Rarely
do I fall for people in narratives. Nor do I ever want to delve deeper into the character
of the people in stories read for recreation. But, on a recent detour from the rigid
structures of my academic writing, I indulged in a leisurely stroll into the
memoir of a dramatic writer, who walked me through her love affair with a man
seventeen or eighteen years her senior and did just that. I also discovered
something else: that my life was marginally woven into theirs, a serendipitous
discovery that filled me with a sense of wonder equivalent to seeing the incandescent
blues and purples of the aurora borealis
on a winter evening, a shooting star against the black curtain of night, the
sensation of walking through fields of molten, oozing lava, and the first inhalation
of an early, mid-autumn, dewy morning in the Catskills.
Out
of her personal accounts in this coming-of-age experience arose more questions
regarding the significance of this relationship to the materialization of the memoir.
I wanted to know more about him, her lover, namely the parts of their
connection that were selectively left out, but would have explained the true
reasons behind the demise of the relationship and the reasons he didn’t want to
resuscitate it. What was it about him that caused her to give up control of her
life and give it to him, to simply relinquish the progress she had initiated
towards her future? Why did the outcome of this relationship trigger a
revisiting of her past; what was its significance to the emotions she had
suppressed in the cellars of her deeper past across the Pacific Ocean? And,
more important to the life choices she made, what was it about the indentations
of her life in the Louisiana wetlands that caused her to keep distancing
herself from her adopted home, despite the obvious caring she received from those with whom she was most familiar? I hoped the reasons were to find her higher self (in the
form of Eat, Pray, Love) rather than
to be with love so that she could
feel she belonged to someone. The selfish, Asian-American feminist side of me
wanted her path to be self-chosen for discovering the Self, building her
character, and awakening to her true north.
As
people with questions do, I researched, pausing from my academic books and journal
articles to delve further into these two people. The identity of the lover, the
letters of his name and the cadence of its pronunciation, were familiar to me. After
more digging, I soon learned that a book had been written about the rise of the
company he brought to life, a book that simultaneously opened the doorway into
the person behind the name in this memoir: his working class history and his
restless spirit, which I suspected were the flames beneath his entrepreneurial
diligence; that his motivations were the result of this profound responsibility
to his family, his ties to his friends, the people who were good to him; that
he had taken himself to task more than once to meet his responsibilities and to
give generously to those important to him. As a published cookbook later revealed, this connoisseur of a beloved Mediterranean fruit (found in probably every Mediterranean kitchen) was a
willing and earnest student of this ingredient. As the co-author of this same cookbook, he showed that he was also a soulful writer,
having penned simple, yet meaningful statements, such as “At my table there are
old friends . . . He loves to come into the cellar to help me choose my wines,
talking the while of all the steps involved in making the day’s dessert. Then
everyone gathers at the table to enjoy the Mediterranean cuisine, enriched with
the stories and comments of everyone present.”
Surprisingly, I also
learned that this lover and I had quite possibly crossed paths several years previously
in a Sydney cafe, while I was in between farm work during my summer break. Though
the memory is now hazy, the expression on his face in a photo image, angled in a certain
way, brought me back to that day by the window, when the sun shining on his
face brought to mind the adventurous Huckleberry Finn, a character brought to
life by Mark Twain, but the way I imagined the adventurous Huck Finn to be in
his early 40s.
As for her, the
memoirist, I learned that she had fashioned her life after him. Although now
living apart from him, she had nevertheless navigated her life to remain in his shadow – right down
to the cookbook she is writing and expecting to publish in 2014. Disappointingly,
I discovered that she is a modern day Camille Claudel to her Rodin. In this, I
interpreted her actions as having run away from herself all those years.
Perhaps she is still.
So, I allowed myself
this daydream into their life stories, completely unrelated to my graduate readings,
and discovered that I yearned for quality, platonic companionship and harbored
poems in the recesses of my heart. I returned from this detour and finished the
research proposal, improved my initial three chapters, reviewed and completed writing the
questions of my surveys and interviews, and revised and read for my chapter 5 . . . with my feet firmly planted on the ground.
