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These are the opening pages of my historical fiction novel, which centers around a young woman who has a job offer in China on the eve of the pandemic, and is writing about her grandfather's life in the Underground to understand her own decision to move abroad. It introduces one of the main characters and the primary conflict, as well as one of the primary settings (Philadelphia). CHAPTER ONE January 2020 In a city of 25 million people, I was alone. The Pearl Tower pierced the foggy skyline in a monochromatic crimson that hypnotized me into walking away from the piano bar where I’d been headed. I braced myself against the unobstructed wind and crossed the deserted street. On the night of January 16th, 2020, this famous patch of skyline felt like it was mine alone to behold. I wandered up and down the Bund, a riverside promenade along the bank of the Huangpu River across from the former financial hub of Shanghai. It was close to midnight on my last night of a whirlwind trip to China for a job interview, and not a soul was outside. The local bars were eerily quiet, and the traffic had all but stopped. My stomach swayed with the weight of a tea-stained egg, fried rice cakes, Shepherd’s Purse dumplings, crab wonton, and the decision that if offered the job, I’d take it. I looked back at the river, its dark waters reflecting a kaleidoscope of neon. The Pearl Tower reminded me of something sinister, but I couldn’t think of what. The emptiness of the Bund reminded me of a headline I’d seen earlier that day. I texted my best friend, Phee. There are rumors of a new virus here. Have you heard anything? No. Ok, never mind. Maybe it’s only a big deal here in China. I dropped my phone back in my purse, but then pulled it back out again to take one last photo of the clouded skyscrapers, their true heights shrouded. It was cold, but in the exhilaration of the decision I’d come to, I didn’t mind. I turned my back to the river, content with my secret plan to finally get out of Philadelphia, a place I loved but that had made me feel stuck. I had given up so many dreams—an abandoned Peace Corps application and a halted decision to live on a farm in Costa Rica among them—all in the name of love. This time, I was choosing myself. I was going to China, a decision that seemed random and illogical to those who didn’t know me, and inevitable to those who did. I boarded the plane the next morning with the knowledge that I’d been preparing for this sort of departure before I’d been born. If restlessness was a gene, I had inherited its most complicated and complete translations. My return flight arrived in Philadelphia on the evening of January 18th, 2020. As I exited the airport, headlines on a nearby TV flashed with news of the same virus I’d only heard rumors of 36 hours before. Looks like a lot happened while I was in the air, I texted Phee. Good thing you made it out of there when you did, she replied. She didn’t know that I was even considering going back. I began to think of ways to rationalize my decision to re-enter whatever it was I’d just left. In the end, I landed on one reason: I felt displaced, and I needed to know why. In the coming weeks, I realized what the neon-red Pearl Tower had reminded me of: a syringe ready to pierce the blackness. Even then, I couldn’t allow myself to see it as a harbinger of what was to come. # I had begun telling people about my plan in secret: that yes, I really was considering taking a job in China despite the situation that was currently spiraling across the globe. The more I said it, the more I began to accept it as an irrevocable decision. I clung to my dream of living abroad, pandemic be damned, with a stubbornness that I couldn’t explain. A month before Philadelphia issued its stay-at-home order, my mother came to visit me. We wandered vintage stores and ate eggy brunch and raced through the streets of historic Old City in a torrential downpour. My mother had a knack for bringing the rain with her wherever she went, like her stress gathered strength just to follow her. “If I get the offer, I’m going to take the job,” I told her over a shared beer. My mother never ordered her own beer, insisting that more than half a pint would send her into full-blown intoxication. I humored this belief by drinking two thirds of the IPA by myself. She didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry,” I added. “I know you might not understand.” “I just worry about you over there.” “Because of—?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I looked up at the glowing pinball machine instead. We were at a garage turned barcade, a place that I enjoyed taking my mother just because it was precisely the sort of place one wouldn’t bring a mother. It was where locals went on cheap Tinder dates and friends gathered to people-watch the chaos of tourists ordering overpriced cheesesteaks at the neon rivals, Pat’s and Gino’s, across the street. Such blatant Americana often amused me. My mother and I observed a man in an out-of-town sports jersey order his cheesesteak with actual cheese instead of Whiz, and I lamented that I wasn’t certain which of these was the graver faux pas. As a vegetarian, I’d never eaten a cheesesteak, but I knew the etiquette as well as any local. “You know,” I began, averting my eyes from so much familiarity. “I often wonder what grandpa would think of me moving to a place like China. It kind of goes against everything our family fought to escape, doesn’t it?” “Your grandfather was a complicated man,” my mother said, her eyes glossy. “But he would have supported whatever you do.” She paused, perhaps desperate to change the subject. “How is your novel?” I slid the beer towards her, sensing she needed it in that moment more than I did. “Dead in the water.” I sighed, not wanting to explain further. My mother considered my unspoken misgivings while dragging the pint glass along the table in a wet line. “Have you considered writing a story about your grandfather’s life?” She brought the beer to her lips and grimaced. It was, as I had feared, too bitter for her palate. “Of course,” I said. “But I don’t know the full story.” “I’ll help you,” she said. “But what if I get something wrong?” I skated my fork across my empty plate. I was terrified that I would misrepresent a man whose history was so fragmented, parts of it in the archives of Drew University, others buried in notarized letters from witnesses in a national archive of Polish eyewitness accounts. It didn’t help that my grandfather’s name was exceedingly common, making his identity immune to search engine sweeps. “I’ll make sure you understand who he really was,” she said. But I wasn’t so convinced. By the time the pandemic was in full swing, I knew that the only way I was going to really understand him was to understand myself during the time I knew him: mostly as a child, worshiping the stories that he told me. “Do you think I’m at all like grandpa?” I asked. “Well, you are both very stubborn,” my mother remarked. Now I wasn’t sure if the grimace was from the beer or not. “And intensely curious.” “I think grandpa also didn’t ever feel very American,” I added. “And neither do I.” “Your grandfather thought everything was going to be easier here. I think he believed that the Universe owed him for what he’d been through.” “I don’t think the Universe owes me anything,” I countered. “But I’ve always felt like I was born in the wrong place.” My mother frowned. I knew she took comments like this personally, assuming that she had failed me somehow, and this was the source of my displacement. “You’re very American,” my mother assured me. “And you should be thankful for that.” “I am.” I swallowed the cloudy dregs of the beer. “But it doesn’t change how I feel.” When had I truly felt thankful to be American in my life? I searched wildly for some reasons that wouldn’t make me seem ungrateful. I had fond memories of eating push popsicles and ice cream tacos down the shore, attending sleep-away camp in the woods, and accompanying my father to canned goods sales at the local supermarket, our donuts in hand as we matched each coupon to its corresponding brand. “You were too young to hear grandpa’s stories from the war,” my mother lamented. “I should’ve tried harder to shield you from all of that.” “Well,” I said with a shrug, “now you can at least help me to get the story right.” What I didn’t tell her was that I couldn’t remember ever not feeling this displacement. Perhaps my understanding of Americanness had been too malleable from the start, and so it was there that I began deconstructing where my grandfather’s Americanness ended and mine began. My mother held up her hand and in an uncharacteristic gesture, ordered another beer. “Some people have a hard life before they’re even born,” she said. “Your grandfather was one of them.”

Response from Elisabeth Ursell for American Upside Down (historical fiction) Assignment 1: Story Statement Determined to prove herself adventurous, Rowena has just accepted a job in China on the cusp of the Covid-19 pandemic and must make a difficult choice: stay behind in America for a man she loves or move abroad for a new adventure. To help her make this choice, she revisits the life of her grandfather, Witold, a dual German-Polish citizen who during World War II evades a Nazi army summons and escapes Poland. Rowena ponders the question that no one in her family has been able to answer: why did Witold re-enter Poland knowing that he was a wanted man? Was it for love? The answer to this question could help Rowena understand why she doesn’t feel American, and why she wants to move to China so badly in the first place. Assignment 2: Antagonists My novel has a few antagonists, including: Theo: Theo is Rowena’s boyfriend, whom she starts dating after accepting the job in China. He is driven by a need for family and tradition, and he cannot understand Rowena’s need to move abroad in the middle of a pandemic. He also belittles her way of dressing and her body, as well as her values, in a subtle attempt to undermine her identity and mold her more into someone similar to his ex-wife. He values grit and resilience above all else, even if it means overriding the nuances of pain. Above all else, he desires to re-create the image of the perfect family that he thinks he’s lost. Henryk: Henryk is a young man who has just arrived from Poland to the United States and takes up a job as a live-in gardener for Ola, one of Witold’s friends from his Polish church. When Ola falls ill suddenly and Henryk inherits her house, Witold becomes suspicious of his motives. Rowena also senses that Henryk is not who he seems when she learns that he understands more English than he is letting on. Eventually, the extent of his manipulative nature comes to light when after Witold’s death, Rowena discovers Henryk taking things from her grandparents’ house under the guise of helping to clear out unwanted items. Henryk is motivated by money and by national pride. He wants to return to Poland as a wealthy and successful man to make up for everything his family lost during the war. The Nazis: The first threat appears as a silent one in the form of a military summons from the Nazis. Later, the SS guards who imprison and torture Witold serve as a physical manifestation of this antagonist. Through the rest of the war, the Nazis represent not only a threat to Witold and his family’s survival, also but force him to reaffirm and defend his identity as a Pole and not a German, despite his dual citizenship. The Communists: When Witold returns to Poland after the war, he faces the Communists as both his captors and torturers, but also as the reason that the woman he loves and came back for is someone he cannot be with. Later, the existence of the Communists also threatens his marriage, especially since his anti-Communist beliefs are seen by his mother-in-law as a threat to Irena’s safety. The Communists also make it nearly impossible for Witold to find a job or send his children to a good school. Assignment 3: Breakout Title · American Upside Down · Bloodplace · The Unpolished Patriot The first title is focused on a recurring theme of the novel: that Witold’s favorite flower, the orchid, will invert itself through a process called resupination in order to receive more sunlight and grow. It is a play on the idea that in order to understand our identity, we have to turn what we assume about ourselves upside down in order to learn our own truths. Bloodplace is a play on a line from the book, which distinguishes Witold’s birthplace (Germany) from the place he identifies as home (Poland). To him, Poland is where he literally sheds his blood and feels that he belongs. The third title is a play on words. Polish is the only word in English that changes meaning based on capitalization, so in this case it implies two things: to distance oneself from the act of being a Polish patriot, and to be “unpolished” or rough. The second meaning ties closely to the idea of becoming an American and how the immigrant experience can deconstruct one’s previously held identities. Assignment 4: Comparables All the Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer: Like my novel, this book alternates between the present time and World War II to show how a grandmother and granddaughter are connected. This book centers around a love story, which is also central to the theme of my novel. Like my novel, this one focuses on unanswered questions about family history. The Nesting Dolls by Alina Adams: This novel, like mine, describes how different generations of a family are interconnected by their traumas. It focuses mostly on the oppression of living through Soviet times, and similar to my book, touches on themes of love and marriage. In particular, the main characters in the book make choices about love based on the experiences and advice of their family members. Assignment 5: Hook/Logline After accepting a job in China on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, Rowena must choose between love and a new life abroad while examining her grandfather’s past decision to flee Communist Poland for the United States. Assignment 6: Primary and Secondary Conflict Rowena’s primary conflict is determining how she identifies as an American and why her Polish heritage often conflicts with it. She believes that due to the immense suffering and perseverance of her grandfather during WWII, she must also suffer in order to deserve her own dreams, such as living abroad. When she accepts a job in China during covid-19, the border closes and her dream is deferred for months on end, which forces her to question why she wants to go so badly in the first place. She feels that she must prove herself resilient in order to honor her grandfather’s memory, and that she must also prove her identity as both an American and a Pole. Her secondary conflict is that she also deeply believes in true love and finds it difficult to choose between love from another and love for herself. Theo presents her with a constant challenge to choosing herself since he believes that tradition and family should come above all else, even one’s dreams. In any situation where Rowena must sacrifice something in the name of love, she believes that she is encountering this choice and that it is a necessary part of love. Witold believes that if he keeps fighting for his native country, Poland, that eventually justice will be found. However, after the immense losses of the Warsaw Uprising and watching his own people working for the Germans, Witold finds that he is running out of faith in the Underground that he has sworn his life to. Witold’s secondary conflict, which mirrors Rowena’s, is that he must choose between love for a woman and allegiance to his convictions about his national identity. When the Nazis’ discovery of his undercover role in the Underground forces him to flee Poland on foot, he must choose whether or not to re-enter the country to reunite with the woman he has fallen in love with. Final Assignment: Setting The novel opens with Rowena standing at the banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, staring at the iconic Pearl Tower. Rowena is on the Bund, the former financial district of the city, to take in the skyline of her potential new home. Shanghai is a city where new meets old: busy shopping streets and narrow alleys full of soup dumplings and bubble tea, along with soaring skyscrapers and old lane homes. One big difference between China and the US is the use of megaphones and loud, repetitive announcements to convey information to the public. Rental bicycles are lying on every street corner, and e-bikes (what we’d call mopeds) clog the streets. The backdrop of the city and its transition from busy to quiet is used to show that that a huge change is coming, since the normally busy Bund is empty. The later scenes in Rowena’s timeline take place primarily in Philadelphia, including a barcade. Philly is a bar-centric city with strong opinions about food. The long lines at the rival cheesesteak stores, Pat’s and Gino’s, are used to mirror the inner tension in Rowena as she wrestles with whether or not to take the job in China during a pandemic. The pandemic is hinted at in the backdrop through the mention of hand sanitizer at the entrance to the supermarket and mandatory masking. Further use of Philly as a setting could include the nearby casino, the subway system (which becomes nearly abandoned during the pandemic), and the growing opioid epidemic in Kensington, where Rowena lives and regularly encounters the homeless. The famed Benjamin Franklin bridge is where Theo and Rowena run together during the early days of the pandemic, and also where they share their first kiss. The bridge offers a stunning view of the city during sunset. The sun reflects off the large windows of the Comcast building, the tallest building in Center City. On one side of the bridge is Camden, a city many locals avoid due to crime, and on the other is Philly. When running, Theo and Rowena always stop short of the Camden side and turn around. This could possibly symbolize that there is some dark place in their own relationship that they don’t want to venture into. Witold’s scenes primarily take place in WWII Poland. He grew up in Poznan in a small apartment near the river. The apartment is small and depends on coal for heating. There are no supermarkets, so food is purchased fresh at the local market. Witold later escapes Poland’s southern border through the Carpathian Mountains, which make up the tallest mountain range in Poland. The winters in Poland are very harsh, and throughout the war lead to conditions that are difficult to survive as Witold evades the Germans. The extensive forest also drives the plot since it allows Witold and the other underground soldiers to hide and evade capture. The forest is where Witold hones his survival and combat skills. One aspect of the forest that could be emphasized more is that Witold knows the names of the many different mushrooms and berries in the forest and which ones are poisonous or not due to his training. Some of these mushrooms keep him alive. Later, Witold moves to Bloomfield, New Jersey. Northern New Jersey is full of strip malls and cars. Witold finds driving to be daunting at first and hesitates to learn how to drive, resorting to tailgating as his own unusual way to seek justice against bad drivers who cut him off. There is a local Polish church in an old municipal building in Boonton, but apart from that, Witold cannot understand the majority of the signs he sees. He struggles to complete basic errands like buying groceries since he is not used to so many choices, like wandering large supermarkets full of plastic packaging. New Jersey also serves as the setting for several scenes in Rowena’s timeline, including a scene shooting at a local gun range in the more rural West Milford, and driving scenes that involve speeding down route 80, a famous east-west highway known for fast drivers. Lastly, the chain restaurant Panera is referenced and serves as a setting for Rowena’s confrontation with her own beliefs about religion and her own bodily autonomy, since it is where she meets a dishwasher and begins smoking with him near the dumpsters behind the restaurant