To Tell a Story Is to Tell It Again, to Carry Another Time

Regret, I was once told, means to weep again. My first thought, when I heard this: That’s what it is to tell a story.

1.

Any story about identity is really a story about more than one identity—and more than one time. For example: a time before and a time after. I have written about my adoption, and the moment I realized I wasn’t white, and my marriage, and parenthood. Not long after my wife died, I wrote about carrying another time with me, the time in which she is still alive, even as I live in a time in which she is dead. I dream again and again that she is dying, instead, that we still have time left, and when I wake, it is with the sense that the only way for me to exist is if there are two of me.

2.

In the novel No-No Boy, canonized within Asian American literature, Ichiro is a Japanese American in his midtwenties who has just gotten out of prison after World War II, after spending years in a concentration camp. He went to prison because he answered no to both “loyalty questions” asked at the camps. These were essentially: Will you renounce Japanese citizenship? and Will you fight for America? At the time, first-generation Japanese Americans could not become US citizens. For the second generation, answering yes to the first question might potentially separate them from their parents; answering yes to the second question meant risking their lives as Americans despite America locking them up for being Japanese.

Ichiro returns from prison to his family in Seattle, now desperate to be accepted as American. He blames his no answers on his mother; he answered what she wanted him to answer. His peers who answered yes-yes despise him—one spits on him at the beginning of the book. His younger brother runs off to the army to compensate for Ichiro’s absence. Their mother, likely out of self-protection, is under the delusion that Japan won the war and will soon repatriate those who remained loyal.

Ichiro’s mother lives in another time, a time that gives her identity meaning. That is to say: the time that most of the world lives in makes no sense to her. But if her delusion is a delusion—if America really won the war—then the American government suffers no consequences for incarcerating hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans. Then who will she be? Who will she become?

Her problem is that no one will share her delusion. This is what a delusion is, or at least this is what we call a delusion: a time that no one will share. In fact, Ichiro pushes his mother to live in his time, in which Japan has lost the war and his mother was wrong—and the novel suggests that accepting other people’s time is what finally pushes her over the edge. Without a time in which her identity makes sense, she has no time; she kills herself. One could read her suicide as a last assertion of time in a book about time lost.

3.

One of the ways we share time is culture. A language, in fact, forces its time on its speakers. The syntax of Korean puts the subject after the object, subordinating the subject in time. In a famous experiment on culture and time measurement, bilingual speakers switched their perception of time depending on which language they were asked to perceive in—subjects watched both a line moving across a screen and a container filling, and when prompted in a language that measures time in distance, as English does (“A day is long”), they would estimate how much time had passed according to the line, and when prompted in a language that measures time in volume, as Greek does (“A day is full”), they would estimate how much time passed according to the container.

When you lose a language, I wonder, do you lose a time? (I ask as an adoptee.) While my wife was actively dying, it became more and more difficult for us to talk. Not to find something to talk about, nor to connect, but to literally speak. Usually, we spoke our own particular mix of Korean and English that accounted for the Korean words I understood and the syntax of my wife’s quick-moving English (e.g. “you not going” instead of “you are not going”). In her pain, my wife found it tiring to speak in our shared language, to speak any English at all. Any communication that was not in her native Korean was explicit, gravitational, exhausting.

Now I find it hard to remember how we used to speak. I never speak that way anymore, because I never have anyone with whom to speak it. A past therapist once suggested that I try talking with my wife despite her physical absence, but I couldn’t do it. How can I speak with her when I have forgotten what words to use?

4.

Regret, the poet Sun Yung Shin told me once, means to weep again. My first thought, when she said this: That’s what it is to tell a story. To weep once is just to weep. To weep again is to put your tears in time. Without storytelling, we would only ever weep over something once; then we would either stop weeping about it forever or never stop weeping about it. Regret requires that time be both discrete and multiple. From one time, you revisit another.

Regret, the poet Sun Yung Shin told me once, means to weep again. My first thought, when she said this: That’s what it is to tell a story.

I have written before about Jill Price, a woman who can’t forget, who lives as if everything she has experienced since she was fourteen is still happening to her. Price says that she is cursed. Her mother says that she is “difficult.” Her past is in her present. Rather than regret, Price holds grudges: Things other people might “forgive and forget” feel to her as if they are just occurring.

What hurts is not that she remembers everything, but that she alone remembers everything.

In fact, what is most interesting to me about Price is that there was a time when living in two times at once didn’t bother her—this was when she fell in love and married, before her husband’s tragic death. The man she fell in love with “just got her,” by which Price means: got her sense of time. Because of the way time works for her, maybe he continues to get her. Maybe this is what she wants.

5.

Critics of No-No Boy have complained that the characters are “flat,” that Ichiro only seems like a round character if combined with his foil in the novel, Kenji, a war hero dying of his wounds. I have asked my Asian American literature students to consider the possibility of oneness. One of the running questions (and sexual jokes) (and examples of ableism) in the book is whether or not Ichiro would be better off with Kenji’s eleven inches of leg than he is with two whole legs and two no’s. My students have often asserted that the answer to that question is another: Whose family spends more time together?

Kenji’s family gathers together before he leaves for the hospital in which he will die. But Ichiro’s family also gets a scene together: the scene in which his brother announces he is joining the army. My students, then, aren’t reacting to quantity. Neither are they solely reacting to mood; both scenes have unhappy occasions. What is different about the time these two families spend together is how much of the time is shared. Kenji’s family participates in the illusion that they will continue to be together, that he isn’t dying at all and will come back from the hospital perfectly well. Ichiro’s family each lives in their own time; they refuse to share.

The time in which Kenji is not dying is as much of a delusion as the time in which Japan has won the war. After Ichiro’s mother kills herself, Ichiro is left to ponder the difference. Why is one delusion acceptable and not the other? After all, if Japan had won the war, wouldn’t everything be reversed? Wouldn’t he be the hero and Kenji the villain? It’s not his mother’s fault that Japan lost.

Indeed, the novel suggests that neither yes-yes nor no-no is right or even singular. It seems to agree with its critics that Ichiro and Kenji together complete a single “round” character—that this is no mistake or shortcoming but an intended effect. Living in two times at once is the name of the (Asian American) game. Despite the dominant model-minority myth, for instance, certain subgroups of Asian Americans are some of the very poorest ethnic groups in the nation. The experience of being marginalized in America is the experience of being displaced from official time, of being split into multiple times, and multiple identities.

6.

Sun Yung Shin’s latest book, Unbearable Splendor, is full of analogues for the adoptee experience. The longest section is about Asterion, the Minotaur from Greek myth. Asterion appears simultaneously all over the labyrinth, in one place and another, reading books, arranging flowers, swimming. He is polite and well-mannered, yet once a month, a group of terrified visitors arrive and disappear. Soon, the narrator himself starts to become another Asterion. He is both observer and actor, monster and servant, adoptee and prisoner, etc.

I have puzzled over these depictions, which resonate with my fragmented experience of identity and my desire to understand what time I am in. While reading Unbearable Splendor, I thought often of another writer, Catherine Chung, whose short story “Give Me Your Body” I teach often.

In this story, the narrator warns us that to speak of a ghost is to call it into one’s life. Despite this, he must speak. As a young boy, he survives a terrible plague that kills everyone else in his village. A shaman woman finds him and takes him to a monastery. There, the monks have a tradition for young men to go out into the woods and have a vision. Upon having this vision, the narrator sees a beautiful girl, whom he follows back to her home, where they eventually marry and have children. But one day, when they return to the spot where they met, someone calls the narrator’s name, and a boy appears and throws a knife at his wife, killing her. The narrator, grieving and confused, recognizes the boy. It’s a friend the narrator used to know at the monastery. The boy looks exactly the same—he hasn’t aged.

Back at the monastery, the narrator is shown his reflection. He too is a boy, not an adult, his body covered in gaping wounds. His now-dead wife was actually a fox spirit who, pretending to be a woman, was consuming him. He walks back to where he believed their home was and finds a fox den full of dead pups (who starved without his flesh to feed on). After these revelations, his old friends shun him, because he has lived in another time. Neither can he connect with them—for the same reason. With the fox and its pups dead, he is the only one who knows the time they shared. As horrified as he is by what happened to him, that time, in which he was married to a beautiful woman and had two beautiful children, is the only time that makes sense to him any longer. The story ends with the implication that by telling his story, the narrator is indeed calling a ghost into his life—he is calling his fox-wife back, trying to reenter the time in which he belonged, even if it means his wife will eat him.

Here is the thing about living in multiple times: What keeps them going is regret, is weeping again. You weep again, because again is the only way to keep that time alive. I wake from my dream time with my wife and, weeping, want to return to the cause of my tears.

You weep again, because again is the only way to keep that time alive.

7.

If there is hope in multiple times, there must be hope of sharing them, of weeping again together. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being follows an author character also named Ruth, who discovers a diary written by a Japanese girl. The character Ruth becomes captivated by the diary. She quickly reaches its end. At that point, however, more pages appear. Inside the diary is now a letter from the girl’s uncle, who was a kamikaze pilot in World War II. The letter is about her uncle’s plan to fly his plane into the ocean and avoid killing anyone. How did the letter get there? And the extra pages?

Ruth ponders all of this and finally has a “dream” in which she meets the girl who wrote the diary. In fact, the girl is writing the diary in the time in which they meet. Ruth understands then how the letter appeared in the girl’s diary: She herself must have given the letter to the girl, in her dream. When Ruth wakes, more pages appear. Their lives have been connected by their shared time—by a story time, an author, and a diary writer.

This shared time only happens because the girl writes about her troubles, because she weeps again—once as part of the story and once in telling it. The girl recounts in her diary her experience with her bullies, her life in a maid café, her grandmother’s wisdom. These stories bring her together with Ruth by separating each of them from their individual times. Where else but in story do you feel time so urgent and yet so far away? The story of Asian America is the shared time of living multiple times at once. We weep again, the second time together.

8.

I carry my wife’s time around with me, but as one of many other times, one of many other stories. I weep again and again. Sometimes I weep to get a time out of me, to get myself out of someone else’s time. Strangers take one look at me and put me in their story of the Asian good at math, their story of the effeminate Asian male, their story of the invading horde or virus carrier, their story of the diligent worker, their story of the ungrateful beneficiary of affirmative action, their story of the lucky adoptee, etc.

I used to share a time with someone, a story we made together. It was a time in which I could take my time. Now that the story is over, should I let go of its plot? I have a story that used to keep me in the world, and it has ended before its end. I weep again to recover what I lose by weeping if I only weep once. I keep time and carry on.