Today I feel like a superhero, except without the super powers. No, I’m the superhero with the double life, changing in the phone booth, racing from one reality to another in the blink of an eye. Today, we slept in, and the day started with a multi-coordinated dash to get dressed and fed and breast milk expressed and the children out the door in under an hour, in the care of their super-dad. Then my writing day started, except not really, because I still needed a shower. This superhero starts slow. Eventually, the writing portion of my writing day began, and I sat on the blue exercise ball and worked on poems. It was definitely a poetry day. I even wrote a new poem! I worked around the muffins for dictators theme of an earlier blog entry. Sort of a recipe for poetry poem. Somewhere in there, I fed the baby, packed my handsome leather bag (for professional use only), dug my nice boots out of the basement, and brushed my hair. Kissed all goodbye, jumped in the car, and drove off to the symposium on fiction for Chinese and Canadian writers. Apparently, I count as a Canadian writer, which is nice to know. In fact, this was my disguise.

Parked, followed signs, entered typical room in typical university facility, pleasant but furnished on budget and by committee. Hoarsely informed organizer of my temporary disability–though thankfully my voice worked enough that I could make myself understood, which was not the case yesterday. Spent the first fifteen minutes chatting with Alistair MacLeod, whom I’d met once before, a long time ago. He seemed to accept my disguise. I was the representative young local writer. One woman thought I was a university student. Which is a pretty nice compliment at this point in my life.

The Chinese writers, flown in from China for this event (though perhaps for more?), spoke very little English, so we were seated in groups with a translator to facilitate conversation. I found the whole process very interesting. I was seated with Dennis Bock, who coincidentally was our neighbour when we lived in Guelph, and his wife and I had babies at the same time, so that felt most unintimidating. I was only kinda in disguise at that point. At our table was Fe Gei, a writer who was working on a massive trilogy about modern Chinese history; he also writes short stories, one of which I was able to read in translation before meeting him. Few of the writers had the opportunity to read each other’s work, since most hadn’t been translated. At our table, we talked, with some difficulty, about concepts of economic class in Canada and in China, and about ideology. It felt like we were trying to represent very different worlds to each other, through the voice of the translator, who had moved to Canada sixteen years ago, and had her own opinions on subjects.

Toward the end of the conversation (well after the meal of take-out Chinese food had been consumed), I was able to ask Fe Gei about his story writing, and about his interest in Western writers, and about Raymond Carver, whose stories he greatly admired. He asked what ideas I was trying to convey through my writing, a question that very nearly stumped me, so I simply said that I start with an emotion, that I write about relationships. That I try to get at the essence of what seem like ordinary moments. He seemed quite chuffed about this. I was taken back to China, which I visited as a high school student in 1992, and to those formal, funny gestures of goodwill, of elaborate and heartfelt hospitality that are much greater than we Canadians are accustomed to offering or receiving. How can I get at this? He said it had been an honour to meet me, and that he would tell young Chinese writers he mentors about me and the kind of writing I was doing. I said something in a similar spirit. But I am not sure whether these were empty compliments of the sort we are used to giving and receiving; or whether he meant it with all his heart, which is what it looked and sounded like. I guess I will never know. Lost in translation.

Then I said a quiet goodbye, and slipped away, because my time was up. Come to think of it, it was less superhero, and more Cinderella. The clock struck midnight and I dashed to the car, just Mommy again, and drove home to my baby, who was desperate for a nurse, and my three-year-old, who, in the few moments while I was changing CJ’s diaper managed to colour both of her hands with a green marker. She approached me with hands hidden under sweater. “Mommy, I not colour my hands.” Huh? “No, Mommy, I not colour my hands.” Oh dear. What a sweet confession. So we added scrubbing hands to our to-do tasks before walking up the hill to school to pick up the kids. I took off my boots and put on my sneakers, and that was all it took.