Carol Lem as Teacher

Writer Jimmy Santiago Baca and Carol Lem

From: Journey to the Interior, a Memoir For almost thirty years teaching has been a creative process, which I have been practicing since 1977 at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park, California. My students, Chicanos/Latinos mostly, play a central role in this ongoing dialogue on writing and identity. I know there are poets who caution against writing poems about teaching and the writing process, but to paraphrase Billy Collins, sometimes there’s nothing else to write about except death, which poets wake up for in the morning. Poems about teaching and writing come naturally since these are two other reasons I wake up for. Identity relates to both not only because of my own search but also, as the English instructor in the Puente Project since 1986, a transfer/writing program which targets under prepared Mexican Americans, I am continuously on the lookout for literary role models. Over the years, students have found literary kinship in Jimmy Santiago Baca, Helena Maria Viramontes, Gary Soto, Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldua, Luis Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez, and many others. And since Puente focuses on writing and identity, the issue of border mentality or biculturalism is always at the core of our discussion. They are especially curious about why a Chinese American is devoting her professional life to helping them transfer to a university. I explain to them that I have more in common with them than the Chinese students who are drawn to my colleague, a non-Chinese woman who was born and raised in China. On one occasion I arranged for a few of my Puente students to participate in the Chicano Poetry Festival at ELAC; besides reading their own poems they were to talk about how reading writers from their cultural background has helped them to find their own voices in writing. The coordinator of the festival invited me as well, the only non-Latino, since I was their teacher. After the reading, a friend and former student came up to me and said,

So Now You’re Chicana She says, seeing me read at a festival where Indio blood merges with the streets of East Los Angeles. My hair is black and my eyes are small almonds. My roots are gray strands. Those who call me Carolina or Mei Ling, I answer, because I drink where the spirit water flows. I am an empty tea cup waiting to fill. My father used to hide a gold coin under his mattress. I once asked why. He simply said, so no one could find it. My mother was raised by the tracks on Alameda, remembered lost baseballs between the wheels. Her father was the first herbalist in Chinatown. I never knew him. My leaves are gray. Today, I do Tai Chi and ask the I Ching what move to make next. Does this mean I’m Chinese or simply lost? Tonight I read my poems of journey, of making do. Though I do not speak Spanish or Chinese I read to those who know, too, the way back begins here. Tomorrow I will play my bamboo flute at Zenshuji Temple in Little Tokyo. So don’t ask who I am. My blood flows with the Tao. Though you cannot see it, it is always here.

The Tao is nowhere to be found, yet it nourishes and completes all things. - Tao Te Ching

It was not until I met another student similar to myself at his age that I realized how much my identity has been shaped by teaching and writing. He was a Chinese American in my creative writing class. One day he came into my office to talk about a personal narrative assignment he was having difficulty with. Whenever students say they don’t like to write about themselves, I know immediately that that’s what they need to do. Sometimes while playing teacher I forget, though, that students, as they sit there in the office with their resistance, questions, and self-doubts, are teaching me. This young Chinese American was reminding me of how I, too, hid inside another writer’s voice, of how I still struggle to hear what my authentic voice is.

Carol Lem with Writer Gary Soto

Creative Writing

He wants to know if his story is any good,

this eighteen year old; slightly Asian

like me, a lover of Russian novels.

Who’s the character? I ask.

Just somebody I made up, he says,

scratching his head and looking down

at the patched floor of East L.A. College.

He opens a backpack: Dostoyevsky, Turgenev,

Tolstoy topple over his third person stories.

Do you ever use the ‘I’?

Again, he fingers his black hair, as though

an answer might be found in the dark roots

where no one sees.

Don't like to write about myself

Is all he’ll give to the small pool of words

filling the next assignment.

I talk about my father who sat in the dark,

the little sounds of the house.

I see him at his desk, a stack of café receipts

and orders beside him, as the sweet and sour

smell of a life wafts through the rooms.

I see myself at twenty-two, reading Eliot,

searching for a safe place inside the words

where I could wander silent between beginnings

and endings and the man at the Chinese market

who asked, Don’t you speak your own language?

How could I say my parents don’t talk much.

I know only the language of books.

When life at home ended, years later

I would stumble my way back syllable by syllable

and begin those long talks into the night.

By then Mother and Father were gone, but now

they spoke with an ancestral voice.

Who was I among the burning incense sticks

and ashes, these borrowed words?

He wants to know if his story is any good.

Your last name is Gee?

But I don’t speak . . . , he snaps.

As afternoon light drapes the window,

students file past, each with a story tucked away

in a backpack of other people’s stories.

If you don’t tell yours, Eric, somebody else will.

Eddy Estrada, Rose Najar, Carol Lem, and Writer Gary Soto

What is his story? I can only guess. But over the years so many stories have crossed through my office, stories about loss and desire, anger and devotion. And the question always, Do you think I can become a writer? When I say You already are, the usual response is “I mean, do you think I’m any good?” Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet usually helps them to see their writing in a more self-reflective way, beginning a process of introspection, which most students find frightening. But once they make the breakthrough the emergence from the cocoon is almost spiritual, a peace with self comes over their face. Here is a passage from one of his letters:

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “ I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

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