Unbroken Song
BY GRACE LOH PRASAD
M. Florine Démosthène, Beings of Time, 2020, collage on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Unbroken Song
GRACE LOH PRASAD / OCT 2020 / ISSUE 2
The Women’s Building is a four-story landmark at the corner of 18th Street and Lapidge in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, halfway between Tartine Bakery and the busiest stretch of Valencia Street, with its trendy bars and eateries. In 1971, a group of visionary women founded the first women-owned and operated community center in the country, and in 1979, they purchased the building they currently occupy—a former union hall covered on two sides, with kaleidoscopic murals depicting significant people and events in women’s history.
I visited the Women’s Building during the first week of 2017, on a night when the air felt charged and heavy in anticipation of a major storm. The threat of torrential rain almost kept me home, but I did not want to miss that evening’s event in the Audre Lorde Room—a conversation between writers Vanessa Hua and Maxine Hong Kingston to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Kingston’s seminal book, The Woman Warrior.
This was the third time I’d seen Kingston in less than a year. The previous April, she did a reading with my poet friend Brynn Saito in the tiny upstairs room at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. She was lovely and gracious, and she chuckled when Brynn read her poem “The Woman Warrior Walks Into a Bar.” Then, in October, I saw Kingston at a literary festival where a group of actors did a staged reading of two of her stories from China Men and one excerpt of The Woman Warrior.
Each story was incredibly vivid, but the one that stayed with me the most was called “The Ghostmate,” about a man who gets lost in a desolate wood in a storm, until he discovers a house inhabited by a beautiful woman who offers him shelter and food and companionship. He vows to stay only one night before returning home, but several more nights pass, then weeks, months and finally years during which he is absent from his wife and family but cannot tear himself away from the enchantress. At times, he feels guilty and tries to summon the strength to return to his family and responsibilities, but then he is lulled back into a trance, unable to resist the comfort and nourishment that ultimately entrap him.
Sitting in the audience, I interpreted “The Ghostmate” as a retelling of a folktale about a spirit wife or succubus seducing a young man. There are many versions of this motif in different cultures, so I was surprised when during the Q&A, Kingston explained that “The Ghostmate” was an allegory for the muse—the creative life—which enthralls and sustains the artist, but also demands sacrifice and can lead to neglecting one’s family. It was eye-opening to hear that even someone as acclaimed as Kingston struggled with balancing writing and family.
I often feel this tension between pursuing my creative ambitions and the relentless grind of a day job and caring for a family. When I was unmarried and doing freelance work, I could travel according to my own whims and spend weeks at writing residencies without anything else to distract me. Once I started a family and went back to an office job, I put my writing on hold for a few years and then slowly, gradually came back to it and learned to fit it into the margins of my busy life. It’s still a tough balancing act; I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve disappeared into my writing only to be called back to reality by a child who needs to be fed, laundry that needs to be folded, summer camps that need to be organized, and so on. There is always something tugging at me, anchoring me to the quotidian when all I want is to be left alone with my imagination.
I wonder if my mother felt this way, too. She abandoned a PhD program to raise my brother and me and to manage the logistics of living abroad. She didn’t return to her studies until more than a decade later, when we were old enough to be independent. Did she also feel torn between two worlds? Did she fantasize about what might have been, the way one thinks about a lover who got away?
At the 40th anniversary event, Kingston was dressed in a bright fuchsia sweater with fringe on the shoulders, a black skirt, and hot pink rubber rain boots. Although her fashion tastes are whimsical and she’s tiny at under five feet tall, she completely filled the room with her magnetism while addressing a standing-room-only crowd. After answering a few questions, Kingston offered to read a passage from The Woman Warrior and asked the audience for suggestions.
From the back of the room, I shouted: “Shaman!”
“Shaman” is a chapter in which Kingston described the trials of her mother, Brave Orchid, while attending medical school in China. Brave Orchid was looked up to by the other midwifery students because she was several years older and thought to be much wiser. Wanting to live up to her reputation, she accepted a challenge to spend the night in a haunted room of the girls’ dormitory where she encountered a Sitting Ghost. Although she survived this ordeal, she woke up weak and disoriented, surrounded by her classmates chanting her name to call her spirit back to the land of the living. This triggers a memory Brave Orchid had of being scared when she was a little girl, and being comforted by her mother who chanted the family’s descent line, which connected her with her living family members and deceased ancestors in a long, unbroken song.
This scene from The Woman Warrior always stayed with me: the idea that chanting your ancestors’ names could rescue you from oblivion. When my mom first developed Alzheimer’s, I noticed she would instantly forget things we had just discussed and could not recall what day it was, whether she had eaten or not, or the basic facts of her life. But she could remember song lyrics. She could still attend church and sing along with the hymns. It was as though the combination of words and music had a staying power that words alone did not. Her ability to recall songs persisted even after her speech became garbled and chaotic, when she’d switch mid-sentence from Taiwanese to Mandarin to English, everything spilling out unorganized as though she’d opened all the kitchen drawers at once instead of one at a time. After she lost the ability to have a lucid conversation or recognize all but a handful of people, she could still sing entire Christmas carols in English—her fourth language, and one she rarely used anymore.
Kingston decided to read from the last two pages of her last chapter instead, called “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” In this chapter, the Woman Warrior is no longer the youthful soldier who had gone to battle but has been summoned by her father to marry a foreigner to forge an alliance between two neighboring clans. The Woman Warrior is disturbed by the barbarian language and their songs sound unpleasant to her at first, but eventually she learns to understand and sing them, while also retaining her own songs and lullabies in her own language. It reads like a parable of assimilation.
I had forgotten that The Woman Warrior ended on a musical note. After the reading and Q&A, I chatted with Kingston and told her that The Woman Warrior had impacted me so much that I carried certain ideas from it like a blueprint for my own memoir. I told her that music was also a theme in my memoir, functioning like a substitute for the language I had lost; it was a language beyond words. She nodded affirmingly and wished me luck finishing my manuscript.
The rain didn’t come that night. But as I took the train home, I reflected on the durability of music and its power to connect people. Music and songs imprint on the brain in a different way than language on its own. I stopped speaking Taiwanese when I went to kindergarten in New Jersey, but I can still remember the verse of a Taiwanese folk song I learned 40 years ago. I was part of a group of kids who learned the song at a Taiwanese church retreat; we rehearsed it a few times then performed it for the adults. I can still hear the notes in my head and the approximate words without knowing what they mean—the only thing I know for sure is the first two words are hóe-chhia which means “train.”
I hadn’t thought about that song in years, and since my dad passed away I would not be able to ask him about it. But the night after I saw Kingston at the Women’s Building, I did a Google search on “Taiwanese folk song train” to see what would come up. Unbelievably, the first Youtube link I clicked on was the song from my childhood, which is called “Diu Diu Deng.” It’s a famous and frequently performed folk song about the sound of water dripping on a train as it passes through a tunnel.
Although I did not know the meaning of the lyrics, my memory of the sounds was surprisingly faithful despite not having heard the song in decades. This is why I believe that music speaks to a more ancient part of the brain, beyond language, beyond words. It has the power to take me home.
In “Shaman,” I found it tremendously comforting to think that my ancestors could claim me and call me back home in a language I no longer speak but which persists deep in my unconscious—a music I’ve strained my whole life to hear. And I’ve come to realize that my creative life and family life are not at odds, after all; they are intertwined.
There is no song without the singer. My writing has meaning because I have ancestors that I want to remember, and a descendant to carry it forward. I won’t let the melody die out. My son will continue the song after I am gone.
Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and is an alumna of VONA. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, Blood Orange Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, The Manifest-Station, Barren Magazine, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Grace is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian Pacific American writers collective. She is currently finishing her memoir-in-essays entitled The Translator’s Daughter.
M. Florine Démosthène was born in the United States and raised between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. Florine earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design (New York) and MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions in the USA, Caribbean, UK, Europe and Africa. She is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Arts Moves Africa Grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She has participated in residencies in the USA, UK, Slovakia, Ghana, and Tanzania. Her work can be seen at the University of South Africa (UNISA), Lowe Museum of Art, PFF Collection of African American Art, and in various private collections worldwide.