Map of My World—or Why I've Fallen off the Edge

I've just completed an assignment that has starkly revealed how little I know about "bedrock" reality.

Before going into detail, I'll put it to you: What would you write if you were asked to describe the geography of the United States? What kind of map would you draw?

I've been challenged by this in the past few weeks, and so, coincidentally, has my seven-year-old son.

In my Vietnamese class, my fellow students and I first translated a narrative titled "Địa lý Việt Nam" ("The Geography of Vietnam"). This essay included sections on "Núi và cao nguyên" (mountains and highlands), "Sông" (rivers), and "Biển và bờ biển" (oceans and coastline). Each section contained several densely packed paragraphs of Vietnamese, detailing facts like the highest point in Vietnam (Mount Fansipan) and the length in kilometers of various rivers, including sông Cửu Long (the Mekong).

In class and at home, I pored over a map of Vietnam in Vietnamese, split between two modes: learning the facts of the landscape and a different way of expressing those facts. I found it fascinating and mind-twisting.

I've always been good at reading maps, but here even places in Vietnam that I had visited needed to be rediscovered. The reframing of place names, provinces, and borders in another language seemed an apt metaphor for viewing the land through a different cultural lens.

Yet I didn't expect such mental twists in viewing my own country. Our next assignment was to write an essay about U.S. geography. I thought this would be a snap at first, until I slammed up against my ignorance of information like the length of the Mississippi River.

Wikipedia (there's a joke in this link) and a variety of websites became my friend. But the real twist came in expressing direction and geographical formation in Vietnamese. My ignorance of the facts I thought I knew—what are the tributaries of the Mississippi, for example? Where does the Columbia originate?—made me feel I'd suddenly just landed on American shores, scratching my head.

One small example: directions such as northwest or southeast in English are reversed in Vietnamese—that is, tây bắc (or "westnorth"). This is easy enough to get used to, but it does also involve a perceptual shift in how one moves in physical space. The Southwest, for instance, is referred to as "miền Tây Nam" ("area West South").

Meanwhile, unknown to me until I attended a potluck breakfast in my son's second-grade class, he had drawn his own map of Vietnam, complete with illustrations of a compass and a ship. There's a thumbnail of it at the top of the post, but you might not be able to make out Nick's personal labels for places. Under "Hannoi," he inserted "us + me"; under "Da nang" he put "didn't go to"; and with "ho chi men city," he wrote "I was born here" and "next time."

Nick's map is accompanied by a story. "Chapter 1 Hotel!!" begins this way: "In Hanoi when I first looked at my hotel it was great with Ho Chi Minh's sayings as famous as MLK to Vietnam." In the second chapter ("Me!"), he writes, "Mom said that we would go to the market place. Vendors were selling everything from fish to...well sea food."

My husband and I were delighted to see his map and to read the story, of course. But it also brought home to me how personal one's sense of location in the physical world is. In Nick's case, after one visit to Vietnam a year ago, he can recreate that geography and label the places that matter to him far more vividly than he can the landscape of where he lives in Massachusetts.

I don't mean that he cares more for his birth country, although I think he'd say that he does. He is also quite rooted in our corner of Cambridge, the streets of our neighborhood that we often walk to school, the collection of shops a few blocks from our house. It's possible to live many places in your mind and heart, and I see his map of Vietnam as so much more than a geographically correct drawing.

As for my geographical correctness, I muffed the verbal description of oceans around the U.S. that I gave in class. When asked why the oceans are important, I basically said the equivalent of "they have everything from fish to...well, uh, seafood."

On the written essay, I scraped through with a B-minus, which is starting to look like a good grade to me. My inability to get top marks, even if I study for hours, is another mind-twist: my old assumption that if I just work hard enough, I'll succeed just doesn't cut it in this class. My new map of the world has dragons and demons on the borders, and includes the possibility of falling right off the edge into the unknown.

The funny thing is, I've felt an odd burden lift from me, a weight I hadn't even realized I carried. All the shifts in perspective have made me see that my internal topography is changing all the time. I think even a year ago, I might have found this a scary thought, one that required maximum mental fortifications. But just as a map of a country like Vietnam isn't static, it doesn't make sense to take the bedrock of me for granted, either.

I've discovered that my knowledge of geography is thoroughly embedded in personal experience: my old wood-block map puzzle of the United States from childhood; the many times on family car trips that we crisscrossed the flat agricultural lands of the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada mountains; the bike trails I've traversed repeatedly in Acadia National Park in Maine. I used to run along the trail from Inspiration Point in Tilden Park, so my memory of the spine of hills that separates Berkeley and the East Bay from the Delta isn't just visual; it's in my feet.

The borders of my map might jump from a floating turkey vulture above Tilden to the buzz of a hummingbird off the trail, from the traffic jams of Saigon to late fall in New England. If I drew a map of all these places—as Nick drew his of Vietnam—I'd label everywhere I've been and where I want to go, including the mysterious edges I can't know.

Am I Crazy to Study Vietnamese?

Đi học về—home from school—and the pros and cons of multi-tasking



This past weekend, my family attended a concert at a local Catholic church with a Vietnamese congregation. It was a fund-raiser featuring the legendary Khánh Ly, who, up until the Fall of Saigon, was akin to the Joan Baez of Vietnam. Her collaboration with the protest-songwriter Trịnh Công Sơn is still beloved by that generation of Vietnamese.

So there I was in a church basement with my family and 200-plus Vietnamese Americans. There was Khánh Ly, looking amazingly good for a woman in her mid-sixties, belting out those beautiful songs. She joked with the audience, accepting roses from her fans. She stood before multicolored tinsel streamers, a mirror ball flashing rainbow light.

I'd been nervous about attending this concert. After months of studying the language, I had performance anxiety about speaking Vietnamese. This turned out to be silly; we were in a suburb outside Boston. Yet I'd hoped to follow what was spoken on stage, if not sung.

Instead the words swirled over my head, out of reach. I felt like a frustrated cat, batting at flecks of light—or a little girl, trying hard to be an adult.

The revolving mirror ball, the language I don't quite understand, are emblematic of so much of my multi-tasking life. My attention divides and divides again. I'm not ADD in any clinical sense, but one book that's become a touchstone for me in the last few years has been Edward Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!

Hallowell, a psychiatrist who lives in the Boston area, popularized ADD and ADHD as diagnoses, and has written a number of well-known books about coping with these disorders. But in CrazyBusy, he goes a step farther, arguing that our multi-tasking, post-millennial, "CrackBerry" era fosters a form of cultural ADD. In that sense, we're all suffering.

I agree. And yet a funny thing has happened this fall, as I juggle more balls than ever, and I live with the consequences of an absurd decision to study Vietnamese for a second year in a row. I've started wondering if divided attention is a bad thing.

Most of us middle-aged geezers complain about memory problems. It's as if you hit forty and BAM! You can't remember your friends' names or how to spell words like gizzard geezer.

Most parents of young children, regardless of age, also complain about memory lapses. You're sleep-deprived, you're required to track dervishes in diapers, your vocabulary gets reduced to Elmo levels of comprehension. If you're working, you're subject to all manner of interruptions at home and the office.

As I sat down to write this, for example, my son Nick barged in and said, "Can I show you my armor?" He proceeded to put on a purple-felt apron from his dress-up box, securing it in back with a set of numchucks (string-connected sticks usually whirled around in a deadly fashion).

He placed a napkin over his head, crowning that with a robin-hood-style hat—the complete medieval samurai warrior. It was impressive.

Where was I?

I've been hit with a double-whammy, it seems: I'm way over forty with a seven-year-old child. (My own parents are also quite ill, but that's another story.) I'm back to writing full-time.

Then there's my Continuing Vietnamese class. I started studying Vietnamese because my son was born in Vietnam. (I've told some of this saga before in print: Click here for the long version. Also see my post "For Shame.") But my original reasoning, with its whiff of selflessness—I'll help Nick get in touch with his birth culture—no longer makes sense. I'm proceeding because of my own arcane interests and a stubborn need to prove myself.

Still, I almost dropped out at the beginning of this semester. It's a very small class of four students, two of whom are fluent speakers, and a dedicated teacher. There's absolutely no place for me to hide.

I have good days, especially when I've done the homework. But more often, they're bad. Very bad. Last week, I missed half of one class because my son was home sick; I arrived at another class with the tail-end of a migraine. I couldn't remember simple grammatical constructions. My stumblings were mixed with long, awkward silences in which I'm sure you could hear the gears grinding. I kept mumbling, "Em chưa hiểu." ("I don't understand yet.")

The week before, I found myself confusing the use of "open" and "closed" in English when distracted by my son. Now all my confusion of verbs of motion and prepositions in Vietnamese seems to be transferring to my native language.

Most of each class is conducted in Vietnamese; I understand about 50 percent. My worst moments are when I'm asked direct questions in which my comprehension is zero. The words seem to bounce off me like a handful of pennies thrown at a mailbox.

At the last class, the name for the Red River—sông Hồng—near Hanoi, a name I know well, kept tripping me up.

There's no doubt that some of my struggles are physiologically caused. Many researchers now believe that what we geezers really experience is failing attention. In "The Midlife Memory Meltdown," an article for O magazine adapted from her book on the topic, journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin says of our aging brains:

"When the frontal lobes are in top form, they're adept at figuring out what's important for the job at hand and what's irrelevant blather; a sort of neural “bouncer” automatically keeps out unnecessary information. In middle age, that bouncer takes a lot of coffee breaks. Instead of focusing on the report that's due, you find yourself wondering what's for dinner. Even background noise—the phone chatter of the coworker in the next cubicle—can impair your ability to concentrate on the task before you."

The thing is, I've always been like this. I'm great at synthesizing ideas, but I've never been good at memorizing facts. Historical dates elude me; foreign vocabulary evaporates as soon as I'm not immersed in it.

I'm also a life-long insomniac—an Olympic champion of sleeplessness—so much so that my husband thinks Barenaked Ladies wrote "Who Needs Sleep?" for me. Lack of sleep is a major cause of memory problems.

But the ideas! My many proliferating story ideas! Here's where I shine, and sleeplessness doesn't seem to slow me down. It's no accident that I'm running four blogs now—one in an editorial capacity for the Women's Review of Books with multiple authors on various deadlines—and writing print articles and prepping for teaching my magazine class in the spring.

A few years back—say, 2006, when CrazyBusy first came out—this would have seemed even crazier to me than it does now. Yet despite the fact that my brain isn't getting any younger, I feel more alive. I've gotten better at mental juggling. I won't claim I'm more organized, but my constantly dividing and skipping attention seems to be sparking me as a writer. I find myself excited by ideas all the time.

In part, that's because I have more control over my own writing and its distribution—a definite silver lining in these cathartic days in the publishing industry. Blogging encourages creativity on the fly.

But the study of Vietnamese also seems to be feeding my passion for words. Just the poetry of Trịnh Công Sơn's songs, the longing for peace and a lost Saigon, testify to so much rich complexity. "Xin cho tôi" ("Please give me" or "May I") ends with "May I ask for just one day."



There's another benefit, too: Experiencing bouts of incomprehension in class takes me back viscerally to what it's like to be a child. It's rare at my age to be humbled in quite this way. In Vietnamese class, I'm always being corrected and looking for approval; I feel by turns resentful, defiant, ashamed, and excited. I'm distracted by big booming life outside the window.

More than Vietnamese culture, then, I'm re-learning the culture of childhood. I'm that little girl listening to Khánh Ly, grasping for flecks of light. For a writer-parent, that may be the best training of all.

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell himself distinguishes between the "stress" that gets your juices flowing and the anxiety-producing mess of having too many commitments:

"If you’re busy doing what matters to you, then being busy is bliss. You’ve found a rhythm for your life that works for you. This world is bursting with possibilities; its energy can be contagious. If you catch the bug, you want to jump out of bed each day and get busy, not because you are run ragged by details or because you are keeping the wolf from your door, but because you are in love with this fast life."

I'm often grumpy about familial distractions; I long for the kinds of writer's retreats I used to take at colonies or in cabins by myself. The real world can get me down, no question, but I know my own work has taken off since I became a mother, despite the additional juggling.

Even the wisest of us doesn't know everything. And perhaps there's a real benefit to failing and stumbling and smacking up against our limitations. For writers, being in control is not necessarily a good thing.

This makes the whole concept of attention "deficit" wrong in metaphysical terms. Maybe we're all dumb mailboxes, pennies bouncing off us in this dervish of a universe. Instead of simply coping, maybe we need to accept the pennies, the flecks of rainbow light, our disorganized version of manna from heaven.

What about you? Do you struggle with divided attention? Do you ever find it a blessing?

Where was I?

I Don't Mind Being Named Martha Anymore

On Embracing the Talking Dog—or Silly Girl—in Me

I'm almost fond of Martha Stewart. She's got chutzpah, rising from the ashes of securities fraud. But anyone who's seen the messy piles in my house would know that I loathe housekeeping and hand-woven flower wreaths. I lack that Martha's spit and polish and need for physical order.

I'm not embracing my inner housekeeper here. Yet a recent mention of a children's book called Martha Doesn't Say Sorry! in a New Yorker article got me thinking about my given name, my long-time ambivalence towards it—and the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I'm growing into it.

According to Daniel Zalewski's article, the latest picture-book Martha by Samantha Berger involves a "stubborn" otter. It has a transparent moral message, Zalewski notes, meant to encourage discipline.

But my first reaction was to think, oh, no! Not another wacky animal character named Martha!

There's already Martha the hippo of all those George and Martha books by James Marshall; there's Martha the talking dog of Martha Speaks and other titles by Susan Meddaugh, now a PBS cartoon series.

To be fair, Zalewski's article is about a lot more than potential Martha-bashing; he argues that many "obstreperous" children's books today depict parents as wimps. He also cites a slew of other characters named everything from Olivia to Finn to Lilly. There's no nefarious trend in naming creatures Martha—I think.

But do other people second-guess their name, as I have since childhood? Some do, I know. For those crossing cultural boundaries, often in the most painful way, it's a serious issue. See The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, in which an Indian immigrant's son resists being named Gogol Ganguli. Or talk to any international adoptee, even one as young as my seven-year-old son.

Back in the day, I longed to be Miranda or Antoinette or Angelique. Instead I got stuck with a long-dead grandmother's name, somebody with whom I'd never shared a personal connection.

I hated being a girl named Martha in the 1960s and 1970s. It was right up there with "A Boy Named Sue." In my Bay Area schools, I was the only one among a swath of Kathys and Debbies and Sherrys. There were a few Martas and Maritas, but the Spanish variations seemed to have infinitely more soul than my Anglicized "tha."

Flashback to third grade: It's February. President's Day is approaching, along with my annual dread of what will be shouted at me on the playground: "Martha Washington! Martha Washington? How's George?"

A year later, I'm at Bridget B's pool party, a few months after the Beatles's White Album has been released. I walk into the B family's swanky new house in a new suburban tract of what will eventually become the outer reaches of Silicon Valley—she's got a pool!—and the other girls giggle, as Bridget plays, "Martha My Dear."

I've never heard it before. I'm blushing, and I hate blushing. I suspect Bridget is trying to humiliate me. "It's so cute!" she insists.

I was still a child, but my response then was more complicated than hating "Martha Washington." I was embarrassed by the idea that I could ever be anyone's inspiration. It was even more depressing when I found out later that Paul McCartney wrote the song for his sheepdog.

Flash forward: I'm an adult hanging out with my friends' kids—and later the friends of my son—and these children love to say to me, "George and Martha!" (downcast eyes, sly grins) or "Are you a dog?" (snort, snort). I laugh along, because the kids seem so delighted to meet an actual human being named Martha.

Not so long ago, a friend of mine shakes her head and tells me, "You really don't seem like a Martha, you know?"

I'm guessing that's a compliment. Various baby-name books and websites translate it as "lady" (from the Aramaic "Marta") or mistress of the house. It's a good fit for Martha Stewart but didn't stick to Martha "Calamity Jane" Cannary Burke, frontier hellion of the late 1800s.

By 2008, the name Martha was ranked 617 in popularity, according to the Social Security Administration. At least it made the top 1,000, but Martha has been on a steady decline for a century, with a few spikes around 2000. Emma and Isabella were the most popular girl names in 2008; Madison was fourth, and Olivia came in a hot sixth.

(I feel compelled to point out that, in addition to Martha, many animal characters have old-fashioned women's names like Olivia and Frances—a pig and badger, respectively—as well as Opal and Daphne of the Toot and Puddle universe—also pigs.)

Meanwhile, Namipedia users on the Baby Name Wizard site rated Martha as sounding smart and strong but not young or sexy.

Yet when I think about Martha the hippo or Martha the talking dog—and really take in those wonderful books—I realize that maybe the name fits me better than I used to believe.

Martha the dog can't shut up after she eats a bowl of alphabet soup and gets the gift of human gab. In Martha Speaks, she annoys her family by rambling on as they're watching TV or reading:

"There's a poodle over on Circuit Street I'd really like to play with. He's small, but what a dog! And speaking of small, I'm sure you're all curious about the early days of my life..."

Martha the hippo wears huge print skirts and is George's best friend. She's pictured smoking a cigar and playing a saxophone. In George and Martha Back in Town, she stands on her head on a surfboard. George, the lifeguard, has a tough time reigning her in:

"Very soon George saw that someone was disobeying the rules.
'No horsing around!' he called through his megaphone.
'It's all right!' shouted Martha. 'It's only me!'

By college, I identified with "Martha My Dear." It became an affectionate nickname from some of my closest friends, who would address letters to me as "M.M. Dear." Others still call me Marth or M ("Em").

The most famous of us—Martha Graham, Martha Stewart, the fictional Martha Jones of Doctor Who—make things happen. Martha may even have become cool because of that sexy Doctor Who character, at least in the U.K.

So is it possible that I actually like my old-fashioned, unpopular name?

This is a fate I never could have imagined at fifteen. But it's true. I can save the world with words, especially in the guise of the latest Martha Jones. I'm zany and stubborn and I refuse to apologize. I can't stop talking or writing, and what's wrong with that?

Even Paul McCartney has said Martha was his muse, not just a sheepdog.

When you find yourself in the thick of it
Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you
Silly girl...