Carol Bergman

We got stuck in the Air Train at San Francisco Airport for more than a half-hour. Fortunately, we had landed at Terminal 1 and the doors had opened—fresh air. The train was crowded, travelers leaving, travelers departing, many with so many bags they could have filled a hangar at the airport. There were children, old people, middle-aged people, a pilot. The pilot debarked and started barking into his phone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he was not happy. There were no trains coming the other way. The trains run on a loop—one breakdown and that is it. Who designed this brilliant system that is run by a computer terminal without any human in sight?

People were quiet at first, then they/we started to talk. Where was the staff, the personnel? (Note the word person embedded in the word personnel.) An electronic voice informed us, every five minutes or so, that we would be moving within ten minutes. And then it thanked us for our patience. How did he/she/it know we were being patient? I had to pee, my husband had to pee, other passengers had to pee, I was thirsty. Should we get off, go to pee in Terminal 1, return to the platform in the hope the trains would be moving and we’d make our flight? Was there any other way to get to Terminal 3? Was there anyone to ask?

We decided to wait it out. We were already weary from a traffic jam over the Bay Bridge, the return of the rental car, and a big bill for gas. No gas station we could see ten miles out—those were the instructions from the rental car company, either a scam or weird instructions. And we had timed our arrival perfectly to buy some food before boarding. No such thing as a decent meal on a plane anymore or a flight attendant to smile and chat and be human when we need something such as a pillow. A pillow? Forget that.

So what are flight attendants these days? Are they persons? Anything more than servers and emergency personnel? How difficult is it to hand out plastic cups of water, for example? I imagine a day will come when there will be totally automated flights—no flight attendants, no pilots. Not far off, I imagine. And with this fantasy I would like to tip my summer straw hat to George Orwell and his novel, 1984. He imagined the unimaginable. Now we are there. Or here.

So I suppose this blog is about the dehumanization of our lives and our selves. All of which is to be resisted and defied by everyone and, particularly, by artists who cannot function without deep connection. When a FB feed tells me that I might know some people and then displays the faces of these people on my screen, I get skittish. There is no way they can know the people I know unless they scan my email. So of course there are surveillance and privacy issues, at the very least. Why would I want to be a FB friend with my mother’s lawyer? How does FB know that I have communicated with my mother’s lawyer? But there is her face on the “people you may know” thread. Is this a thread?

I spoke to our pilot as we exited the plane. He was at the cockpit door waiting for the passengers to squeeze their way down the too-narrow aisle, all PR smiles in his crisp white shirt, slightly disheveled blond hair and beer belly. He hoped we enjoyed our flight. He hoped we would fly the friendly skies again. I interrupted his script when I asked if he was the pilot I’d seen on the stuck Air Train. He said no, he wasn’t, he’d flown up from San Diego in his own plane. And he didn’t seem to know or care about our little ordeal on the Air Train. He avoided eye contact. He had no empathy. He was a robot.  Read More 

I met Mykel, a writer friend, for a long, leisurely lunch with our actor friend, Josephine. We all taught English at a Japanese language school—Mykel still does—and we stay in touch. Mykel had been to my reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe in January, but had not paid for his book. He owed me lunch, he had said, and when we made a date for lunch, we half-jokingly reminded each other of the IOU.

It’s customary for writers to support one another’s work by turning up at readings and buying a copy of the book. It may seem quaint, but writers still sign books and personalize the signature at readings. I suppose this is more out of validation and vanity than anything else, one small way to launch a book. The reading is fun, all the rest of the publicity is annoying, time-consuming hard work. Nonetheless, we still do all of it—the reading and what follows.

Alas, on the day we met, I was not feeling well and ordered a glass of ginger ale, a cheap date. Mykel had not mentioned “Nomads,” whether he’d read it, or not read it, or what he thought about it. In truth, it doesn’t matter to me all that much. I know when my work is good or not and carry on regardless, but I do pay a bit more attention to what a writer has to say. I won’t solicit a comment, not after the book has been critiqued, edited and published. But I do listen. And what Mykel said confirmed—in a quirky way—the appeal of the book and my joy in writing it. “I hate to say this,” he began, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but ‘Nomads’ makes really good bathroom reading.”

Mykel is quirky himself—in mid-summer he wears big black work books, he’s traveled to over 60 countries and has friends in every one of them, he’s lived in Mongolia, Japan and Germany, he is a linguist and a musician as well as a writer, and he is very funny. So I laughed. Whatever he said, it wasn’t to shock me, it was a kind of compliment. Kind of, sort of. Because what he meant was—these are fast, short, self-contained, distilled stories. All of a piece, satisfying. And so I thanked him and suggested that he might want to try them at bed-time also. And to buy the second volume—“Nomads 2”—when it is published later this year.  Read More 

After she died, but before the memorial, someone said, “she got what she wanted.” Others followed in the same vein, the vein had been opened. They came, they went, they paid their respects, and they repeated that careworn phrase. What did it mean exactly? That she had died gradually, peacefully, relatively pain-free, her friends and family talking to her, singing to her, embracing her? Is that what she wanted? What about the drama of a terminal illness for a woman with very young children, still young herself, or the day the doctor announced that she had three months to live, give or take, that she should spend as much time with her children as possible and—another careworn phrase—get her affairs in order? What about that? Is that what she wanted?

She tried to remain positive, or appear positive, at least. Everyone commented on that after she was gone, how deliberate she was as she gave away her jewelry, her knitting wool, her clothes. She did not think ahead to her children’s adult years—that they might want to keep some of these possessions. No, she had decided to give them away. It was what she wanted, she said. In other words, she got what she wanted.

And this was false, and saying it did not make anyone feel any better as she lay dying, or after she had died. Because what she had wanted was to live. That is what she wanted and what everyone who loved her wanted. They wanted her to defy the odds and live.

Friends, family, a family tragedy or death, yes, of course, let us use euphemisms and soften the blows; it is easier, it is right. But as writers, we cannot sustain the use of euphemisms for very long and find the truth.

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The world has a lot of children--rich and poor-- every one of them wants to learn unless they are discouraged from learning. Joyce, a friend of mine, works with little ones in the Bronx as an ESL teacher. The school is "failing," and the powers that be are desperate to save it. Their solution is more jargon, more restraint on experienced teachers, more testing of the kids, more evaluation of the teachers, more day-to-day interruptions with memos and meetings.

Dear Reader, this is a polemical post today, please forgive me, but I am appalled by what Joyce has been telling me. She has asked for an alias, so she is Joyce for now. "Anyone will know it is me," she told me. She wants to keep working in the school. On top of all her other obligations, she doesn't need an encounter with the powers that be.

Joyce is devoted, well-trained and experienced. She uses her background as an actor and pastry chef in the classroom. She has an after-school cooking program and takes the kids on trips. She is bi-lingual and communicates easily with parents. She takes photographs, records stories, makes individualized books. When she runs into her students on the streets they are excited to see her and she is excited to see them. Why, then, hasn't she been able to teach in her classroom since April? Because of constant testing and evaluation.

The education and protection of children is a universal human right as codified in the UN's Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26 and elsewhere). Never before in my career as an educator have I questioned whether the United States is fulfilling this mandate. But I do now. Every term more and more students enter my workshops disabled by our failing educational system. Some can barely speak or write; they have no confidence and inadequate knowledge. When I begin to talk about reading to raise their knowledge base, they seem dumbfounded. Eventually they get it: they have been attending public, tax-funded schools but not getting an education. The Chinese and European students in my classes often know more, write better English and are more disciplined. This is more than embarrassing; it is shameful. All these skills can and should be taught in our schools.

When there is a war or a disaster, Unicef quickly sets up a full range of services for children in "child-friendly spaces," designed by a relief-worker friend, MacKay Wolff, and his team during his stint in Albania during the war in Kosovo. The brochure generated for this project reads, in part: "Children want and need to learn. Education of good quality is the most effective and efficient means societies have for organising learning opportunities which will assure that their children have the knowledge and skills they need to survive, develop and participate. Good education is, therefore, good for children."

Volunteers descend on the disaster zone for as long as the donations keep coming in and the schools flourish. There’s determination, a battlefield mentality. Perhaps that’s what we need in our collapsing urban school systems. That said, teachers like Joyce are already there on the front line doing their best with limited resources. Confused bureaucrats now monitor their every attempt at helping the children in their care.

Last Saturday, after a pleasant afternoon with my family at The New York Botanical Garden, and a leisurely meal at an upscale restaurant in the garden, we headed back to Manhattan from the Bronx. The GPS went haywire and we ended up driving down Webster Avenue, under the railroad tracks past Jerome Avenue. This is not a privileged neighborhood; it's the Third World. Joyce's school is not far from here, I thought. This is how the children she teaches have to live. They are as much at risk as the children in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Congo or Nepal.  Read More 

There was a newspaper every morning on the mat outside our apartment door. We were on the seventh floor and this was a marvel to me. How did it get there and so early? We were at the breakfast table by 6:30—all four of us—and my step-father had opened the door and picked up the paper before we were all assembled. Being the man of the house and the most interested in domestic politics and foreign affairs—at least that was my explanation until I went to college and learned better—he had prerogatives on the newspaper. That said, he shared its contents by reading various articles aloud and then asking his children questions.

My sister was always too young—even as she got older—so I had the opportunity and challenge to answer the questions to show-off and make my mother proud and my sister jealous. For this great effort I was rewarded with the arts section of the newspaper. Mostly, I looked at the movie ads and advertisements. But I drew the pages back as my stepfather did into a kind of scroll, right to left, and felt very grown up.

These days, I mostly read the newspaper digitally and I miss the smell of the paper, the newsprint on my hands, our small family at the breakfast table together before the frenzy of getting to school and work, and my stepfather’s lessons about all the world’s glories and woes.  Read More 

Ever since NYU Shanghai opened in 2012, I have had at least one or two Chinese students in my writing workshop. They are usually shy, or quiet, or scared, or in culture shock. They are expected to speak and to write with abandon, transparency and heart. Their English is still challenged, but this is not the biggest challenge. My classroom is an open classroom in an open society. For all our troubles here, we will not be put in jail for speaking or writing anything. Our inhibitions have a different origin: the constraints of the marketplace (difficult enough at times) or our own personal, psychological obstacles, all surmountable.

There are 44 writers in jail in China and many more under house arrest. China is the only country in the world that has incarcerated a Nobel Laureate: Liu Xiaobo. Liu was represented by an empty chair at the ceremony in Oslo in 2010. He is still in jail and his wife is under house arrest. Theirs is one of many stories of artists, writers and dissidents in China, a despotic communist state where one-man rule is as potent, brutal and feudal as it was under the emperors. With the economic boom and China’s influence and money on every continent, it is easy to forget this.

What happens to my students when they return to China? At an American PEN gathering this week, three Chinese dissidents (Murong Xuecun, Bao Pu and Xiaolu Guo) in town for demonstrations at the Book Expo, talked about the pervasive, endemic, government-driven censorship in China. And to a person, they were skeptical of the value of American authors getting published in China—a vast, tempting new marketplace—or of privileged Chinese students studying here who return to China with the cachet of an American diploma. Many are “seduced” by jobs in government or industry.

I feel protective of my Chinese students. I get to know them quickly despite their shyness. And I think it is cynical to believe that when they return they will necessarily be seduced. After all, writing is a strengthening, clarifying process. A personal transformation takes place that is both sustaining and lifelong. And so I am hopeful that exposure to a free-thinking environment will somehow take hold, and that the Chinese students who pass through our classes may, one day, be in the vanguard of democratic change in China. Or, if not them, then their children. And though all reference to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 has been expunged in mainland China, it will be found again, and published for all to read, and celebrate.

Recent history in other countries, including our own, provide the best example. American history textbooks never mentioned the genocide of the Native Americans until the 1960’s, or the brutalities of slavery, for that matter, two fault lines in our own past which have still not been reconciled or healed. And in Israel, it is only in the last decade that the Israelis have learned about the eracination of the Palestinian people during their fight for independence during the British mandate.

As for the publishing opportunities for foreign authors in China, it’s a hard call. “Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories,” has been published twice in China, more recently using the “simple” alphabet. I signed a contract both times too casually. To get published in China, that is a good thing, I thought.Yes and no. PEN now recommends a series of actions before publication in China. I might have insisted on a translator to check on the deletions, excisions, and changes that were made, for example. The more writers that do this, the better. My agent might have done the same.

Is it better to have 90% of a book published in China—available in its entirety in Hong Kong and Taiwan or on the black market—or not to have it published there at all? Do we perpetuate censorship and the despotic regime by agreeing to publication? Or are we supporting the struggling publishers and editors who want to keep going and are always on the side of the writer and literature?

The answers to these questions test our moral conscience as they did before the fall of apartheid in South Africa. And that is a good for a writer.

A PDF of the American PEN “Censorship and Conscience Report” is available online:

http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/PEN_Censorship-and-Conscience_5-20-15.pdf  Read More 

When Princess Di was killed in a car crash in Paris and the paparazzi were gloating and falling over each other to get the most gruesome shot, what kind of journalism was this? Salacious, scandalous, tabloid journalism. And all of those reporters and photo-journalists—to their shame—were liable to a fine and imprisonment under French law which is grounded in the Napoleonic Code. Some refer to it as the “good samaritan law,” whereby anyone witnessing injury or distress is obliged to help. It is different in the United States; our law is based on English Common Law and there is no liability if we do not help, or moral obligation, or “duty to rescue.” Nonetheless, the discussion about rescue, engagement, and bearing testimony, is a constant among journalists. If we see a child starving in the desert and take a photograph for the newspaper we work for, are we obliged to help that child?

I will always remember those journalists on the day Princess Di was killed, I cannot forget them and what they did. She may or may not have survived her injuries; we will never know. But her death became a touchstone for many journalists who were repulsed by the paparazzi that day. I study my own motivations every time I interview and sit down to write. I try not to exploit for my own gain or fame, though temptations abound. I am not perfect. Every reporter gets an adrenalin rush on a big story.

I am thinking about all this today because of a front page story in the NY Times by Adam Nossiter, The West Africa Bureau Chief of the NY Times. He has been covering the Boko Haram atrocities in Nigeria for a while now, and has received death threats. He gets in close, takes risks. (Before Nigeria, he covered the Ebola outbreak.) And, yes, this is all very good for his career, and, yes, he will win prizes, but he is a reporter who cares. Perhaps, just perhaps, his courage will help the young girls who have been raped, impregnated and infected with HIV heal from their ordeal. I am sure he will not sleep well at night until he has done all he can to bring attention to this story.  Read More 

My daughter teases me about my texting. The texts are too long and I have turned off the auto-correct. “Write, correct, write, delete,” she says lovingly, and we both laugh. She does read them—I am her mom—but she is very busy and doesn’t have a lot of time and feels bad when she doesn’t have time to read them, which is really perfectly okay

Text has a purpose: fast, immediate communication, right? But I write tomes.

My Facebook status posts are long also and I use the “note” function which is terrific. I post the blog on my website into a Facebook note—excuse me FB, for short—and then share it to my personal timeline. My daughter, who is brilliant at all of this, organized my FB page to feed into my Twitter.

But this is the thing: I’m a writer. I don’t abbreviate, or I find it difficult to abbreviate. “Where r u,” for example. I want everyone to read what I have written and I want to read what everyone has written. But I understand that time is limited and that not everyone will admire and respond to my beautiful long narrative sentences.

When I was in graduate school, I learned that whatever medium we choose to use is up to us; how we use it is up to us, and every one of them is a tool, nothing more. Whatever medium I choose, so far as I am concerned, is the perfect opportunity to write a decent sentence and to practice writing decent sentences.

Kindly join me in this endeavor, “like” my Carol Bergman Writer Facebook page, and feel free to write long comments if you have the time. I promise to read them and to reply when I have the time.  Read More 

I went to the United Nations yesterday to meet Sueichi Kido from Nagasaki. He is one of twenty survivors of the atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki who traveled to New York for the opening of an exhibit in the UN lobby, discussions at the UN about the world’s nuclear arsenal, and a commemorative concert at Ethical Culture School.

The survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha, a Japanese word that literally translates to "explosion-affected people." Hibakusha and their children have been stigmatized in Japan and it is only recently that the government has recognized their medical complaints as a consequence of the blasts.

The Americans—President Truman and his advisers—who unleashed this weapon of mass destruction, censored the press after the blasts and suppressed the stories of the military witnesses and survivors. Even General MacArthur doubted the wisdom of dropping the bombs, and feared it. He argued that the saturation bombing of Tokyo-- 200,000 killed--just prior to the nuclear blasts, would end the war just as quickly.

A small man with a cherubic face once badly burned, Mr. Kido is devoting his retirement years to telling his story. “There aren’t many of us left. We are getting old, we are sick,” he says. Five-years-old at the time of the blast and living within the 2km epicenter, his mother carried him away from the wind and flames in search of shelter. Flesh was melting off their bodies, they were thirsty. There was no water, no shelter, no medical facility. The city had been incinerated.

Needless to say, there was no question of a normal childhood for Mr. Kido after this holocaust. He didn’t stop trembling until he was ten-years-old, or laugh, or play. PTSD doesn’t describe the implosion in his body and his soul.

"A uranium gun-type atomic bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the city of Nagasaki on August 9. Little Boy exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizable military garrison."
– Source, Wikipedia.

The curator of the exhibit, Erico Narita, had invited me to the exhibit. She showed me around and translated. She is in her 30’s and grew up in northern Japan near Hakkaido, a blissful, peaceful, innocent, post-war childhood. Contemporary Japanese history is not taught in the schools so she knew very little about Hiroshima and Nagasaki until she began her research. Therefore, the stories of the survivors in this 70th anniversary year serve a double purpose, at home and abroad.

Knowing that people don’t read a lot these days, Ms. Narita created a balanced narrative with photographs and graphics. And though the pictures are muted black and white, be warned that they are hard to look at.

When there is no knowledge, there is no discussion, Mr. Kido explains. He is a retired Japanese history professor and no friend of Emperor worship or the current Prime Minister. And so his story is also well-balanced; he is not a victim. There are fault lines in every nation, we said to one another as Erico translated. Then we bowed gently, shook hands, and said good-bye.

“Nucelar-Free World; Cries from Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” a multi-media exhibition, will be in the Main Gallery of the United Nations until May 31st. There are lines to get in and airport-strength security. Bring ID. Mr. Kido, the Assistant Secretary General of Hidankyo, the Japan Conference of the A and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization, and the last of the visitors, will be in the gallery until May 10. Read More 

I managed to get away for a few days after the end of term and I am still away as I write this. It's chilly, the fire was on when I arrived at my daughter and son-in-law's house in upstate New York, but the sun was out.

This morning I was up with the light, wrote in my journal, listened to music as I read the awful news from Nepal, called an editor in London, took out the compost, let the chickens out (there is one rooster), forgot to collect the eggs, fed the dog, walked with the dog down a quiet country road, had a yogurt and strawberry breakfast (the strawberries frozen from fresh picking last summer), made a phone call or two, checked my e-mail, had a Facetime conversation with my husband in the city (partially a business call about our small, family-owned publishing business), and though this all seems busy, it did not feel busy, nor is it late, just mid-day right now. Life here is just as productive as in the city, more so probably, because there is less distraction. I move through the day slowly; it is very quiet.

I wish I could be here all the time, but I cannot. Even the drive over the mountain above the tree line revives me. I drive in all weathers and experience--viscerally--the change of season.

I feel blessed to be able to come up here to refuel and let my mind drift. I'm working on another collection of short pieces as they occur to me. This will be called either "Nomads Two," or "Nomads Redux." I have about forty already, not all of them usable, but it seems to be a format that works for me, a distillation that enables me to improve the precision of my writing and keep the writing muscle supple, especially during term time when I am so immersed in my students' work.

But the late spring and summer is for my own work, usually fiction. I want to start another novel. I've already done some research, taken notes, visualized characters. Like the flora at this time of year, my ideas are slowly budding.  Read More