In 2001, a young woman in Florida wrote, asking if I would answer some questions about my writing. I said I would be happy to (and refrained from adding, although I wanted to, “…if you’ll answer some of MY questions about what the heck is going on with voting in Florida!”) She and her friends had read “First Love” (a story in The Loom) and loved it. Here are her questions and my responses:
How did you first get involved in writing?
I was an avid reader as a child, and started writing stories in fourth grade. (I may have written some earlier than that, but can’t remember that far back! It was my fourth grade teacher, a tall, blonde lady from Texas, who decided I was talented and started a lunchtime creative writing group). I wrote mostly horse stories back then; at the time (early 1960s), it was inconceivable to write about my own life, or to imagine fiction with Japanese-American characters in it. In high school, I graduated from horse stories to writing historical fiction — always set in the U.S., always with white male main characters with names like John and Steven.
I spent my junior year of college in England, studying English literature: Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence. A friend from back home, for Christmas, sent me a volume of Japanese haiku, illustrated with Zen watercolors. It certainly wasn’t my first exposure to haiku; yet, in that context, immersed in Western civilization as I was, I felt a kinship with the Japanese aesthetic that I never had before.
At the end of the school year, I traveled around Europe. In Athens, I stayed in a pension in the shadow of the Parthenon. It was a kind of youth hostel — we slept on cots on a rooftop. In the adjacent cot was another young Japanese-American woman who was also traveling around Europe. We whispered late into the night, about home.
When I returned from Europe, I enrolled in a Creative Writing class at UC Berkeley, taught by the Korean-American writer, Kim Yong-Ik. It was in that class that I first began writing stories about Asian-American characters.
What year did you write “First Love”?
I began a first draft of the story around 1975, but never finished it. I had the kernel of a story, but didn’t know what it was about yet. In 1981 or thereabouts, while I was living in Japan, one day as I walked up the hill toward the school where I was teaching English, a perfect first line for the story came into my head. I began over and got through a whole draft, which was written in the first person, and, while there was definitely something there, I didn’t feel it was “there” yet. In the winter of ’82, I realized that the story needed to be written in the third person. I threw away that first line and started the story with the motorcycle image. It was pretty much in finished shape by early ’83. (It’s not that I’m a terribly slow writer — it’s just that I have never had the luxury of being able to write full-time!)
I submitted the story to a variety of magazines and received some very nice rejection slips. “Too young,” said Mademoiselle. “Try Seventeen.” “Too old,” said Seventeen. I received some suggestions on how to change the story from an editor who couldn’t spell. (That magazine shall remain nameless.) “First Love” was a finalist in a fiction competition sponsored by Fiction Network, a short story magazine in San Francisco. But it never did get published — not until Graywolf Press accepted my collection, The Loom and Other Stories, for publication, in 1991. Now it is the most frequently anthologized story from my collection!
Another funny story about “First Love.” When The Loom was reviewed in the New York Times Review of Books, the reviewer praised a story entitled “Wild Mushrooms” and trashed “First Love.” On the same day (December 7, to coincide with the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor), the Oakland Tribune ran a full-page review, and the reviewer LOVED “First Love.” Must be an east coast-west coast cultural difference!
What was the first story that you ever wrote?
Other than the horse stories and historical fiction about patriotic young American men, you mean… The story that begins The Loom, called “Ohaka-mairi,” (visiting the graves of ancestors), was my first attempt to write from my own Japanese-American experience. It was written in 1974, after I returned from England, and was finishing up my B.A. at U.C. Berkeley. The story is about a family visiting the grave of the narrator’s sister. It was a very short story, and nothing much happens in it, but in my portrait of this grieving family, I tried to capture specifics of Japanese-American life in a way that would transcend boundaries of culture.
What is your favorite story that you’ve written?
That’s a tough question. It’s like asking a parent which child is her favorite! Even though you may know that one is more or less accomplished, you suffered birth pains for all of them, and even the weaker ones have their idiosyncratic quirks. “The Loom” was probably my most ambitious story, in that I tried to put myself in my mother’s shoes and imagine what life was like for a woman of her generation. In it, I was starting out with an attitude that I wrote the story in order to explore, and what I discovered about my mother’s generation, and myself, was surprising. “Wild Mushrooms” was probably the easiest and fastest story I’ve ever written — it was basically written in one sitting, with a few minor revisions later. I like its simplicity, and feel that, per page, it probably packs the most power of any story I’ve written. But I have to say that the funny stories — “First Love” and “American Fish” — were the most fun to write.
What is your personal opinion of “First Love”?
I’m very fond of it. It’s like my naughty child — the troublemaker. At times, I’ve felt that critics sometimes see only a “Grease”-like tale of a young girl falling for a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. But to me, it’s always been what I call a tragi-comedy about assimilation. Jo and George’s romance flies in the face of the assimilation theory of evolution; George’s appeal for Jo is that his differences are “out there,” not hidden and a cause of shame; but in the end, the lovers fail each other. The pull of assimilation is too strong. You gain something by assimilating, but you also lose a lot.
Is it difficult to think of story ideas?
I have a million ideas for stories, so I would say that thinking of ideas is not difficult. What’s difficult is shaping them. Or, the idea may not be substantial enough to support a story. It’s a bit like trying to grow tomatoes from seeds. You start with lots of seeds, but the birds eat half of them. The rest sprout, and the snails go to work. At each stage, only the strongest survive. Finally, you may end up with five or six actual plants, out of which three or four produce edible fruit.
When you write a story, do you actually decide what the symbols are going to be and what they stand for?
“Decide” is probably not the right word. It implies rational, conscious premeditation. These things tend to evolve. For me, a story often begins with an image, perhaps something that really happens that stays in my mind. “First Love” grew from the image that appears at the end of the story: the old Japanese woman, calling out after the narrator as she hurries to get away. Writing the story is a way of, first of all, understanding why I am moved by the image, and second, establishing the sequence of events and characters that will enable the reader to experience the same emotion. In that process of exploration, symbols tend to evolve — sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with more deliberation. It seems miraculous, really, the way it (sometimes) all works. When I redrafted “First Love,” I realized that the dynamic image of the two unlike characters whizzing by on a motorcycle was the perfect opening image, as the story is about defying expectations as well as two people trying to bridge the gap between two worlds — and as neither fits into the other’s world, they are obligated to move back and forth between the two.
“Legal pad”: Courtesy of Rick Payette. Licensed under cc by NC-ND 2.0. “Acropolis”: Courtesy of Erik Drost. Licensed under cc by 2.0. “Tomato seedings”: Courtesy of GloomyCorp. Licensed under cc by NC 2.0.
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