Wildlife Sightings in Downtown Osaka

Today, smack in the middle of one of the best seasons in Osaka–the air is soft, the humidity low, the sun out but not too fierce–I stumbled upon a new cafe along the river on Tosabori Dori. It’s called “Brooklyn Roasting Company,” although in true Japanese fashion, I have no idea why: the owners seem to be comprised of a Japanese hispter and his French-Senegalese buddy.

But the coffee is strong, I can sit with my laptop right out on their wide, Ikea-looking wooden deck along the river, and it’s a lovely place to work on the book. (Chapter 11 is in progress!)

Then I see a curious visitor: a stork, I think, (or what looks like a stork to this urban girl), enjoying the view out over the river from the ledge of the building next to the cafe, then turning around on his spindly legs and pointing his majestic beak this way and that. I grab my cell phone and snap this picture, delighted. “Who knew!?” I think, that I’d be sitting side-by-side with a stork enjoying my coffee, pecking out words to my book on my laptop while he surveys the view we share?

It’s not until the bird has flown away and I start eagerly uploading the picture to Facebook that I realize I’ve been joined by another photo-enthusiast enjoying the sights: a boat of Japanese tourists passing by, one of whom takes out her cell-phone camera, points it towards me, and snaps a picture of the gaijin with the laptop sitting at the cafe.

9 Years Ago Today, I Met the Shogun

Nine years ago today, I met the Shogun. I kept trying to stand near him, and he kept moving away from me, afraid, he’d tell me later, that I was going to try to make him speak English.

Two weeks later, he said, “Lub you,” to which I responded “What?” He had to repeat it a few more times before I realized his “ub” was “ove.”

As I’ve written before, seven months ago, the Shogun and I gave up hoping I’d ever be able to sustain a pregnancy, after almost five years of trying: my body somehow too full of slip for those tiny sparks of life to take hold for long. “But you know,” he told me, as our deadline to stop trying neared, “if we can have baby, that would be like miracle. But it will still only be like dessert, because you will always be main course.”

So today, with nine years of days together and Mother’s Day approaching with the promise of a holiday we’ll both ignore, I won’t forget how lucky I am that, although he kept moving away from me that first day we met, I kept moving towards him, and eventually we both stood still, together.

What Does Home Mean When You Live Abroad?

I’ve been thinking about the concept of home a lot lately. Partly from watching home so much on TV a few weeks ago as the Boston Marathon bombing unfolded, partly from missing home like I always do, no matter how happy I am at any given moment in my expat life in Japan, partly from seeing this wonderful poster advertising the arrival of the Boston MFA’s Japanese art collection in Osaka (I most love the “I’m home” part, written in Japanese on the left and English on the right), partly from having just finished Emily Raboteau’s very lovely, very smart new memoir Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, and partly from reading a New York Times review of the next book I want to read, André Aciman’s Harvard Square, containing the line that hooked me: “I had come here, an exile from Alexandria, doing what all exiles do on impulse, which is to look for their homeland abroad, to bridge the things here to things there, to rewrite the present so as not to write off the past.”

And of course, partly from working on my own forthcoming book and teasing out what it means to be at home in the world when you live as an expat.

How Do We Put Words onto the Feeling of Being at Home? How Do We Define It?

Raboteau’s concept of home in particular envelops the political, the spiritual, and the historical, and deals with a sense of displacement that I, as a middle-class, educated, free, white American woman will never suffer from, even while I live as a minority in a country a hemisphere away from the place that feels most like mine. (And my privilege at having a place that feels most like mine doesn’t escape me.)

But I’m intrigued by how to define home as an expat. And by Raboteau’s alignment of “home” with Zion, or the “Promised Land.” I know how easy it is, when we live overseas, to lose our gimlet eye about home: to romanticize it, to see it as a kind of lost Eden, a place where we wouldn’t suffer the same disappointments or lonelinesses or defeats that we suffer in our expat lives. (Sometimes it’s like we think the grass would always be greener if we were only back on our “real” sides.)

And if we do tend to romanticize home, especially as expats, then how do we really define it truly?

Here’s what I wrote about the struggle to define the strangely abstract concept of home, when I returned to Boston for the first time after moving to Japan:

Just walking down the sidewalk in Boston or Cambridge felt different than it had in Osaka.  My movements were the same.  My gait, my breath, my heartbeat.  But I felt different.

Was I spontaneously, unconsciously, responding to the familiarity of the New England air around me, the specific calibration of its weight or humidity, that I’d always been accustomed to without ever knowing it?  Did hearing the flat sounds of American English all around me, combined with the consistent hum and flow of some never-before noticed Northeastern traffic pattern, send untraceable signals from my ear-drums to my brain, that I was where I belonged, where I was most used to being?  Was the force of gravity slightly different here in New England, rooting my feet just so to the native concrete—and could my heart sense that, even though my brain couldn’t fully define it?  Or was it some combination of all these things, or of my mind not constantly accounting for all the new, unexpected, yet minute details of everyday life on another side of the planet?

My sense of being at home felt distinctly different, more powerful, from my age-old certainty that Boston was where I wanted to settle because of the safety its familiarity afforded. My attachment to the place and its pulse felt deeper now, like a phantom limb sprouting inside me.  My home in Boston had become a part of me in a way I had never felt: not only was the city where I wanted to live, it was where I belonged, because I so clearly hadn’t belonged in Japan.

Ultimately, I realized, Japan had made home coalesce into a new, almost magical force, a vortex of comfort and belonging whose pull now called to me with remarkable might: a siren song reverberating off some land’s foreign cliffs, vertiginous rock-face that only sharpened each echo.

So how about it? What exactly is it to feel at home? I’m struggling with this question as I write my book, with how to put words onto how exactly to define the feeling of being at home. And wondering about the question, does living in a foreign land–even by choice–somehow make our own seem more sacred, or magical?

Watching Home from Far Away – Guest Post @ Writer Abroad

Thanks so much to Writer Abroad and fellow expat Chantal Panozzo for asking me to do a guest post on her blog. Here’s the link, which goes with a big shout-out to my city and fellow Bostonians for all you’ve been through in the past 10 days: Watching Home from Far Away: On Watching the Boston Marathon Bombings from Japan

From Osaka to Boston, With Love

When I left my first love, Boston, for my second love, my Japanese husband in Osaka, I gained a new life, but I never lost my primal connection to the city I will always call home.

For all my friends, family, Four Stories peeps, and fellow Bostonians who spent what I’m sure was a restless night last night, the only thing I can think to offer, from all the way across a continent and an ocean on a beautiful spring day in Osaka, is a memory of my first trip back to Boston after moving to Japan. It reminded me of why, no matter where I go and what new things I see and learn, I’ve always loved Boston first, and always will.

Can’t wait to come home to Boston again soon….

It was 11:30pm when we finally landed at Logan, almost 24 hours after leaving Japan. I stepped into a terminal that seemed improbably tiny and modest compared to Osaka’s. The hallway and food court were dark, and as I passed the broad windows where the city’s lights twinkled as they always had over my thirty-odd years of traveling through Boston’s airport, everything looked both the same and strangely new. The Pru, the Hancock tower blinking in the distance: each familiar site now held a fresh dimension, an edge of foreignness sharpening its contours.

A few nights later, still flattened by jetlag, I drove home from an early dinner with some girlfriends, lumbering slowly in my aging VW. Crossing the Mass Ave bridge at dusk, I glimpsed the State Capital’s dome glowing on its hill, the Charles river stretched out below, a shifting spread of blue.

 Past Copley, I crept down my neighborhood’s narrow streets, peering through my windshield, searching for the ever-elusive South End parking space. Turning a corner off Dartmouth Street, I saw a car double-parked under a headlight, blocking the road. Still in Japanese public-decorum mode, I beeped softly, but the vehicle didn’t budge.  I beeped again. Nothing.

Maybe they’ve gone inside an apartment? It was getting too dark to see the driver. Annoyed, weary, I hauled myself out of my VW, preparing a polite request. But before I reached the car, its engine suddenly ignited, and it began to move.  Then I heard the furious honking at my back.

A man in a beat-up, dark blue sedan had pulled up behind me, bumper dented, worn-out air-freshener dangling lackadaisically from the rearview mirror, spinning slowly. He must beeping at that double-parked car, too, I thought, honking in support of my patient protest, I noted, feeling virtuous in our shared vehicular predicament.

But then the driver behind me leaned out the window, jutted his head towards me in one angry thrust. “Jesus Christ!” He screamed. “Get back in the goddamn caaa, you moron! Waddya doin’? You’re blocking the whole fuckin’ street!” I begin feebly to protest, to explain that I was only attempting to clear the road. In response, he slammed his palm back onto the horn, emitting another series of long, irate, and humiliatingly loud admonishments.

In a rush, my exhaustion overwhelmed me.  I didn’t have the energy to absorb the full-throttled aggression of a Boston driver, or the thick skin to deflect it—especially not after having floated in a bubble of extreme, collective self-restraint for a month in Japan. I felt my cheeks flame in the darkening air, then burst helplessly into tears.

Suddenly, I longed for the more respectful, civilized manners of Toru’s home.  What’s wrong with the people in this country? I thought as I hurried back to my car, slammed the door shut, turned the ignition as fast as I could.  What purpose on Earth does it serve to be so rude? Why are people here so…so ill-behaved? Self-righteous indignation pricked through my shock and embarrassment.

But as I drove away, the tears receded.  An image of myself, startled and mortified under the pale wash of streetlights, flashed through my mind, and with it surged a laugh, then a wave of release. This is my crazy neighborhood. I was finally back in a place providing me, and everyone around me, permission to unloose the thoughts that lurked inside, to announce ourselves and our minute-by-minute reactions to the world.  To thrust, in a glorious rush of self-expression, our internal states into public, without a hint of shame.

I realized then that Japan’s enforced harmony, although soothing at times, was also suffocating, a dense fog of decorum settling over everyone and sealing shut, with hermetic insistence, any signs of discord. Sitting in my aging car’s front seat, rumbling down my neighborhood’s liberally pot-holed side-streets, I breathed out a long sigh, unloosening my lungs in relief and even, in a strange way, gratitude for the driver who had been cursing me moments before.

I’m home, in Boston, in America, I thought, almost giddy. I and everyone around me can finally express our feelings as we have them. 

Perhaps we could sometimes be rude or noisy. But I suddenly saw my and my fellow citizens’ carefree expressiveness as our own curious form of mutual respect, and even love: an agreement to relinquish the façade of permanent politeness and bare our souls together. Perhaps it’s skewed species of love, I allowed, but when it works, we forge a generous, communal, trust: You be you, and I’ll be me, and somehow, despite the annoyance and noise and clumsiness, we’ll have faith that we’ll all get by, ourselves, together.

Excerpted from Chapter 5 of The Good Shufu: A Wife in Search of a Life Between East and West (forthcoming, Putnam)

Expat Wives, Lean In, and the One Question Feminism is Afraid Of

The recent “Lean in” debate that has roiled its way through the media seems to rest not just on arguments about, as the description of Facebook’s Cheryl Sandberg  puts it in her book, the challenges and “bias[es] surrounding the lives and choices of working women,” but a predetermined belief about the two biggest choices women today face: between career and children, motherhood and professional motivation.

When, in the New York Times, Princeton prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter jumped into the debate, Slaughter summed up Sandberg’s argument as,

[B]elieve in yourself, give it your all, “lean in” and “don’t leave before you leave” — which is to say, don’t doubt your ability to combine work and family and thus edge yourself out of plum assignments before you even have a baby…. Still, after the start [of every woman’s career aspirations] comes a very long road, with lots of bumps and what the law professor Joan Williams calls “the maternal wall” smack in the middle of it. Sandberg’s approach, as important as it is, is at best half a loaf.

So there you have it, the one point on which both Sandberg and Slaughter (and most of the media covering the fracas) seem to agree: the debate about women’s choices and fulfillment rests on the glass ceiling being, in its essence, the ‘maternal wall.’

Are We Afraid to Admit What We Give up for Men, and If So, Why?

But what about those of us working women, or even just women who want to be passionately engaged in our lives and work and communities, for whom the choice, or the first choice anyway, has been between our husbands or partners and our careers? Those of us who have followed our counterparts to new countries or cultures and had our careers challenged because of it? Or who have never had children, either because—like me—they failed when they tried, or because they never pursued parenthood, but have still had to face major choices for their marriages that have impacted their work?

Is this whole debate about Leaning In covering up another debate that seems almost too antifeminist to bring up? And if so, why? Why are we somehow more embarrassed to say we made life choices based on our husbands (or partners) than on our kids?

The org InterNations reports of the 2010 Brookfield Global Relocations Trends Survey, “only 9% of previously employed women held a job during their time as a trailing spouse,” a statistic echoed by UN Special about the vast number of women who relocate for their partners.

Much energy has been expended by the feminist movement, by individual men and women trying to carve out answers in their lives about meaning, family, and sacrifice, and even by some corners of corporate America to de-stigmatize women who choose children over career, or face maternal responsibilities that challenge their professional ones. But it seems no one really wants to talk about women who make family-related choices when they don’t involve offspring—and especially when they involve just husbands.

So I’m asking now:

• Is it legitimate, for smart, passionate, ambitious women, to give up or compromise our careers for their husbands?
• Does it make us anti-feminist or failures when we do?

My answer:

I struggled for many years—and still do, sometimes—with all I’ve given up for my marriage, especially since it’s an international one. But I know that facing, surviving, and then capitalizing on the challenges my marriage has presented, has in many ways made me stronger, smarter, and even more fulfilled, in some surprising ways.

I’ve developed skills—and grit—that I bet are harder than even some of the ones Facebook’s boardroom requires. Among them:

• The flexibility to toggle between to diametrically opposed cultures and lives—the world of Boston’s leftist academics and writers; and the world of a foreign housewife in Japan. And to do this, if not always gracefully, at least with spirit.
• The courage to look at my life denuded of any of the professional or academic accomplishments I’d gathered in my almost 40 years in Boston, bereft of even of the identity of one who belongs (for, as a foreigner in Japan, I’m told in dozens of tiny ways throughout every day that I don’t belong), and ask, what do I really want for myself, for my life, for my family, and how to I build that in a world where I don’t even speak the language, where I can’t even read the street signs?
• The determination to say, I am a woman who, in some ways, gave up her world for her husband. And I am still a feminist: a passionately engaged and motivated woman with enough persistence to keep trying, day by day, to build a new world and life for myself on top of, and even because of, the one I sacrificed for a marriage.

So how would you answer these questions?

How We End Up Where We Are

This week, I passed the 50,000-word mark on The Good Shufu, meaning (phew!) I’m still on track to get it to my editor at Putnam by my deadline in Jan. One of my main themes in the book, and I think a central theme in so many people’s lives, is how the world can lead us to two opposite places at once: the place we never thought we’d be, and the place that was somehow our destination anyway, even though that destination looks completely different from how we thought it would. (More about this here.)

So recently, I was really excited to learn about a new memoir coming out from Sourcebooks, Good Chinese Wife, by the incomparable Susan Blumberg-Kason, who writes about her own unexpected journey. Here’s what Susan says about the ways her story describes ending up where we least expect to be and where we were always heading, and finding these to be, in some senses, one and the same:

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

I’ve heard it as a statement and asked as a question, out of earshot or spoken to me directly. It’s been happening for so long that I can’t recall when it started. And it doesn’t matter where it comes from—relatives or people I’ve just met—but the bottom line is the same. People can’t understand how someone who studied Mandarin and earned an advanced degree in Chinese politics isn’t working in either or both.

I was a serious student, albeit never at the top of my class. Yet I toiled in college, copying Chinese characters over and over seven nights a week, including a year abroad in Hong Kong. I continued studying Mandarin after graduation for a couple of years in Washington, DC.

Susan in front of her dorm in China as a student in 1991

Back in the early to mid-1990s China was opening and foreigners were just beginning to flock there to find work. My first love was Hong Kong, so I returned there for graduate school when I was twenty-three. That’s where I studied Chinese politics. I pictured promising job prospects after graduation, and with any hope they would allow me to remain in Hong Kong.

But family got in the way. Or rather I should say I chose family over career. I just didn’t know it at the time. I had always viewed myself as fiercely independent and non-conformist. In 1991 at the age of twenty-one, I traveled alone to forbidden countries like Vietnam and dangerous ones like Cambodia. I was cut off from the world alone in a Moscow apartment, shivering and feverish from an unknown illness, just a month before the Soviet Union fell. And surely the very fact of moving back to Hong Kong as a single woman a few years later proved that I was my own person.

One month into my first graduate school semester I met and fell in love with a dashing PhD student from mainland China. I married him six months later. After receiving my master’s degree, I took any job I could find in Hong Kong just so we could stay together while he finished his post-doctoral fellowship. This was in 1996, a year before the Handover and during a massive localization program where all jobs were to go local Hong Kong Chinese. Expats were hired for their foreign ‘expertise’, and in my case that turned out to be something in which I had no formal training or educational background. I happily accepted my one job offer: an English editing position at another university in Hong Kong.

And again, in front of the same dorm, in 2012

When my husband’s Hong Kong visa expired a couple years later, he wanted to try living in San Francisco. He had several friends from China who lived there. So I followed him to California and accepted an entry-level editing/administrative assistant position because it would give us immediate health insurance, which we needed badly because I was pregnant. By the time we divorced at the new millennium, I was no closer to working in a field where I could use Mandarin or my background in China and Hong Kong.

Fast forward a decade. I remarried and now live in a small, Chicago suburb. I stay home with my three kids while my husband works a seventy-hour week. He’s in a career that requires a local license, so there’s no chance we’ll ever move from this area. But after all this time, I’m finally using my background in Hong Kong and China.  And it’s in the most intimate way I can think of. For the last five years I’ve been working on a memoir of my first marriage and my years in Asia. GOOD CHINESE WIFE will be published by Sourcebooks next summer. [Note from Tracy: YAY!]

The road to publication—learning to write memoir, finding an agent, going on submission to land a publisher—has been the most challenging and difficult job I’ve ever had. But it’s also by far been the most rewarding. It just goes to show that things often work out better than one could ever expect.

What Passes for Au Naturel in Japan

After four plus years of failed fertility treatments, more than a year taking care of Shogun Sr after he was confined to a wheelchair and then months preparing to move him into a care house, and over six years trying to be a good Japanese wife (without a dishwasher: oh, the horror, the horror), my hands were in disrepair. Nails weak and chipped from where I’d bitten them, waiting and anguishing, throughout countless hours at the fertility clinic, cuticles ragged from all the hand-washing and sanitizing you need to do to care for a beloved failing elder, and no chance of getting a good gel manicure while you’re fretting over how to cut out the inorganic products in your life, lest they compromise your dismal chances at fertility as a 40-something with a poor hormone profile.

So since the Shogun and I have given up trying to make a baby, and his father Shogun Sr is now in the care house full-time, I’ve started treating myself to manicures again. I found a salon right near out apaato (that’s “apartment” as the Japanese pronounce it) where the guy will give me a gel manicure for well less than the around $80 it usually costs in Japan.

For my first manicure there a few weeks ago, I asked for “something that looks natural.” Naturar-u, onegashimas! I asked in my broken Japanese; “Please make it look natural.” So we chose a pale pink–or I chose a pale pink after refusing the shocking pink he first suggested for a natural look.

Today I went back for another manicure, and this time I asked for a French manicure, with white tips and clear polish so your nails look clean: like the real, natural you, only better. Moi kai, naturar-u onegaishimas! I asked; “Again, please make it look natural.”

To-rashee-san wa naturar-u suki desu-ne! The manicurist nodded. “Tracy-san likes natural, isn’t that so!”

I noticed as he was painting the white stripe at the top of my nail that he was making it a little thick, but I decided not to protest. At least it will look clean and hopefully help my nails grow longer, I thought. Plus, I don’t know how to say the word “thick” in Japanese.

Then he whipped out the sparkle.

Spaka-ru! I protested, shaking my head. I couldn’t wave my hand for emphasis because my nails were drying under the UV lamp.

Hai, spaka-ru! “Yes, sparkles!” he confirmed. Kono mani-cua wa spaka-ru irimasu, he decreed: This type of manicure requires sparkles. Brooking no delay, he dipped a tiny brush into the pot of sparkles and began painting. Iie, ne! he’d exclaim periodically: “It’s great, isn’t it!”

Before he was finished, he tried convince me to add some additional beads and sequins to my nails, then offered to add a decal with a lacy stripe to each tip (at no extra cost, he assured me), but I demurred.

In the end, he was so pleased with his work that he asked me to pose my hands on a black bolster with little puffy hearts stitched into it. So here’s my “natural-looking” manicure, Japan-style: Like the real, natural me, only, I suppose, more sparkly:

A Chinese Wife Advises a Japanese One on Building a Better Blog Following

Know what happens when you get your first book deal before you’ve written your first book? You need to write the thing and build up your following at the same time. I was at the AWP 2013 conference in Boston a few weeks ago, and everyone was talking about the importance of having a social media following, even before the book comes out. In fact, ideally a year or so before it comes out! (Actually, everyone was talking about the importance of having a “platform,” but that word bugs me: the only platforms I like are tastefully-designed platform shoes.)

So in addition to freaking out over whether I’ll get the book written in time, and written well, now I’m freaking out about my sadly non-satorial “platform.”

But I’ve turned to the wonderful, kind, lovely, and very smart Jocelyn Eikenburg, whose blog Speaking of China has this really big following. Jocelyn has been so generous with her support and enthusiasm since we met over social media a few months ago. And, as usual, she was really generous in response to my question about how she manages to be such a social media diva.

Here’s all her advice!

Let me tell you a secret — for a long time, I sucked at blogging and building a following. Back in 2007 and 2008, years when I labored at writing about business and China, and engaging with people on these issues, I couldn’t seem to get more than a handful of people to notice me. I felt lucky if I got even one comment or pingback in a month and didn’t know Twitter from Facebook.

After all that, sometimes I can’t believe how I’ve built up a following with Speaking of China.

Of course, it didn’t happen right away and it took persistence and time. But with dedication — and some direction — you just might generate a following of your own. To jumpstart your efforts, here are the ideas that have helped guide me along the way.

Be Unique

Whenever people ask me about building a following, one of the first things I tell them is, “Be unique.”

It’s a lot harder to get noticed when what you’re offering is not that special. For example, in the China expat community, it seems like every single day a new “English teacher writes about China” blog pops up. Since this has been done seemingly thousands (if not millions) of times, these bloggers will have a tough time convincing more than just their friends and family to follow them. In marketing terms, their blogs lack a “Unique Selling Point” (or “USP”).

On the other hand, if you choose a unique focus for your blog — and thus give it a USP — you’ll stand out. And a blog that stands out gets noticed and creates buzz.

I did this primarily through my focus (love, family and relationships in China) and my perspective (a Western woman married to a Chinese guy).

You could also give your blog a USP if you have an extraordinary voice or perspective — like a David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell.

Before you start out, read through the blogs in your potential subject area — or related areas. Know the competition, so you can figure out what you can do that’s different or even better. How do you find the blogs? Try these suggestions for old-school directories, new applications and search tools.

Blog With Focus

I’ll bet you know at least one person that turned her blog into a sort of random “personal diary”. One day, she’s sharing a photo of her cat in some compromising position. The next she’s ranting about annoying neighbors or giving you a blow-by-blow of her entire vacation to Disney World.

The whole “I’ll post whatever floats my boat” approach won’t cut it if you want to build a following. When you move randomly from topic to topic, people don’t know what to expect from you. That means it’s a lot harder for them to decide whether you’re offering something of value to them. And if they’re not sure, they’ll move on to a better blog.

This is the reason why I gave my blog an unequivocal tagline — One Western woman with a Chinese husband writes about love, family and relationships in China — which I’ve carried over to my social media presence as well.

The best part about focusing? You can build yourself up as an expert and become the go-to person on that subject, which can even land you in the media (which happened to me).

Be Passionate

Remember that business/China blog I mentioned in the introduction? One of the biggest reasons I failed was something so simple, but so important — I didn’t really enjoy writing about business in China! And because I disliked it, I didn’t blog very often and even struggled to promote my work, knowing deep down it didn’t reflect my best efforts.

With Speaking of China, though, I had the passion to do it from the beginning. And it grew as I focused my blog and refined my approach. It’s that passion that still keeps me posting after nearly four years.

So whatever you choose to focus on, make sure your passion is there. Passion will help you create irresistible content. And with passion, you’ll continue blogging for the long haul.

Be Reliable

Readers love knowing what to expect. If you’ve defined your subject area and you’ve made it unique, you’re more than halfway there. But there’s another part of that equation — showing up on a regular basis. Yes, I’m talking about posting on a schedule that your readers will come to know and expect.

Think of it from another perspective. A lot of us subscribe to magazines and we count on that content arriving at our doorstep or in our e-reader on schedule. Just imagine if the magazines just decided to only deliver their content when they felt inspired. Or worse, what if the magazines just forgot to deliver it once or twice?

That’s why I think of my blog like a magazine — that my readers deserve to know when new content will come and that I should deliver on that promise.

The great thing is, most blogs today allow you to schedule your content ahead of time — handy for when you’re on vacation!

I post Mondays and Fridays every single week, same time and place. And when I’m on trips or just unable to post (which occasionally happens when an emergency comes up), I even run simple posts with archived content — because I always get new readers and chances are it’s new to someone out there.

Know Your Audience

Every blog and social media butterfly an audience. The better you know them, the better you can tailor your content to your readers.

But how to know them?

Site analytics are a great place to start — which give you some information about where your visitors found your blog, how they entered your site (referral from another website? search engines?) and even popular search queries that bring traffic to you. For a wordpress.com blog like Tracy, you can study your Site Stats — built into your site. If you have a self-hosted site like mine, you can use Google Analytics.

Still, if your site doesn’t generate a lot of traffic yet, you might not gain much from analytics alone.

Try keyword tools like the free Google Keywords. While it’s not comprehensive, it does help you learn what people are searching on for a specific topic — which could then generate some potential ideas for future posts and keywords you could add to your content (see my paragraph below on incorporating keywords into posts for more details).

Figure out where your audience hangs out — such as other blogs, forums or even groups on social media sites — and see what they’re talking about and what fires them up.

Check the social media as well. For example, you can search through Twitter and Google Plus with keywords to see what people are saying on your topic.

And remember, the more you blog and share over time, the more you’ll come to know your audience through comments, e-mails, and even people you interact with on social media.

Write Great Content With Readers in Mind

Okay, so your blog is something unique. You have a theme. You have passion. You’ve set a schedule. You even know your audience.

But when it comes to attracting readers, you have to write for them.

Let’s return to that “personal diary” blogger I mentioned above. She’s definitely not thinking about her readers when she publishes a blow-by-blow account of her vacation or complaining about neighbors. Sure, she’s random and that’s a problem. But there’s a bigger problem — no one really cares about her life when it’s presented as some navel-gazing journal.

Now that doesn’t mean your own experiences can’t become great content — I blog about my experiences all the time. But the difference is, I mine my experiences for questions or truths or insights or something entertaining that might resonate with my readers.

There are many ways to write for your readers. Here are some examples of how I do it:

1. Short memoir-like essays that, as I said above, end with something more universal that readers can connect with

2. Advice columns where I answer questions from readers

3. Lists of movies or books or blogs my readers might want to know about

4. Commentary on news that’s relevant to my readership

5. Highlighting celebrities in our community

6. Interviews of bloggers my readers might want to know more about

7. Sharing stories of love found — and love lost — submitted by readers

8. Introducing love-related Chinese idioms, since many of my readers are interested in the language

9. Reviewing books of interest to readers

10. Creating lists of “reasons why” on a certain topic that might enlighten readers or spur conversations

11. Confronting issues — such as stereotypes — that my readers care about

But that’s not the last word in content. See number 10 on this post on growing traffic and also Seth Godin’s post for more ideas.

Incorporate Keywords and Keyphrases into Titles, Posts and Tags

A lot of my traffic comes from the search engines — which means any blogger should never forget the power of search engine optimization (aka SEO).

One of the most important things you can do is incorporate popular keywords and keyphrases (from your audience research) into your post titles, body content and tags. Even better, if a keyword or keyphrase lends itself to a great post, then use that as the title and pepper it into the post itself. See here for more ideas on using keywords in your posts.

If you have a self-hosted blog and you use WordPress like I do, you can tap into even more SEO possibilities with plugins like my favorite, Yoast’s WordPress SEO.

Make It Easy To Subscribe To/Share Your Content

Everyone has a favorite method for receiving content. For me, it’s e-mail. So imagine how I feel when I discover a new blog, only to find that the author offers no option for subscribing to posts by e-mail.

That’s why it’s so important to offer your content in a variety of formats — something that definitely boosts your readership. When you offer only one option — such as RSS or even just e-mail — you’re missing out on readers that prefer a different format entirely.

If you have a self-hosted blog like mine, you need to know Feedburner — it’s free and when someone clicks on my RSS feed, my readers see a wealth of subscription options (including e-mail — something you must activate, but is easy to add).

But you’ll also need to add in links to your social media sites in a prominent place somewhere in your blog’s header or — like me — the top of the sidebar. Additionally, I go one step further and add a subscribe/follow call to action at the end of my posts:

Liked this? Get FREE updates to new posts by RSS or E-mail. You can also follow this blog on Facebook, Twitter, and Sina Weibo/新浪微博. Thanks for reading!

For wordpress.com users, you have built-in options to easily display in your sidebar — there’s e-mail, RSS and even social media widgets you can add there, inviting readers to subscribe in multiple ways.

Encourage people to share your content by adding social media buttons to your posts. Some people start posts with them, others end posts with them — but I like to start and end posts with these social media buttons so readers have the option to share something they see right away or just after they’ve read it.

And think about new and emerging ways for people to view your content. Nowadays, almost everyone and their cousin has a smartphone. That’s why I’m thinking about optimizing my site for those visitors. If you use wordpress.com, check to see if your theme is mobile-ready.

Follow and Support Other Blogs

Your fellow bloggers can actually help boost your readership just by following and interacting with them.

Subscribe to blogs related to your topic — and be sure to read them and comment. Everyone loves to get comments on their site, so it definitely generates goodwill. Plus if you include your website’s link, you’re announcing your virtual presence to the blogger, who might just link back to you.

Share their content on social media like Twitter and Facebook (making sure to @mention the author, where possible, and anyone else who might be interested).

And don’t forget to link back to the blogs you follow, which bloggers always love! You might even go one step further like I did and divide your blogs into topics/subjects. I’ve maintained a list of every single blog written by Western women or Chinese men who are part of our community, which has positioned my site as a the place to go to find the newest blogs in neighborhood.

Do Guest Posts

I’m doing a guest post right now — and it’s one of the best ways to build up your following! Identify large and popular blogs relevant to your audience and approach them about doing a guest post. As Ms. Career Girl writes,

Make a focused effort of reaching out to a few bloggers per week when they were new on the scene.  If you’re emailing a more established/high traffic blog, I suggest having your post already written.  Make it as easy for the blogger as possible!  Put a link to your blog in your bio at the end of each guest post so people can visit your site.  A lot of bloggers are happy to publish guest writers because it diversifies their content and perspective.  In many cases, they’re just happy not to have to write a post themselves for a day!

Use Social Media

I’ll be honest — I am a reluctant social media user. I was late to Facebook, and late to Twitter. But one thing is certain: they have value, and the proof came in my referrals. Facebook remains my number one source for referrals from another site.

For Twitter, one of the best things you can do is follow Alexis Grant’s advice:

[Create] a Twitter list of people you want to notice you, people who can help you get where you want to be. And this is important: it’s a private list, so only you can see it….

Now what should you do with this list? You should pull it into Hootsuite (or your preferred Twitter app or simply check it via Twitter) and use it to subtly help these people notice you….

To accomplish this, RT a few of their tweets, and add a thoughtful comment so they know you’re a smart cookie. @reply to one or two of their tweets. Or offer a valuable resource that will help them in some way, and CC them on the tweet. You might even introduce them to someone you know who could help them. The key is to interact with them in a valuable and interesting way.

Alexis also adds in another post that it’s important to use the @mention in your Tweets at least 90 percent of the time.

For Facebook, start out by creating a page — such as a page for your blog or book or an author page. But since Likes mean everything on Facebook, how do you get people to notice and Like your site? Authormedia.com offers 10 great tips including provide value to your followers, invite friends, create shareable images, and promote offline.

One thing that I’ve started to find valuable — and am trying to use more of — is tagging other influential people who you know will share the content and also influential/popular Facebook pages related to it. While I wouldn’t overuse or abuse it (such as tagging the same people/pages all the time, regardless of the content), when it makes sense to tag, be bold and go for it. For even more inspiration on Facebook, check out this post.

Pinterest is also a new and emerging platform, but one that’s a lot of fun to use. You can basically post images from any site or blog to “boards” you create on Pinterest, which people can then follow. Instead of using the template boards Pinterest suggests for you, I created my own boards related to my site — including a board dedicated to showcasing photos of couples of Chinese men/Western women. But as I read this post with more tips on using Pinterest, I realize I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with this platform.

Become The News Source For Your Topic/Theme

Sure, I have a unique and focused blog and I use social media. But I take it one step further by sharing content on social media sites with relevance to my own blog.

What kind of content? Relevant blog posts from other websites, news articles, photos of couples, new books my readers might be interested in, and more.

When you focus on sharing a certain type of content, people will see you as the go-to expert for this information and be more likely to follow you on social media (and even subscribe to your content).

Besides subscribing to relevant blogs, I also receive Google Alerts on specific areas of interest on a daily basis. For example, when I find great news stories or blog posts or even photos embedded in blogs/articles, I share them on social media platforms.

Find Your “Promotional Groove”

Almost every day, I stumble across yet another post with tips on building a following or a platform — and more often than not, they read like a one-size-fits-all proposition. That you MUST do what they say or else.

But guess what? Not everyone can become, say, a Twitter Power User. We all have different strengths and personalities. And that means that some methods will work better for you than others.

So as you work on your connections and following, don’t fret if something doesn’t feel right to you. Be honest with yourself and be willing to go in different direction, even if it means ignoring some advice (including my own). But as long as you keep trying and experimenting, believe me — you’ll find your own promotional groove, just like I did.

Jocelyn Eikenburg writes about love, family and relationships in China at Speaking of China, and was published recently in the China anthology Unsavory Elements.

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing: On my forthcoming memoir, The Good Shufu: A Wife in Search of a Life Between East & West (Putnam Press)

Being a gaijin wife in Osaka, I can be pretty out of it. I’d never heard of “The Next Big Thing,” or even knew what a “blog meme” was, until the lovely Jocelyn Eikenburg set me straight.  She’s the author of the forthcoming book Red All Over, a memoir of finding love and home in China; about, as she has written, “what happens when you let go of every expectation you had about life, love and even your own wedding, and just learn to listen to your heart and say ‘I do’ to the people, places and possibilities that really matter.” Jocelyn has been one of the most enthusiastic and supportive friends and fellow writers I’ve met online since my unexpected book deal landed in my lap!

She’s also a smart and funny and a beautiful writer, and if you don’t know about her and her blog Speaking of China, then you are missing out.

As for this “Next Big Thing,” it involves answering a few questions and then sharing the love by tagging another writer you admire, which I do below:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

The Good Shufu: A Wife in Search of a Life Between East & West

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Well, the basic idea came from my falling madly in love with the least likely person in the world: a Japanese salaryman who could barely speak English (and I spoke no Japanese).

The book is about what happens when you are a Boston-based, skeptical, plan-obsessed, feminist literary academic who meets the love of your life, but being together means you must give up every plan or goal you’ve ever had and essentially forfeit your own world for his.

Ultimately, though, it’s the story of finding love and meaning in a foreign language, as well as hope and happiness amidst the boatload of loss and confusion that we call real life. (Here’s the full overview.)

What genre does your book fall under?

Memoir

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Really??? I need to finish writing the book first before I can even start to think about this one. Now, if you’re asking what I’d want to wear on the red carpet, that’s another story. But don’t get me started, or I may just stop writing and click over to some online shopping sites, just to see what they….

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The Good Shufu a true story about finding love, meaning, hope, and self in the least likely places in the world: the places we always swore we’d never go.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The Good Shufu is forthcoming from Penguin’s Putnam imprint in 2015. It’s represented by the very, very wonderful Rachel Sussman of Chalberg & Sussuman.

And I’m still in shock and awe over all of this!

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Oooh, check back in, let’s say, 7 months? The full draft is due to my editor at Putnam, the incredible Sara Minnich, in January 2014.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I started writing the book at the tail end of 4+ brutal years of fertility treatments and 2 pretty heart-rending pregnancy losses, all undergone in Japan (and I still speak virtually no Japanese). I hadn’t written anything—I mean anything—in a few years because of the stress of this medical issue. And then one day, just off the cuff, I sent a pitch to the editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog about the difference between the desire to have a biological child and the desire to be a parent.

She published the piece (although with a much different title than the one I had chosen), and a few days later, an editor at Putnam emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in submitting a memoir proposal. I was shocked! And delighted! And still totally infertile! So while all I wanted to do was crawl under the covers and hide from the world and my twice-daily-in-the-stomach-blood-thinner shots that my clinic in Osaka thought I needed to have any chance of sustaining a pregnancy, I signed up for a course on nonfiction proposal writing through MediaBistro, wrote a proposal and four sample chapters, submitted it to Putnam, and they offered me a deal!

I was shocked! And delighted! And still totally infertile!

But working on this book has been one kind of godsend, because it has helped me cope with coming to terms with turning 45 and abandoning our medical quest to try to have a child—an issue I write about towards the end of the memoir.

As my husband says, “If we can have baby, that will be like miracle. But it will still only be like dessert, because you’ll always be the main course.”

So, despite some of the sadness of the past few years, how can I not feel like the luckiest girl in the world?

Now, I’m excited to introduce Kaitlin Solimine, another recent friend and fellow writer whom I’m honored to follow and know! She’s an award-winning writer about China, a former U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Arts Fellow, and the 2010 Donald E. Axinn Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Most recently, she was the March 2012 guest editor for the magazine Cha: An Asian Literary Journal , and I got to hear her give an incredible reading from her forthcoming novel at the Four Stories Boston 2013 opening night, an MP3 of which is posted here. Rumor has it, she attracted some publishing interest at this event, which doesn’t surprise me one bit!