Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy:

For the apparel oft proclaims the man;

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are most select and generous, chief in that.

—Polonius in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

Pauline Trigère, by all accounts a fearsome woman, was born in Paris in 1908 to Russian-Jewish parents, both garment makers. She learned to cut patterns and sew clothes as a child, and though she dreamed of being a surgeon, her father disapproved, so she became a seamstress instead. She got married at 21, to a tailor. Of her marriage she later said:“I was young, my mother worried about me, he wanted to marry me and so I did.”

In 1937, wary of the growing threat of Nazism, she and her family emigrated. They intended to move to South America but she fell in love with their stopover city of New York and there they stayed. They opened a tailoring shop. In 1942, with no warning, her husband disappeared, leaving Trigère to care for their two children alone. (He eventually wrote, years later, to ask for a divorce; she signed the papers and never heard from him again. She met another man in 1952 who she stayed with — but did not marry — for the rest of her life. In 1984, she said: “I was really a little housewife with two small children and I had a husband who really didn’t want his wife to work. He didn’t like the competition. That’s why I’m not married to him anymore.”

To make money, she and her brother launched a collection of 11 designs under her name, Pauline Trigère. She took loans and sold her diamond earrings to finance the company. It took off quickly; people loved the precise tailoring and modern silhouettes of her dresses and coats. Within a few years she had won one of the most prestigious fashion awards in the country (thrice) and was dressing women like Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy (and Patricia Neal’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

Pauline Trigère clothes are playful and flattering; there is a pleasing simplicity offset by a sharp edge; they have structure and dignity; they are daring and fun (she dabbled in reversible capes, popularized the women’s jumpsuit and pioneered the rhinestone bra); they are truly chic. She was so adept at her craft that she draped and cut fabric directly on mannequins or live models, working from the images in her head. Most designers sketch out the designs, measure out the flat pattern, cut the fabric and sew the piece together. Placing bolts of fabric onto a mannequin or a person requires an advanced skillset — an intuitive understanding, drilled in by decades of experience, of how each type of material will fall and hang and fold; an acute spatial judgment; a sculptor’s touch.

Trigère loved to wear turtle pins. She dubbed her country house in South Salem “La Tortue” (The Turtle). She refused to reveal her age until 1998, at her 90th birthday party, when she announced to her 200 guests that she had hidden the number somewhere on the party invitation. Two years later, she was namechecked in the New York Times as one of “a quartet of New York social figures in their 90’s who are some of the city’s fiercest partygoers.” In 1992 the same paper described her as “the grand dame of American fashion.”

In 1961, Trigère became “the first top New York designer” to employ a black model when she hired 23-year-old Beverly Valdes on a full-time contract. At the time, American fashion was extremely racially segregated: the major magazines never featured black women, the major modeling agencies did not represent them (in 1961 there was one agency in New York that specifically represented black models) and they almost never appeared on mainstream runways. Instead, they modeled for black-owned brands and posed for magazines like Ebony; some even emigrated to Europe to model for the fashion houses there.

When asked about her decision to hire Valdes, Trigère gave a characteristically blunt response: “I didn’t choose Beverly to make history, I chose her because of her good features.” But she publicly defended Valdes and resisted racist threats, like the one from a major department store in Memphis that told her it would pull her label from their shelves if she continued working with Valdes; she ignored them, and the store ended up restocking her anyway. Evidently the promise of good business trumped the owners’ commitment to racism.

She was an unrepentant micromanager, a quality that sabotaged potentially lucrative licensing deals, according to her son:

“She had, in a way, too tight a grip on everything. We had various licensing deals, for men’s sport shirts, sunglasses, bedding, plastic tableware. But the problem was she couldn’t leave those people alone,” says Radley, who ran his mother’s business for years before finally convincing her to fold it in 1994. “She’d say, ‘It’s my taste, my knowledge — what I’ve achieved means something and I don’t want it ruined!’ She would tell them how to train their salespeople and decorate their showrooms. So most of the deals lasted a year or two and then just fizzled out. I blame a good part of it on my mother. She couldn’t just let the money roll in.”

Perhaps she could have relaxed a little, but being protective of the reputation and the company you created — especially if it is in your name — is a good instinct. Matters of intangible appeal like taste, transfigured into cultural capital, and aesthetic authority, are difficult to accumulate and very easy to destroy.

A model who worked for Trigère in the early 1980s describes her thus:

“A small woman with a great figure and a gigantic personality, she always wore clothes of her own design, accessorized with big glasses, red lipstick, and a trail of golden turtles — her signature creature — pinned to her person. She took pleasure in her sultry, heavy French accent and coy malapropisms. She was 71, vital and volatile. […] She terrified me.”

Sadly the writer deprives us of examples of those “coy malapropisms”. Also, are we who do not have a “signature creature” erring in our lives?

Pauline Trigère is amply represented in the permanent collection of the Met’s Costume Institute (many of the designs were gifted directly to the museum by her), including this silk “cocktail ensemble” from 1971, which makes me think sexy insect (this is compliment; I would love to wear it):

Trigère also designed many truly perfect scarf coats (i.e. a coat with a matching scarf, see below; there are lots on eBay), decades before the scarf coat’s alleged pioneer Toteme brought it back into fashion in 2021. Open the schools!

She played with big sweeping curves and cascading forms. I love the fur lining on this eggplant-colored coat, bringing the center of gravity low, weighing the wearer down like an anchor — and then, flung off, it unveils an elegant matching dress!

I also love the big fold of this black overcoat (or dress? the Costume Institute calls it a dress…) which resembles the flap of an envelope, and the sleekly bulbous swoop of this crimson coat that transforms the wearer into a bright red cherry — and then off comes the coat to reveal a sparkly red minidress and a matching scarf! Imagine pulling up to the office holiday party in that outfit in 1962, when Trigère designed it. Lives would have been changed…

I honestly can see the Duke of Wellington wearing this camel-hued cape. Wellington if he slayed, etc. It also makes me think of a question mark. And that high collar, and that gigantic color-matched button! Her use of buttons brings me endless delight. A touch avant-garde for 1952. It must have been fun to glide around in:

I need to stop adding images to this post, which is already way over the email length limit. I hope someone clicked “View entire message” and is enjoying these photos. I highly recommend perusing the Costume Institute’s online archive, and not just for Ms. Trigère, though of course you must begin with her — this plaid ensemble, this hooded silk coat with perhaps the biggest button I’ve seen yet in one of her designs, this unassuming grey ensemble (again with a knotted matching scarf) hiding a truly audacious fur stole, and another sexy insect silk cocktail dress, this time with a matching silk scarf constellated with tiny glass studs. Oh, and this gorgeous metallic knit gown, which looks like something a space-age version of Arwen from Lord of the Rings might wear.

I love this parting anecdote, from her 2002 New York Times obituary:

“People always say to me, ‘Aren’t you French?’ and I say, ‘No, I am American,’” she said. “I found in this country everything I wanted. This country made me Pauline Trigère.”

Shortly after her 90th birthday, she told friends that she had left instructions that she wanted to be cremated wearing her trademark bright red lipstick. “What does it matter?” one friend asked. “Who will know whether or not you have lipstick on?”

“I’ll know,” she said.

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In 1903, five years before Pauline Trigère’s birth, Germaine Émilie Krebs was born — also in Paris, also to a Jewish family, though her parents were middle class French Jews who sent her to painting and sculpture lessons when she was a girl. Like Trigère, her parents disapproved of her childhood career aspiration — to be a ballet dancer, and maybe also a sculptor — so she went into fashion instead. Unlike Trigère, she did become a seamstress in a tailor’s shop but a milliner and then a dressmaking apprentice at a haute couture house. She opened her own house, La Maison Alix, in 1932, and went by the name Alix until she married the painter Serge Czerefkov, whereupon she rechristened herself and her couture house Madame Grès, a partial anagram of Serge. (That was the name under which she designed for the rest of her life, even though her husband appears to have done a Gauguin and abandoned his wife and their daughter and gone to Tahiti. Czerefkov’s art dealer later claimed: “They could not possibly have lived in harmony, with each cutting on the other’s ego. Grès wasn’t going to play second fiddle.”)

Madame Grès designed costumes for plays and gowns for glamorous women: Grace Kelly, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich. Even more so than Trigère, she was a master of drapery, and likewise draped and cut clothes on live models. Her training as a sculptor influenced her work:

“I work with my hands, with a mass of fabric, like a sculptor with clay ... a fabric has character, its own life. By touching it I know what I am doing, but I can’t make it do what it does not want to.”

She also apparently said, often, that “I wanted to be a sculptor. For me, working with cloth or stone is the same thing”.

Her clothes have more of that elusive quality of “timelessness” than Pauline Trigère’s, which are more easily categorized by decade. With Madame Grès, absolutely indifferent to trends, the task is much harder.

In her evening dresses she favored intricate braiding and pleating, and flowing gowns that evoke Grecian and neoclassical forms.

Grès traveled around the world searching for new textiles and collecting inspiration. In the 1950s she visited India, and the influence shows:

Most of these dresses are made with soft, flowy silk jersey, but she also used the stiffer, crisper fabric of silk taffeta for more dramatic creations:

Madame Grès — very unlike Pauline Trigère in this respect —  was known for being secretive and shy. According to a dressmaker who worked with her for 23 years,

“Mme Grès was timid and reserved, like a mouse in a box. Instead of surrounding herself with assistants when she worked on her designs, she would shut herself away in the studio with her mannequins, rolls of cloth and hundreds of pins. Then, having worked all night, she would show us what she had done and say, ‘What do you think of that, mes petites?’ She was never satisfied with her work. Perfection was her aim and she was rigorously self-critical. One of her standards was that the back of a dress should look as beautiful as the front.

“There was a calm about her. She never breathed down our necks. She taught me everything, from A to Z. But making drapery is a lost skill, there are no more apprentices.

Unlike Trigère, she was not an enthusiastic partygoer or hostess:

Madame Grès made no use of her beauty, and, in later years, despite a string of elegant houses, she rarely entertained or went out. Andreana Marcello tells me, “I used to say to her, ‘Please, do some cocktail dresses.’ And she would say, ‘But, please, Andreana, tell me what you do in a cocktail dress.’ She didn’t know what to say.” She was private, internal, and driven, too controlling to allow herself the spontaneity of a charmer. She never held the Duke of Windsor in her spell as Chanel had. Nor would she have cared to.

And here is a duchess friend describing her:

“She was so elegant. She would never say a word. I didn’t dare ask questions. When she wanted to speak, I would listen.”

Beneath her silence was a heart of steel. She was in Paris when the Nazis invaded and occupied the city in 1940. She was by then a famous haute couture designer. There are various accounts of her wartime experience, many of them vague; the fact that she was such a private person adds to the mystery; we have no public testimony from her to corroborate the stories. But we know that:

1. The Germans were aware of her and who she was

2. At one point during the war she and her daughter were living in the Pyrenees, but she lived in Nazi-occupied Paris for a portion of the war

3. She continued working and making clothes and put in large orders for her usual silk jersey fabric

4. At some point the Germans shut down her atelier, possibly using her hoarding of fabric (a rationed good) as an excuse

The timing and sequence of these events aren’t totally clear, nor is the question of how she survived the war unscathed. An otherwise fascinating (and depressing) Vanity Fair article from 1996 says she was a Catholic but her former employer denounced her “as a traitor, and, falsely, as a Jew”, and that this is why she fled to the South of France. But this is wrong — she was certainly Jewish, though she may have converted to Catholicism in an effort to avoid Nazi persecution, as so many European Jews tried to do.

Some sources say that during the war Madame Grès made gowns in red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag; others say that the wives of German officers asked her to make dresses for them and that she refused; both of these activities may have contributed to the forced closure of her atelier.

What we know for certain is that she sewed the Star of David into the linings of the dresses she was making in Nazi-occupied Paris, because at least one of the dresses — which features two Stars hidden in its seams — has been preserved.

One of the signature scents from her affiliated perfume house, Parfums Grès, is said to be “inspired by Alix Grès’ character”. It is called Cabochard, which means stubborn.

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Only about 60,000 people live in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, one of four towns in the southwest founded by Robert P. McCulloch, a land developer, oil, gas and geothermal energy speculator, and purveyor of lawnmowers, garden tractors, car, boat and airplane engines, and, in 1949, the world’s first one-man chainsaw.

McCulloch was a man of gorgeously midcentury dreams. He founded and ran six eponymous companies before he died in 1977. With the money he inherited from his father and made from his own superchargers, motor engines, oil exploration, and real estate deals, McCulloch produced a working prototype of a steam-powered coupé (1953), manufactured a fleet of two-seat gyrocopters (a strange cousin of the heli) that he hoped would one day sit in every driveway beside the family car (1969), and launched a passenger airline to ferry prospective residents to the various cities he was spawning in the desert (1970). His California home appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in 1956, billed as a “push-button paradise” of futuristic contraptions: rotating sunbeds, self-heating barbecues, automatic whiskey dispensers, and buttons for drawing curtains and turning on the lights.

The doohickey house was located in Palm Springs, about three hours’ drive from Lake Havasu City. McCulloch purchased the land for the city after flying his prop plane over near the border of California and Arizona, scouting for opportunity, and spotting Havasu Lake (actually a reservoir) in the middle of the desert. He enlisted C.V. Wood, the chief designer of Disneyland in Anaheim — which had opened 15 years earlier, in 1955 — to design a new town.

Lake Havasu City is the site of McCulloch’s most famous shenanigan: in 1968, he purchased the London Bridge from the City of London. McCulloch did not, as is often repeated, believe he was buying the more distinctive Tower Bridge, nor is his exploit the origin of the phrase “I have a bridge to sell you.” The man knew what he was doing!

The bridge, too weak to support the increasingly heavy vehicles of the modern world, was sinking into the Thames. Rather than demolishing it to build a new one, the city government thought to save some money by seeing if anyone would want to buy it. McCulloch did.

Slab by slab, he had 10,000 tons of 19th-century granite shipped from the UK to an unpopulated patch of desert in Arizona, where he did not even have a river for the bridge to cross.

The plan was to reassemble the bridge on dry ground, laying the arches over the sand dunes and then digging the sand out and rerouting a section of the Colorado River to run underneath it. After their permit to do this was denied, Wood, the Disney designer, pulled strings to get an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson himself, whom he somehow convinced to let them build the bridge and carry out the minor terraforming work necessary for it to actually function as such.

It took three years and seven million dollars, thrice as much as it cost McCulloch to purchase all the land that would make up Lake Havasu City. It was an extravagant, delightful, ridiculous, and wholly unnecessary gimmick: what could be more American?

McCulloch thought the bridge might attract attention to his fledgling city and encourage people to move there. The scheme worked (others, like the family gyrocopter, did not): Lake Havasu City remains populated and pleasant today and the bridge remains a quirky tourist attraction. There’s a manmade beach with a view of the bridge called London Bridge Beach and a mini strip-mall on the waterfront called the “English Village”, a cluster of shops, restaurants, and jet ski rentals dubiously styled to resemble old Albion.

I suppose the buildings above are alluding to Tudor architecture…and then below I spy an old-school telephone box and, in the foreground, what looks like a real British postbox from the Victorian era (note the “VR” royal cypher), presumably also imported from England. And some not-very-English-looking shopfronts (At a push, they’re colorful, so…Notting Hill? idk) with a fake castle turret tucked in the middle. What the hell, sure.

C.V. Wood also helped McCulloch design an Arizona cattle ranch he purchased in the sixties, into an urban oasis, Fountain Hills, which today is a suburb of Phoenix. The town is named for the massive jet fountain that spurts water 560 feet in the air and which for the first decade of its existence was the tallest fountain in the world. (It’s still the tallest in America, and globally a respectable fourth-tallest.) The fountain water is dyed bright green on St. Patrick’s Day. I have been trying to find more detailed information on its construction but I believe McCulloch consulted Swiss engineers and had at least part of the fountain made in Switzerland (home, of course, to Geneva’s very similar Jet d'Eau, c. 1886) and shipped to the US.

In an interview with the BBC, McCulloch’s grandson Michael describes his grandfather as a lovely and idiosyncratic man.

“He was a genius,” says his grandson Michael. “He was astute at building and invention; he designed engines - that was his forte.”

“He was a little on the eccentric side, but extremely nice. I only ever saw a very gentle person.”

“He came up with a lot of ideas,” says Michael. “He created a jet pack, a two-person helicopter. He made a thing that was like a facelift [using] steam, which would tighten your skin.”

“It was just something he did for fun. He was a very smart, creative person that needed to keep inventing.”

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II.

If I was designing a city from scratch I might do something like William Light did with Adelaide. What is today the city’s urban core is a figure eight of contiguous public parks ringing neatly gridded streets, themselves embedded with six tree-filled squares. And a (natural) river running through it to boot.

The British settlers who founded the city arrived on the jut of coastal land that would become Adelaide in 1836. Their aim was to establish the first “free” settlement in Australia, distinct from the convict colonies of Sydney and Brisbane.

The colonial administrator William Light (whose father, Francis, founded George Town, one of my favorite cities in the world) was appointed Surveyor-General. He mapped out the land, chose a site, and drew up a city plan.

Light’s plan (and its name: Light’s Vision) reflected the settlement’s utopian ideals: besides the parks, he made no provisions for a jail of any kind. The idea was that a town of enlightened free men would not be committing any crime, and so such a thing would be unnecessary. Unfortunately they did not anticipate the convicts escaping from other parts of Australia and turning up in their little slice of heaven, plus probably there was local crime too. By 1840 a permanent jail was under construction.

The modern city of Adelaide has grown and sprawled outside Light’s figure eight, and some of the green space has been converted into parking lots, concert venues, etc., but most of it is still intact. The parks are numbered, 29 in total. Their contents include botanical gardens, horse paddocks, nature preserves, festival grounds, the zoo, and avenues of elm trees planted in the 1860s.

The figure eight parks remind me of when I “designed” houses as a child, scribbling on A4 printer paper and handing my creations to my father to review (obviously he was the one who granted planning permission). I had thought of everything: hundred-stall stables for all my horses, turrets for my private rooms and libraries, and very generously even thirty or forty spacious kennels for my dog-loving brother to keep his pet dogs.

I mentioned the Adelaide Park Lands to an urbanism-minded friend recently and he said that they are a nightmare for car traffic, because their shape has necessitated the construction of a ring road around them, and then lots more roads had to be built to cut through the parks and connect the inside to the rest of the city. Also, people are always parking illegally on the green! Poor William Light failed to account for the devilish automobile. Turns out utopias are hard to actualize (a lesson I also learned when I became an adult and understood the financial requirements of a hundred-horse stable, etc).

Still: how beautiful.

III.

In my ignorance, if I had been made to guess when the The Ideal City of Baltimore was painted, I would have been off by at least a few hundred years. It reminds me, in its spatiality and its eerie quiet, of the work of 20th century surrealists like Giorgio di Chirico and Paul Delvaux, but in fact it was painted in Italy in the 1480s. Its attribution is unclear; the best guess is Fra Carnevale.

It’s easier to invent an ideal city when there are no people in it. There are a few people in the below paintings, which I will leave you with, a little morning-to-night triptych of nearly vanishing points.

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In its heyday the SS United States was a very beautiful ship, and a very fast one, breaking the global speed record for a transatlantic voyage when it first set off in 1952. At full speed, if you ventured onto the deck to face the wind, it apparently felt like you were being punched in the face. The stacks, or funnels, were 65 feet tall apiece, about the height of a six-storey building, and painted bright red.

I wrote an essay for Lit Hub a couple months ago about crafting a sense of place in my novel, which is set in Philadelphia. I mention the SS United States in it because when I lived in Philly the ship lived there too, on the Delaware River, where it had been sitting for decades after “retiring”. It was an odd and wonderful thing to see on the waterfront, and it’s sad that it had to go (evicted by the landlord of course), especially since the campaign to save it and turn it into a visitable museum didn’t succeed. That’s not to say its current fate is a bad thing; quite the opposite. It might well have been condemned to a much more undignified end, scrapped in the junkyard and so on. Instead, its parts — including the anchor and those big red funnels — will be displayed in a not-yet-built museum, while its bones will become a home for coral and fish and whoever else lives under the Floridian sea.

Still, seeing it taken apart bit by bit is a little painful for anyone who was fond of it. (Should I be saying “she” instead of “it”?) I suppose it’s sort of like your friend donating their body to science, their organs to the transplant list. Death begetting knowledge and life.

I will now share the essay I wrote in May:

For nearly my entire life, the SS United States, a 990-foot-long, 80-year-old ocean liner that in 1952 broke the world record for the fastest transatlantic voyage by any ship, was parked on the banks of the Delaware River in South Philadelphia, accumulating rust.

But this February, despite dogged campaigning by the granddaughter of the ship’s designer and other supporters, the SS United States was evicted from its riverside spot and escorted by a fleet of diminutive tugboats to Mobile, Alabama, where it is being inspected and taken apart in preparation for its final journey to the bottom of the sea. (Off the coast of Florida, to be specific, to become the world’s largest artificial reef).

When I lived in Philadelphia, the ship was still there, immense as a tower block, and just as unmoving. Though its paint pitiably peeled and rust flaked like dandruff from its sides, the SS United States retained a solemn and shabby grandeur during its decades on the Delaware.

I left Philadelphia in 2019 and moved across the world, to Hong Kong, to work as a journalist. I haven’t been back since the ocean liner’s abduction, so my memory is out of date, but I remember walking along the waterfront and staring at the ship, awed by the size of it, and by the mere fact of its presence—why the hell, I thought to myself, was this thing here at all? But it was a part of the city, and part of what made the city what it was: a scruffy and idiosyncratic delight.

My debut novel, Gingko Season, is set in Philadelphia, and the SS United States appears in the book. Part of the fun of writing Gingko Season was in conjuring a distant and beloved city that made such an impression on me when I lived there. In that sense, my novel is a love letter to Philadelphia and its beautiful and specific charms. It is a city where one can linger for hours in the streets, parks, rivers, and among the architecture; a city which, at least during the time the novel is set, had, for some reason, a slowly oxidizing colossus on its shores.

The author Robert Caro, who is not a novelist, writes in his quasi-memoir Working about the need to establish a “sense of place” in his books, which are works of meticulously reported nonfiction. While researching his biography of Lyndon Johnson, in order to capture the landscape and the poverty of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up, Caro and his wife Ina moved to rural Texas for three years. A writer of fiction need not go to such extremes (though it might be fun to try). But the result of Caro’s dogged journalistic commitment is exquisite novelistic detail: as I sit here now, I can easily recall Caro’s descriptions of the treacherous soil of the Hill Country and the hellish heat of the wood-fired stoves in the Texas summertime that he writes about in The Path to Power. The precision and density of his descriptive prose, and the magnetic pull it exerts on the reader, is something I hope to achieve in my own fictional place-setting, and something from which all writers of fiction can learn.

While writing Gingko Season and trying to describe Philadelphia, I had thousands of contemporaneous photos stored on my phone, and all the riches of the Internet to fact check my memory and fill in what I didn’t know. For a journalist, these tools are invaluable, but for a novelist they are a double-edged sword. I adore the meaty detail of sensation (sight, smell, sound, you know the list) and the concreteness of fact (street names, snack ingredients, species of tree), but too much fealty to fact is dangerous. Facts may be used sparingly, liberally, or not at all, but they must never overpower a narrative; in the effort to evoke a sense of place, an overreliance on factual detail can blur the reader’s perception, or begin to resemble a guidebook entry.

The novelist enjoys a right that the journalist lacks—the right to invent, even in a work of “realist” or “historical” fiction, with glee and without compunction; the right to delay a solar eclipse by a year so that it appears in a single scene; the right to the gamut of imagination. In this mode of writing, one begs and borrows and steals from life—plagiarizing anecdotes, tweaking sob stories, uprooting trees and moving buildings hundreds or thousands of miles. Whatever the story needs, it will get.

At one point in Gingko Season I describe a casement window with colored panes through which the protagonist observes the changing afternoon light. That window is real, and it’s on Baltimore Avenue. But I also send my characters on walks I never took and into buildings that don’t exist. The novelist J.L. Carr, in the foreword to his masterful novel A Month in the Country, wrote: “Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s ends.” Carr lists a few scenes in the novel that “happened” in North Yorkshire, where he grew up and where the story takes place. But other things were transplanted from elsewhere in England: a church in Northamptonshire and a vicarage in London become a church and a vicarage in Yorkshire. The placeness of place in Carr’s novel is concocted by a mixture of retold, remembered experience and the addition and subtraction, wherever necessary, of good old made-up stuff.

So, too, the Philadelphia of Gingko Season is a Philadelphia of imagination and unreliable memory as much as it is the city as it “actually” existed in 2018-19. It is also a Philadelphia filtered through the eyes of an outsider, someone who was born and raised in a different country, stayed for a few years, fell in love (with people, sure, but crucially, with place), and then left.

A few months after I moved away, the pandemic began, and the prospect of a trip back to Philly became untenable. Quite suddenly there was a rift between the Philadelphia I knew and the Philadelphia I was hearing about from friends and on the news. I wasn’t there to see the silent, emptied streets of that first winter and spring, or the crowds of protestors and blocked highway traffic and teargas of the summer of 2020. A couple of years later I started writing Gingko Season. My task was to evoke a time-bound place, a place that no longer existed or never had. Philadelphia felt distant—geographically, temporally—but in a way that helped. It gave me room to remember, to misremember, and, best of all, to invent.

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One morning in November, from his usual window seat, Zirui witnessed an arrest. Two police officers were quarrelling with a sweet potato seller, an old man in a black cap. Neither of the police officers looked older than seventeen. Zirui could not hear their conversation but he was close enough to see the grey nosehairs in the old man’s nostrils, and the angry, pleading movements of his mouth, and his hands, which gripped the sides of his cart. It was unclear how long the interaction had been taking place. Zirui watched as one of the officers wrenched the sweet potato seller away, pinning his arms behind his back. The second officer rushed to the van and hauled open its rear doors. They shoved the old man inside; he stumbled. The light changed and the bus lurched and moved on, turning a corner before Zirui could see what happened next.

Although the new subway line that opened in the spring would have enabled Zirui to cut his commute time in half, he had not altered his habit of taking the bus to work. He did not enjoy the experience of travel in the contextless, air-conditioned underground, where public safety jingles singsonged through overhead speakers and, on the trains, little screens showed newsreaders complimenting the economy or played instructional videos on how best to slice a cucumber. He preferred to luxuriate in the Beijing traffic, to stare at the backs of strangers’ heads, to press his cheek against the window, bone on juddering glass, and watch the sparks erupt from the overhead wires as they met the electric current poles of the bus.

The office where Zirui worked was one of several hundred branches of a real estate company that sold property in new developments all over China. Some of the developments were so new that the apartments he sold did not yet exist when his clients signed for them, and would not exist for months or even years after their mortgage payments commenced. The company had outposts in every province, and its offices were always at street level, with floor-to-ceiling windows through which pedestrians could glimpse, in between the slivers of pane not obscured by bright cluttered property ads, the Zirui and his colleagues working inside.

His desk abutted those windows, through which, that morning, he watched two skinny cooks from the Hunanese restaurant across the street puffing on cigarettes and shivering in their kitchen whites. Color-coded couriers zipped by on silent mopeds, their arms nestled in the elbow-length gloves they attached to the handlebars to protect their forearms from the burn of cold winter air in motion. The neighbourhood snack vendor, a middle-aged woman with a blue-rinse perm, carefully arranged the sweet potatoes in her coal-smeared wok.

Zirui turned to his screen. He was assessing an email from one Mrs. Huang. She and her husband, she rather testily explained, had purchased a one-bedroom in one of the as-yet nonexistent developments that Zirui touted for his employer. This one was a gated compound near the Sixth Ring Road that would consist of eight apartment blocks with eighty-eight floors apiece. The Huangs, whose thirtieth-floor apartment would overlook one of the compound’s three playgrounds, had paid the signing deposit four years ago and made their mortgage repayments every month since, despite the fact that the developer in charge of the project had halted construction two years prior with no explanation or indication of when it might recommence.

Zirui crafted a quick, canned response, ensuring Mrs. Huang that she and her fellow tenants would hear more from the company soon. In fact, she had reached out to Zirui twice already, and each time had received from him a similarly anodyne and equivocating reply. He had grown used to his clients’ pestering, which reliably dropped off after enough polite rebuttals; he did not remember her particular case; to him she was an indistinguishable of the irritating aggregate.

He also viewed the people to whom he sold properties with a measure of contempt, categorising them in his head as cash-rich speculators who were driving up prices in an already tight housing market in order to shore up their investments. He presumed Mrs. Huang was one of these people, greedy for a second or third flat with no intent to live in it or even rent it out. Zirui owned his home too, but he had spent years saving, and he knew that he would never be able to afford to move himself and his wife to a larger home, let alone purchase a second one. He reread his email, checking for mistakes, and then pressed send.

At lunchtime, he crossed the street to the snack vendor and asked for some roasted chestnuts and quail’s eggs. As the woman shook the chestnuts into a plastic bag, he eyed the sweet potatoes basting in their skins.

“Are you always here?”

“It’s a good spot,” she said, and handed him his bag of food.

It was a grey and frigid day. Because of the cold, the blue-and-yellow exercise machines were bereft of the retirees who frequented them, and he sat alone in the park. The warmth of the snacks in his hands reassured him. As he ate, he revisited the morning’s events. Why had the police taken that old man and his cart away in their van? Had they approached him intending to arrest him, or had the interaction escalated in such a way that they decided they needed to bring him in? Had someone called the police and reported the seller for doing something illegal? Had they left the cart there, or taken it with them? If they had taken it, would they return it when they released him? If they had abandoned it, was it still there now?

He wondered if it might be an issue of permits, if the man had set up his stall in an area forbidden to snack vendors. But it had been a public sidewalk, no different to the one where the woman outside Zirui’s office hawked the same foods. He wasn’t sure if he’d seen the old man before, so he couldn’t guess whether this was the first morning the man had occupied that spot, or whether he had always been there; whether clashes with the police were part of the texture of the man’s daily life, and he would reappear tomorrow, or whether this was an aberration, a point after which the man’s life would never be the same.

On his way back to the office, he paused at the cart where he had purchased his lunch. The woman was squatting to reach the stove, prodding at the coals with a metal stick.

“Do you need a permit for this?”

“Hah?”

“A permit?”

She stared at him, and prodded the coals.

“Have the police ever told you to leave?”

She clanged shut the door of the stove.

“I’m not doing anything illegal.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You’re not a cop. You work there. I see you go in every day.”

“What are you so suspicious for?”

“Why are you asking me this stuff? Are you going to report me?”

“Why would I report you?” said Zirui. “You said you’re not doing anything illegal.”

“I’m not.”

“Then why would I report you?”

The woman was scowling now. She kneeled to the stove again and stabbed at the coals. Zirui shrugged and walked away.

Several new emails were waiting for him when he sat back down at his desk, including a long, irate message from Mrs. Huang. This time he sent a second, more contrite response — nothing that could be construed as an actual apology, of course, because that would imply guilt, but a tone that suggested remorse. He finished the email with a pledge, which he did not intend to keep, that he would reach out to the developers on Mrs. Huang’s behalf to find out more and would revert to her as soon as he could with an update.

On the way home that evening, Zirui made sure to take a window seat on the opposite side of the bus to view the site of the arrest, but the sweet potato seller was not there, and the cart was not there. He disembarked at the next stop, shovelling his hands into his coat pockets and tensing his neck against the wind, and walked to where the two officers — he kept thinking of them as boys — had arrested the old man. He didn’t think he would speak to the man if he found him, but, he supposed, it would be a comfort to himself if he could see him reunited with his cart, shielded from the cold by the smoke of the cooking fire, handing soft steaming packets of potatoes to hungry customers. That was plausible. But Zirui was unconvinced by his own reasoning. Maybe he didn’t care about the old man; maybe he just hoped to witness another dramatic scene to enliven his day.

Instead of returning to the bus stop, he decided to walk home, or walk in the direction of home until he got too cold or tired or bored. By the time he reached the canal, it was dark. He ascended a skybridge, stopping halfway across to lean over the railing and watch the cars trundle up and down the Second Ring Road. It was still rush hour, and they moved at a quick crawl, stopping and starting in accordance with the traffic lights. Nearby, sitting cross-legged with his back to the railing, was a man playing the erhu. A clear, coarse melody emerged, one that Zirui recognized from his childhood, a song that everyone in China his age would recognize too. The erhu player had a small round bald spot on the top of his head, and he sat cross-legged on an island of cardboard. Beside him was a plastic container, empty but for a couple of coins Zirui suspected the man had placed there himself, to signify the container’s purpose to passersby. He was trying not to look at the man’s feet, which were bare, and parts of which were greenish and blackened, the color of preserved egg. People rarely gave money to beggars at this time of year: it was awkward to fumble in one’s pocket or purse with stiff numb fingers just to extract a few kuai. Zirui, moved by the music, began to sing along. The erhu player’s tanned and lined face was transfigured by a sudden smile, and he looked up. Zirui was startled, and stopped singing: the man had no eyes. He began to walk on. He supposed he could have taken a note from his wallet for the man, but it would have taken so long.

He descended the skybridge, thinking about erhu lessons in primary school: sheet music in rainbow-bound books, and the scrape of metal chairs on the classroom floor, and quiet Teacher Wen, who wore her hair in braids. He thought again of the potato seller, this time wondering if the man had a wife. Would the wife have heard, by now, of the husband’s arrest? Surely the police would have been in touch. And pretty Teacher Wen — had she ever married?

Lijia was waiting for him at home. She had covered the dinner dishes in plastic film, and the rice was warming in the cooker. They sat down to eat. Lijia had made spare ribs in fermented black bean sauce, one of his favorites. He rolled a rib around in his mouth, feeling the meat separate easily from the bone. When he was done he spat it gently onto the table. He knew Lijia didn’t like it when did that, but it gave him such pleasure.

“How was lunch today?” Lijia asked. She meant the meal she had packed for him. She had a habit, usually endearing but in this case irritating, of bringing up other meals, past or future, the moment she sat down to the one she was having.

“Oh. I didn’t eat it.”

“Why not?”

Zirui shrugged and popped another rib into his mouth. While he masticated, Lijia told him how she had spent her day — he half-listened, knowing it would be identical to her other days — and then told him that her brother Liming was coming to visit the following weekend. Zirui chewed and nodded and spat.

“I might give him a call,” he said.

“Really?” Lijia said. She and her brother were close — they were twins, after all — but Liming and Zirui had never quite seen eye to eye.

“I saw the police arrest someone today. I’d be interested to hear his perspective.”

“Why? Did they talk to you?”

Zirui shook his head. “I just saw it from the bus.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Zirui. “Maybe nothing.”

Lijia stood up and came around to his side of the table. With one hand she held her own empty plate, and with the other she swept his pork bones onto it. She shook them into the bin and returned to the table.

“It was a sweet potato vendor,” Zirui said. “He looked about seventy. Eighty, even.”

“Maybe he owed a fine.”

“It didn’t seem like that. It seemed—”

He stopped himself. He was recalling the things that disturbed him: doughy young expressionless faces, wrinkled knuckles red and pink in the cold, car tires bobbing from the impact of a slammed door.

Lijia said, “I’m sure it happens all the time.”

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At work the next day, Zirui deleted three emails from Mrs. Huang without reading them and sent a newly married couple some blueprints for a spacious two-bedroom in a lakeside high-rise on the other side of town from where Mrs. Huang’s apartment was going to be. The high-rise didn’t exist yet; neither did the lake.

Just before lunch, Mrs. Huang called his office phone. He had preemptively saved her number, predicting that she would call, and when he saw her name he let it ring until it stopped. Two minutes later a voicemail appeared, and he heard her speak for the first time. She sounded younger than he had supposed, and angrier, and possibly attractive, though voices were often misleading. He deleted the voicemail. Later in the afternoon, he and his colleagues traveled to a larger branch office where a regional executive briefed them on a financial platform the company had just launched to augment its real estate listings app. The platform offered a peer-to-peer micro-lending service and a money market fund, and it was available on the company’s standalone app and as a mini-program on WeChat. Once your bank account was linked, anytime you wanted to throw a little bit of money into the fund — the minimum was one jiao, a tenth of a yuan — you tapped on a multicoloured orb that released gold coins into the air: one jiao per tap. It reminded Zirui of the colourful candy puzzle games he played sometimes on the bus; he supposed that was the point.

All company employees, the executive said, needed to work harder to promote the platform to their clients, so that the company would be able to reach its target number of monthly active users. “Every drop of water helps to fill the well,” the executive said. At the end of the talk, Zirui and his colleagues stood up and clapped in the manner they knew they were expected to do.

That weekend, Zirui and Lijia made a trip to the IKEA in northeast Beijing. They ate Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes and walked around the megastore, seeing what was new. Zirui took a nap in a Trönken bed while Lijia selected a new shower curtain and purchased light bulbs for their home. In the afternoon they visited Zirui’s parents, and on Sunday they met some of their university friends for hotpot and beer.

At lunch on Monday, Zirui asked the vendor outside his office for a sweet potato. The woman, who today was wearing a black vinyl visor to shade her face from the winter sun, removed the big iron lid. Steam erupted. With deft movements she selected a potato and double-bagged it. Zirui took the packet, holding it by its edges, and handed her some cash.

“Someone was looking for you,” she said as she counted his change.

“What?”

“A woman,” she smirked. “She was here, looking for you.”

“You know my name?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know this woman was looking for me?”

“She had a picture of you on her phone.”

“When was this?”

“Friday.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said yes, he works there. But your office was closed.”

“We had a company event. What did she want?”

“How should I know?”

“She didn’t say?”

“Nope.”

“What did she look like?”

“Annoyed.”

“Annoyed?”

“Maybe she’s a cop.” The woman grinned. “Coming to arrest you.”

“Watch it.” Zirui snapped. He took his change and walked to the park. Sitting on the bench, he burned his fingers trying to push the dry skin off the pulpy potato flesh.

On his way back to the office, he passed the vendor, who was hunched over her phone. As he got closer, he could see her jabbing at the screen, causing gold coins to spin and rise up into a line of fluffy clouds, at which point a pleasant piano melody tinkled forth.

“So this is what my money’s going to?” Zirui said, in a tone he intended to be jocular. The woman whirled around. She tucked her phone into the breast pocket of her padded jacket.

“What do you want?”

“I didn’t realize you were a financial speculator.”

“Isn’t this your game? What are you telling me off for?”

“It’s not a game. And it’s not mine.”

“It’s your company.”

“Mind your business.”

“Mind yours!”

Back at the computer, six unread emails and five voicemails from Mrs. Huang. The person who had come looking for him had to have been her. He felt uneasy, and affronted, and unsure of company protocol. Was there security he could call? Someone he needed to inform? Would she try to contact his bosses? Had she already? Would this all be blamed on him? He deleted all the messages. Before the end of the work day, he sold two more apartments in the lakeside development. He smiled on the bus home, thinking of his commission.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday passed and she did not email or call. On Friday, Lijia spent the day roasting a duck in honour of Liming’s arrival. He was coming up from Shanghai, where he worked for a security firm that provided bodyguards for the wealthy — mostly tech founders and online influencers. Before that, he had worked in the Suzhou public security bureau for fifteen years.

Mrs. Huang receded from Zirui’s mind and his brother-in-law took her place. He decided that he would tell the story of the sweet potato seller, and ask Liming what he thought might have happened to the man. He and Lijia had not discussed the incident after that first night; Zirui would not have been able to say with confidence that Lijia even remembered the conversation. The closer the dinner came, the more Zirui rehearsed the exchange he would have with Liming. Although he had first thought to tell the story as an amusing anecdote, and use it a way to demonstrate to Liming that Zirui valued his professional opinion, he spent the bus ride home that Friday in a state of growing agitation, running through the imagined dialogue again and again, not realising until he stepped off the bus and flinched in the cold that he was angry. Somehow he had convinced himself that Liming was involved in the incident, in fantastical and implausible ways: Liming was the driver of the van they’d hauled the old man into; Liming was the superintendent, a cold voice piped by Bluetooth into the officers’ ears; Liming was the police commissioner who he had ordered the old man’s arrest. Zirui tried to summon the faces of the baby-faced cops to clear the picture in his mind, and his mind offered him the face of a young Liming. He struggled to compose himself. But when he walked into his house, and saw his brother-in-law’s lurid green Nike trainers on the floor, he was calm. He understood that he was being ridiculous.

Lijia was in the kitchen and Liming was on the couch, drinking a Sprite and looking at the plasma screen TV.

“Hey, you’re in the news.” Liming said.

“What?”

“Your company. Bit of a scandal.”

Zirui stared at the television. His stomach turned to ice. There was a passport-style picture of a woman on one side of the screen, and Zirui’s company’s logo on the other side. He shut his eyes. He could hear the presenter explaining that a woman had committed suicide by jumping off the roof of an unfinished high-rise that his company represented. No one knew how the woman had managed to gain access to the construction site or ascend to the top of the building. Her husband wanted to sue Zirui’s company; they had been paying their mortgage for years. The presenter said that a company spokesperson, in a statement posted on WeChat and distributed to media, had expressed regret over the woman’s death and extended condolences to her family.

“Any insider details for us?” said Liming. Zirui did not respond. He felt as if he were detached from his body, and his mind was a well, and Liming’s voice was coming to him from a long way away, in a different language to his own. From inside the well he heard the presenter say that the woman had been identified: Huang Derong. Wang Derong. Huang Derong?

“Is he saying Wang or Huang?”

“Why are you shouting?”

“Wang or Huang?”

“Wang! It’s right there, look!”

Zirui opened his eyes. The surname flashed on the screen. He began to laugh.

“You alright, brother?”

“Yes, yes, yes, brother,” Zirui said through his tears. “Everything is alright.”

Dinner was jolly, especially after Zirui insisted they uncork a second bottle of wine and bring out the good baijiu to celebrate the small family reunion. His wife and her brother had always been close; Zirui, for his part, had forgotten how much he enjoyed Liming’s relaxed manner and easy humour. The duck was very good, and the wine went well with it, and Liming entertained them with tales of his most fastidious clients, dropping enough hints that they could sometimes guess the celebrity involved in the story. Zirui and Liming downed baijiu in tiny glasses, and even Lijia had a sip. Underneath Zirui’s enjoyment of the evening pulsed his own story of the sweet potato seller, and the episode of what he was already thinking of as a brief attack of illness when he got off the bus, and his earlier, now diminishing conviction to raise the incident with Liming. After the news report about the death of the woman named Wang, everything else seemed trivial. Inwardly, he chided himself for having gotten so worked up about something so irrelevant to his own life, for making himself sick imagining all the horrible things that might have befallen the sweet potato seller, in the van or in detention, in a court or in a prison cell. Probably the man was fine. If he had done nothing wrong, the misunderstanding would be worked out by now. If he had done something wrong, then in all likelihood that meant he was a criminal. And why waste one’s thoughts on a criminal? Zirui drained his glass and set it down. He watched the brother and sister laugh together at a joke he’d missed, their noses in profile a mirrored image. With his chopsticks he reached for another piece of duck.

This is a short story I wrote. I hope you enjoyed reading it!

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The launch event for Gingko Season took place at Yu & Me Books in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The small space was filled with friends and family. One of my best friends flew in from LA, surprising me, and I saw people I haven’t seen in years, and was touched that they came out to support me and buy the book and listen to me talk. Friends and relatives came from San Fransisco and Detroit and Miami, my parents from Malaysia, and my brother from Sydney, so he wins the Farthest Traveled award.

I did a Q&A with Gina Chung, the author of Sea Change and Green Frog. Gina is a very talented writer and turned out to be a brilliant interlocutor as well. She prepared a series of thoughtful and super fun questions about my book, and her relaxed, good-humoured competency helped me chill out (I was nervous all day leading up to the talk). Then I signed some copies of Gingko Season, trying out my dubious new author signature, and the attendees bought up all the copies in stock.

After the event we walked to the nearby Whiskey Tavern for celebratory drinks. I am sometimes very disorganised and had planned nothing for the evening until earlier that day, when I selected the bar based on proximity to the bookstore and reserved a couple of tables. They emailed to ask if there was any special occasion and I told them I was launching my book. When we arrived at the bar, we saw that they had printed out copies of the book cover and hung a banner that said “CONGRATULATIONS ON LAUNCHING YOUR BOOK NAOMI … WE’RE SO PROUD OF YOU!!!!!!!” It was a lovely surprise. Something about the fact that the “we’re” logically referred to the bar employees whom I’d never met was so funny, and weirdly moving. And our server was wearing a Yu & Me hat!

This was not a book of the big advance, Times Square billboard variety, so my publication week and its lead up was pretty relaxed, which has been nice (I’m easily overwhelmed). The day after the Yu & Me event we had a cosy family party in the apartment of dear friends, with a book cover cake. I had a fun conversation with Megan Labrise of Kirkus Reviews for their Fully Booked podcast, which you can listen to here. A couple more podcasts coming up, and a couple of events in August and beyond. I’ve been pondering some guerrilla marketing tactics but I’m mostly happy for Gingko Season to live its life in the world without me (but of course with my support) and get to work on my second novel, which I’m excited to write.

I treasure the creative cycle of depletion, rest, recharge, and renewal. I can’t remember when exactly the transition happened and I felt the door close on GS and open on [redacted] but it’s a great feeling, to find out, after putting everything you can into your first book — Your First Book!! — that there is gas in the tank again, and you’re ready(ish) to go. Obviously Book #2 might turn out to be terrible and a total failure but that’s okay, still gotta do it.

On Saturday morning, I woke up and looked at my phone and saw that my [insert all superlatives here, she’s the best] agent Iwalani had texted me. Agents operate on a sort of inverse principle to the usual dictum — with them, no news is bad news. But that means news is usually good news! And it was: Gingko Season had received a great review from the New York Times.

I have that thing I think a lot of people have where I dream of an accomplishment, but when I achieve it, I don’t experience the sense of accomplishment I imagined I would back when it was just a dream. The forever shifting goalposts are good for motivation but can be a bummer when it comes to feeling positive about your life’s work etc etc. But I will say that when I woke up to Lauren Christensen of the New York Times Book Review calling the book “superb” and devoting several hundred words to a serious consideration of the ideas and characters in it, I had a few solid hours of real living-in-the-moment happiness. Proper LeBron meme moment for like half a day, which is ages. And then yesterday a lovely stranger who attended the Yu & Me launch came up to me in a different bookstore and told me she had just finished reading the novel, and loved it! She made a TikTok about it too that you can watch here (I’m not on TikTok so I am extremely grateful for all the BookTok help I can get). So: a pretty amazing week!

And don’t worry, back to regularly scheduled programming i.e. rambles about random art and literature topics next time.

Some stuff to read

• I wrote an essay for Lit Hub about creating a sense of place in fiction. I mention Robert Caro, J.L. Carr, and the beleaguered SS United States. I’ve never written a “craft” essay before, it was interesting. Like, okay, guess it’s time to adopt a slightly hectoring tone about something I’m basing mostly off of vibes. But it was fun to write :) Excerpt:

I adore the meaty detail of sensation (sight, smell, sound, you know the list) and the concreteness of fact (street names, snack ingredients, species of tree), but too much fealty to fact is dangerous. Facts may be used sparingly, liberally, or not at all, but they must never overpower a narrative; in the effort to evoke a sense of place, an overreliance on factual detail can blur the reader’s perception, or begin to resemble a guidebook entry.

The novelist enjoys a right that the journalist lacks—the right to invent, even in a work of “realist” or “historical” fiction, with glee and without compunction; the right to delay a solar eclipse by a year so that it appears in a single scene; the right to the gamut of imagination. In this mode of writing, one begs and borrows and steals from life—plagiarizing anecdotes, tweaking sob stories, uprooting trees and moving buildings hundreds or thousands of miles. Whatever the story needs, it will get.

• I’m really excited to read Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux’s new biography of Gauguin, one of my favorite artists. She draws on newly discovered and previously unused sources to paint (lol) a revisionist-ish picture of the artist. I read The Moon and Sixpence, Somerset Maugham’s freaky fictionalised take on Gauguin’s life, a year or two ago, and even though I know it’s just an “inspired by” I’m looking forward to this new biography dispelling some of the impressions with which that novel left me. Great book though! In the NYT review of Wild Thing, I loved the following bit, which reminded me of Proust (in the idea that reality tarnishes memory and that memory is realer/better/more worthy than reality) and also of Napoleon (who maybe could have returned to his homeland of Corsica to live out his first exile, but chose Elba instead):

He later recalled his early life in Peru in dreamy, almost hallucinatory, terms.

“He would always scorn people who elevated the realm of sight above the mysterious realm of thought and memory,” Prideaux writes. Presented with the opportunity to visit Lima again, while working as a sailor in his 20s, he decided against it, preferring instead what Prideaux mordantly calls “the Peru-of-the-mind, untouched by too much reality.”

• “Pity the Barefoot Pigeon” by Ian Frazier in the New Yorker. I was predisposed to this because I already love pigeons and believe them to be an unfairly maligned species but I cried at the ending. It also made me want to patent something, as the author of the piece casually mentions he has done. My idea of a perfect story: becoming obsessed with something and then wandering around New York talking to lovable weirdos who are even more obsessed with it. To any New Yorker editors reading this: I’m ready for your commission, and I have ideas!

  • Some of my favorite lines:

    • “Homing pigeons, which are trained to return to their roosts from great distances, sometimes get injured, and, if they can’t fly, have been known to spend days or weeks walking home.”

    • “Exotic varieties will die off or will revert to ordinary street pigeons in several generations if humans get bored with them and stop rebreeding them.”

    • “the birds were kind of burbling, like gently percolating coffee.”

    • “He opened the door and took out an adult pigeon and showed it to me. It sat peaceably in his hand as he spread its feet between his fingers. The foot felt soft, like my grandmother’s hands when I was seven.”

    • “Pigeons appear almost instantly, pecking so avidly that dozens of individual bread cubes go flying into the air above the mass of birds like popping popcorn.”

Thanks for reading!

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Bendiner asked Liang if he wanted to give a talk at the Architects Alumni Association dinner that had been arranged to accommodate Liang’s busy schedule. “You can see what a hot shot you have gotten to be,” Bendiner teased his old classmate in a letter. Liang politely declined the speaking invitation, explaining in a handwritten reply that “it would be best for me to join my old friends, have lots of fun, and no talk.”

Liang stayed overnight and left Philadelphia the next evening, after spending the day “in the Museum,” likely the Penn Museum or the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bendiner had been trying to get Penn to award Liang an honorary degree, but missed the deadline and was advised to re-apply the following year, provided Liang was still in the United States. By that time, though, Liang had returned to China for good.

Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin were part of a group of Chinese students who came to the US on Boxer Indemnity scholarships in the 1920s and then returned to China, becoming known as the First Generation in Chinese architecture.

“Every architect in China traces his or her lineage from this group,” says Nancy Steinhardt, professor of East Asian art and curator of Chinese art at the Penn Museum. “They took the Penn education, they went back to China, and they wanted to make a difference in the future of their nation.”

When Liang and Lin arrived at Penn in September 1924, Philadelphia was the third-largest city in the country. It was a vital sea port and industrial powerhouse. Architecturally, it was emerging from the City Beautiful Movement and into the golden age of the pre-Crash 1920s.

Everywhere, buildings were cropping up that reflected the city’s vibrancy and growth: in 1927, the Parkway Central Library opened its doors; in 1928, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in 1929, the Rodin Museum, designed by the French Beaux-Arts master Paul Philippe Cret, who taught and influenced Liang, Lin, and other members of the First Generation, as well as the architect Louis Kahn, who graduated from Penn the year Liang and Lin matriculated.

Cret came to Penn in 1903, recruited by Fine Arts dean Warren Powers Laird to lead the architectural program, and stayed on the faculty until he retired in 1937. By the 1920s, when Liang, Lin, and many other Boxer scholars were on campus, the program had flowered into one of the best in the country, specializing in the Beaux-Arts style Cret had imported from Paris. In 1926 the School of Fine Arts announced that Penn students had won more architecture competitions in the previous four years than students from all other schools combined; half of the winners were Chinese students.

Philadelphia is dotted with Paul Cret’s influence. In addition to the Rodin Museum, he drafted the first plans for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, based on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and he designed the original Barnes Foundation building in Merion, all in the Beaux-Arts style. Steinhardt says that there is no evidence that Liang and the other First Generation architects came to Penn specifically to study under Cret. “It’s kind of just really good fortune that this was the person Liang worked with.”

The overlap between Cret and the students who became part of the First Generation was serendipitous. There is a certain visual compatibility between the Beaux-Arts style and traditional Chinese architecture, Steinhardt explains. In both disciplines, “There’s a grand formalism, there’s symmetry, there’s the use of gates, and there’s also a link with antiquity.”

Just place a photograph of the Forbidden City’s Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing next to a photograph of a Beaux-Arts building, Steinhardt suggests, and in both “there is this grandeur, symmetry, clear central axis, and emphasis on the sides and the top.”

Liang’s Beaux-Arts education lent itself to his preservation efforts back in China, offering “a gentler way to modernize.”

“Liang’s personal mission was for China to be able to modernize without losing Old China,” Steinhardt says. “So what he was trying to do is use modern materials, but always make China look like China. He really worked hard not to lose the past.”

It was not just the sublime that he picked up through his architectural education at Penn, but the mundane, too. He took classes in heating and plumbing, which traditional Chinese buildings—like those in the Forbidden City, constructed from impermanent materials like wood—had never incorporated.

Though Liang and Lin both came to Penn to study architecture, only Liang graduated with degrees in it (earning both a master’s and a bachelor’s in architecture in three years). The architecture program did not admit women—it only changed that policy in the mid-1930s—so Lin graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree. At the time, only 10 percent of students in the School of Fine Arts—which encompassed the architecture, music, and fine arts programs—were women, and the majority studied music.

According to Wilma Fairbank, Lin’s close friend and author of a seminal biography of the couple, women couldn’t enter the program because “architectural students had to work on their drafting at all hours of the night, and the unchaperoned presence of women would be improper.”

Lin had not acquiesced without a fight: when she was still in Beijing, she and her father wrote letters to Laird, asking if she could circumvent the policy, even enlisting the Chinese Legation Minister—equivalent to the national ambassador—to speak to the dean on her behalf. Laird was unrelenting, advising Lin to apply to other schools or to consider working toward a fine arts degree and supplementing it with architecture electives.

Lin opted to enroll at Penn despite those limitations, but her academic record shows that architecture was always front and center. She worked in Cret’s office, took graduate-level design courses and some courses that ordinarily excluded women (carpentry, plumbing, and drainage), and from 1926 to 1927 even served as a part-time architecture instructor. With the help of a summer session, she still managed to graduate a year early.

Laird, who had been so resistant to admitting Lin to the architecture program, later wrote, “Miss Lin has pursued her course of study with great earnestness and a high degree of success. The amount of study which she has taken each year has been greater than that of the average student … In point of character, breeding, mentality and natural talent Miss Lin has shown the highest qualities.”

Classmates recall Lin Huiyin, who went by Phyllis in English-speaking circles, as vivacious and social. Her friend and fellow student Elizabeth Sutro, who later married Bendiner, told Penn archivist Francis Dallett in 1979 that Lin was “an exquisite, lovely girl” with a “wonderful sense of humor.” The author of a 1925 article in the The Philadelphia Public Ledger seemed as spellbound by Lin as everyone else who met her, writing of her “soft laughter” and “sharp, black eyes twinkling with amusement.”

In Chinese popular culture today, the couple has been elevated to near-mythical romantic status. They have been the subject of multi–part documentaries, television soap operas, and even an actual opera—the China National Opera and Drama Theatre’s Lin Huiyin, which premiered in May 2017 in Beijing.

Lin’s personal life especially has been the subject of public sensation. Before heading to Penn and marrying Liang, she became acquainted with the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo while studying in England. Xu fell in love with the young Lin and divorced his first wife, Zhang Youyi, whose great niece went on to write a book about Zhang’s life and that tumultuous love triangle.

In addition to architecture, Lin was also a published writer of poems and prose. She traveled Europe with her father, the politician and diplomat Lin Changmin. When Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore visited China, it was Lin’s family who hosted the giant of Bengali literature, and Lin and Xu who interpreted for him.

Lin’s ability to travel and her access to education was an anomaly for women at that time. She enjoyed these privileges thanks to a wealthy family and supportive father, explains Siyen Fei, associate professor of Chinese history at Penn. “Not everybody enjoyed that level of freedom. Social class was a big factor.”

Still, Lin’s lifetime of accomplishments was exceptional. “She really became, I think, a role model in China for women,” Fei says. “She was very active, she’s beautiful, talented, and she still asserted that kind of independence—she had a career [and] a husband who really respected what she did.”

As widespread as Lin’s influence may have been, her legacy is most tangible on a much smaller scale—within her family. Her niece is the American architect Maya Lin, whose illustrious career was kickstarted in 1981 when, at 21 and still an undergraduate at Yale, she won a nationwide competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.

“My whole life was framed by my father’s respect for Lin Huiyin,” Maya Lin said to Smithsonian magazine in 2017. “You could say that Lin’s passion for art and architecture flows through me[.] Now I’m doing what she wanted to do.”

Liang and Lin, not yet married, lived separately while at Penn. For some time, Lin lived in a boarding house on Woodland Avenue, a block east of what became her favorite place in Philly.

“Woodland Cemetery is the spot I like best in this whole city of Philadelphia,” Lin told The Philadelphia Public Ledger. “It’s only the hustle, bustle and noise that never ends that makes me so tired. I like quiet, I like to get alone sometimes … If I go to Fairmount Park, yes, I see trees and grass, but the crowds are always there. I guess I must sit among the tombs.”

Her attraction to that bucolic burial ground, with its winding paths and immense trees, would later find an echo in her niece’s experience of New Haven. Maya Lin, in a 1982 Washington Post article, described visits to the cemetery near Yale’s campus as one of her favorite activities as an undergraduate architecture student there. “The Grove Street Cemetery is beautiful,” she said at the time. “There’s something peaceful about it. You feel removed. You feel you’re in their world. You’re in the world of the dead.”

Though she stole away to the cemetery for peace and solitude, Lin Huiyin was remarkably active in collegiate extracurricular life. She was a member of the Chinese Student Association, the May Day Lighting Committee, and the Social Committee of the Philadelphia Chinese Students’ Club. In 1926 she won a Christmas card design competition, and in 1927 she invited prominent Chinese intellectual Hu Shih to speak in Philadelphia.

For Liang, Lin, and the other First Generation architects, Penn was always a stepping stone to a greater, lifelong commitment. “They were the kind of people who did not plan to stay in the West at all. They really identified with China and they were here to learn things to bring back to China,” Fei says. When they returned to China, the First Generation set up the first architecture schools and design firms in the country.

Nineteen-year-old Lin, speaking to the Ledger correspondent, explained how she intended to use her Western education: “We must learn the fundamental principles of all art only in order to apply them to designs distinctly ours. We want to study methods of construction that mean permanency.”

Liang and Lin married in 1928 and spent the rest of their shared life collaborating on articles, teaching, traveling, and designing buildings together. They spent much of the 1930s traversing China’s vast and remote countryside, seeking and surveying centuries-old wooden temples tucked into mountainside terraces, often braving mud, lice, and bandits to do so.

Their measurements, sketches, and photographs are in some cases the only such recordings of the beautiful and dilapidated structures they found, many of which were destroyed by Japanese bombings during World War II, or amidst the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. According to Dallett, the archivist, they sent two or three volumes of their drawings of temple woodwork back to Philadelphia as a gift for their mentor Paul Cret.

When the People’s Liberation Army was on the brink of taking over Beijing during China’s civil war, its leaders asked Liang and Lin to help mark out any buildings of cultural value, so that they knew what to protect if fighting extended into the city. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, Liang and Lin stayed in China to work with the new government and help shape the future of their country. Liang also hoped that a socialist government would bring urban planning and preservation under centralized control.

The couple designed the Monument to the People’s Heroes, an obelisk that stands today in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, though Lin did not live to see it completed. She died of tuberculosis in 1955, three years before construction finished on the obelisk and a decade before the start of the Cultural Revolution, under which Liang was deemed a counterrevolutionary and sent to the countryside for re-education.

Liang’s second wife, Lin Zhu, hid his notes and drawings to avoid the risk of confiscation; those papers later formed his posthumous magnum opus, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, which contains some of the only recordings of the structures he and Lin painstakingly chronicled in the 1930s. Liang died in Beijing in 1972.

It’s hard, in retrospect, not to look at their story and see a tragedy, a narrative of lost potential. In 1949, Liang drafted an urban development plan for Beijing, outlining a proposal to preserve and commemorate its magnificent castellated city walls, ancient gates, watchtowers and hutong—the architecture that had prompted American city planner Edmund Bacon (sometimes referred to as “The Father of Modern Philadelphia”) to dub Beijing, in the 1930s, “possibly the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth.”

Liang’s plan envisioned a total transformation of Beijing that combined the preservation of the old with the construction of the new. “He came back literally to build a new China. That was his mission, that was his mandate,” Steinhardt says. According to his plans, the old city was to become a public park, and adjacent satellite towns and industrial zones could be constructed in its outskirts. But Mao Zedong rejected Liang’s proposal, famously pledging to remake the metropolis into “a forest of smokestacks.”

“It’s a really human story,” Steinhardt says. “It’s not that much of an exaggeration to say he gave his life to try to save the city of Beijing, and he wasn’t successful.”

But Liang’s impact on modern Chinese architecture—in tandem with Lin, his lifelong collaborator until her death—remains unparalleled. While other First Generation members went on to become “pure architects,” Steinhardt sees Liang’s influence manifested in numerous roles: architect, educator, academic, historic preservationist, and pioneer in field work and restoration.

Even now, Steinhardt says, Penn’s campus is a site of near pilgrimage. Chinese architects will come and ask to see where Liang took classes and sketched buildings, and students remain in awe of their predecessor. For “architecture students who come here,” she says, “this is where Liang studied.”

Liang and Lin were born to well-off families who represented the intellectual, cultural, and social elite of China. After 1949, when many of the same background chose to leave, Fei says, “They decided to stay because of their sense of mission to change things in China and to do something for Chinese people. So they also belong to these very progressive, left-wing, young scholars in China. There’s still a lot to be said about that kind of idealism.”

Every spring, Fei teaches a survey course on modern China for Penn undergraduates, the majority of whom have never heard of the famous couple. When she gets to the lectures on Liang and Lin, she says, “I can see students’ eyes kind of light up. They really are excited to see this aspect of Penn.”

For Chinese international students, the connection can be even more significant. “I think we sort of see the increasing presence of international students as a very recent phenomenon,” Fei says. “For Chinese students, I think for a lot of them it’s very meaningful when they [see] we actually have got this long connection between China and Penn.”

When Alfred Bendiner was applying for an honorary degree from Penn on behalf of his friend Liang, he sent over a three-page copy of the architect’s CV for Liang to check over before mailing it to the Penn administration. Liang returned the copy with his corrections in black ink: an honorary degree from Princeton in 1947, the Chinese titles of monographs from the 1930s, a couple of typos.

Under the heading “Creative Work in Architecture”—a listing of the buildings he’d designed—Liang had amended every entry, from “The Geology Building, National Peking University” to “a number of residences and shops, etc.,” in his neat, cramped handwriting, so that they read:

& Phyllis Lin; (Lin Hui–yin)

in collaboration with Phyllis Lin

with Phyllis Lin.

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This article first appeared in The Pennsylvania Gazette. I’ve made some extremely minor line edits and added new photographs, including unpublished photos I took of archival materials I came across in my research for the story. Sifting through archives is, in my opinion, one of the most fun and exciting things in the world. I’m currently researching some other archives-based stories that I hope to publish here, so let me know if you like this format or have any feedback. Thanks as ever for reading!

“Ah! how tired I am, my dear fellow! It will be the death of me! However, I can tell it to you—to you!”

He bent towards Frederic’s ear in a mysterious fashion:

“I am trying to discover again the red of Chinese copper!”

And he explained the nature of the glaze and the little fire.

Many pages later, he’s still at it:

Arnoux took a great deal of pains with his earthenware works. He was endeavouring to discover the copper-red of the Chinese, but his colours evaporated in the process of baking. In order to avoid cracks in his ware, he mixed lime with his potter’s clay; but the articles got broken for the most part; the enamel of his paintings on the raw material boiled away; his large plates became bulged; and, attributing these mischances to the inferior plant of his manufactory, he was anxious to start other grinding-mills and other drying-rooms.

He never succeeds. The last we hear of it, Arnoux has abandoned the effort, and Arnoux’s wife is showing the underwhelming fruits of his trials to Frederic, the protagonist, who spends most of the book deceiving and manipulating Arnoux in order to seduce said wife.

In order to divert his attention with something of an amusing nature, she showed him the species of museum that decorated the staircase. The specimens, hung up against the wall or laid on shelves, bore witness to the efforts and the successive fads of Arnoux. After seeking vainly for the red of Chinese copper, he had wished to manufacture majolicas, faiënce, Etruscan and Oriental ware, and had, in fact, attempted all the improvements which were realised at a later period.

[…]

He now made letters for signboards and wine-labels; but his intelligence was not high enough to attain to art, nor commonplace enough to look merely to profit, so that, without satisfying anyone, he had ruined himself.

Oof. Perhaps Arnoux would been comforted to know that achieving the coveted “copper-red of the Chinese” also frustrated the Chinese themselves. During the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) artisans in Jingdezhen, the porcelain manufacturing capital of China, perfected the famous blue and white glazed “china” porcelain. Vast consignments of bowls and plates and cups and jugs were sold around China and shipped abroad to buyers in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Red glazes — made from copper oxide — also started to appear. This may have been spurred by a shortage of cobalt (necessary for the blue glaze) and/or an emperor’s personal preference for the color. But red-glazed porcelain came nowhere near the quantity or quality of the blue and white. The copper oxide pigment was incredibly sensitive to changes in temperature and the surrounding air, and required extremely precise kiln conditions. The thickness of the glaze or the particular mixture of pigment and other ingredients could mean the difference between a bright red and a brownish, greyish, or liver-hued vase. The glazes bubbled and cracked and the red-shaded lines bled and leaked, ruining painstakingly intricate patterns and necessitating simpler designs.1

The difficulty of obtaining a proper red glaze is evident in the contrast between the blue and white porcelain and the copper-red porcelain from the same era:

Three words appear again and again in descriptions of the copper-red porcelain of the Yuan Dynasty: “experimental”, “unstable”, and “difficult”. This sounds exactly like Arnoux’s experience. But what exactly was he trying to emulate?

Hundreds of years had passed between the copper-red “misfires” (as in-kiln errors are literally called) of 14th century China and Arnoux’s own misfires in mid-19th century France, when Sentimental Education takes place. Arnoux would have seen later, more skilful iterations of copper-red glazed porcelain.

The Yuan (1271-1368) and the succeeding Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties exported ceramics around the world. China’s ceramics manufacturing hubs were near-industrial in organization, technology, efficiency and sheer scale. These city-wide setups were not too far from what one might term a “factory” or a “production line”. There were imperial kilns which produced porcelain for the emperor, manufacturers for the domestic Chinese market, and manufacturers dedicated solely to export markets, able and willing to make whatever shape, size, color and pattern their customers required. They made porcelain with Islamic motifs and Arabic calligraphy and inscribed plates with the names of Mughal emperors. They made platters larger than any in China, for clients in Turkey and Iran and Java who used them for communal meals; they made ceramic traveler’s flasks for pilgrims in Syria.

By the 17th century, Europe — largely absent from the globalised commercial dealings of the previous Yuan Dynasty — had become a big export market. Now the craftspeople at Jingdezhen were etching winged cherubs and Latin mottos and Portuguese coats of arms on their porcelain. Of course they were also selling the classic blue and white peonies and dragons and qilins. Europeans loved the Chinese stuff, too.

Balzac’s 1836 novel L’Interdiction sets the word “chinoiserie” down in print for the first time; 40 years later it begins to appear in French dictionaries. By the mid-19th century, the chinoiserie craze in Europe had peaked, but — at least in the affluent Paris of Sentimental Education — it remained a coveted aesthetic. In Flaubert’s novel there appear Chinese shot-silk parasols with carved ivory handles, Chinese ornaments and lacquered screens, Chinese-style anterooms in Parisian homes with painted lanterns, decorative sprigs of bamboo, and tiger skins. And of course Chinese porcelain, and the elusive copper-red glaze.

Arnoux would not have known about the early 14th century misfires, the pale brown-greys and the faded illustrations. By his time, the Jingdezhen artisans had gotten much better at handling the volatile pigment through new techniques and ingredient mixtures and centuries of practice. He was probably comparing his own attempts to objects like this porcelain vase from the 18th century:

Even the Sotheby’s catalogue note for this vase makes note of the challenges that defeated Arnoux:

Due to the difficulties of firing copper red successfully, ceramics painted with underglaze red designs are comparatively rare. The present vase showcases the great technical advances of the High Qing dynasty that enabled the success of this vibrant decorative mode.

Here’s another testament to the difficulty, from a porcelain specialist:

The problem with all these glazes are that copper is very volatile and it is just very difficult to fire a glaze based on copper so as it turns out pure red when finished. The success rate of wares with specifically copper red glazes has up until today typically been very low.

In Sentimental Education, Arnoux is not presented as especially sympathetic (not that any character in Flaubert’s novels escapes from the author’s cool and ironic judgment); he’s a bit of a fool, oblivious to Frederic’s designs on his wife, frivolous and ineffectual in his pursuit of aesthetic beauty and business success. All of these traits are exemplified by his failed attempt to achieve the “copper-red of the Chinese”. The whole thing is really just a comic sub-subplot.

But in fact, Arnoux was trying to do something very difficult, something that the greatest artisans in the only country in the world capable of producing porcelain at such a high standard took generations to perfect.

And it’s not as if they cracked it one day and solved the problem forever, either. The beautiful copper-red glazes achieved by the “great technical advances of the High Qing” mentioned in the Sotheby’s catalogue were themselves considered lesser imitations of red-glazed porcelain produced in the 1420s and 1430s, and then basically never again.

The red porcelain of the earlyish 15th century Ming dynasty is widely considered the high-water mark of the copper-red glaze. In Chinese it is called xianhong 鮮紅 – “fresh red” or jihong 祭紅 – “ceremonial red”, because the pieces were used as altar vessels. A remarkable feature of these pieces is that they are monochrome. No dragons, no phoenixes, no landscapes, no calligraphy. Just color.

There are just a few dozen surviving examples left. In the later Ming, the ability to produce quite such a vibrant red was lost; centuries later, during the Qing dynasty, Jingdezhen ceramicists diligently tried to match the glossy blood red their antecedents had achieved. They came close, but never really recreated it. Here is one of the copper-red glazed porcelain dishes from that high-water mark era:

If you’ll indulge me, I will end this missive with an extended excerpt from the National Museum of Asian Art’s beautifully written history of this dish and others like it. With such context Arnoux’s trials do not seem so silly at all.

Chinese monochrome porcelains are among the greatest achievements in world ceramics, and no color is more sought-after or admired than the luscious copper-red glaze of the early fifteenth century, especially of the Xuande reign. Although imitated later, it was never again realized. During the short period when this glaze was perfected, the imperial court presided over a populous, cosmopolitan state actively engaged in global trade and overseas exploration.

[…]

The superb, difficult-to-accomplish red of this dish demonstrates the exacting standards and extent of imperial control that reached from the capital in Beijing to the far-away kilns in Jingdezhen, where the dish was produced.

The triumph of Xuande copper-red-glaze lies in the combination of color and texture—raspberry (some call it—cherry) red, thick and velvety. The tactile quality of the surface is created by millions of trapped bubbles in the glaze that suffuse it with tiny speckles and subtle irregularities in color. Some minute pitting from burst bubbles creates the typical early 15th century "orange peel" surface.

[…]

The complexity in using difficult-to-control copper severely limited the number of successful firings; off-color fragments excavated from the early Ming imperial kiln site record many failed attempts.

[…]

Production of this high-temperature red glaze is extremely challenging and was pursued consistently beginning only in the fourteenth century, reaching a breakthrough in the Xuande period. The colorant is finely ground copper oxide mixed into the glaze. During firing, reduction of the copper ions to colloidal copper metal and phase separation in the glaze produced a complex network of reddish and yellowish glasses to create the mottled effect. Scientific analysis shows differences in the percentage of copper (and occasional additions of other metal oxides) even within the short period of the first half of the 15th century when the glaze was attempted, and suggests considerable tweaking and experimentation devoted to producing this rich red.

Changes also occurred to the base glaze: adding slightly more calcium facilitated the escape of bubbles and dissolving of batch material that otherwise veiled the red. The percentage of copper was reduced to about half of one per cent (of which possibly half volatilized and disappeared during firing). With too little copper, the color was pale; with too much, it became livery. Some small kilns at the imperial site are now thought possibly to have been dedicated to the red wares, which required slight over firing for success and so could not be mixed easily with other types of wares.

Extensive scientific analysis since 1985 is bringing scholars close to understanding how Xuande copper-red glaze was achieved, but it still retains a touch of mystery, not least of all in imagining how potters in the early fifteenth century were able to control so expertly the many challenges and complexities of its production. The remarkable beauty of this copper-red dish inspires us to reflect on China’s place as world leader in the art of porcelain.2

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The United States Post Office Cooper Station (named after Peter Cooper, the 19th century industrialist who founded Cooper Union) was built in 1936-7, one of many beautiful public buildings to come out of the New Deal. (It’s also where the hapless Newman works in Seinfeld). It is an example of a type of Art Deco architecture called Streamline Moderne, a subset of the genre characterised by, well, streamlined design. The buildings are less ornate than Art Deco, and perhaps more functional, but it is a functionality that does not sacrifice aesthetic grace, and may even accentuate such grace. Cooper Station is on the more sober end of Streamline Moderne, which encompasses the subtle, the whimsical and, at its most extreme, the ridiculous (which I have no objection to).

My favourite example of Streamline Moderne architecture is Tiong Bahru, a neighbourhood in Singapore, where the typical features of the style have been tweaked to suit the tropical climate. Walking around this area is a total delight, because there is so much to see — open-air markets, two-storey shopfronts, multi-level housing blocks (nicknamed “aeroplane towers” because of their resemblance), all showcasing different interpretations of Streamline Moderne.

Apartment buildings that look like ocean liners, food markets that look like air traffic control towers or spaceships. Streamline Moderne architects took inspiration from (and lent it to) the aerodynamism of the cars, trains, planes and ships (and airships) of the 1920s and 1930s.

Probably in part because of the association with blimps — which represent so concisely one branching-off of early 20th century industrialization that we decided not to follow — Streamline Moderne offers a compelling kind of retrofuturism, and evokes the aesthetic possibilities of an alternative history of (post)industrial development, more visually appealing to me at least than another popular retrofuturist vision, that of steampunk. The Second World War, of course, was the great interruption to this architectural movement; by peacetime, the mood had shifted, and the utopian whimsy of Streamline Moderne design must, in its hopefulness and its humor, have seemed awfully out of place and out of date.

And the whimsy could devolve into the downright silly, as with the Streamline Moderne Coca-Cola Bottling Plant in Los Angeles, built in 1939, which gives us a very literal take on an ocean liner, complete with portholes and a ship’s deck and flybridge. Even the flagpole looks like a mast. But isn’t it great?

The nostalgic draw of the “futuristic” world of these designs is made more acute when one thinks of — to give an example of an iconic early 20th century mode of transport — the cruise ships we have today, compared to those we had and might have had (admittedly some ideas were, even back then, a little too far-fetched to ever materialise) if history had taken us in another aesthetic direction. Take the Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, launched in 2024 as the world’s largest cruise ship, and schlepping its terrible way across the oceans as we speak:

I personally prefer such vessels as the MV Kalakala, a delightful Streamline Moderne ferry that served Puget Sound in Washington state between 1935 and 1967. (Just don’t look up the Kalakala’s fate because it’s very depressing.)

What do you think? Shall we bring it back?

PS: All my newsletter posts are free, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But I have switched on the option to pay, since I am now a full-time freelance writer, a.k.a. broke. If you’d like to support my current and future writing projects for the price of one coffee/beer a month (half a coffee/beer if you live in New York lol), please feel free to do so :) Thanks for reading!

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A teeming, jostling room, black-walled, spotlit. Rustling polyester puffers, inane sotto voce remarks, figures slumped on backless benches, taking breaks from the art. A dense flock of retirees, led by a museum guide, moving through the interlocking rooms like a finger through a well of honey, viscous and slow.

To begin with there is the head of Christ, carved from a walnut tree in 1338. For most of its existence the head had a body — a suffering body, for the life-size sculpture depicted his crucifixion — but in 1944, Allied bombs destroyed the Basilica dell’Osservanza on the outskirts of Siena, where the crucifix lay. The sculpture was blown to pieces; the head remained mostly intact (the mouth is gone, and a tidy stripe of missing wood rends the gaunt and tranquil face into two untouching halves), and a knee survived, too; and from these corporeal fragments tumbled scraps of parchment. A neatish hand identifies the artist, Lando di Pietro, whose name we would never have known had the crucifix remained intact.

Nearby there is a painting (tempera and gold leaf) of the Madonna nursing her child. English: Nursing Virgin. Italian: Madonna del Latte. (Better.) She looks bored; he looks hungry. Look at her glowing cheeks, and the textures of their skin:

There is also the cut-out crucifix with its bright drip of blood, from about 1320; like the nearby predella and other paintings and votive objects in the exhibit, it is “extremely rare” and “the earliest … of its kind to survive”.

And many other thrills and pangs, including axial perspective, and color (blue robes, white tiles, green columns, pink castles, gold bridles, shadow-black devils, blood-red SPQR flags, a twilit sunset), and the grief that stains a mother’s face at the sight of her dead son, and the faint veins on a man’s hand:

The exhibition’s title is “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350”. The date marking its end is not as arbitrary as these dates often are; when the Black Death came for Siena, half the city died, including the Lorenzetti brothers who made the aforementioned works and most of the other artists in the exhibit, too. Painting (the Western variety) began in Siena with these artists; luckily for us it survived the catastrophe. Still—one feels the loss.

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All a preamble to say that for this last issue of this newsletter in 2024, I will be sharing some of my favorite screenshots from the past year.

In January, when my beloved M was laid up in bed with a debilitating flu, I spent the day alternately cooling his fevered forehead with damp towels and editing the Wikipedia page for Tristan da Cunha, which was sorely lacking in sources. This screenshot comes from the website of the island group’s sole hospital.

In February, my friends and I began reading Ossian, the dubious “author” of a cycle of poems once deemed the Celtic version of Homer. The whole thing is almost certainly a fabrication of a Scotsman named Macpherson but it is a good yarn nonetheless. Macpherson claimed to have discovered and translated Ossian’s manuscripts; knowing he is its true author makes his extensive and painfully detailed footnotes (here as you can see, the footnotes for just six opening lines have crowded the main text off the page) much funnier. Sometimes Macpherson throws doubt on the poems, disputing other translators’ (who don’t exist) choices, or wondering if later bards duplicitously amended the verse of Ossian (who, again, does not exist); Macpherson’s commitment to the bit is commendable.

In March, from one of my favorite Wikipedia pages, “List of Chinese inventions”.

In April, when we read the play Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo.

In May, when I was inspired by the bold prose style and existential vigour of a restaurant’s Instagram caption. (Plus, cold Meursault and a whole fish — the dream lunch!)

In June, in Italy, discovering the names of singing birds.

In July, reading Chinatown by Thuận, in Singapore, with R, A, and M.

In August, in Taipei, experiencing an earthquake for the first time.

In September, reading Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania. People rag on Theroux for his habit of phonetically rendering accents but I find it evocative and entertaining, as in the above dialogue with a citizen of New Zealand. Your Aussie’s an enemal!

In October, when we read the play The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot.

In November, discovering a perfect story in an Instagram comment. It has everything you need.

In December, Proust appearing in the lede of a USA Today article about Miller High Life’s bar-scented perfume; the tags at the bottom of a New York Times profile of Luigi Mangione; and lines from Voyage by Tom Stoppard, wherein Bakunin’s sister and father are discussing his worrisome endeavours.

Gingko Season giveaway

If you are in the US, you have until December 31 to enter a Goodreads giveaway for a free print copy of my novel, Gingko Season. Enter here!

Thanks for reading and happy new year!

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In The House of Mirth, our flaky softboy leading man, Lawrence Selden, is stunned by the sight of doomed heroine Lily Bart in her chosen tableau:

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality—the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid setting—she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo’s Cleopatra—had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without distracting accessories of dress or surroundings. Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.

“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!”

These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden’s shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline, affected their hearer in an unexpected way. It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again.

One of the most potent effects of The House of Mirth is its sense of claustrophobia — the characters are trapped in the confines of a rigid and contemptible social order where even the smallest deviations from the norm can have life-ruining consequences. Neither Selden nor Lily totally fit into their soul-stifling milieu, and this is what first draws them together; but Lily, among other things, is a woman and so things for her, of course, are worse. But in the suspended moment of the tableau, she is, by being “frozen” in this sylvan image, briefly freed from the downward spiral of her own life (even as, sadly, her “bold get-up” only contributes to her souring reputation among the narrow-minded society men and women who admire her beauty at the same time as they punish her for it).

In Elective Affinities, the star of the tableau is a minor character named Luciana, the annoying daughter of one of the protagonists. The woman she portrays in the Terburg painting has her back to the viewer, but Luciana cuts such a compelling figure that the other guests go a little nuts and demand her to turn around and reveal her face: being a good showwoman, she resists.

For a third they had taken the so-called “Father's Admonition” of Terburg, and who does not know Wille's admirable engraving of this picture? One foot thrown over the other, sits a noble knightly-looking father; his daughter stands before him, to whose conscience he seems to be addressing himself. She, a fine striking figure, in a folding drapery of white satin, is only to be seen from behind, but her whole bearing appears to signify that she is collecting herself. That the admonition is not too severe, that she is not being utterly put to shame, is to be gathered from the air and attitude of the father, while the mother seems as if she were trying to conceal some slight embarrassment she is looking into a glass of wine, which she is on the point of drinking.

Here was an opportunity for Luciana to appear in her highest splendor. Her back hair, the form of her head, neck, and shoulders, were beyond all conception beautiful; and the waist, which in the modern antique of the ordinary dresses of young ladies is hardly visible, showed to the greatest advantage in all its graceful slender elegance in the really old costume.

The Architect had contrived to dispose the rich folds of the white satin with the most exquisite nature, and, without any question whatever, this living imitation far exceeded the original picture, and produced universal delight.

The spectators could never be satisfied with demanding a repetition of the performance, and the very natural wish to see the face and front of so lovely a creature, when they had done looking at her from behind, at last became so decided, that a merry impatient young wit, cried out aloud the words one is accustomed to write at the bottom of a page, “Tournez, s’il vous plait,” which was echoed all round the room. The performers, however, understood their advantage too well, and had mastered too completely the idea of these works of art to yield to the most general clamor.

The daughter remained standing in her shame, without favoring the spectators with the expression of her face. The father continued to sit in his attitude of admonition and the mother did not lift nose or eyes out of the transparent glass, in which, although she seemed to be drinking, the wine did not diminish.

In both tableaux, part of the titillation is that Lily and Luciana appear in clothes more revealing than their contemporary garb (for Lily, bare feet and a simple, body-clinging dress rather than one of one of those Gilded Age wedding cupcake gowns, and for Luciana, a sexily cinched waist, thrilling in an era of empire-waist drabbery).

The title Goethe gives the painting, as is the interpretation of the scene — the standard one until recently — that he repeats; though Terburg leaves it ambiguous, the modern consensus seems to be that the woman is a prostitute, the man is a potential client, and the setting is a brothel. I guess the wine-drinking woman is the madame? But what a painting! My favorite parts of it are the crinkly silver of the dress, the hangdog dog in the shadows, and the woman with her nose in the glass of wine, who does indeed, as Goethe writes, look as if she is trying to conceal “some slight embarrassment”. It’s such a familiar gesture — have we not all been reluctant witness to an intimate or uncomfortable conversation between other people, staring into our glass of wine just for something to do and desperately hoping it will soon be over?

Fun fact: Terburg’s painting makes a cameo in a later work by his fellow Dutch Golden Age painter Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, The Slippers, though in this depiction there is, for some reason, an added boy:

And I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that Magritte has a painting called Elective Affinities — named after the book — which he made in 1933:

Magritte is one of my favorite painters and I’ve been thinking about this caged egg since my September newsletter about Felice Casorati’s eggs. I included it there too, and now that I think about it, Magritte’s painting — and reading that Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, which I really like, shares similarities with Goethe’s Elective Affinities — may be what prompted me to go and read the novel, which I honestly didn’t really vibe with because although there are some great parts I found the main couple pretty infuriating for reasons I need not go into here. Let me know if you’ve read it and we can discuss! Anyway, here is Magritte’s Elective Affinities once more. A fragile thing locked in a cage … if it tried to smash against the bars it would shatter … just like poor Lily Bart … !

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Here is the link to pre-order it on Amazon, here is the link for Barnes & Noble, and here is the link for Bookshop.org.

And here is the delightful little teaser that you will find online:

I also make some jokes in it that hopefully someone will find funny. And it’s set in the best city in the United States — if you don’t know where that is, you’ll have to buy the book to find out :)

I finished the first draft of Gingko Season in January 2023, and there is at least one little scrap of writing in it that I first jotted down (I say jotted; iPhone notes app duh) in early 2018. I’m very excited to be able to share it with you at long last, next year, on May 20th (520…Chinese Valentine’s Day, no less).

Pre-orders, I am learning, are especially important because they signal how many copies the publisher should print, and they encourage independent bookstores to stock books they may otherwise not know about or want to take a risk on (e.g. a debut novel by a random person they’ve never heard of, i.e. me). So, pre-order! Share with friends, family, enemies, strangers! Tell your favorite bookstore/public library to stock it! Post about it on Instagram and tag me @gingkoseason!

The book costs US$19.99 (or US$18.59 on Bookshop.org for some reason) and it’s a slim and comestible 272 pages — a wonderful present for a friend or a lover, and, if you don’t like reading books, a pretty living room accessory nonetheless. So, once more (sorry! I’m getting used to it too…)—

• Pre-order: Amazon

• Pre-order: Barnes & Noble

• Pre-order: Bookshop.org

Thanks for reading, and I promise the next newsletter will be back to regular programming!

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Egg in Italian is uovo; with the article, l’uovo. Simple, masculine (-o). The eggs is le uova; unusually, the plural form becomes feminine, but, even more unusually, uses the singular feminine -a for the noun and the plural feminine le (rather than la) for the article. This is highly irregular, and has no bearing on Casorati’s paintings, but I’m sure any fellow Italian learners reading this are nodding/shaking their heads, all too familiar with the tricky grammar of the egg.

Casorati’s egg paintings span decades. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was painting eggs; near the end of his life, he was still painting eggs. One early egg painting is called Scherzo uova. Scherzo is joke (singular). Uova is eggs (plural). Joke eggs? Eggs joke? Surely egg joke. Egg play? But here it is:

I love Scherzo uova because even though it is the oldest of his egg paintings, it appears futuristic: whatever blue-green patterned cloth or carpet atop which the eggs rest evokes, for the viewer of 2024, CGI dots, green screens, popular visualisations of the Internet, the Matrix; and the eggs seem to float in this digital ether.

Six years later came Le uova sul cassettone, “The eggs on the dresser”:

Forty years later, Uova nel paesaggio, “Eggs in the landscape”:

Sometimes the eggs appear in the paintings without being referenced in the titles, like in Natura morta con l’elmo (“Still life with helmet”) from 1947, which also features a rare brown egg beside Casorati’s usual white egg:

In Fruttiera con limoni e uova (“Fruit bowl with lemons and eggs”) from 1959, the eggs nestle among lemons, though an errant egg on the table beside the fruit bowl assures the viewer that the eggs hold pride of place over their still life companion-rivals (and how could lemons hope to triumph over eggs in the battle of the oval-shaped, when the word oval itself (and its various tributaries, ovoid, ovate, oviform) derives from, of course, ovum — egg?). Even without this extra egg, the simple lemons cannot compete with the spectral eggs under whom they burrow. The eggs compel the eye to linger; they are even whiter than the white porcelain of their bowl. (This is not Casorati’s only painting of admixed lemons and eggs.)

There is an eggness, even, to the paintings of his that lack eggs. By eggness I suppose I mean moods or qualities including but not limited to: unsettling, precarious/light/balancing, deadpan, cool-temperatured, enclosed, expectant, enceinte. Quiet in the same way that certain paintings of Magritte or Paul Delvaux are quiet: a loaded, ominous quiet, a static state that crackles with potential energy.

There are no eggs in Casorati’s Silvana Cenni, but there is a woman with a suspiciously egg-shaped head:

Casorati never painted a fried egg or a scrambled egg or an omelette; he never painted a bleeding yolk. His eggs have no cracks; their fluids do not run. (“I adore static forms,” he once said.)1 But why was he so into eggs? I don’t know. It is a mystery, unhatched.

Magritte also painted an egg once, and named the painting after a Goethe novel:

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Non-fiction: the work of James. C Scott

The anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott passed away last week. He is one of the contemporary thinkers I admire most; his books Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed are two of my favorites. If you would like a shorter introduction to his work, perhaps “Anarchist Calisthenics”, an account of his attempts to inject some joie de vivre into Germans (the book from which it derives is free to read here); and listen to this interview from 2021 in which he discusses some major themes in his books and talks about organising support for civilian resistance in Myanmar.

Fiction: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

I read this a few years ago on the recommendation of my friend Navya, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently because I told Nick and Stephanie to read it and now we’re discussing how great it is. There’s nothing better than a multi-friend recommendation chain! Science fiction readers will be familiar — both this novel and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the Hugo Award — but non-scifi readers should definitely check it out. Devious court politics, diplomatic intrigue, high-stakes poetry contests, the seductive charms of imperial culture, freaky technology, cool naming conventions, gayly pining for one’s frenemy coworker…and more…

Fiction: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Adam Thorpe

Madame Bovary may be the book I’ve reread the most in my life, and every time I do, the decision is vindicated — it is simply the best novel ever written. A reread always unearths something “new”, whether it’s an image that jumps at you which you’d scarcely noticed before, or a character you disliked with whom you now find yourself sympathising (I won’t go into specifics but if anyone has read this/reads it later and wants to dish about the relationships, adultery, etc., let’s do it). It’s also “new” because it’s my first time reading this translation — Adam Thorpe’s — and it is superb. I love Thorpe’s description of the novel from an essay he wrote on the translation process:

Madame Bovary is perhaps the most carefully written book in literary history. It is the verbal equivalent of the Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4 wristwatch, with 36 complications and a 1,000-year calendar.

If this sounds appealing to you, you should definitely read Flaubert! On the other hand, if it’s off-putting, you should still read Flaubert — he’s much more fun than a wristwatch! While reading Thorpe’s translation I’ve been thinking about how modern and immediate the writing feels compared to older translations where the language can feel like a veil of “history” occluding the vibrancy of the writing and the characters and their emotions and lives. So I was happy when Thorpe wrote this in his essay:

I've always believed in the modernity of the past, from which our temporal conceit blinkers us. With an effort of the imagination we can think back to the past's present, when it was fresh and frighteningly new to those who dwelt in it, and language can be the spell that gets us there.

I think this applies to historical fiction as well as translated work. I’m often frustrated by historical fiction that seems to deliberately distance the reader from the people and events it is trying to portray by adopting stilted dialogue and a consciously “historical” prose style; in such books, the characters often end up behaving and speaking in ahistorical, generic ways, i.e., they’re boring (there’s also often a noticeable lack of humour and irony, as if to count as “history”, stodgy dull seriousness is necessary). To give a positive example — that is, a work of historical fiction that achieves immediacy and also drives home the moral foreignness of a past world at the same time as it immerses us in that world — I would put forth the 2018 film The Favourite by Yorgos Lanthimos. For a literary example:

Fiction: You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

A sly, psychedelic (re)telling of the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma in 1519. Such a fun and engrossing book. The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan is rendered so alive through sensation — this is a book full of smells. At the same time it depicts such a mind-bogglingly alien society that it kind of reads like scifi, and in fact there are more than a few similarities with the Teixcalaanli empire in A Memory Called Empire, which I believe was partially inspired by the Aztec empire (the name is already a hint). Both books also have great banquet scenes.

After I finished this I read an even more experimental historical novel by Enrigue, Sudden Death, which is about a lot of things, including a tennis match between Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. I will leave you with the following lines from that book:

Descriptions of works of art, like descriptions of dreams, halt stories and sap their strength. A work of art can be part of the story only if it alters the line of history as it's being drawn, and yet if a work of art, like a dream, is worth remembering, it's precisely because it represents a blind spot for history. Art and dreams don't stick with us because they have the capacity to move things along, but because they stop the world: they function as a parenthesis, a dyke, a moment of rest.

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The year before, he had completed his first large painting, Bathers at Asnières, but it was rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon. Seurat responded by founding an independent salon with some other artists that would have no jury and no selection criteria, a place that welcomed and encouraged experimental art. Both Bathers and in Le Bec du Hoc are in the pointillist style, the technique with which Seurat is now principally associated and which, then, he had only just developed.

Perhaps the most famous example of pointillism is Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which he completed in 1886, and which appears in that great American movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In the film, the camera cuts between the painting and a dumbstruck Cameron, and every time it returns to the painting it moves closer and closer in on one little girl until her face becomes a collection of multicoloured dots from which it is impossible to discern even the shape of an eye or the line of a nose.1

A Sunday Afternoon is in Chicago but Bathers and Le Bec du Hoc are side by side in the National Gallery in London. If you look closely at the latter, you can see a border of dots, which Seurat added in 1888, three years after completing the painting, during which time he had studied deeply the work of men such as the physicist Ogden Rood, a pioneer of colour theory, the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who researched textile dyes, and the mathematician Charles Henry, who became his friend. All of them influenced Seurat’s understanding and use of colour.

The dots he added to Le Bec du Hoc in 1888 are dark red and dark blue, colours that don’t appear at all in the pale summery landscape that the painting depicts — but the result is one of harmony. The same shades and a similar border reappear in A Sunday Afternoon — also added years after the painting was completed, in 1888 or 1889 — though here they are bolder and more assured, more striking. The border is startling in its modernity. There is a pleasing shock of colour contrast, and the effect of the “frame” and of those unnatural staticky shades running alongside the greens of the park and the blues of the lake anachronises the painting in some way — as if the dotted border, so reminiscent of pixelated television noise, thrusts the subjects of the painting into the conscious view of the future, from which vantage point we have, until we notice this strange and compelling perimeter which seems to be addressing us in our own familiar techno-visual language, been looking with cool historical detachment at the top hats, the parasols, the centaurian bustles and the monkey on a lady’s leash.

The cliff in this painting no longer exists. During the Second World War, the Germans built bunkers and machine gun emplacements on the promontory, which overlooks the English Channel. The allies bombed it in the lead-up to D-Day and the particular protrusion of rock that Seurat painted was destroyed. On D-Day itself, June 6, 1944, American soldiers made chaotic landings at the beaches below and then scaled the cliffs with rope ladders and grappling hooks while being fired upon by the Germans. Somehow most of them reached the top. Then the fighting began: two full days of it, at the end of which 90 of the 225 rangers who had set off from England were still alive.2

Like their cousins in Dover, the cliffs of Normandy are chalk, and in the geologic timescale date to the Bathonian age, during the Middle Jurassic period, when the land of the world was in the shape of the letter C: Pangaea had recently separated but the Americas, Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica were still one conjoined mass, thinly bridged by little Europe to the similarly entwined hulk of Siberia and China and Southeast Asia, and Tibet was an island alone in the middle of an ocean that no longer exists, a body of water called the Tethys Sea. All of this to say that the beak of cliff enshrined in Seurat’s painting had been around, perhaps underwater, not yet in its beakish form, but around nonetheless, for about 165 million years when it was bombed into dust during the Second World War; luckily for us, Seurat preserved it in paints.

Fifty-nine years before D-Day, the promontory was peaceful, not a pillbox in sight; Seurat lounged on the grassy bluffs and made quick studies that he would later use to paint Le Bec du Hoc. About 50 miles down the coast, Parisians strolled the promenade and crowded the seaside hotels of the resort town of Cabourg, which would later be immortalised as the fictional town of Balbec in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In 1885 Marcel Proust was 14 years old, and hadn’t yet visited Cabourg; he went for the first time in 1907, hoping his poor health would improve by the sea, by which time Seurat, whom Proust, as far as I know, never mentioned in his various writings on art (Proust loved Impressionists like Renoir and Monet, who refused to show their work in the same exhibition as Post-Impressionist Seurat), had died, sixteen years earlier, of illness, at the painfully young age of 31.

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Reading the Ancients

For several years now I’ve taken part in semi-regular playreading sessions with a small group of friends. Our Whatsapp chat is called “Greek Playreading” because we mostly read ancient Greek plays. As you might imagine, it began during the pandemic, but happily it has evolved into a tradition and survived the scattering of the group across continents.

The first reading I took part in was the Aeneid, which is not a Greek play but a Roman epic poem written by Virgil and published in 19 B.C. Fun fact: Virgil, on his deathbed, asked that the entire manuscript be burned, because he hadn’t finished editing it, but his executors ignored him and published it anyway. Many such cases! We’ve now read a majority of the surviving plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and we await with genuinely bated breath for the AI whiz kids to unlock the secrets of all those burned scrolls. (Seriously, the group chat went wild the day this article came out. I’m getting excited just recalling it. I hope the boys are working hard.)

When we were all in Hong Kong, we took turns hosting the gatherings and cooked dinners from online recipes that claimed to authentically replicate ancient Greek and Roman dishes. It often turned out quite disgusting, but luckily we could wash it down with flagons of cheap red wine, also disgusting, because we read that Romans flavoured their wine with herbs and spices and honey and water, and felt the need to recreate this authentically too. Now we all live in different countries and timezones and Zoom must suffice; we’ve also expanded to plays from later eras, but like to focus on things we wouldn’t normally or easily read.

Many readings have served more as opportunities to do weird accents than as studious inquiries into antiquity, and we also keep a very juvenile running list of our favourite lines (a recent example: “Thy breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams”, from Ossian). In a shocking twist, and despite our best efforts, all this reading seems to have taught us some things. The other day I came across the final exam Sylvia Plath took at Cambridge in 1957, on tragedy in literature. I shared it with Greek Playreading and we were all very pleased to realize we not only understood the questions but could go some way in answering them. (e.g. “The Chorus had been threatened with extinction more than once — notably by Euripides himself when he found it such a nuisance at certain points in the Medea and the Hippolytus; but its inherent vitality (that is, the fact that the Greek poets were not conservative) found a new use for it again and again.” Can you justify these suggestions from your knowledge of Greek Tragedy? So fun!)

So there’s my pitch for spending your precious free time reading 2,500-year-old plays (and 2,000-year-old epic poems, and 500-year-old fake epic poems, and 350 -year-old remakes of 2,500-year-old plays, and so on…): it’s good fun with friends, and the intellectual payoff lasts the rest of your life, plus you get to annoy other people by talking about it if you so wish.

Retellings — Racine and Molière

A few months ago we read Racine’s Phèdre (1677) and Molière’s Psyché (1671). Racine and Molière are two of the three Shakespeare-level playwriting greats of 17th century France (sorry Corneille, we haven’t read you yet). Racine is known primarily as a tragedian and Molière is most famous for his comedies. We chose Phèdre and Psyché because they are retellings of Greek stories. (1957 Cambridge exam: ‘Examine the effects of an imitation of the Greek in the Phèdre of Racine or in any other single play of the period 1650-1850.’ Honestly, an alternate title for this newsletter, maybe even another newsletter, could be “why you should read old exam paper questions”. Questions like ‘What is the usefulness, if any, at the present time, of the word “tragedy”?’ and ‘“To move wild laughter in the throat of death…” Describe some varieties of so-called “comic relief” in tragedy’ really get me thinking about things … like, as a writer, to remember that carefully applied touches of comedy can deepen the intensity of sad moments, and decrease the risk of melodrama or hacky sentimentalism, but must also be regulated lest they lead to bathos or otherwise ruin said moments. The questions also make me think how much less well-rounded we are now (e.g., I had to look up the “wild laughter” line — Love’s Labour Lost. The rest of the line is, “…It cannot be, it is impossible.”) Or maybe it’s just a skill issue on my part and you, reader, are laughing away at my failure to identify the source. Other questions include untranslated French quotes — can anyone shed light on whether undergraduates studying English at Cambridge today are still expected to be reasonably fluent in French? Either way, I am motivated to read more Shakespeare, and study more French.)

Anyway, Phèdre is about a queen — the title is the French version of her Greek name, Phaedra — who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, which leads to various missteps and tragic consequences. Another reason I was excited to read this play was because it plays an important role (lol) in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time — one of the narrator’s early obsessions is an actress, La Berma, whose iconic role is Phaedra in Phèdre!

Psyché tells the story of Psyche, a beautiful girl who attracts the attention of Cupid (Eros, the god of desire) after he accidentally scratches himself with one of his arrows and falls in love with her. Tragic consequences also arise. (The genre of Psyché is something like tragicomic ballet, although sadly the accompanying music has been lost. Also, Corneille helped write it, so technically I have read a bit of Corneille. I am so sorry but I cannot resist quoting another one of those exam questions. It is pertinent: ‘“But Racine alone in his century possessed the sense of the tragic (Corneille did not), and so was the only one to fit passion and social convention into a tragic opposition by taking passion at the point the others dared not contemplate, where it broke the bounds decorum set for it."1 Test the felicity of this account of Racine by considering (with comparative references to Corneille) one or more of Racine's plays.’)

In both Phèdre and Psyché, love is a consuming and unstoppable force. It dominates its hosts like a parasite and makes them do crazy, ill-advised things. It makes them hurt people and ruin themselves. There are many wonderful lines in Phèdre that present love as a degrading experience, because one is made so helpless by it. (NB: I wrote this paragraph and all following before I read the above question, but isn’t it cool how they kind of fit together?) Lines like this:

Am I too made the slave of love, and brought

To stoop so low?

So complains Hippolytus, Phaedra’s stepson, who has fallen in love with someone just as intensely as Phaedra has fallen in love with him — someone else, someone that, for reasons I don’t need to go into here, he is also forbidden from loving and marrying. His tutor Theramenes, trying to counsel him, asks:

What heart so stout that Venus has not vanquish'd?

…

How can I doubt you love?

Vainly would you conceal the fatal wound.

Theramenes’ words — the reference to Venus, the image of love as a life-threatening wound — are a lovely echo of the story of Psyche and Cupid, who literally wounds himself with one of his arrows, which makes him fall in love with Psyche. Cupid was in fact trying to shoot Psyche with the arrow to make her fall in love with some gross guy/monster as punishment for being too hot, as demanded by Cupid’s mother Aphrodite/Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, who is envious of all the attention Psyche is getting down on earth.

But to return to Phèdre, love makes one contemptible to oneself, it makes one abject, it makes one act rashly and take risks and upend one’s life.

Here is Phaedra’s nurse Oenone trying, like Theramenes with Hippolytus, to comfort the wretched, lovelorn, doomed Phaedra, who has just found out that Hippolytus is in love with someone else:

          OENONE
          Ah, Madam, pray dismiss a groundless dread:
          Look less severely on a venial error.
          You love. We cannot conquer destiny.
          You were drawn on as by a fatal charm.
          Is that a marvel without precedent
          Among us? Has love triumph'd over you,
          And o'er none else? Weakness is natural
          To man. A mortal, to a mortal's lot
          Submit. You chafe against a yoke that others
          Have long since borne. The dwellers in Olympus,
          The gods themselves, who terrify with threats
          The sins of men, have burn'd with lawless fires.

          PHAEDRA
          What words are these I hear? What counsel this
          You dare to give me? Will you to the end
          Pour poison in mine ears? You have destroy'd me.

Oenone’s reassurances that we are powerless in the face of the tidal waves of love and our own mortal weakness is, somewhat understandably, cold comfort to Phaedra, who is also pissed because Oenone encouraged her to confess her feelings to Hippolytus, even though she’s married to his dad, who is the king, etc. Many years ago I egged on a friend who was on the verge of profess her feelings to a friend of hers who was in a relationship, because she was in pain and I thought it would be “cathartic” for her to admit how she felt. In retrospect, this was bad advice. Luckily my friend was more forgiving than Phaedra, who fires Oenone and kicks her out of the palace.

At one point in the play, Hippolytus confesses his feelings to Aricia, the woman he loves. If you think this excerpt is too long then you are mistaken; it is as short as I could possibly cut such a beautiful passage:

          I, who, so long the enemy of Love,
          Mock'd at his fetters and despised his captives,
          Who, pitying poor mortals that were shipwreck'd,
          In seeming safety view'd the storms from land,
          Now find myself to the same fate exposed,
          Toss'd to and fro upon a sea of troubles!
          My boldness has been vanquish'd in a moment,
          And humbled is the pride wherein I boasted.
          For nearly six months past, ashamed, despairing,
          Bearing where'er I go the shaft that rends
          My heart, I struggle vainly to be free
          From you and from myself; I shun you, present;
          Absent, I find you near; I see your form
          In the dark forest depths; the shades of night,
          Nor less broad daylight, bring back to my view
          The charms that I avoid; all things conspire
          To make Hippolytus your slave.

Both he and Phaedra, he more consciously than she, see themselves as exceptions to the rule, and are angered by the idea that they are just as susceptible to the ailment of love as the next person.

For most of Psyché, the titular heroine is very different from Phaedra and Hippolytus and Cupid-scratched-by-his-arrow. Countless men throw themselves at Psyche, but she herself has never been in love. Venus hates that Psyche remains indifferent to all the men who try to win her affection, interpreting it as a threatening pridefulness and an insult to Venus herself. She plots to destroy Psyche’s life, and Psyche, who does not know why she has been made to suffer, reflects that her never having fallen in love is beginning to seem like a curse:

all kings seemed created to love me; all their subjects, looking upon me as on a goddess, were but now beginning to accustom me to the incense they never ceased to offer; sighs followed me, for which I gave naught in return. My soul remained fancy-free, while it captivated so many, and in the midst of so much love was queen of all hearts, and yet mistress of my own. Oh! heaven! hast thou counted a crime this want of feeling? All this severity which thou dost exhibit, is it because in return for their vows I have given nothing but esteem?

Poor Psyche. It’s unfortunate for her that she incurs the wrath of a goddess, but it’s much sadder that her own sisters — whom she loves and does not suspect of ill will — despise her for the same reason that Venus does: she is beautiful, she has suitors, and she is not in love with any of them. Psyche’s freedom from the condition of love infuriates Venus and her sisters. They take it to mean that she thinks she’s better than them, superior to a goddess, unacceptably self-esteeming.

In the end, Psyche does fall in love — with Cupid, who kind of engineers the whole thing. He rescues her from death-by-monster, a violent fate to which her own father has abandoned her (blame Venus), and whisks her to his heavenly palace in the skies, where he appears in the form of a super hot guy. Who could resist? They have this interesting exchange in the midst of her rapidly developing infatuation, in which he, too, chides her for her previous lack of feeling:

CUPID: Your heart, Psyche, has ever been too insensible, and you must not wonder if, to repair the insult, Love now pays himself with usury for that which your soul ought to have granted him. The time is come in which your lips must breathe those sighs so long restrained; and while it draws you from that fierce humour, an endless rapture, as sweet as it is unknown, must wound you as deeply as it ought to have wounded you during those golden days the course of which your unfeeling soul has profaned.

PSYCHE: Not to love is, then, a great crime?

CUPID: Do you suffer a hard punishment for it?

PSYCHE: The punishment is mild indeed.

CUPID: The penalty is suited to the offence; and Love, on this glorious day, avenges himself of lack of love by an excess of love.

PSYCHE: Would I had been punished before! My life's happiness lies in it. I ought to blush at it, or to whisper it low, but this torture has too many charms. Suffer me to say, and to repeat it aloud; though I said it a hundred times, I would never blush for it. It is not I who speak; and the wonderful empire, the amiable violence of your presence, sway my voice as soon as I begin to speak. Vainly does my modesty take secret offence at it; vainly would my sex and decency bind me to other laws; it is your eyes that dictate my answer, and my lips, the slaves of their almighty power, no longer consult me on the self-respect I owe myself.

Again, as in Phèdre, there are the images of love as a wounding, as torture, punishment, debasement. But this time, because it is requited, it is a glorious and transcendent wounding. Psyche is happy, deliriously relieved, to give up her rationality and aloofness and surrender to emotion. The amiable violence of your presence — what more perfect way to describe being in the vicinity of a crush?

One last couplet, from Psyché:

If you’d like to read these plays here is the English translation of Phèdre that we read and here is Psyché. Shoutout to Project Gutenberg.

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We climb a grassy knoll and enter the main house, a 1930s plantation bungalow overlooking serene Dedduwa Lake. A dedicated team of horticulturalists and gardeners carry out the delicate task of maintaining the grounds, which deliberately teeter on the boundary between kempt and wild.

Lunuganga, a 25 acre country estate in Sri Lanka, was the lifelong preoccupation of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003), the pioneer of tropical modernism and one of the 20th century’s greatest architects.

In 1948, Bawa purchased an old rubber estate about halfway between Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, and the old southern port of Galle. He’d spent the previous two years on a grand tour of Europe, Asia and America, and his time in Italy stirred a desire to construct an Italian garden of his own. He was a 29-year-old lawyer with no training in architecture or landscape design. But he had some money from his dad and an uncompromising vision of beauty. He deserted the legal profession, retrained as an architect, and spent the next three decades designing Lunuganga, carving a tropical Eden out of agricultural monotony.

Lunuganga is large, and you can wander around for a long time before you realise its immanent sense of wellbeing and harmony is the work of Bawa’s relentless and invisible hand: the breakfast table with a straight-line prospect of the forest-obscured stupa on a distant hill, the checkerboard flagstones that alternate with grass squares, the charming Tuscan-ochre house on the opposite shore of the lake that you later discover is a government irrigation office, and had an unsightly corrugated iron roof until Bawa paid for its renovation and repainting in order to improve the view from the terrace – his favourite spot to sit with a gin and tonic and watch the sunset.

There is a decades-old frangipani tree – in fact it is two trees – shaped by Bawa, using bonsai methods, into a distinctive curved symmetry. Decades ago the young branches were weighed down with stones tied to their limbs so that they grew low to the ground and now, older, graze it, running parallel to the grass before reaching upwards into the sky like grasping claws.

Scattered around the property are mini Roman pavilions, Grecian nude statues, bulbous Ming dynasty grain jars, sculptures and statues and salvaged lampposts (taken from Colombo and refashioned into columns for an outdoor gazebo). Bawa loved black-and-white, so there are prettily panelled black-and-white doors, black-and-white checkered floor tiles, and – when he was still alive, but sadly no more – black-and-white cows roaming the gentle slopes.

The terraced gardens leading down to the lake are riotous with trees – ebony, balsa, Java plum, Spanish cherry and mangrove. Waterhens mince daintily through the grass; parakeets, barbets and bulbuls chirp and flutter among the leaves; Brahminy kites circle in the sky and at dusk, a fleet of bats makes its way over our heads, their silhouettes unmistakable in the waning light. The cumulative effect is one akin to magic.1

I’ve only touched the surface of Lunuganga’s beauty and power – I haven’t mentioned the levels of landscape, the antique furniture, the artwork, the picture-frame perfect doorways and windows, the Sri Lankan parliament in miniature, the endless details and the genius calculations of appearance and effect, the staircases, the bells – but I think it might be the most beautiful place I have ever been. At least that is how I felt when I was there, two months ago, and how I feel now, recalling it.

Ideally you should visit yourself – there are garden tours, open to the public, or rooms if you have some cash to spare – or check out the little reel I made from videos I took there in February, which I think evokes the place better than anything I’ve written. I agree with Bawa here:

I have a very strong conviction that it is impossible to explain architecture in words - I have always enjoyed seeing buildings but seldom enjoyed reading explanations about them - as I feel, with others, that architecture cannot be totally explained but must be experienced. —Geoffrey Bawa, “Statement by the Architect”

Happy International Workers’ Day!

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“Oh, exactly! And what has caused this extraordinary change in you? Running out stark naked in the rain, and playing Bacchante? Desire for sensation, or the anticipation of going to Venice?”

—D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Last year I wrote about visiting Venice during the pandemic and what the desire to go to Venice symbolised for the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

[DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS FOR THIS CENTURY-OLD BOOK]

In the sixth volume of the book, The Fugitive, he finally makes it. The narrator awakes in Venice, and makes his observations—as he often does—from bed:

When, at ten o'clock in the morning, my shutters were thrown open, I saw blazing there, instead of the gleaming black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, the golden angel on the campanile of St Mark's. Glittering in a sunlight which made it almost impossible to keep one's eyes upon it, this angel promised me, with its outstretched arms, for the moment when I appeared on the Piazzetta half an hour later, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will. I could see nothing else so long as I remained in bed, but as the whole world is merely a vast sundial, a single sunlit segment of which enables us to tell what time it is, on the very first morning I was reminded of the shops in the Place de l'Eglise at Combray, which, on Sunday mornings, were always on the point of shutting when arrived for mass, while the straw in the marketplace smelt strongly in the already hot sunlight.

There are two moments of startling narrative ellipsis in In Search of Lost Time. The first is after the narrator’s beloved grandmother dies, in volume three, The Guermantes Way. The heartbreaking narration of her deteriorating health and eventual death at the end of the chapter is followed by, in the opening of the next chapter, a jump in time and the narrator’s declaration of jarring nonchalance that thanks to a sudden change in the autumn weather, “I had been born again, life lay intact before me”. The second moment is less shocking but echoes the first in its swift, unexplained, and thus highly effective transition. The narrator is alone in his apartment in Paris, grieving his dead mistress and second-guessing the events of the past in such excruciating detail that he tires himself out: “Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without having really got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.” The chapter ends, and in the next we are in Venice, and he is lying in bed enjoying the sunshine in the passage excerpted above. After so much idealisation of Venice, so much hand-wringing about the impossibility of satiating long-held desires and so many other instances of being let down by long-held aesthetic obsessions—not to mention the mourning of his girlfriend—he is just there, in Venice, having a good time.

In W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo (1990), the narrator also wakes up in Venice, but sadly not in a very good mood:

Waking up in Venice is unlike waking up in any other place. The day begins quietly. Only a stray shout here and there may break the calm, or the sound of a shutter being raised, or the wing-beat of the pigeons. How often, I thought to myself, had I lain thus in a hotel room, in Vienna or Frankfurt or Brussels, with my hands clasped under my head, listening not to the stillness, as in Venice, but to the roar of the traffic, with a mounting sense of panic. That, then, I thought on such occasions, is the new ocean. Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being released from where it was held by the traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us. Thus it was that the silence which hung over the city of Venice that All Saints' morning seemed wholly unreal, as if it were about to be shattered, while I lay submerged in the white air that drifted in at my half-open window.

Quite a contrast to Proust. I don’t know whether to blame the ceaseless onslaught of modernity and its cacophonous accoutrements, or the author’s Germanic constitution. (Perhaps both. Love you WGS…) Anyway, he is right that car noise pollution sucks.

In Watermark: An Essay on Venice (1992), Joseph Brodsky also wakes up in Venice, but it is louder than Sebald’s Venice, and he is in a much better mood:

In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china tea-set were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting is your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but a bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it is time for breakfast.

Poor Sebald! Where were the rousing church bells when he visited?

I don’t really have anything intelligent to say linking these passages—unless anyone wants more hypothesising about national stereotypes and prose style (here we have the sensual French, the glum German, the darkly ironic Russian émigré, it could work)—but I thought it would be nice to share them together like this, and to recommend these three great and very different works.

I have never woken up in Venice; the only time I visited I arrived in the morning and left before the sun set, and I have no plans to return, so I am glad to be able to read a multitude of impressions about this particular experience, which seems on the whole to be a good one to have had.

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By 1819, when he had been on St. Helena for four years, he was fat and depressed, and chafing under the harsh governorship of Sir Hudson Lowe, who restricted his freedom of movement and posted so many soldiers on sentry duty that Napoleon spent most of his time cooped up in his mildewy residence, Longwood House, glaring at the British guards through a hole he’d bored into the window slats.

His doctor advised exercise, and suggested he fix up the unkempt gardens around the house. Napoleon was receptive to this idea. He got himself a gardening outfit and drew up plans for winding paths and flower beds and enlisted his aides and household servants and a team of hired labourers to realise his vision. What, you think the world’s greatest military commander wasn’t going to marshal troops?

The labourers who built Napoleon’s garden with him were Chinese men, part of a larger group of Chinese workers brought to St. Helena by the East India Company to fill the labour shortage caused by the British Empire’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It seems that most came from Macau and Canton, aka Guangzhou, though at least some were from Penang. They were paid (though not much) and worked on fixed-term contracts, at the end of which they returned home. Sometimes they wanted to stay, but they were almost never allowed.

There were maybe 700 Chinese workers in St. Helena in 1819, the year Napoleon started gardening. They planted flowers and trees and dug sunken paths that dipped below the sight line of the British guards, allowing Napoleon to take walks unobserved (he hated being watched, as anyone would). They lugged barrels of spring water to his house for his baths, and to fill up the new pond they built in the garden. Once, Napoleon gifted them a bottle of wine; another time, he defended them when one of his French staff scolded them for digging too close to the roots of a yew. The Chinese workers supposedly had no idea who Napoleon was, but found his gardening outfit amusing — red slippers, big straw hat, and a simple jacket and trousers made of nankeen, a type of cotton cloth originally made in China, hence the name — Nankeen = Nanjing.

I want to know more about these men, but there is very little to find out. Every Chinese worker in St. Helena had to carry a token with a number on it; this number was his sole form of identification. Even in official records of employment and transit, the Chinese on St. Helena are identified only by the numbers assigned to them, so we don’t know any of their names. We only have the numbers, and meagre sources like criminal records, which offer tiny and tantalising windows into unremembered dramas — 

3^rd April 1815: Chinese No. 152 charged with striking Overseer Carshaw. SENTENCE: 100 lashes and fined 20 shillings (£1.00), to be stopped in 2 monthly instalments.1

— or what is considered valuable for posterity, i.e. what Napoleon — who at this point was pretty much the most famous man alive (ex-China, apparently) — was doing and saying. Through the documentation of Napoleon’s life, we know more than we otherwise would about the group of men who worked alongside him in his garden in the last years of his life. For instance,

One of the Chinese was a skilled carpenter who helped build a Chinese pavilion at the extremity of the turf wall so Napoleon could sit there looking out to sea. The pavilion was decorated with white muslin and furnished with a Chinese armchair and bamboo chaise longue. From here Napoleon could see the panorama around Longwood and use his telescope to watch ships arriving in the distant bay. The canopy and walls of the square pavilion were canvas and it had glass diamond-shaped windows. It was painted light green with grey window frames and was approached via a grass-covered staircase supported by pickets which followed the curve of the turf wall. On the top of the pavilion there was a Chinese dragon weathervane.2

I spent some time scrolling through the Google Maps photos of Longwood House, and a version of the pavilion still stands today, complete with dragon weathervane.

The carpenter and two other men also made Napoleon a bamboo aviary:

The semicircular aviary was beautifully constructed from painted wood and metal. The three Chinese artisans who worked on it were known as numbers 146, 174 and 178. They raised it above the ground on clawed feet and decorated it with Chinese motifs, including a flower basket, egret and ribbon that formed a rebus representing longevity. The word “peony” formed a second rebus meaning wealth and rank, and birds among crab-apple blossoms along the bottom spelt out the message “May your noble house be blessed with wealth and honour”.

The line “the three Chinese artisans who worked on it were known as numbers 146, 174 and 178” really gives me the creeps. I wish we had their names. But the birdcage they built was beautiful. I especially love the feet:

I recently read The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe (thanks L for the recommendation!), an incredible book. It tells the story of the Golden Venture, a ship carrying 286 undocumented immigrants from China to the US. After a series of hellish misadventures at sea, the ship ran aground on the Rockaway peninsula in New York in 1993. Most of the passengers were arrested; many were deported, a few were granted asylum and the majority languished in jail for years in immigration limbo, until Clinton finally pardoned them in 1997. During their four years in jail many of the men started making sculptures out of magazines and legal pads and cardboard. They made thousands of pieces of art, American stuff like papier-mâché bald eagles and Statues of Liberty and Chinese stuff like dragons and pagodas and folded paper cranes.3 I knew about the Golden Venture art before — through Lisa Hsiao Chen’s 2022 novel Activities of Daily Living — but had not read about the artists themselves in such detail until I read The Snakehead, which follows their long and perilous journey from China across the world to America and then their years of struggle for freedom from behind bars.

Many of the pieces were sold to help with the passengers’ legal costs, but some are in the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York. I couldn’t help but think of these “folk artists” as I read about the unnamed Chinese artisans of 200 years ago (happily, we do know the names of the survivors of the Golden Venture). People are far away from home and in bad situations, and (still) make art.

Another project the Chinese labourers in St. Helena did for Napoleon was the construction of a cave with a small water feature where the Emperor could take his lunch for a change of scenery. The workers designed wooden panels covered with snakes, dragons, birds and other stuff Chinese people love. The panels decorated the inside of the cave. It is delightful to imagine Napoleon sitting at a little table in this makeshift cave, slurping his soup and dictating his memoirs to an aide against a backdrop of Chinese peonies and storks, double happinesses and dragons. The year of the rabbit is almost over; 1819 was a rabbit year too; 1820 and 2024, dragon years. Napoleon was an ox. I don’t know the birthdays of the men who made all these beautiful things for him, but maybe one of them was an ox, too.

I read a lot of great nonfiction this year. Here are some highlights, in chronological order of reading:

• The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama – guys, he cooks…

• The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm – I first encountered this years ago when I saw the Russian-language copy at my friend Kirill’s house and he glumly informed me that his girlfriend had assigned it to him to read. More than anything else what has stuck with me are Fromm’s musings on the nature of evil — its mystery and the continued problem its mysteriousness poses to us. This was published in 1956, when for obvious reasons the concept of evil was one that weighed heavily on many people’s minds, not least people like Fromm, a German Jew who fled to the US after the Nazis came to power (and who, early in life, was taken by Zionism, before abandoning it because it conflicted with his humanist principles).

• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford – which I wrote about in my Mongolia dispatch earlier this year.

• The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell – journalists need to start crawling around in coal tunnels again.

• The House of Fragile Things by James McAuley – a beautiful and devastating work of microhistory, and wonderful to read alongside Proust, whose Charles Swann is a fictional version of some of the people in this book, and who experiences and represents many of the same pleasures and sadnesses of late-19th-century-to-WW1-Paris that appear here. I wanted to write a standalone post about this (and Proust, and art, and other stuff) and I may do so in 2024.

• The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera – I do admire Milan Kundera’s insistence on omitting himself from the public consciousness so that his work can stand on its own, but it’s very funny how weird he was about giving interviews. The “conversations” included in this book appear as transcribed dialogues, suspiciously cogent. This is how the interviewer described the process: “We held several free and lengthy discussions in French; instead of a tape recorder, we used a typewriter, scissors, and glue. Gradually, amid discarded scraps of paper and after several revisions, this text emerged.”

• Vertigo by W.G. Sebald – genre-nebulous but whatever, Sebald never misses. Great bit where he wakes up in Venice that reminded me of Proust’s narrator waking up in Venice in The Fugitive. But that’s for another future post…

• Among the Braves by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin – I am so happy this book exists. Historical narrative (of modern Chinese/Hong Kong history and of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and their aftermath, which although recent in objective time are so distant from today’s reality as to feel historical already), gripping journalism (the section on the teenagers who commandeered a boat to Taiwan to seek refuge and the part about Joshua Wong trying to seek asylum in the US, whew), but also, crucially, it lays out the (ongoing) implications of 2019 for the rest of the world. Listen to my interview with Shibani and Tim here (from 34:45)!

• The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm – sad to say this was on the syllabus for a class back in college and I didn’t read it at the time because I was a wastrel, but now I have and it is great. The Didion girlies should organise themselves and give JM the same revival.

• Underground Asia by Tim Harper – I’ve been telling everyone to read this for months. It has a solid place in my top three favourite history books of all time. READ IT!

• Sparks by Ian Johnson – despite the preponderance of extremely bleak and harrowing events described here, I finished it feeling hopeful and inspired, which is a testament to the brilliance of the individuals profiled in it. One of those books whose title eludes you before reading, and is extremely moving after reading. Also prompted my mother, who read it after me, to feel very grateful to our ancestors for migrating from China a hundred years ago. I concurred with the sentiment.

• The End of the Novel of Love by Vivian Gornick – someone posted a picture of the first page of this on twitter and it was so good that I immediately borrowed it from the library, and the rest of it was just as good as the opening. Twitter has actually led me to more than one great book this year, it’s not all doom and gloom over there!

• Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami – I know it’s fashionable to drag Murakami these days because he’s a signifier for a certain type of misogynistic film bro but teenage me was obsessed with Fight Club, Scorsese, Camus and Murakami novels and you know what I still get it, which leads me to the terrifying conclusion that I am the misogynistic film bro? Anyway, my friend Michelle sent me this after I sold my own book, no note or warning, a complete surprise, but somehow I guessed it was her. Opening the package and seeing the title several months ago was the first time it really “hit” me that I am/will be technically a “novelist” too. A cool feeling. Love his frequent evocations of baseball (he’s a Yakult Swallows fan).

• The Interpreter’s Daughter by Teresa Lim – my mother recommended this to me, so we are 2 for 2 on recommending each other distressing histories of 20th century China and its diaspora. Don’t read much memoir but this was illuminating, and very sad. Some similarities with the McAuley book — close-up multigenerational portraits of brilliant families (of intellectuals, artists, political activists, precociously rebellious women) who flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but are (unbeknownst to themselves, horribly and inescapably known to the reader) rocketing towards the catastrophic events of the Second World War — the Holocaust for Jewish families, the Japanese occupation for Chinese families. A haunting line: “But history forms in secret spaces, unknowable till it has emerged. Your future may be its captive.”

This is already getting too long to also list fiction, movies and plays (I have a new year’s eve party to get ready for…) so I will stop here, or rather, immediately after the inclusion of the below, because I’ve already written most of it and I think there is thematic continuity with some of the books and ideas described above.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro – this was the last book of Ishiguro’s that I hadn’t read, I suppose because I’ve never heard people talk about it, except to say that it’s not as good as his other books, a sentiment with which he himself agreed. I read it a couple months after reading his divisive novel The Unconsoled, and found them to be wonderful companions. Reading The Unconsoled is like skating on the surface of a frozen lake: you can see the murky shapes below, but you can’t quite make out what they are, and you can never break through the ice to find out. To a certain extent all his books have this veiled feeling, it’s part of what makes them so compelling, but The Unconsoled really subverts the normal “set-up and narrative reward” structure of most novels, which can be frustrating, until you submit yourself to its internal logic, which resembles that of a dream. When We Were Orphans felt almost opposite — I think it’s the most “plotty” of his books, it’s presented as a detective story, and there are shocking twists and reveals, compared to the complete lack of traditional resolution in The Unconsoled or the sort of slow-moving, gradually disclosed revelations of his other books. To take up the metaphor again, WWWO smashes through the ice with an axe.

Maybe that’s why people didn’t like it — it differs in that sense from his more beloved books — but I found it intense and heartbreaking, and hard to put down. Many of KI’s books wrestle with this growing phantom presence of a great evil (in several the evil is explicitly fascism, other times it’s more implicit) and people’s struggles to fight against or even acknowledge something so gargantuan and frightening. I’ve always loved the description of KI’s work from the Nobel committee — “in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Under the ice … it’s the abyss!

In WWWO, the protagonist, Christopher, believes that through his work as a detective he can combat the dark forces of evil that seem to be enveloping the world, and in this book, which builds to the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, the evil is manifest in fascism. Like many a KI protagonist, Christopher is polite, repressed and deluded, and sometimes has random outbursts of rage. His is also one of the most poignant and upsetting depictions of — sorry to resort to therapy speak — the pain of the “inner child” that I’ve read in a while. Reader, I sobbed.

There’s a really eerie scene with a Japanese general who tells Christopher, who is English, about his love of classical music, Dickens, etc., and Christopher is like, how can you love these things and be okay with what the Japanese are doing (at this point we are in Shanghai in 1937 and Japan is full-scale invading China) and the general denies that there’s a contradiction, or if there is it doesn’t bother him. This scene is especially creepy not just because of the questions it raises about the uselessness of art in the face of evil, etc., but because it immediately follows on from a lengthy and tormenting description of an active war zone in a modern city, a total shift in setting from the preceding and succeeding pages (wherein Christopher has been hobnobbing at fancy parties, then [horror of war interlude] then suddenly we’re chatting to the suave general about literature and opera), told in the same tone (which apparently some critics found issue with but which I actually think was a huge strength). Experientially, I would compare reading this section of the novel to the movie Children of Men, specifically the relentless single-shot take starting from when they board the bus into the refugee camp.

I guess it’s silly to say anything by KI is underrated given that he is a Nobel laureate now but seriously this book is so underrated. And this post is too long…

Thanks so much for reading and please share this newsletter with anyone you think might get a kick out of it. See you in 2024!

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