Man in the Empty Boat Read online

  Here’s how I became a writer. After I’d returned from China, friends and family encouraged me to write down some of the experiences I’d had there. I loved telling those stories, but it never occurred to me to write them down, because I’d never enjoyed writing. Writing had always felt more or less like a chore to me, a school assignment that had to be fulfilled so that a person could move on to the next level of school. Come to think of it, education in general often seemed to me to be like a giant spanking machine. You crawled your way through it simply to prove that you could make it through; at the end, you got your diploma and your life could finally begin.

  In middle school and high school, I rarely read books unless I had to, or unless they contained information that I thought would bring me closer to my goal of enlightenment. My lack of interest in reading for pleasure gave way abruptly during the spring break of my sophomore year at college. Rather than go home for the two weeks, I decided to stay in the dorm by myself so that I could study Chinese day and night without any interruptions. After about a week of this Scrooge-like experiment, and after eating a lot of canned food warmed up on a hot plate, I started to feel lonely. In our dorm room, one of my roommates had installed a beanbag chair in the corner, and on that ugly, red lump sat a paperback book. The cover art showed a man wearing a World War II pilot’s helmet, which appealed to me. Like most boys of my generation, I’d grown up building plastic and balsa-wood models of World War II airplanes and had always been fascinated by stories about World War II airmen, so I opened the book and decided to give it a try. The book was The World According to Garp by John Irving, and I didn’t get up from that beanbag chair until I was half done with it.

  When I did get up, I was angry. At the halfway point of the story, something terrible happens. This turn of events, which involved two children, was so upsetting to me that I slammed the book closed and stalked around the dormitory in a rage. I was furious at the author for planting that awful scene in my mind, and I cursed the fact that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remove it from my imagination. What sort of cruel, sick person would want to put readers through this? Why wasn’t there a warning on the cover? This experience ruined my spring break. I couldn’t study at all after that; I was haunted by that scene and by the tragic scenarios that unfolded in my head in its wake. I couldn’t turn it off. And I threw that goddamned book in the garbage. I didn’t care that it wasn’t mine.

  A month later, I went to a bookstore and bought another copy of that goddamned book. I just had to know how it ended, I couldn’t stand not knowing any longer. I read the second half in another marathon session on the beanbag chair, and what a relief it was to get to the end. The author somehow resolved the terrible dissonance he’d created, and I got up from the chair feeling as if I had awakened into a new world, a world transfigured by horrifying beauty, by randomness, by mysterious order, by hate, by love, and by just about everything else. It was a confusing experience, but it was sublime. After that, I started reading for pleasure, and the authors I remember enjoying most during that time were Loren Eiseley, Willa Cather, E. B. White, Robertson Davies, and Frans G. Bengtsson.

  Writing was another matter. Unlike reading, composition was slow and deliberate. Since the words were coming out of my own head, I never felt surprised by them. Because I rarely put more than the minimum required effort into what I wrote, the finished product brought me little satisfaction. But when I started writing about what had happened to me in China, I felt differently. These were stories that I enjoyed telling, so I had a basic confidence in the material. But the first few drafts I wrote came out awful. What was I doing wrong?

  I discovered that writing a story isn’t the same as telling it. Composition has its own requirements and its own set of rules. It bothered me that the stories didn’t read well on the page. It became an itch that I had to scratch until the itch had gone away.

  The painstaking ordeal of rewriting over and over again didn’t feel like a chore anymore. It felt like a necessity. If you were cooking a roast for someone and could see that the meat was still frozen in the middle, you wouldn’t serve it just because it was dinnertime. You’d keep that thing in the oven until it had thawed out and cooked. That’s what you’d do, and that’s how I felt about getting those first stories right. I didn’t have to force myself to sit down and work on them; I felt pulled toward my desk and my ancient manual typewriter. And when, at last, I was satisfied with them, I felt as good as I’d ever felt when practicing martial arts—maybe even better. That’s how writing saved me when my back gave out, and when those stories about China were published in 1987 under the title Iron & Silk—and received positive reviews and led to my being chosen as the subject of a Dewar’s Scotch ad—that’s when I decided that the life of a writer was the life for me.

  Seven

  I MET MY SOUL MATE the same year I started writing. A mutual friend introduced us, thinking we would have a lot in common because Jessica Yu was a fencer and fifth-generation Chinese-American. He invited us over for dinner at his apartment, and I took a liking to Jessica right away, in spite of the fact that she listened to punk rock, wore a pair of homemade earrings showing a cow being struck by a car, and topped it all off with a disheveled Mohawk. She had a dark sense of humor and a gift for storytelling, but most intriguing of all to me was the fact that she had clearly not been raised by rabbits. She was only nineteen years old but had the self-confidence and poise of someone decades older.

  Unfortunately, my friend’s inexperience as a matchmaker became evident when we learned that Jessica already had a boyfriend. This gave me an opportunity to demonstrate my persistence. Rabbits can’t bust down doors, but they can gnaw through almost anything. I found out that Jessica, who was an undergraduate at Yale at the time, was taking a course in modern Chinese literature from a professor I knew. After waiting several months so as to avoid seeming obvious, I convinced the professor to let me visit the class as a guest lecturer to discuss life in contemporary mainland China. A few months later, I gave a demonstration of traditional Chinese sword techniques for the Yale fencing team. Then, exactly one year after that initial dinner, I heard from our mutual friend that Jessica and her boyfriend had split up. I called her right away and asked if she would join me for a drink to celebrate my birthday the following night. She sounded more perplexed than delighted but was too polite to say no.

  At that time, I drove what I could afford, which was a rusted-out 1967 Volkswagen Bug that had a giant hole in the floorboards, no heat, and windshield wipers that didn’t work. The night of our first date—my twenty-sixth birthday—the car wouldn’t start after I’d dropped Jessica off at her apartment. I tried to jump-start it by pushing it down the street in the snow as fast as I could, hopping inside, and then popping the clutch. Twenty minutes later, one of her housemates glanced outside the window and asked, “Isn’t that the guy you had dinner with?” They watched me until I’d pushed the car out of sight.

  On our third date, during a freezing rain, the locks on the doors froze shut while we were having dinner. I had to borrow a lighter from someone in the restaurant and hold the flame under the door handles until the ice melted. Then I had to drive home with the window down so that I could keep the windshield clear by wiping it with my hand.

  The biggest problem I faced, though, wasn’t my crappy ride or my starving-artist lifestyle. It was having to overcome a cultural stereotype. White guys who have dedicated themselves to the study of Asian philosophy, language, and martial arts often come with baggage. If their attraction to traditional Asian culture is based on a combination of fantasy and misplaced idealism, they may be tempted to project versions of those fantasies onto contemporary Asian females, who have no interest in behaving like Tokugawa-era courtesans.

  Jessica needn’t have worried. Guys who fit that description tend to avoid Ivy League–educated athletes with nearly shaven heads who listen to Stiff Little Fingers and have pictures of Tommy Hearns hung over their desks. And I had lived i
n China for two years, where the spectacle of brass-throated women berating their husbands in public—with delighted onlookers cheering them on—was a common occurrence. I had no misconceptions about Chinese women being submissive. Still, I understood what I was up against and figured, since I’d already waited a year, what was the rush? She kept me at arm’s length for a while but eventually decided to give me a chance.

  Our personalities complemented each other in ways that made for a lively but stable combination. The main thing, I think, is that because she had such deep reserves of self-confidence, she could enjoy my company without needing it—and she didn’t expect or want me to need hers. Emotional drama wasn’t her thing, and her untroubled presence made me feel less troubled myself.

  We dated for two years before she graduated in 1987, then we moved to San Francisco, an hour’s drive from where Jessica had been raised and where her parents still lived. The more time I got to spend with them, the more I liked them—and I’d liked them from the beginning. Her father, John, had been born in Shanghai and raised in the Philippines, where he experienced the horrors of war as a child during the Japanese occupation. He was an academic prodigy, which led to his enrollment at Stanford medical school at age nineteen. He chose oncology as his specialty and did his residency at Sloan-Kettering hospital in Manhattan, but instead of going into private practice, he joined the fledgling Kaiser hospital in Santa Clara in hopes of being part of a movement in the United States toward socialized medicine. Jessica’s mother, Connie, was a fourth-generation Chinese-American whose father was a graduate of the Stanford School of Engineering who served as an officer of the U.S. Army during World War II. Connie became an antiwar activist during the Vietnam War, but her parents did not interfere with her choice and their relationship was preserved. Connie stayed home to raise the three children—Jennifer, Jessica, and their brother, Marty—but still found time to become a published historian and a fencing coach.

  Both John and Connie had been raised Catholic. During high school, John became very serious about religion and even considered joining the priesthood, but he chose medicine instead. Then, during the Vietnam War, when the Church refused to condemn America’s role in that conflict, both he and Connie stopped attending services. As the war dragged on, they stopped believing in God. Jessica and her siblings, like me, were raised without religion.

  The fact that I was not Chinese was never an issue for Jessica’s parents. They’d campaigned for George McGovern, rooted for the 49ers before the team had won any Super Bowls, and named their only son after Martin Luther King—they were ethnic Californians, for heaven’s sake. And besides, I could speak Chinese with Jessica’s grandparents, all four of whom lived in the area. I was a shoo-in for the Promising Boyfriend role.

  While I began work on a novel, Jessica launched her career as a filmmaker with a job arranging pasta on forks for a frozen foods commercial. We got married in a Japanese garden with Jessica’s Uncle Al—a Chinese-American race car driver, how cool is that?—serving as our celebrant. And then, in 1989, we moved south to Los Angeles. We were young artists in love, we could beat anyone on our block in a sword or spear fight, and we owned a Toyota Corolla with windshield wipers that worked. What could go wrong?

  Eight

  I’LL TELL YOU WHAT COULD go wrong: She turned out to be more talented than me. I know, I know—your heart bleeds. Being married to a great talent is a problem most people would love to have, and it’s a problem that I certainly do love having now, but before having children, and as each of my books seemed to take longer and longer to write and seemed to sell fewer and fewer copies, it was hard sometimes to look across the living room and watch her work—usually on several projects at once. She is to creativity what Old Faithful is to geysers: bountiful, inexhaustible, and . . . well, faithful. She delivers every day, rain or shine, on time and under budget. I, on the other hand, am more like a drain with roots growing in it: prone to restricted flow and aggravating blockages.

  In 1996, she was nominated for an Academy Award for a short-subject documentary film she’d made called Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien. It’s about a writer who contracted polio as a child during the epidemic of the mid-1950s. The disease left him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own. He had to spend most of his life in a Jules Verne–ian contraption called an iron lung, with only his head protruding from one end of the vacuum chamber. After teaching himself to write by typing with a stick that he held in his mouth, he earned a degree from Berkeley and went on to publish regularly as a journalist and poet. Sandy Close, his editor and longtime friend, thought a film ought to be made about him, and she thought Jessica would be the right person to make it. She made the introductions and with Mark’s blessing, Jessica produced, directed, and edited the film herself on a miniscule budget. In case you didn’t watch the Oscars that year, I’ll describe what happened.

  “And the award goes to . . . Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien. Director: Jessica Yu.”

  Jessica made her way to the stage while I craned my neck to see her over the top of Nicole Kidman’s hairdo. Muhammad Ali and George Foreman were sitting together only a few rows away. I felt as if I had awakened to find myself in the hall of Valhalla, just in time to see my wife shed her mortal form and take her place in the firmament. Jessica accepted the statue from Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and then said to nearly a billion viewers around the world, “You know you’ve entered new territory when you realize that your outfit cost more than your film.”

  I’ve been asked many times if that line was true. The answer is yes, but with an asterisk. The outfit cost us nothing. The dress was a loaner from a designer, the diamond jewelry borrowed from Harry Winston in Beverly Hills. The value of the outfit, however, did exceed the total production cost of her film by a margin of four to one.

  Immediately following the program, the nominees and their guests moved to a large banquet hall adjacent to the theater for the Governors Ball, the Academy’s official celebration. The room was crammed with movie stars and their entourages. Jessica’s parents sat with us at our table, and they were ecstatic. Connie, my mother-in-law, said that when Jessica got up on stage and the monitors overhead showed us what television viewers all over the world were seeing, she felt overcome by emotion. She suddenly remembered being a little Chinese-American girl in San Francisco, watching the Oscars with her parents on a black-and-white television set in the 1950s. None of the faces that appeared on the screen ever looked like hers or any of her relatives’. Celebrities didn’t have single-fold eyelids in those days. Now look whose face was on the screen! Her own daughter’s.

  Just as the dinner entrée was served, a publicist for the event came to fetch Jessica and lead her around the room to be photographed with the other award winners. “It’s for the archives,” she explained. “You won’t need your purse, Ms. Yu—just bring the Oscar.”

  Jessica’s parents weren’t going to miss this. They went with her, while I got the assignment of staying at the table and watching her purse. The other people at our table had after-parties to attend, so they took off a few minutes later. It was just me and the floral centerpiece.

  Husbands who have had to watch their wives’ purses agree that it is a challenging task. How do you convey to strangers that the purse belongs in your care—you aren’t stealing it—yet it is definitely not yours? The trick, I think, is to manage to look both aggrieved and nonchalant at the same time. I stuck the purse on the empty seat next to me, stared at my dessert fork, and pretended to be glad of the chance to have a quiet moment to myself. This was fine for forty minutes or so, but when I had to use the bathroom, my anxiety peaked. Here I was, in the same room as Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and I was about to pass by their tables holding a purse. A small, sparkly purse. And this was before BlackBerrys, cell phones, and other personal electronic devices had come along, when men never carried anything in public.

  I held it away from my b
ody with my thumb and index finger. I intended to look purposeful, like someone who had spotted the object on the ground and was bringing it to the lost-and-found desk. I hurried past the manly role models of my youth and found, to my relief, that the men’s room was empty. But before I could finish, the door opened behind me and Al Pacino—who had presented the Best Picture award that night—stepped inside. He glanced at me, then at the purse, and then he moved as far away from me as he could, to the farthest stall. After washing my hands, I stuffed the purse under my coat jacket and held it under my armpit, and that’s where it stayed until the Governors Ball ended.

  On our way home that night, Jessica took off the Harry Winston bracelet and held it up under our car’s overhead light while I drove. The diamonds cast glittering, rainbow-hued images all over the interior of the car. We teased each other about the fact that there was something Cinderella-ish about the way the night had ended: The jewelry and dress had to be returned, we were taking our desserts home in a doggie bag (chocolate Oscar statues dipped in gold flake), and our car—the Toyota Corolla, by then nine years old—had indeed resembled a pumpkin coach when the valet attendants brought it up for us. The actor Red Buttons and a group of his friends had been chatting with us on the curb, congratulating Jessica on her brilliant acceptance speech, when our dust-streaked sedan pulled up between a stretch limo and a town car.

  The spell was broken, but we still had the Oscar with us and an outfit that was worth more than our house. Jessica held the bracelet right up close to her eyes and looked through the diamonds. “You’ve got to try this!” she gasped. She took control of the steering wheel for me so I could have a peek, and against the night sky the vision was truly spectacular—I felt as if I were floating inside the heart of a star cluster.