Reading Nonfiction in 2022

Four nonfiction books absorbed me in 2022 and meandered their way into my writing:

1. Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories (2020) by Jonathan Padwe

2. The Geometry of Grief (2021) by Michael Frame

3. Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life (2017) by Jonathan Gould

4. Pictures at a Revolution (2009) by Mark Harris

I read "Pictures at a Revolution" in January 2021, the month Sidney Poitier died. I would highlight it on Kindle then stream a scene from In The Heat of the Night. I read that in 1967, when everybody was coming to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, the director managed to sneak in a print of the movie at a local theater for a midnight test screening. The audience had no clue that they were going to see Sidney Poitier slap a powerful old white man in town. "When we got to the scene where Endicott slaps Tibbs and Tibbs slaps him right back , there was suddenly no sardonic or ironic feeling in the audience. There was a gasp, an intake of breath throughout the theater that was almost palpable." Meanwhile, in the Philippines, thirty farmers were gunned down on Taft Avenue. They were on their way to the palace to ask former President Marcos to step down. Many of them wore amulets. They believed it would protect them from bullets. The carnage took place in the spring break of 1967 as young people from all over the U.S. flocked to San Francisco where I've lived since 2008. Otis Redding strode onto stage in Monterey in a silk green suit that summer, the same year my teenage parents first met in the central plains of Luzon. In Manila, Philippine National Artist Nora Aunor appeared in public for the first time after winning at the grand finals of a nationwide talent search. In Monterey, Otis Redding grabbed the microphone and commanded the audience to Shake! Everybody say it. Shake! Let me hear the whole crowd!

Jonathan Gould's phenomenal writing and exhaustively researched book, "An Unfinished Life", is a front seat ticket to a brilliant artist’s life cut short. Otis' plane crashed six months after the concert and I was born a week later, on the longest night of the year. I was grieving Ottis in the book when I learned that Marcos, Jr. won the election in the Philippines. It’s just one grief over another. It’s relentless. My most played song on Spotify during this period wasn’t Ottis Redding, but Sam Cooke’s "A Change is Gonna Come". I go to the movie And I go downtown And somebody keep telling me “Don’t hang around” It’s been a long time coming But I know a change gonna come Oh yes, it will. That song was a lifeline. Sam was Otis' idol. He was devastated when Sam died. Both gone, two artists who left fierce legacies into the world I was born into, the Sixties.

Two other books opened up new channels for my grief to meander—Michael Frame’s "The Geometry of Grief" and Jonathan Padwe’s "Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories." Frame is a mathematician and an expert in fractal geometry. I like how he can make me picture something like sadness as planes that can break into different dimensions of anguish, and how you can trace lines and patterns across time.

"A day is a laboratory for a life".

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories is arguably the best book I read in 2022. In Jonathan Padwe’s work, I read about the indigenous Jarai in Cambodia seventeen years after I stumbled into their funeral in the highlands of Rattanakiri in 2005. Padwe spent years living with them in Rattanakiri and wrote about violence and ecology. It allowed me to see grief in a different way, how the land itself could and would tell its story.

I was reading it around the time I was invited to a zoom reunion in Phnom Penh with writers I worked with many years ago. It had been more than a decade since I last saw them. They were students and recent graduates when I first met them. What they had in common were raw talent, youth, and a hunger to learn and tell stories through words and pictures. I reconnected with them, all of them still doing what they loved doing as writers and artists. We saw bits and parts of our previous lives in each other on that call.

I read Padwe's book and it made me think of some of the funerals I’ve attended in different parts of the world. Grief meanders. I witnessed a cremation in Nepal once. I was visiting the Pashupatinath Temple along the Bagmati River when I saw dozens of men, shrouded in white cloth wailing through the smoke. I had never seen so many men in anguish. All men, no women. They held each other, sobbing. I later learned that it had only been a few hours since they lost their loved ones. I wondered where the women were, who died. There were things to consider. Tradition. Economy. Space. In Thailand, we do a washing ritual. We gently pour water on one hand of the deceased. I participated in the ritual twice, hours after death, my final respects to a coworker who died in an accident, and my Thai boyfriend’s mother who died of old age. In South Africa, we traveled to Kuruman to attend a Catholic burial. I remember the non-stop acapella singing. The bereaved hummed as the pallbearers carried the casket out of the house. We sang on the streets all the way to the grave. We were still singing as we walked away, the sun in our eyes. A man’s hand reached out and held mine. I turned and recognized my local colleague from Pretoria, six feet tall, singing and smiling at me. It was the first time a man, a stranger, held my hand in public abroad. I was forty years old. I looked around. It seemed the most casual thing. People held hands. I didn’t know the words to the song, so I hummed.

I read these four wonderful books in 2022 and wrote four personal essays this year. One just came out. Thank you, Salt Hill Journal. Another is a finalist for the Narrative Prize Fall Story. I thank my husband, my editors, my therapist, my Filipina doctor, and the authors for helping me get through a tumultuous, violent, occasionally soothing, revelatory year of reading and writing our grief.