Sentences That Rise Above the Chaos

learning how to read and write from the first writer I ever met, Fae Myenne Ng

“Time Flies Backward,” Beth Kephart, Monotype

1993. My son, nearly four, is strapped into his car seat behind me. I am driving away from Philadelphia toward our suburban home. It is the soft weather of late spring, and the radio is on—an interview with a writer named Fae Myenne Ng. Her first novel, Bone—a story of San Francisco’s Chinatown, seafarers and seamstresses, choices denied and futures claimed, secrets that will not be decoded, losses that will not be explained—has just been released. She sounds so smart. She is so damned compelling. I must, I realize, meet her. She’ll be speaking at a city bookstore in a few hours, and I turn the car around. I’ve never met an actual writer. I’ve never heard a writer read. I never ask for favors, but this time I will. I will. I will meet Fae Myenne Ng.

Hours on, my husband watching our son in the basement of the city bookstore, I sit upstairs, listening, rapt. Back of the room. Last open chair. Fae Myenne Ng is teaching me how to read her book by reading it out loud. I trance within her slow and dignified rhythms. I succumb to the spare prose, ride her arrow of time, an arrow moving backward. I buy my copy and I stand in line, the very last person to greet her. Two or three times I have nearly turned away, aware of my husband in the basement, aware of the favor I have asked him. (Just this once, I need to do this.) But I wait. I stand. Time ticking. It is, now, my turn, and Ng looks up. Signing my book, she asks if I’m a writer. I say, I stammer, that I am learning how to write.

Months later, a package arrives from a place far away. It is a pen, the gift of Fae Myenne Ng. It is her insistence: You are a writer. You must write.

I can’t remember giving her my address. I can’t imagine how, how, how she has found the time to remember me, my awkward stammer and unknowing. Her book is famous now. She is famous now. Prizes. Accolades. She is at work on her new book, Steer Toward Rock, which I will also read, of course, fifteen years later, when it is published to equal acclaim.

How many times have I touched the spines of those two books? How many times have I remembered?

A few days ago, in the fog of a post-Christmas flu, during a night in which I never slept, I pulled Bone from its place of honor on my shelf. Beneath a thick quilt and an oversized heating pad, I read this gorgeous story again, with the rhythms with which Ng taught me to read it. Voice on the page. Voice in the air. You don’t forget either. I remembered the pen, remembered Ng. I sat, when I was done, eyes closed, the fog in me now intense and lovely. And then, as we do, I searched online for her. She is the author, I discover, of a new prize-winning memoir with a deliciously daring subtitle (Orphan Bachelors: On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family). Another fifteen years have passed. Another book.

I ordered it, of course, and then I sat and listened to this conversation between Ng and her long-time friend Mona Simpson. I listened all the way through, to the very end, where Ng’s current and recent writing students raise their hands and talk. It is no surprise to me that Ng repeatedly turns the questions back upon those who speak—tell me more about you. No surprise that she is listening—to them. No surprise that the stories that emerge between the teacher and her students are stories about confidence (Ng insisting that her students have it), about taking no notes in class (class should be “like a cocktail party”), about a tradition in which students read the first sentences of their own work out loud while banging on the table before them, making noise loud as a thunderous train, because the sentences they read, the sentences they write, must rise above the chaos.

Distilled. Determined.