Who Wrote the Poem You Can Never Go Home Again
I've traveled a good deal—Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean area, Canada—but until Cathay I'd never had the experience of measuring a place entirely against what I imagined about it from books. I don't know why, but I expected things there would exist caught in amber.
The frontal lobes of my encephalon had prepared me for China'due south modernity, but somewhere in the lower recesses I one-half-expected to see flickering shadows of a iii,000-year-old agrarian culture with intact hamlet life, rice paddies, and peasants in pajamas toiling in the fields with oxen.
I hoped in Cathay I would get a chance to at least run into some countryside and brand contact with something that would offer a hint of Pearl Buck's rural mural in The Skilful World.
Almost a week into the trip we went by motorbus to Hangzhou, a city of seven million south of Shanghai. Hangzhou is the hometown of a young banana professor of Chinese at our college we telephone call TZ .
It's TZ's first twelvemonth on the faculty, and the trip was quite a perk. He got to visit China and introduce a group of eager new colleagues to his domicile .
As the offset calendar week of the trip unfolded I realized I had a slap-up deal in common with TZ. Though we are of dissimilar generations and various cultures, TZ is a author too. He has a PHD from Berkeley, but what he really wants, he told me as we left Fudan University, was to be "the most famous writer from Hangzhou ."
Forty miles out of Shanghai nosotros finally began to run into more of what TZ called "the rural side," the equivalent of the countryside in the U.s.. Nosotros passed a large land market set up upwardly nether a highway overpass. It stretched on for a long distance under the raised highway. I was disappointed. And so far the countryside looked more like a light industrial zone. There was nothing quaint or agrarian about a farmer's market place ready up in the shadow of an overpass .
TZ sensed my thwarting, said, "No, the rural side drive is not similar drive from Spartanburg to Atlanta."
Nosotros rolled on further and finally what we passed became a more diverse agricultural landscape, a vineyard hither, a pocket-sized chicken farm there, iv or v shallow ponds to subcontract fish, a v-acre fallow winter field, another two acres of small hot houses .
The agronomics is dumbo and public. The farmers' houses are all packed together, all two or 3 story moderns. More similar mini-flat complexes and they notwithstanding didn't match my Romantic view of the countryside. I tried to articulate my thwarting. TZ explained the sometime villages like I wanted to see accept been gone for 40 years. "This is a very rich area now with all the manufacture, so fifty-fifty the farmers live in nice houses. "
TZ has corking love of his identify of birth, specially in its literary tradition. "Four of half-dozen best writers of the xxth Century come up from my province," TZ said with pride as we approached the city. He said that he writes mostly about Hangzhou and has published a few stories in US Chinese linguistic communication magazines, but that what he really wants is to put together a book of short stories about gimmicky Hangzhou "like Joyce, you know, Dubliners.'' He said his favorite American writer of the 20thursday Century is Thomas Wolfe. "You can't go home once more," he said. "This I know, this twenty-four hour period."
This render home was a big moment for TZ, his first visit back every bit a professional person, not a student anymore. I asked him if his parents read what he writes. "Oh no, I would be afraid for my father to read my stories."
As we approached Hangzhou nosotros crossed a fairly big river. TZ said, "When I was a kid I always swam in that river." He smiled a little as if to tell me that maybe information technology's not the same at present. "I was very liberal when I was young. But now I'm pretty conservative. I hate information technology that so many people come to my hometown. I tin't even speak my own dialect in my own boondocks now. "
TZ stepped off the bus when we approached downtown. He would get see his parents like a good son. He disappeared downwardly a crowded city street .
Equally nosotros rolled on into Hangzhou I thought about how different two writers tin can exist. I grew upward in a Southern American town in the middle of what many called "the American Century."
I was Thomas Wolf's doppelganger. Go home? I couldn't even successfully leave. I tried the Pacific Northwest, New England, the coast of Georgia, and I always came domicile. I've at present been "dwelling" for 23 years, teaching at a college that's a stone's throw abroad from where my great-grandparents were married at a textile village church well-nigh a century agone .
TZ teaches half-mode effectually the world from Hangzhou, writing stories nigh his hometown at the beginning of what some are already calling "the Chinese Century." Maybe he volition write virtually the bully "economic take-off" as seen through the optics of his own Sino version of Stephen Dedalus. Perhaps he will capture the epiphany of swimming in that river in the brief moment just earlier the soul of China collides with the future .
"Oh lost!" Thomas Wolfe said, dreaming of the past, and longing for literary relief from the present and the future .
Source: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/03/you-cant-go-home-again-by-john-lane-1.html
0 Response to "Who Wrote the Poem You Can Never Go Home Again"
Post a Comment