Made in America

On this episode of Articulate Experience—three writers who grew up with distinct vantage points on American identity.

Gish Jen was raised in the 1960s by Chinese immigrants living in New York. It took decades of learning, reflecting, and writing, for her to embrace the full complexity of her bi-cultural identity—but looking back, she wouldn’t change a thing. 

The sci-fi/fantasy writer Tochi Onyebuchi has always been fascinated by other people and their perspectives. But it was only after he started writing about his own experiences as a Nigerian-American in his mid-twenties that his speculative fiction began to take off. Today, he’s earned some of the genre’s highest honors.

Deborah Eisenberg came of age with the so-called, “peace and love generation” —educated young Americans who believed that the world was changing for the better. Over four decades, her short stories have formed a record of her evolving understanding of her native country, and of herself. 

• [1:38] Gish Jen
• [17:25] Tochi Onyebuchi 
• [34:12] Deborah Eisenberg

Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.

Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.

More at articulateshow.org

Chapters

• 1:38 Gish Jen
• 17:25 Tochi Onyebuchi
• 34:12 Deborah Eisenberg

Transcript

INTRO

VO: Welcome to Articulate Experience — the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers. I’m Jim Cotter. On this episode— three authors with radically different takes on what it means to be “Made in America.”

Growing up first generation Chinese in Yonkers, New York provoked Gish Jen to learn, and write, about the the inner workings of the East-West cultural divide. 

GISH JEN: In this struggle between ... so I want to be a writer. That's a very pit-like thing to do. If that's at odds with my duties as a daughter, as a mother, from the point of view of my parents, but of course, your duties come first. This idea that you should realize yourself is not really ... that's just not paramount. 

VO: As the high-achieving eldest son of Nigerian immigrants, it took Tochi Onyebuchi until his mid-twenties to internalize racial dynamics in America. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: I’ve felt like an interloper in the African-American experience even though all these external cues are lumping me into that same bucket so, you know, my parents didn’t live through the Detroit race riots. There’s no real, you know, historical, you know, lived tangible connection between me and the civil rights struggle, but I benefit from these things by virtue of my color.

VO: And, through her short stories Deborah Eisenberg has dissected American life from the vantage point of its most controversial generation.  

DEBORAH EISENBERG: my poor maligned despised generation, which I think of as very, very wonderful, really beautiful, we didn't have to worry about money. And we did believe that the world was going to get better and it was getting better.

VO: That’s all ahead, on Articulate Experience.

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GISH GEN

VO: Gish Jen is intimately familiar with the struggle to belong—a struggle she has dissected on the page from every imaginable angle. 

From an early age, Jen was outspoken, opinionated, and driven— all qualities that would serve her well as an American but that were unbecoming of the dutiful wife her traditional Chinese parents, Norman and Agnes, hoped she would become.

GISH JEN: I was frequently told that I had too much to say. I mean, my mother told me that every day. I mean, I was way more outspoken than I should have been. And also, I will say that I was the bringer of news from the outside world into the household. “The president has been shot.” You know, my mother said to me, “you're crazy.” You know, that was a very tough moment for me because I wasn't crazy because president really had been shot. And all these a million ideas about things that were okay for girls to do, girl, okay for girls to wear pants, pants at school. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of rub the whole way. Um, especially for me as a girl. Girls are graceful. Girls were not supposed to talk so much, you know, all, you know, all those kinds of things. Interestingly, she would also say, “you have to know how to talk.” And “you have to know how to talk” is not about expressing yourself. It's about getting what you want to get nicely. But the nicely is very important. Another thing that she would say is “you have no consideration for others”. Now, I actually think that's completely not true. I think I have a lot of consideration for others. I have to say, in a general kind of way. I don't think that that's such a bad thing to teach someone, you know?

JIM COTTER: No, but is this not her? 

GISH JEN: Because it's, it's not a way of saying, you know, no, I think it's her way of saying, you know, not everything you have to say has to, you know, to talk. You have to know how to talk in a way that has consideration for others. Not everything you have to say has to, you know, you don't have to, um, confront everybody with everything you know. 

JIM COTTER: Do you not think that this might have been her struggling with her own culture and how it didn't work in this culture? Like Chinese people tend to be quite direct. I don't wanna make wide sweeping statements, but I do like that about native Chinese people who I speak with. They, they say it. The Dutch have this as well, and it doesn't always come off very well in American culture. So is this not her making sure her daughter doesn't make the same mistakes of directness that she was already making? Cuz these sound like rules for America, not necessarily rules for a good life in China. 

GISH JEN: That's an interesting question. I would have to really think about that. You know, I know what you mean about the bluntness. Yeah. You know, it's because they're not self-conscious. Right? They're not self-conscious. And it's also because they are in a society where relationships are a given, where relationships are not elective. So therefore you don't have to be polite. And other words, if you think about the person to whom you just sort of say, “just move,” right? Or, you know what I mean? Or, or, or, you know, “get that cup” that is a person with whom you have a very solid relationship. You don't have to say please because it's like telling your arm to do something. You don't have to say please. You don't say, “please arm, please move”. Right. <laugh>, you just say move arm. Right? So there's a kind of intimacy there. But like I say, there's an assumption that the relationships are not fragile. There's an assumption that the relationships are extremely stable and can take a little bit of directness. 

In China, they think, and they all say in, in China, they, they'll say, “don't be polite.” And what they really mean is, “please treat me like a family member”. And to say please, and thank you... they feel that you're distancing yourself and that you're not really a member of the family. And I think that if you come from a very individualistic culture, you almost can't conceive of that level of intimacy. 

VO: Growing up, Jen faced conflicts familiar to many second generation kids. Assimilating just enough not to fit in at home, yet sufficiently tied to her family’s culture to be seen as an outsider by her peers. 

In suburban Yonkers, the Jens stuck out. Gish and her four siblings were ostracized and tormented by neighborhood kids, who would throw rocks disguised as snowballs. But this didn’t break her spirit. Reading became an escape. She found allies in her favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, Louisa May Alcott, Albert Camus. In high school she changed her name from Lilian to Gish, honoring Lillian Kish, the first lady of American cinema. 

Yet the more the young Gish tried to find herself, the more difficult it became to live the kind of life her parents envisioned for her. Years later she would learn that her internal struggle came down to two radically different notions of Selfhood— INdependence versus INTERdependence. 

GISH JEN: I think it's the universal struggle. It is, especially now that America has exported individualism everywhere. Right? And I think in a general kind of way for millennia, we've had one kind of self, flexi self, an interdependent self. Now go on, expand on that, a self fundamentally in relationship to others, you know? And of course that was completely adaptive. You know, for millennia you are out hunting, obviously you must hunt with others. You're farming, obviously you must form with others. And obviously your social structures will reflect that. And then you will internalize an idea about yourself that involves being in those social structures. It's only with modernity that we have these ideas that in order to survive it's best to have no attachments. You know, that's because the best kind of worker is a worker who, who can just simply move to another city, who can just be moved around like a, like a production unit. So these are two very different ideas about what a, an adaptive self looks like. With the second idea, of course, the modern idea of a very recent idea, but nonetheless, right now, a very dominant idea. So you have these, you have these two selves in tension. 

VO: Jen first explored this dynamic scientifically—delving into studies that included everything from interviews to fMRIs for her 2013 book Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. A decade on, her perspective continues to evolve.  

GISH JEN: I don't like the word interdependent because I think people think they know what that means. They know what collectivism means. They think they know what it means. You know, I always use the word “flexi self”. Your job as a person, your imperative is to be flexible and to, um, respond to the needs of others as opposed to in the West, where we imagine ourselves as kind of like avocados with a big pit inside of us. And, you know, your imperative is to be true to that pit. So these are two very different things, but it's not that everybody gloms together and everybody thinks alike. It's not that, however, in this kind of struggle between, so “I wanna be a writer,” um, that's, that's a very kind of pit-like thing to do. If that's at odds with, you know, my duties as a, as a daughter, as a mother, from the point of view of my parents, but of course, your duties come first. You know what I mean? So this, this, this idea that you should realize yourself, you know, that's just not paramount. It's not that you can't do it, but it doesn't come first. So here in America, of course, you know, your first obligation is, is to realize yourself, you know, to be true to that pit. They don't have that idea. Not only that, they don't have this idea that, that there even is a pit. You know what I mean? That can't be changed. Um, and I will say that there's a lot of implications in education for this, because in China, you know, a child is not naturally good at math. Here in America, we sort of say basically, “this kid just doesn't have the math pit”. And the kid thinks that too. The kid thinks, you know, “I'm just not good at math”. In China, they don't, you know, they have a much more flexible view of the south. 

So it's kind of like, well, you know, some, some kids are better at math than others, but everybody can learn math. You just have to flexibly work a little harder, you know, <laugh>. And I think that today, actually in the United States, many educators are trying to get the students to think in this more flex-self way. Because actually, you know, there are many skills that which you could acquire if you had what they call now a “growth mindset”. You know? So if you don't have this idea that “I have this kind of set pit inside me”, if you get rid of that idea, actually you, you know, you are able to bloom in, in ways that maybe you don't realize you can. 

For many years, Jen worked hard to deny the truth buried at the center of her so called “pit-self”— she was born to be a writer.    

VO: When the time came for Jen to attend college, she had long nurtured a private love of writing, but wouldn’t give up hope of one day pleasing her parents. At Harvard, she studied law and medicine, but couldn’t commit to either. In a last-ditch effort to secure a future her mom and dad would approve of, she enrolled at Stanford business school. It was a disaster. She hated every minute of her first year and dropped out early in her second.

GISH JEN: Nobody would speak to me. I mean, everybody was so angry at me. It was just so unacceptable for somebody to take off in this very western individualistic direction. It was something that I had to do, honestly, if I could have made myself go to business school, get a nice job, if I could have made myself do it, I would've made myself do it. But I couldn't. And I understood that I was made of something else. And that thing had to do with writing. 

VO: Just as her family was turning away from her, Jen was falling in love– with a star of her business school class, David O’Connor. He supported her unconditionally: first in her choice to drop out, then in her decision to spend a year in China, and ultimately, cheering on her move to the Midwest to pursue her long-standing dream at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1983, they wed, and Jen’s parents were so relieved to see their headstrong daughter married at all that they welcomed the pair back into the fold. 

GISH JEN: He was Irish American. And you know, it would've been better had he been Chinese American, but they had kind of given up on the Chinese American thing. I mean, you have to remember how few Chinese Americans there were then—to hope that your child would marry another Chinese American was just not very realistic. I mean, there were none in our town. Right? You know, who would, you know, who would that be? 

JIM COTTER: Well, in any of the towns you lived in. 

GISH JEN: Yeah, yeah. There were, you know, so it's not, you know, it's not like that was not a very real, so there was never, 

JIM COTTER: That was never the expectation. They had no hope that you were gonna go back to China In five years

GISH JEN:  No, no, no, no, no. And a also, in their view, no Chinese American guy would have been interested in me <laugh>. I was so outspoken. My parents always thought that I was totally unmarriageable. I mean, they couldn't believe that anybody would marry. They were grateful to David <laugh>. 

JIM COTTER: What, what was it about the O'Connor clan as you got to know them? Was, was there any revelation for you in how they conducted themselves versus how you'd grown up? Were there any surprises where there's any point where you're like, oh, families behave like that? 

GISH JEN: You know, I don't know about the whole family, but I will say that it was a revelation to me that David himself would be so unstintingly supportive of something that truly had no promise whatsoever. 

JIM COTTER: He was in love with you!

GISH JEN: I know, but I, I still think it was kind of a magical thing. I mean, it truly, you know, he was this really kind of depressed person who wanted you to do this thing that you didn't really know very, was not very at all clear about what that would look like. He never asked me like, “well, what would that look like? What would success look like?” Or, “How do you think, do you think that you would ever get a teaching job?” Or, he never asked me any of those questions. 

JIM COTTER:  And those would've been questions that if he had been Chinese, for instance, or well, someone, those would've been front and center? 

GISH JEN: Somebody might have asked me. I mean, actually, I don't think he had to be Chinese American to ask me those questions. 

JIM COTTER:  No, but he's not, he doesn't own you like he's, he's 

GISH JEN: Your boyfriend. Well, even after we got married, he, he never asked me any of these things. And, um, when we, um, got married, were given tons and tons of, you know, crystal, all these things we never used, especially from my Chinese relatives. And we had dutifully packed them all up and brought them all out west to Stanford. And then we're coming back and, you know, I'm just like, “you know what? Oh my God, you know, I'm so overwhelmed” by these kind of duties, the sense that we had to take care of all these items. David opened a window, took a glass, and he threw it out, <laugh>. And that was that. And we had a huge garage sale that Saturday. We got rid of all of it. And I don't know if this is anything to do with being Irish American or, you know, was just David, but he was so wonderful that way. It was just like, “Forget it.” Boom, gone.

VO: O’Connor’s self-assuredness rubbed off on Jen. And so, to quiet the chorus of other voices in her head that threatened to drown out her own ideas, she followed his example by throwing away these distractions.

GISH JEN:  For a long time. You know, when I first sat down at my desk, I would make like a little visual icon of anybody whose voice I did not want to hear. And I would take them and I would move them, and I would put them in the hall. So starting with, of course, my mother—Bang <laugh>. My editor. Early on, certain people in my writing class— I would remove them all just so I could hear myself. And then it's just there and I just write it down. Do you know what I mean? So I don't have to goad myself to do

JIM COTTER: I wish I did know what you mean <laugh> 

GISH JEN: <laugh>, <laugh>. 

JIM COTTER: Because the Western voice is saying, “be unique. Express yourself. Express yourself. What is it that you really want to say?” 

GISH JEN: I don't have the voice that says “be unique.” Definitely don't have that voice. And I don't hear a voice that says “express myself”. I do hear a voice that, that says, “if this is the last book that you will ever write, what is it that you need to say? What is it that you know in your bones that you really should get down on the page before you die?” <laugh>? I have that kind of feeling. It's maybe more of a sense of responsibility because I know that I have these things in my bones and I, I know that they are often not said, they're not expressed. And I know that I can do that. For whatever reason it was given to me. It was given to me to have this material. It was given to me to, and then it is just my job to put those things together and do what I was supposed to do. 

VO: The more Gish Jen tuned into her inner voice, the more she found she had to say about families like hers. Newcomers to the West navigating old and new world values. In much of her fiction, grandparents, parents, and children clash about what they owe to each other versus what they owe to themselves. In 1991’s Typical American, the protagonist, a Chinese grandfather named Ralph, resists assimilation.

(Excerpt from Gish Jen’s Typical American):

He refused to be made of an American citizen. He thumbed his nose at the relief act meant to help him as though to claim his home was China, was to make China indeed his home. And wasn’t it still, even if his place and it was fading like a picture hung too long in a barbershop. Even if he didn’t know where his family was any more or was it exactly because he didn’t know where his family was? For certainly he felt more attached to them for their having turned abstract, missing them more than he had liked them. The missing being simpler.

VO: Much like Ralph, Jen’s own parents were reticent to build a life in America. They came to the U.S. separately in the 1940s and they always planned to return home after finishing graduate school. But once communism took hold in China, they weren’t allowed to go back. A generation on, Jen has reconciled her Eastern roots with her Western surroundings, and to a great extent resolved her own bi-cultural identity crisis. Today, she understands the forces at play within her own spirit and has come to cherish the values her parents instilled in her.

GISH JEN:  Today. As an adult, I feel that the richest parts of me are not, those are one individualism, which I certainly have. I in the end, as you know, I did what I wanted. I became this writer that, you know, my family did not want me to be. And yet I would say that this older self that I fought so hard to kind of get rid of, I would say that, boy, you know, if I could do something to the world, I would somehow give it to all my individualistic friends who I think are just suffering from the levels of individualism that they've been brought up on. 

VO: Gish Jen’s latest work of fiction, 2020’s, The Resisters, is in some ways a departure from her earlier works. But at its core, it tells a familiar story of a strong-willed outsider who survives by finding a way to live on her own terms. Not because she’s selfish, but because it’s what she must do to survive. And today, Gish Jen has found a way to be be exactly who she was meant to be— a writer.

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TOCHI ONYEBUCHI

VO: Tochi Onyebuchi was educated in some of America’s most prestigious institutions. Choate, Yale, Columbia Law. 

The eldest son of Nigerian immigrants, he was (always) expected to achieve. But success didn’t shield him from suffering. His adolescence was cut short the day before his 11th birthday, when his father died of cancer. 

As his mother began working multiple jobs to provide for her family he felt obliged to help ease her burden, but that sense of responsibility held him back from his own grief. He was diagnosed with depression in high school and later with bipolar disorder. Heavy drinking snowballed into what he’s described as “raging” alcoholism before quitting in his mid-twenties.

Through it all, he wrote obsessively. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: If I had a free period in the middle of the day, I was writing. If I finished my homework early into study hours, I was writing until lights out on the weekends. I didn't go out to parties or things of that sort, you know, a terrible amount. Cuz I was always busy writing. And the thing about it was, I never felt as though I was missing out because I loved writing so much. I love the process of it, not just world building or telling story, but even just tinkering with sentences. I'm just super nerdy. 

JIM COTTER: Just, just the craftiness of it. Yeah, I I thought there's joy in that as well.  

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: I love it. You know, it reminds me so much of sports where you'll have basketball players that show up at random gyms and it's just them. If they're just practicing, it's, it can be just a regular like Saturday morning before anybody's there and it's just them and they're just shooting, they're just doing their thing. 

JIM COTTER:

It's not what they do, it's who they are. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Exactly. And that was, that was how embedded writing was in my DNA. 

VO: By high school, Onyebuchi estimates he was already writing a novel a year, 16 of them before he ever got published. He was especially drawn to the escapism of speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy— so hungry for new perspectives that he neglected his own. Onyebuchi was in his mid-twenties before he started including characters who looked like him in his stories. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: I think I just found other people in other backgrounds and other dynamics more interesting. And I think it's a combination of things. So in college I was an “IR”, international relations concentration. And so I was always fascinated in the world outside this country. I had spent a lot of time studying Palestine. I had studied all these civil conflicts on the African continent. That was what interested me. The, the United States was boring to me. And I think part of that manifested itself in me not necessarily thinking that the United States and by extension me and my family and our experience of the United States was anything worth writing about. I wanted to write about, I wanted to write about a Kosovo-Armenian arms dealer. 

JIM COTTER:  Sure. It almost feels like you've been practicing a lot of different cuisines. And then one day you go, “I'm just gonna, no recipes here.” And then you, you, you sort of sip the soup and you go, “ah!” 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: <laugh>. Yeah. 

JIM COTTER: That's, that tastes better than a lot…Anything else I've made, it tastes a lot better than a lot of stuff that had made for me. Yeah? That was the feeling? 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Yeah. You know, that I think was such a turning point in my career. 

JIM COTTER: And did you have any self-doubt? Did you sort of go, “hang on a second, ego” <laugh>, get you out of my head. Like was there any doubt or any self-questioning about the fact that it was really the the real thing?

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: No, no. And I, I, I think part of that is, you know, the sort of Nigerian upbringing. You're not allowed to be bad at things <laugh>, you know, you're, you're like, the mandate is success no matter what field you're in, whether you're playing professional football or whether you're a neurosurgeon. You have to be successful. You have to succeed. And so I think part of it too was I'd been working so hard for so long at this thing 

JIM COTTER: That it wasn't luck at this point. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Exactly. Like I 

JIM COTTER: You deserved it. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Yeah. Like, I knew how hard I'd been working on this thing. And it's not even like I, I don't even think I'm being sort of conceited or, or saying how great I am or anything. I just put in a lot of work. 

JIM COTTER: Well, and you got to be the best for, you know, you were heading towards the best version of yourself. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Exactly. 

JIM COTTER: There's no conce in that. Right? 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Exactly. And I also think it was a marriage of concerns in my identity starting to converge. I think that is one of the dynamics that was happening as well, which is that I started caring about things like racism in the United States, which wasn't always a concern for me. And granted, I lived a very charmed life. Even ensconced in this New England boarding school, things had gone very well for me. 

JIM COTTER:  And did you ever feel you being condescend to, because of the color of your skin? That must have happened at some point. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Oh yeah, but I just never detected it. I didn't know to look for it. So much else was going fantastically in my life that it never felt as though I were being discriminated against on the basis of my race. And part of that was I just didn't notice it or I didn't know to look for it. But I started to learn. And when those two things started to, you know, converge on each other and started to become the subject of my writing, all of a sudden I was writing from inside an experience. I hadn't been doing that before. I was never a Kosovo-Albanian arms dealer. And even, whatever autobiographical elements I'd injected into those stories, they were so fleeting and the connection was so tenuous. There didn't seem to be any of me in there. 

JIM COTTER: You're in a really great space, right? Cuz you have the immigrant ex—no, you're not an immigrant, but you have the immigrant part of your family. You have the African part and you have the African-American part of your being. And it's different, right? It's, it's, 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: It's this liminal space. Yeah. And it's precisely this thing where oftentimes I've felt like an interloper in the African-American experience, even though all these external cues are lumping me into that same bucket. So, you know, my, my parents didn't live through the Detroit race riots. There's no connection between me and the Tulsa race massacre. There's no real historical lived tangible connection between me and the civil rights struggle. But I, I benefit from these things by virtue of my color. And at the same time, there's this whole privilege that exists in knowing directly where I come from, being able to trace that back, the obliviation of which was part of the project of chattel slavery. It becomes much easier to treat a slave the way, way that they treated slaves, if you can obliterate the idea of history and personhood and whatnot. And so it's fascinating too, and this was very much an environment that I grew up in where, you know, you'll have immigrants from Nigeria, for instance, who lived through Sani Abacha’s terror, who lived through the two previous Biafra administrations, you know, who lived through the Biafran war. 

And they come here and what they witness actually with African-American communities and neighborhoods is they witness effect but not cause. Right? So they'll see, for instance, certain neighborhoods and not understand that ghettos are constructs like ghettos are urban planning. They'll see the fact that there will be a greater percentage of West Africans or people of West African descent in the Ivy Leagues than actual African Americans, and not trace that to the various vagaries of the college admissions process. So they'll see all these things, but like they don't necessarily have any reason to know about these things. It felt like a necessary conversation to have, especially 

JIM COTTER:  With yourself to begin with. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Exactly. Because I'm, you know, I'm living this experience and I'm going on this journey and I'm like, “wait a second, there's all this stuff going on that I'm learning about”. So much of my transformation did happen rather late in life in law school. You know, it was in law school that I really got immersed into the issues of incarceration both overseas and in the United States. And that changed my life profoundly. You know, the African American experience was very much an academic mm-hmm. <affirmative> item in my life. But then, like, I started knowing people who went to jail. I started personally knowing people who went to prison. I started personally knowing people who got chewed up and spit out by these systems. And that made it real in a way that it wasn't necessarily real for my parents' generation. 

VO: Onyebuchi’s legal training became a tool kit for him to dissect increasingly complex realities through increasingly complex fiction. In the years that followed, as public awareness of police killings of African-Americans grew, so too did Onyebuchi’s need to make sense of it all. In 2013, things came to a head. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: I was still going to be a lawyer. I'm going to do EIP, the early interview program. So I'm going to talk to all these associates and partners of all these firms to get our summer associateship for the next summer. And then the firm that I do that with is where I'm going to work after grad— I had it all sort of planned out. 

JIM COTTER: I imagine these are pretty top level, 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Oh yeah, no, they're all the, you know, top 50, what they call the “vault 50.” 

JIM COTTER: So you're still breezing through. 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Yeah. Like I'm, I'm doing pretty well for myself. But that summer is when things sort of started to change. And when I started to get very enmeshed in issues of social justice, it was also the summer where George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin. But I remember the verdicts came down and all these people that I thought would be upset at the fact that this man had been acquitted of the very clear murder of this boy were like, “oh yeah, no, the boy deserved what he got”. 

JIM COTTER: Oh, I thought you were gonna say it was just, “well, that's just the way things are in America.” I thought it was just gonna be apathy. No, it was actual, 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: It was in some instances apathy. In some instances, “oh, justice was done”. And like these were people I'd, I'd gone to high school with. These were people that I'd gone to grade school with, fellow church members, all this stuff across the board. And I was like, “wait, are you serious? Did we watch the same trial?” So to have all these people across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds be like, “yeah, no, of course Zimmerman was innocent” was such a, I guess you could even call it a radicalizing moment. So all this stuff is happening and I'm starting to see myself pivot away from what had been the plan in law school, which has become a corporate lawyer, pay off my school debt and earn enough money to take care of mom and retire early. And so that was when I started to pivot into issues of social justice. And increasingly they started to inform my writing. I knew that there was something maybe poisonous sort of festering in me. There was this combination of rage and hopelessness and so many other things. But I knew I needed to get it out of me. I knew I needed to expel it somehow. And the way that I organize the universe is through writing. Um, that's how I'm able to sort of articulate so much. And when you can sort of articulate the shape of the monster before you, it all of a sudden becomes a lot less intimidating. 

VO: 2020’s Riot Baby was the outcome of that articulation. The book follows two black siblings: Kevin, who becomes imprisoned, and his sister, Ella who has supernatural powers.Riot Baby was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, two of the highest honors in speculative fiction. But fantasy writing wasn’t just a way for Onyebuchi to connect to massive political struggles. It also helped him to grapple with something more intimate—his own family’s tangled history. Onyebuchi’s mother grew up in Nigeria during the Biafran War. After hearing about her experiences, he wrote War Girls, a novel set in 2172 which follows a similar conflict.

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI:I'm always thinking in terms of drama and conflict and that friction of people who spin against the way the world turns, I guess you could say. And I find often the people that are lowest on the social totem pole in the world that we recognize, but also in any sort of story world that I create have the most compelling stories. So that was one of the reasons why I chose the protagonist in Riot Baby, for instance, that I did. Because so many of these kids have the most compelling stories and they were also not things that I had seen before, particularly in a speculative context. I didn't necessarily see a protagonist who was a young black woman who basically had the powers of a God growing up in South Central, surrounded by gang banger culture, living through the Rodney King uprising, being in Harlem during the two thousands and developing this, this incredible power. But being incredibly angry at the same time and trying to figure out where that anger is coming from, that was very compelling to me. There's almost a sense of Greek tragedy to it, where you can do whatever you want, essentially with these powers except for this one thing. And it's the one thing that you want more than anything to be able to do, which is protect your younger brother. 

VO: Tochi Onyebuchi never assumed he would be able to turn his love of writing into a career that would make his mother proud. But by 2019, he finally got an advance large enough to write full time, and he hasn’t looked back. Even his mom has come around.  

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: It was important for me to reconnect to my mother's experience in part because, you know, not to say that I felt alienated at that point in time from Nigeria, Nigerian history, but I didn't necessarily feel as connected as I wanted to be. And <laugh> so was as though this was the most mischief making way in which I could get more connected to Nigerian is writing about this very verboten topic. But it was also, I think there are a lot of Nigerian Americans who feel that way. And it might just be a first generation immigrant thing, but yeah, no, it's always interesting. Cause I think too about all my sort of hyphenate friends in the United States, Vietnamese-American, Palestinian-American, what have you, whose parents have lived through these incredible traumas. And in many ways were the generation that's writing about these things. And there's this question that I asked myself or at least asked myself during the composition of War Girl, was, “by forcing my mom to excavate these memories, am I re-injuring her?” And I wonder if that's a question that, you know, first generation immigrant kids who grow up to be writers and writing about these experience ask themselves is because this is perhaps the most traumatic thing that my parent or grandparent has ever gone through. 

JIM COTTER: And did you ask that question as you were asking for the stories? 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Yes, I, and I asked my, well, 

JIM COTTER: She tutted and said, “I'm made of stern her stuff, son.” 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Well, I mean, she's incredibly stoic, right? And it, you know, part of that is the, you know, completely living into the immigrant stereotype of, you know, you just sort of keep it moving. You don't let anything stop you. You do all these impossible things so that your children and their children can have the much better life and it's the American dream, right? So she was very stoic about all of it and very generous with her time and with her memories and things of that sort. But I could not help this sort of creeping guilt that <laugh> I was, that I was putting her through something or that, you know, to a certain extent that I might have been causing her any sort of pain, you know, as a son, as the oldest son, by the way, as the oldest son in the family, am I hurting her needlessly?

JIM COTTER: So, she tells you the story. Did she read the what you wrote? 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: So she's read portions of it. What was actually really meaningful was, at a certain point towards the end of the writing of the book, I had to submit a pronunciation guide. And so I went through with mom over all the words that they had questions about, and she recorded pronunciations for them. And even looking back on that memory, now, I, I have to control my emotions a bit because it seemed like in many ways the culminating moment of what I'd been trying to accomplish with this book personally, which was to get closer to mom. She, 

JIM COTTER: That that might have been the most vulnerable part because you actually have to go back there and then that voice in your head, “how do we pronounce the name of that village? How do we pronounce the name of that river?” 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. 

JIM COTTER: That's probably more real because the stories we tell are maybe 20% recall and, and 80% imagination. Imagination storytelling. Was that the a point where you felt there was more, I don't know, electricity around it? 

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI:  There was, it just felt like there was this abiding love. It also felt like validation of my career choice <laugh>. So there's that aspect of it too, where she's helping me be a writer. She's helping me write a thing. 

VO: Tochi Onyebuchi is, in many ways a living embodiment of The American Dream.  He fills his stories with magic, telekinesis, space colonies, and cyborgs. But under-girding it all is a voracious curiosity to connect with how and why people behave as they do in a world that can seem unrelenting, unpredictable, and unfair. And while he hasn’t found answers to all of his questions, he’s dedicated to creating vast new worlds where he just might.

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DEBORAH EISENBERG

VO: Deborah Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago in 1945. Her Jewish grandparents had immigrated from Eastern Europe, and as first-generation Americans, her parents valued success. 

A child of the so-called “baby boom,” Eisenberg came of age during a period of great social upheaval— the first time in modern memory that young people were recognized as a meaningful group of voters…and shoppers. But just as politicians and marketers were starting to fetishize youth culture, Eisenberg was struggling to figure out who she was and who she might become.  

Her mother, always anxious and with chronic back pain, led a young Deborah to cultivate many fears of her own. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: I was not very good at being a child. I was temperamental. I think I was considered somebody who couldn't manage very well on her own. Something was considered lacking in me. I got, you know, “oh, what are we going to do about her? Nobody's gonna marry her. She can't get a job.” That sort of thing. It wasn't explicitly said, but it was, there was a nervousness about me. 

JIM COTTER: And also there was a cultural disconnect. You weren't being a good Jewish girl.

DEBORAH EISENBERG: I was not. But my parents, they had worked very hard to be middle class assimilated exceptable. 

JIM COTTER: They were dutiful, 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: They were very dutiful. They were also very decent people, I have to say, with a lot of integrity. But there was a lot of pressure to be credentialed and so on. And, uh, you know, I was always a weirdo. Uh, also I came from a suburb where everybody was blonde. Everybody looked like Tuesday Welles. And you know, I was a weirdo in the house and I was a weirdo out of the house. So, I mean, I didn't wanna be unusual. I suffered for it, but I definitely considered myself more conspicuous than I was by far. I had an extreme view of it, but I did have that view. I think that I was programmed to fail in a way, and I expected to fail. That was the comfortable position for me. But I was afraid of failing, but I was afraid of not failing. So in other words, being in a state of complete paralysis, 

VO: Eisenberg discovered a salve for her anxieties in cigarettes. With every puff, she evaded the uncertainties that plagued her, finding solace in liminal space—observing the world at a distance, shrouded in smoke. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: I smoked three packs of golds a day, and I loved smoking. I really loved it. I loved every cigarette, and I loved everything about smoking. I mean, my sense of self was absolutely constructed by nicotine, which is very powerful drug. And also the of smoking in various ways. I mean, to be able to sort of emit a smoke screen between you and the world, it's really quite wonderful. I mean, it's a full costume and there really wasn't anything aside from the costume. 

I was really hollowed at by that time, not by smoking entirely, but a kind of despair. And so I was a very, very, very rickety construction. I didn't feel that I could do anything. There was nothing really I wanted to do at all. And so cigarettes are a very good compensation for forward motion,  for forward motion for existence. Really, they're excellent. 

VO: At 26, Eisenberg discovered something she needed more than cigarettes— or rather, someone. The actor, playwright, and essayist Wallace Shawn was her intellectual match and, it turned out, the love of her life. He was also severely asthmatic, and couldn’t share a home with a smoker.  

DEBORAH EISENBERG: And really, there was sufficient information about passive smoking that I knew it was very bad for him. And I thought, “I'm never going to meet anybody this great again. I don't want to kill him. And I don't really want to be in absolute servitude to these cigarettes”. I mean, I've gotta go out in the middle of the night. If I run out of cigarettes, I, I can't not have a cigarette in my hand, and I don't wanna be so chained to something. So I made the decision that I would stop smoking, and it was very violent and horrible. It was awful. The only way for me to stop was to stop. I mean, I couldn't cut down. There was no question of that. I knew that I couldn't rely on my willpower because I, I don't have any, and I knew it wouldn't work. So I had to make it non-negotiable. That was it. And it was like a death. And there was a very long period that was like a morning period, and I was so angry all the time. I cannot begin to tell you I was in such a rage. 

JIM COTTER: Who were you angry with?

DEBORAH EISENBERG: I became very, very angry at tobacco, big tobacco. This has been done to me. This addiction has been levied upon me for my few dollars to enrich somebody. I was exploding with rage. I mean, also nicotine. Nicotine is, it's very, very pacifying. 

(Excerpt from Deborah Eisenberg’s “Days”)

I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it. When the haze cleared over the charred landscape, the person I had always assumed to be behind the smoke was revealed to be a tinny. Weights and balances apparatus, rapidly dissembling on contact with oxygen. I lie on the floor. And how with grief a friend tells me, during the third week, it will occur to you that you're insane. And you'll think, well, now I'm insane. What difference does it make whether I smoke or not? This is a trick to get you to smoke. I am insane, but I'm determined to wait it out. 

VO: Through the 1970s, as Deborah Eisenberg continued to suffer through nicotine withdrawal, her partner Wallace Shawn suggested she might try writing her feelings, a journal of sorts. With his encouragement, Eisenberg finally started gaining confidence both on and off the page. And though the pair never married, they remain constant companions to this day. He has, Eisenberg admits, fundamentally changed the way she sees herself, and the world. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Politically, I was much more ignorant, but also much more radical. 

JIM COTTER: And, and he'd had the perfect American life. Was it Chote, Harvard, Magdalane college? 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: It was Dalton, Dalton Putney. Harvard. 

JIM COTTER: Harvard, 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Magdalane College. Oxford. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was perfect. Not that I shouldn't speak for him, but, uh, he did not love Harvard. 

JIM COTTER:  No, but in terms of like, if we're gonna talk about the version of Americanness, if you were to just look at it from the outside, yeah, YOU would go, “that's a guy who's made, made his way in the world”. And, and when you met him, completely unaware that, that there were, there had been costs for other people, he had never met for him to have had that, that life. Did he resist it when you started to talk about Well, his privilege was, I guess? 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Oh, no, he was extremely aware of his privilege. I mean, he was, I would say over aware of his privilege. And I think that he still, he still attributes to his privilege, virtues that were absolutely his own and cultivated by him. 

JIM COTTER: That's nice. That's healthy. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. But he overestimates the privilege, I think, in his formation. 

JIM COTTER: I'm sort of contagious though, this idea that anything's possible. You just sort of, you get up every day and, and it's a new world. Like he just seems to have this sunshine around him. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: He has a sunshine around him, and he also has a dark night around him. I, I would say he is very, very courageous, morally and intellectually.

JIM COTTER: Rather than fearless?

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Yeah. Oh yeah. Not at all. Not at all. Fearless. Very, very courageous. I had not much been taken seriously, and I didn't take myself seriously. I said, “oh, you know, I'm not a serious person at all”. And he said, “no, you, you are a serious person”. That was amazing. 

VO: It took Deborah Eisenberg three years in countless drafts to finish her first short story days, a slightly fictionalized first person account of her battle with nicotine. It was published in her debut collection Transactions in a Foreign Currency in 1986. 

Her second book under the 82nd Airborne came six years later. The title essay read in part here by the author, references the time she and Shawn spent visiting Central America in the 1980s, witnessing firsthand the impact of U.S. foreign policy under the Reagan administration in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. 

(Excerpt from Deborah Eisenberg’s “Under the 82nd Airborne”)

“Excuse me,” Mr. Best said. “One slight correction.” He twinkled charmingly at Caitlin. “Honduras is a neutral country—the Contras are not here.”

“No the point,” Boyce said loudly to Caitlin, “the point is that Honduras is a highly sensitive strategic area. Of course we have financial interests in the region—we’ve never attempted to deny that—but the point is that, strategically speaking, Honduras is money in the bank. And that's why the Soviets and the Cubans are stirring up these indigenous movements all over the place. Otherwise, Jesus, I mean, these people are Pacific. They don't know what's going on. They're farmers for heaven's sake. And that's the point. You see that we're not just here because we go all gooey inside. When we think about the relationship between free enterprise and democracy,”

VO: Deborah Eisenberg thinks a lot about what it means to be an American and the responsibility its citizens bear for their country’s actions around the world. Coming from immigrant stock, she sees America’s promise of the pursuit of happiness as double-edged, and in most cases, fantastical, unobtainable.

DEBORAH EISENBERG:  The implicit assumption is probably that most people don't have the circumstance to pursue happiness. And of course, Americans are marked or cursed, you might say, by this burden of feeling that happiness is owed to them. And that that might be at the expense of all other people. Well, that certainly is enacted globally, or it might be the cause of tremendous resentment because as you say, it is unobtainable or unattainable. 

JIM COTTER:Something I was interested in, because we, on the outside, I mean, I'm an immigrant, and just when we looked at America, we saw people who seemed to be under the impression that they were benignly trying to do good in the world, yet they government wasn't really telling them the truth about what was going on. Or maybe they didn't wanna know the truth. And this is not just even a reason we go back into the invasion of Mexico or, or the Philippines or, you know, name it or Panama. It's, I mean. It's not something that's just happened in the last two years. No. That, and it's not a defense. It… hasn't it always been the case that even in nature, that the big strong, more powerful is going to step on the smaller if they can get away with it?

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Sure. I mean that's, that's the whole point of being big, strong and powerful. 

JIM COTTER:  And is it that America was supposed to be better? Was that the thing that bothered you? Because you have struggled with the idea of your being an American for a long time because of this cozy chicken pot in every two cars in the driveway, apple pie, whatever the, the, the Funhouse mirror version of, and I say this, I'm an American now myself, so I don't, I can't speak to overall Americans obviously, but, but this sort of funhouse mirror version that Americans have for themselves, that it's God-fearing, hardworking American dream. You clearly from a young age knew that wasn't the case. And, and you, you struggled in practical terms and you went and did things to try and make it better. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Not as many as I would like to have done. 

JIM COTTER: Well, that's a very American thing to do, to find out that something's wrong with 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Yes. 

JIM COTTER: And then try to march out and do something 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Nobody likes to think of themselves as sadists. And America has, at least since the second World War, presented itself as the champion of certain values. And of course, famously democracy as it's rigging elections elsewhere all over the world. And it's very flattering. It's very soothing. The other side of that formula is feeling betrayed because we were brought up to thank, you know, what a wonderful place, doing good all over the world, doing good in our own country, being an excellent country. 

JIM COTTER: But even, even the presumptions of the culture was that people would get educated, be honest, be faithful. Yes, yes. You know, do it like the, the fundamental on the, the street level, on the, on the human level. These were very both optimistic and virtuous principles under which people tried to live. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG:  Yes. And in fact, I think of that often because when I was growing up, the middle class was very large and it was expanding and there was a huge post-war economic boom. And of course it did not extend to everyone by a long shot, but it extended to quite a, quite a lot of people and my contemporaries and I think the generation before me, and probably the one after, benefited from really excellent public schools that were available that is not available to people any longer. 

JIM COTTER: On the contrary, this generation have become indentured servants effectively. Because if you don't have intergenerational wealth and you have to pay for college yourself, you must go and work for the man to pay back the loans. There's no excuses. You can't bankrupt your way out of it. So you gotta go, you not, you know, you gotta get to it 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Absolutely horrifying. And also the consequences, I think in the field of education are very, very degrading because education then has to be instrumental and it has to have definable focused goals. Whereas I think of education as something that is inherently inefficient and enables people to develop mentally and psychologically in areas that actually won't make any money for them, and yet will afford an enormous amount of pleasure. And I think how restricted mentally children, students are now that they're really kept on very narrow tracks and have to be to become part of this earning machine or producing machine or simply a part of the machine, of the market. And that seems to me to be almost the most dehumanizing thing that can be done to people. To go back to your question about happiness, I think that the greatest pleasure that humans can have that's available to humans is to be able to expand into their full mental arena, develop some, I mean, I think everybody has a longing and a drive for some kind of aesthetic pleasure. And to be able to learn how to find that and refine it and enjoy it, to me is the greatest thing that humans can have. And that also to me is part of what education, ideally, is how to enjoy learning things, how to enjoy listening to things, how to enjoy seeing, reading things. And it, it just permeates every area of your being. And if people are denied that through this kind of education that we've seen developing over, what, 20 years, 30 years, maybe even a little longer. It's a tremendous cruelty. I think 

VO: Now in her seventies, Deborah Eisenberg has amassed an impressive body of work, despite famously only completing one piece a year. In five short story collections, one play, and a handful of essays she has examined multi-generational immigrants, young transplants to New York, people adversely affected by U.S. foreign policy, the blissful ignorance of entitled Americans and the wisdom of age. She's one of MacArthur Genius Grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 2007 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Four decades on, Eisenberg says making fiction has become more difficult with time. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Writing is the way I think. And nothing has made me sit down to write now for several years. I think that my mind isn't ready to formulate a coherent, fictional world. 

JIM COTTER: I'm guessing,  I think that despite how you felt about life in your early days, you expected that things would get better. And when I say get better, that the world would heal itself, would, would behave itself better, would become more moral. And you grew up in a period in the sixties and and your generation had enormous opportunity and it hasn't gotten better. It's gotten worse. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Yeah. Uh, there's no question about that. That my poor maligned, despised generation, which I think of as very, very wonderful, really beautiful— there was a veneer of money in this country so thick, we could walk on it. We didn't have to worry about money, we didn't think about money. We rejected the idea that making money had great value. I mean, I'm speaking for a lot of people, of course, but there were a lot of people and we did believe that the world was going to get better and it was getting better and 

JIM COTTER: Everything was possible. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Yeah. And, uh, of course it didn't, and it, now it's as bad as it's ever been, if not worse. 

JIM COTTER: I just worry that your generation, the people who really had morals, and we see it in this generation as well, like phenomenal interest in in put in things being right. But we saw very few political leaders who were obviously, you know, influenced by those ideals. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG: Right? Well, some of them were murdered, some of them were jailed. 

JIM COTTER: But yes, the idealists tended not to, first of all, not to wanna be in, um, conventional politics. 

DEBORAH EISENBERG:Yeah. The body politics  And then that has been proven to be true. Yeah. No, my generation left the field and who did we leave it to but the assholes? It's true. Uh, and so when we're blamed as we have been by subsequent generations, there's a lot of ground for that blame because we did leave the field. But I do think that the, that the vision that was shared by my generation as a whole was, it was fantastic. It was beautiful. But yes, it, the amplifying noise is very inhibitive, I think 

VO: Now in her late seventies, Deborah Eisenberg grapples with her generation's flights and failures laid bear. In hindsight, still, it seems unlikely that she said all she's going to say. She will no doubt continue thinking deeply about the generations proceeding and following her own— at her own pace, of course. 

PROMO

VO: On the next Articulate Experience: three writers whose lives were changed by one fateful moment.

Just before his freshman year at college, a fatal accident gave Darin Strauss permission to live life how he wanted. 

DARIN STRAUSS: But then I had the accident. I think that was sort of the final push. Maybe it was just knowing that, uh, that life can throw you these curve balls. So why, why play it safe anyway? 

VO: Sarah Ruhl wasn’t sold on becoming a playwright, until one night she crashed into her purpose. 

SARAH RUHL: There’s a part of me as an origin story that feels like, “did I die? Wait, has my whole life been a dream since?” I mean, it's just strange to me that there was a complete and total blackout before this change of vocation happened. 

VO: And, the poet Natasha Trethaway was 19 when her mother was murdered. Nearly 4 decades on, the loss remains a driving force.

NATASHA TRETHAWAY: I was saying to myself, “now, you know, now you have a wound that never heals hat might make you an Artist”.  

VO: I’m Jim Cotter — join us for the next Articulate Experience. 

CREDITS 

VO: 

Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.

More at articulateshow.org

The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.

Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.

Original music and sound design by John Avarese.

I'm Jim Cotter.