Q&A with writer Suellen Zima

Suellen Zima

Suellen Zima is a writer and blogger in Southern California. She is the author of Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, and the forthcoming Out of Step: A Diary to My Dead Son.

Q: Why did you decide to write a diary to your late son, and how would you describe the relationship between you?

A: My son died in 2003.  As Mother's Day approached in 2011, I had a strong feeling that he was just too dead.  I needed to try to do something to make him come more alive to me.  I had half-heartedly, unsuccessfully tried a few times to write something about him, but that had gone nowhere. 

So, I thought, "Why not write a diary to him and see what happens?"  I had no plot, didn't know if anything would come of it, or where it might lead, if anywhere.  There were a lot of pieces to our mother-son relationship that were unsaid and unfinished.  We both had felt abandoned by the other after [my] divorce.  Although I always knew something about him from his dad, there had been long gaps where he had refused any contact with me. 

When being HIV-positive turned into AIDS, he knew his time was limited.  It was then he started calling me again, and visited me once.  He died two years later, a month before his 35th birthday. Interracial adoption in the 1970s, divorce when he was 12, guilt and abandonment, homosexuality, HIV-AIDS, dying and grieving were all parts of our complicated mother-son relationship.

Q: How did writing the diary affect you?

A: I wrote in the diary frequently until Mother's Day of 2012. Sometimes I talked to him as I would if he were alive, telling him about up-to-date news I thought would interest him. I discussed interesting aspects of books I was reading. I told him about my life after the divorce that he hadn't wanted to hear about. I attempted to understand him better, both as the child he had been, and as the adult I barely knew. And I wanted him to know me as the person I was now. 

Slowly, subtly, I felt a shift in my emotions. I purposely became more optimistic. My anger and guilt became muted as I endeavored to talk to my son. I enjoyed our communication and felt more connected to him than I had in years. He popped into my mind often, reminding me of things I wanted to tell him in the diary.

Q: Your previous book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, followed your travels around the world, particularly to China. What about China kept drawing you back?

A: I first went to China in 1988 out of sheer curiosity. I knew nothing about China.  I didn't know any Chinese people. And no one was talking much about China at that time. My first fascination with China was, I suppose, the third-world time machine effect. I knew I wanted to get to know the people, and I chose teaching as my tool to learn the culture from the inside. 

At that time, the students were an intriguing mixture of both innocence and depth, with incredible motivation for learning English. They not only respected their teachers, but treated them as people they wanted to know better. They took me places and invited me to visit their families. Because I nurtured the relationships and visited often over the years, my students became my friends. 

We are still in contact. Now I am a senior, and they are middle-aged.  Six of them asked me to be the foreign grandmother to their children, and this has been a continuing joy in my life.

Q: Do you see links between your two books, and if so, how are the themes you explore in both books connected?

A: Out of Step:  A Diary To My Dead Son is really a prequel and a sequel to Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird. Because my son chose not to travel with me after the divorce, our communication in a time before the ease of computers, e-mail, and long distance phone calls was limited. Since he felt I had abandoned him by choosing my life abroad, he didn't want much contact. 

So, the years covered in Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird did not include him. His rejection, plus my guilt for choosing to divorce, made it too painful for me to write about him. However, in the diary, I filled in the gaps of those years without much contact, continued the relationship after he re-connected to me two years before he died, and covered the years since his death in 2003. 

The two books offer very different perspectives on the roads I have traveled in my life. 

Q: Are you planning to write another book?

A: While the seed of writing a book about the times and cultures I explored through my travels was in my mind for a while, the idea to try writing a diary arose unexpectedly from the nagging thought that my son was too dead. 

When I had tried writing about him, I realized I didn't really know enough about him after the age of 12 to write about him. Besides, I craved a form of writing that would re-start some form of communication. The diary emerged spontaneously and I continued to write in it frequently over the next year.

After I ended the diary as a book, I missed the communication with my son.  So, I have continued to write him e-mails. I don't know at this point whether those e-mails will one day become a book. I surprised myself by publishing one book.  There is also a Chinese translation of my first book on an online website in China. And now Out of Step:  A Diary To My Dead Son will be available to all.  Because I am sure I won't stop writing, I know that I will continue my blog (www.zimatravels.com/wordpress). It's quite possible another book will emerge eventually.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Visit http://www.zimatravels.com and Follow the Senior Hummingbird as she wanders, wonders, and writes.

Paying to Breathe in China

 
From my earliest memories in China and Taiwan over 20 years ago, I remember the highly visible air pollution swirling around me.  In Nanjing, huge piles of coal and black smoke spewing out of tall towers were easy to see.  In Taiwan, black ash rained down on my balcony and the smell of the burning from the dump in back of the school where I taught sometimes was bad enough to cancel classes.  After a visit to a friend in Beijing, I clocked a full ten minutes of the plane lifting up until we made it into clear, blue skies.  People sometimes wore masks, but most didn't.  It was so scary in Taiwan that I made a promise to my body to leave after my one-year teaching contract.


As the skies darkened, the trajectory of modernization that China was on in the 1990s became crystal clear -- everyone wanted his or her own car to drive.  Gridlock was assured as each of my friends who never thought they'd own a car actually became a car owner.


Third-world countries have the advantage of seeing the mistakes of developed countries, but like willful teenagers who feel invulnerable, they move full steam ahead on the same collision courses with pollution and environmental degradation.   It  was no surprise to me that breathing has become a newsworthy topic in Beijing of late.  Headliners made up words like "airpocalypse" and "airmageddon" to describe the severe extent of the problem this January and February.  Generally, cancer in younger people has risen in China.  How much is induced by air pollution?

Although there are few good ideas on how to deal with the terrible air, there are scientific measurements to tell them just how unhealthy breathing is in Beijing.  Particulate matter can and is quantified.  If anything above 300 is "hazardous," and the index stops at 500, what do the readings of over 1,000 micrograms say about what's entering the tender lungs of Beijing residents?  And those outside Beijing can't breathe so easily either.


Supply and demand makes entrepreneurship go round -- good fresh air is no longer plentiful or free.  Enter the businessmen who see profit in selling sophisticated face masks for the equivalent of $50.  Zhao Danqing's factory has sold over 1 million so far.   A joint venture of a Shenzhen company and a California company teamed up to build a huge dome above parts of the Beijing International School.  Under the dome, the students play tennis, soccer, badminton, and basketball protected from the lethal air outside the dome.  Lowering the particulate measurement from 650 micrograms outside the dome to 25 inside the dome makes other schools, government sports facilities, and even wealthy families want domes too.  In fact, you can buy a 54,000 square foot dome for a reasonable $1 million.  With a wealthier general population, home air filters are selling well.  $1600 will buy a machine capable of filtering a bedroom.


A creative entrepreneur who became rich from re-cycling, Chen Guangbiao, is selling cans of "fresh air" gathered from far outside Beijing for 80 cents apiece with the proceeds going to charities.   He even handed out cans for free on a street in Beijing to make his point that China needs to think of its children and grandchildren instead of GDP growth.
But, as they gasp to breathe in the poisonous air, is anyone listening?    


Comments?? E-mail Suellen at ZimaTravels.com

Required for Travel

Whether you are a tourist, a long-term traveler, or engaging in the more recent titles of vagabonding or indie travel, you will need to carry these things along with you.  They don't weigh much, are easily packed, are not expensive, and won't rot, mildew, or freeze.  In spite of all their benefits, however, they are all too often forgotten, neglected, or misplaced.

A travel website out of Australia, Bootsnall.com, has put together the Indie Travel Manifesto.  Indie has become the modern term for anything independent.  Manifesto in my dictionary is defined as "a public declaration of motives and intentions by a government or by a person or group regarded as having some public importance."  Manifesto is a strong word, but I guess it fits.  My more simple advice -- "Don't leave home without them." 

I will mention a few of them in light of having spent about 18 nomadic years wandering the world, sometimes settling in for anywhere from one year to five years.   Although in the later years I sometimes stumbled upon internet cafes, almost all my travel was just me and my Lonely Planet guidebooks.  "Be humble, good-humored, courteous and patient" speaks for itself.   It's just common sense.  Two more, "Find  pleasure in simple moments and details," and "Listen" requires being able to observe details and and truly listen.  These are harder tasks than they sound, especially with over-confident, verbose Americans.

"Adapt as you go" rightly presupposes that everything won't work out as you plan.  So, pack enough flexibility to change plans for any number of "unknowns" and the wisdom to know when and how to do so.  "Slow down; enjoy the experience"  tells you that rushing through countries and experiences ends up a messy blur.  "Make meaningful connections" opens up the opportunity to gain more from your travels than you ever expected.  Solo travel, albeit with occasional, temporary hook-ups with other travelers, gives you much more opportunity to interact with locals.

"Seek to understand other cultures," is perhaps the best advice for indie travelers.  That was the driving force that kept me endlessly challenged and happily on the move for so many years.   You can read about other cultures, but the experience of living in these other cultures adds many dimensions to your understanding of the world we live in.  Go with questions and open eyes to see "the nuances of the world."

But don't forget to smile.  I remember looking out the window on a stopped train in rural China in 1988.  A Chinese peasant was walking near the train and stared hard at me.  I'm sure I was the first foreigner he had ever seen in person.  He looked surprised, fearful, and quite like one would look at an alien from another planet.  I broke into a wide smile.  I could read his mind and see his relief.  "She's a human being too," he must have thought because he shyly smiled back.

Travel can be an adventurous time machine either forward or backward.   So, don't gripe and whine about what's not the same as at home.  Explore and appreciate what is around you instead of what you left behind.  I can't say what travel with technology is like since "live streaming, filming, blogging, and vlogging" aren't my style.  But Mark Twain's words are as true today as when he wrote them - "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it solely on these accounts."

Chances are high that you won't come back the same.
Suellen Zima
Visit http://www.zimatravels.com and Follow the Senior Hummingbird as she wanders, wonders, and writes.