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Show Don’t Tell
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham And yet: everyone in the writing world will insist on show don’t tell. Put the reader in the room; let her smell the coffee or the roses or the gunpowder. It’s exactly the right way to describe the…
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All That Jazz
My father has many gifts but dancing is not one of them. My mother taught me to dance: the two step, the waltz, the cha cha cha. She played the jazz tunes of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. We danced in the living room. She wore house slippers; I was in bare feet. My mother…
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Korea
In high school, I took a history class called China, Japan and Korea. Or maybe that was the title of our textbook. The salient details have escaped me. I had forgotten how close these countries are and how long their history of meddling in each other’s affairs. Two Korea’s In a recent interview by The Financial…
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Amah
Nian is a servant in my novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle. She’s new to the Song household, the lowest in rank among the servants. Song Anyi arrives at the family home – more dead than alive following a vicious rape – and Nian becomes her amah. I never had an amah although both my…
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Politically Correct
Shortly after the US elections, Chinese-American writer Amy Tan posted this on her Facebook page: We are now determining different ways we can support what matters to the country, our world, and our planet. One of those decisions is to cut out of our lives those people who were friends who voted for Trump or…
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Shame Is a Useless Emotion
To keep me out of a gang or getting pregnant by age 16, my parents sent me to an all-girls Catholic high school. The Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary founded Ramona Convent in 1889. The road from Ramona led via circuitous paths to where I am now: an author. Shame The Dancing Girl and the…
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Old House
My father called it the Old House. Every week he would go there to visit his grandparents. My father described the Old House as a mixed-up design. It had a courtyard and a main hall like a proper Chinese house, but also two stories. The first time I visited Shanghai in 1984, Grandaunt Ta-An was still…
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The Sense of an Ending
I think a lot about the craft of writing. The poem, the essay, the short story and the novel each have their own internal rules, all of which are to be broken if a writer wants to achieve something new. Lately, my obsession has become short form. The short story has all the same requisites as…
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A Death in the Family
Last month, my Aunt Ruth died. She was my father’s only sister and his favorite sibling. We called her Guma (姑妈) (father’s sister), just as her children called my father jiujiu (舅舅) (mother’s brother). The Chinese are very particular about family relationships. There are words to distinguish an older brother from a younger one and…
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War Without End
War in China. These soldiers are headed for the Japanese front. It’s 1944 in Luzhou, a river port in Sichuan province. In the back row from right to left are my father, my Uncle Charles and my Aunt Viola’s youngest brother. My father waited to enlist until he had graduated from university. By then, the war was…