I wrote the first letter when I was 14, and I stole the idea from a novel. I was alone in my bedroom reading “Emily of New Moon,” a series by L. M. Montgomery, who also wrote the more famous series “Anne of Green Gables.” There are three Emily books, and although I loved Anne, I related more to Emily. Anne is a spunky extrovert, whereas Emily is more withdrawn, more serious. I was a serious, bookish child. I could, in fact, trace my childhood via the female literary characters I loved: Trixie Belden to Betsy and Tacy, Emily of New Moon to Morgaine in “The Mists of Avalon,” all the women in Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook.”
I was 14, and Emily’s bone-deep loneliness resonated with me. When I read the section in the second novel where Emily writes a letter to her future self, I put down the book and did the same thing. It was an impulse; the idea of the letter delighted me. It was a grand gesture, yet of the kind an introverted kid could make alone, with no one noticing. I described the current state of my life and listed my hopes and dreams for myself 10 years later. When I finished writing, I sealed the letter, and from that moment forward, fought the desire to break the seal. I can still remember how hard it was to keep from opening the envelope at the age of 16, and 18 and 20. Talk about delayed gratification! A decade — during that stage of life — was an eternity. I wonder, now, what I was hoping to find in those pages. A truth about myself that, if learned, would allow me to be happy? An answer to the question of who I was, and whether I mattered?
Minimalism, to me, is more about attention than anything else. It advocates seeing the world not as a series of products to consume, but sensory experiences to have on your own terms. A stand-mixer can be as beautiful as the Mona Lisa. Historically, minimalism tells us to focus on what doesn’t at first seem pleasant or beautiful and turn it into art instead of creating a worldview based only on what we already like.
First, eat the pho with your eyes, Tony Chheum told me, when I interviewed him in 2014. Your big, round bowl should be volcanically hot, sending off curls of steam. Next to it, a pile of crisp mung bean sprouts, fresh basil leaves, cilantro sprigs, jalapeño slices, and a wedge of lime awaits. Next to that, if you want, a small platter of thinly cut, extra rare beef.
I was speaking with him in his restaurant, Phonatik, on Dimond. He was sitting across from me at a table in the VIP room, where the graffiti-style artwork on the walls matches his tattoos. I was there to talk about the Vietnamese noodle shops that had been colonizing Anchorage’s strip malls. Drive down any major artery in Anchorage, and a pho shop will eventually appear, tucked in next to a cell phone store or a manicure salon or a dry cleaner.
My friends and I all seemed to be taking stock — considering having kids or feeling exhausted by new parenthood, searching for meaning in careers or seeking balance after working nonstop in our 20s — and speculating all the while thanks to social media if others were enjoying happier relationships, better jobs, and fitter bodies.
This is expected, of course. You make a plan for your life, and then life gets in the way. What is new is that we’re less happy than our 30-something predecessors, possibly because this taking-stock moment is happening during a decade when adulthood milestones — and lack of milestones — are converging in a unique-to-this-cohort way.
In 2019, just twenty-five years after Crocodile’s publication, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, merging fantasy with reality. Qiu did not live to see that day, but her work remains an indelible tribute to the struggle and tragedy that accompanied the fight for equal rights. It shows us exactly why it is a great thing for a nation to decouple love from anguish. In the novel, Lazi’s intention is to “leave behind some sort of record before… memories evaporate” and one might imagine Qiu’s aim to be similar. As a novel that risks much to say much, Crocodile succeeds on these terms as both testament and novel.
“No metaphors yet / For my father-in-law,” he writes in “Poem Not an Elegy in a Season of Elegies.” “He still in my head belongs to being.”
The line is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, who is also recollected in these pages: “No ideas but in things.” What Hass, like Williams, is evoking is a way of being — emotional, yes, but also physical, in which abstraction only distracts us from the substance of the world.
That said, revising an heirloom means messing with a lot of people’s memories — including mine: When I opened the 1,080-page hardcover, I found my date bread now calls for walnuts instead of pecans, water instead of coffee, an extra half-cup of dates but no raisins, and oil instead of butter.
I baked one loaf of my old recipe for their visit, and one new one. When I asked why they’d changed my Date Spice Bread to a nutmeg-free Date Nut Bread, the surprise was on me: They had only retested a recipe that had already been updated in editions later than mine.