She completely dissed me, but that's another story.
Yet, I persevered long enough to gain a first date a few weeks later. There we sat, in a seafood restaurant on Sungjian Nan Loo (ie Sungjian South Road) in Taipei, Taiwan, making awkward conversation.
The most intriguing part was that we eventually settled on the topic of jewelry design. (There are several sources at hand in that part of the world for breathtakingly beautiful jade of various colors, sumptuous amber, and intricately worked silver.)
Now, if someone had tapped me on the shoulder at the time to let me know that within ten years, we would own a small gallery just north of Seattle, I would have immediately asked what he was smoking. I have to be honest here: I wasn't talking jewelry design with her because I was interested in it. I was saying whatever I needed to say to get to a second date.
And, I did. Which led to a third, a fourth, followed by countless ups and down, emotional highs and lows, the Chinese wedding, the American one, a gallery and - somewhere along the way - two slowly growing artistic careers.
Which begs the question: I've known and loved this woman for over twenty years. Just how much, if at all, has she affected my art?
Quite a lot, actually. When we met, I had no idea whatsoever of becoming a writer, whether novelist or playwright. In fact, I was so far from appreciating writing of quality that - typical of my upbringing - I read only spy, military, and crime thrillers. One after another.
To read a thoughtful novel, instead of an action one, was to my mind a sign of the effeminate. Only a "limp-wristed guy" (as we put it back in the Midwest) would ever do it.
And that's just reading such a novel. How about writing one?
Here's a bit from my first novel, Fighting for Eden...
It was a beautiful ride. In fields along the way, with a hawk soaring high above for company, they could see the lazy ballet of line after line of sprinklers throwing out their offering to the parched earth, their great ten foot high wheels rusting quietly in the morning's heat. Pausing to watch a rainbow doing its sparkling dance over a water line, a sight she never tired of no matter how often she saw it, she spotted a coyote in the distance skulking along the side of an irrigation ditch and, glancing quickly at Jake, thought a prayer of thanks that he wasn't carrying a rifle. Whip danced a few steps herself, rousing Jessie from her reverie...
Clearly not a passage you'll find in your average thriller.
Whence the change? As I recall, Manya's greatest influence on me as a writer came down to one question that she asked me long, long ago. We were discussing the merits of my typical reading fare, and she asked...
"You've read so many of these thrillers. How many of them do you remember?"
Almost none, I had to confess. They all just tended to blur, one into another. I thought that was the point, actually. Read to escape for a little while.
But, now, suddenly, this whole new world opened up. Why settle for the routine, the common, when I could reach beyond them for those who had gone one better? After all, if you've only so much time before the big curtain descends, why not spend it on the best?
And the rest, as they say, is history.
PS. (Fighting for Eden is available on Kindle, also in softcover from Lulu.)
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