Han Ong on Writing on the Basis of Vibes

In your story “Ming,” a poet named Thadeus inherits a Chinese artifact worth millions of dollars from a man he knew very briefly years earlier. Did you begin with that premise and see where it took you, or did you know from the start where the story would go?

The subjects and the various elements of the story were discrete islands to begin with. For the longest time, I wanted to write a story about an outrageous gift—so that’s one strand. And then I was visiting a friend at N.Y.U. Langone, and I thought, out of nowhere, The hospital should have a poet-in-residence program; it would offer the patients some comfort, as well as healthful social interactions. Then, regarding the outrageous gift, I began to consider that it might be a valuable piece of art, and that it would be along the lines of a Matisse canvas, say. I don’t remember how the Matisse canvas transformed into a Song-dynasty celadon cup, except that I was reading a lot on the subject of chinoiserie at one point. And, lastly, I used to walk by my neighborhood church on my way home late at night, and eventually I realized that the people who were often on the sidewalk having the most quiet, intense conversations had just got out of an Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meeting and that the subtext of their hushed talk was “Don’t let me be alone right now.” This understanding gave me the most hair-raising sensation, and I knew that I would write about these people one day.

Even if I tried, I couldn’t hope to do better in describing how this story was written than Prince’s lyrics for his song “1999”: “I was dreamin’ when I wrote this / Forgive me if it goes astray.”

El-Masry and his bequest are a mystery to Thadeus. Are they a mystery to you as well? Or do you have a sense of what el-Masry saw in Thadeus that inspired the gift?

It could be a big capricious act on el-Masry’s part. Or an ailing el-Masry could have inflated the meaning and import of his time with Thadeus. Or there could have been genuine feeling from the older man for the young poet, a recognition (unspoken) of gay kinship. Or el-Masry could have read the poem that Thadeus wrote about him and published in a book of poems about his time at N.Y.U. Langone, where the two men met. Maybe el-Masry loved the poem: the bequest could be el-Masry’s own poem, in return for Thadeus’s. Or maybe el-Masry was lukewarm about the poem, but still decided to gift Thadeus with a precious Chinese artifact. Maybe the teacup is to commemorate the ritual of tea drinking that the two men engaged in every day for two weeks while el-Masry was bedridden. Or el-Masry could simply be a resolute, independent, solitary, obdurate character, and, when it came time to create a list of people to leave things to, he had only three names, none of them family members, and one of them Thadeus’s.

Thadeus is a regular at A.A. meetings, where he has a community of sorts. How important to the narrative is his history of alcoholism?

As the earlier Prince lyrics that I quoted to describe my writing method for “Ming” attest, I understand much of the story only on an intuitive level—on the basis of “vibes.”

The daisy chain of “vibes” for “Ming” goes something like this: Thadeus’s being in A.A. means that he was formerly “in the drink,” which means that he was swimming, which means that he saw the world at an askew angle, which means that he is prone to swooning. So Thadeus’s being in A.A. made sense because el-Masry’s bequest puts him “in a great swoon” for the second time in his life (the first being the stretch of time he spent drinking). Most of us who lead humdrum lives welcome any opportunity to swoon, but for Thadeus it’s an existential crisis: he’s afraid that he’ll “swoon” right off the edge of the cliff!

Also, I was interested in this paradox, although I understood it only retrospectively: How does a character with a propensity for self-sabotage (suggested by the history that took Thadeus to A.A.) deal with a gift that is offered, in a sense, with some underlying love?

You give us a fair amount of information on Thadeus’s current life and circumstances—and a little on his drinking days—but no sense of his larger background and past, though his last name, Wong, suggests a Chinese heritage. Why did you choose to limit what the reader knows about him beyond the present tense of the narrative?

Having already cited “vibes,” I guess I’ll continue in this vein. These decisions—to circumscribe the character with a limited set of attributes (for example, it’s been brought to my attention that I rarely describe my characters’ physical appearance)—are a matter of feeling. I do what feels right. I write what feels called for. My characters make decisions. In this case, Thadeus decides to go to A.A.; to seek out the company of his A.A. sponsor outside the meetings; to not enrich himself by immediately selling a valuable gift; to stop writing poetry; to begin writing poetry again. And, most of all, my characters talk; even Thadeus’s poems are a form of conversation. Through these two modes, so much is revealed about the characters. Sometimes there’s too much, and I can’t bear it. Also, per the late painter Agnes Martin, “We are born as verbs and not as nouns.” Amen, Sister Agnes!

As for the present tense—yes, I’ve written a lot of stories in the present tense. Meanwhile, I avoid the corners of the Internet where people have issued sermons and screeds about the ill-advisedness of writing short stories in the present tense. Nobody has been able, to me, to make a convincing case for not writing in the present tense. Also, bitch, please.

The celadon cup that Thadeus inherits triggers many reactions in him, one of which is that he writes poems for the first time in years. Why do you think this particular object—or its juxtaposition with some ultracheap, poorly fabricated figurines—sets him writing again?

This is my guess: it’s not just the cup but the fact that Thadeus knows he has only two years with it that concentrates his mind. For a while, there is some suspense: Will the cup freeze Thadeus forever in his non-writing silence? And then I suppose you could say that, by taking the pressure off, by treating this valuable object as simply a prop in child’s play, he is able to loosen up, and thus the writing comes back.

You mentioned that you wrote most of “Ming” in 2019. What kept you from getting to a final version before now?

I had a feeling that, if I didn’t get the closing poem right, the whole story, regardless of how faultless it had been up until that point, would just crumble; that this kind of story, more than any other, relies on a gossamer logic, on magic, if you will; and that the magic needs to be sustained until the very end.

I e-mail myself the latest drafts of my stories for safekeeping, so I’ll use two examples from the story’s evolution to illustrate my point about not getting the final poem quite right, until the eventual moment when I felt I did:

From April 22, 2020:

Hello, my name is Thad
and I’m an alcoholic
but what is this.
What is this.
What is this.
I am all right
right now.

From May 6, 2021:

Hello, my name is Thad
and I’m an alcoholic
first one nod
and then more
like grasses in the wind bowing
and unbowing
affirming the current of the room
passing and receiving and passing again
a circle
a cup
a communal sip
passing and receiving and passing
a second circle
the same cup
drunk to its dregs
and because they are waiting
because each nod is a clamor
I say it:
I am all right, I say,
right now.

In the first case, I feel that I’ve underwritten, and in the second that I’ve overwritten. Six months after May, 2021, I got to the version of the poem that appears in the story. And, once that poem fell into place, I knew that I had a story, and then I had to fix and improve the other poems in it as well.

As a last note, having name-checked Philip Levine in “Ming,” I will say that he is my favorite poet, and that my favorite Levine poem is called “The Suit.” ♦