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Subversions into the Green Hills of Songpan
As a young boy, I only had two ambitions. The first was of being a cowboy in the Wild West, riding lonely mountain trails, eating peyote, consulting Navajo shamans, and pilfering forgotten ghost towns. The other was to go to China like Marco Polo exploring its wilds and cities along the Silk Road in search of the real General Tso, the great Qing Dynasty soldier-statesman made famous by Chinese takeout menus the world over. But never in my wildest, childish hallucinations could I have imagined that I would discover an amalgam of these in reality, as if a chapter in the story of my life became a chimerical tale of…
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Will reading the book Wired for Story really make you a better storyteller?
In my 36th year as a would-be and penniless writer, I found myself exiled to a dark rough and tumble city in the Far West, guns blazing as a steely-eyed wordslinger for hire. But then one day I stumbled upon Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story. The book’s first pages caught my attention. But alas, the price wasn’t right for a poor, humble teacher on a Chinese salary. I had bills to pay, a mistress to please, and habits to feed. Plus there was the local research base full of giant pandas; the damn things generated reams of Chinglish prose I would have to revise for a pittance.  Already my inbox…
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It’s All About Image
I don’t remember ever planning on just being, much less being in Chengdu or even being a writer. Yet here I am. As an American in China I have hard time reconciling the fact that I had to come all the way to China in order to find freedom and success in the way H.D. Thoreau wrote about in Walden: I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined [emphasis mine], he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an…