2.8 writing to expose the darkness to the light

what we learn from generations past

cloudy spring skies over our daffodil field

Sometimes I am struck by incredible guilt that I am able to bury myself here at our farm in northern New England.

The eruption of student protests across the United States has hit me hard. These protests started at Columbia University, where my daughter is a graduating senior, before rolling out across the country at many other college campuses. My daughter was in the high school class of 2020, so she had no high school graduation or public celebration, and now there is a similar type of COVID gloom permeating the Columbia campus, where the president of the university called in the NYPD to dispel the student protesters. Students have been urged to cut short their semesters and leave. Final exams are either cancelled or being given remotely. Campus is emptying out, and the various celebrations honoring student leaders have been called off. They may be rescheduled, but many of the students won't be there. My daughter was a finalist for a major award, but who knows if she is this year’s winner, because they had to cancel the event where it would have been announced.

Monday morning, I awoke to the news that commencement itself has been cancelled.

Meanwhile, I am sitting at my desk with my usual idyllic view. I'm trying to do my work, but my job as a novelist is to give my readers an alternate world to sink into for a few hours, and I'm feeling really uncomfortable about this. It feels trivial, and even a bit cruel, to even have the capability to ignore so much pain.

I'm aware that I personally am privileged to be able to turn my back on difficult moments being experienced by others. Even if I agree or disagree with the motivations for this or that group, that doesn't matter since I get to have my opinions from the safety of my desk. It’s hard to feel like I can have an effect on anything at all, when my “job” involves sitting here with my beautiful view and trying to distract my readers from their lives.

And as a parent of a graduating senior at a college where emotions are running high, I can’t deny that I feel panicky over the harm that can come to my particular student. I want to tell her not to sign any petitions, not to raise her voice, not to post angry messages on social media. I want to counsel her to duck and avoid the ugliness.

I didn’t say any of these things. Instead, I suggested that the university president had a difficult job. I reminded her that along with the things that are said, there are many things that cannot be said, and that we have to always read between the lines in order to come to a fuller understanding of a complex issue. And I maintained that there are always fewer choices for action than people think, and sometimes you have to call the police because there’s no one else you can call.

The thing about text is that you can’t see your child rolling her eyes in response.

You can maintain an unfailingly civil conversation and not really have a conversation at all. I’m sure my daughter disagrees with me, but just as I’m not outright pleading with her to stay away from potential trouble, she isn’t bluntly telling me that I have no moral compass. I have no idea if perhaps in their sibling group chat, my kids have lost all respect for me and aren’t bothering to engage with anything I’ve said.

But I feel guilty and ashamed, a coward for not urging my kids to stand up for what is right. If anything, I desperately do not want them to do anything that will harm them or their futures.

I’m reminded of the many tales of post-war starvation that my Japanese mother told me in a perfectly dry, neutral tone. If I had been more aware, I would have realized that there was something wrong with the fact that she could tell me terrible stories without any emotion.

I’m a hoarder, just like she was, buying bottle after bottle of soy sauce, vinegar, sake—if you see my pantry, you’ll see my inherited anxiety at work. She was all about putting your head down and working for the corporate master for umpteen zillion years, accepting whatever indignities along with your reliable paycheck, until you got your golden watch and could finally have a life for a few years before you died. I tried to follow this path, I really did. But I bailed out of that treadmill early, and over the years I’ve had to bear her scorn and dire warnings about the folly of my life choices, even when my choices led to some good results.

I still live with that failure to follow my mother’s counsel, and while I tried to raise my children differently, to go ahead and follow their consciences and their hearts, I am forced to admit that I don’t want any of them to hold up a sign or get arrested. I want them to get their diplomas. I want them to have steady paychecks. I want them to get into grad school or whatever they apply for. No matter what I said to them, my core messaging is still based on grabbing safety whenever you can, not trusting the world, and suppressing your true self.

Part of what artists do is to respond to the world. Sometimes they're moved by beauty. Sometimes they're horrified by ugliness. What I write about in my novels is women living in difficult circumstances who eventually find the strength to stand on their own two feet. I’m sure I’m channeling something from my own story into all of my fiction—that’s just the way it works—but this week I’ve wondered if I’m even qualified to be a protagonist in any of my books. I think that’s the question I’ve been asking in every book, but this week I am in doubt about my worthiness to tell these stories, and this makes me sad.

If you’ve been raised to fear the utter collapse of the world, if you fundamentally believe that you have no agency, that bad things will happen and you can’t do anything about it because people like you do not run the world—can you survive without compromising your principles? And if you’re not the one who suffered, but your parents—can you get rid of this burden without losing yourself?

The difficult answer to this is that I believe my mother did morally suspect things in order to survive, and she had to develop an attitude of indifference. I think I’ve been fighting against that path my entire life, and yet when it comes to my kids, their survival is the only thing I care about, morality be damned. I’m not far off from my mother’s thinking, no matter how far I think I’ve come from her postwar trauma.

All I can do is write, and keep writing. At the very least, I am willing to acknowledge the vast gray area that lies between good and evil. I have to believe that this is the contribution that art makes, the exposing to daylight of the hidden side of human experience. As I sit here watching the early spring rain, I think about turning over the random fallen branches in the yard, the remnants of the last ice storm (in April!), and finding worms and bugs and rot underneath. It may be ugly, but it’s real, and in many ways it’s good for the earth as well as a necessary part of the cycle. Perhaps there is no way to experience the good without the knowledge of the bad.