The Quest

Guiding Lights
by Eric Liu

We all need people to help us find the way. In this stirring new book, acclaimed author and educator Eric Liu takes us on a quest for those guiding lights. He shares invaluable lessons from people whose "classrooms" are boardrooms, arenas, concert halls, theaters, kitchens, and places of worship - and in the process, he reveals a surprising path to purpose.

As he entered fatherhood and a phase of changing ambitions, Eric Liu set out in search of great mentors. He found much more. He encountered people from all walks of life, from all across the country, with something powerful to pass on about how to change lives. Among those Liu portrays in vivid and fascinating narratives are one of Hollywood's finest acting teachers, who turns a middling young actress into a project for transformation; an esteemed major league pitching coach, haunted by the players he's let down; a rising executive whose eye for untapped talent allows her to rescue a floundering employee; a master clown whose workshop teaches a husband-and-wife team to revamp their relationship, onstage and off; a high school debate coach whose protégée falters at the pinnacle, and thus finds triumph; and a gangland priest who has saved many and yet still must confront the limits of his power to heal.

In these pages are remarkable stories of apprenticeship of failure, hope, and discovery. These are stories of men and women who learned to hear the sound of other people's voices and, in so doing, found their own way to a better and fuller life. As Eric Liu reminds us, these are our stories. Lyrical and accessible, Guiding Lights is a course to benefit any reader, a superb work of narrative nonfiction, and an exciting departure for its accomplished author. This book will change how we live, lead, learn, and love. Pass it on.

1

She saw right through me. Right through my careful presentation of self, my reportorial pose, into the inner chambers. We'd known each other for fifteen minutes. I was there to interview her. Had my leather-bound notebook, my questions all lined up. We chatted. I told her about this book. In passing, in response to I don't even remember what, maybe something she'd said about her family, I mentioned that my father was deceased.

An hour and a half later, after answering my queries about how she had become an acting coach, about her challenging students, her general philosophy of teaching — after all the preliminaries — Ivana decided to show rather than tell. We did a little exercise. She asked me to pretend I was drunk. I hadn't expected this, but here we were, and I felt more awkward about not playing along than about playing. So I gave it a shot. At first I stumbled about her living room, mimicking the weave and wobble of someone who's had one too many drinks. But my imbalance was too studied, and my eyes were too alertly scanning her face for reactions. She asked me to remove my glasses. Without them my vision descends to 20/400: the world dissolves into bleeding pools of color.

It worked. I was utterly disoriented. I couldn't see, but more important I couldn't tell where I was going next. I was genuinely in less control of myself than I'd been only a few minutes ago. Pretty soon I was doing quite the drunk act in her house, and she chuckled with approval, paced around me in the high-ceilinged, echoey room, giving loose direction, telling me to pick up this glass or that book, to talk to her, to slur my words more when speaking.

Then, out of the blue, she asked me to think about my father. Just when I thought we were playing one game, she revealed another. As my father's face flashed across my mind, my own face slackened involuntarily. My mouth fell open. I exhaled, then again, like a last gasp. It was over in a second. I wasn't able to play a drunk anymore. But neither was I in the state I'd been in prior to our little scene. "Do you feel the difference?" she asked. I nodded, swallowing. Maybe now, her arched brow suggested, I would be ready to learn.

2

Ivana Chubbuck is one of Hollywood's most successful and sought-after acting coaches. And she'll tell you that. She'll tell you that she's transformed Halle Berry and Elisabeth Shue, that Beyoncé Knowles and Jim Carrey and Charlize Theron have sought her touch, that studios and television networks turn to her for emergency house calls, to rescue leading men and women who aren't quite cutting it. She seems to have a raw need to prove her potency, to advertise it, and there is something both compelling and distasteful about her naked hunger for recognition. She is a curious specimen: the sensitive listener and the obsessive winner.

She is fifty-one and has the way of a savvy and world-weary lioness. It's her voice more than anything that reveals her. Eye-VAAAH-nah. A husky, smoky rumble that reveals a past of drugs, beatings, failed relationships. She yells and shouts in class but in private she slows to an energy-conserving deadpan. She often punctuates her own witticisms with a slow, almost menacing "A-heh-heh-heh" laugh, pushed out through bared teeth. Her cheekbones are high, and she has a mane of dark brown hair. She doesn't try to hide her wrinkles but she has curves still, and in the classes she teaches at night, you can spy some of the young male actors slumped in the seats before her, their eyes drawn to the red sweater wrapping her torso. She knows this.

Ivana has a gift, an uncanny ability to take a jumble of unintended signals — a darting look, a tiny flinch, a catch in the voice — and to convert them into a whole story about what moves and makes a person. What do you need to be pushed? Do you freeze when you are attacked or do you fight? In this, she reminds me of politicians I've known, or of cops I've been on the beat with. She knows even before she knows why she knows. What was it about me that had told her an act of drunkenness was called for, that inhibitions and self-control were the first things? What did I do in mentioning my father that told her to circle back to him? What did I give away? "I guess it's just intuition," she offers.

Of course. But Ivana's intuition is not just a current that carries her along blithely. Ivana has seized this intuition of hers, this sixth sense, and wrought it with the force of her formidable will into a powerful and refined instrument. Her hyperperceptive listening, her ability to be an actor whisperer, is not simply a "gift." It is the result of a deeper process that has unfolded over many years, making her the teacher and the woman she is. A cauldron of life history roars inside her unseen, burning without rest, reducing to liquid all that it encounters.

3

"Eva will have a hard time remembering what she used to be like," Ivana once said to me. "When you change and grow it's hard to remember what you used to be. Halle doesn't remember what she was like before she became a strong woman." But Eva does remember. She remembers the first classes, the way she felt. Ivana was her first coach, her only one so far. Whatever Eva is about to become is because Ivana has helped her be- come it.

When Eva Mendes arrived, she wasn't quite sure how she'd gotten there. Eva stumbled into acting. A typical Hollywood story, except that it's really the opposite of typical. It's the story of one in ten thousand, or a million. She was twenty-three, an on-and-off marketing student at Cal State Northridge, hanging out with friends and not sure what was next, when an agent saw a picture of her in the portfolio of her neighbor, a photographer. That's all it took. A marketable Latina, sultry and smart, alluringly distant. The agent found Eva, hounded her. In fairly short order, this daughter of Cuban immigrants found herself in studio auditions and screen tests. She appeared in music videos, a commercial or two, and then was cast in the 1998 teen horror flick Children of the Corn 5.

At first it was like a freak accident, not a sign that her calling had come calling. She thought, "Cool, I was in a movie." The work helped pay the bills. Not that anyone watched Children of the Corn 5 for the acting, but she did seem comfortable. In truth, she was miserable during that experience — precisely because she wasn't a natural. She'd never acted, and had no preparation going into that role. "I didn't realize how hard it would be. When I wanted to express something," she says, "I had no idea how to do it. It was always so frustrating." She got a few other roles like these, which got her more exposure, but also reflected the limits of her ability. Eva knew this. And as she looked around, thinking about her accidental career, she discovered she had something in her, a catalytic mixture of pride and humility, that spurred her to seek out a teacher. She wanted a path to an identity still undefined. She quit school and committed herself to acting. She started auditing classes all over town. The first six teachers she met left her cold. "They were nuts. I just didn't see how acting like a tree was connected to anything I was doing," she recalls.

Copyright © 2004 by Eric Liu. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Eric Liu is a fellow at the New America Foundation. He writes the "Teachings" column for Slate and is the author of The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, a New York Times Notable Book featured in the PBS documentary "Matters of Race". Liu served as a speechwriter for President Clinton and later as White House deputy domestic policy adviser. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he teaches at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.