Dear Teacher,

You were the most rigorous teacher I’ve ever had. I imagine this is something you’ve heard before. At the time, your intelligence seemed like an outpost, perhaps in a different century. Have you ever noticed that century and country share all the same letters but one?

Not being an English major or having native English-speaking parents, I was challenged by your words, your letters. I read and reread, underlined, circled, double underlined, starred, put question marks next to them. Your words seemed so much older than mine. So much bigger than mine. Could this be possible? Could the same words you use and I use be that different?

Once you told me that sometimes I was in danger of outsmarting my poems, that sometimes my poems were written to illustrate an understanding I already had.

Do you know that Susan Sontag said something similar? I think I am ready to learn to write. Think with words, not with ideas.

You might know that Gertrude Stein said the same thing:

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in thought or afterwards in a recasting.^xv

And Louise Glück talks about how writing is the act of learning to know:

At the heart of that work will be a question, a problem. And we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome. The poems themselves are like experiments, which the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind. Those poets who claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response prematurely advertise the deficiencies of the chosen particulars, as though without strenuous guidance the reader might not reach an intended conclusion.^xvi

Dear Teacher, Susan, Gertrude, and Louise, what you were saying to me in beautiful language was that I shaped and molded my poems into a meaning I already possessed. That my poems lacked discovery and wildness. The house was already built, and I took your hand and led you through the finished rooms where we marveled at the chandeliers which were preconceived thought.

I like the idea of the writing staying slightly ahead of thought. The way the moon always seems to be chasing a whale.

Later you told me to try and start each poem at a particular moment and pursue it as a path of discovery. I think you meant that I took all the power away from the poem because I thought words were thinking. Dear Teacher, I don’t think I was able to find that path of discovery in the time I worked with you, but I promise you that I tried. And I am still trying.

I now think words are light. How they illuminate the small beak of a lark isn’t up to the writer. It’s up to the lark and the light. A writer is just a guest, the birder.

In one of my papers, you marked my misplaced modifiers, ambiguous pronouns, inaccurate punctuation, and split infinitives. Dear Teacher, you were the first teacher to uncover my grammatical errors. Until then, I had no idea. How slanted my words may have seemed to you, each misplaced modifier, a hot poker in your eye.

After Father had a stroke, I packed up his books. Many of the books had markings on each page in red pen, some many more than others. Father had circled words he didn’t know and written their definitions in the margins in Chinese. His circles were jagged, as if zigzagging a circle might somehow will words into meaning.

Sometimes I wonder how much grammar my parents didn’t pass on to me. On the other hand, I can speak another language, Mandarin, decently. I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a family where everyone spoke the same language. The only language we had wholly in common was silence. Growing up, I held a tin can to my ear and the string crossed oceans.

I kept one of Father’s books, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I read it and paused at the words Father didn’t know. Pelted, circled in red, then a light red line to the margin and tiny Chinese characters I couldn’t read. Appendage, intricate, wrought-iron, tapestry … And then all the circled phrases.

The first time I had read The Kite Runner, I raced through it because the narrative moved so quickly and the writing seemed simple in diction, syntax, and vocabulary. This time I got to see how slowly Father read the book. I always thought he knew everything.

After a while, coming upon a circled word sparked a curiosity: What word didn’t Father know? Occasionally the words in the margin were in English. I became enamored with how the mind folds one language into another. Not what is lost, but what is gained.

Recently we took Father out to eat at a local noodle shop. With his right hand, he picked up his chopsticks, grabbed some noodles, and with his left hand, picked up a napkin. Father proceeded to transfer the noodles into the napkin. I wondered about this long after watching him. He never ate anything in the end.

As we left, the other mostly Chinese people in the restaurant stared at him as he shuffled to the door, hair too long, pants partially unbuttoned. I became aware that I had gotten used to his odd appearance and behavior.

As I pulled his sweatshirt forward, I thought, Father can no longer read. All that work circling English words in all those books over all those decades, gone. That was the last time we took him out to eat.

Dear Teacher, twenty years ago, I asked you if a writer needs to suffer. I wasn’t yet convinced that I had suffered enough compared to other writers that I knew. Mother hadn’t committed suicide. Father hadn’t abandoned me. Sister didn’t die in a car crash. Father didn’t beat me (unless I truly deserved it).

You told me that suffering can deepen and expand a poet’s work. And that sometimes suffering can put so much pressure on a person that they have no choice but to become a poet. You told me that suffering is one’s fate and that regardless of whether the fates have distributed suffering to me, if I see the world around me, care about and for other people, face the setbacks of the world, read with hunger, get older, encounter illness, and if life is not lost on me—and if, all the while, I learn how to write better and to pay attention better—maybe, just maybe, I would be able to write better poems.

Dear Teacher, I hope I have found ways to deepen and enlarge my writing. I have tried to look closely at the world around me. I have cared about and deeply for other people. I try and read with real hunger, have had setbacks, have aged, and have encountered illness and death. I hope life has not been lost on me. And I hope my grammar has improved in the process.