In those following weeks, I do think often about quitting writing altogether. Maybe my mother was right all along; maybe a lengthy career just isn’t in the cards for me. Maybe I should treat The Last Front as the launchpad to get myself set up somewhere else. I have enough money to pay for any preprofessional graduate degree, and a suitably high GPA from an Ivy League school to get into most top-ten law or business programs. Maybe I’ll study for the LSAT. Maybe I’ll enroll in some online quant boot camps and then go into consulting.
It’s attractive, the prospect of a stable job with clearly defined hours and benefits, where being white does not make you boring and redundant but rather a perfectly average and desirable hire. No more panic-scrolling; no more dick-measuring competitions; no more reading emails a thousand times over to figure out if my marketing person hates me or not.
But I can’t quit the one thing that gives meaning to my life.
Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I’d spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every time I learn that some young up-and-comer is living the life I should be living.
Writing has formed the core of my identity since I was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive. And as miserable as it makes me, I’ll cling to that magic for as long as I live.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT I HAVE NOTHING TO WRITE FOR DANIELLA. None of my old pitches will do. I’ve pulled a few of my former project drafts from the metaphorical trunk, but their premises all now strike me as dull, derivative, or plain stupid:
A YA rom-com about a girl in love with a boy who’s been dead for a hundred years. (This one is all vibes and no plot, and based largely on my undergraduate crush on Nathan Hale’s statue on campus.)
A pair of lovers who are reincarnated century after century into the same iteration of their tragic story until they can find a way to break the cycle. (The premise is cool, but it’s too daunting to research so many different historical periods. I mean, what’s cute about the 1700s?)
A girl murdered by an ex-boyfriend who comes back as a ghost and who tries to save his next victim, but she keeps failing, and eventually the murdered girls form this ghost posse that at last succeeds in putting the guy in jail. (Okay, that one has promise, but Netflix just aired a modern Bluebeard retelling, and I don’t want to be accused of plagiarism again.)
I browse through Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, looking for promising nuggets of history to expand on. Maybe I could write about the missing Chinese survivors of the Titanic. Or the panhandlers of Gold Mountain. Or the NYPD Oriental Gang Unit—they were called the Jade Squad, and that’d be a fucking cool name for a title, wouldn’t it? Or the Chinese mafia—Patrick Radden Keefe wrote a great nonfiction book about a Chinese snakehead who operated out of New York City for years. What if I did a fictionalized version of her life?
Why the obsession with China, though? Why am I limiting myself? Shouldn’t it be equally viable to write about Russian immigrants, or African refugees? I never wanted to pigeonhole my writing brand to China; it only happened that way by accident. I think one of my grandparents or great-grandparents might have been Jewish; I could call up one of my aunts to ask, use that as a bridge to Jewish history and mythology. And I know for a fact that my mother’s spoken about having some Cherokee heritage before. Maybe that’s worth interrogating—maybe there’s a story here about discovering connections I didn’t even know I had.
Truth be told, I’m intimidated by the work involved. Since I’ve already done all that research for The Last Front, Chinese-inspired stories seem a bit easier. I already know so much about the history, about the current political touchpoints involved. I already speak the critical vocabulary; all I need is a hook.
I once met a poet who carried a tiny notebook everywhere she went and wrote down at least one quippy observation about every encounter she had throughout the day. The barista’s hair was a desperate shade of purple. The woman at the table beside her drew out the word “yes” like a stalling tactic. The boss’s name slid off the doorman’s tongue like rusty pennies.
“I don’t create so much as I collect,” explained the poet. “The world is already so rich. All I do is distill the messiness of human life into a concentrated reading experience.”
I try the same thing on a day running errands around DC. I record some thoughts on the dry cleaner—crowded, efficient, owner is either Greek or Russian and is it racist that I can’t tell which?—and in the K Street Trader Joe’s—every time she came here, the shelves seemed full of organic promise, but she always inevitably left with the same bag of ginger snaps and microwave fettuccini. I feel very Scholarly and Observant while I’m scribbling at the checkout counter, but when I get home, I can’t find the spark in anything I’ve produced. It’s all so bland. No one wants to read about the culinary politics of Trader Ming’s.
I need to go further. I need to write about things that white people don’t see on a daily basis.
The next afternoon, I take the green line out to Chinatown, which—despite having lived in DC for nearly five years—I’ve actually never been to. I’m a bit apprehensive because I saw on Reddit that DC’s Chinatown has the highest crime rates in the city, and when I get out of the metro station, the whole place does carry a menacing air of neglect. I walk with my hands shoved into my pockets, fingers tightly wrapped around my phone and wallet. I wish I’d brought pepper spray.
Stop being such a nervous white girl, I scold myself. Real people live here; it’s not a war zone. I can’t learn their stories if I’m acting like a jumpy tourist.
I stroll past the Calvary Baptist Church and snap a photo of the Friendship Archway, which welcomes me to Chinatown in resplendent shades of turquoise and gold. I don’t know what the characters on the middle placard say; I’ll have to look that up later.
Otherwise, Chinatown doesn’t have much to offer in the cultural sphere. I stroll past a Starbucks, a Ruby Tuesday, a Rita’s, and a Bed Bath & Beyond. These stores all have Chinese names hanging over their doorways in proud gold or red calligraphy, but on the inside, they carry the same stuff you’d find anywhere else. Weirdly, I don’t see a lot of Chinese people around. I’d read an article a while back arguing that DC Chinatown had been viciously gentrified, but I hadn’t expected it to look so much like any DC block.
I’m starving, so I duck into the first casual eatery I see—a shop called Mr. Shen’s Dumplings, its English name barely visible among the Chinese signs and TripAdvisor clippings that crowd the display window. The place feels a little run-down. The tables are chipped, the windows greasy. But isn’t that the mark of an authentic Chinese restaurant? I remember reading this on Twitter once. If a Chinese food joint expends no effort on its aesthetic, that’s a sign the food is amazing. Or that the owners don’t give a shit.
I’m the only person inside. That’s not necessarily a bad sign. It’s four in the afternoon; too late for lunch, too early for dinner. A waitress wordlessly places a dirty-looking cup of water and a plastic menu before me, then walks off.
I glance around, feeling stupid. I’m clearly intruding on the employees’ off hours between meals, and I feel awkward taking up so much space. There’s nothing I want to eat here. The menu consists entirely of different kinds of soup dumplings. I don’t know what a soup dumpling is, but it sounds gross. The strong, musty, dumpster-like smell wafting from the kitchen doors is killing my appetite.
“Are you ready?” The waitress pops up at my side, pen and pad in hand.
“Oh—sorry, yeah.” I pause, then point to the first thing I see on the menu. I guess it’d be rude to walk out at this point. “Can I get, um, the pork-and-leek dumplings?”
“Six or twelve?”
“Six.”