Writing an Ordinary Existence

I didn’t know how to make things happen in fiction—maybe because the drama of my life seemed so ordinary to everyone else.

A couple of months ago, I was opening a container of antibacterial wipes when I couldn’t get the coil of them to behave, to fit one sheet at a time through the spiral lid and kiss out one wipe after another. I had gone into the bright afternoon street to clean the dashboard of my car that I had wanted to clean for months as I watched it turn furry with dust. I didn’t know if this was a normal thing to do because I hadn’t had a car since I was seventeen, and actually this was my partner’s car that I rode in because I didn’t really drive, but I was procrastinating and so I put the container between my knees and got the chemical soak of antibacterial liquid all over my fingers as I attempted to wrangle out the center of the sheets, to push it through its assigned space. But while I was doing so, I became incredibly sad, remembering a moment when my older brother came up to me with a Swiffer and asked, How do I do this again?

*

My brother and I grew up in a small town where we were the only divorced and multiracial family we knew. My brother took solace in music and basketball, and I read. Fantasy books and Nancy Drew books and Sweet Valley High and Baby-Sitters Club, and in middle school, all of the books about working in PR or publishing in New York City. In college, I was assigned Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson and Mary Gaitskill. I read constantly and with great hunger. None of these stories were anything like mine, but I wasn’t expecting them to be.

I could find myself in any corner—no matter how small and webbed-over with strings, I gamely wiped them away. In Raymond Carver, I saw my fascination with alcohol and tragic love. In Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, I saw the kaleidoscopic beauty of being a misfit, but also the deep anxiety of wanting to be loved—recall Fuckhead worrying about if his friends like him, if they’re really his friends. I read them a hundred times, felt their pain and desire for love, marveled at their fuckups and how much I still wanted, always, to stay nuzzled in their words until their worlds felt like mine.

Maybe it was being writer-raised on the dominant narratives of society, allowed to just exist, that made me think nothing was wrong with a story I once submitted for workshop as a young writer: linked vignettes that circled a biracial Asian American girl who lived with her white mother and felt very alone when her mother began to remarry. She was named Lia then, but it was my first attempt at writing what would become my debut novel Win Me Something, peeks and glimpses where I allowed myself to invent a character who was also biracial Chinese American, someone else who had been raised within a divorced and blended family like I was. Before that, I had mostly written about narrators of unnamed races, who everyone, including me, assumed were white. I gave them dead family members, or failing marriages, or one-night stands that went awry—the things I had been taught were interesting to read about. But in these glimpses of Lia, I tried something new. I tried what was interesting to me.

It didn’t go well. My teacher held up my story and asked of my narrator, What’s special about her? I remember my mind becoming a lake, deliciously dark and deep with no ripples to speak of. There needs to be a reason to tell a story about her. You should be able to tell us, right away, what is special about her.

She exists, I thought helplessly. And, I didn’t know she wasn’t special, that she had to be.

I thought about Fuckhead, about Raymond Carver, beloved for their working-class stories, their ordinary men. I had never thought of measuring stories in specialness before. What was special about Carver’s cheating husband in Gazebo, drinking Teacher’s with a spill of water as his wife walks around in her underwear? What was special about Fuckhead, working the overnight shift at a hospital and eating pills with the orderly before driving around? What I loved about them was that they were so ordinary, yet so alive, flawed and pulsing, the camera zoomed in close as they flunked normal life.

Finally, I said, I don’t know. My teacher nodded. The class exhaled in an awkward silence. I have a note written from that day: Usually you write about an adolescent because there is something incredible about them.

*

The Swiffer has the same type of catches as a container of cleaning wipes. You drape a rectangular sheet over its head and poke each corner into the catch on the other side. I probably don’t have to tell you. It’s a normal thing to know. That my brother couldn’t remember how to do this, that he’d looked at it and puzzled over it and then came over to me to ask for help, pinched something deep in my chest. I kind of laughed as I showed him, laughed that he couldn’t figure it out, being such a simple thing—but I struggle with simple things too. The Swiffer was just something I had already figured out.

At this time, I had moved in with him in North Carolina. It was the only time we had lived together as adults. Before I moved down from Brooklyn, I wondered what it would be like. We hadn’t lived in the same house since I was fifteen and he was eighteen, and now we were twenty-six and twenty-nine. We never ate dinner around a table growing up because my mom often worked nights. But here, my brother mostly cooked for us. He showed me how to make succotash with vegetables from the farmer’s market and a perfect BLT with bread fried in bacon fat. Neither of us had ever been very neat or clean people, which for me carried some amount of shame at not being domestic, at how we were often made to feel by one side of our family that we were unclean. Like our mother, who abhorred dusting and wiping and vacuuming and soaping and had not taught us how to do any of those things.

The suburb my brother and I grew up in was an unremarkable American place. Two-point-seven square miles of starred-and-striped flags wrinkling in the wind, thickets of trees where high schoolers hid to shake out cigars and fill them with stems, football fields frenzied on Saturday mornings with red and black paint striped on cheeks, the Nabisco factory nearby exhaling the scent of cookies before it rained. I was born three years and one day after him, and the first word I spoke was brother, which is maybe why I keep saying it instead of his name: Cory.

When Cory was about to start kindergarten, he was called to an interview at our town’s public school. A white woman with a clipboard sat before him and asked, What is a ball? but Cory just stared at her. What color is the sun?

The thing you need to know about Cory is he’s smart, incredibly so, especially good at patterns, at one point a professional poker player. But he is not cooperative or receptive to authority. He never was. Even then. The woman pointed to a fire truck and enunciated her words very loudly—What color is the little truck?

Cory had known the color wheel and much more years ago. My grandmother likes to talk about when she took him to the duck pond and said, look at the ducks! They’re geese, he said flatly at two years old. My dad, pointing to a dinosaur on TV: Look at the T. rex! That’s a stegosaurus, Cory corrected. He could recite the full name of every dinosaur in existence by the time he was two and a half, so my mother was confused and worried that he had gone silent.

We have a gentle house, my mom said. He doesn’t get asked questions in this rapid-fire way. It’s such a strange response to the situation, but it does show that my mom picked up on the fact that there was something hostile about it, something she had never seen before in her own life.

Maybe he’s just not ready for kindergarten, the woman said. Smugly, maybe. But on his way out, Cory pointed to a painting on the wall and began talking about the type of tree and how the family was walking to the nearby lake, full sentences, descriptions of water and grass. He had never answered her questions, but she had to admit that he knew what color grass was. So he started kindergarten in the fall.

Three years later, when I began, I wasn’t given this test, though we’re not sure why. But I had been put in full-day preschool earlier than Cory, where I was asked repeatedly by the pigtailed white girls, Why are you wearing a dress if you’re a boy? because I hadn’t yet grown long hair, because my name was androgynous, and maybe the other reason too. So I had years of practice at questions from strangers by the time I got to kindergarten. I knew how to mimic, to dumb down. Cory continued to talk back and act out, setting off stink bombs, writing self-researched papers on the Chinese Exclusion Act, switching classes and schools to varying effects. I was obedient. I loved questions that had real answers, that I could respond to with facts. I would have responded so crisply at that test: A fire truck is red. The sun is yellow. A ball is something you throw, if there is someone there to catch.

*

I don’t think my workshop teacher meant what I took from it—that writing about Willa couldn’t work unless she was given some sparkly backstory, some glimmering strength, if she was an alcoholic who had stopped managing her motel, or if she sat on a seat full of baby rabbits. Perhaps she could tell I didn’t yet know enough about my own identity to write about it. Maybe she meant a different thing I often heard from teachers: Nothing happens in this story. Maybe because all of the worst moments in my life seemed the most ordinary to everyone else, I was utterly unaware of how to make things happen in fiction. That’s the thing about the microaggression type of racism: It only changes the air for you. And when you see how the world only believes the mold of its predetermined shape, you lose faith in your own thoughts. You start to believe the air didn’t change at all.

A friend once came back from a class with Sheila Heti and told me she’d said something like, If you don’t care about plot, maybe you don’t see the world as cause and effect. Maybe the world doesn’t make sense to you in that way.

A collection of moments in my life that felt like punches to my stomach: When the health teacher asked who I was and a boy shouted, The Chinese girl! and pointed at me as I stood in the hall. When I was in line with my blonde mother at the grocery store and strangers asked her what country she adopted me from while they reached to pet my hair. When the same thing happened at Burger King, and CVS, and the dentist’s office. When I scrolled AIM in my bedroom to see the nickname that a group of white girls had made up for me, HOKE (hoe chink), had been written as We Hate Hoke on all their profiles. When I was tested to be advanced in certain subjects and requested English but was placed in math and science instead. When my college roommate interrupted me while talking about my dad and said that actually, he did have an accent. When Cory began listening to rap and wearing JNCO jeans, like everyone did, and my town began calling only him scary.

I can see these moments vividly, but I can also see how swiftly they pass by as moments, how still they are to others watching. How, when my college roommate corrected me, we were sitting cross-legged on a scratchy carpet with two other students, and she had talked over me as if being helpful, adding a detail—actually, he does have an accent—and the conversation zoomed on from there. How, when I scrolled AIM in my bedroom, the wallpaper did not turn into creatures that wrapped a scarf around my neck and prepared me for battle, my mother did not rush in having heard, and I did not stop going to school. I scrolled AIM and then I lay in my bed and then my life went on. So was this why I thought that the wrong things were important? Moments that felt interminable and wailing to me passed others like nothing.

The writer Brandon Taylor, who I think is excellent at writing microaggressions, once wrote in his newsletter, “To read Carver is to face down that most worrisome of quandaries: what are we to do with the lives that are not remarkable, those lives that everyone else ends up living?” If you can only write about adolescents who are incredible, I guess it would be important to define: incredible to who? I think my teacher phrased it badly when she asked, What’s special about her?—like a challenge. Or maybe she was right, and I wasn’t ready. I might say now that what is unique about Willa is that she has existed in so many worlds, but only in the sliver between. Between families, between ethnicities, between careers, between classes. What’s unique about her is she knows how to code-switch more than she knows how to be truthful, that she has not ever truly felt loved but still eyes the world with empathy and desire. But those are also the things that are ordinary about her. Unremarkable. I guess that’s why I like them.

When I was younger, I did not understand microaggressions or racism, just that I had to be very vigilant at all times, because at any second someone could interrupt my day and turn my head into a seashell, empty but for the sound of frothing waves, of blood crashing between ears. When I was younger, I felt embarrassed whenever my palms would sweat. For a month, we square-danced in gym class and I pulled the sleeves of an oversized sweatshirt over my hands so no one could tell when I had to clasp their palm in mine. Now, my hands only sweat before I public speak or have to face down an anti-vaxxer, which is to say only when I am in fight-or-flight response. I think my body was in that state every day of every year growing up—alarm bells ringing, from first period to last. But I was just sitting quietly in class, opening my locker and closing it, changing for gym class, eating plastic-wrapped cookies I bought for three quarters in the cafeteria. How was I to communicate what it felt like, to have an ordinary day that felt like a seismic war?

What I wanted to find someone to talk with about were the moments that felt like punches to my stomach, the accumulation of those moments and how they ballooned in a prickling weight. But I did not push back against my teacher; I didn’t understand her. I continued to write stories of raceless narrators, giving them angry boyfriends and dead parents, abandoning Lia until I turned her into Willa, years later. The most frequent thing readers in my MFA program told me was that Willa was too alone; it wasn’t believable for her to have no allies, no close friends. I was too embarrassed to say, But some people are that alone.

That’s what I wanted to capture—a particular loneliness, the loneliness of illegibility, that crackles only for you. The loneliness of seeming as if you are just pulling your sweatshirt sleeve down past your wrist, but really you are racked with fear, shaking with nerves, deathly afraid of someone perceiving you, though actually, you would bend steel to have someone perceive you. But the moment passes, and no one does, and all that’s happened is you’ve pulled a torn sweatshirt sleeve down over your palm, and continued to go on.

In Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, he discusses, among other things, redefining plot and rethinking Western story shapes: “Why, when the protagonist faces the world, does she need to win, lose, or draw? This is a Western idea of conflict. What if she understands herself as a part of that world, that world as a part of herself? What if she simply continues to live?”

Incredible is an interesting way to describe who should be written about, because at its base it means impossible to believe. And yet that was the root of why my stories were never taken to. Most of my rejections found prospective agents and editors simply unable to relate to the narrator; couldn’t identify enough to go to bat for her. Couldn’t believe in her. Couldn’t understand why she existed the way she did. Couldn’t figure out what had happened, or why they were supposed to care.

I often think I began writing my first book because of Cory. I couldn’t imagine growing up in this world without him for a particular reason: He is the only person who shares my genetic makeup, who shares my place in our family. My other siblings have different parents, have grown up in different houses, and have different ethnic backgrounds. I imagined someone who didn’t have my brother, and that was Willa. But in our childhood, we never huddled in our rooms discussing the latest racist thing someone said, how mean our stepfather was, how much we wanted to get out. We had no language in which to ask for help or even complain. We sat in the living room watching music videos, switching between BET and MTV. We drove between our parents’ houses on weekends, stopping at diners along the way. Our stepparents told us what we were doing wrong, and we either changed or didn’t, but we held it all silently. It was only when he left for college that I began calling him after things went wrong, crying wordlessly into the phone. And he would sit there wordlessly as well, listening.

So when I thought of Cory asking me how to use a cleaning tool, I saw the things he wasn’t taught, which I was not either. I know the things he was taught that I wish he hadn’t been. I know how those lessons don’t just affect the moments they happen in, but the whole of our bodies and existences, how they wormed their way in and won’t always leave.

I returned inside from cleaning my car that day and felt tender and scooped out. I cleaned fervently in North Carolina, I remembered then. Cory would cook, and I would clean, and I asked him to show me how to sear scallops, and he asked me to show him how to string up a Swiffer. It wouldn’t be incredible to most. But that isn’t important to me.