Noel C. Cilker

I will admit that I've not been paying very much attention to this blog (my last entry, I was shocked to find out, was over two months ago). I apologize, though it's for good reason. I've been writing my Ah Toy book quite regularly, and my excuse (to myself at least) is that I would rather spend my writing energy - which comes in finite daily amounts - on the book rather than the blog. Nobody has written to me to complain, which is nice, but that could be akin to saying that the baby bird is no longer clamoring for food because it has flown off in search of a more attentive parent! (I've never heard of a bird doing this, but . . .) . . . while we're on the subject, I'd like to quote from a book that I've mentioned before , Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life  by Anne Lamott. It relates to a minor panic attack I had a few weeks ago. My students assume that when well-respected writers sit down to write their books, they know pr

I'm noticing an increase in the amount of "What are you doing these days?" inquiries, so I think it's time to hop back onto the ol' Blogger and bring you up to date with my book progress. Things are going well. I'm splitting my time between working on the book and some family business stuff, so I'm not writing every  day, but I'm writing consistently. Every week I'm able to get around 3,000 to 4,000 words written which is a moderate success. I'm at about 54,000 right now which, according to the length of your average historical narrative, is about halfway. It's difficult to measure these things, though, because it's a rough draft. The story could end up being much longer - because I have a mountain of research to draw from - or much shorter - because an editor just crossed out that mountain of research and more. My biggest realization from my last post (has it been almost two months already?) is that I'm feeling this weird di

I find, from time to time, that it's difficult to explain to people  exactly  what it is I write. "It's history," I say, "but it's not a textbook. It's going to read like a novel." "Oh, so you mean a historical fiction?" I'm asked. "No, it's all true, all nonfiction. It's more like a historical narrative, I guess." "Oh," is the usual response I get, usually accompanied with a quizzical expression of someone who doesn't get it but would rather talk about something else. I really don't know what to call the genre. The closest I've found is Narrative History which is taking history and telling it in story form. This genre allows for more speculation, more dramatic elements and, for the reader, a more exciting and engaging bit of history. The problem I face, though, is how much license can I take and still have it counted as a history book? Passages like this easily count as history

A lot has happened since I posted a month ago. The biggest accomplishment is that I've hit about 25,000 words in my rough draft. That's in the vicinity of 25% completion, although with all the cutting and editing I'm going to have to do, it could be considered less. One thing I'm noticing is that I'm using a lot of quotes from primary and secondary sources. A LOT. This sometimes makes me feel a little guilty because I wonder if I should count them toward my daily goal of 1,000 words. After all, all it takes is some copying and pasting of a paragraphs-long firsthand account and suddenly I'm the most efficient writer in Berkeley! A thousand words by lunchtime! But is it a cop out to take someone else's words and add them to my count? For instance, here's a paragraph I wrote about the service in some early Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. Keep in mind this is a rough draft with no editing. "Gwai-lo" in the first line is a Cantonese word for

One of the lessons I'm trying to learn is how to write effectively. Having a schedule full of activities, as mentioned in my previous post, doesn't help. But more to the point, I'm trying to unlearn what I used to do in school as a writer and learn what I should  be doing instead. For example, in school, I used to sit in front of an empty computer screen with that damned cursor blinking . . . blinking . . . blinking . . . waiting for me to write something, anything,  that would break up that field of white. Every writer faces the daunting challenge of a blank page but my problem was how I went about filling it. Instead of spewing out ideas and getting them on the page, I crafted complete sentences in my mind, honing them and trying to get them perfect before setting my typing hands to work. I'm learning now that that's not sustainable. I lost too many good ideas because I couldn't get them into the right form. Getting everything perfect before  I write doesn

Here's a quick update from the land of writing. You may have noticed that it's been two weeks since I last posted. If I can remember that far back, I believe I mentioned that I had wrapped up my research phase and was on to writing, which I've been doing with some regularity . . . "some" meaning a bunch of other stuff has popped up and demanded my attention. Most of it is due to the time of year. High school baseball has started up again and so has my umpiring. This is good for me because it gets me out of the house and into the sun, where my visage transforms from ghostly to merely pale. Plus calling kids out on a third strike is good for my arm muscles. I've been back and forth to San Jose recently to lead some meetings as our family business continues its restructuring. It's constructive, quality work with great people but it takes time. I'm excited because we've accomplished a lot and it feels important to me that I can involve mysel

For a historian, research is fun. It's probably the biggest reason I quit teaching. I realized this when I used to arrive at my classroom at 5:45 in the morning, spend the next hour and a half online looking for a letter or speech that conveyed the ideas of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (or the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the Black Panthers, or women on the home front in World War II, or . . . ), and feet a stab of dread as the bell for first period rang. It wasn't that I disliked the students. They were generally good and tried to learn, and at the very least didn't screw around when they weren't interested. Rather, the sound of that bell meant that my researching was done and I had to go on stage. After three years of ruing that first period bell, I finally admitted it to myself: I would rather make  the lessons than teach  them. Fast forward a few years and here I am, seated at a desk, a mountain of books to my left and my laptop to my right. What a perfect way to

Working on a book focused on Ah Toy specifically and the Chinese in general has formed for me a nice symbiosis. Because I married into a family of Chinese descent, I felt naturally drawn to studying a Chinese character. Researching Ah Toy has inevitably led to researching Chinese culture itself, and while I knew I didn't know much about it ( which would make Socrates proud ), I quickly realized I didn't know anything at all! (Which would make Socrates ecstatic!) While my book isn't meant to be a sociological study of the Chinese community, I had to know something  for the story to come across as authentic, so I dove into a couple of highly regarded books. One is called  Things Chinese,  written by James Ball in 1893. "Too old!" you might think, but I found it to be quite valuable. Cultures, despite deeply ingrained philosophies and traditions, change over time. The closer to the 1850s I could get, the better, and with sections titled "Acupuncture," &qu

For the past few weeks, I've been giving you a sense of what Old San Francisco looked like: the drawings, the photos, the buildings, the ships-turned-hotels-and-what-not, and the descriptions of Portsmouth Square in all its interchangeable forms. For so small a town, San Francisco was a feast for the eyes with never a dull sight to behold. But as Ah Toy debarked her ship in 1849, the sounds of San Francisco hit her just as strongly as the sights. Not immediately, of course, because she saw San Francisco before she heard it as she sailed through the Golden Gate (or rather, saw it soon after ... the town wasn't visible from the Golden Gate). But as her ship pulled into the harbor and the town grew closer, she began to hear the sounds of life become louder and louder. She also heard her fellow passengers become more and more excited and chattery. After leaving the ship and walking up the wharf with her belongings, Ah Toy heard the hum of voices of people debarking some ships a

If you live in San Francisco, you probably avoid it. If you're visiting from out of town, it's probably the second place on your list of must-see sites (after Fisherman's Wharf). It's crowded with people spacily walking about and lining up to overpay for a ride on the cheesily nostalgic cable car. It's Union Square, just off the Powell Bart station and filled with tourist destinations and Christmas shopping necessities: Macy's, Express, and the guilty pleasure (and surprisingly good, but don't tell anyone I said so) Cheesecake Factory. But, as Gary Kamiya writes in his excellent "Portals of the Past" column in the San Francisco Chronicle, "for decades, the center of San Francisco was not Union Square but Portsmouth Square, and the most important streets by far were not Powell or Stockton, but Montgomery and Kearny." Portsmouth Square was the center of town life, where everything important happened, and where Ah Toy, after quickly ascer

Every now and then I see signs that I've been working on a topic too long. I saw one last week after I posted some cool images of San Francisco that I found in the Bancroft Library. One in particular caught the attention of a faithful follower, this drawing of a San Francisco street scene in 1849: I had seen this image a few times before so I didn't give it a second thought. The reader, however, noticed something kind of wacky about it. "I had no idea old ships were turned into storehouses and hotels!" she wrote, and if you take a really close peek, you can see that she's right. The "Storeship" and the "Niantic Hotel" are, indeed, ships. I didn't even think to point them out last week because, well, I have been immersed in San Francisco history for the past seven months and for me it was old news. I've become San Fran-jaded! So I figured it was time to put on a new set of glasses. The artist of this drawing was not crazy nor ma

For the past who-knows-how-many months - I'll say seven - I've been nose deep in books. Some exciting, some boring, some valuable, and some that leave me wondering how they ever got published. My local library (quick plug for local libraries!) has been indispensable as a resource for information about San Francisco and the Gold Rush, as has Google (quick plug for local Googles!) with its vast collection of digitized old books from the 1850s. I literally click my mouse buttons and books appear on my screen. As a result I haven't had to move much and my butt has grown into my office chair. I'm now coming to the point where it's time to venture outside and see what lies beyond the computer screen. One of the reasons is that I'm starting to see facts repeat themselves in the books I'm looking through, and the other reason is that I'm feeling, frankly, a little ashamed. Why? Because I haven't been to the Bancroft yet. The Bancroft Library, for those o

Writing about the Chinese is both a blessing and a curse. I will say, right off the bat, that the blessings far outweigh any difficulties I've come across, both in my research and as I begin my writing. The most obvious plus is that I'm learning more and more about the culture of my husband's family. None of their ancestors, to their or my knowledge, made the Pacific crossing in a boat to find gold in the 1800s, but in 1981 my in-laws did  embark from Hong Kong, as Ah Toy did, crossed the Pacific, as Ah Toy did, and, like our mistress hero, arrived in San Francisco to try their hands at a new and more profitable life in a foreign land. (I'm fairly certain that their similarities end there, especially occupationally.) Additionally, I've read some fascinating books about Chinese religion, superstitions, philosophy on food, yin and yang, feng shui, and numerous other facets of Chinese culture that have caused me, from time to time, to gleefully shout, "I sort of

The New Year, wherever or whomever you are, naturally prompts us to look back and see how far we've come. Usually we only review the last 365 days, stop at the previous January 1st, then swing our eyes back around and head down the trail of our current nascent year. Gold Rush San Franciscans did the same. Though most were still not convinced that the city was going to be their permanent home (they had families to get back to to share their gold - or gambling - riches with), they still felt that a pausing-to-reflect was in order, if nothing else than to take a quick break from rebuilding their burnt out homes or mapping out which geographic region of the street was the least muddy to cross. These are people who worked on the Sabbath (!) mind you, so taking a hiatus to recall the past year was no small deal. The big newspaper at the time was the Daily Alta California.  On the morning of January 1st, 1851, the residents of San Francisco awoke, plunked a coin into the hand of a s