As young women, Geling Yan and Anchee Min separately fled the repressive regime in their native China and came to Chicago to learn English.
Yan, a former ballet dancer, journalist and Army major, was already a published novelist. Min, who had never written anything professionally, had been plucked from a collective farm to portray Madame Mao Tsetung in a movie, but, when Mao died and his wife was denounced, the film was canceled and Min was shunted aside as a political outcast.
Today, the two women, who became friends while in Chicago, are recognized as major Chinese writers. They recently returned to town — Yan from Taiwan, Min from the San Francisco area — to participate in the Story Week Festival of Writers, sponsored by the English Department at Columbia College.
During their visit, they took time to talk with Tempo. Here’s an edited transcript:
Tempo: Anchee, you came to Chicago in 1984 and became a writer here?
Min: I wanted to have a green card. I tried painting. I had a one-man show and didn’t sell anything. I had a photography one-man show and didn’t sell anything. I worked for a design company for two months. So, in desperation, my dream was to be a secretary. So I needed to learn English. In Chicago, that’s easy because you have “L’s,” the train stations and elevators. I would say, “Excuse me, my English is not good. Do you say, ‘I was here tomorrow’?” And this person would correct me.
I went to the placement office, and they said, “You have to learn typing.” So I went to Payless Shoes and got a shoe box, and I drew circles on it [like a keyboard]. So, on my way to Libertyville where I worked in a Chinese restaurant, on the train, I practiced on the shoe box.
I was so desperate. I worked as a house maid, a plumber, a gallery attendant, delivery, everything, waitressing. [At the urging of her boyfriend, she entered many writing contests.] One cost me $5, the Mississippi Valley Review, a national writing contest, and I won the contest and got published. In the meantime, I was rich enough that I could buy a typewriter at Maxwell Street.
Tempo: Geling, you came here in 1990 to
improve your English?
Yan: My English was very limited. Chicago — I always think that the place that makes you suffer is the place you will always forever remember. I grew up here. I learned everything — how to do laundry at a coin laundry, and how to deal with people who are rude. You know, Chicago people are kind of rude.
When [you don’t] have enough language proficiency, you get a sixth sense to be very sharp. You open your eyes. You’re like a child. You observe everything. You talk to yourself so much, you enrich inwardly. It benefits a writer very fast.
Min: I’d see homeless people and think, I envy you because, first of all, you have the right to work, and, second of all, you speak English. That first year was fascinating. I was tired, exhausted, from absorbing so much. I’d say to people, “Can you take a picture of me?” And they’d say, “Why? It’s just a post office.” I’d say, “It’s not the post office. It’s the American flag. It’ll show the people back home I arrived in America and I’m safe.”
The weather here is hard. I grew up in Shanghai. All we had were autumn and spring. But I said, “Gee, you know there’s no [Communist] Party secretary. I can say anything.”
I felt great the day I said to the restaurant owner, “I quit.” In China, you can never say that.
Tempo: This was at the restaurant in Libertyville. What was its name?
Min: Hunan Inn.
Tempo: Geling, where was your restaurant?
Yan: It was a Chinese fast food restaurant at Madison and LaSalle. My job finished at 1, and I had to run more than 10 blocks [to school], and my class started at 1.
Min: My job started at 5. Normally the school finished at 4. At Union Station, the train took off at 4:15, so I always had to leave school a little bit early. I took the train to Libertyville and ran down to the restaurant.
Yan: She always did her homework on the train.
Min: My first American sentence was: “May I take your order?” I was so thrilled the person understood me.
I’d finish the job at 11:30 and get home in Logan Square, and then I started my second job. From 12 to 3:30, I did fabric painting. I lived all over Chicago. I lived at 4311 S. Halsted. I was so happy. For the first time in my life, I lived in my own space. It was 6-by-6, less than that. But I was thrilled.
Yan: I was sharing an apartment with one of my classmates, and I learned that Americans are not like the Chinese in sharing things. In China, when you have more, you give to someone. When they have more, they give to you. But, with my American roommate, if I read her newspaper, she asked me if I would split the cost of the newspaper. She got this cat, and I played with the cat. Sometimes the cat would sleep in my room, and she said, would I like to share the vaccination cost for the cat? That would be just unthinkable in China.
Tempo: Where was your apartment?
Yan: In Rogers Park. The neighborhood was not so good. I remember one man exposed himself. One night, I got robbed. I was a very trusting person and, most of the time, was preoccupied. So this young guy must have observed me for sometime, and he followed me to my apartment. He tried to strangle me.
Min: That happened to you too?
Yan: He took my money and tried to break off my necklace. He scratched my neck. He was 17 or 18 years old, a very gentle-looking young man.
Tempo: “The Banquet Bug” is the first book you’ve written in English. Why now?
Yan: My English is now mature enough. I think there are two personalities in me now. One’s an English self; one’s a Chinese self. The English self seems to be younger and more straightforward and braver, simpler. My Chinese self — my readers in China always expect my books to be very complex and very rich in language and always with experiments in language and experiments in form.
Tempo: Having lived in Chicago, do you see the world differently?
Yan: Chicago is so masculine, compared with San Francisco and some other cities. I learned the American way of life here. I learned from my experiences working in the restaurant and walking on the street and dealing with people doing laundry at the coin laundry.
Min: Chicago made me more Chinese. It freed me to be my true self as a Chinese and then as an American. Chicago — the city and its people have a down-to-earthness which I share. You look at the city skyline. It soars like a phoenix from a fire.
I got the sense that I am not a bolt that’s on the Communist machine anymore. I learned from “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” and Oprah Winfrey and Chicago Public Radio that, if you strive, you can be anybody you want to be. Chicago’s my cradle. It actually gave me the nerve to dream.
Yan: She’s my hero.
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preardon@tribune.com
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Anchee Min
Age: 50
Books: “Red Azalea,” a memoir of her childhood under communism and a New York Times Notable Book for 1994. Also five novels about key events and figures in Chinese history, the latest of which, “The Last Empress,” was just published by Houghton Mifflin.
Birthplace: Shanghai .
Years in Chicago: 1984-1995. She came to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but knew little English. While working odd jobs, she learned the language through a program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and by watching such television shows as “Sesame Street,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” She graduated from the Art Institute with a master’s of fine arts. All of her books have been written in English.
Present home: Outside of San Francisco.
Next in Chicago: April 22 for an appearance on Writers on the Record with Victoria Lautman, noon, Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave
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Geling Yan
Age: 48
Books : A dozen novels and short story collections, all originally written in Chinese, and “The Banquet Bug,” published in 2006 by Hyperion, her first book written in English.
Birthplace: Shanghai.
Years in Chicago: 1990-1999. She came to Chicago to study for a master’s of fine arts in creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. Wrote about her time here in “Wu Chu Lu Ka Fei Guan (No Exit Cafe),” published in China in 2001 but not yet translated into English.
Present homes: Berkeley, Calif.; and Taipei, Taiwan.
Upcoming: Publication of “The Banquet Bug” in paperback by Hyperion in August.
