Interview with Author Bonnie Tsui

"Water is the great equalizer—no matter your age or size or color or physical ability, it buoys us all. Libraries are the same. They are portals to magical worlds beyond the ones we currently inhabit. And we all could use that right about now."

For an unexpectedly rewarding thought experiment, ask yourself: why do we swim? If a flood of fond memories of water and sun return for you, it probably makes little sense at first to ask why we, humans, swim, but as author Bonnie Tsui reminds us, primates are among the only mammals not innately possessed of swimming instincts. “Elephants, dogs, cats (albeit reluctantly), and even bats can swim...humans and other large primates, like chimpanzees, have to be taught.” We are quite well-adapted to land, so again: why do we swim?

Bonnie Tsui’s recently published Why We Swim, is an impressively researched, book-length exploration of this question divided into five parts: Survival, Well-Being, Community, Competition and Flow. Part memoir, part ontology, it becomes clear that her probing, ecstatic inquiry into the nature of mankind’s relationship to water is shaped as much by her personal history as by her journalistic background. Indeed, Tsui reveals early that her very existence is owed to water–her mother fell in love with a hunky lifeguard in a Hong Kong pool. She remains devoted to water as a swimmer and surfer and contributes frequently on the subject for both The New York Times and California Sunday magazine. Tsui weaves her story into ours and her insights are delivered in a manner reminiscent of tidal flow—perhaps the same as that which delivered them to her. As a consequence, there is quite a lot to love about reading her book at this moment even as most of us can only dream of submersion; Why We Swim is a contemplative balm for swimmers and nonswimmers alike.

I spoke with Bonnie at a conference—likely one of the last to take place before the general quarantine, a couple of months ago. At that time we hoped to arrange for a live author event to coincide with the April 14th publication of Why We Swim, but when the pandemic intervened her book tour went virtual and she agreed to respond to some of my questions remotely. 

Off the Shelf (OtS): How did you conceive of the topic for this book and, given the exploratory nature of the text, how did you know when you were done?

Bonnie Tsui (BT): I wrote an essay about swimming as the last refuge from connectivity six years ago for The New York Times. After seeing the reader response, I started thinking that maybe there was a bigger book in me about swimming. I started to collect bits and pieces, but in a back-burner sort of way, when I had downtime from my other writing, to investigate an interesting character I'd heard of or a story someone told me. I didn't really start putting a proposal together until about three years ago, when I finally figured out the architecture for the book: to call it Why We Swim, and to organize it in five different thematic sections representing the different ways we can answer that question. Figuring out the narrative structure of the book was the biggest challenge. Once I did that, we sold it and I was off to the races. When did I know it was done? Well, I had a deadline, and I am a stickler for deadlines, so I met it. But strangely enough the book did want to be the length that it was—no matter how much new material I added, it would expand only momentarily and then contract back to around 70,000 words. It had its own internal set point.

OtS: Would you mind sharing a bit about your research process?

BT: When I wasn't on a research trip or out reporting or conducting interviews for the book, I spent a lot of time in the pool thinking about it. What did I think about when I was swimming? What did the water feel Iike, look like, sound like? I also spent a lot of time requesting books from the North Berkeley Public Library (thank you, BPL!), to do background reading or to read authors I liked, to see how they approached making scientific passages more accessible and reconstructing vivid scenes that happened in the past. Sometimes I would go work in a carrel at the library in the San Francisco Botanical Garden, which is tucked inside Golden Gate Park. I just loved sitting there and looking at flowers and greenery outside, and then taking a walk and lying in the grass when I needed a breath of fresh air.

OtS: Next, admittedly this is a bit of interviewer privilege, but as a former swimmer I must ask a bit about your competitive swimming history. You seem to have never fallen out of love with swimming, or experienced ‘burn out’ like so many competitive swimmers. Are you conscious of anything specific that contributed to this consistent love of swimming?

BT: I am a very reluctant competitor. I did well as a young swimmer but topped out at state qualifying meets in New York. When I got to college, I was tired of swimming competitively and wanted to try other water sports: crew, water polo. Playing a sport in college doesn't leave much time for anything else, so I went back to swimming, this time on my own. When I joined a swim team again as an adult, it was after years of the Masters coach asking me to join (and me saying no because I had two young kids and a job and there was no way I could get to the pool at 6am, but also because I didn't know if I want to be told what to do in the pool again). Once I did join, I found there is still a thrill to competing, it's the camaraderie and community in practice that I love most about the team.

OtS: One thing that becomes clear in your book is that you have swum in many gorgeous places. Do you have any favorites from your time in NYC?

BT: I LOVE Hamilton Fish—it was my pool when I lived in the East Village. Also you have to love the name. I have great memories of leaving my insanely hot third-floor walk-up and trudging over to the pool early on a summer morning and diving into that crisp water. Magic. I also have an amazing memory of swimming one morning at Riverbank State Park in Harlem and looking over into the next lane and coming face to face with Jenny Thompson. She was in med school at Columbia at the time. She smiled at me and said hello and then set off down the lane with her incredible butterfly. 

OtS: In an excerpt you recently published, you referenced our experience with social distancing and the corresponding, collective yen for precisely those benefits that swimming delivers, barred for many of us currently:

“There’s a poignancy to being a swimmer now, in that we’re not able to do it just when we need it most. But even though public pools are closed and we are limited in the wild places where we can swim, thinking about immersion in our favorite watering holes is still a balm. As the writer Heather Hansman pointed out to me recently, there is value in those places even (and especially) when we’re not in them—it’s what Wallace Stegner called 'the geography of hope.'”

Are there any books that you would consider must-reads for those of us trying to access the ‘geography of hope’ during this time? (see Bonnie’s list here)

BT: The Nature Fix by Florence Williams, The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane (print only), Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit and Downriver by Heather Hansman (print only)

OtS: You talk about a benefit of swimming being one of the remaining refuges from connectivity. For those readers who are stuck in their apartments, desirous of even fleeting opportunities to disappear, have you learned anything from disappearing through swimming that can be employed outside bodies of water?

BT: Float in the bath. Meditate. Someone told me today that she stopped doing yoga when she started swimming because it was the same thing, except in water, so perhaps a return to land-based yoga is called for. And there is certainly a strong case for books as a way to disappear.

OtS: As we near closing, you mentioned you are a Berkeley Library user, so why do you love the library?

BT: Water is the great equalizer—no matter your age or size or color or physical ability, it buoys us all. Libraries are the same. They are portals to magical worlds beyond the ones we currently inhabit. And we all could use that right about now.

OtS:  And finally, as this is a library blog, we would love to know what books are on your nightstand right now.

BT: Just finished The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, and Writers and Lovers (ebook, eaudiobook), by Lily King. Both are fantastic. When it comes to books, I mostly read novels because I read so much nonfiction—magazine and newspaper-length stories—for work. In the way we talk about disappearing, I really escape into fiction and read it quickly. I have Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (ebook, eaudiobook) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus up next.

See these booklists: Bonnie’s Recommendations , Swimming: history, and Swimming: Training, for titles selected by Bonnie and more books related to swimming.

Erik Bobilin is an Adult Services librarian for Brooklyn Public Library who hails from a family of swimmers and grew up in and around the water. Unlike Bonnie, he has not yet worked up the nerve to swim in sub 60-degree or shark inhabited waters.