On the First 46 Pages of David Shih's Chinese Prodigal A Memoir in Eight Arguments

I can’t talk about David’s book as a whole here because that would be like trying to explain New York City to you in a single breath. He has taken on personal narrative, the complexities of being Chinese in America, of being not-Black, not-White, and language.

I haven’t gotten to the end yet. The problem is I can’t stop rereading the beginning. The last time I felt like this was when I first read Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion. Those sentences! How did she do that? It was then I became aware of the similarities between surgery and writing, how words and white space can be both scalpel and flesh.

David wrote, “I didn’t think my first book would come out so belatedly in my career, but now I hope I know why. These days I keep a slip of paper taped to my computer monitor with quotations I like. The words belong to James Baldwin. A few years before his death, Baldwin was asked by an interviewer what experience had taught him about writing. ‘You learn how little you know,’ he replied. ‘It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.’ I took him to mean that your bad writing told on you because to be a coherent writer is to know who you are, which comes with facing down your fears. The tendency to not do that, to not face down your fears and know who you are, is a peculiarly American dishonesty, Baldwin knew, which explains why it was a part of my life for so long.”

I was in Garrett Hongo’s MFA program at the University of Oregon with David forever ago, and I have loved his writing since day one. He is careful and loving and smart and surprising, and the long wait for this book is so worth it. I had to write something about Prodigal Son for you before I became so overwhelmed and could write nothing. The point of this post is to tell you to get the book yourself so you can see what it’s all about.

”My long education had taught me that words were deeds. It promised that you could build a life out of language, one I now didn’t want to quit. At some point I began to believe that each word I spoke or read or heard was a solution in its own right. I was like a scribing Puritan or a senator in a filibuster. In me, my father got not what he needed but what he had blessed: an American son with the ability to tell him no in a thousand ways when it mattered the most.”

I take so much pleasure in retyping David’s sentences here. Look! Take the following paragraph and type it your own damn self and see how it feels:

“‘It was your father’s decision,’ my mother revealed. ‘I wanted all of you to learn Chinese, but her said no.’ I suppose he hoped to spare us the same fear he had speaking English, to smash that barrier to real problem-solving, leaving not a single trace of the old country in our syntax or idioms or the way we said a word like ‘particularly’. It would be a clean break. And it wasn’t until that moment when she told me that, and he was already gone, that I realized my going away to school was in fact nothing at all like his own odyssey, only appearing grand to me at the time relative to the meager purview and ambitions of the assimilated and the native.”

You are welcome. I’m going to try to bust past page 48 now and go on to 49. Wish me luck.