But Nan was merely forty, and still had many years of life ahead. What should he do next? Work hard to acquire another business? Absolutely not. Of that he was certain. He didn't want to die a successful businessman.
Nan remembered the credo he had repeated to Danning six years before: Do something moneyed people cannot do. The memory occasioned a sudden pang in his heart. It seemed that he had forgotten his goal and gotten lost in making money. Why hadn't he devoted himself to writing poetry? Instead, all these years he had been working like a brainless machine. He tried to convince himself that this "detour" might be a necessary procedure, a step toward some achievement of higher order, since logically speaking, only after you were fed and sheltered could you mull over ideas and enjoy the leisure needed for creating arts. Yet his disappointment wouldn't abate, its heaviness weighing down his mind.
He couldn't help fulminating against himself mentally. "You've been living like a worm and exist only in the flesh. You're just a channel of food, a walking corpse." He was so irascible these days that his wife and son again avoided eating with him at the same table.
2
SHUBO often came in to give Nan World Journal after he himself had read it. If the restaurant wasn't busy, the two of them would chat at length. One afternoon, Nan told his friend that he should have spent more time writing poetry, Shubo shook his balding head and said, "You're too impractical."
"Why should I be practical?" countered Nan. "The world has been created by impractical people."
"I mean, you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew."
"If you speak Chinese, you don't need to mix in English idioms. When did you learn that expression, yesterday?" Nan felt his temper rising.
"See, that's exactly your problem," Shubo said, and took a swallow of oolong tea.
"What are you getting at?"
"You're impatient and always talk and act as if your bottom were on fire."
Nan hated that expression and asked, "What do you mean by 'impatient'?"
"We're new here and cannot go a million miles in one life. Writing poetry can be a profession only for your grandchildren. For example, I don't think Taotao will write poetry. You want him to study science to earn a meal ticket, don't you?"
" Maybe, but that has nothing to do with my life. "
"Forget about your life. You're supposed to sacrifice yourself for your children, who are an extension of your life and who will do the same for their children. That's how we Chinese survive and multiply-each generation lives for the next."
"That's why children must be filial to their parents, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Guess what, I don't buy into that crap. Why should I sacrifice myself? I'm done sacrificing-I've had enough. Besides, 'sacrifice' is just an excuse for our cowardice and laziness. My son has his life and I must have mine." Nan wanted to remind Shubo that he didn't even have a child and was unqualified to talk about parental sacrifice, but he held back.
" Nan, you're too impatient. In your life span you want go through the course of three generations. You'll be better off if you scale down your ambition. If you really want to write, do it in Chinese. That will be more reasonable."
"I don't want to be reasonable," sneered Nan. "We're too often emasculated by reason and pragmatism."
"We shouldn't continue talking like this, going in circles. All I'm saying is that one must be financially secure first and then think about making arts or writing books. In other words, it takes generations for the immigrants to outgrow the material stage."
"That's a philistine mentality," said Nan.
"No, it's the American way. Remember, Ben Franklin's father forbade his son to be a poet, saying most verse makers were just beggars?"
"Then Franklin 's dad was a major American philistine," Nan said crossly, his long eyes glinting. "I don't believe artists starve in America. I've met many of them. They can be poor and wretched, but they don't starve. Take Dick Harrison for example, he's living a good life by being a poet."
" Nan, you're too stubborn. Dick's great-grandparents came to the States last century. Like I said, your grandchildren will be able to live Dick's kind of life, but that's not for us."
" So we have to compromise?"
"Do we have another choice?"
Niyan came over and put their checkbook in front of her husband, who was off work today. Their air conditioner had been struck by lightning the night before, and a technician was scheduled to come and look at it at three o'clock. Shubo rose and stretched up his arms, then rubbed the small of his back with both hands.
He'd suffered a backache recently, having to do a ten-hour shift six days a week at Grand Buddha. "We'll talk more about this next time," he told Nan, and thrust the checkbook into his pocket, ready to leave.
Nan grimaced without speaking.
3
NAN decided to write poetry again. It seemed he couldn't get anywhere if he continued writing in Chinese. Obscure and unpublished, he was completely isolated from the Chinese writers' community, which was centered in New York. In Toronto there was also a group of novelists who, though having emigrated, were still writing in their mother tongue and sending their works back to China for publication, but their manuscripts were often censored there or rejected on the grounds that the subject matter wasn't right. In Nan 's case, it was clear that writing in Chinese would lead him to a dead end. Could he do it in English? The same old question again tormented him these days. He knew that to him Chinese meant the past and English the future, the identification with his son. He also understood that by adopting another language he might wander farther away from his Chinese heritage and have to endure more loneliness and run more risk; eventually he might have to estrange himself from his mother tongue, in which a writer of his situation, in fact all writers in the Chinese diaspora, would be marginalized. But to write poetry in English was like climbing a mountain with a summit he couldn't see or envision. It was very likely that he might mess up his life without getting anywhere. Still, was there another way if he was determined to write?
The following Thursday when Dick came for lunch, Nan asked his friend to give him a list of books of contemporary poetry in English that he should know. Without hesitation Dick wrote eleven titles on the notepad Nan had placed before him. They included:
Darker, Mark Strand
Scream! Sam Fisher
The Fortunate Traveller, Derek Walcott
Descending Figure, Louise Gluck
The Book of the Body, Frank Bidart
An Explanation of America, Robert Pinsky
North, Seamus Heaney
Elsewhere, Linda Dewit
The Ether Dome and Other Poems, Allen Grossman
Dien Cai Dau, Yusef Komunyakaa
An Appointment in the Afternoon, Richard Harrison
"Thanks, thanks," Nan said. He tore off the sheet and folded it carefully. "I've made up my mind to write in English." "Good. You've been dillydallying too long," Dick said. "Do you sink I can make it eventually?" "Depends on what you mean by 'make it.' "