Preview: On ‘The Death of The Author’
On a Spring day, I walk, newly vaccinated, along the treelined sidewalk to my neighborhood cafe. I order an iced coffee and open my journal. Has what I’ve been searching for been beyond words? Is everything in life guaranteed to be expressed with language, or is it okay to let something sit, like a sweet dissolving in your mouth? At a table six feet away, a small group of friends are gathered, telling each other stories. I pick up my pen and wonder,
What are you?
Who will you become?
I typed the last passage of Kaleidoscope and, cursor still blinking, drew a breath. It’s a surreal experience when you hit the final note of a big manuscript, when all the unfolding tangents return to a final question; a question that you started with and, through the writing (or reading) is asked again, maybe answered, from a gained point of view.
Finishing Kaleidoscope was no exception and its scope, literally, took my breath away: a memoir-in-essays capturing key moments of my mixed-race coming of age. These stories spanned continents and generations, relationships and regions in America, different versions of my past self who I somehow was and was no longer. The manuscript managed to contain questions I had spent my life feeling, trying to put into words, and answering—
How do you explain to people what it feels like to be two races—both and neither—at the same time? How do you make someone understand the loneliness of your otherness when no one, even your own family, shares the patchwork of your identity? What do you do when you are both privileged and marginalized? When you are an outsider within your own, multiple, cultures? How do you explain the awe the first time you meet someone who is mixed, like you, the way it feels like meeting a fellow traveler—exchanging stories and discovering you weren’t alone after all? How it feels to be part of a people without a history, but has existed all along?
This search was the subject of my writing ever since I was in college. I could remember meeting with my advisor in her cozy office, lit by a lamp and smelling of books and stale coffee, the sloping hillside of our campus—a farm in the woods—outside her wide window. The students designed our own majors, and I vented all the things I was studying—graphic novels and Mandarin and the anthropology of cities and suburbs; fiction workshops on style and sensibilities, comp lit classes on fairy tales and mythology, trying to understand the meaning of America and what it means to be mixed-race—desperately asking her, But what does this all have in common? And her serene reply, which offered no comfort, They have you in common.
—a memory that I revisited in my work notes as those disparate strands miraculously fit together: Who knew digital photography lessons would come in handy as a writer using Instagram? How was I supposed to know that being raised in a kung fu school and studying media would lend itself to an epic East-Meets-Western novel?
And here was Kaleidoscope, ready to be sent to my editor. I started envisioning the next steps toward publication—finding a book designer and working with them on a concept—a book like a kaleidoscope, a note to self “Contact printer—iridescent interiors?” Plans began to form for a supplement in the back of the book with prompts for reflection, a social media campaign—maybe even an anthology—inviting other mixed-race people to share their piece of the kaleidoscope of our experiences. The book would be a gathering place, a beginning, as much as its own story or piece of art.
But then, with a sobering sink of my stomach, I realized, Oh god—this is going to be a book.
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