JMW: What’s most exciting about this book to you?
Mary Ann: We’re excited that we were able to humanize Chinese people through the stories in our memoir.
I view the book as a China spin on the song, “Russians,” recorded by the rock group Sting in 1985 during the Cold War. The song talks about “a growing feeling of hysteria” in response to “threats” by the Soviets. It suggests that what might save “you and me” from a war is to consider “if the Russians love their children too.” It seems that the tensions between the United States and China are now similar to those between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. It feels important that our book communicates the theme that Chinese people experience longings, disappointments, and successes–and that they have partners and children and parents they care about just like Americans.
JMW: Do you see it as a new departure for you, a continuation of earlier work/themes, or some combination?
Fran: Since I have focused mostly on poetry, including about some of my experiences in Asia, especially Vietnam, the memoir is a departure for me in my writing life. Working with journals, letters, and interviews, and cowriting this book have all been new. And fulfilling!
Mary Ann: The book is an expansion of my work in writing and publishing personal essays. I also applied much of what I learned as a longtime journalist to provide a social and political context for our stories about China.
JMW: Do you see your work as “Mennonite,” and how or how not? (We know this is a ridiculously broad and fraught question, so feel free to respond in whatever way seems right to you.)
Fran and Mary Ann: We identified as Mennonites when we were teachers in China though we didn’t communicate or explain that identity to Chinese people back then. We spent a lot of time explaining who we were as Americans.
In the memoir, we write about how being Mennonite shaped why we were in China in the first place; we were graduates of Goshen College and the former president of our alma mater, J. Lawrence Burkholder, had connections in China. Being Mennonite meant that we shared certain values, such as being nonmaterialistic, with Chinese people in the 1980s.
One aspect of the memoir is that it is “Mennonite,” but that’s not the only aspect. We admit that we were surprised to see the book placed in the category of “Mennonite Christianity” by Amazon.com, lumped in with Amish romance novels that have predictable plot lines. That categorization feels wrong.
JMW: What themes, issues, techniques, and/or other authors were most in your mind as this project came into being?
Fran and Mary Ann: We had a theme in mind for the book from the beginning that it would be about friendship. What developed was not only a story about friendships formed between Chinese people and us, despite a lot of obstacles, but also about how the friendship that we shared helped us to better engage in a culture that was new to us.
We couldn’t help viewing the book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by former Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, as a reference point. Like Hessler, we taught English in a city located on the Yangtze River in China’s Sichuan Province. We love Hessler’ focus on ordinary Chinese people. At the same time, the stories that we tell are different because we have a different orientation. We were English teachers in China a decade before he was, we lived in a closed Chinese city, we are women, and we are people who have consistently been rooted in communities of faith.
JMW: What part(s) of your writing process might other writers find useful, either to imitate or to avoid?
Fran and Mary Ann: Writing the memoir was a huge experiment in collaborative writing! We feel we have gained valuable insight into how one writes in conjunction with another, how writing styles differ, how perspectives and memories differ, and how to negotiate these. We are happy with the alternating chapters in the memoir with our distinct individual voices.
However, for other authors starting collaborative projects, we recommend agreeing to some guidelines for working together rather than just diving in as we did. We had to backtrack and revise some of our modes of operation. The collaboration really made our memoir much better than if either of us had written a memoir about teaching in Luzhou, China, on our own. It has meant a great deal that we could together revisit our memories from the 1980s, meet up for writing retreats to process them, and then do book events together.
JMW: Is there a brief excerpt, or a poem if this is a book of poems, that we can reprint as part of this interview?
Fran and Mary Ann: Here are short excerpts written by each of us, so that our distinct voices come through.
Scenes from Luzhou (pp. 25-26)
Every time Mary Ann and I went out, curious townspeople stared; when we stopped to look at something or to bargain for vegetables or tasty tangerines, we invariably drew a crowd. And when we went out walking, we never knew quite what to expect: a man watering ducks as they walked down the hilly street, someone hauling a dresser on his back, women picking lice out of each other’s hair. As we gradually were allowed more freedom to roam the city, we began enjoying the longer strolls into town. We discovered there were different sections. For example, there was the fishing area, which was for those of a lower class but in a clean, old section of town with steps leading down to the river. Some of these people actually lived on the boats, which were moored on the banks of the Yangtze at night. We once were astonished to see the boatmen gathered in one boat, sitting on stools and watching TV on the deck! It seemed quite a nomadic life—little junks, naked children, and a small hollow inside for sleeping, with cooking facilities out the back . . . .
One day we saw a woman who had just fallen from a second-story window—out cold. We sometimes saw patients carried by two or four people on makeshift stretchers over the heads of the passersby—that sight felt like an older China—such a strange mixture of old and new.
–Fran
Haikus (p. 54, p.121)
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Self-conscious lovers
stroll on Sunday streets,
making couplehood public.
A lone junk floats down
the Chang River, ignoring
morning dragon breath
–Mary Ann
The Rules Loosen Up a Tad (pp. 123-124)
Fran and I held an end-of-the-term tea party for our third class of intensive English students. We served tea, peaches, and brownies we had baked in a recently purchased toaster oven. Everyone seemed to relax, and Fran and I did not feel as if we were orchestrating everything for once. It seemed that the students asked whatever questions came to mind, and we did the same. They asked:
“Are most Americans really self-centered?”
“What are you most afraid of in the United States?”
“Do Americans have drinking games?”
We asked: “What do you like best about China?” Some of the answers were job security, a sense of safety, history, and peacefulness.
–Mary Ann
Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com.
Mary Ann Zehr is the writing program director for Eastern Mennonite University. She was a journalist for Education Week newspaper for fourteen years and a public high school English teacher for eight years.
Fran Martens Friesen is associate professor of English at Fresno Pacific University where she has been teaching writing and literature for nearly twenty years. She and her husband, Ken Froesen, have three adult children.