重音五问 I Five Questions with Minghao Tu

“Five Questions with Friends”是我们新开设的灵魂拷问系列，在这里，我们将邀请我们认识的海外亚裔写作者们来讨（吐）论（槽）跨语言写作这个事情，这一期我们请来的是住在纽约的青年剧作家涂铭豪。

Accent Society=A

Tu Minghao=T

A：Why do you write in English?

T：So no one in my family can read my writing! The tyranny of childhood and adolescence is just so powerful. Our upbringing is in us, right?—all the habits, mindsets, and behavioral patterns that we picked up, practiced, and grew used to. Most of the time we’re not even conscious of them. So even my parents or middle school teachers don’t have access to my writing now. Do their voices in my head still read it? Do I seek the approval of their voices? Do I restrict myself to please them? Do I make choices because of them without knowing it’s because of them? … Now, I don’t think exophony is about escaping your identity. No one can escape it. What I’m wrestling with is how to develop the Zen non-attachment so I can have full awareness of my patterns. Writing in a second language can be a tool for detaching and defamiliarizing.

There’s a whole list of exophonic writers (e.g. Beckett, Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, etc). Beckett specifically said he wanted the “feeling of being ill-equipped.” A nice phrase, isn’t it? When I make a grammar mistake, I remind myself that I should pause for a second and question whether or not to correct it. Happy accidents require a lot of work.

A：What did you get from your MFA, anything good, awful, or meaningful?

T：During the first year of my MFA, I had a great mentor who was a no-bullshit “craft person.” Under the influence, I was passionately devoted to honing my craft. I grew much more conscious of the tools at my disposal. I learned that as a writer I had more than instinct to rely on. That said, grad school was an intense, overstimulating, but lonely place, where everyone was busy with their stuff, and rightly so. In that environment, it’s easy to become overly practical and goal-oriented in a capitalistic fashion. More dangerously, you can lose sight of the most important thing: the joy of writing. I did for a while. It was not until the last year that I began to reconnect with my joy, with encouragement from another mentor who said: “Pursue pleasure.”

In grad school, we all talk about “know the rules and then break them.” But without practicing the “fuck it” mindset, it’s hard to have the courage to break anything. The fear is subconscious, and you fall into the traps without knowing it. I’ve noticed that when I pursue pleasure rather than approval, I become more aware of my cliches. Additionally, bitterness and curiosity cannot co-exist. When I lost the creative joy and the “original mind,” when I became bitter or jealous, I also lost my curiosity and compassion for others. So, my biggest takeaway from grad school: Protect the joy. It’s hard. It’s a daily practice, with constant setbacks and progresses.

A：What creative medium do you work in to take a break from your writing?

T：I sing. I think singing and dancing are the purest art. (And maybe sex in the woods?). The goal is not to finish it—not to rush through it to achieve something. The goal is to just sing or dance. You surrender yourself to that orgasmic moment. It’s self-expression. It’s repetition and variation. It’s present, physical, visceral, and ritualistic. Imagine an audience watching a play without thinking “How or when will this play end?” or “What will I get out of this experience?” ….  Don’t you want to see that play, with that audience?

A：Tell us a book/movie/play/artwork… that you have recently enjoyed.

T：Jean Luc Goddard’s Band of Outsiders. I love anyone who can break into dance in public for no reason, with a face that says: “Up yours! I’m enjoying myself.” That spur-of-the-moment spontaneity is so rare in a world of go-getters, worriers, and overachievers. On the other hand, that dance sequence in the film was meticulously choreographed. Is that similar to what Calvino said about lightness requiring exactitude? Anyway, I believe the filmmakers were having fun making the film in 1964. So was I watching it in 2020.

I recently read a comment on self-indulgence by Charles Ludlam, who co-founded Theatre of the Ridiculous. Let me loosely adapt it: Self-indulgence is rigorous work. You have to have a self to indulge in, you have to know that self, you have to develop your own methodology of indulging, and you have to carry it through, even in the face of discouragement.

A：Share with us some gossip about your writing community.

T: I’m a bit of a slow writer. Give me a year and I’ll come up with something.

Bio

Born in Wuhan, China and currently based in NYC, Minghao Tu writes eclectic plays in which disparate worlds and styles collide. His plays have been developed and presented/produced at Voyage Theater Company, Tofte Lake Center, New York Public library, Ground Floor Theatre, Lucky Chaos Productions, and UT New Theatre; featured on 3Views of the Lilly’s, The Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Mix; and semifinalists at PlayPenn, Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, American Shakespeare Center, and the Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center. He was a Jame A. Michener fellow at UT Austin. He is a current member of off-off-Broadway Pipeline Theatre Company’s 2020/2021 PlayLab.

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