with strong voices, passions, pageants

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once but leave before it makes you soft. --Baz Luhrman.

Over the last three years, I have acquired many big-city homes—London, Beijing, Qingdao, and DC—with DC being the smallest at half a million and Beijing the largest at 14 million. Even the streets of Manhattan felt a bit like home when I visited in August and was comforted by the sight of a bagel shop, a sushi restaurant, a BBQ joint, and a Korean grocery store all on the same block across from my grandma’s apartment—a kind of homecoming after 6 months in more-homogenous China. New York is my dad’s rejected homeland, after all; “I’m Midwestern by choice,” he says. It is a place I come back to, again and again, and I feel wrong if I don’t visit once a year, maybe to remind myself that it’s still there. But my dearest home--not a city, at all--remains little Ann Arbor, with her wide streets and green trees arching overhead, with bookstores and bars and a world of restaurants... Home is the place you go away from and come back to.

Last March when I was living in Qingdao, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, an intensely beautiful, epic story, full of weighty words that paint a vibrant picture of life in Latin America. While sitting in my 14th floor apartment overlooking Fuzhou Beilu and barges on the distant horizon, I found something comic and strangely wonderful about reading Marquez—surrounded not by parrots and palm fronds and Spanish, but by gingko trees and cherry blossoms, emerging infrastructure and mounds of rubble, the weight of sharp Chinese tones and of filmy pollution being blown away by the hazy mist off the sea.

Now, on the other side of the world, I find myself amongst a mildly similar contrast—reading Charlie Baxter’s Saul & Patsy and Fuchsia Dunlop’s chili-soaked memoir, Shark Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet & Sour Memoir of Eating in China. These two books, as profoundly different as they are, bring out a sense of “home” for me like neither could on its own.

Dr. Baxter was my mom’s professor at Wayne State before he began his career at U of M and is the Garrison Keillor of Michigan, arguably our poet-laureate (even though he recently retreated to Minneapolis). He writes about Michigan’s landscape, people, and nuances with dexterity, thoughtfulness, understanding, and a sincere reverence for the beautiful peculiarities that make this place inimitable.

At the same time, I’ve been reliving the three lazy, haze-filled days I spent in Chengdu last July, while I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan food memoir. My former professor, Kevin Miller, lived in China for several years and recommended Dunlop’s books to me last fall. I think he understood, in his quiet, awkward way, that I was urgently, frantically, trying to hold onto something—onto anything I could from my time in China, even if I’m not planning on enrolling in cooking school in Chengdu like Dunlop did (in 1994, when there were even fewer laowai (foreigners) in China and there were certainly no laowai women at a Sichuan culinary academy.)

Reading Dunlop’s book in my carpeted bedroom here in Michigan, in Meiguo, makes my head rush with memories of faces and sounds and tastes of Chinese chaos. I can only read a few pages at a time before I am overwhelmed with a strange homesickness.

A similar power of contrast holds true for this poem by Walt Whitman. It is the differences between the language, the imagery, and the pacing of the first half and the second that brings out the beauty of each. And it is a beauty I have been toying with a great deal lately. Part of me is forever fascinated by the intensity of cities like Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York—with their passions and pageants—while the other, quieter part of me daydreams about owning a vineyard in Napa, about running off to Spain or New Zealand, where I will ride a motorbike and stare at fluffy sheep-clouds and harvest grapes all day long in the splendid, silent sun.

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

--Walt Whitman

1

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow'd grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape,

Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching

content,

Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the

Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can

walk undisturb'd,

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire,

Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the

world a rural domestic life,

Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears

only,

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal

sanities!

These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and

rack'd by the war-strife,)

These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,

While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,

Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,

Where you hold me enchain'd a certain time refusing to give me up,

Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich'd of soul, you give me forever

faces;

(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,

see my own soul trampling down what it ask'd for.)

2
Keep your splendid silent sun,
Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets--give me these phantoms incessant and
endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes--give me women--give me comrades and
lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day--let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching--give me the sound of
the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments--some starting away, flush'd
and reckless,
Some, their time up, returning with thinn'd ranks, young, yet very
old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
torchlight procession!
The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.