The City Writer Versus the Country Writer

Long before moving to the country in upstate New York, I had associated nature with purity—uncultivated land, the night sky gasping with stars, uninterrupted silence, the bald eagle spreading its impressive wings. Even though I wasn’t personally convinced by the little I read of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—their evocation of nature and their self-reliant spirits too distanced from my own childhood in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a hub of over eight million people—I still took their words as literary gospel, as one does with the classics. I was attracted to both of the authors’ connections to the natural world, the very mystery of which felt out of reach. From the time that I could articulate my dream of becoming a writer, I’ve held the devout-like belief that real writers draw their inspirations from nature, that real writers see through the veins of leaves with the eye and attentiveness of a scientist, that they live and work in solitude, in a mountain’s shadow—ideally, in a dilapidated cabin that they’ve built themselves.

It didn’t matter that nothing I ever wrote was grounded in place, true to my identity as a drifting immigrant who had never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home. In my mind, I’d built an altar to nature, to the romantic notion that true masterpieces sprout from remote soils, unsullied by humanity’s footsteps. Conveniently, perhaps, I ignored the fact that what I write and what I read are populated not by trees and babbling brooks, but by people, by their abrasive confrontation with one another, their misunderstandings, their failures. I read about silence, too, but it is the silence of people—which carries different shades of anger, disappointment, resignation, contentment, and death. It’s perhaps not a surprise that I fell in love with a man who grew up surrounded by nature, who walks comfortably barefoot on a field of dry grass and jagged rocks, while I limp behind, wishing I could enjoy it more.

*

For nearly eight years of living in New York City, my husband and I would leave for upstate, fleeing to Port Authority every other Friday, our backpacks still packed from the previous visit, our dog in a soft cage draped with a jacket or a scarf so we could sneak her onto the Greyhound bus. Our city routine consisted of an intense work week, punctuated by a few social outings where we managed alcohol consumption with attempts to redirect our stretched-thin bodies and minds by slamming weights at the gym, and then finally running toward the countryside for refuge. Recharge and repeat.

The city was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and I found myself in a constant push-pull, in a frenetic struggle toward psychological freedom—something I might loosely identify as freedom from distraction, ambition, striving, fear of missing out, expectations—and freedom from other people. In my love/hate relationship with New York, I’d begun to pathologize it. The city was becoming increasingly like a toxic partner. I wanted it to love me, needed it to accept me; I wanted to escape from it, while simultaneously I was drawn to its impossible demands. I’d had enough of the city and couldn’t get enough of it. The condition for a person to develop an addiction happens when dopamine is released in expectation of a reward, and as the reward becomes more irregular, we are driven to compulsively repeat a behavior in hope of pleasure. It is not pleasure itself that primes addiction, but its promise. The city, if anything, is an inexhaustible source of promises. You can be more beautiful, more talented, more successful, more popular; you can attend more events, try out more restaurants, go to more galleries, meet more important people, date someone more compatible—you can be more. Implicit within this promise is that who you are, as you are, is not enough.

Years before ever actually leaving New York, I’d perhaps been leaving in my mind, preparing myself by reading books like Never Can Say Goodbye, a collection of essays edited by Sari Botton, on writers’ complicated relationships with New York City.

In the summer of 2021, my husband quit his job of fourteen years. As I’d been freelancing for a few years by then, we were suddenly footloose. We got married in July, and in August, we packed our lives into boxes and left for upstate. The few weeks leading up to our move, I vacillated on a wide spectrum of emotions: mourning, joy, desperation, regret, excitement, fear. As I stood on the sidewalk watching my friend shove my healthy and embarrassingly millennial Monstera plant into the back seat of her car, I felt acutely what Elizabeth Bishop ingeniously termed “the art of losing” in her poem “One Art.”

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I’d left so many homes by then, from Vietnam, to Singapore, to Texas, to Oregon, and then New York, that I thought I had, in a sense, mastered losing—but nowhere else had I grown the way the city forced me to grow. There, I’d grown indoor tomatoes and seriously undernourished beans, adopted two cats, gained and lost friends, wrote my first novel, and fallen in love with my husband. On the steps to the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, in front of the Alma Mater statue, I’d passed out in a haze of drunkenness and shame after having my story workshopped. I didn’t feel good enough to be there, in New York, and despite that, I was.

Implicit within this promise is that who you are, as you are, is not enough. 

How, then, to say goodbye? Is leaving akin to failing? Was I admitting defeat? At the same time, I realized I was moving toward the life I’ve been fantasizing about since becoming a writer: a life of simplicity, of less. I was going to be a real writer, as my high school self had designated.

You’ve done nothing but tortured me, fuck you, I’m done, I said silently while facing an overflowing garbage can in the street, perhaps to make it easier to turn my back.

*

Upon hearing the news of my move, a friend told me, “Just don’t get up to any of the weird stuff Eve does,” referring to a character in my second novel Constellations of Eve, which drew inspiration for its desolate setting in the countryside—proof that I’ve been traveling in my mind toward quieter grounds, though I was now abandoning the very place where the novel had taken shape and came into being. I didn’t know yet that it was the industrialized misery of the city that had driven me inward to the mystery of the country and of nature. Counterintuitive though it may sound, I could imagine the countryside setting because I didn’t fully grasp it, and because I was immersed in its contrast. Inspiration, I’ve learned, is a sense of understanding, not necessarily mastery or familiarity; it is knowledge imbued with mystery. I often write about things because I seek to understand them, things that flicker on the line of being just within reach and, at once, ungraspable.

The cabin where I now live, in the summer, is surrounded by thick green foliage. Nestled in shadows, I am secluded from the road, other houses, other people. USPS does not deliver to my address. My phone does not get reception either. As winter approaches, I go out less and less; my only social interaction is with my husband and occasionally his family, who live about a forty-five-minute drive away. I resist falling into “the weird stuff” my friend ominously warned me of but increasingly find that my brain craves feedback where there is none.

A heavy sleeper my entire life, I suddenly find myself awake nearly every night around two or three in the morning. To lull myself back to sleep, I read with bleary eyes, not registering the words. As I’ve started doing commissioned copywriting, I find myself reading on how to write better headlines, SEO optimization, and sale conversions at three in the morning, while a family of squirrels noisily scurry back and forth on the cabin’s roof. Unsurprisingly, this does not put me back to sleep. I realize that I am hungry, so I rummage in the fridge for snacks, but there is nothing interesting there, as Asian food and ingredients are a rarity in the area. I’m hungry, hungry, hungry, my brain screams. The next day, I binge Inferno for six hours, a Korean dating show on Netflix—the Asian faces a comfort. There I am, I tell myself, as though I need to remind myself of who I am.

It isn’t only food or diversity I’m longing for, but the sound of an ambulance whirring past the window at midnight, the subway performers that I would pretend to be indifferent to while discreetly following their every move, fascinated by their ability to disappear amid a crowd after their act ends. It is different to walk down a city street as one among hundreds of people than to walk down a country road and encounter another person by chance. I am not just any stranger out here: I am a Vietnamese woman walking her dog. I make sure to nod at the passerby in order not to be perceived as rude. The specificity is agonizing—I realize how often I’d counted on invisibility in the city as protection, as a shield. How comforting it was to be one among millions, to be nobody. I rush through my walks, counting the steps because there is no marker by blocks, go inside the cabin, and shut the door. Silently, I pray to the transcendentalist poets to help me understand nature, while in reality, I cannot conjure the enthusiasm to go for a hike, let alone study a leaf’s detail with Zen-like devotion. Where is the inspiration I was promised?

Some days, I go with my husband to his father’s property, where my husband is building a tiny house on a trailer, plank by plank, nail by nail, with his own hands. It is winter, and snowing. I’m sitting in the front passenger seat in our car, my laptop on my lap, propped up by a neck pillow that permanently lives in the vehicle. My coffee steams in the car’s cup holder; my dog sleeps at my feet. I try to connect to the Wi-Fi from my father-in-law’s house, which doesn’t always reach the car—which is probably for the best; I will work on my novel instead of answering emails. Occasionally, my husband turns from wherever he is perched—on a ladder, on the roof—and waves to me to come check out his progress. I walk across the field, toward him, ice crunching underfoot, careful not to slip. He shows me the planks of wood he has torched and sanded, varying shades of a burning dark. They are beautiful. He is proud of his work. He is happy here.

Back inside my mobile office/SUV, I write about the city. I’m thinking of the time when I found a green glass bottle with its neck wrapped in paper towels shoved down the toilet at Think Coffee on the Lower East Side. I had really needed to use the restroom, so I bit my lips, took some paper towels, and fished out the bottle. Let’s hope it’s not a bomb, I half joked to myself. I think about the neatly dressed young man who was in the bathroom before me, who had held the door open for me. Who are you? I thought, and, Why? He couldn’t have possibly believed the bottle would fit. What exactly was his goal? I alerted the store manager of this strange occurrence, and also because there was no running water—it appeared the young man had also turned off the valve to the sink water before he left. Was it just a random act of ill will, or childlike malice? By the time I left the café, I was alive with inspiration.

Where is the inspiration I was promised?

In the city, there are vast fortunes, as well as misfortunes: under bridges are the makeshift tents of many people struck by homelessness, and skyward are the multimillion-dollar penthouses, which ironically are often vacant since they only serve as pied-à-terres. This sharp contrast creates the kind of industrialized misery particular to metropolis. Perhaps it is from this constant social tension that writing is born. All good writing introduces, wrestles with, sustains tension. Ideas occur perhaps not from what happened, but within the tension of what could have happened, not from what was, but what could have been. In my writing, I’ve always prioritized emotional and psychological landscapes of people and not of trees or of weather, unless they reflect the characters’ inner states. Ideas come from other people—a small revelation. And the city offers, if anything, the gift of other people in abundance.

*

Today, I find myself looking out the windshield. My father-in-law is fidgeting with the engine of his tractor. Frustrated, he grumbles to himself. Across the lawn, his other son, my brother-in-law, is trying to find out whose dead cat he has wrapped up in a piece of cloth in the garage, after mistakenly informing everybody that his own pet, identical in color and markings to the dead cat, had apparently been run over and killed. Occasionally, people come knocking on the passenger window to tell me something, a bit of news, some gossip. My brother-in-law stops by to hand me The Book of Paul, written by his great-grandmother about his great-grandfather. It reads like the idealized résumé of a king. I’m moved by the book, its attempt to commensurate a life, and by the exclusion of the vulnerabilities that would have made that life interesting. I consider my brother and father-in-law, and my husband—three men in the same orbit and yet always missing each other, unable to say just what they mean.

The winter sky is gray and silent. Instead of street lamps, star lights are the unintended witness to the lives of others. I do not overturn stones and rocks on my path, nor am I able to differentiate between the songs of birds—I’ve finally given up on letting Whitman or Thoreau dictate how I should love nature—but I am looking underneath things. Choosing one life means missing out on another; it is not possible to be everywhere all at once, to do everything, to be everyone. For inspiration, I needn’t look far, but out the windshield, at the whirl of lives around me. The silence of men is louder than any city sirens. The city and the country have that in common; they’re both built on the backs of people. They’re both chock-full of unrequited dreams, hopes, and regrets. I, too, can love a blade of grass when it’s held in the palm of a grandmother, and the serenity on my husband’s face as our home materializes before his eyes. I push the car ignition to turn on the heat to warm myself. Someone tells me I am welcome to work in their living room, but I decline, not quite ready to exit the car, to let go of the idea of being in transit. Things might be different tomorrow, next week, next month, but for now, I can sit here in the life I’ve chosen. Joyously missing out.

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