New Writing Class: Assignment 1 - What Stuff Says About You

So I started a writing class this winter to help me get back into writing consistently since I've basically abandoned this blog for the past few months. For the next few months, I'll be posting assignments created during the class.

Here's how each class is structured:

1. Zee, director and program coordinator the Emma's Writing Center, introduces everyone in case there are new members to the class.
   
2. The first 5 minutes are devoted to getting settled in with a bit of meditation (it's really a nice moment of silence to help clear your mind).
3. Then Zee provides a "spark" or idea on which to write. These range from physical objects placed in the center of the room, a technique such as short poems or list-making, or a general topic on which to build upon. Sparks usually involve a multitude of different ideas, and the overall point is to inspire some kind of writing.
   
4. Members then spend 40-45 min writing on the spark. Writing can be in any form: poems, essays, fictional stories, stream of consciousness writing, etc. Anything is acceptable.
   
5. The remaining hour is spent reading your work out loud. (I had no idea exactly how terrifying this was until I first did it. Zee has explained that it's part of finding your voice and being comfortable with sharing it).

All in all, it's a lot of fun.

Assignment 1: What Stuff Says About You
In the center of the room, there is a table full of objects such as a camera, a picture frame, a fan, and other knick knacks. I thought of the immense clutter in my parents' house.


I called home from a rest stop in Ohio on I-90 to let them know that I would be arriving late, probably around 2:00am. My sister picked up.

"So don't wait up for us. I know Mom's probably worried, but I'll be there tonight. Just tell her to go to sleep and we'll talk in the morning. I'll try not to wake the cat either haha."

Brown Sugar, our cat, was better known as just "Kitty" since my Taiwanese parents never adopted the Western idea of naming animals. It took a lot of convincing just to let us keep him. That is, I simply brought one home one day and offered no other recourse.

"Well... It's funny that you mentioned Kitty. Cause... he's not here anymore." Susan explained.

"What do you mean?"

"So the doctor told mom that she shouldn't be handling anything with a lot of bacteria such as cleaning cat litter. I guess chemo will wear her down. And so Dad just got rid of him. I mean I came home one day and Kitty was gone! Dad said that he gave him to a family who has other cats," she stammered.

"But our cat is 15 years old!" My cell phone was tucked uncomfortably under my chin and I had finally given up on cleaning the smashed insects off of the windshield. It was futile.

"I KNOW! And I didn't even get to say good bye. I've been begging Dad to let us know where he is so that I can make sure he's ok. I mean he didn't even ASK us. He just took him... and he was gone," her voice was choking into a whimper. I could tell she was crying quietly.

"We'll talk about it when I get home. I can't believe this."

I always hated coming home. I was going to grad school in Chicago and lived in a condo on the 25th floor of a high rise that faced the lake and the city. Coming home made me realize exactly how antithetical the life I wanted to live was in comparison to the life I HAD lived in the cramped, dark, dusty, cluttered, crumbling house of my parents.

In Chicago, my apartment was relatively immaculate give or take a few overgrowths of printed articles and books. The wall to wall windows facing the Chicago skyline let in so much light that it was often difficult to nap in the living room. Since neither my boyfriend at the time and I were gainfully employed, it was easy to keep things clean. Our small smattering of IKEA furniture provided a minimalist and modern look. Sometimes I wondered if we overshot and made it look empty.

At home there were piles of boxes from floor to ceiling, lining the walls of every room. The area that was once our porch was converted into an unheated storage area due to an architectural whim of my father. It was now completely full of boxes, surplus that could not fit in the equally congested garage. These boxes were the coffins of hundreds of abandoned things, ranging from ancient video tapes (Oh, I had forgotten about Beta) to childhood toys some of which weren't even ours. Not only was our father a decorated garage sale bargain hunter, he was also a pathological hoarder.

In his old age, my father's skin had grown increasingly brown while his hair shockingly white. It's as if he aspires to be the visual stereotype of the ancient philosophers depicted in Chinese soap operas. He follows suit and periodically spit out a brutally obvious observation. My favorite was: "It is always good to learn new things."

He would tell this to me and my sister every time we did something remotely related to academics or learning, especially when it involved some new technology. He said it when I first showed him how to program a remote (that I had figured out on my own). He said it when I introduced him to AOL Online and email. He said it when I finished Middle School. He said it when I graduated high school. He said it when I started going to college. Then he began saying it whenever I came home during breaks as if to encourage me to go back. By the time I started graduate school, I had developed a thorough resentment of this particular adage.

In the case of bargain hunting, it was always: "A good businessman always knows how to bargain." I remember him telling this to me as a child as we walked up a stranger's driveway, having pulled over on a quiet country road. There was a squat woman wearing a Tweety Bird t-shirt, fanning herself with a newspaper as she sat in a lawn chair. The table next to her held a spread of knick knacks and unwanted dishware. My father tried to haggle the cost of a 25 cent mug down to 5 cents. I think we ended up buying 2 mugs for 50 cents.

The porch was filled with the remnants of a pink 80's childhood, including a dilapidated Barbie townhouse that now sagged severely on one side; its plastic columns strained to bear the weight of several underwatered, yellowing plants. There were roller skates, sized 8 and 9, that were far too big for my sister and I's feet, but yet my father still felt that they were a great acquisition and encouraged us to try wearing these accoutrements of a past time, which to us were past its prime. There were used boxing gloves that survived a brief tenure inside our house due to an unfortunate maiden voyage on my 5-year-old sister's hands straight into my father's face.

As I entered the porch, I understood that part of my role here was not only to help my mother during her treatments, but to evict these items from their graveyard. It was all I could do in my cat's memory.

Written on January 30th, 2010.