by Wang Ping
The first time I applied for a literary grant was an accident. That morning in 1992, Lewis Warsh, a New York school poet, said he was going to the post office to mail the NEA application. “What’s that?” I asked. He was amazed I’d never heard of it.
“Come on, Lewis,” I laughed. “I’m new in America, and new to the poetry world.”
Lewis explained that NEA stood for National Endowment for the Arts, that every year it gave $20,000 to artists, musicians, poets, and writers.
“That’s a humongous amount of money. What do you do with it?”
He laughed. “Well, you can stop working yourself to the bone for a year or two and concentrate on your writing.”
My eyes opened wide. I had come to America with $26 in my pocket, and I’d been working several jobs at the same time, but my income had never surpassed $10,000. I wouldn’t even know what to do with the money if I got it. But of course I wouldn’t get it, even if I had the nerve to apply.
Lewis looked at me pensively, then said, “You know what? I have an extra copy of the application form. Why don’t you fill it out and we’ll take it to the post office?”
I jumped, stuttering. “No, no, no making fun of me. There are so many great poets in America. I’m so new, and I don’t even speak English very well. Didn’t Helen Vendler, the poetry authority from Harvard, say that nobody could write decent poetry in a second language?”
“Don’t worry about Vendler. The panel won’t know who you are. It’s anonymous. You must trust yourself. There’s a reason why you came to America, and why you walked into my classroom. It was an accident but no accident. You have a story to tell, and you can’t rest until you tell it, right? That’s what the NEA panel is looking for, not perfect grammar or perfect spelling. Sure it counts, but grammar alone doesn’t make a story sing. It’s your heart, your passion, and your experience that make your magic. And you have it. It shines through your words. Remember, it’s part of your job as a writer, this application, this sending your work out into the world. I’ve been applying for over twenty years. I only got it the year Ron and Lyn were on the panel. But it doesn’t matter. You apply every year, just like the way you write every day.”
A few years before, I had left China and come to NYC for a master’s degree in literature at Long Island University, Brooklyn. One day, I walked into Lewis’s classroom, thinking it was a literature class. I was 20 minutes late, and was too embarrassed to leave when I discovered that it was a creative writing workshop. So I sat down and wrote a story about a chicken and duck I had on the farm in China. To my surprise, everyone loved it. I decided to give it another try before I dropped the class. The second assignment was about our first political experience. I gave him the story of witnessing the Red Guards shaving my mother’s head in the sign of yin yang then parading her on an open truck through the town. I was about six years old. It came back with Lewis’s large handwriting on the first page: “Start writing a novel, NOW!” I was stunned. How did he know my secret desire? In China, writing was sacred. Poets and writers were revered as heroes and sages. Growing up with a brilliant mother and beautiful sister, people had always thought of me as dumb, mute, stupid, ugly, and worse, stubborn. I had never even dared think about writing. Here I was, so new to the English language, so alien to America and its culture, and yet I was told I should start writing a novel. A window opened in my heart. Yes, this had been my secret longing as a child: to sing and tell stories, and I do have a few stories to tell.
I looked at Lewis, my lips trembling. “I’ll try. But I don’t even know how to start.”
So Lewis ended up filling out the form and picking eight poems from my slim portfolio. As he licked the envelope, he said,
“Now I want you to forget about this. Most likely, we’ll get a rejection letter, as it happens to most people. Thousands of people apply. But it has never stopped people from buying lottery tickets, right? It is in a way like gambling. The panel is different every year. Their tastes for poetry vary, so do their moods, and the panel dynamic. You never know when your words will pull the heartstrings of the judges. Sometimes you do get lucky. Let’s pray Helen Vendler won’t be on the panel.”
We laughed and threw the manila envelopes in the mail. I followed Lewis’s instruction and went about my daily life—going to school, teaching, writing, meeting friends—and totally forgot about the application.
Until one afternoon, I got a big envelope from Washington, D.C. I had a habit of throwing away my mail when I couldn’t recognize the sender, or when it didn’t have a pretty stamp. I was about to toss it when Lewis grabbed it and ordered: “Open it, Ping. Open it.” His voice was high. I looked at him. He was trembling with excitement. I tore the envelope and pulled out the letter:
“Dear Mr. Ping, we are pleased to inform you . . .”
I looked up at Lewis. Tears were welling up in his eyes. “You did it, Ping, you did it.” His voice choked, and he lowered his head.
I was dumbfounded. What did it mean? What had I done? I didn’t even fill out the form. Lewis did everything. Finally I managed to say, “What . . . what about you, Lewis?”
He wiped his eyes. “I guess I’ll have to keep trying next year.”
“This doesn’t make sense. You taught me everything I know about poetry, and you’ve published so many books, hundreds of poems in magazines. And I have published only a few poems, barely making the requirement. It must be a mistake.”
He came over and hugged me with a kiss. “No mistake, no mistake. You have a story to tell, and the panel heard it.”
“What about your story? You have so many!”
“They’ll hear it again someday. I will never give up, I promise.”
The grant opened a series of new doors for me as a poet and writer. I quit my jobs at Chinese restaurants and PS1, entered NYU for my PhD, and went to Tibet with Lewis, which sowed the seed for the Kinship of Rivers project. But most important, it boosted my confidence as a budding poet and writer. Before that, I was an immigrant answering phones in a law office under the name Penny, just because my boss couldn’t pronounce the name Ping, a waitress going from restaurant to restaurant for minimum wage, a sub for the public schools, a starving ugly duckling in the land of America. Suddenly, I got congratulation letters from senators and congressmen, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and public libraries invited me to give readings, and my name was changed from Penny Wan back to Wang Ping . . .
I started trusting myself, trusting the stories in me that had to be told, trusting that I had a unique way to tell them. And I stopped being afraid of anything—opening my mouth to express my feelings of joy and sorrow, to tell the truth, to ask questions . . . Most important of all, I was no longer afraid of making mistakes.
Being fearless really freed my spirit and unleashed my creativity. We often envy children’s imaginations and creativity. What we really envy is their freedom to babble, play, fall, and make lots of mess. A sensible parent or teacher will not punish them for their accidents and mistakes. It is through endless falls that children become masters of all things. As we grow up, however, we become branded with more and more inhibitions, rules, and fears. What we are most afraid of, however, is making fools of ourselves in front of our peers and communities.
Fear blinds us, mutes us, and shrivels our hearts, imaginations, visions, and guts. Fear makes us rigid, narrow minded, hostile, depressed. It binds us with thousands of invisible chains.
When I arrived in New York City with $26 in my pocket, on the night of the Metro winning the Cup, I was very afraid. Everything was hard and overwhelming: the all-night madness on the streets, the drive into Manhattan to work, the UPS man asking me if I came from the moon, the first bite of pizza, the subway and Union Square, searching for jobs and cheap apartments . . . Even milk, my comfort drink, tasted alien and yucky (it turned out to be pasteurized). I cried myself to sleep every night. I was afraid until I walked into the “wrong” class at the “wrong” time and discovered that I could sing, that people loved to hear it, including the NEA panel.
A timid Leo started to roar.
I tell the story to every student, each aspiring poet and writer: we must dare to dream big, dare to act big, dare to give it all, our heart and guts. But first of all, we must dare to open ourselves to the world, dare to feel pain and joy, dare to be vulnerable, to make big fools of ourselves, dare to fall over and over until we get up with grace and laughter, then we will fly, one hand on the throttle, the other on the yoke.
For the past decade, I’ve judged for NEA, PEN, and many other literary fellowships and awards. I always look for that fierce spirit in the story, that harmony between content and form, that fearless song . . .
People say, “Give love a chance.” I say, “Give your story a chance.” Just open your heart and lungs and let it rip. Let it pull the heartstrings of your readers, and you’ll have the fruit.
And of course, Lewis Warsh still applies to NEA every year, as he promised.
Wang Ping was born in China and came to the United States in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, a five-year project that builds a sense of kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance, and food. With other artists and poets, she has been teaching poetry and art workshops to children and seniors along the river communities, making thousands of flags as gifts to take to the Mississippi during 2011–12 and to the Yangtze in 2013.
Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), All Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze (forthcoming 2012), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and cotranslated, is published by Hanging Loose. Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, cotranslation with Ron Padgett, 2010 from Zephyr. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities, and in 2002, Random House published it in paperback. The Last Communist Virgin won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award and Asian American Studies Award. She has had two photography and multimedia exhibitions—Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College (2007), and All Roads to Lhasa at Banfill-Locke Cultural Center (2008). Wang Ping collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves, a film installation about illegal Chinese immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship.
Emilie
Thank you so much for the inspiring story.
I’m signing up for my first class at the Loft in Minneapolis today, encouraged by friends and family who keep telling me I should write a book. I too, have stories to tell.