A Song for the Work
For the past year, I have not written creatively. This is the longest time I have spent away from writing since my elementary school days. For a while I attributed my creative absence to the demands of being a resident physician. During the COVID-19 pandemic, my working hours stayed roughly the same while my non-working hours expanded into emptiness, yet nothing changed. Call it ennui; call it writer’s block (although I believe you cannot have writer’s block unless you are actively trying to write something, which I was not). Day after day, cursors blinked. Blank walls stared back.
Last summer, I had a conference call with my editor. When I was a medical student, I won a writing award sponsored by a small publisher affiliated with Bryn Mawr. I was awarded, as part of the prize, a contract for a future book. At the time, I had pitched a collection of nonfiction essays (“about medicine, or the intersection of the humanities and medicine” is what I had proposed over email). After my first year of residency, I had written a handful of essays and sent them to my editor for review. Not one suited what he imagined my work ought to be. In short, he was looking something with broader appeal, more marketable, “in the vein of House of God.” (Never mind that House of God is a work of fiction and I am exclusively a nonfiction writer with limited interest in lampooning modern day resident livelihoods, for what more is there to say? We are still tired. Little has changed.)
My failed pitch reminded me of all the reasons why I am not a full-time writer today. They are all bad reasons. In college, I started writing for school publications but soon quit because I hated getting assigned to stories I had no interest in only to turn in a draft that became so heavily edited that I could no longer identify my own writing—a problem I consider the bane of probably every artist in existence, creating for money versus creating for oneself, and how far you are willing to go in the hopes that someday, these become one and the same. I was not willing to go far at all, and so I ended up in medical school instead.
However, my editor was not far off. When I was younger, I actually wrote fiction exclusively. In high school, I completed a book of vignettes about a group of Asian American kids growing up on the same block. I spent an entire summer writing cover letters and sending my manuscript to various publishers, and then hoarded all my return mail in a drawer of my desk with the fantasy that one day, when I became successful—which to me meant seeing a book at the airport bookstore with my five-letter name down the spine—I could point to my desk drawer crammed with hundreds of rejections of every type and form and proclaim, “Look! I, too, once failed tremendously, over and over, yet here I stand.”
I started writing nonfiction in college, out of a failure of imagination and a fear of speaking for anyone except myself. All my characters, previously unique, had eventually become tiny reiterations of my experiences, for how could I know the life of another? I wanted to write about women, single women, lost women, women in pain—yet even if there was truth in those stories, I felt that I could never make them mine. They were not my truth, so how dare I recreate them on the page? I was so afraid, and that fear took the life out of my work. After that, I stuck to writing about myself.
Writing about oneself, as a person of color, had its own set of concerns. As a teenager, I was inspired to write as a means of filling a void in the canon. I spent my early years in small town Ohio, where the touchstone of Chinese American literature in my elementary and middle school was, exclusively, Amy Tan. Before the dawn of the internet, it was hard to identify who her successors were. I supposed that maybe it was up to me. But I did not want to be cast as a Chinese American writer, a female writer, or even, nowadays, a physician writer. Dan Brown and Stephen King get to be simply writers, without modifiers or qualifications, so why couldn’t I? When I write, I contend with the dichotomous impulses to both plug the gap in the narrative yet avoid speaking for anyone else, which lately has resulted in simply abstaining from writing altogether. I think, for now, this is okay. There are more urgent voices who deserve our attention.
My writing professor, Anne Fadiman, recently published an essay on teaching creative writing over Zoom. Reading it, I miss her. I miss sitting together with my classmates every week, discussing the literature we read and literature we wrote, the constant encouragements, the ritual unburdening of the things we carried and witnessing those things, once ugly and unseen, blossom into something tremendous and beautiful and whole, and to know, if only amongst ourselves, that this is the work that matters.