Jamie Chai Yun Liew writes while she waits — at the soccer field, the passport office, wherever
The Canada Reads finalist says her desk is not always a creative space
Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Dandelion author Jamie Chai Yun Liew.
As I am writing this piece, I am in a classroom where my son's strings ensemble is rehearsing. The music, when they are in sync, is stunning, and I find myself pausing to take in the harmony.
I write in predictable places like my office, coffee shops, libraries, archives and at vacation cottages. I have written in transit, in hotel rooms, airports, on ferries, planes and trains. My laptop and notebooks come with me to beaches, ski lodges, on the sidelines of a soccer pitch, on the sidewalk waiting to get into a Passport Canada office and in hospital waiting rooms. My favourite places to write have been in kopitiams and open-air hawker markets, on the balcony of a chilli crab restaurant on stilts in the water, at a picnic table in Kapi'olani Park in Honolulu where a bird landed next to my laptop, and my mother's dining room table. My least favourite places are the air-conditioned malls in Southeast Asia, freezing without a sweater.
I write wherever I find myself. I didn't always write like this and longed for a desk with a nice ambience. My research, however, takes me on the road. Even when I am home, I have a family with a busy schedule, and the opportunity to write does not always present itself when I am in an ideal location. My day job jealously covets my time at my desk and pulls me from it to teach, into meetings, and sparingly, to court. The desk is not always a creative space. Increasingly, I find myself writing where I am waiting, in between the places my family and I need to be.
I like immersing my writing in places. Certain spaces — with their aesthetics, smells and temperature — find themselves into my narratives. I write with bowls of curry laksa next to me, listening to the sound of gossiping aunties, complaining uncles and the sirens of cicadas.
When I was writing Dandelion, I didn't know my early reflections would become a novel. It started as a journal to creatively document how I felt about the research I was conducting about statelessness. I wanted to collect and store the emotional aspects of the stories I heard from stateless people, their families and advocates because I could not neatly fit them into my legal or academic writing. Their sentiments felt familiar and echoed what I thought was an unusual story my father told me about why he immigrated to Canada.
I was grappling with questions of why statelessness is pervasive, common and largely unknown. I began to write with the hope of bringing the varied felt experiences migrants as well as stateless and racialized people endure — both the joys when risks taken work out and the grief when something lost is longed for.
In Dandelion, I was attuned to the traditional Indigenous territories the story was situated in and I was sojourning in. Within the pages, I tried to pay homage to these Indigenous communities in small ways. Wherever I was writing, I revisited in my mind some favourite locales from my childhood and the places where I have found community, especially those I frequented on maternity leave.
As I connected the vignettes and rewrote my drafts, I found myself wanting to steal time to jot down a thread or connection. When I was in Ottawa, I grew tired of writing in one place, agitated and restless, and would move to different establishments west on Somerset Street in Chinatown, then I would keep going as it became Wellington Street. I met friends in their writing spots in Old Ottawa South. I rotated among the local haunts that tolerated me.
When I was in Southeast Asia, I succumbed to sunset views, sitting on patios and balconies, while my spouse put the kids to bed. While my children were in daycare or school there, I frequented outdoor establishments during the slow peaks of their day, sometimes slapping my ankles where mosquitos found me. I have written in the dark while my children were sleeping in the same hotel room, tucking a knitted shawl under my arms, with the light from my laptop as my only guide. I have also written while sweating, drinking a piping hot, extra sweet teh tarik in a café that only had ceiling fans, getting angry at a pen that leaked across my notebook.
Writing is a lonely experience and I seek accompaniment: leaves rustling in the trees, people laughing next to me, the strange playlists in coffee shops and the shuffling of snow pants. I am grateful for the times I can steal a moment in between writing, when I like to pause and take in light passing through different windows, appreciate a good conclusion to a piece of music being played and sip my tea.
Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads March 17-20.
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