Our slow-motion Spring continues in Vancouver. The weather’s alternated between sunshine and rain, but it’s been consistently unseasonably cold. The cool weather has extended the seasons, slowing down the process of change. As I write, we have just finished the third and final wave of cherry blossoms, petals now coating the streets in what looks like pink snow, and the green of leaves now coming to the trees. We’ve had a friend visiting, and it’s always refreshing to see Vancouver again through an outsider’s eyes, to remind myself again of the natural beauty, and the pleasure of being connected to the rhythms of the natural world. Walk out to Stanley Park and you come to a heronry, over a hundred nests in trees that are still bare, but now full with clacking bills and building activity. Look up at the sky through the trees and the nests become tangles, knots in a network of branches that grow ever finer and thinner as they branch further out from the trunk. And for some reason I think of a conversation with a doctor friend about his father’s dementia, about the tau tangles that grew, invisible, in the brain.
As this change happens, I’ve hit pause. In one way my studies never quite seem to be over; just as I finished my courses, I had to hunt down paperwork from practicum sites, and then begin to assemble a portfolio of references and transcripts to apply for my Registered Clinical Counsellor status with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors. The process will be drawn out: I first formally graduate in the middle of May, then submit my application, and, when that’s approved, a process that I’ve been told could take six weeks, I have to undergo a new police record check. In a sense, then, the story I’ve been part of since I began prerequisite courses for the masters in the summer of 2016 continues. And yet the paperwork, while it can’t be rushed, doesn’t fill my days. People ask me what I’m doing, and I find it difficult to answer. I’m reading a little, writing a little, reworking some of the material that came out of my father’s death five years ago. And, with COVID-19 going through a lull in the public consciousness at least, we’ve been getting out more. Last weekend I saw another film, and then, for the first time in more than two years, a live play.
The movie was a documentary shown at SFU Harbourside, Angie Chen’s One Tree Three Lives, the story of the life of the novelist Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), her childhood in the Japanese Concession in Hankou, her young adult life in Taiwan, and her later life as co-founder of the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. Angie Chen was present, and she answered questions about her connection with Nieh Hualing, which goes back to her student days in Iowa. The documentary was beautifully made, and its title (which is clearer in Chinese： 一生三世, “one life three worlds”) perhaps suggests the central theme, the idea of moving from world to another, but always being, in Nieh Engle’s words, outside, 外, and being comfortable with this. The film was very empathic to its subject, and yet somehow it didn’t feel hagiographic: what I particularly liked was casual and unplanned moments of interaction which Chen somehow captured. Nieh Engle and the filmmaker and crew went to Taipei to find the area where her house had been decades before, and ran into a chatty construction foreman who thought she looked Japanese; Chen also captured a moment in Nieh Engle’s house in Iowa where she has an interaction with a contractor, claiming that he’s charging her too much, and yet both remain good-humoured. There’s something very disarmingly human about these moments of serendipity set against a huge sweep of history, the end of Word War II, the Chinese Revolution, the flight to Taiwan, and the thawing of the Cold War with American recognition of China after Nixon’s trip to Beijing. It’s a history that I fell into later: my first years in China and Taiwan, from 1986 to early 1988, were marked by the return of family members from Taiwan to the Mainland for the first time since 1949, and the death of Chiang Ching-kuo. And I, too, have lived most (and thinking back, all) of my life as someone who tried to belong and yet was often 外.
The play was Taran Kootenhayoo’s White Noise, at the Firehall Arts Centre. In Singapore terms, I sometimes think of much of the work at the Firehall as similar to TNS: drama that deals with important social issues, yet attempts to do so in an approachable way. The play, produced by Savage Society, had a great premise: a First Nations family, whose son has made a fortune in creating a popular app, move into a fancy Point Grey house, and are invited to dinner by a White family. Tension slowly builds, and let’s just say truth and reconciliation are a lot more complex than the White family imagines at first. The play was really tightly plotted, funny but also hard-hitting, and I was sorry to learn about Kootenhayoo’s death last year.
It is useful to take this time to be open to possibilities, and not to rush to planning, as I always did in the past. I’m looking around. Later in May, I’ll go to the UK for two weeks, and visit my parents’ graves, and see friends and my sister. In June I’ll be back here, and then in late July I’ll go back to Singapore for five months. My life isn’t as tidy as Nieh Hualing’s, with its roots in China, trunk in Taiwan, and then branching out in America. Mine seems rather to be a series of spurts of growth, and then returns: an untidy thicket rather than a stately tree. In England, Canada, and Singapore, I find myself in a state of belong and not belonging, although in different ways. I left England long ago, and people do not quite know what to make of me when I go there now: how I dress, the way that I talk that is inflected elsewhere. In Vancouver, now my wardrobe’s changed, I can pass as Canadian until I open my mouth. And then, I still remember in Singapore the last time I returned by myself, picking up a taxi at the airport and getting into conversation with the taxi driver, mixing Mandarin and something like Singlish, and him suddenly saying, despite the way I appeared, “you’re local.” But these moments of belonging, I know, are temporary at best. In Angie Chen’s film, she interviews many other Chinese-language writers about Nieh Huiling. One is Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇) whose short story collection 台北人 (Taipei People) – about, paradoxically, mainlanders in exile in Taiwan — I read eagerly when my Chinese was at its best. For Pai, this outsideness he detects in Nieh, and which informs his own practice, is essential to a writer’s life. And perhaps, I think, this outsideness, this 外字 is also found on all the branches of my futures, and my own struggle to live rightly in this world.