Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

THE WRITERS

Life unfolds in strange ways.

I was not granted the aesthetic and relaxing health resort therapy I’d been hoping for. Instead I was granted a new, keener awareness as a Japanese writer from an unexpected source — from the very thing I had secretly tried to avoid: international exchange with writers. It might be an overstatement to call what took place an “exchange,” for few of my fellow participants had sufficient command of English, and even with those who did, I seldom got to engage in real conversation. Still, the eventual impetus to write this book was indeed occasioned by my mingling with writers from diverse countries. Reflecting back, I can only feel grateful to the IWP for providing me with what turned out to be an invaluable experience.

The new and keener awareness I gained as a Japanese writer had very little to do with the IWP participants as individuals. If truth be told — and if I may be allowed a little impertinence — these writers, myself included, were not particularly outstanding individuals. At least we did not give any such impression. To start with, our appearance was unprepossessing. The American Midwest has an overwhelmingly white majority. Many residents are of German or Scandinavian descent, the kind of people who would once have been called “Aryan.” Having grown up in the New York metropolitan area, where all kinds of ethnic groups coexist, as I looked around at the University of Iowa students I was stunned by how many blond, blue-eyed people there are on Earth. They were also amazingly tall and dazzlingly young. People who I secretly thought would look perfect in Nazi propaganda films as members of the Hitler Jugend — though they might not like the comparison — were walking all over campus with majestic long strides.

Among such people, we writers cut a poor figure. Of course, many of us were not white, and even among the whites, many were of eastern European or Mediterranean descent — neither blond nor blue-eyed. We also were not tall. We were not young. And because many of us came from poor countries, and because writers are the way they are, we were not well dressed. Everywhere we went in this small college town that appreciates literature, we were always treated warmly and respectfully. But when we moved around in a group, we could have easily been mistaken for a band of recent immigrants or refugees. If our connection to the IWP weren’t known, some might have found our presence a bit disturbing.

Despite our unimpressive exteriors, perhaps our souls were aglow with inner light, you may kindly suggest. Well, sadly, that didn’t seem to be the case either. Ancient tales tell of people who look like beggars, lunatics, or imbeciles but are in fact a company of saints in the eyes of God. Those tales did not seem to apply to us writers. Interacting with the others on a daily basis, I didn’t get the sense that this was a group of people blessed with particularly high spirituality, generous hearts, or noble aspirations. I didn’t even get the sense that this was a group of people with particularly fine minds, as writers are generally credited with having — though I am sure this was mostly because so many of us did not speak English well. In fact, I kept thinking that if anything we were a bunch of hard-to-please curmudgeons. I often pondered the stress Chris and the other organizers must be going through.

And yet, as I kept spending more and more time with the other writers, a sense of wonderment began to wash over me.

In every corner of the globe, writers are writing. In every corner of the globe, different writers under different conditions are giving all they’ve got to their writing. To be sure, more than 99.9 percent of the seven billion inhabitants on Earth will end their lives not knowing that these writers ever existed or that their novels, short stories, or poems were ever written. Still, in every corner of the globe, while they work, raise their children, or care for their elderly parents, writers are finding the time to hunch in front of a computer or scribble in a notebook, trying their best to write. They are probably shortening their lives a bit by doing so, but they are trying their best to write nonetheless.

I began to spend more time with a world map from the campus bookstore spread out on my desk.

Yes, people were writing in Mongolia, too. The Mongolian poet I mentioned had the family name of Dashnyam. He was the only person whom everyone addressed by his family name, his first name being too long to remember, let alone pronounce. Dashnyam’s presence was a constant reminder that people were writing in Mongolia, too, in that distant, almost mythical land. The bits and pieces of his life that he shared with me using his limited English only deepened my sense of wonder.

Dashnyam, a big man, was prone to feeling lonely. “I’m lonely,” he would say as he came into my room. “I miss Mongolia.” Despite his hearty appearance, maybe he was sensitive to the cold like me. Or maybe he simply liked warm drinks. I would offer him one of the lukewarm canned beers stacked in the corner of my fridgeless room; he would drink it while warming it even more in his big hands. And he would tell me stories. His father, I learned, was a hunter. The big family lived in a big tent, or ger, in the steppe. He grew up eating mutton stew cooked in a pot in the middle of the ger. The stew was not a feast for special occasions, he said. Day after day, they ate the same mutton stew. They also had lamb cheese and sheep’s milk; they drank liquor made of sheep’s milk, too. It sounded like ovine torture to me, but Dashnyam, warming the canned beer in his hands, repeated longingly: “I miss Mongolia.”

Dashnyam’s study in the Soviet Union happened by chance. With the aim of solidifying its empire, the former Soviet government took the policy of urging satellite nations to send their brightest boys and girls to the Soviet Union so that they could experience several years of boarding school, receive intensive training in the Russian language and Marxist-Leninist thought, and then go back to their home countries to become new leaders. One-party rule always incubates corruption. Each nation’s high government officials naturally packed off their own children to the program. Frustrated with all the lazy idiots arriving year after year, the Soviet government decided to change its policy: it would return to the true principle of Communism and bring in the commonest of all children, the children of hunters, farmers, and fishers. Sons of a hunter, Dashnyam and his younger brother were selected. The two boys must have excelled in their local school; perhaps their father was also a leading figure in their village — though this is pure speculation. Quite predictably, things again did not turn out as hoped. The commoners’ children proved to be, if anything, even more incompetent than those of the elites. The government abandoned its new policy after only a few years, but by then Dashnyam and his brother had begun studying in the Soviet Union. Or at least that’s how I understood his story. He later returned to the Soviet Union to earn his doctorate and then, once back in Mongolia for good, became involved in the independence movement. The Soviets’ laudable policy of letting in the children of commoners ended up coming home to roost.

Dashnyam also wrote poems with romantic refrains like “I think of you.” He told me that there was a young Russian woman he was in love with back in his student days in Moscow, a woman who was blonde and beautiful. Yet when they finally reunited a few years ago, after the Soviet Union fell, she had gained weight—“like this,” he said, using both hands to suggest a belly even bigger than his own. When a man talks this way about a woman he once loved, it usually comes off as a cheap shot. Dashnyam’s tone and manner, however, suggested that life’s all-too-predictable course left him nonplussed, or richly amused, or both. He did not sound vulgar at all.