Where Vanessa Hua Writes

It’s my childhood desk, which I began using again after my father passed away and we moved in with my mother.

For the first few months of the pandemic, I positioned a webcam on a wobbly stack of books whenever I had an online meeting, my body awkwardly twisted to feature my bookcase as a professional-looking background.

I didn’t want to give up my view of the oak-studded hills behind our house, but when we went through the hassle of rotating my desk and moving it to another wall, the move felt transformative. With this new orientation, I felt focused and energized—in part because it forced me to clean up my desk, but also because I’d invested in myself.

About that desk: it’s my childhood desk, which I began using again after my father passed away and I moved in with my mother, along with my husband and twin sons. The setup is a bit jury rigged, propped up by a hardback to raise the monitor to the right height. We scavenged the fancy chair from my husband’s office, which cleared its space during the lockdown last year.

For my birthday, my husband bought me an under-the-desk exercycle, which I’ve come to refer to as my “granny Peleton.” I’d been eying it for months, but worried that it wouldn’t fit, or that I wouldn’t end up using it. Now I’m a convert. (Cue the hamster jokes.) I pedal for a couple hours or more each day, and I’ve never slept better! The other night, while visiting a friend’s creative writing class, I pedaled away while answering questions, the students none the wiser. It whirs almost silently as I finish edits on my next novel—the first one I wrote, but the third book that will be published, in the spring of next year.

The old Playskool doll—with a peg of a body and a round head, with an orange-red helmet and matching suit—is a talisman that I’ve dubbed “Underwater Guy.” I discovered him on a beach at a writing residency on Whidbey Island a few years ago. When I’m trying to sort out something in my writing, I’ll pick up Underwater Guy and fiddle with his head, turning it round and round as if he is possessed, and pump his arms up and down. I give my hands a task, so that my thoughts might open up.