Heather A. Diamond's Blog

If you have ever wondered about the people and processes involved in transforming the written word into audiobooks, here is your chance to peek behind the scenes. In the past few months, I have had the pleasure of working with voice actor Yu-Li Alice Shen who created the audio version of Rabbit in the Moon. When I sleuthed her online, I discovered that she is also a writer, professor, stage actor, and musician. The audiobook is out this week, so I took the opportunity to interview Yu-Li so I could introduce her to you. Here she is talking about her creative work and the process of voicing an audiobook.

Me: I know you are a writer and performer as well as a voice actor. I’d love to know more about your creative work.

Yu-Li: Literature, writing, and theatre have been my vocation and avocation for the last eleven years. I earned an MFA in playwriting from Virginia Tech in 2009, and I currently teach college composition at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. My full-length play, Image May Contain (based on my experience going to Taiwan to perform Buddhist funeral rituals for my late, estranged father), was fully staged by STAGEtwo Productions in 2019, and it won the Association of Theatre in Higher Education’s Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Award Runner-Up in 2021. My first full-length play, Entitled, won the Southeastern Theatre Conference’s Charles M. Getchell New Play Award in 2010, and several of my one-act plays have been performed locally and read/workshopped at national conferences.

Evansville boasts a rich and diverse theatre community too, for which I have acted, directed, and stage-managed. Some of my favorite acting roles include Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mash in Aaron Posner’s Stupid F****** Bird, and Hannah Jarvis in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I lead community playwriting workshops in the summer, I judge high school performance competitions for Indiana Thespians every year, and I also swing dance and play ukulele at local retirement homes.

My academic writing has extended to autoethnographies about my time driving Uber rideshare and the microaggressions that I experienced—broadening out into wider implications of racism, sexism, and classism, within and against BIPOC and AAPI communities.

Me: What made you decide to become a voice actor recording audiobooks?

Yu-Li: In late 2020, a former college voice professor got in contact with some of her alumni to pilot a Zoom class on breaking into the audiobook industry. Some of us were stage/film actors, out of work due to the pandemic, and some of us were theatre and English majors in college who had families and/or “real adult jobs” now. This was a wonderful opportunity to tap back into our undergraduate acting training and perform remotely while also getting paid. I had recently started a podcast as well called Going Terribly (irreverent, immature word nerdery), and I had grown accustomed to listening to my own voice recorded, so reading out loud in a dark closet full of my own clothes to dampen outside noise didn’t seem too far a leap after that!

Me: What steps and considerations are involved in the process of narrating a book?

Yu-Li: Freelance audiobooking requires a lot of self-promotion, discipline, and planning. On the business side, I had to first set my Per Finished Hour rate and curate voice samples on my profile for Findaway (the audiobook production company), which led to me being invited to audition for your book. I recorded and submitted the audition, was chosen (thankfully!), and then I had to consider a realistic timeline for project completion and secure an editor for post-production.

On the artistic side, we discussed your ideas for tone and timbre, disparate character voices, and foreign word pronunciations. I then prepared my own chapter and character breakdown and narration schedule—mostly recording for 3 hours a night in my closet “studio.”

All told, over the course of 3 months, I spent roughly 24 hours recording, 14 hours proofing the text for mistakes, and 30 hours editing out mouth sounds/errant breaths and doing final quality checks. The post-production part of the process usually takes the most time, and I even had help from friend and sound engineer Jeremy Graham who cleaned up and mastered my raw files.

At 7.5 total finished hours, this was my longest book to date, and I had definitely underestimated the timeline, but you were very flexible and supportive!

Me: In your experience, is narrating memoir different from narrating fiction?

Yu-Li: Yes, memoir generally has more narrative prose and fewer character voices. As a professor, I feel that my “neutral” voice is well-suited to the cerebral pathos of memoir; however, honoring silences and beats and finding the rise and fall of a chapter are imperative to captivating a listener without spoken dialogue.

As an actor with a somewhat impish face/voice/vibe, I feel that my quirky vocal characterizations lend themselves well to Young Adult fiction. Switching between several voices is quite challenging though, and I am learning more about breath control/support and timing between spoken dialogue and dialogue tags.

Me: Were there any particular challenges to narrating Rabbit in the Moon?

Yu-Li: Besides the challenge that every narrator faces in wanting to do a book justice and getting the performance right, I would liken Rabbit in the Moon‘s specific challenge to dramaturgical research for a theatrical production. Owing to the historical and cultural content, there are many Cantonese and Mandarin words in the text—regions, phrases, foods, people’s names. Even though I grew up speaking Mandarin, my usage now is rudimentarily conversational, so I had to make sure my pronunciations were correct and consistent. You sent me voice memos of you and Fred pronouncing the words, and I also looked up words on Google and YouTube, but I had to be careful to sift through some videos of Anglicized pronunciations.

Me: Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience narrating Rabbit in the Moon? 

Yu-Li: Narrating Rabbit in the Moon was such a unique experience for me because I was reading and learning about what is ostensibly “my” culture, but through an outsider’s lens and as an outsider myself. I was born in Taiwan, raised in the US, and have never been to China or Hong Kong, so aspects of your book felt simultaneously familiar yet foreign to me.

I remember wearing permanent jade jewelry, folding paper gold ingots for my deceased relatives, feeling overwhelmed by a re nao family gathering, and being judgmental about the culture clash minutiae of daily life. However, your deeply-felt ruminations on expatriate life, interracial marriage, Teochew customs, Hawaiian culture, and Russian/Jewish influences in Harbin were completely new and edifying for me.

We may have divergent backgrounds, but they are almost parallel in opposite directions. With you and I both being academics, our natural inclination, of course, is to notice and question, and I like to think your text and my voice matched to create a nuanced exploration of self, family, world, and life that answers and resonates.

The audio version of Rabbit in the Moon is available from Authors Direct as well as Apple, Google Play, Kobo, Scribd. More outlets coming.

Book marketing has me obsessing over visibility. I loved fairytales as a young reader, and they made me think a lot about magic. If I could have a single magic attribute, I wondered, what would I choose? The answer was always the same—invisibility. In fairytales, a cloak of invisibility grants the ability to eavesdrop, the freedom to go wherever one wants, and the power to get out of tight squeezes. It’s a free ticket to anywhere and a “get out of jail” card rolled into one.

It’s also the perfect introvert choice. No one could tell invisible me I should smile or talk to people. At school, I could disappear from math and P.E. At home, no one would know I was still reading after dark. I could raid the cookie jar or slip out of the house unseen.

I wished for invisibility again when I was in my twenties and newly divorced. No one would make catcalls when I walked down the street. No boss or teacher would hit on me when I was minding my own business. If anyone did, they’d never guess where the paybacks came from. Hot coffee in a lap. A beer sloshed at a wink.

What I didn’t get until I started teaching at an inner-city community college in Houston was that I had been invisible all along. My situational visibility as a young, single, white woman was radically different from the societal visibility of being black or brown in a White-dominated culture. Unlike many of my POC students, I could drive down any street without being pulled over. I could walk through a department store without being followed. I could rent an apartment, apply for a job, and get good medical care without being profiled and pre-judged. I was invisible in ways that had always been invisible to me. Whiteness was my cloak.

Then I moved to Hawaii, where my cloak was neither fashionable nor a superpower. In Hawaii I was haole, and haole means foreigner. It also means arrogant and clueless, so haoles, as a category, are often the target of jokes and suspicion. As I learned the history of White-controlled disenfranchisement and exploitation in Hawaii, I understood why I could never shed the label. It took me a while before I could laugh at the haole jokes that once made me tear up. Adapting doesn’t mean you get to erase history. It means you get an opportunity to see things from another side. Whether White people choose to get mad or be humbled by the experience of being racially marked, it’s hard to relinquish the invisible kind of invisibility until we realize it blinds us to both our own and other people’s realities.

In Hong Kong, my whiteness shifted again. On the one hand, expectations for Westerners to be competent in Asian culture are so low that I get applause for my decent chopstick skills and limited Cantonese. I sometimes feel like a performing poodle. On the other hand, colonially inflected thinking sometimes grants me status that has little to do with my middle-class, public school upbringing.

Here’s an example. Recently, Fred and I were ordering dim sum in the Chung Chi Staff Club, a campus restaurant near his office. The Chinese waitress greeted Fred as a regular, then looked with interest at me. She asked him something in Cantonese, and I heard him say Mei gwok jan, American. She widened her eyes and gestured an exaggerated thumbs up at him. He bantered back. When she left, he translated: “She’s impressed that I have an American wife, so I told her that we were both lucky. “So now I’m a trophy wife?” I asked. “Some people still think like that,” he said.

Although Asian women marrying Western men has been a phenomenon since World War II, Asian men with White wives are still seen as marrying up by many people on both sides of the Pacific.

Sometimes my whiteness puzzles Hong Kong Chinese people. When Fred and I went out for lunch with some of his old friends, one of them remarked that I am the same size as her but small and dark for an American. “You know how most Americans are,” she said, making a circle with her arms. She’s not alone in assuming all Westerners are tall, light-haired, blue-eyed, and overweight. As Fred did with the waitress, I found myself talking back to a misconception. “Those are just the ones you notice,” I suggested. In a sea of smaller statures, towering Europeans, Americans, and Australians stand out. If I stand next to them in the MTR or on a street corner, they make me feel small and different. Compared to them, I blend in.

A few days ago I participated in a Zoom interview with a group of high-school students in Houston. These students, who are the progeny of Asian/ White mixed marriages, formed a multicultural club because they didn’t feel they fit in with the students who identified as Asian American. They said they often felt like outsiders in a national culture that, despite all evidence to the contrary, still ascribes to rigid, politicized racial categories. That tells them they are less, not more.

I wished that I could whisk them all to Hawaii. In the islands, where interracial marriage has been the norm for generations, their faces would instantly fit in as hapa—half or mixed race in Hawaiian. Mid-Pacific, they could explore who they are and where they belong without being burdened by being racially marked. Of course, it is never that easy. In Hawaii, as elsewhere, other parameters are used to categorize and judge people, such as how we speak, dress, and behave. Any one of those could get them labeled haole despite their hapa faces.

But first, they’d get to try on the cloak of invisibility. As they strolled through the streets without being seen, I’d like to think they would experience relief. Instead of the wake-up immersion into Otherness I’d like to prescribe for all White Americans, these hapa students would get an infusion of power and freedom, the invisible magic of feeling they belong.

Ching Ming (also spelled Qing Ming), one of two annual “grave-sweeping” observances in the Chinese calendar, coincides with Easter this year, which seems vaguely appropriate to me. They are both commemorations of death, transition, and afterlife. Of course, Easter focuses on a single individual while Ching Ming is when Chinese families honor their ancestors. I might be stretching things, but the emphasis in both cases seems to be on continuity after death.

Due to social distancing and family work schedules, we went last Saturday to visit the Lau clan’s ancestors. We were a smaller group than the last time I joined them—only sixteen of us hiking up the hill from Number 10, the family home, to Cheung Chau Cemetery. Along the way, the six cousins, who grew up in the same house shared stories and memories. One cousin pushed a cart carrying a roast pig in a red plastic tote bag. Others carried flowers and bags of oranges, candles, incense, and paper offerings for the deceased. The pig and oranges would be offered and then taken home to be consumed after the ancestors “ate.” The flowers would be left, and the rest of the offerings would be burned.

Quite a few families had the same idea, so the columbarium area was crowded, and the cemetery was smoky. Ashes from paper offerings drifted on the breeze and sifted into our hair. We started at the grave of Great Grandmother, where we always begin the tour. Fred’s uncle and brother brought along a paint trowel and a flathead screwdriver to clean away dirt and weeds. The flowers were arranged and oranges piled into little pyramids. We all stepped up in birth order (wives with husbands) to kowtow three times and plant sticks of incense in the holder full of sand. Then we were off to the next family grave to repeat our actions.

Family members talk to the deceased at gravesides—saying hello and goodbye. Sometimes making jokes. This year a cousin said all this will be online in the future and playfully said we should ask for text confirmation for the hell money we burn, to make sure it was received on the other side. They also talk to non-family dead, apologizing and asking permission because gravestones are so packed together that all of this ritual involves stepping over and on the neighboring stones.

There is a bare patch in the cemetery that always fascinates me, and on Saturday we saw two men digging there. In the past, many Chinese were buried twice, with bones ritually disinterred after decomposition and reburied in baskets or urns.  Because there is no burial space left in the cemetery, Cheung Chau dead are now cremated and their ashes placed in niches in columbarium walls. The diggers were probably dealing with the last wave of two-part burials, and I imagine the empty space will eventually be “developed” into more columbarium space.

Ritual still has a place even when there is no space. I watched people carefully cleaning their loved ones’ images on the niches and putting flowers into the tiny vases attached to the walls. Offerings of food, candles, and incense had been set out in front of the wall, and paper offerings were being burned in a nearby bin.

The outsider and chronicler in the family, I am always asking hard questions. As we trundled the pig and oranges back to Number 10, I asked one of the younger family members if he thought that his generation would do perform these rituals when the parents were gone. His answer was probably not. He said that most of them don’t have any idea what to do. They just go along to be with family and do what they are told. He echoed the cousin who said this will probably all be online in the future, a comment I had thought was a joke. He didn’t think it would be a problem to gather online. How sad I thought.

What is lost when traditions die out? I later asked my husband what mattered most about Ching Ming, and he said it was the bonding of family, the storytelling, the being and eating together. What I also saw was that cemetery traditions like Ching Ming reinforce ties to place, to cultural identity, and to the past. They acknowledge that ancestors live on through their descendants. As each generation becomes more modern and Westernized, I wonder if they will even know what they have lost.

Being in a Chinese family periodically throws me up against my cultural edges and forces me to question behaviors or beliefs I take for granted. For me, the concept of reciprocity is like an electric fence between my American training and Chinese customs. It zaps me with words like favor, debt, and obligation—all of which make me squirm.

Even the word favor can have negative connotations, as in don’t do me any favors or I was doing him a favor. The implication in both cases is of an action performed out of pity and without sincerity.

How do you feel about asking favors? How about when someone asks you for one or says that you owe them one?  To me, asking for a favor has always felt both presumptuous and little dangerous. I avoid it when I can and tend to ask in an apologetic tone and offer to do one in return when I do. I worry about the win win, about what’s in it for both sides.

The way I’ve always seen it in the past, if I ask you for a favor, I’m both risking rejection and agreeing to be in your debt. If you ask me for one in return, I can’t say no. Chances are, I’ll be relieved to return the favor because then we’ll be even. If you ask me to do something I don’t want to do, I might feel obligated. If I do something out of obligation, I’m not doing it for the right reasons. Then I wonder if you did me the original favor out of obligation. At this point, I’m on a gerbil wheel inside my head, and I’ve forgotten all about generosity and gratitude because I’m too busy keeping score.

When Benjamin Franklin said “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” he was talking about more than money. He was reinforcing individual independence. But Chinese society is based on the family, and the family is based on interdependence. If Ben could see the flurry of lai see, or red pockets, at Chinese New Year, where red envelopes filled with money are handed out and around, he would probably have called it a waste. He wouldn’t have understood that the ritual exchange is a way of representing and reinforcing the network of relationships.

The Chinese guanxi system is the same ritual exchange writ large. Where Westerners see croneyism and nepotism (not to say those aren’t a problem), insiders see a loyalty network that operates through a system of mutual favors and obligations. It’s just the way things are done. (Certain organizations in the US operate the same way despite laws to the contrary.)

When my parents visited Hong Kong, my father kept reaching for his wallet only to be told to put it back. He was disconcerted by his inability to pay for meals whenever he was with my husband’s extended family. For them, it was a given that they would host and that hosts pay. My parents were being welcomed into the family. My independent father didn’t understand that his being there with them was his end of the reciprocity, and that they were reinforcing a new family tie by taking care of everything.

I asked my husband’s first cousin’s wife if she could design the cover for my forthcoming memoir. I’d seen her graphic design work and loved it. I was careful to give her an out because I didn’t want her to feel obligated to take on my project. She said yes, produced exactly what I wanted, and then refused payment. She’s a busy mother with a career, and I worried that I took advantage of her and that she felt obligated. “The Lau family sticks together,” she said, and offered to help more.

“Reciprocity,” my husband says. “It’s how Chinese family works.”

That made me think about the things I do for others and why I do them. When I give feedback on another writer’s essays, for example, I don’t think of it as a favor to them. I see it as helping and as a privilege to be trusted with someone’s words and asked for my opinion. I hate to feel obligated, but I love to feel connected, and doing things for others makes me feel part of a network.

Amazing how changing what I call something that makes me uncomfortable can shift my perspective.

As my book publication date nears, I am in the position of “calling in favors” of other writers and friends and even asking favors of strangers. Asking still makes me squirm because I risk rejection, yet the generosity of people sharing their time and experience reminds me that reciprocity is how we cement relationships and build community. Asking and receiving help is how we make space for generosity gratitude. It’s how we become family.

Today is Yan Yat, the seventh day of Chinese New Year, a day that is called everybody’s birthday because according to legend it was when humans were created. So Happy Birthday, everyone! We should all be eating seven-vegetable soup to celebrate being a year older and a new beginning.

It’s also my husband’s birthday, so this year we had a celebration pile-up with Chinese New Year (which floats on the lunar calendar), Valentine’s Day, and his birthday rolling in one after the other. We might as well feast all month, right? Of course the foods for Chinese celebrations are different from what I grew up with. Instead of cake and ice cream, my husband grew up eating eggs and noodles on his birthday. Sweet eggs for a good year and noodles (sometimes also sweet) for longevity. I appreciate the sentiment and symbolism, but having my savory and sweet expectations reversed still seems pretty weird sometimes.

Last week we welcomed the year of the Ox with three days of celebrating with family on Cheung Chau: New Year’s Eve when married sons return home, the first day when married daughters return, and the second day when everyone comes together. We feasted on fish, chicken, duck, goose, pork, bamboo shoots, and stuffed mushrooms and tofu skins. We had multiple desserts made from red dates, chestnuts, glutinous rice four, mung beans, and taro. Following traditions that most other Hongkongers have abandoned, every dish but the roast goose was made at home and by hand.

 A new year is a new start, and last week I did something for the first I am embarrassed to admit took me so long. I wanted to watch the pre-New Year cooking marathon, so after over twenty years in the family and three years in Hong Kong, I made a solo trip to Cheung Chau and spent three days in my in-laws’ communal household while my husband stayed home to work. Sounds totally unimpressive when I say it, but I almost didn’t go because I was afraid. Once I recognized that as the reason, I knew I had to go. Once I got there, I realized that my fear was more memory than reality. Left over from when I was new to Hong Kong, new to Chinese culture, a shy American with culture shock.

Back then I felt like everyone was watching me. I worried about being unable to communicate, fumbling with my chopsticks, doing something inappropriate. I felt out of place and clueless. My small child shyness came back full force. It’s not that no one spoke English. An uncle and an aunt do—one fluently and one serviceably. Also my sister-in-law and the maid although less comfortably. But they weren’t always there, and it was work to keep me in the loop when they were. I leaned on my husband to translate, interpret, guide, and mediate.

I stepped way outside of my comfort zone twenty years ago when I first came to Hong Kong, but I didn’t realize then that beyond every doorway we step through, there is another threshold we must dare ourselves to pass. In other words, the process of getting over myself doesn’t stop.

Rabbit in the Moon, my memoir about adjusting to my Chinese family, is due out in May, so I’m especially attentive to what has changed over the years. If you have visited your grade school, or your child’s classroom, and thought Wow, the chairs and desks are so small! you have experienced some of the disconnect I felt last week. Certain things validated my memories. For example, I slept in the room where my husband and I slept in 2001—the one with its own bathroom—and the bed really is so hard it feels like lying on a sheet of plywood. People really do walk through to use the bathroom. But the furniture isn’t nearly as dark or as big as I remembered. The stored clothing on the top bunk doesn’t go ALL the way to the ceiling. I couldn’t even smell the mothballs I once found so overpowering.

The biggest difference is me. I no longer assume boisterous discussions are arguments. Where moving as a group once felt like an invasion, it now feels like family. My mother-in-law urging me to eat or sleep once seemed pushy, and now feels endearing. When no one remembers to translate, I ask someone to clue me in or just sit back and observe. When my back hurts from the hard bed, I speak up instead of suffering in silence. When everyone jokes that I can’t mange fish bones, I laugh at myself instead of feeling humiliated. I’m no longer embarrassed to walk around in my pajamas or bow out for a nap. I may still be clueless half the time, but I’ve crossed over.

When the family convened for the festivities this year, they were as loud as always. They roared out their new year greetings and bellowed over toasts and gambling games. My jovial husband the loudest of the loud Lau clan. I used to want to duck and cover, to escape, but their hilarity is infectious and it’s hard not to enjoy their joy. The food might be different from what I’m used to, but I witnessed the love and labor it takes to make it, and everyone’s pleasure in eating their favorite dishes makes me happy.

As for birthdays, I’ll still expect cake on mine, but I’m happy to eat noodles on my husband’s special day. And I wish you whichever you prefer, since today everyone gets a new start!

My intercultural marriage is never dull, but parts of it are mired in translation. 

My husband was born and raised in Hong Kong, educated in London and the USA, and spent most of his adult life in America. He is multilingual: Cantonese, Mandarin, a couple of dialects from his grandparents, English, and a smattering of French, German, and Korean (mostly food words—he loves to eat). I grew up in a white, suburban town in the USA. I speak English and a little high school Spanish. Here in Hong Kong, where we moved three years ago, it’s embarrassing to be me.

He’s an ethnomusicologist, and I’m a folklorist, which translates to two culture geeks fascinated by everyday stuff the majority doesn’t find important, like folk songs, superstitions, and proverbs. And because we’re both teachers, we’ve each benefitted from having a personal guide to the other’s culture. Or at least that was how I saw it when he was the foreigner on my home turf, and I was the expert. Now the tables are turned, and I’m more linguistically handicapped than he’s ever been.

I ask a lot of questions, and if I had a Hong Kong dollar, which isn’t worth much, for every time his answer started with There’s a Chinese saying for that, I’d be able to shop at the expat grocery store without flinching at the cost. Apparently, there is a Chinese saying for everything. It’s become a running joke between us that sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a fortune cookie. 

Let me give you an example. The other day when I missed seeing something obvious, he laughed and said, “Your eyes are too big.” When I looked at him blankly with my big eyes, he explained, There’s a Chinese saying that your eyes are so big you can’t see.” Extended blank look from me.

            “Wouldn’t big eyes make it more likely I’d see?” I asked. “Is that the same as you can’t see the forest for the trees?”

            “That’s the point, your eyes are too big! It makes sense to Chinese.” We probably continued in this vein, and I can assure you that if we did, we got nowhere. To get the last word, I may have added, “If it was a snake, it would have bit me.”

The linguistic tangles work in both directions. My husband is a master of Cantonese slang, swearing, and proverbs. He’s got American swearing and slang down for the most part, but proverbs are tricky. Once he tried to turn the tables on me in a playful spat by saying, “That’s the cow calling the cattle black.”

            “ What? You mean a kettle, not a cow.”

            “ No, a cow.”

            “ But not all cows are black”

            “But some of them are. Are all kettles black?”

You’ve got the idea and have probably guessed that his version is the one we now use. Marriages thrive on a shared language, even if it’s unintelligible to outsiders.

Shared jokes are one of the reasons I haven’t learned more than basic Cantonese. Well, that an atrophied American brain faced with all those tones and too many seemingly innocent words that become obscene if you use the wrong one (a crab, a shoe, and a slur for a female body part—I rest my case). I also blame it on silly appropriations. If you hear us snickering in front of a window full of roasted ducks, you can bet we’re recycling our “duk m duk” joke, which is our inside wordplay on the way Cantonese ask if something is okay.

Some linguistic tangles I can only admire. If my husband trips, which he is prone to do, he says he P.K’d. P.K. is an abbreviated form of a Cantonese expletive that literally means to fall in the street, or, in English, to drop dead. Neither of us wants that to happen, but applying a Cantonese metaphor literally is enough to trip anyone who isn’t an insider pro.

I should probably question why it’s the insults and swear words I remember in Cantonese. While I recognize the equivalents to some rude expressions in English, others baffle me. Calling someone a lump of rice or a sweet potato? Saying it would be better to have given birth to barbecued pork? You have to pull your pants down to fart? Colorful, yes, but you obviously have to grow up in a language for full impact. To get a sense of how embedded these kinds of sayings are, take a look at “The Great Canton and Hong Kong Proverbs,” produced by graphic designer Ah To and visually depicting eighty-one Cantonese proverbs. I got the gist only while the images alone had my husband guffawing.  Here’s the link: https://writecantonese8.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cantonese-proverbs-in-one-picture/

Sometimes the gulf between cultural meanings is more serious. While I was finishing my forthcoming memoir about my intercultural marriage, I asked my husband if I should ask for his family’s permission to talk about them in the book. He said, “They already know you’re writing a book.”

             “Shouldn’t I at least ask?”

             “Only an outsider would ask. It’s like you’re saying you’re not part of the family.”

             “I’m asking because I AM family, and I don’t want to offend them. I’m trying to show respect.”

             “They trust you, so the way they see it, why would you write anything that would upset them? “They’ll see it as being gin ngoi.

             “Which is?”

             “It’s a Chinese saying. Gin ngoi means you’re seeing yourself as such an outsider you don’t even know you’re doing it.

             “That doesn’t make any sense.”

              “It’s a cultural thing.”

In other words, if I do what I think is the right thing, I end up wrong in ways I can’t even figure out. Even if I can pronounce gin ngoi perfectly, and I can, I’m too gin ngoi to get it.

We’ve been doing this translation/interpretation dance for twenty plus years, and it’s ongoing. There are no gendered pronouns in Chinese, so the characters in my husband’s stories in English often become gender fluid, and I am forever interrupting to ask if he means he or she. I’m a former English teacher, but when he asks me to explain the rules and exceptions of American grammar, I find myself looking up idioms and proverbs I’ve never questioned. We’re both forced to think after we talk, if not before, if we want to be understood. It keeps things interesting even when we go in circles.

No doubt there’s a Chinese saying for that.

NOTE: My memoir, Rabbit in the Moon: A Memoir, will be released in April 2021 by Camphor Press. If you are interested in receiving pre-publication updates, please sign up for my mailing list on my website: https://heatherdiamondwriter.com/contact/

A story is supposed to unfurl and take us somewhere unexpected, but my father used to flip to the end of whatever book he picked up and read the ending first. “You ruin the surprise!” I protested. His response was always the same: “If I know how it ends, then I’ll know if I want to read the book.” I’m a former bookseller and college literature teacher, a writer and book lover. His reading quirk wasn’t nearly as offensive as people buying books by size and color (I’d had those customers in my bookstore), but it still seemed wrong to my mind. Looking ahead is cheating.

When I read and watch TV with my phone in hand, I tell myself it’s research. I do online searches while reading historical novels or watching documentaries because I want to know about the author or director. Sometimes I want more historical context or to know if book and film versions agree. I’m curious about what reviewers have to say.

This week I spent two evenings binge-watching A Suitable Boy, a Netflix miniseries based on a novel of the same name by Vikram Seth. I was confused about the family connections, so I looked up the characters. Wikipedia provided a lovely chart. Between episodes, I read about the casting and sets. I read about various awards for the book, how it has been called an Indian War and Peace, that the promised sequel has not yet appeared.

And then I cheated. Somewhere in the last two episodes, I skimmed and then read the plot summary. Why would I do such a thing? What about all my lectures about tension and suspense, my admonitions to my father that the joy of immersion dwells in our willingness to be led into unknown circumstances?

All I can say for myself is that the suspense was doing me in. I couldn’t wait to find out which of the three love interests the protagonists would choose. I knew which one I would choose, and I couldn’t bear the disappointment if she chose otherwise. I needed to know whether the stabbing victim would live or die because I couldn’t withstand the grief if he perished. I couldn’t change the outcomes, but maybe if I knew what was coming, I could be prepared.

When the last episode ended (you must watch for yourself—I know better than to spoil endings for others), I flipped to the US news: Covid cases spiraling, the presidential election in two days, televised flashbacks to 2000 and 2016 when many of us had our hearts broken by the election outcomes, foreign interference, conspiracy theories, armed militias, threats and lies. We are living with uncertainty upon uncertainty.

I suddenly wished I could tell my father I get it. I want to know how it all turns out. Do we conquer the virus? Does democracy survive? Do we get on with our lives together? Does love outweigh hate? I want to be prepared. I want to know if I should keep going or walk away from the story. Maybe this is why I love afterlife films and books where the protagonist dies in the first chapter or is already dead. The hard stuff is over, and the story can only go on or up from there.

I don’t know about you, but for me, this not going anywhere is getting strange. As if life in 2020 could get any stranger. I returned to Hong Kong at the tail end of July, and it’s now mid-October. While I was away, COVID-19 cases dwindled, and the protests died down (except for a few quickly squelched splutters). Despite a looming typhoon warning today, even the weather here has been static. A few degrees cooler at night, an erratic breeze, the same green, the midday heat.

Hong Kong is its usual old noisy self. Pile drivers, concrete drills, traffic, trains, vendors, people. Yet the city feels oddly muffled in the wake of the new security law making dissent illegal. On the CUHK campus, where we live, life is back to normal. Students are not yet meeting in classrooms, but they are here on the sidewalks and shuttle buses. Of course, now everyone now wears surgical masks wherever they go.

Despite the noise, Hong Kong feels as muzzled as it looks. On interior and exterior walls around campus, the ghostly outlines of protest posters and graffiti peek through fresh paint. Guards sit under awnings at every entrance, checking IDs. Nearby malls in Kowloon Tong and Shatin have been fitted with new, shatterproof, railings. The former Lennon Walls in Taipo, a riot of creative fury last fall, are stripped back to dirty white tile. When post-its appear, they are blank—a poignant statement about being silenced.

The seeming normalcy of the city, the heat, and the disquiet of the world at large make me feel like doing nothing. But doing nothing leads to mental and physical torpor. Escaping would be nice, but under current restrictions, we can’t return to Hong Kong without negative COVID-19 test results within 72 hours of departure and two-weeks quarantine in a hotel. For now, we’re grounded.

Since we can’t fly off to foreign destinations, the cure for our cabin fever and itchy feet is exploring closer to home. Walking is a good first step. Take that pun and stroll with it.

Last weekend we met a local couple in Fanling, a town a few stops away from us in the New Territories, for dim sum and an impromptu walk through the old town and beyond. Our stroll took us past a small and bear-bedecked temple to the mythical first emperor of China—Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. We wandered through shop-lined streets and beyond a thicket of high-rises under construction.

Within minutes, we were single file on concrete pathways winding through yellow creeping daisies and banana trees laden with fruit. City noise retreated, and butterflies the size of finches flitted over white ginger and red hibiscus. Amid all this lush greenery, we arrived at the remnants of a village. Overrun gardens, outdoor tables and chairs, and clotheslines mutely attested to recent human activity.

As we followed the path, our friend told us this area was all villages and gardens thirty years ago. Most of the residents relocated when the government and developers purchased the land for conversion to high-rises. At the edge of the village, he pointed to a hand-painted banner over a courtyard entrance and laughed. One of the hold-outs, he said, waiting for a better deal. The sign said the residents aren’t moving until they get the check.

Who needs museums and foreign destinations when there is so much contrast and information to discover nearby? And much as I enjoyed finding a pocket of quiet beyond the city, encountering a little defiance in its midst made me feel hopeful that Hong Kong people will always find a way to speak.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about authenticity. That thought came on the tail of a dream in which I was in a pink kitchen telling someone about why it wasn’t ok for a white woman to dress up in Chinese clothes and be part of a Chinese festival. As I explained, the festival played out like a movie. There were giant horses with normal size riders. The woman had dark blonde hair and was wearing a cheongsam. I was convinced and convincing in the dream.

That I laid awake for an hour thinking about authenticity probably had a lot to do with jet lag from flying back to Hong Kong after spending five months in my mother’s house.

It’s dislocating to travel between lives. My siblings and mother are there. My husband and cats are here. Because I think too much, or so I’ve always been told, I can work myself into a pity party of un-belonging on either end. Here I’m a foreign wife. There I’m the family defector, also a kind of foreigner. When I go there, it takes me a while to relearn the culture, to get with the program, to understand that life went on just fine without me. I’m guilty of either hovering in the background like a snooty anthropologist or jumping in and taking over like I’m the new CEO.

I went back to WA State to see my sister through chemo. I was a rotten older sister way back when, and I figured it was the least I could do. In the first weeks there were frictions with our ninety-four-year-old mother. I didn’t buy the right brands at the store. I put the wrong utensils in the dishwasher. My cooking was too salty, too one-dish, too rich, too much. I was presumptuous to think I could plant vegetables in her garden. I deprived her of her morning routine by filling her bird feeders. Her cat liked me better. She talked while I was reading, and I couldn’t think. I was snippy and defensive. I forgot I was sixty-seven and nursed my hurt feelings like I was ten.

Then we settled in. I tried to take up less space in her space, to remember that as an adult child in her house, I’m a guest and not a resident. To remember that even with family (especially with family), I need time out, time alone, downtime. To remember that being ninety-four is its own category of accomplishment and has its own rules. Or none. As the weeks went by, we watched the birds together. Raccoons and deer came to visit.

Now I am back in my flat and my marriage—still social distancing—and I have a different set of re-entry dislocations. The cats are either mad at me for my absence or they like my husband best. After months of enjoying nature, I’m not allowed outside for fourteen days of quarantine.  Which is just as well since the weather is hot and it’s typhoon season. I was the baking queen at my mother’s house, but here there is no AC in our kitchen and the oven is erratic. My clothes are crunchy because we have no dryer. It sounds like the upstairs neighbors are throwing bowling balls. I don’t know what to do with myself because the self that lives here doesn’t have family to tend and contend with.

Give me a week, and I’ll settle in.  I’ll be fine.

So what does all this have to do with authenticity? On the back side of my recent travel, here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe changing environments always requires a certain amount of performance while we figure out, or re-figure out, how to belong where we land. That makes us shape-changers, but not fakes. In the long run, maybe I don’t need place, people, expectations, and behaviors to line up before I can relax and be myself. Maybe there aren’t multiple me’s, and my authenticity is fluid, as present in the adjusting as the settling in.

It’s possible the woman in my dream was going about it all wrong or trying way too hard. But then again, maybe she was at home in herself and the world.

Yesterday Hong Kong recorded no new Covid 19 cases for the third time in a week while the United States was rocketing toward a million reported cases. Hong Kong people continue to go about their business while in the USA, many businesses are closed and people are staying home. Except, of course, for gun and sign-toting extremists who claim orders to stay home and cover their faces infringe on their personal liberty. As someone who lives in both places and writes about my experiences with Chinese versus American culture, I am stunned by the contrasts. What is going on?

In America, I hesitate to go out. My husband and I are planning our future house on Whidbey Island, and yesterday my youngest brother, who works for a developer, invited me to visit new houses on the “other side,” as islanders call the mainland here. He assured me no one had been to those sites in over a week. Normally I would jump at the chance. Then I thought about riding the ferry, the stay-at-home order still in effect, the fact that I am staying with my elderly mother and my sister who is undergoing chemo. Typhoid Mary popped into my head, and I decided to stay home. These times are plenty weird, but for me, the weirdest part was realizing that if I were still in Hong Kong, I would have gone. I would have donned a mask and taken the train, the subway, or a taxi. I might have even visited my elderly in-laws and eaten lunch in a restaurant. I would have been cautious, but not fearful. Not the kind of paranoia I am feeling in the USA.

So what’s the difference? I’d put my money on independence versus interdependence. As I’ve said before, Hong Kongers lived through SARS and MERS. They know the drill, so I trust everyone to protect themselves and me. Before masks were mandated in Hong Kong, only westerners chose to go out in public bare-faced (to be fair, some found themselves without a supply). Recently my husband (Hong Kong Chinese) told me that he took a taxi to a local eatery with a western colleague who was not wearing a mask. The driver said (in Cantonese, which the colleague doesn’t speak) that he was afraid to transport westerners because they weren’t following the recommended practices. Hongkongers see the mask as mutual protection.

I’m happy to say that when I venture out for groceries in our little corner of the Pacific Northwest, the majority of people are now wearing masks and many also wear gloves. Our supermarket allows only fifty people inside at a time and has erected plexi shields between shoppers and clerks. No home bags are allowed, and carts are being sanitized. All good, yet I am aghast at how long it took to adopt what was already working in Hong Kong. A mask had been part of my standard attire since January, but mask-wearing was still being stigmatized and discouraged in the US when I arrived in March. In a recent visit to the local bank with my sister, appointment only, I saw one teller who was unmasked and another wearing hers over only her mouth. The notary handed my sister an un-sanitized pen (my sister wisely brought her own). The bank could all have used a blast of Hong Kong’s ubiquitous infomercials on virus protection. My hands may feel like paper, but I’ll never wash them the same way again.

Many states in the US are now cautiously reopening for businesses. With spotty testing and endless misinformation from the government, no one knows if this is a good idea with regards to public health. It’s a lifeline thrown to people desperate to pay for food and housing after the closure of non-essential businesses in many states and in a country whose social safety nets are full of holes. By contrast, Hong Kong’s government closed borders and selectively closed bars, gyms, and karaoke parlors as well and limited government services where lines are inevitable. It banned public gatherings of more than four people and required restaurants to restrict the distance between tables and the number of people per table. This period has been hard on many small businesses, but for most people life has gone on.

If I return to Hong Kong now, I will be quarantined for fourteen days, and that’s ok. Early on, Hong Kong was able to quarantine patients and regulate visitors in ways that are challenging to impossible in the USA. One factor is that Americans value independence, but so do Hongkongers. Hong Kong was plunged into virus protection measures immediately after months of pro-democracy protests, and its Beijing-beholden government has recently used the new restrictions as a cover for arresting pro-democracy leaders (much like the US president has used this crisis to halt immigration and reverse environmental protections). That said, I’ll leave the political debates for others. I’m most interested in how this plays out in public and how independence is being interpreted in terms of “I” or “we.” We, in our homes, communities, or the world, will make it through this if everyone looks out for everyone. That’s interdependence. Wear the mask, wash your hands, don’t touch your face. Do it for yourself and others.

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