The Anxiety of Exclamation Points

My exclamation points are part of a decades-long project to be as truthful as possible to my lived experience as a child of immigrants.

“We, your writing teachers, will be dead,” I tell my students, “but your classmates are your own literary generation. You’ll be with each other for the rest of your lives.”

During my years in writing classrooms as both a student and instructor, I’ve watched it happen: a uniting of students against the teacher. Some ideas and methods presented as downright truth pass out of existence precisely in the moment of instruction, only to be replaced by the opposite, unvarnished truths of a new aesthetic. It could be Bloom’s anxiety of influence. It could be the brevity of literary memory. It could be boredom.

I’ve seen new writers sensing an aesthetic and political sea change. I’ve seen them righteously, and rightfully, shaking off what they were told, straining in the opposite direction from where their teachers—sometimes I—tried to guide them about point of view, diction, genre. Yes, these changes are fought out on the level of craft. Craft is the medium through which writers reveal their assumptions. It’s almost impossible for writers to instruct on the elements of craft without giving themselves away—by this, I mean revealing expectations and beliefs unidentifiable to themselves, like an accent learned in childhood.

But the craft advice of teachers can also be long-lasting, outliving the teachers themselves. Write what you know. Show, don’t tell. Be concise and understated if you want to be called good. It’s been a personal challenge for me, over thirty years, to shake off some of my late professors’ exhortations when I’ve needed to.

Take exclamation points, for example. According to the generation of teachers I learned from, exclamation points are generally unwarranted, unnecessary. This ban was strictly enforced in every adult education class I took.

In graduate school, my most commanding professor, the late Frank Conroy, used to photocopy pages from William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style to distribute in workshop along with a list of offending passages from the student work under discussion. On exclamation points, Strunk and White wrote: “Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation. . . . The exclamation mark is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands.” The authors imply that any other use would be gratuitous or—worse!—loud.

Outside of the classroom, Frank advised his own young son, “You should use only two exclamation points in your entire life.” He himself spoke with such authority that he didn’t need exclamation points. I still smile at the dry wit in his confident disparagement, “The tail of language is wagging the dog of art.” He had a reassuring belief in the accuracy of his own opinions. Some students flocked to him, while others raged against him. His absolute standard gave some a guide toward improvement and others an opponent to resist.

In the doctrine of Strunk and White, exclamation points are unnecessary. Unseemly. I know this, and yet my new novel, The Family Chao, contains 419 of them, enough for more than two hundred lives. At some point in the last fifteen years, I decided to take a stand on their behalf. The exclamation points are part of a decades-long project to be as truthful as possible to my lived experience as a child of Chinese immigrants in Wisconsin.

In the 1990s, I wrote my first stories using the tools I had learned from Strunk and White. I tried repeatedly to recreate the emotions I had felt growing up in the Midwest, in a claustrophobic house, with unhappy parents. I published a collection exploring immigrant lives of quiet suffering. I’m proud of my first book. But it was a struggle to write, not the least because the techniques I had been taught were not useful in portraying the whole of what I experienced.

The techniques I had been taught were not useful in portraying the whole of what I experienced.

This is because my large family did not suffer quietly. We lived lives of noisy desperation. Yes, there was silence: My father’s reticence about his experience of the Japanese occupation of China emanated from the chair where he sat watching black-and-white war movies. But there was also a lot of lecturing and scolding. There was laughter and sobbing. There was verbal abuse. Our personal narratives were sometimes “self-pitying.” Our affect was sometimes “sentimental” and our behavior “melodramatic.”

For years, I couldn’t give myself permission to write about our outsized emotions. I had been brought up in one culture and had learned to express myself in an entirely different one. In his essay “Creating a Scene,” Charles Baxter describes the challenge for a writer attempting scenes that dramatize a significant conflict, only to have workshop participants call the results melodramatic: “Overt anger and straightforward conflicts still strike many genteel readers as unrefined.”

Well into my forties, I began to wonder, What if I’m not writing for a genteel reader? What if I’m not a genteel reader myself? After all, I had been born into a family so far outside of the American class system of the time that no matter how well I did in school, I’d never be a part of it. As a child, I considered the acquisition of genteel behavior to be the burden of girls who were born looking the most like a Barbie doll. The closer one came to looking like a Barbie, the more she would feel pressure to behave. It was not my burden to bear. And yet, when I began to write, I followed the rules of my teachers as carefully as any obedient student. And for years, I’d told my students what my teachers had told me.

I remember a morning, well into the ninth draft of The Family Chao, when I searched ! and found a total of 437. That morning, I went over each one of those exclamation points. They were peppered through the lines the characters texted to one another. They exploded batlike from interior passages; they turned monologues into hyperbolic rants. I imagined justifying each one to the copy editor. There were a few—well, around twenty—places where I thought a moment of silence might be needed. But for the most part, I was ready to defend.

I searched ! and found a total of 437.

And ultimately, my editors accepted the exuberance of this voice. Maybe because I’ve worked with my main editor for twenty-five years now. It’s possible she didn’t challenge the exclamation points because they were balanced by an unusually lively plot. It’s possible that I just lucked out. And it’s possible the world is changing.

If the critic Eduardo Mateo Gambarte is right, and a literary generation is in fact fifteen years, then two generations have passed since I was taught not to use exclamation points. Today, I feel almost morally required to shout; it is impossible not to shout! It took me more than a decade of teaching before I learned to tell my students that there are immeasurable ways to write, that no one will get in trouble for being sentimental or grandiose. These days, when I tell them this, they sit around the table looking back at me, some relieved and others aware they’re watching me fight my own, old battles. They are already free. As for myself, I’ve given up on any attempt to be called “good,” and it is a relief.