Chapter 179: Other Lands; Other Voices

Something gets lost when students from abroad come to America and learn to write as journalists here: the voices they carry with them.

There is an expectation that they will adapt to what might best be called Standard American Journalism English. There is, at least notionally, nothing wrong with instilling in young journalists an approach that values speed and brevity in conveying vital information. People have grown accustomed to wanting to know quickly what they feel they need to know.

The problem comes when this expectation extends to storytelling. There are, of course, all sorts of ways to tell a story, as any novelist, short story writer and graduate of an MFA fiction program can attest. But journalism is not always so tolerant; as I have written in earlier chapters, there are expectations of how a story is best told, and forms that ensure that those expectations are met.

This can be frustrating for young American journalists whose own storytelling traditions may not resemble the anecdotal-lede-nut-graf-quote-from-Ivy-League-sociologist formulation that has been a journalistic template for the past couple of generations. Bear in mind that it was not always this way; read journalism from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and you’ll see an altogether different way of telling stories – slower, meandering, ledes appearing in the fifth paragraph and even later. No matter. That past is now as distant as the Age of the Typewriter.

Imagine, then, landing here with all your bags and ideas of what stories are supposed to sound like, only to be told that you might have left those traditions and sensibilities behind.

I have read and edited the work of many students who come from other countries and wish I could have an extended do-over for all the times I pushed those students to get quicker to the point, to shorten up their sentences, to trim out what sounded to their ears like color and to mine as busy-ness.

Now, far too late for too many of those terrific and talented students, I see how narrow I was in how I defined good work. It was not as if I had not read literature from other countries in translation. Rather, I had not fully appreciated how those same literary qualities could be so effective in my students’ work.

I have a wonderful class this spring that has produced an anthology that will be published in a few weeks. Several of those students are from other countries. And though they write fluently and powerfully in English, it is clear that how they approach the storytelling is so different and wonderfully so.

We got to talking about how they thought about storytelling and what informed their sensibilities and approaches. They had wise and illuminating things to say and so I asked if they’d explain how they see their work, and how where they grew up and the languages they spoke shaped them. I also put the question to Diego Couchay, who writes this newsletter once a month and was also once a student of mine.

Here’s what they had to say.

Ayushee Roy: I’m Bengali, and though I grew up living in a mix of cultural realities across Singapore, London, Kolkata, and the US, I think the storytelling traditions I carry are still most deeply rooted in my heritage. Each place has seeped into my writing and shaped it in its own way: my spellings are British, my slang American, and my thoughts stamped with Southeast Asian flavour despite a distinctly Bengali flair for the dramatic.

I tend to reach for adjectives, conjure metaphor, and invite in superlatives a tad more often than most writers. I think that’s partly because of how I’ve always experienced language at home. We speak Bengali, even though we’re all fluent in English. And Bengali, at least the way my mother and grandfather wield it, is ever-brimming with rhythm, lyricism, and embellishment.

My mother has an idiom for every situation, a proverb for every emotion. Storytelling, in our home, often meant circling a point rather than arriving at it directly: layering meaning, building tension, allowing space for jokes, exaggeration, and reactions. I think I carry that sensibility into my work too- not to merely state a fact, but rather to shape feeling around it.

Shiyu Yu: Traditional Chinese writing often builds toward an anti-climax, where the emotional resonance lingers long after the last word. It tends to stretch the emotional thread across a long arc, laying down countless subtle undercurrents that slowly accumulate until they reach a breaking point. Along the way, the writing is typically rich with modifiers, metaphors - both direct and implied - and elevated language.

Take, for example, this passage: “One day, you will cross the silent, ink-washed river, leave behind the old Peach Blossom Spring nestled among mountains, and find yourself beneath a boundless, somber night sky. You will witness mountain after insurmountable mountain collapse, sea after impassable sea dry into farmland. And you must remember - your fate rests on the tip of a blade, and that blade must always move forward.” (This is my best translation attempt and may not fully capture the original intent.)

This was written by one of my favorite Chinese authors. But a Chinese American friend of mine didn’t like it at all. She felt the language was vague - beautiful, yes, but hard to grasp. I suspect part of that disconnect lies in translation. I’ve experienced something similar reading English novels translated into Chinese. There’s often a strong “translated” feeling. Certain words and phrases don’t quite sit naturally in the Chinese linguistic context, and reading them feels tiring. But when I read the original English version, I don’t feel that way. Take “St. Patrick’s Cathedral” in English, or “the old Peach Blossom Spring" in Chinese. Each carries cultural and emotional weight in its own context. Once taken out of that context, the familiarity disappears. Perhaps this sense of estrangement is at the core of the question.

My own writing background is rather complicated. I grew up in Boston, but my writing style has been shaped by both Chinese literature and American dramatic writing (I wrote scripts before I turned to journalism). The first time I truly felt the difference between writing traditions was during my college application process. My personal statement was outright rejected by a teacher. She told me it was too vague, not precise enough. She wanted every sentence to convey a clear point. No fluff, no ambiguity.

If I wanted to say I loved writing, I had to say exactly that “I love writing.” Not something like: “Within the delicate structure of each sentence, I saw the abyss in the heavens, saw emptiness in every gaze, and found salvation in hopelessness.” In short, I used to circle around my point with poetic language, never quite saying the word “writing” at all.

Nikita Apte: My mother tongue is Marathi. It's the state language of Maharashtra, India, where I grew up. Though I've never written at length in Marathi, when I think about its vocabulary, what comes to mind is color and abundance. In comparison, English feels almost limited in its ability to convey sentiment and emotion - lacking in spirit.

But that is in contrast to how I feel when I write in English - there are so many adjectives, idioms, ways to 'dress up' what the words are saying. I'm reading On Writing Well by Zinsser, where he talks about a tendency in writers to overcomplicate instead of stripping back. I find it is so much easier to 'decorate' than to show restraint in writing. In Marathi, some words seem to hold more intrinsic meaning - maybe because it is a language specific to the place and people it addresses. Certain phrases would require entire sentences in English to convey their meaning.

Growing up, I was exposed to several Indian languages through an unlikely source - sports. I played basketball in school, first at the city level and then on the state team. Nearly every state in India has its own language. When we traveled for tournaments, stayed in new cities, interacted with players from other teams - language was a part of the cultural landscape. It was also an early lesson in being able to connect with people through shared interests - like our love for the game - instead of language/conversation. I think about that now, when I write - how do I convey a feeling and keep it concise?

Diego Courchay: Part of the difficulty for me is that any storytelling traditions I’ve inherited are rooted in two languages (Spanish and French) as I try to delineate their influence in a third. I wouldn’t know how much of each has seeped into my writing in English, beyond the periodic search for specific words that have no equivalent. I’m drawn to the rhythm of Spanish, and its diversity across countries, and yet, what I value in English is greater succinctness and its use as a common language. I’m fond of specific words in French, their haughtiness, and how steeped in history they seem. Still, it can feel like a corset.

What I can say is that how each language expresses daily things, its adjectives, and its sayings, offers hues that enrich the possibilities of expression. There’s poetry, sometimes comedy, in translating what we would say in another tongue. Likewise, knowing that feelings can be worded differently, that words can change genders –happiness is feminine in Spanish, masculine in French– makes us aware of the varieties of meaning. And don’t get me started on syntax!

Traditions migrate and influence each other. New Journalism did influence writers in Latin America, but it did so by merging with longstanding traditions there. Think that a single word in Spanish, crónica (chronicle), contains all the hues found in English-language expressions such as narrative journalism, literary journalism, or creative non-fiction. Its roots run deep in the Latin American continent, first described in Spanish by Western colonizers in texts known as the “Chronicles of the Indies” in the 16th century. A word on French tradition: for me, it was an education in the culture of the essay and the roots of literary criticism. Then there’s the fact that everything seems to be available in translation. Whereas literature in translation amounts to 3% of books published annually in English, it’s 19% in French. How much more of the world can you discover?

Ailing Li: Growing up with Chinese literary traditions, I've noticed some key differences in how we approach writing compared to American (journalism) styles. The biggest one is that we're really big on "意象" (imagery) in Chinese writing. We love creating these vivid, sensory-rich worlds that pull readers in right away. Instead of getting straight to the point, we often start by setting a mood and emotional landscape. For us, the magic often happens in what's left unsaid rather than explicitly stated.

I think it comes down to the nature of Chinese itself. Since it's ideographic rather than phonetic, each character is basically a little picture with meaning beyond just its sound. This naturally lends itself to metaphor and symbolism in ways that feel different from English.

Ayushee - Your writing has this beautiful poetic quality that feels so precious and special, and I really enjoy reading your works every time. I completely understand what you mean about "circling a point rather than arriving at it directly," and that's exactly what we do in Chinese storytelling too!

And Diego, I love your point about different languages merging within us. It is fascinating to see how these various traditions blend into something uniquely our own. I feel the same way navigating between Chinese and English - sometimes struggling to translate concepts that exist in one language but not the other, but also discovering new possibilities in that space between languages.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture