First Person: Writing a Larger World

An essay by Aimee Liu

“My work seems so trivial!”

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, fiction writers across the country sent up this collective lament. The events of that one ghastly day were so much more tragic, more vivid, more sinister and violent than anything we could imagine that many of my fellow novelists despaired of ever writing anything “relevant” again.

In the subsequent seventeen months, the weekly bestseller lists have reassured us that irony is not really dead, and heartland dramas, romantic sagas, and small–town murder mysteries are once again in demand. Yet the question that loomed largest in those first weeks after the terrorist attacks — “Why do they hate us?” — remains a conundrum for most Americans, even as the US occupies Iraq. This question exposes both our nation’s innocence and ignorance of the world beyond our borders. For many writers, the desire to remedy this ignorance has led to a renewed interest in the international novel.

As it happens, several such novelists belong to my writers’ group. One reason we had come together, in fact, was because of our shared interest in foreign affairs. I was working on a book set in India and Central Asia in 1949. Mark Lee was writing about journalists and aid workers in Africa and East Timor. Leslie Monsour was crafting a story about an American family in Mexico in the fifties. But before 9/11 we all felt we were writing against the tide of popular interest and concern.

We worried that the U.S. literary marketplace wouldn’t respond to stories set outside America. How many of Mark’s readers would know the difference between East Timor and Ethiopia? How many of mine would care about a character from Sinkiang, China, much less about the politics of this forgettable land? Although agents and editors claimed they were looking for “diverse” fiction, that generally translated to mean stories about diverse cultures living within American borders. Language was a formidable obstacle. How many Spanish terms could Leslie use without taxing her English–speaking readers’ patience? Would my readers be able to track one character named Osman and another named Akbar? Set a story in another country, and the reader has to work twice as hard, unless he or she has been there. At least this was our assumption in the spring of 2001.

As a precaution against reader frustration, we intensified the focus on our American characters and downplayed the international scope of the plots. It’s an American love story that just happens to open during an African uprising. It’s an American coming–of–age story, even if it is set south of the border. It’s a tale of an American woman’s longing and resilience informed by the circumstances of China at the start of the Cold War. But these were dodges, and we knew it. What captivated us in writing these tales was not the familiar but the foreign characters and elements.

Why? For one thing, we accepted the edict: “Write what you know.” All three of us had personal experience overseas. Two had spent long stretches of childhood abroad, and one had worked in the Third World as an adult. We knew what it is to be The Foreigner — to dream in Tagalog without understanding a word of Tagalog; to step from a plane into a climate so thick and hot it seems to melt on one’s skin; to celebrate the weirdness of transplanted customs, like Christmas trees in India; and to almost but never quite take in stride images that the locals consider mundane —legless children grinning for handouts, or stark naked holy men dusted in saffron. The yearning to understand that comes from such experiences prompted us to revisit the past and make sense of it — through our fiction.

The members of my writing group also knew firsthand how it felt to return to a country so preoccupied with itself that no one even asked where we were coming back from. Such homecomings naturally aroused our anger and frustration, and confusion. The most vivid and, for some of us, the most formative years of our lives were spent overseas, yet our friends yawned and changed the subject whenever we tried to talk about the places we had seen. This American preoccupation was as much a common theme in our stories as the international locales.

Mark, Leslie and I wrote stories based on our experiences abroad not because we believed they would be bestsellers but because of an opposite impulse. We needed, for ourselves, to tell stories that nobody much wanted to hear, and we gravitated to each other, in part, because we all understood and condoned this irrational need.

Then came 9/11. Overnight those foreign place names, titles, and terms started showing up in headlines across the country. Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bali, Sinkiang. The widely discredited United Nations was now a daily news item. Men named Osama, Abdel, and Mohammed made the CNN crawl. The wider world suddenly became relevant to ordinary Americans, and so did the stories and perspectives Mark, and Leslie, and I were writing down.

There’s another standard edict in writing: “Deliver what the reader needs to know only when the reader needs to know it.” Now our readers needed to know what we had to tell them. What have Americans done to deserve attack by foreigners? What can we do to restore international goodwill? Why do they hate us? Our novels don’t contain all the answers, but they do present, as fiction alone can, multiple perspectives. The actions and choices of our characters mirror many of the actions and choices facing us in real life today. And so do the consequences of these choices.

The market has responded. Two books workshopped in our group were published this spring. I suspect the third will not be far behind.

Do we feel vindicated? Hardly. The peace and prosperity that permit a nation to shrug off the rest of the world is a privilege from which we all have benefited. But 9/11 and the current threat of war suggest that it’s a privilege our country can no longer afford. America needs to look outward. And the international novel can light the way.

There is nothing trivial about it.

The writer: Aimee Liu, author of the new novel, Flash House, is immediate past president of the literary and human rights organization PEN USA.

You can read an excerpt of Mark Lee's The Canal House here at California Authors. And, Liu's moving essay about the power of keeping a journal can be found here.

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