"Taking a Turn in the Garden State" by Bonnie Chau
Never has New Jersey been on my list of places. I have spent much of my life dreaming about other locales. The places where I actually lived have made a lot of sense, I think. I grew up in southern Orange County in southern California, and went to college in L.A., living there for nearly all my twenties. That made sense. When I left L.A., New York City, too, made sense. It was on the opposite side of the country, nearly the furthest I could get, and I had friends who lived there, stuff was happening there, lots of writers, artists, and so on. There were a couple years I lived in France, teaching English, and that, too, made sense, given my childhood travels in France and my knowledge of the language. Throughout all those years, I dreamed of other places I might want to live: Marseille, London, Australia, Philly, New Orleans, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, China, Athens, Berlin. All the places on my list were places I had been, or had connections to, or at least places that had an associated narrative or mythology I wanted to explore.
Now I was unexpectedly living in New Jersey. And I was having trouble in New Jersey. Trouble in New Jersey! I had never been anywhere in New Jersey before, and knew nothing about it aside from a handful of flights into or out of EWR. I had probably absorbed some of the media stereotypes (I never watched but knew vaguely of the show Jersey Shore) and some of the prejudices just from having lived in New York City for nearly a decade. How did I get here? All the time, I was thinking, what am I doing in New Jersey? I know, ostensibly, how I ended up in New Jersey. And yet I could not wrap my head around it. I said the words out loud to friends: I live in New Jersey. I’m going home now, and my home is in...New Jersey? The words meant nothing to me. I call them words, though I suppose I mean the name. The name meant nothing to me. I couldn’t even see it as a name, because I could barely see it as a place.
Perhaps it was an extension of the isolation of the pandemic—of nearly a year of attempting to create in what felt like a vacuum—but here in New Jersey, whether or not it had anything to do with New Jersey, thinking about art had become unclear. I seemed to have nothing to write about—I was watching nothing, I was reading nothing, and yet I was living with an artist whose house was filled with paintings, drawings, and prints, and we talked about process and materials and ideas all the time. What I was, was in the thick of it, but I seemed not to be absorbing it in a way that translated to writing about it.
One day, my housemate and I drove to Frenchtown to visit the local contemporary art behemoth, ArtYard. I stood in the gallery, a cavernous white cube space with gleaming polished concrete floors, and looked at the accoutrements in the bedroom and bathroom setups by Genevieve Gaignard, the clothing in Wendy Red Star’s piece, Karrine Smith’s fleshy collagen film installation, Jen Liu’s speculative video work, and everything seemed so far away. I had a feeling that the way I was used to experiencing art simply seemed very distant, worlds away, even irrelevant. This sentiment itself was strange. The inaugural show, Girl You Want, curated by J. Vanessa Lyon, examines race, class, gender, labor, artifice, identity—issues which were not irrelevant here in New Jersey, where gigantic pickup trucks were adorned with Punisher skulls, Trump signs and enormous American flags punctuated the streets, where I regularly saw anti-Antifa baseball caps, and a huge “China won” banner. I realized that my imagined audience was nowhere in sight. If this was my current life, there was a yawning abyss between my output, and anyone who might be interested in my output.
I tried to think about how I might write about Wong Kar Wai’s films, or about Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a Next Millennium, while sitting in a house built in the 1750s, near where George Washington crossed the Delaware. I couldn’t see what they had to do with my life now, which was full of heat and humidity, grass and mosquitos and tick checks, two cats which I may or may not be allergic to, three chickens that each laid one egg per day, and four fuzzy ducklings. I had no appropriate clothing for this life and ended up at the local Tractor Supply digging through a pile of NRA t-shirts and work jeans.
Every morning I stumbled out the dutch door, and opened another door to let the hens out, and filled one bowl of chicken feed, one bowl of scratch grains, and one bowl of water. I checked on the ducklings, their lighting, their heat lamp and thermometer, their food and water. The ducklings were extraordinarily messy, which apparently they are notorious for. Their bedding had to be changed constantly; they were very splashy. We had to make sure the cats didn’t eat them, too. We had to watch out for Russ the possum and Wally (or Ernie?) the raccoon. I was perpetually hosing out food bowls and scooping fowl shit and sloppy wet duckling bedding out into the compost, clambering over precarious piles of things to collect chicken eggs. I found myself wrangling and chasing after the ducklings as they moved from one enclosure to another, chasing them around a kiddie pool, which we’d scrambled to get for them before kiddie pools sold out for the summer. I was constantly crouched on the ground scrounging around for slugs and Brood X cicadas and their vacated exoskeleton shells to feed to the ducklings which were doubling in weight every week. There were many pressing questions: Why couldn’t I get slug slime off my fingers? Why was the white chicken being broody? Why did the brown chicken have a poopy butt? Why was one duckling tiny? Why was another duckling always trying to eat things that were too big? What was going on with the one duckling that wasn’t climbing into the water? Nevermind what I was doing right or wrong, what was I doing at all? Farmlife, I repeated to myself, as if this might explain everything.
I woke up in the middle of one night and unable to fall back asleep, dragged my laptop into bed to watch something. I have often been interested in the practice of reading the literature of a place while in that very place (Nancy Drew’s Trouble in Tahiti while in Tahiti in the 80s, Abdellah Taïa in Morocco, Leena Krohn in Finland). When the movie Garden State popped up, it was obvious I had to watch it. I had seen it in the theater when it came out in 2004 when I was twenty-two, and I wondered how it would feel now that seventeen years had passed, and I found myself mysteriously living in the Garden State. Yes, I thought, surely watching Garden State will help me get in touch with it, will teach me how to live here, where I felt an outsider.
I watched, waiting for some sort of recognition. The most recognizable thing was the zoned-out look on Zach Braff’s face throughout the first part of the movie, as he lies in bed, as he learns about his mother’s death over the phone, as he drives, as he takes diners’ orders at the restaurant where he works, as he talks to his father, as he sits at a party. This is basically the expression of being an overwhelmed human in 2021.
On further reflection, I decide that actually the most resonant part of this movie is the short scene at the beginning, when Braff’s character, stereotypical Hollywood-struggling-actor-server that he is, shows up late to work at an Asian restaurant, and puts on his Asian-looking uniform shirt and applies eyeliner to his eyes while his supervisor gives him a talking-to. Then he goes to his table, and some L.A. woman demands bread, and he says “We don’t have bread... we’re a Vietnamese restaurant,” and the woman is like, “Well you’re not Vietnamese,” and he’s like “No...I’m not…” I suppose it was the weirdness of the eyeliner, and the refrain I was hearing in my head as I watched, that someone—the movie, the universe—was saying to me, “Well you’re not white..?” and I’m like the zoned-out Zach Braff, saying, “No… I’m not…”
I watched on. I was waiting for a feeling of familiarity, of resonance, of I don’t know what. Something that would indicate something. But there was nothing. The houses and the way they lined the street looked vaguely New Jersey-ish, but not really any more than anywhere else. I stared at the cemetery, at the mansion, at the hotel, at the bar, at the parking lot, but they all looked generic. The settings were elsewhere in the state anyway, it wasn’t reasonable to expect that the scenery of one part of the state might resemble an entirely different part of the state, but I suppose I had thought it might, that here on this side of the country where the states were tiny, you could expect such things. Of course you just couldn’t expect a movie to reflect back to you what a place was actually like. The greenness depicted seemed recognizable, I decided. The rain seemed about right, I thought. But that was all I could get, all I could admit to, all I could squeeze out.
One evening, my housemate mentioned needing to prepare some surfaces. “Oh, what do you mean?” I asked. “Like out in the garden?” He was often talking about gardening and work he had to do on the soil. “No,” he said, “to prepare some canvases, so I can start doing some paintings. Always gotta prepare your surfaces, whether it's gessoing, or whatever it is you have to do to get it ready. That’s just part of the work, before you can actually start."
I thought about the difference between the blank canvas and the blank page. What work and time and energy has already been invested for the painter in the surface preparation? What might be the equivalent in writing? I looked at the pile of books on my desk. Upon hearing about my new farmlife, a friend had given me a copy of the novel, Nives by Sacha Naspini, translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford. It was about an older Italian woman living in the Tuscan countryside, who brings one of the chickens into the house to keep her company after her husband keels over in the pigpen. It might be just what I needed. A story that had just a few superficial connections to my life. I too was feeling nutty; I wasn’t about to bring one of the chickens into the house with me, but I was happy that she was doing it. And I certainly understood talking to animals. I had been talking to birds for quite a while now, and now I was talking not only to the two cats, three chickens, and four ducks, I was talking to insects, to the flies, bees, and cicadas.
Several pages in, Nives, the protagonist, has taken in Giacomina, the chicken, and is finally sleeping through the night again, and just when you think the chicken has solved her widow woes, it suddenly freezes while watching a Tide commercial on TV. The spin cycle appears to have put her in a trance, causing her to “take a funny turn.” Coincidentally, just that morning, our brown and white chicken also appeared to have frozen in place, standing still as a statue, staring off into space in the middle of the grass under the sugar maple tree, not looking or moving or eating or pecking or making a sound. What was going on? Finally she plopped down with her back to us. My housemate suggested that the chicken was showing us her butthole because something was up with her digestion and/or her butt; she wanted us to help.
I wondered if I was the one who had taken a funny turn. One can take a turn for the worse or the better. But taking a “funny turn” is ambiguous and enigmatic. I wondered what the original Italian phrasing was for this. I had been joking that maybe I was turning into a chicken since I was always mimicking the funny bobbling bok-boking clucking squawking creaking of the hens, and the chicken coop, which was being renovated, was looking pretty awesome, even for human habitation. In the book, the chicken moves into the human’s house, and perhaps in my life, the human would be moving into the chicken’s house. It seemed unlikely that I was turning into a chicken, but it seemed not too unlikely that I had taken a funny turn, or was in the process of doing so. In this turn, I was unsure of how to triangulate between my self, the surrounding world, and my art.
I told my housemate about the book, and the fictional chicken’s strange resemblance to our chicken. So what happens? he asked. I don’t know! I shrugged. The woman doesn’t know what happened, and now she’s calling the local vet for advice. I wasn’t confident that whatever solution surfaced in the novel would be helpful to us, but I read on. When I finished the book, I found myself feeling slightly unsettled by the fact that in the end, my connection to the novel seemed not to lie in the superficial elements of premise—a woman, a chicken, a farm—but in its exploration of many themes that I, too, was perpetually preoccupied with in my life, and therefore, in my own writing: memory, narrativizing, love and loss, failures of communication and language, the ways in which we tell stories about ourselves and our pasts, and why we do, the ways in which we characterize ourselves and others around us.
In a recent conversation between Kate Briggs and Kate Zambreno for a Columbia University virtual event, Briggs mentions the permission to keep writing about the same things, revolving around the same preoccupations, in reference to Zambreno’s continual studies of artists and writers such as Hervé Guibert and Roland Barthes. In her response, Zambreno talks about the feeling that visual artists are often expected to do the same things over and over again, whereas writers are expected to do a new thing with every book, every project, and the desire to go against this expectation, to be persistently exploring and obsessed with and not done with the same things. I was unsettled, after Nives, by my apparent tendency to find and read into the same subjects as ever, but ultimately, in a time and place where nothing around me was still, and I too was not still, the familiarity and resonance of those themes brought with it a sense of necessary grounding.
Sometimes grounding comes in very unexpected forms. One thing about living here in the country is driving. Coming from car-culture California, one of the things I missed while living in NYC was listening to top 40 radio while driving. But in New Jersey, this old habit presented itself again. I don’t know any radio stations here aside from Hot 97, so it's just Hot 97 all the time. It's simultaneously familiar and a little bit thrilling—open road, windows down. One cold and rainy night a couple months ago, I drove to pick up a friend from the train station; his train ended up delayed, and I sat in the parking lot listening to Hot 97 for so long that the car battery died. Over and over again I listen to songs by Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars and Dua Lipa and The Weeknd and Pop Smoke. Through Hot 97, at least, it seems I am able to call up a connection to something stabilizing, a decade or so of my teens and twenties spent listening to the radio in the car. If the surface I am preparing here in New Jersey consists of layers and layers of the same old thing, so be it.
Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and is currently an editor at Public Books and the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
