I’m honored to be one of the International Armenian Literary Alliance’s 2023 Mentees and thrilled to have the brilliant insights and creative suggestions from my mentor, the talented author and artist Dana Walrath. I hope to give back to aspiring writers in the same way, one day. Proud to be part of this awesome group of writers, poets and creatives.

This year, IALA celebrates a record number of talented and diverse writers who were selected as mentees for our third mentorship program, which will run until August 31st, 2023. We received many applications from around the world, and are excited to welcome writers from Artsakh, Armenia, Europe and North America working on novels, short stories, poetry and, for the first year, literary translation!

Read more about the winners in IALA’s announcement.

My mother was first diagnosed with cancer at age 48, in 1973. Deep inside, she must have felt the death sentence, always a possibility, for the rest of her life, but she pushed that thought away. In the dark of night or in her hospital bed when she was undergoing surgery and treatments, she must have felt alone and scared, terrified really.

She said later that in the hospital she felt there was no way she was going to leave us—her four children. And she didn’t despite having a limited lumpectomy in those early years of breast cancer treatment even when they found “involvement of the lymph nodes.”  She even joked about her diagnosis and said she’d “made a clean breast of it.”

The cancer recurred two more times, separated by more than five years each time, so the recurrences were considered new, unrelated to the first one. And she fought them off each time.

How did she have the courage and strength to stay so strong? She didn’t really let on her fear, but she must have felt it. And her pain.  She didn’t complain. Much later, when I was looking through some things with her in her study, I found a book mark with a little kitty hanging onto a branch by her front paws, her furry body fully stretched out, and the words “hang in there” written across the bottom. She told me I had given it to her and she took it with her to her chemo appointments.  Here she was, holding onto such a little gift. But she beat that cancer and stayed with us for decades longer than the time of that the first awful diagnosis.

She had heart-lung problems, probably from the imprecise radiation of those early years, and then such a serious lung infection that doctors went in to operate and remove what they thought was a cancerous tumor, only to find a pocket of infection that antibiotics had been unable to treat. After the lung operation, her breathing became labored, but she refused to let it keep her from playing tennis or working out on the treadmill or going out to movies, dinners, or parties, or flying across the country with her husband of over 70 years until finally it became too difficult for her to move from her bed to the chair next to it without gasping for breath.

It must have felt so cruel to hear the diagnosis at age 93 that she had nodules in her lungs that looked like cancer, not the branch-like formation of lung cancer but breast cancer that had spread to her lungs, cells left over from all those years ago, perhaps.

But we weren’t sure. Those nodules could have been a recurrence of her lung infection, which years earlier was also mistaken for a cancerous tumor and wasn’t. This could be the same mistaken interpretation.

She was too weak even for a biopsy, though, and too weak to withstand treatment regardless of what we learned. So we really didn’t know for sure, but we let it go. It wouldn’t matter knowing anyway.

The hospice nurse called it cancer when Mom asked her why she was so weak, why it was so difficult to breathe. I wish now we had said it was that lung infection. Because it could have been. I think she beat cancer. And I really didn’t want her to think she hadn’t, that somehow cancer got the best of her in the end after all of those years fighting it. It didn’t. Old age did. Or that damn lung infection.

A few nights ago, I went to sleep with those thoughts. And suddenly Mom was there, wearing her brown wool pants from Banana Republic and a brown cotton long-sleeve top. No gold jewelry, though, even though she often wore sparkling gold necklaces. She looked so good, maybe 15 or 20 years younger, and so much stronger with good color in her face, her blond hair bright and healthy and her face relaxed and happy.

“Mommie,” I yelled. “You’re back. Where were you?” She mumbled something about having things to do. I hugged her, and she hugged me back tightly. You were gone five days, I was thinking to myself. We thought all was lost. And here you are.

I wanted to call out to my sister and my brothers that Mom was back, but I didn’t want to let her go.

I felt her strong arms around me, pressed against the middle of my back. I held onto her tightly. I felt her breathing and could hear the saliva in the back of her throat, like she had just swallowed. I caught a whiff of the smell of her body.

Please don’t let this be a dream, I said to myself. It’s too real. It can’t be a dream.

The picture froze. The rectangle framing my mother and me flashed out and fizzled away.

My brain dissolved into fuzziness and then I was awake. And my mother was gone. Why couldn’t that have been real?

Today, September 10, is her birthday. She would have been 94. She died on January 18, 2019.

Within two hours of landing in Shanghai after flying for over 20 hours from Boston this summer, I was weaving through traffic on a yellow rental bike, following my son along Shanghai’s narrow streets. Moments before, when he had selected the bike from a clump of them on the sidewalk, scanned the bike’s ID with his phone, unlocked it, and handed it to me, I had said, “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“But you mountain bike,” he said.

“It’s not the biking I’m worried about. I’m not putting it all together too well.” I waved vaguely into the air and got on the bike anyway. Off we went. Oddly enough, despite the narrow streets and jet lag, we pedaled among Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, Toyota Camrys, and the occasional Porsche and Jaguar, as well as bright white-and-green buses, and zillions of scooters and bikes, going from the language school where he was studying Mandarin for the summer to his apartment without anyone dying.

“It’s because the drivers don’t want to kill bicyclists in Shanghai the way they do in the U.S.,” he said. The key to survival, as a pedestrian or bicyclist, is to pick your line and stick to it. People will drive around you.

And that more or less characterized my one-week trip—one unexpected experience after another. I had thought of China as an ancient kingdom and now a developing country but not nearly as modern and sophisticated as the United States. Wrong. At least when it comes to Shanghai.

For starters, so much of Shanghai is brand new, built in the last twenty years or so, including a shiny, fast subway with about 20 different lines, in contrast to Boston’s delay-plagued, rattling trains. China has the world’s only magnetic levitation train, which reached 430 kilometers per hour as I rode in from the airport, and soaring skyscrapers, towering hotels, and massive apartment blocks. Luxury stores abound—Armani, Gucci, Cartier, YSL, Prada, and Zara—and small boutiques for discriminating shoppers since Chinese consumers account for one-third of the global luxury market.

From riding the subway, I was certain no one in the city was over 30 or anything other than gorgeous. Women dressed in short-shorts or pretty skirts and tops, crammed into train cars, glued to their iPhones. I wondered what Deng Xiaoping would say about their scant clothing or the prevalence of apps. Or would he just be glad the Communist Party was still in power and, overall, the level of economic prosperity had risen for most people, although much more for some than for others?

Another discovery was how international Shanghai is. Take the restaurants. From all-you-can-eat-and-drink taco places to high-end coffee shops roasting their own beans, you name it, you can find it. During my week there, I had the best soup dumplings, a Shanghainese speciality, as well as the best hash browns at a diner, not to mention a perfectly grilled rack of lamb at a farm-to-table place. But then again, Shanghai has been an international center since the Opium Wars, when Great Britain forced opium on the Chinese people around1840 to help balance its trade deficit with China caused by the British love for tea.

Amidst the gleaming luxury cars on the narrow streets were not only people on bikes and scooters but men pedaling bicycle rickshaws, hauling stacks of flattened cardboard boxes or pieces of scrap wood piled high. One bicycle rickshaw was loaded 10 feet high with huge bags filled with empty plastic bottles. The recycling man, I guess.

Also unexpectedly, the air quality was not wretched. Part of the reason lay in the scooters zooming up behind me on the sidewalk before I could even hear them. It was my son who clued me in. Nearly all of the scooters and cars are electric. Not a single bus or truck belched noxious diesel smoke. Central planning has some upsides, compared to our buffoon-in-chief rolling back auto efficiency standards so we can burn the maximum amount of fossil fuels. If Xi Jinping, or his top advisors decide on something in China, it happens.

That is not to say that people enjoy the freedom we have in the United States. I was watching CNN one evening in my hotel room while brushing my teeth and the screen went dark for over five minutes after the announcer mentioned the problem of people-to-people lending in Beijing. Given that the banks in China are owned by the government, individuals getting into money lending would be a problem. And if you are a minority, basically anyone who is not Han Chinese, forget it. There are about a million Uyghurs in internment camps right now, although the Chinese government denies it.

And what exactly is the economic system in China? Pudong, with its neon skyscrapers and the second-tallest building in the world, is Shanghai’s financial center built to rival Hong Kong, constructed in the last 20 years. China is buying up resources around the globe, building infrastructure in third world countries, so China can have access not only to minerals and resources there but also to those markets for selling Chinese goods. What could be more capitalist than that? So is this authoritarian capitalism?

And what about traditional Chinese culture? I had visited China in the 1980s when people still put their birds outside in cages in the narrow lanes between housing blocks for fresh air, and old people did early morning Tai Chi in the park. Now, so many neighborhoods have been knocked down, entire blocks at a time, that many of the ones that remain are like attractions for shoppers and tourists. The French Concession, however, still has blocks of low-rise buildings and beautiful, white-bark plane trees with large leaves that look a lot like maple leaves, lining the two-lane streets and creating welcome shade from the hot August sun.

And judging from the Chinese crowds at the spectacular Shanghai Museum, people very much appreciate the magnificent exhibits of ancient Chinese art. The museum is so popular that one signs says, “Here is a line of 4 hours.” Fortunately, there was no need for that sign the day I visited.

And where was the older generation? My guidebook said 25% of the people in Shanghai are over 60. I’d hardly seen any other than a few older women in what looked like comfy pajamas.

On my last morning, I got up early and left my sleek, hi-rise hotel for a walk in the tiny park nearby, an oasis of green in a traffick-y, paved-over area near the Jing An Temple. Just inside the park, a group of middle-aged Chinese women and a few men were lined up in four or five rows, doing stretching exercises to music coming from a boom box, while a woman up front led the group. It could have been an exercise class at my health club back home except for the Chinese pedestrians who rolled their luggage right through the middle of the group, crossing the park while I stood off to the side.

I wandered around and found a group of older Chinese women wearing dresses and low blocky heels dancing in two long lines to what sounded exactly like Merle Haggard. Their dance style wasn’t sassy, the way it would be in the United States. Instead, the women looked almost bored, lifting their feet half-heartedly, stopping to chat with their friends, and raising their arms nonchalantly.

Nearby was the group I had most wanted to find. Several older Chinese men and women were practicing Tai Chi, flowing from one move to the next as if surrounded by something palpable that the rest of us could not see. One gray-haired man was particularly mesmerizing, dressed in a white shirt and loose, dark pants. I couldn’t take my eyes off him until he stepped out of the group and went to talk to some old men sitting on a wooden bench nearby.

In all, maybe eight different groups were dancing or exercising in this little park before 9 am. Skinny but healthy-looking wild cats with surprisingly un-matted fur wandered through it all, completely at home. In fact, it probably was their home.

From there, I explored another neighborhood and ended up strolling down Julu Lu, a lovely, two-lane street in the French Concession, near a creative arts center, a magazine publisher, and a writing center. I heard classical guitar music coming from a small speaker at the Farmhouse Cafe. I stopped at the walk-up window and ordered a cappuccino. I wasn’t sure if the young Chinese man who prepared my drink would understand English, but he looked like he might be a student and I had to try. “What is that music?” I asked.

“Julian Bream,” he said with a smile. We grinned at each other for several moments, sharing the clear, perfect notes of Britain’s foremost classical guitarist, playing what sounded like Bach.

That formed one of my lasting impressions of this hot, crowded, ultra-modern Chinese city and was a perfect ending to my trip: an unexpected connection with a total stranger that transcended boundaries of time and culture. You never know what you will find in China. I hope you get a chance to go too.

“Be sure to go to the Anne Frank House.” That was one of my writing partners when I told her I was heading to Amsterdam.  “Also, look for the bench where Hazel and Augustus sat by the canal in The Fault in Our Stars,” she added. Since she’d missed the Van Gogh Museum when jet lag left her sleeping through her timed entry, she limited her recommendations to those two.

As much as I loved The Fault in Our Stars, I wasn’t sure about finding the bench. There must be hundreds, thousands of benches by canals in Amsterdam. I couldn’t stroll around forever. And the Anne Frank House? Wasn’t that in Germany? Maybe Amsterdam had some kind of museum but not the actual hiding place. I googled it and, sure enough, Anne Frank had hid in Amsterdam. How did I not know that? I’d read her diary as a kid and again as an adult and never placed the location.

I went online for tickets and the only entry time left was the morning I would arrive in Amsterdam after flying all night from Boston and changing planes. Everything had to work perfectly: Both flights had to be on time, international customs had to be a zillion times faster than it is in Boston, and I couldn’t get lost going from the airport into the city and walking to the museum. Never mind I’d never been to Amsterdam before.

Despite a middle seat in a row of five across, I slept several hours on the plane. Flights and customs were a breeze, signage at Schipol International Airport to the train was easy—no Dutch required—and a helpful conductor motioned all of us going into Amsterdam onto a waiting train. Thirty minutes later I arrived downtown, checked my carry-on in a locker at the train station and headed toward the Anne Frank House about a mile away, feeling quite self-satisfied and full of energy from a perfect cappuccino at the airport.

I arrived with nearly an hour to spare and no, they don’t let you go in before your allotted time. It was hard to slow down. I walked through the Cheese Museum (smelly), West Church (grand Renaissance church where Rembrandt was buried in 1669) and the Tulip Museum (kind of pointless) before returning to the Anne Frank House and trying to absorb its presence. It looks like any building in Amsterdam, a flat-fronted, brick, four-story row house along a cobblestone walkway next to a canal.

I stared at the exterior trying to imagine what people felt in the 1940s, passing this unremarkable building after the Nazis invaded The Netherlands, or what Anne and her family and the Van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer felt hiding inside for over two years.

People now sit at open air cafes on nearby corners, drinking Amstel Light or espresso, and enjoy the sun and each other’s company even on a raw windy day. That Anne Frank’s actual hiding place was here is such a contrast to the current scene surrounding it that it seemed unreal, like a movie set.

Long lines of people were waiting to enter: teenagers, older couples and everyone in between, wearing jeans and t-shirts, slacks and dresses; people of light and dark complexions, speaking a variety of languages.

Once inside, I viewed a short video showing scenes from that grim time in history that forced Anne and her family into hiding to avoid the Nazi death camps. From there, I passed beside the hinged bookcase, now left ajar, that hid the doorway to the annex, and entered Anne Frank’s world. I followed the stream of visitors, reading quotes from Anne’s diary written on the walls.

“I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want!”

“But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

I ended up in her room, hardly realizing it at first since it is dimly lit to protect the magazine pictures she had put up on the walls. I passed through the other rooms and up the stairway, as steep as a ladder, to the attic.

The actual diary itself, sits under glass in low light, in the middle of the room.

“Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl.”

Someone, no one knows who, informed on the people in the annex, and Dutch police, led by an SS squad leader, arrested all eight of them in 1944. They were deported to the death camp at Auschwitz. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, probably only a few months before the war ended in 1945. Anne was 15. Her father, Otto Frank, was the only one of the eight to survive. He devoted the rest of his life to bringing her words to us.

“I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”

The museum shows how their survival depended on Otto Frank’s four employees, who were not Jewish and who hid them and kept them alive for over two years. Miep Gies and her husband found food every day for the eight in the Secret Annex and another Jew they were sheltering in their own home and themselves—eleven people at a time of coupon rationing, running the risk of death themselves. They kept the people in the Secret Annex alive long enough for Anne to write her diary chronicling all that happened. It was Miep Gies, who found Anne’s diary and papers after Anne was arrested and gave them to Otto Frank when he was released from Auschwitz.

Once outside, reflecting on the experience, I was certain I had heard Anne’s voice, speaking aloud when I was inside. And even though I was sad and angry, I was also happy. She had a huge ambition in life and she realized it in her short time here. And the humanity and courage of the helpers doing the right thing inspired me as much as Anne and her father.

I never ended up looking for Hazel and Augustus’ bench. I was actually in Amsterdam for the opening of an opera about Machiavelli, for which my older brother wrote the libretto, and the opera was stupendous. But the Anne Frank House was the beating heart of the trip. If Anne could see the millions of us now, waiting in line to read her words, walking through her hiding place, and glimpsing what befell the people there, she would know how much she gave all of us, for which we are forever grateful.

At the Genocide Memorial in Armenia, I knelt and placed my red carnation at the edge of the eternal flame and stood silently with throngs of people who had come from all over the world at the end of May for the Aurora Prize award.

Its full name is the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, and it will be awarded for eight years, from 2015 to 2023, in commemoration of the eight years of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire 100 years ago, spanning 1915 to 1923, when 1.5 million Armenians were killed. The prize is given in gratitude for acts of humanity that helped to save Armenians and now recognizes heroes saving lives today in dangerous circumstances around the world. We had come to the Genocide Memorial to pay our respects and would soon head to the award ceremony, where my brother David would be master of ceremonies.

After placing my flower, I stood next to a friend with our backs to one of the huge basalt slabs of the Genocide Memorial, which lean inward in a circle around the eternal flame. I watched other people lay down their red and white carnations, cross themselves, and stand, lost in thought or prayer.

I thought about my father’s cousins, aunts, and uncles who were caught up in the genocide. One of my father’s uncles, a businessman, was imprisoned and disappeared with nearly all the men in their town. One of my father’s aunts perished with her little daughter on the death march that followed the disappearance and murder of all those men. One of my father’s teenaged cousins was taken for the Labor Battalion to build roads for the Ottoman Army where unarmed Armenian men worked as slave laborers in places so remote they either died of exposure or starvation or were murdered outright. Another teenaged cousin survived for weeks on the forced march across the desert only to disappear when they neared Ras al Ayn, a notorious death camp for Armenians in Syria. I said the names of all those relatives in my head.

And I said the names of relatives who survived. One cousin of my father’s was a little boy, barely alive, left with nomadic people in the desert to care for him and raise him, probably without ever knowing he was Armenian. Two other boy cousins were kept in a Turkish household while their mother was forced to march across the desert to Aleppo, where the U.S. Consul found the women nearly naked, their skin burned “to the color of a green olive.” She was able to reunite with her sons and come live with them in the U.S., rarely smiling in photos and nearly always wearing black, baggy dresses. Another one of my father’s cousins I met at a family gathering in southern California. A great aunt pointed him out to me, saying only, “He’s an orphan.” I nodded, not fully understanding what she was telling me. She added, “He married an orphan.” I thought it was sad for orphans to marry each other, not realizing she was telling me they were genocide survivors.

I said their names too at the Genocide Memorial.

I had come here once before, in 2006. That time, I felt the spirits of my relatives moving in waves through the basalt slabs, as if they were there, finally finding a final resting place where they could be honored, cherished, and mourned. This time I didn’t feel anything occupying the rock walls towering over me. The walls didn’t even look impressive. They looked squat and insignificant.

It was only later, looking at the Aurora photographer’s photos, which included the moment I placed my carnation beside the eternal flame, that I realized those slabs were as immense as I had thought the first time in 2006.

But this time, all I felt was loss, and maybe a sense of confusion, as if my ancestors and everyone else’s were saying, “We don’t want your tears or your flowers, we want our lives back.”

The Aurora Prize this year was awarded a few hours later in a spectacular ceremony to Dr. Tom Catena, the only doctor permanently working in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan, treating 500 patients each day while warplanes bomb the region in a deadly civil war. The award was justly deserved and aptly named, to awaken humanity before it is too late.

“Maybe the next time I see you, you’ll play better.”

That was Alexandrina, my tennis instructor, at the end of my third day of adult tennis camp in Florida last week. Blond, strong, charming really, in her 20s, and originally from Bulgaria, she had patiently been hitting balls to me in the exact right spot for me to blast top-spin forehands and backhands back at her in the hot sun. I had really wanted to come to tennis camp and work on my game, but I hadn’t exactly been blasting anything. “You just need to learn the basics,” she added.

She didn’t need to say that. I’ve been playing tennis since I was eleven when my mother was the one on the other side of the net arcing balls over to me at the public courts near our house in Washington, D.C. I went on to compete as a junior and even played on the Stanford Varsity freshman year. Granted it was before Title 9 turned women’s sports into serious business, but still, I’m not a beginner.

Then again, Alex, who majored in coaching at college, now teaches teenagers from all over the world at this Florida tennis academy where I’d come for a few days. These kids play several hours each day and attend school on the side in a building overlooking the courts. So, of course, my tennis level is basic.

Still, it hurt my feelings. And it also made me want to get better and come back next year.

Why do I even care? Unlike these teenagers, I don’t have an international tennis career ahead of me. But I do have an image in my mind of the tennis player I want to be and an image of the tennis player I am. I want them to be the same.

In a way, that’s how I learned to telemark ski. Several years ago, I was cross-country skiing on gently rolling terrain at the base of Mt. Rainier in Washington state with friends and looked up to see two guys floating down a lower flank of the mountain, deep powder flying around them as they made their telemark turns on bended knee, and I thought that’s what I want to do.

Never mind that I was afraid of heights at the time, did not alpine ski, and had hyperventilated a third of the way up a green (basically flat) beginner’s slope during a group cross-country ski lesson at Snoqualmie Pass in Washington. I wanted to learn to telemark ski. After years of working at it, I can now probably get down that slope at Mt. Rainier, although I’ve always actually wondered.

And so with tennis, it’s somewhat the same. I don’t look at Venus or Serena and say, “That’s what I want to do,” since I know I never could. But I do want to hit hard and accurately the way they do.

Surprisingly, that’s not what Alex had me practice during our session. Instead, she told me to get further behind the ball and transfer my weight forward as I hit it. “That’s the easiest place to be,” she said. “Hit effortlessly. No matter where the ball lands.” She had me running way back to get behind a deep ball, and then racing forward (and stopping) before hitting a short one. The same stroke, the same position, no matter where the ball landed. That one drill for over an hour.

At one point, I told her I lacked confidence. She didn’t ask me why or speak about confidence like it was a character trait that you either had or you didn’t. Instead, she said, “It’s different for each person how many times you have to do something until you feel confident.” Like it was something someone could learn, that I could learn. And she told me to move my opponent around on the court and wait until they are off to one side before coming to net. “That way, you don’t have to put pressure on yourself to hit the perfect shot.”

That advice alone was worth the trip to tennis camp — building confidence through steady practice and setting things up to make it easy on yourself.

At the end of our final drill, she said, “After all the balls we hit, look how few are on your side of the net. You have beaten your first opponent – the net.”

Maybe one day I will actually master the basics and move on.