Ask the Author: Bonnie Tsui
Answered Questions (3)
Bonnie Tsui
Hi Marc! You're right that many monkeys can swim. It's the larger primates who seem to need to be taught -- a.k.a. the great apes, which include orangutans, chimps, and humans.
Bonnie Tsui
My parents met in a swimming pool in Hong Kong; it's part of my origin story. My brother and I joined the swim team and became lifeguards in due time, just like our father. Swimming has been a constant, a through line running across the last three and a half decades of my life. My own relationship with it can't help but be a through line in this book.
Bonnie Tsui
Well, survival first of all! That's the most basic reason, of course, and I talk to scientists and follow traces of our human evolutionary past to talk about this in the book. But after we learn to survive the water, swimming can become something else: a way to well-being, and health; a path to find community, through a team or club; an avenue to competition, which, if you think about it, is really our fight-or-flight survival instincts subsumed in a race setting. And swimming itself can be a window to flow, in all the ways we talk about that state of being: physical, psychological, emotional. The book is structured thematically, by all these different ways we can answer that question.
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