Carey Dunne
Love and Memoir
the eye interviews ellen graf
PrintEllen Graf writes out of rural upstate New York where she lives with her husband Zhong-Hua Lu. She is a graduate of Bennington College Writing Seminars in non-fiction. Her first book, “The Natural Laws of Good Luck: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage,” details her marriage to a man in China whom she barely knew. The book has been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Authors promotion and the Borders Books Original Voices award. Graf is a recipient of both the Ludwig Volgelstein Writers Grant and of the New York Foundation for the Arts 2009 Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature.
Zhong-Hua and you were married within a few weeks of meeting each other. What was that like?
I knew his sister here—she was here in America. She thought, “Well, you know, maybe you’d like my brother.” She actually offered to take me to China and see if I liked him. At first I thought it was very kind of an uncomfortable idea and I was taken aback. But then I just started to open my mind because I didn’t really have a lot to lose, and also because someone was going to take me to China so if I didn’t like this person that was OK.
Many times people are either attracted to someone because that person has something that they lack, or because of surface-reasons—how a person looks can be very magnetic—so this trip to China just kind of removed all of that. Once I got to China, being able to communicate without language and without expectation was a huge part of the experience. ... Both of us knew that we were coming from very different cultures, so that helped us put aside expecting the other person to act in a certain way or communicate in a certain way.
Of course I couldn’t predict what hardships would befall us, but I didn’t feel it was a risk. Especially after I saw him, I knew that it would be OK. Spending time with him, feeling how he was, how he gave so much space just to be whoever I am. So risk is really just what you don’t know. What anyone has. What comes that you don’t know that you can’t predict. I guess you can say that is a risk. Anybody has risk. I didn’t feel it a risk in choosing him.
So what prompted you to write about your experiences?
Zhong-Hua has a genetic illness and ... before he really had gotten a grip on English, he became very ill and underwent some major surgeries. When I realized he wouldn’t recover quickly, I realized I had to do something to pay the bills. I was still working as a sculptor and a mask-maker when he came. Writing was the last thing in my bag of tricks. So I said, “I need to do this, because I’m not a business person, I don’t know how to make my art into something that can support both of us.” So I just decided to do it because I knew that because I didn’t have a work record, I didn’t have a way to get a different kind of job that would pay what we needed. I knew that I needed to pull out the stops for us in order to support us. So a lot of our journey has been driven by necessity.
That seems like you were going into writing the book with a lot of expectations and a lot riding on it.
I don’t know if I expected something except that I knew I was doing my absolute best. And I hoped my absolute best was enough to make something that would mean something to other people that really wasn’t just about us. It wasn’t about two eccentric people in a novelty kind of way, but it was about the staggering effort that it takes to try to love another person. So I guess the unexpected thing was that that actually happened.
I learned that that was what people connected to—they were connecting to their own efforts to relate, and a lot of people who thought they were odd couples for different reasons or people that wanted to take a risk or had wanted to when they were young, you know old people that wanted to, or even people relating to just that idea of wanting to do something that they hadn’t done. So, um, that’s about as much as I can say.
And now you’ve been married for 10 years. What’s the secret? Does it have anything to do with being able to write about and share your experiences?
I don’t try to give people advice unless they ask me for advice. But from my experience I can say that I’ve experienced that to let go of your own expectations of what you think another person owes you or that they should be for you ... is very useful. When you really care about someone you want it to work, you want to be with them; it just becomes more painful to cling, to think what you know and continue to judge them by your own framework. That was the secret for me. The more you judge someone, the more you can’t perceive him. It is of great value to give another person a lot of space, to be who they need to be in relation to the world, to do what they need to do. My husband says that is “giving the used-car person space” (he often speaks in metaphors). He says if you go home and give them space, they think about it and give you a better price. It’s the idea of letting someone’s goodness motivate them in relation to what they do instead of pressuring them or making them feel guilty or bad. It’s trusting that person. I think it’s hard. I’ve had to learn it. It’s hard to give space when you’re not getting what you want right now.
12 November 2009
vol. 7, issue 9
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