When I first arrived in Canada at the age of eight, I had to take an ESL class at school. Because there were so few students in the class, the ESL instructor acted essentially as a private tutor to each of us in turn. Ironically, because I was given so many more reading and writing assignments than my Canadian-born classmates, my facility with English soon overtook theirs. Within a year, my writing was so good that my teacher told my grandparents at the parent-teacher interview that I should be published. When I explained this to my grandmother, who didn’t speak English herself, she was very pleased; but she never acted on it, nor would my grandparents have known how. But imagine — a year ago I was obliged to take an ESL class, and now I had become so skilled that my teacher thought I should be a professional author! It was an enormous boost to my confidence and a huge incentive to keep on writing.
I think there were two factors that made my writings so popular with my teachers and classmates. The first was that I had developed a fantasy universe that I could use over and over again. I did this primarily out of laziness. Now, I don’t know what the other kids wrote about week after week when they were tasked with yet another writing assignment, but I imagined that the teachers must have been bored to death after reading twenty or thirty more-or-less identical accounts of a typical day in the life of a child. I honestly don’t know how the other children managed to come up with fresh material every week. What I did instead was to invent an entire world populated by sentient cats, with a timeline that spanned from pre-history into what we would think of as the future. That way, I could write everything from murder mysteries to fantasy adventures to science fiction, and I’d always have a setting and characters at the ready. I even drew a superhero comic book based on the futuristic setting. I discovered that people liked continuity in their stories, and so I learned the art of the foreshadow and the cliffhanger on my own before I was formally introduced to them in high school. But these techniques should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched an episodic television series: introduce an element of suspense before each commercial break, resolve the situation (or not!) when the show resumes, and throw in a major crisis towards the end which remains unresolved — until next time.
(Speaking of foreshadowing, the protagonists of many of my stories were black cats. At the time I wasn’t sophisticated enough to think of my stories as “racial allegories”. I merely gave my heroes black hair because I had black hair, and because of the association of black cats with mystical powers and hence their status as feared outsiders. In retrospect, that’s exactly how Asians are often viewed in North American culture. In any case, I am currently living with three black cats in real life.)
The second factor was that I was heavily influenced by Hong Kong cinema and, to a lesser extent, Japanese children’s television, which was also very popular in Hong Kong. Nowadays this is nothing special, because North American audiences have since been exposed to shows such as the Power Rangers (adapted from the Japanese Super Sentai series) and wuxia movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and many mainstream Hollywood action movies have been employing fight choreographers from Hong Kong (or at the very least, making use of techniques copied from them) since The Matrix. But my teachers and classmates thought that the action sequences in my stories were the absolute pinnacle of extraordinary and simply could not get enough of them.
I think it’s very interesting how something that is completely commonplace in one cultural context can become so exceptional in another. When the other kids, who had grown up with European mythology, wrote fantasy stories, they were always about knights and monsters (and maybe a few elves and dwarves — and unicorns from the girls) and quests with material objectives: kill the dragon, save the princess, find the treasure, win the war, and so on. Now, knights are extraordinary men, to be sure, and they often wielded magic weapons and wore enchanted armours, but their powers are usually not innate to them. In my stories, on the other hand, the heroes were peasants or slaves or came from other ordinary backgrounds, but they eventually learned — after very difficult trials — to perform extraordinary feats such as leap over mountains and cleave buildings in half with a single stroke of their sword. And their motivations were usually very personal: to avenge their or their family’s honour, to topple a tyrant or an official who had wronged them, to become the best martial artist in the world. To anyone who has ever watched a Chinese martial arts movie or read a wuxia novel, I think my stories would have appeared quite typical for the genre (well, except for the fact that they took place in a world of sentient cats — rather than of sentient apes). I don’t know if anyone has tried this, but I think that there is a market for a series of English-language wuxia novels — and I don’t mean translations of novels from Chinese, but original fantasy novels written in English with “wuxia elements”.
People often talk about how cultures interact — meld, or clash, or whatever — in the abstract, but my experiences as a young writer taught me some very valuable lessons in the concrete. I found that people will generally enjoy whatever is enjoyable and adopt as their own whatever is good, and are usually receptive to experiencing things that don’t originate in their own cultural comfort zone — until someone starts putting labels on things and telling them that this particular thing belongs to that culture or ethnic group, and so on. This kind of divisive labelling is especially dangerous and damaging when it comes to ideas which have developed in the past several centuries in the Western world, such as the scientific method and the concept of fundamental human rights. These ideas are universal and belong to all human beings, not just those of European Judeo-Christian heritage — and it is absurd to reject them on the grounds that they are “Western”. I will have a lot more to write about these topics later.
Here, I will only note that I used to write a lot about various scientific topics as well as the effects of science and technology on culture and society. When I entered the gifted program in elementary school, I was given further motivation to continue writing by my teachers and peers. The teachers repeatedly emphasised that, in a wide variety of intellectual fields, there is a high correlation between the amount of writing a person did and his or her success and lasting fame, and they cited many historical figures as examples in support of this thesis. But it was never made clear which was the cause and which was the effect: whether these people were successful because they wrote a lot, or whether they wrote a lot (or — what I thought was more likely — more of their writings were noticed and preserved) because they were successful. Indeed, it wasn’t even clear that there was a cause-and-effect relationship at all. But in any case, the teachers in the gifted program really emphasised the importance of writing to the development and expression of a gifted child’s talents, and in this I think they were absolutely correct. Their emphasis has left a lasting impression on me.
I began to write a lot of essays at this time, and my classmates were always asking me to see both these and my stories. So, even though I no longer had ESL class, I continued to write much more than my peers. I had a reputation as a writer, and I put in a lot of effort to maintain it. I think in the last two years of elementary school and the first two of high school, I wrote something almost every day, outside of school. People would mention a topic to me, and I would write an essay or a short story or a poem about it; then I’d pass this around to my friends, and they in turn would come back to me with comments. And their comments would sometimes inspire me to write something else. So I was blogging before there was blogging!
– davinci
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