The Reader Travels

Oh my gosh. There’s babies poppin’ out everywhere!

I slip back to northern Mexico with The Hummingbird’s Daughter where Teresita Urrea was a mid-wife and a healer. The book starts with Teresita’s own birth, and we see so many babies born through her eyes and her gentle, but strong hands. She brought life wherever she went, and even defeated death in her own miracle resurrection.

For each of the past two Sundays there is a new baby boy. Alex came on Father’s Day, an American boy born to Chinese parents. His grandparents are here from China to care for him and connect him back to his roots, but his is a whole new world.

Isaac came this morning, three weeks early. His father is part Mexican, part viking, a powerful combination, and his mother is warm and thoughtful, energetic and funny. He was turned upside down, so they had to cut him from his mother’s belly, but he is healthy and strong as a viking should be.

May they both be blessed by the grace and wonder of Santa Teresita.

My father is an honest man among pirates. It’s a hard role to fill, a difficult task to achieve, keeping your integrity and principles when corruption surrounds you.

He believed in respect and chivalry, whisked my mother away from the sea dogs in her family. Because he was sensitive and respectful, the pirates judged him as weak, but he prevailed.

We moved to a town where the pirates wore white sheets, and there he stood for equality and respect for all the people, regardless of race or religion. In our next home, he worked on an island, a city founded by Jean Lafitte. Corruption was all around, and there he stood for the law and fought to uphold it.

My father is a mighty, good man, and I see his example reflected in his son, who also stands for respect and equality and the deepest love for his family.

Happy Fathers Day!

Like Amy Tan herself, her main characters are Americans. They lack any insights into the spiritual world because their land is shiny and new, whitewashed and sometimes superficial. It is only back in the old country that we see spirits come to life, in a land with centuries of custom, tradition and ancestors who watch over their families on earth.

I’d like to keep traveling west from China, all the way to England, another place with a long, long history and their own connections to the new world of America. Although Henry James pre-dates magical realism, I can’t help but think of his novella The Turn of the Screw, when we talk about the fuzzy borders between the “real” and the spiritual.

Many a college literature course asks students to answer the question, is James’s ghost real, or is it simply a product of a disturbed mind? It’s funny to watch the different film adaptations of the book to see which took the ghost angle, and which was from the crazy school.

I like to think James’s ghosts were real, and here’s why. James was born in the US, but moved to England and claimed it as his home. An anglophile to the core, James would have rejected the shiny newness of his birthplace and embraced the fact that more people take their ghosts seriously in old England.

Who knew Henry James was a magical realist?

We write together, me and my man. The way we’ve worked so far, he writes the first draft, the bones of the novel, and I come back behind and fill in the flesh, bring it new life. It’s kinda the way Banky and Holden create comic books together in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. Holden does the initial drawings and Banky gives them color and life, ink as life blood. I could be ridiculed for being a “tracer,” but I don’t think of it that way.

In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Ruth Young is a ghost writer. This is a different concept of collaborative writing. Ruth takes another person’s stories and ideas and puts them in words, infusing them with a spirit, making them live. The name “ghost writer” would have you think she’s like a poltergeist moving furniture and type in the night, while her mother thinks it means she talks to the spirits, for such is her experience in life.

Again, we’re teetering between East and West, and throughout this novel, the western world Ruth lives in seems but a skeleton of a life comparing to the richness of the eastern world where her mother came from. In Ruth’s skeletal blindness she reduces her mother’s rich spiritual past to mere superstition and delusion. But all she has to do is blow on the bones, and they come to life around her.