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.

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

In this country, in this world, there are a lot of lonely, unfulfilled people. We breed fear in the American suburbs and isolate ourselves from our neighbors--both next-door and across international boundaries--and in our cities, we don’t know the faces on either side of our apartments’ walls.

Now that winter has settled-in and the remains of the hollow, frenetic holiday season have long dissipated, all we’re left with is a cold, hard, loneliness. And as a possible antidote we have... Valentine’s Day.

Like the holiday season, it, too, has largely lost its meaning and luster.

When I look towards lovey-dovey day this year, I have a new association: a dark, unfamiliar city; a clanky, janky bus; a language I can (still) neither speak nor read; and a steamy huo guo restaurant where I shared hot pot with Stella, Tracy, Yolanda, and Kelly on my first full day in Qingdao. Everything was foreign then, but the warmth offered to me by that food and those faces over the following months is enough to keep me full on nights that now seem even darker.

So for all of you who are feeling cold--inside and out--I wish I could take you for hot pot. It does wonders. But instead, some written love from e. e. cummings will have to do.

When I read this poem, I think I interpret it differently than the author intended. Because when I think about "love," I don’t think about one time or one place or one person. I imagine every face--however unlikely, however far away--that I can’t go a day without thinking about, even now. I carry all of you(in my heart).

i carry your heart with me

--e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster

This poem is one of my favorite life-mantras. We've all had that moment when we realize, immediately after walking out the door, that our keys are still inside. For just those times, I've been trying to memorize this poem--and others--so I can recall these words when I'm uncontrollably flustered and can't seem to accept that shit happens.

I also like how this poem turns at the beginning of the last stanza. Losing is one thing when we're talking about a watch, or even a house. But we let people go, too, and often with a cold nonchalance better left to keys. Why is it that with lost objects we feel as if the world is crashing down around us, but with people, we just let them go?

Finally, there's Bishop's interjection in the last line. Sometimes I'm not sure I like it, but it has to be there; it makes the poem. Writing really is the salvation.

Posting this poem seemed especially fitting now, when I am in constant flux--always staying, going, leaving, losing.

One Art

--Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained

One week into The Post and I’m already behind. Insert comment on Miriam-lateness here.

Ok, here’s a real-life conversation from last week…

Me: I was supposed to be born in mid-October, so I was a few days early.

Allison: You? Early?! I guess it happened that one time aaaand it’s never happened since! (buh dum chh)

I didn’t post on Monday, as promised, because I was sick and still went to work. Bad move. I’m paying for it now. I dragged myself to a clinic this afternoon to find out what's wrong (I've been sick three times in four weeks; turns out I have a sinus infection and an ear infection) and then I went on a quest for the ultimate medicine: Matzah ball soup.

Whenever I'm sick, all I want is chicken soup. My dad sent me a bunch of Hanukkah presents last month, including a gift card for a delicatessen in Tenleytown, so I managed to get carry-out today. I cashed in big-time--two containers of matzah ball soup, a turkey melt, an everything bagel, blintzes, rugelach, and a Dr. Brown’s cream soda. Now I have enough food to last me through the weekend--and hopefully through this illness.

So my question for you is: What are your favorite comfort foods??! And why? (This seems like the kind of question my roommate would like. She's moving out tomorrow and it’s going to get lonely around here!!)

My comfort foods are:

*Mom’s chicken soup with acini di pepe

*Mom’s polenta with spicy Italian sausage

*Mom’s roast beef and mashed potatoes

*Mom’s cornbread and Irish soda bread

*Mom’s oatmeal (notice a trend here?)

*Chinese food--onion pancakes, rou chuan, guan guan mien from Tai Dong, etc.

*And of course, kreplach or matzah ball soup

Comfort foods remind us of where we're from... So what are your favorites?

This poem has been one of my favorites since Mrs. Greenbaum’s Advanced Writing class senior year. It was a great class--probably my favorite at Groves. We wrote a lot. We read a lot--both poetry and prose--and I knew I loved Mrs. Greenbaum when we read a short story by Charlie Baxter, who was my mom’s professor in college. Emily, Caitlyn, Kate, and I were in the class together, which gives me the warm fuzzies because Caitlyn and I had brunch in Woodley last week, and almost exactly a year ago, Emily and I were in Southeast Asia.

I like the simplicity of this poem and how everyday it is--like a snapshot out of Alan Dugan’s life. It makes me think of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and of being in New York--one of the places I'm from, in a way.

And most of all, as a perpetually-late Libra, I like the imperfect metaphor of perfect balance.

Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli
--Alan Dugan
This is the time of night at the delicatessen
when the manager is balancing
a nearly empty ketchup bottle
upside-down on a nearly full ketchup bottle
and spreading his hands slowly away
from the perfect balance like shall I say
a priest blessing the balance, the achievement
of perfect emptiness, of perfect fullness? No,
this is a kosher delicatessen. The manager
is not like. He is not like a priest,
he is not even like a rabbi, he
is not like anyone else except the manager
as he turns to watch the waitress
discussing the lamb stew with my wife,
how most people eat the whole thing,
they don’t take it home in a container,
as she mops up the tables, as the
cashier shall I say balances out? No. The computer does all that. This
is not the time for metaphors. This is the time
to turn out the lights, and yes,
imagine it, those two ketchup bottles
will stand there all night long
as acrobatic metaphors of balance,
of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained,
of any metaphor you wish unless
the manager snaps his fingers at the door,
goes back, and separates them for the night
from that unnatural balance, and the store goes dark
as my wife says we should take a cab
or walk, the stew is starting to drip already.
Shall I say that the container can not
contain the thing contained anymore? No.
Just that the lamb stew is leaking all across town
in one place: it is leaking on the floor of the taxi-cab,
and that somebody is going to pay for this ride.