Since 1981
I was born on the coast of Southern California to loving parents who raised me well. No sooner was I seat-legal to fly, we moved to the opposite coast, and then shortly after to Norway. All this was because of my father’s job as an engineer for Mobil Oil, a job that moved us about every 18 months among several countries by the time I was 13. In this way, I missed most of the American 80s, and spent my wonder years in places like Jakarta and Doha, returning to the States for short intervals.
As a young child, I caught glimpses of American pop culture embedded in VHS tapes sent overseas by friends and family. I have vivid memories of certain Saturday mornings and especially a broadcast of Star Wars: A New Hope which included actor interviews and commercials for C3P0s, a sugar cereal that did not survive long enough for me to try it. I believed it to taste like a Frosted Flake, but in the shape of two Apple Jacks fused together. Between overseas postings, we returned to a house in Pennington, New Jersey, near Princeton, where Mobil had its research and development offices. Our neighborhood was leafy green with white picket fences, four seasons, and friendly neighbors. I remember eating pizza for the first time at a bowling alley party. Yellow school buses, little league baseball, late-model Legos, playing wall-ball at Hopewell Elementary during recess. Totally different from our homes in Indonesia, where beggar children scavenged our trash cans to survive.
My strongest memory of the 80s is from Jakarta, I was perhaps 6, and my sister and I were returning from a birthday party with gift bags full of candy we didn’t like. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but I ended up walking across the dirt street to offer the party favors to the neighbors while the driver leaned against the wrought iron gate of our walled villa smoking a clove cigarette. That wall had broken green glass cemented along the top. I lost my nerve halfway when the faces began to appear in the shadows of the slum houses that ringed our block. I dropped the bags, ran back to Mom and Muhammed, and within seconds the kids had descended upon the candy and it was just gone. At night, a man walked the streets playing bag-pipes. Other music: the call to prayer following the path of the sun, roosters in the morning, and goats climbing on cars parked in the road as we drove past in the school van.
In 1992 we moved to Qatar, a place that no one had ever heard of at the time. A family friend asked if we were outside of SCUD missile range, which we were, barely. As I recall, we were to have moved earlier in the year, but were postponed by the first Gulf War. We lived in an ex-patriot compound in the capital city, Doha. There were white stucco walls separating each house, of which there were four basic designs and everybody had the same initial furniture package. It was so damn hot in the summer, you could literally fry an egg on the hood of your family’s Land Cruiser, but we still walked around barefoot, using the walls as our own adolescent highway system. (No broken glass embedded here.) At first I went to the British school, where my claim to fame was the Emir’s son often asked me for my math homework to copy at the beginning of class. That was 7th grade, or rather, first form. For 8th grade, I switched to the American International School, which was less prestigious, but more inviting. It was there, in English class, that I began writing fantasy stories that consumed me every day after school and often on the weekends. That’s when I first caught the bug.
The following year I returned to the States, solo, to attend a boarding school in New England near family. In high school, my core group of friends shared three common denominators: we wrestled, we read fantasy and sci-fi, and we spent our Sunday mornings playing chess or taking long walks. Perhaps also, none of us were cool enough to drink or do drugs—we were weird enough chasing goblins through the woods of Southborough. So my brain, not yet fully formed, was spared the artificial intensity of an all too typical high school experience, and for that I am thankful.
By age 17, I was not all that interested in college. My plan, if you can call it a plan, was a vague idea of joining the Marines, like an older schoolmate who was captain of our wrestling team had done. He was doing ROTC at Harvard. I had a less grand vision (realistic) of working my way up to an NCO. But then our wrestling coach left the school and his replacement failed to inspire in the same way. If there’s one thing a high school wrestling coach must be, it’s inspiring. Teenage boys need to exercise, hard, for two or three hours a day in order to emerge as decent human beings, and that doesn’t happen on its own for most of us. I quit the squad but held on to lacrosse and soccer, which I found great enjoyment from, and was even captain of my JV teams. Senior year, a new teacher joined the faculty. He taught drama, which I took both semesters, as well a storytelling class with a master story teller, who was also my Shakespeare teacher. This was another game changer. It took long Sunday walks through the woods hunting dragons to the level of “for credit”. Ultimately, I would attend Emerson College, where I earned a BFA in creative writing.
In high school I had grown up exploring Boston in limited ways: Blue Man Group, the Boston Pops, Quincy Market, Newberry Street. College was an apartment and finding a steady job at a Beacon Hill pub where I found myself making real money for the first time—much better than the shitty retail jobs I worked over high school summers. College was also girlfriends, writing classes, and movie screenings on the roof of a friend’s place in Mission Hill during the dog days. After college I was rejected from the graduate school I wanted to go to and worked as a cook at a nice restaurant. Met a girl. We moved to DC. I got a job as a teacher at a charter school in Anacostia. We broke up. I moved out. I bought a car and hit the road, hard.
My first year teaching, like all first year teachers if you’re doing it right, was an all-day, all-night, all-consuming venture. I think I read one single novel for pleasure that entire school year, Atlas Shrugged. The school where I taught was about as different from my high school as you could get. It took me a long time to unpack what all had happened there. After I left DC, I bought a National Parks pass and explored a number of them as I traveled the country, staying with friends, staying with family. Eventually I moved down to Pawleys, Island, SC to get serious about graduate school. I took a couple classes at Coastal Carolina: Literary Theory and African American Literature, both of which I had realized in DC, I knew nothing about. This is when I met my wife, Laura, who happened to take both those courses at the same time. Fell in love just in time to be accepted to the creative writing program at Boston University, finally, where I had been applying the Andy Dufresne method of acceptance for years: keep writing until they give in.
My teachers at BU are fantastic and changed my life forever. Are you seeing the pattern, yet? My peers, collegial, critical, and supportive. The fiction program at Boston University was everything I had hoped for, and more; approval was granted to upgrade the degree from MA to MFA the year I was accepted. A lucky break, indeed, and well worth the wait. One of the things that attracted me to BU is the no frills nature of the program. That is, you get one intense, productive year, then get out to make room for the next crop. In addition to my course work, I was fortunate enough to teach writing workshops fall, spring, and summer to undergraduates at the university and high school students at Boston Arts Academy.
Laura and I survived the long distance, in large part due to $9 fares on Spirit Airlines. When she was selected for a teaching fellowship with Princeton in Asia, she left for Thailand while I finished my thesis in Boston. A couple months later, we were based out of Chiang Mai, married, and striking out to surrounding South East Asia whenever we could.
We watched the Great Recession unfold on our computer monitors from a studio apartment with views of Doi Suthep, the mountain temple where we were blessed by Buddhist monks following the formalities of marriage filings. At the same time, we read the local English language dailies as the red-shirt, yellow-shirt political conflicts escalated. By spring of 2009 it was time to come back to America.
We returned to the beach, where we first met, and started preparing for the next chapter. I enrolled at Horry-Georgetown Technical College to study heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, and in 2010 we moved to the Clemson area of South Carolina. Laura is a graduate student at Clemson, pursuing dual degrees in history and literature, and I enjoy my work at a family-owned heating and air company. We live on lake Hartwell with our newborn daughter Ada and our two dogs. Today is a spring day and the azaleas are blooming.
March, 2012
Seneca, SC
