When Jonathan Wright was mining memories for his new book, “Half a World Away,” he went first to his journal, written when he was 10 years old and on an intercontinental trip with his family in 1963. The diary was full of gems that captured a sense of wonder — and, at times, horror — about the state of the world and young Wright’s place in it. There were the black-and-white images, too, that he had taken throughout the nine-month venture, photographs that he and his brother supplemented with a stack of colorful postcards.
As an adult now in his 70s, when Wright held up all this treasure to the light, in his mind’s eye he started to see pictures — not photos or videos, but what he said was akin to a “Live Photo” on an iPhone, a three-second compilation of the moment before and the moment after tapping the shutter button.
“I started to have experiences where I was writing and I’d be seeing my mother,” he said, “and suddenly she would turn toward me and cock her head with that asymmetrical smile that was her specialty.”
Wright’s senses, particularly his sense of smell, could spark scenes, and then a memoir.
“The stories are written in my voice of that time, in the language that I knew at that age,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Sometimes, recollections have melted like hot wax or been dusted over like donkey tracks in an arid land. Then, with a change of wind or light, I can look at a picture, smell boxwood, see a mountain range line, and images will begin to return, to move, and to solidify.”
By the time Wright joined Hampshire College’s inaugural class in September 1970, he had lost his mother, and his father would pass soon after. The two were a power couple of Chinese history scholars tenured at Yale University. Thus the 1963 excursion, organized by his parents as a sort of learning lab for Wright and his older brother — complete with their own live-in tutor — was precious for so many reasons. It was a once-in-a-lifetime vacation with their esteemed parents while the two boys’ lives were just beginning. The trip unfolded at a time in the United States when John F. Kennedy had been elected President and a wave of hope spread across the world. And Wright was able to see, for the first time, that he had significant privilege and the ability to use it for good.
“Living was really different, depending on when a person was born,” he writes, noting with disgust that, historically, French royalty and Turkish sultans enjoyed unfathomable luxury while everyday people didn’t have enough to eat. In a particularly heartbreaking moment outside of the Ajanta Caves in India, Wright finishes a snack and throws a banana peel out of the car window, and when he looks back sees “the nearby children diving and scrapping for the treat.”
There are light moments, too, when Wright just gets to be a kid, and his professorial parents can relax with him. In Paris, he describes giggling with his brother Duncan: “Duncan and I had bubbly water, eau gazeuse, as Duncan called it in French, and he knew how to ask the waiter for it,” he writes. “He liked to say it with an exaggerated French accent and [Dad] thought it was hilarious. Duncan did not often make jokes, but when he thought something was funny, he laughed like crazy. If [Dad] had indigestion, Duncan would whisper to me, ‘Monsieur le gazeuse,’ and then laugh even more.”
After graduating from Hampshire College, Wright founded Wright Builders, a sustainable construction company in Northampton, where he is now the senior advisor. He is a published poet and a U.S. Rowing certified sculling instructor who lives in Northampton.
In the afterword, he writes that “on the raft of restlessness” of his adulthood, building, writing and a sense of justice have carried him like currents set in motion by that memorable trip: “Those nine months shaped and textured nearly everything in my life.”
Jonathan Wright’s “Half a World Away” (Brook Hollow Press, 268 pages, $19.95) can be purchased at jonathanawright.com/half-a-world-away. On Saturday, Aug. 29 at 11 a.m., Wright will read from his novel at the Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, New Hampshire.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.