Student EssaysBelow you will find excerpts from essays written by ASU MFA students, documenting their teaching and traveling in China. “I am always slightly disoriented when I first arrive in a new city, which used to bother me, but I have found that all cities – though cars may drive on the left or have street signs in an unfamiliar alphabet – have crosswalks and street names and city blocks, and that with a map, I can find my way.
And yet there are details you couldn’t possibly know about a certain place without being there yourself, and details about yourself you couldn’t possibly know without breaking outside the walls of your comfort zone. The Great Wall is literally covered with carved graffiti, for example. The strange juxtaposition of having two or three Hong Kong tailors per block try to get you inside their shop, against merchants in a Beijing hudong (market) physically pulling you by the arm toward their stall. The way swallows fly in whirlwinds, like tornadoes, catching insects; the streets that are lined with ginkgo trees; the smell and feel – the weight – of the humid Hong Kong air, and the green-hued color of its harbor. These are the kinds of details travel guides don’t tell you, and the sorts of things someone else couldn’t necessarily tell you because everyone notices and is affected by different things. “Out on the town that night I had the chance to converse with a local couple whose English was a lot better than my Cantonese. They were amenable to my questioning them about how they perceived mainland China as compared to Hong Kong with its ‘Special Administration’ status, and what they thought of the recent violence in Tibet. They both acknowledged feeling culturally distanced and somewhat superior to mainland China in terms of Hong Kong being a more cosmopolitan city and less insular than most other mainland urban centres; but they also expressed a loyalty to China and complained of the west’s perception of China as being slow to make social reforms. In short they believed that, given enough time, China would turn the corner on its human rights record. It was an illuminating conversation—even though at times it was difficult to hear above the ruckus of the rockabilly band. “While travelling around Asia this summer, I met up with various old friends from school and college. When they asked what I was doing, I told them I was in graduate school, studying creative writing. ‘Then how are you travelling,’ they asked me. So I told them.
The idea that graduate students, among the most underpaid citizens of the workforce, could afford to travel three continents away without fear of perpetual penury was astonishing for my friends. The more I spoke to people outside the program, the more I found myself equally astonished. There is a habit among those of us in the program to take these sort of opportunities for granted, when in reality they are truly special—I will allow myself to lapse into the vernacular and say, absolutely stupendous.
In Beijing I spoke to a grocer who said that the Chinese government had closed all shipments of vegetables coming from outside the city till the end of the Olympics. The grocer was clearly suffering the financial affects of this action, but was nevertheless very very excited about the Games. In Bangkok, a taxidriver first offered me a ladyboy, then found out I had no money, and explained the role of boxing in the Thailand prison system instead. In Laos my hotel clerk spent the day immersed in a fourth-grade English grammar workbook, and shyly asked me to help him with some of the problems—unfortunately we could not work on adjectives because the second-hand book already had those exercises filled out.
“Certainly, my experiences abroad will impact my writing. After a first trip abroad, let alone to a region so vastly different from one’s own, this is to be expected. What has come unexpectedly to me, however, is the overwhelmingly large impact of what, at the time, were seemingly insignificant moments. One in particular that comes to mind is the sight of a billboard on the border of the Cambodian city of Siem Reap, printed with five English words, “We No Longer Need Weapons,” and two accompanying illustrations—one of Cambodian children being handed guns by soldiers, the other of the same children being handed only books. Seated in the cabin of a speeding motorcycle rickshaw, if I had blinked or turned away for even a second, I would have missed it. That brief glimpse, however, became a jarring and lasting reminder, not just of the horrifying history of the country, but of the influence, the impact that writing has on our world. As writers, our words can build or destroy, inspire or disgust. They can encourage some to pick up a weapon and kill, others to lay down their weapons and discuss. Our writing can posit questions of the ordinary and make the extraordinary familiar. Maybe most importantly, yet most often forgotten, is that it stands for us where we are not present, has the potential to live so much longer than our own bodies. It is a legacy that exists not just as us in the world, but our ideas, and the ideas within others that our words can awaken. It was a reminder to me of why I am a writer, and why writing is so much more than just me telling of myself, telling the stories that I’ve created within the solitude of the page. For that, more than anything, I am grateful for this experience. |
|