The Writing Dream
by Kao Kalia Yang
When I was a little girl, I drew connected circles in a lined notebook and wrote down the stories of my family. My grandmother’s sister who was killed by a witch back in Laos; my grandmother’s beautiful baby girl who died beneath a shaded tree in the mountain gardens my grandmother tended with my grandfather; the little girl whose spirit was stolen and whose body was replaced by a purple pig; the return of my grandmother’s dead mother, her large hand coming straight through their thatched roof hut, feeling the air for her hungry children. All these stories lived inside me. In silence, they traveled line after careful line onto the page.
When I grew older and learned how to write, I made up stories that had no end in sight. They were all about a slightly chubby girl of normal looks and intelligence who secretly carried beauty in her heart. When rainbows shaped under the shine of the sun, she saw dragons coming out to drink, their beautiful colors an invitation to worlds of magic where sky and ocean mixed in the blue of clouds. Brown bushes full of trash, McDonald cups, and ketchup-stained napkins became garbage fruits on garbage bushes. Poverty became a reminder of family and friends: who do you want to give to, who should you give to, what does a person give when there’s only love, more and more and more kindness? Before I knew what type of writer I wanted to be in the world, I dreamt of becoming a good person. It didn’t matter that the stories saw no end; it was all about the beginnings then.
When I grew up and made the decision to pursue writing seriously, I read George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, and Joan Didion, and I decided that I wanted to be a writer of the things that mattered. I learned that when a writer writes of something, she learns of it, feels it so well that her mind becomes the sounding board for the things in her heart. I wanted to learn about the important things in the world: how people become who they are, the places that make them, the people who shape them, and the destinations they struggle toward. What matters in the life of one person matters over the rest of humanity. Drawing out these connections was what I wanted to give myself to — just as the great writers before me had done.
When I had opportunity to write and be read by individuals that I respected, I learned that there were many ways to write of the things that mattered. The ways to become a serious writer were as diverse as the writers and their voices. I could not walk behind established paths and did not want to. I had to discover my own, burn the grass as my ancestors had done, dig deep into roots and pull with all my strength, wrap my arms around boulders and lift heavier than my weight, to clear the ground for the seeds I yearned to plant. My thoughts to the harvest, I toiled in the dirt of a writer’s journey. I toil in it still.
There are many days when I get up and remember the little girl I was, the stories that gnawed for voice inside of me. I remember the child with pages full of beginnings, discovering beauties and recording them, unsure how to proceed. I remember the young woman deciding on the path of writing, and the people whose words and works had pull over her heart and her mind. I feel the reality of being a young person in the world struggling to find support to do the things she has always dreamt of on the page. I realize how the page is the canvas of my life. I know that with words, I make meaning of my days and bring meaning to those around me.
And I dream the writing dream. I dream that one day soon my book will be published, and it will show the world one more way into words. I dream that this book will have the power to give value to all the dreams I’ve collected along the way, not just my own, but those that were planted inside of me by my grandmother, my people, and the hard lives we’ve had all along history’s forsaken trails. I dream the writing dream: to live in language forever, to unravel the human story and grant it the power to change human life.
Kalia received her Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and she has had work published in Water~Stone Review, Satya Magazine, and Paj Ntaub Voice. Her essay “To the Men in My Family Who Love Chickens” won the 2005 Lantern Books Essay Contest.
Currently Kalia is a managing partner of Words Wanted LLP, a writing agency located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She’s also working on a novel, The Latehomecomer, which chronicles the lives and stories of Hmong refugees.
