Ian finished taking notes, set the page aside, and started to write on a fresh piece of paper.
Kate,
I’m no poet, my love, but I’ll tell you this—you always made me want to be one. You made a believer of me in the beauty of words and thoughts. And now, I believe in so many things. In you. In love and goodness and forever. In that we were drawn together for reasons.
I touch our daughter’s face, and I see yours. I hear her laugh, and I listen to you.
You’re right—something can’t be pulled from you if it’s a part of you. And you’re a part of me. And I will always cherish this oneness, just as the sun must cherish its unity with the sky.
I know, my love, that I don’t need to ask your forgiveness for what I’m about to do, for opening my heart. I know that you led me down this path, and why you did so. You took my hand and guided me toward a source of light, a new beginning. Not away from you, but toward you, toward that oneness, that sense beyond self.
I love you so much, Kate. I always have and I always will. You created us, and from us, such wonder has happened. Mattie will be happy. Content. And loved. You saved her. And me. And we’re going to save a child of the streets. A boy who was lost, but soon will be found.
We’ve lived so many lives together, you and I. And we’ll keep living them, not in flesh, but in spirit. And then, one day, I won’t need wishing trees to talk with you. I’ll go where you’ve gone, where beauty seeks refuge, where bliss becomes eternal, and together we’ll watch goodness unfold—like one of Mattie’s drawings, full of so much splendor and hope and love. So much wonder.
Look at what we’ve done, my love. Look and be happy. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Ian
He folded the paper carefully. After making sure that Mattie was still asleep and that the room’s door was locked, he crept to the edge of the balcony. The ground was about twenty feet below, and the beat of his heart quickened as he eyed a nearby branch, which was almost an arm’s length away and as thick as his thigh. Certain that the branch would support him, that the old tree wouldn’t fail him, Ian tucked his letter into his pocket. He climbed over the railing and stood on the edge of the balcony, holding the metal behind him.
After taking several deep breaths and studying the branch, he leapt for it, his arms wrapping around it, his skin pierced and torn in several places, but his mind unyielding. Grunting, he pulled himself up, swinging his leg over the branch, twisting so that he was atop it. Scooting forward, he reached the trunk of the tree and began to climb. He took pleasure in the task, as if he were drawing closer to Kate. And he went up, higher and higher, until the tree swayed beneath him, and distant lights on the Red Sea shined like fireflies.
A breeze arose, causing leaves to move and chatter, the tree to come alive. He watched the stars, the gathering of worlds. He thought of Mattie sleeping below, of how they would explore more peaks and valleys, seas and sketches. His life wasn’t over, he knew, though not long ago he had feared that it was. In so many ways, he was like the tree, whose ancestors might have shaded Moses. The tree had been wounded in places, with stumps where branches had been, with cracks in once-smooth wood. Yet the tree was unquestionably alive, and supported life. Insects crawled about it. A bird’s nest was near. The tree still knew how to sing in the wind.
Ian found a crevice in the trunk, which held old leaves and a fine layer of sand. The sand must have arrived before the hotel was built, when storms carried the desert toward the Red Sea. Careful not to disturb the sand, Ian tucked his note into the crevice. The act of seeing the ancient sand, of leaving Kate a note, felt holy. At no point since her death had Ian felt closer to Kate than he did now. He believed in the wishing tree. He believed that she could see him on it, and that she would read or hear or somehow sense the words that he had written. She had spoken to him from the dead—leading him here, to a place where he could rise anew, where the Nile flowed, millennium after millennium, carrying silt and moisture to soil that brought life to the desert, to a place of memories, of histories, of dynasties that would continue to be discovered and celebrated.
The river still flowed, its waters not yet gone, its stories not yet fully told.
HONG KONG
The Smiles of Strangers
“A BIRD DOES NOT SING BECAUSE IT HAS AN ANSWER. A BIRD SINGS BECAUSE IT HAS A SONG.”
—CHINESE SAYING
An old man removed his thick glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, and then settled back on the bench. He had been coming to the park since childhood, and though the city below it had changed, the park hadn’t. The boulders were the same, as were the wide stretch of grass, the laugher of children, the way the sun felt on his skin.
As he had many times over the past year and a half, the old man watched a family of Westerners, their words incomprehensible to him, but their faces familiar and welcome. The family sat on a picnic blanket and savored the day. A girl with light brown hair lay on her belly, drawing in a sketch pad. Another girl, about the same age, laughed with a dark-skinned boy who had only recently begun arriving with them.
The old man didn’t understand the appearance of the boy, who looked so different from the girls and the man and woman, who often held hands. The boy always sat near the girls and played with them as if they were his siblings, even though they did not have the same flesh and blood.
As the sun climbed higher, the old man continued to watch the family, savoring their joy, reminded of his own brothers and sisters.
The father removed a soccer ball from a backpack, and soon he and the woman were chasing the ball, and the children ran and laughed, kicking and falling and giggling and making the old man smile so many times.
Dear Reader,
I want to take a moment to thank you for reading The Wishing Trees. Countless wonderful and deserving novels exist, and I’m grateful that you set the time aside to read my book. I hope you enjoyed it.
The Wishing Trees follows in the footsteps of my third novel, Dragon House, and I’d like to update you on the street children that Dragon House is helping. The success of that novel, along with direct donations from readers, has allowed us to buy sets of schoolbooks for about eight hundred Vietnamese street children over the past year. I’m so grateful for this outcome and am indebted to readers, librarians, and booksellers for their encouragement and generosity.
I also want some good to come out of The Wishing Trees and plan to donate some of the funds generated by my book to support the Arbor Day Foundation. So, if you’ve purchased The Wishing Trees, or told a friend about it, know that you’ve helped plant a little tree—a wishing tree, as I like to think.
As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments. I can be reached through my Web site at www.johnshors.com.
Be well.
John
Acknowledgments
The Wishing Trees would not have been possible without the support of my wife, Allison, and our children, Sophie and Jack. Thank you for letting me live my dream. I love you all.
I’d like to express my gratitude toward Ellen Edwards, my wonderful editor, as well as Laura Dail, my agent extraordinaire. Thanks also to my parents, John and Patsy Shors; my brothers, Tom, Matt, and Luke; as well as Mary and Doug Barakat, Bruce McPherson, Dustin O’Regan, Amy Tan, Wally Lamb, Mahbod Seraji, Kara Cesare, Michael Brosowski, Pennie Ianniciello, Clover Apelian, Shawna Sharp, Sarah Streett, Bliss Darragh, Diane Saarinen, Amy Cherry, Kara Welsh, Craig Burke, Kaitlyn Kennedy, and Davina Witts at BookBrowse.com.
John Shors is the bestselling author of Beneath a Marble Sky, Beside a Burning Sea, Dragon House, and The Wishing Trees. He has won numerous awards for his writing, and his novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
John lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and two children. For more information, please visit www.johnshors.com.
READERS GUIDE
A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN SHORS
Q. At the heart of The Wishing Trees is a touching fathe
r-daughter relationship. How much did you draw upon your relationship with your own daughter in creating the interactions between Ian and Mattie?
A. I try in all my novels not to base characters on the people in my life. I prefer to create characters from scratch, to watch them grow, draft by draft. Having said that, certainly my experience as the father of a young girl and boy was crucial for this novel. I could put myself in Ian’s shoes, and make him believable, because of this experience. Also, having young children made it easier for me to write from Mattie’s perspective.
Q. What particular challenges did you encounter in writing about two people grieving for the wife and mother whom they loved?
A. Obviously, two such people are going to have a great deal of sadness in their lives, and I needed to honor that sadness. But I didn’t want to dwell on it too deeply. I wanted to also give my characters hope and humor, compassion and joy. Finding a balance between sorrow and celebration was a difficult process.
Q. Describe your experience with “wish trees.”
A. After graduating from college, I moved to Kyoto, Japan, where I taught English for several years. I have vivid memories of wish trees, which were often located in popular parks. The trees tended to be old—propped up with bamboo poles and rope. During holidays and busy weekends, the trees were covered with thousands of small white pieces of paper that contained people’s wishes. I loved the sight of these trees, and the thought of wishes being fulfilled.
Q. Did many of the scenes in The Wishing Trees come from your own personal experience?
A. While teaching in Japan I managed to save enough money to backpack throughout Asia. I was fortunate to spend a significant amount of time in all of the countries depicted in The Wishing Trees, and many of the scenes in the novel are based on my own experiences. For instance, I swam with the sharks at Ko Phi Phi, I helped a Nepalese girl carry her firewood up an endless series of stone steps, and I went on a self-propelled roller coaster in India. I am the type of writer who needs to live in a place to bring that place to life on the page. There’s no way I could have written this novel without having first visited the cities, mountains, and coastlines portrayed within it.
Q. What fuels your passion for travel? And what are your favorite countries to visit?
A. I love being in a new place and exploring. To me there are few experiences as exhilarating as making discoveries. Sometimes I’m amazed at what can be found near my home in Colorado. Sometimes a journey takes me overseas. Whatever the case, I’m always looking for new experiences, which make me a better writer. In terms of my favorite destinations, I have a strong attachment to Asia. Perhaps this kinship is bred from familiarity. I feel as if I understand the region well. I admire its cultures and its people and its natural wonders. Of course, I hope to travel more extensively to other continents, and to get to know those places as well. Every country, I believe, has something to offer.
Q. As an armchair traveler, I would enjoy hearing about a particularly good travel experience and a particularly bad one, if you’d care to share.
A. I’ve been blessed with a lot of wonderful experiences, but one stands out. While living in Japan, two friends and I rode our mountain bikes across a mountainous part of the country. We didn’t have much money, and one evening we opted to sleep in a city’s park—not eager for a cold, damp, and uncomfortable night, but without much choice. As we were setting up our sleeping bags, an old woman walked past us. She was probably in her late eighties, and couldn’t speak a word of English. But through a series of friendly gestures, she invited us into her nearby home, where we bathed as she cooked us an enormous meal. We later drank sake and danced with her, and slept in the beds that once comforted her children. By the end of that night, I realized just how deep a capacity the human heart has for goodwill, and that realization continues to resonate within me today.
Now, in terms of bad experiences, I’ve some of those too. Once, in the slums of a large Asian city, some men tried to rob me, and instead of giving them what they wanted, I ran away, which wasn’t a wise move. I was caught a few minutes later, and found myself fighting off a bunch of angry thieves. I would have been in big trouble had not a local television reporter happened on the scene and come to my rescue.
Q. Why does The Wishing Trees span so much of the globe?
A. I wanted Ian and Mattie to take an emotional and spiritual journey as well as a physical one. These two ideas went hand in hand. One of my goals was to have my characters learn from the people they met, and that needed to happen in a variety of countries and cultures, where attitudes toward life and death vary enormously. I believe we can all learn from one another, no matter how different, even incompatible, we at first appear, and I hoped to show that in The Wishing Trees.
Q. Which character was the hardest to write and why?
A. I’d say that Ian was the toughest, because of his vernacular. I thought that an Australian character would add a dimension to the novel and was intrigued with the idea of bringing Ian to life. But Australians use as much slang as any group of people in the world, and I was a bit nervous about making his voice believable. I didn’t want to go too far in one direction or not far enough in the other. So, I studied Australian slang and had an Australian friend read an early draft of The Wishing Trees. I was also fortunate to have traveled to Australia, and have always had some of their colorful expressions stuck in my head. Sometimes, for instance, I find myself saying, “I reckon,” when other people would just say, “Yes.”
Q. Your previous novels have had many characters and various subplots. Why did you decide to switch things up in The Wishing Trees?
A. I’m not particularly interested in writing the same kind of novel over and over. What I’m interested in is challenging myself and providing readers with fresh stories. For instance, in Beneath a Marble Sky, I wrote in the first person, bringing to life the voice of a seventeenth-century Indian princess—not an easy task for a guy sitting in his office in Colorado. In Beside a Burning Sea, I began each chapter with an original haiku. Dragon House is a tale about some remarkable homeless children. In many ways, The Wishing Trees is a departure from my earlier work. There are only a few characters. There’s no villain. And there’s no dominant love story. In my future novels, I’ll continue to pursue different themes and experiment with structure, point of view, and other writing techniques.
Q. What’s the hardest aspect about being a writer?
A. Well, of course there are deadlines and pressures, which can rule my day-to-day existence. But what I think is toughest is the lack of camaraderie that’s so often found in other professions. Rarely do writers have brainstorming sessions, go out to lunch together, or enjoy an after-work cocktail. Writing is a very solitary affair. Sometimes that’s wonderful. But it can also be a bit too quiet. And when that silence starts to settle in, I find it necessary to go out for a walk, to somehow interact with the world.
Q. Why do children play such big roles in your novels?
A. I want to bring diverse points of view to my books. That diversity can be defined by age, race, personal attributes, and so forth. For me, children are a means to add different voices, and very compelling voices at that. I think children often interpret the world in ways that adults don’t, and it’s rewarding to open myself to their way of seeing. My own children, for example, often take pleasure in experiences that I might rush past—the sensation of stepping into mud, the texture of a feather, the sight of something small and wondrous.
Q. It’s absolutely amazing that you’ve spoken to almost twenty-five hundred book clubs around the world, both in person and via speakerphone. Why have you made such efforts, and why do you think so many people are involved in book clubs?
A. Once my first novel, Beneath a Marble Sky, took off internationally, selling well in many countries, I decided that I wanted to give something back to readers. If people were going to support me—reading my novels and telling their friends about them—then I needed to support them in
return. Communicating with tens of thousands of readers via e-mail and through book club talks requires a lot of work on my part, but it’s worth it. Readers deserve such interaction, and I’m honored to reach out to them.
I believe that books are not an endangered species. There’s so much talk these days about the demise of books, about the end of reading as a leisure activity. But I think there is some false drama built into these conversations. Books are vehicles that take us to magnificent destinations; they’re irreplaceable. The fact that I’m still speaking with several book clubs every night further convinces me that the love affair with the book has not ended. Book clubs symbolize this communal, continual love.
Q. Tell us about your next novel.
A. My next novel is set in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand—an island paradise that was hit hard by the tsunami in 2004. In the book I bring together three Americans—two brothers and the woman who loves them both—and a local Thai family that depends on Western tourism while also disliking many of the changes it produces. As this mingling of cultures and personal relationships creates growing conflicts, a disastrous event threatens my characters’ lives, challenges their loyalties, and turns their expectations upside down. I’m already deep into the story and am excited about the way it’s unfolding.