married in September ’06 ― our life situations held us apart for months at a clip. (See my earlier post on that period.) We kept ourselves in real time with daily chats, graduating eventually to internet telephony (via Skype). So we have a voluminous textual record of our romance.

Anna regularly laments the restrictions she feels in speaking and writing English, at which she’s also self-taught. I find her extraordinarily expressive, with a fine ear for nuance in the speech and prose and poetry of others in English; I can only imagine what it would be like to hear her or read her in her own tongue, and understand the richness of her thought in those forms. And while she wants me to have the ability to read her writing, I’ve encouraged her all along to write in Chinese. It’s her natural instrument, after all. And for every writer who, like Nabokov, finds English better suited to their purposes than their first language, thousands struggle with the frustration of communicating through a vehicle that’s unfamiliar, restrictive, and inhibiting.

In November of 2009 ― perhaps emboldened by watching the ease with which I worked with this blogware ― Anna initiated her own blog, writing in Chinese and posting the results at a blogsite hosted in mainland China. Its Chinese title, 人在纽约-乡情驿站, translates roughly as “Memory Palace in New York.” She writes reminiscences, vignettes of her life today, political and social commentary, poetry, and more, adds her own photographs, and creates idiosyncratic blog collages of text, musical selections she thinks apropos, and images (some of the images hers, some by others).

I can’t read any of it yet, so she summarizes her posts for me. And also the responses thereto, which come from poets, fiction writers, filmmakers, and others involved in mainland China’s cultural scene. I envy them their ability to enjoy this aspect of Anna, in a way I can’t. But I take great satisfaction in knowing that she’s finding a readership, with whom she’s entered into a dialogue. And I’m thrilled that she’s coming into her own as a writer.

All of which, again, makes me think of that little girl half a world away, in a situation I can only pretend to imagine, hungry for knowledge, sneaking into that space of forbidden literature, making a safe space for herself there, absorbed in words. Which last impulse I do know, as also my own. So when I saw this lone, slightly battered, mildly kitsch Alexander Backer chalkware bookend in a second-hand store, depicting a young girl reading, I thought of Anna. Seemed just right for her, with Valentine’s Day coming up, and needed only a bit of cosmetic repair.

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This post supported by a donation from photographer Harry Wilks.