Household Words

A Vocation to Teach

Cultural Shape Shifter

The Ball is in her Court

Campus Counseling Conundrum

Wang Ping finds refuge in her St. Paul garden
PHOTO BY SARA RUBINSTEIN

Cultural Shape-Shifter

English Professor Wang Ping writes in English about China, her native land.

By Elizabeth Larsen

English professor Wang Ping's office in Old Main could be seen as a symbol of her life. Framed photographs of Chinese peasants and landscapes--snapped by Wang on her yearly trips to the country of her birth--transform an entire wall into an art gallery of a faraway land. Directly across the room from the images of sand dunes and suspension bridges, American and English classics compete for shelf space with her young sons' hockey portraits.

The ways that East and West infuse each other drive Wang's writing. The author of two books of poetry, two short story collections, a novel, and a cultural study of the traditional Chinese practice of footbinding, Wang hopes her work serves as a bridge between China and America. "Everything China does is so linked to everyone here," she says. Wang has been writing for most of the day and is kneeling on the floor to give her body a break while she drinks tea. "There is a cultural and economic and even military exchange that has been going on for centuries."The Last Communist Virgin, her most recent short story collection, navigates a 20-year span of those exchanges, from the tumultuous days of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the hardscrabble life of Chinese immigrants in 1980s America, to the recent construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River.

At a time when American eyes are focused on China's potential to be the next economic superpower, Wang's loosely connected stories peek beneath the spreadsheets of globalization to confide the longings, not only of lovers for one another, but also of Chinese immigrants for their culture. "There are a lot of misperceptions and stereotypes about the Chinese and China," says Wang. "The images now are all about counterfeit drugs and piracy and traditional, exotic women. The Chinese are like everyone else. They want love and sex and everything else that we want for daily life."

Wang was born in Shanghai and grew up on an island in the East China Sea. Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, launched to purge China of its liberal bourgeoisie, stormed into her city when she was in second grade, shutting down the schools and ending her formal education. The government banned all books except those written by Mao. "Day-to-day survival occupied most of our time," she says. "There were a lot of chores and everything was done by hand. We had no refrigerator. We had to walk three or four miles to the market every day and stand in lines for food because everything was rationed."

Here and there, Wang seized upon rare spare moments to lose herself in the few books that were passed around illegally. She taught herself English from the radio her family acquired when she was 15. "That was how I learned," she says. "I have an insatiable appetite for knowledge that I think came from that vacuum."

After three years of farming in a mountain village, Wang talked her way into Beijing University to study English literature. She emigrated to the United States in 1985 with $26 in her pocket to pursue a master's degree at New York's Long Island University. "I wanted something I couldn't get in China," she says, "which I guess was freedom. Not the Western version of freedom, which has become so vulgarized--especially through the Iraqi war. But I came here because I knew that my personality wouldn't fit in well in China because you have to follow rules--at least on the surface. I'm a free spirit. I can't obey rules. I'm very blunt."

Writing in English, says Wang, has freed her to tell the stories that have long roiled inside her because she doesn't censor herself as she would were she writing in Chinese.

Wang's fate as a writer was sealed when she mistakenly walked into a creative writing course, a blunder that she now sees as a karmic twist of fate. "It wasn't an accident," she says. "I always knew that I wanted to write poetry and be a writer. Only I didn't dare because it was so intimidating." Her first three years in America were mostly about survival, she says. Eventually she earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China came out of her dissertation.

Like the writer Vladimir Nabokov, Wang draws from memories that hit the page in English rather than the language in which they were created. Writing in English, says Wang, has freed her to tell the stories that have long roiled inside her because she doesn't censor herself as she would were she writing in Chinese. "Mother tongue is the tightest filter ever," she says. "It tells us where to look, what to look at, and how to think." Still, in the stories Wang returns to detail the lives she knows intimately: those of Chinese citizens and Chinese immigrants in the United States. "Maybe I can write only when I'm out of the whirl of everyday life and I can see things more clearly," she says. "Writing these stories is my nostalgia. I'm living here [in St. Paul] but at the same time living in China."

While opportunity was the force that brought Wang to New York City, her journey to Minnesota was propelled by love. Her partner needed to return to the Twin Cities to take over his family business. Wang was finishing her dissertation and thought it was a good time to leave New York. So they threw their son a first birthday party and packed up the car. Another son soon followed. So did the honors and accolades: she was awarded both the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship and the Loft Career Initiative Grant. She has been teaching creative writing at Macalester since 1999.

For someone who had to fight so tenaciously for her own education, Wang seems remarkably free of resentment for her far more privileged students. "I see the passion in every student here," she says, after acknowledging that her demanding expectations scare away some students. "Those who stay thank me for the progress they make. They always rise to a challenge, which I think is part of the Macalester tradition." Wang especially likes teaching students with no writing background. For those students, learning to use words creatively is like learning a second language, she says.

Because it can be hard for college writing students to veer away from the still-fresh intensity of a first love or a high school trauma, Wang structures many of her courses around a single theme that forces her students to combine research with their writing. Last year, she taught environmental writing and encouraged her students to take a multimedia approach to their work, much as Wang herself has done with her photography exhibit, Beyond the Gate: China in Flux After the Three Gorges Dam, which opened at Macalester last March and detailed human and environmental changes wrought by construction of the dam. "Maverick," the final story in The Last Communist Virgin, articulates her belief that all living things are connected. "We have been living as though we are the masters," she says. "But the consequences are severe. I think we have to live with a heightened awareness that we are just one member of an interdependent ecosystem."

Wang photographed the Three Gorges Dam area during several of her annual trips to China. Though her sons are still in elementary school, they accompany her on these journeys and may soon travel with her to Tibet. "They have three cultures," she says, adding that they are equally at ease at Hebrew school, in Chinese classes, and in the mainstream American boy culture embodied in those hockey photos.

Still, for all her family's cultural shape-shifting, Wang's profoundest desire is to spend an entire year in her homeland and to start writing in Chinese. "I bet that if I am writing in Chinese," she says, "I will write about America."

Elizabeth Larsen has written for Utne Reader, Child, Mother Jones, and other national magazines. She lives in Minneapolis.