United States

(下面有中文)

BEIJING Last month while home for  Christmas I attended a ninetieth birthday party for my Grandma with family and friends. Like others returning from China I went through that process of trying to explain the unexplainable fascination with China. Yet more than once I sensed a certain fumbling for questions from my interlocutors, it was them for a change struggling to small talk, not me.

The FX TV series American Horror Story presents an intriguing portrait of America in the new millennium through the distorting lens of the Gothic mode. Essentially a haunted house story, the series (now 2/3 into its first season) refuses to play by the rules or adhere to the mythology of the sub-genre.

I have always found myself between two worlds, not always belonging in either, but always fortunate to have both.

I grew up in Mexico City with an American mother and a Mexican father.  Amongst my friends at home, I was always the gringa which, depending on the day, seemed mildly offensive.

BEIJING - Last Saturday I spent a moment staring at a picture of a naked man pulling a cart of coal in an underground mine. Throughout the 3 Shadows Gallery, designed by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, you could see the juxtaposition of coal + ice (煤＋冰), a show produced by Asia Society’s Orville Schell.

"When the Towers Fell,"* by Galway Kinnell.

This week has left me in a pensive mood. With the constant barrage of remembrance specials and slideshows in the media, even those of us living outside the country are very aware that the tenth anniverary of September 11, 2001 is this weekend. As one who was thankfully not directly affected by this tragedy, such an anniversary does not stand as a time for me to remember lost loved ones. Rather I find myself desiring to step back and take a long look at what our country was before September 11, 2001, and what it has become today. Politically, how have we changed, and what caused this change?

Not far from where I grew up there's a tiny park, at its centerpiece is a misshapen lump of corroding metal.  For years I could never decide whether the lump was a modern art installation or just a large piece of refuse that the town simply refused to collect.  Years later I learned that it in fact was a piece of the USS Maine, a United States battleship which blew up in the harbor of Havana, Cuba in 1896.  The destruction of a US Navy warship in a foreign port was as shocking to the citizens of end-of-the-century America as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would be just over one hundred years later; the Maine would go on to serve as the causus belli<

In a 2010 roundtable discussion here at the Mantle, I wrote about the responsibilities of a writer in a time or place of conflict. While my opinions on the subject continue to inform my writing and the creative decisions I make, two encounters with nonfiction writing classes during the 2011 Writers in Motion study tour of America occasion a coda of sorts.