Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Notes from the Second Person: On Twinning, Marguerite Duras, and Aesthetic Desire  
Addie Tsai

Marguerite Duras is my twin, my double, my unwilling doppelganger.
Marguerite Duras is the object of my obsession, the albatross still hanging from my neck.

I’m not sure which came first.

Let me explain.

I first read The Lover when I was 13. I handed the slim, yellow volume to my Chinese father who was crouched low to the ground, eyeing the engineering textbooks at our local discount bookstore. He didn’t look twice at the novella with the young girl’s face etched in the cover. Did he notice the synopsis on the back? Or the words a tumultuous affair with an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover?

At 13, I crushed hard on the girls at school and on the charmers my mother brought home from who knows where and on all the older Chinese men my father brought into my life, weekend after weekend, while he rehearsed in a language not my own of plays not my own in a Chinese world never my own.

At 13, I snuck into my closet at night while everyone else was asleep. I read the little volume until the grease from my fingertips that became wet with sexual longing and shame dirtied the book’s corner and spine. I scoured it as though it were meant merely as a vessel for my erotic exploration. Like a young adolescent who uses anything she could get her hands on. The Lover was what I could get my hands on. My eyes burned with young desire as I read about the 17-year-old schoolgirl friend Helene Lagonelle’s sumptuous breasts, as I snuck into the Chinese lover’s black limousine that picked up the adolescent Duras from boarding school, and as I disappeared into a corner of the lover’s flat while the 26-year-old businessman endlessly loved that frail, untouched 15-year-old girl with no father, no money, who loved her younger brother as though he were her child, who hated her older brother as though he were the enemy, as though he were a thief in the night, stealing their mother’s love.

Her mother said nothing when the girl began her descent into the affair with the Chinese businessman. Because he had money. And what could her mother say, her mother who gave her daughter the dress she wore on the ferry when she first encountered the man who loved her until death. The transparent, threadbare silk dress that used to belong to the girl’s mother, but the silk was too transparent for her, she could no longer wear it. And the men’s fedora and gold lamé high heels—well, her mother bought those for her, too.

But wait, I’ve neglected to tell you something.

Marguerite Duras isn’t my only twin.

I have another twin, an identical twin named Emma, after Flaubert’s first anti-heroine, the lover of the doctor who gave sexual favors without affect until she ended her own life. And my Emma, she too started her life as an adolescent lover of an older Chinese businessman.

You can never escape your twinning, I was told once. And don’t try to run from your desire for her. It will only lead you to a dead-end.

I can’t help it. What I want is to write a book just like The Lover. What I want is to be Marguerite Duras.

I will never be able to call myself The Lover. But my twin, she always will.

What a cruel twist of fate. That the bridge between me and the writer I’d find myself so wedded to—as though we were lovers, as though we were twins—would indeed be the twin itself, what I’ve spent my entire life running from only to find myself face-to-face again with yet another twin, each of us—Duras and me—writing away our one sorrow.

*

Over 15 years after I slept with Duras’s little memoir under my pillow, and after my desire for the father-lover grew soft, and hardened with the reality of my childhood at the time, a childhood consumed with men the age of my father, men who spoke only Mandarin, men who adored us and who touched our small, round cheeks and who posed in photos with us with their arms around our waists, I started to write my own memoir. I never fell in love with my father-lovers as a young girl, but I did as a woman. And I began my own memoir five years after my last affair with a father-lover fell apart.

It’s true. None of my lovers have ever been Chinese, and none of them were businessmen, and I have never lived in French Indochina and I have not been struck by inconceivable poverty and my life has never been affected by war. My father is not dead.

But there have been times that I too might be compelled to call my older brother the killer of the night, the child-hunter, and there have been many more times that I might be compelled to call him, as Duras called her younger brother, my child.

And yes, my mother too has passed down dresses she bought for herself from the second-hand store and my mother has glittered with pride when grown men admired them on her two, perfect, adolescent girls.

My mother is not dead, although she is dead to me.
And somewhere, you might hear me say: In my head I no longer have the scent of her skin, nor in my eyes the color of her eyes. I can’t remember her voice, except sometimes when it grew soft with the weariness of evening. Her laughter I can’t hear anymore—not her laughter nor her cries. It’s over, I don’t remember. That’s why I can write so easily now, so long, so fully.

15 years after our adolescence was hijacked by my violent Chinese father, my wild American mother, and all the men who they encouraged to slip their way in between my twin and me, a writer suggested I read The Lover. This was an aesthetic suggestion made to me after reading five pages of prose I’d written about my mother when I was 22.

I uncovered my old copy, still marked with youthful transgression. This time I saw, mirrored in her work, everything I wanted within myself to be able to write. I wanted her silence and her voice. I wanted her incantatory lyricism and her perfect, compact, nonlinear vignettes that invoked a trance of memory and trauma and stillness in me. I wanted to describe the self as in the body and outside of it, at once physically embodied and taken away.

I couldn’t figure it out. What was the source of my Duras-ian twinning? Had I spent too much of my life overshadowed by my twin’s story, was I just an unwilling participant to yet another triangle, was I merely enthralled with Duras’s narrative because it so closely mirrored Emma’s adolescent narrative with her own Chinese lover, was that why I found myself so taken by Duras, so obsessed with Duras, yearning so long and hard to swallow Duras’s words and make them mine?

I wrote a memoir called What Came Between Them about the erotic triangle between the twins and that third who inserts himself, always and again, between them.

In it, a confession:
I thought, at first, I’d take on just one part of it. I had a vision, I told myself. I’ll write one book called The Twin/Lover. It will explore the eroticism and fusion of twinning, particularly of my twinning, how my twin and I are like two spirals circling and breaking apart in the dark.

And there’d be a second book, The Lover/Twin, that would take on my lovers, and how in their narcissistic fever, they wanted to reclaim that space that was my twin’s birthright, to be fused to my flesh as though one body. Would we melt in a pool if there were any attempt to separate us?

—from the introduction to What Came Between Them

It took two years upon writing the memoir to break my obsession, to split the cord I wrapped around Duras and me. And to free the twin within me—the one who’d associated herself for years as the one who had a twin with a fraught story, but never a twin with a fraught story of her own.

Women have been in darkness for centuries, Duras said. They don’t know themselves. Or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness.

It begs the question. Was it a coincidence that the voice I felt so connected to was also tied to the dark narrative I’d lived with all my life? Maybe Duras and I are connected through our darkness. And the voice that translates our darkness, and the darkness that informs the voice, simply can’t be separated.

You can never escape your twinning. And don’t try to run from your desire for her. It will only lead you to a dead-end.

 

Addie Tsai received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Forklift, Ohio, Post Road, Caketrain, Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian American Women's Poetry, and Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Sexuality, among others. Her manuscript and in its place— was semi-finalist in Tupelo Press's 2009 Dorset Prize and finalist in Four Way Books' 2011 Larry Levis Prize. She currently teaches Literature and Composition at Houston Community College, where she runs a nationally-known reading series.