酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Reading and Writing: Life on the Page



The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning


Two years ago this month, on a wintry morning, I was ready to give up learning to write in English. I had been walking on the snow-covered streets of Toronto for almost an hour with no destination in mind. All of a sudden, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cry out, I stopped walking and raised my head, screaming at the top of my lungs about all the frustrations pent up since I chose to write in English exclusively a year before, “I’m really tired of starting over. No matter what I do, it gets wiped out. I want to leave something meaningful behind.” Everybody around me at the time was scared away.

pass by each other
then disappear --
footprints in the snow

Two years have gone by, swiftly and silently. I have always tried and always failed to succeed in English writing, but I still keep on writing. As the poet Robert Louis Stevenson once claimed, "Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." Based on my own writing experience, I find that writing can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, of revising and erasing. For me now, to write in English is to attempt, to make a run at something without knowing whether I am going to succeed. It points a way for me to function with relative freedom in the unfamiliar world of the alphabet, and it helps me to make myself up from moment to moment and to gradually turn my old Chinese self into a new one.

Eric, an alphabet apprentice
thwarted by time’s passing --
pines to be a poet
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Reading and Writing: Life on the Page



The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning


Two years ago this month, on a wintry morning, I was ready to give up learning to write in English. I had been walking on the snow-covered streets of Toronto for almost an hour with no destination in mind. All of a sudden, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cry out, I stopped walking and raised my head, screaming at the top of my lungs about all the frustrations pent up since I chose to write in English exclusively a year before, “I’m really tired of starting over. No matter what I do, it gets wiped out. I want to leave something meaningful behind.” Everybody around me at the time was scared away.

pass by each other
then disappear --
footprints in the snow

Two years have gone by, swiftly and silently. I have always tried and always failed to succeed in English writing, but I still keep on writing. As the poet Robert Louis Stevenson once claimed, "Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits." Based on my own writing experience, I find that writing can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, of revising and erasing. For me now, to write in English is to attempt, to make a run at something without knowing whether I am going to succeed. It points a way for me to function with relative freedom in the unfamiliar world of the alphabet, and it helps me to make myself up from moment to moment and to gradually turn my old Chinese self into a new one.

Eric, an alphabet apprentice
thwarted by time’s passing --
pines to be a poet
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[ericcoliu]

In an interview with Dave Weich, the Chinese American writer and two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Ha Jin claimed that the most important work of immigrant literature for him is Nabokov's Pnin. As he emphasized, “[It] deals with the question of language, and I think that's at the core of the immigrant experience: how to learn the language--or give up learning the language!--but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant. Your life is always affected by the insufficiency.”
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

In an interview with Dave Weich, the Chinese American writer and two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Ha Jin claimed that the most important work of immigrant literature for him is Nabokov's Pnin. As he emphasized, “[It] deals with the question of language, and I think that's at the core of the immigrant experience: how to learn the language--or give up learning the language!--but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant. Your life is always affected by the insufficiency.”
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[christine]

A heartfelt description of survival and adjustment in an alien land, and of the firming-up of a literary vocation.

[[christine]]

A heartfelt description of survival and adjustment in an alien land, and of the firming-up of a literary vocation.

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

Below are replies from my friend:


This a heartfelt piece, nicely accomplished. The reader feels your need to succeed. You express it so well that we feel the pain and difficulty along with you.

-- Christopher T George

Chen-ou- I was really taken by your use of a birth to describe the process of becoming a writer in another language. Great idea.

I have so much respect for people who master more than one language. I remember reading Lolita for the first time and thinking about how hard that must have been to write. I also loved reading Jerzy Kosinski because he found so many interesting ways to use give his characters a voice.

-- Lazarus
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Below are replies from my friend:


This a heartfelt piece, nicely accomplished. The reader feels your need to succeed. You express it so well that we feel the pain and difficulty along with you.

-- Christopher T George

Chen-ou- I was really taken by your use of a birth to describe the process of becoming a writer in another language. Great idea.

I have so much respect for people who master more than one language. I remember reading Lolita for the first time and thinking about how hard that must have been to write. I also loved reading Jerzy Kosinski because he found so many interesting ways to use give his characters a voice.

-- Lazarus
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[fanfan]

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[dundas]

[[dundas]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[robarts]

[[robarts]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[ericcoliu]

I’ve revised my poem.

slow and methodical
work of editing and rewriting
persists through the frustration.


Yes, this is the wrenching process of writing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

I’ve revised my poem.

slow and methodical
work of editing and rewriting
persists through the frustration.


Yes, this is the wrenching process of writing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul