4 September 2018
Tempe, AZ
Anne and Me
When I was eleven, my greatest wish in the world was to have red hair. Two of my
favorite heroines from the books I loved had red hair: the clever and intrepid Girl Detective
Nancy Drew and my personal favorite, the carrot-haired orphan, Anne Shirley from Avonlea.
The most exciting things, it seemed, happened to young women with red hair. To my preteen
mind, it seemed impossibly unfair that I couldn’t have red hair, too.
In those awkward years of transition from girl to almost adult, I generally preferred books
to people. I don’t have any memories of my parents reading to me as a child, but I do remember
the stack of Nora Roberts paperbacks on my mother’s nightstand and the rows of well-worn Tom
Clancy and John Grisham books on the shelves in my father’s study, which he would let me take
down and “play library” with or even try to read a few pages of closely-printed black type before
I lost interest. Our mother took my sister and me to the local public library nearly every Saturday
morning, and she would let us check out as many books as we wanted from any part of the
library, as long as we could carry them out ourselves. I loved the library: the smell of dust and
paper, the cool, dry air, the shadows between the tall metal shelves. I loved that my mother, who
rarely trusted us out of her sight in public, would let me wander off on my own between the
stacks, sometimes for hours, until I emerged juggling a too-tall pile of books in my arms, to find
the two of them waiting patiently on the wooden bench by the library’s front doors. Returning
home, I would spend the rest of the day in the cool semi-darkness of our sitting room, lying flat on my back on the couch, my stack of books piled precariously high on the coffee table at my
right elbow.
I’m not sure exactly what it was about L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series
that attracted me so strongly, but I do know that I read the whole eight-book series cover to cover
several times and watched the made-for-TV movies more times than I can count. Anne Shirley,
the orphan who was supposed to be a boy but managed to talk her way into staying anyway,
seemed to me a creature utterly different from everything and everyone I knew. I loved her wild
imagination and her romantic spirit, her devotion to her adopted parents Matthew and Marilla
Cuthbert, her loyal friendship to the girl next door, Diana Barry, and her hatred-turned-rivalry-
turned-friendship-turned-romance-turned-marriage with Gilbert Blythe, the clever, popular, and
kind boy who lived down the lane. I envied her courage and her ability (or curse) to speak
exactly what she was thinking, her capacity for dramatic, yet ultimately harmless escapades, and
her poise and wit under pressure. I was fascinated by Anne’s little country farmhouse, her idyllic
small town, the charming pace of rural life before cars and telephones. For a quiet, bookish,
Chinese American daughter of immigrants from Taiwan and Singapore, feeling stranded in the
suburbs in the dry, unforgiving heat of Arizona, Anne’s life seemed to be completely removed
from my own. And yet, I identified with how Anne’s over-vivid imagination sometimes kept her
from interacting properly with the people around her, how she found pride and validation in her
success at school, how she thirsted for words and books and knowledge like a parched woman in
the desert; I remember, like Anne, understanding what it felt like to be an outsider, too.
I’m still learning the numerous ways that Anne has impacted who I am as a reader, a
writer, a teacher, and a woman. As a girl, Anne taught me that a woman should be valued for her
brain more than her looks, but that it’s completely okay to want to feel smart and pretty at the same time. She taught me that real, lasting love of all kinds is less likely to be dramatic and
“romantical” than quiet and steady. She taught me about the power of education to change a life,
that reading and writing could help me build the life I wanted for myself. As an adult, Anne
reminds me to hold on to my childhood pleasure in imagination and stories, to see beauty in the
small, simple things, and to remain hopeful even in the darkest of circumstances. She reminds
me that even in the midst of great grief, there can still be room for great joy. As a teacher, Anne
reminds me to look beyond a student’s troubled past or tendency toward daydreaming or too-
intense emotions to the potential inside of them. She reminds me that books give us the
opportunity to step into the lives of people who may seem utterly different and yet turn out to be
remarkably similar to ourselves, and she reminds me of how powerful such experiences are for
young people in particular. Of course, reading (and watching) Anne twenty years later is a very
different experience. My adult mind, trained to analyze and critique and to notice what isn’t
being said in the spaces between the stories, recognizes that Anne’s world isn’t as perfect or
idyllic as it seemed to me when I was eleven. But even now, the remembrance of Anne’s joy and
warmth and spirit still lingers, as does my old, improbable, illogical childhood desire for red hair.
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