How do words make us see? Read The Washing Room

“I’ve always wondered what kind of lifestyle it takes for someone to grow fungus on their body.”

Over the past three weeks, I have had a number of people, many of whom are gifted writers, read this sentence. Every single one wanted to read more. Why? Before answering this question let me provide a bit of context. The sentence opens up the chapter of a book entitled The Washing Room. The book’s title is also the title of this particular chapter. You can read a version of the whole chapter on the website of Harvard’s literary magazine The Advocate.

The sentence invites us in to a world. The world, even one we interpret from a single sentence, is unlike the one we know. “Invites” might not be the right word; “shock” isn’t quite right either as that would be too strong, but maybe “shivers “will do. If it seems as though I am being too nitpicky about the right word, I am trying to be precise because the words in this book are often terribly precise and I want to try, given my own linguistic limitations, to attempt to get this across.

Many of the sentences in this book have a scientific precision, while others have a poetic attention to sound and image. Some have both. The same description of the sentences might well be applied to the writer, My Ngoc To.  “We are our stories” is the line I used to help summarize the end of my interview and comments with My Ngoc, posted a fewdays ago about her experience at Harvard. The line applies well to her memoir too:

I’ve always wondered what kind of lifestyle it takes for someone to grow fungus on their body. I used to think that these people were the exception, but I have touched too many feet with clumps of dirt scrunched up under the nails to continue believing that the majority of the population keeps itself clean. 

I especially loved thick, yellow toenails hiding years of bacteria between layers of keratin. Heels covered in calluses. Toe hair. Sores. A fine layer of dead, crusted skin running from the heels all the way up to the knees.    

This is the world of a nail technician: flakes of dead skin and cuticles, bits of nails and hair, dirt squished into balls nudged into the corners of spa chairs. Anything that could get filthy got filthy, and three years of subjugation to this law taught me to wash my hands.  

If My Ngoc’s interview shared some surprising details about her less than perfect experience at Harvard, The Washing Room lets us get dirty. Her words fascinate. For most who have ever entered a nail salon, the sound of Vietnamese, the smell of nail polish, and feel of hands or clippers or emery boards are what stays with us. My Ngoc reverses the perspective and in such ways that we will never again feel the same way. That is what great writing does. It changes perspectives.

John Casey, national book award winner, in his insightful just released book, Beyond the First Draft: The Art of Fiction, shares some of his thoughts about the rules of writing with by enlisting the help of other writers (as I am doing too): 

Conrad’s’ “Above all, I want to make you see” is a wonderful motto. Fiction often fails because it isn’t visible enough. I see my own early bad writing repeated year after year by otherwise gifted young writers because they want to get right to the metaphysics. But when they or I get to what things look like— not just picturesque landscapes but people’s expressions, light on water, the way a worker works— things perk up.

My Ngoc’s prose makes us see and things do indeed “perk up.” By perk up, I mean that our neurons start firing at a higher level as we absorb the gritty details. I am not sure we perk up in the sense of feeling happy except from an aesthetic sense.

Through her memoir, My Ngoc does not make the mistake that many young writers do-she rarely goes in for metaphysics. Some of the most compelling passages, such as the ones here, have either a touch of irony or clinical detachment. Her study of biology permits her to describe the detailed formation of a human heart in ways that make the miracle of the heart at birth comes across as more than a metaphor for how we feel. We see the heart and we see the feet and we see the many places My Ngoc must travel to. By travel I don’t mean exotic places .(Although one of my few critiques of the book as it currently stands is that it does not take us on her journey to South America, something she mentions but does not describe. It’s always a good sign when a reader wants a book longer—see Samuel Johnson’s phrase about Paradise Lost).

It also seems fitting that Casey invokes Conrad’s rule, since Conrad’s first language was not English and My Ngoc was a young immigrant to the US growing up in a household in which Vietnamese was the common tongue. It does happen, rarely (think of Nabokov too), that writers come into their own in a second language. For these chosen few they pay attention to words in ways those of us who have been immersed in our native tongue sometimes overlook.

Thus far I have not tried to describe the plot, or narrative arc of The Washing Room. In part this is due to my belief that what makes great writing great is not the plot (the Russian Formalist say there are only 9 of them anyway) but the exposition, the pace and the details that we see (and hear and touch and smell and taste). We live within the sentences that sing and many of the sentences in this book do.

The plot follows what the Germans called a bildungsroman, a novel of maturation. My Ngoc begins her memoir in childhood and follows her life through her time in Georgia, living, at first, hand to mouth, and then slowly rising into some economic security. But the nail salon her parents run requires My Ngoc and her sisters to work many hours and to take on all the most challenging clients who walk in through the door. My Ngoc must do the work that other employees not a part of the family would find, as we certainly would, overwhelming. Rather than rebel, My Ngoc does her job well, but uses the Washing Room as her sanctuary.  The relationships among family members receive sharp focus throughout the book. The characters, as it were, are not flat but rounded. They have their strengths and weaknesses, but my vague description should simply be a road sign to find out more about my Ngoc and her family. Those who read for the plot will see that her life did not come from privilege but it did prepare her for success, and then it didn’t, and then it did again.

Once she leaves for Harvard, all seems well for a while, until it isn’t. The books chapters on her depression, hospitalization and recovery are, at times, hard to read. She takes great care to write sympathetically about those she is with in the mental hospitals, the young men and women who seem lost, far more perhaps than she. My Ngoc does not attempt to analyze herself and her depression with too many terms and jargon-ride labels. Instead she describes the people, the rooms, and the movement across time.

By the end of the memoir, both the physical and mental journeys that My Ngoc undergoes returns her to what appears to be a safe harbor. In addition she includes her artwork that “speaks” to us too.  My Ngoc may be headed in the footsteps of a faculty member at Harvard she has interviewed. Has written and taught about her own battles with depression and how to come out of it in ways that will help others and herself too.

“There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery.” Henry James

 James Wood uses this quote as the epigraph to his wonderful book How Fiction Works. Cookery in writing means the nouns and the verbs, the sounds and rhythms. While there may be a few recipes that work for writing, the cookery is what makes it something that is a feast for the senses, somethng that sticks to the ribs and to the synapses.

If it seems odd that I am using quotes about fiction to write about The Washing Room, I think the lines between fiction and what is now called creative non-fiction have blurred over the past generation. Creative non-fiction is the fastest growing part of creative writing programs and it is also something sees far more often on social media too. The techniques of making us see and using good cookery apply just as well to creative non-fiction too. My Ngoc’s book is a testament to this. The cliché about truth being stranger than fiction has some merit but I do know that non-fiction can be more evocative than lots of fiction. Woods, in his own voice this time, describes the aims of his book this way: “If the book has a larger argument it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these possibilities”. Once again I would say this sentence applies well to The Washing Room. The artifice does not consist of made up details (James Frey did a good job of that), but in the details that let us see in an accurate way the life she has led unfold. For anyone looking to read words that will inspire with what I would call, (stealing Yeats here), terrible beauty, The Washing Room will.

My Ngoc selling signing and selling her book in Boston