Yesterday, a novelist told me that non-fiction was dishonest. He said that his fiction is truer than non-fiction, because truth is imagined anyway, and that at least fiction writers own up to their artifice.

I told him about the prosecutor in Roman Polanski's case. Years after Polanski had led the country, the prosecutor gave a filmmaker a long interview, and in it he admitted that the DA had forged evidence in the case against Polanski. The filmmaker took the interview and put it in her movie, for anybody to see. But now that Polanski is in custody and might face trial again, the prosecutor recanted all the statements he made in the movie. He said he just made it all up!

This is a case where truth turned out to be fiction, maybe. Documentary films exist in a gray area somewhere between truth and fiction anyway. I guess any story that really hooks you in has got to be carefully constructed, even if it's made up of facts.

Professionals who tell true stories are like translators. Have you ever read two different translations of the same book? A book that can be clunky and dense in one version can be fluid and clean in the other. Translators have this power. So do journalists, or documentarians, or biographers.

Or anybody, for that matter, in the case of their own lives. Every conscious moment, I'm telling myself the story of how I've gotten to the present moment. It's how I remember anything. And depending on how I interpret my own history, that's who I am.

So you could just as easily say that the very idea of fiction is misleading, because it assumes the existence of its opposite - fact. But facts themselves are made up of presumptions, best-guesses, and our obscured views. So I don't mind if non-fiction tells only one truth, because one is better than none.

So...

Today I walked down 72nd St. for a few minutes. I remembered that in high school I visited a special st. On the upper west side called Pomander Walk. Its a street surrounded by big brick apartment buildings. In the middle of it all, there's a metal gate that looks like it let's you into an alleyway. But you open it and walk into a tiny village street, lined with townhouses on both sides. I have a recollection that the roofs were bright red and green but that might be wishful thinking. Every house was different, and some had gardens in front, some had rock gardens.

Manhattan is full of strange places like that, places that are both public and private, if you just know who to ask. I think that's where I'd like to live, in a house where Im hidden and also just a door knock away.

One of my favorite things is to get letters from my friends. I like hearing about how they feel and think about what their life is lately. Something about learning about the interior life of the people I care about makes me feel good. I think that no matter what, writing a letter is a hopeful act. It means that we think that we can make a connection, even when the news we have to share isn't all that good. Maybe it's because there's no news that's all bad. Even if we're talking about something very sad, like how much we miss someone who's gone, there's happiness mixed into it, because we're remembering something nice, and telling someone about it brings it back. I think that's something really confusing about being an adult - that it's the things that bring us joy that can also end up hurting us. So it's a relief to tell someone about it, and have them confirm that indeed, it doesn't make sense. That makes its own kind of sense.

M said something that I want to remember. He's in LA, and he was feeding a strange cat while he was on the phone with me.


He said, "It’s like you forgot that the most important thing is to please yourself.”

i remembered

I write because there are beautiful stories out there. The stories out there are the same as the stories we have inside. These stories are beautiful, but they're also scary and sad, and we don't like to think about them sometimes. But if we hear the story coming from the outside, then it can be easier to listen to the story inside.

I looked up from writing a beat story today and I thought, this is boring. I had a paranoid thought.

"Only my third assignment for journalism school, and I'm already phoning it in."

Then, I had a truer and sadder thought.

"I've forgotten why I write."

I emailed the story, which probably isn't too bad, at 5 p.m. Still, since then I've been speculating about how this happened. How did I forget why I write and how can I remember my motives again?

It's been going something like this:

"So what do I like? What do I believe in?

I believe in human connections. I believe that when you can look at other people with empathy, you can see yourself, and feel at peace. I believe that people are generally good."

I had to stop here. I don't know if I'm good, or even generally good. Actually, I feel quite bad.

It's impossible to believe in human connections when I feel that I personally am not good. If I don't believe in human connections, well then, I'm lost.

Sigh. This must be resolved.

Let's talk about something else.

This morning, on my walk to the train I saw a nice photograph stapled to a parking meter. It said "Henry Thies for City Council" about and below a picture of a white man, looking kind and professional, with his arms crossed.

Isn't Thies a French name?

Then, I heart shouting ahead, and I thought it was a protester or a madwoman. I turned the corner and it turned out to be a woman scolding her little boy. He looked at her dumbfounded as she yelled, "...you do not fold it like that! That is FILTHY!"

I thought that little boy must think that's normal speaking volume, and that made me smile.

Then, as I was taking the train uptown, I remembered that a Korean-American girl I barely know once said that I wasn't really Korean, I was basically white. I was pissed off about that for at least five minutes.

koreans and golf

It's a stereotype that Korean people love golf, but my parents never played when I was growing up. In the early nineties, my father went on a golfing tournament with his alumni association, and he came in last place and was given a bowling ball as a prize. He brought home a trophy that said, "Most Honest Golfer," and we left it the anteroom where we put on our shoes.

My dad said, "Golf is boring." He bought himself a leftie set of clubs for when my grandfather came to visit, around the same time as the alumni tournament. This was when I was in high school, living in the basement and being morose. My father used the clubs maybe once, and from then on they lived propped in the corner of the stairwell, facing the laundry room.

My grandfather was a smoker, a talker, and a golfer. There are thousands of photographs of him holding clubs, in the final moments of a full swing, a club parallel to the green behind his back. He won a big tournament in 1980, and I was photographed sitting inside the silver trophy, an alien in a giant soft boiled egg cup.

It's most likely that when my father said golf was boring, he really meant it was boring for someone like him who had no time to practice. In the past few years, now that my has started to be more comfortable, and less stressed, he's started to pick up the game. Now he goes twice a week to practice, during the week.

"He's excellent," says my grandmother. She's a golfer too, and she's visiting from Seoul for the first time since my grandfather died this February. My grandmother's hair is white because she stopped dying it, but her attitude is the same. She said, "I plan on living for at least another twenty years."

Now she calls my father "distinguished," even though thirty-five years ago, she and my grandfather were against the marriage, because he was broke. Last week, they both ate lobsters together, flanking my mom. All water under the bridge.

tonight i met the first asian american mayor of cranston, rhode island. he's the first asian american mayor in rhode island, and he was just elected this past november, by a landslide. he ran and lost in 2006, by 69 votes. he ran on a platform of fiscal restraint in 2009 and won 70-30, against an Irish Catholic incumbent in a city that's eighty percent Irish Catholic. The mayor, whose name i never got, is Chinese and Protestant. His family owned a Chinese restaurant in Providence for many years. His deputy for constituent affairs is a broad and stout latino who likes steak and avoids the doctor, and who got his start in politics working for The Most Notorious Mayor in America, a rhode island mayor in the 90s who was so corrupt that a documentary by that name was made about him. But the deputy has emerged unscathed, it seems.

you can tell who are politicians in a room, because they have good posture, and they touch each other, almost hug, when introducing people.

a room full of journalists is pretty dull indeed. but that's ok, i'm happy to get more dull in my life.