“A Storied Articulation of Ideas:” On Creativity in the Academy
I began writing travel fiction ten years ago, in 2008, during my first year in graduate school, where I was beginning to specialize in Asian American Studies, and literatures concerning empire, racism, and travel. It was also the year I first visited Bangkok, and ended up taking the typical Banana Pancake tour from Thailand through Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. It’s a trip that I always look upon as a political coming-of-age. Being in Southeast Asia for months at a time gave palpable presence to histories of bombing, war, and colonization, which I could only understand abstractly within the safety and comfort of my North American institution. All of this I wanted to bring back with me, to let spring whatever work could emerge, and to create disruptions in places complicit in, but largely unaffected by, the violences that have taken place across the sea.
I became an accidental academic in 2008, when I took refuge from the precarity guaranteed by the recession and decided to stay in graduate school. I started writing both my books that year, my fiction book Stamped: an anti-travel novel, and my academic book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literatures of the Transpacific. The research and love of literature that spurred my academic writing did the same for my fiction. I did not intend for these works to come out together, though looking back, I understand them now as sharing the same resources.
If there’s anything worse than an academic who writes fiction, it’s the fiction writer who explains their stories through academic language. For many artists, not talking about the work becomes a way to protect one’s commodity/brand, to appear authentic and mysterious, but also universal, above politics, concerned only with craft, as if led by an uncatchable muse only visible to the artist. They let their agents, dealers, managers, editors talk for them.
I hope to write academically about fiction and creatively about research. But mainly I want to be able to do creative work within the institution, which can be both a resource for creative and academic work, as well as an entity seeking to see the author as a source, as the OED defines it, “a place, person, or thing from which something comes or can be obtained.”
To Scholar, Creatively
In a recent piece for PMLA, Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote that “only as an English-language writer of fiction, rather than as an English professor, could I acknowledge Vietnamese bodies.” Constrained by committees, editors, and other academic gatekeepers, Nguyen could not center Vietnamese people as subjects even in scholarship about the very war that took place on their soil. Creative work emerged as a form of communicating what academic methods could not see. As Barbara Christian wrote in 1987,
“People of color have always theorized — but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”
Of these writers, W.E.B. Du Bois, whose Souls of Black Folk merged poetry, fiction, and essay, was a great grandfather, while today writers like Viet Nguyen, Saidiya Hartman, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Fred Moten, and Larissa Lai, continue to blend scholarship and creativity today. What defines this work to me are authors who do the research, do the work, but express that work through imagination and play, as the serious world of traditional academic methods fail to capture the unique life of the person or the community that they call home. To scholar creatively, as I’m calling it, can help us imagine history and the future differently (how Du Bois used it), can bring humanity to those outside of disciplinary boundaries (as Nguyen uses it), and can explore the inner-workings and experience of archives (as Hartman uses it). Creative scholarship dares one to follow their instinct rather than their grant outline, to write not with templates but with surprise, as Christian emphasizes, “the surprise that comes from reading something that compels you to read differently.” When the expectations of traditional scholarship have left us desperately scrounging for humanity, creative work surprises with flesh and soul.
From my first year as an undergraduate I imagined embarking upon the creative path, sitting in on fiction workshops and seeking creative writing mentors. That is, until one day, during a workshop, our class was given the rare opportunity to read a piece of classic literature as an example of good craft-based writing. The piece was George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” a story set in Burma when it was a British colony, and narrated by a British policeman, who was “all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British.” I have never forgotten this story’s end, its prevailing insight that “every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at.” My fellow students and instructor did not see what I saw. They saw the story as a shining example of craft, how the elephant turned from an “it” to a “he,” how he operated as an analog to the people of Burma. I found none of this half as interesting as the context — where was Burma, anyways? What was it really like to be a colonial there? Was it possible to contain such a private life of doubt, even as a soldier within a violent and racist empire? I wanted to discuss these questions, but when I did, I was met with criticism that I was not reading like an artist, that I was too taken in by the story. I was merely the part Chinese, part Filipino, part white person in the room, a descendant of both colonizers and colonial subjects, and to say that the story meant more to me because of that history seemed to ignore the all-important dimension of craft, that purposefully mystified process, that great divider between the failed story and the stories praised in traditional literary journals. I found myself in the same situation as Junot Díaz when he wrote of the Cornell MFA, “we never talked about race except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that ‘race discussions’ were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having.”
Offput by MFA writing courses and agog to see the world, I scuttled my plans for an MFA and took the path of travel, holding dear to the notion that it was more important to have something to say than to learn to say it well. I longed to feel something dull enough to keep me guessing, sassy enough to give me the once-over, and something so braided within the uncertain destinies of racial others that it provoked self-destruction — sent me plunging off the levitating plane of the self and into the messy contradictions of the pleasure, desire, and power.
So I spent five months wandering North America hitchhiking, ridesharing, couchsharing, hosteling, and seeking out strange encounters. After North America, I spent a year in South Korea, and then spent my graduate school years flitting briefly from country to country — Japan, China, The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and others — before settling to live for two years in Nanjing, China, and another two in Hong Kong.
Not Crisp, Not Clear, But in Blur
Stamped is the blurred product of travel and academic research. I sought to mine the lived experience of minority, queer, and poor folks, who find their homespun identities unspooling when they attempt to settle elsewhere. The novel is about people looking for playful mirrors — seeing themselves, confronting themselves, then being unable to account for the violence that emerges from the twisted funhouse. Resolving never to go back to America, the characters weave through the afterlives of colonial histories — the Cambodian genocide, the Philippine-American War, and the many military bases throughout the Pacific. One of the central focuses of the book is confrontation, and the anger that follows. Anger, as Audre Lorde wrote, should not be feared, but should be something we learn to deal with, to orchestrate from cacophony into symphony, “so that [those furies] do not tear us apart” (129). While writing Stamped, I wanted to explore how the anger that manifests from travel can be reshaped by galvanizing forces, but can also be domesticated through ready-made narratives: the local nationalist propaganda, the tourist industry, the internalized imperial attitudes. These forces turn anger from discordance into anthem, shifting the blame by trumpeting a gruesome chorus of self-hate, racism, and dispossession. Anyone is susceptible to this, even the cadre of frequently sloshed queer, Black, POC travelers within my novel, who act upon Asia with whatever privilege they afford, chasing their own ends, until they are undone by the road. How does one get out of this chronic mess? I asked myself while writing. What risks does one need to take? What comes with the loss of an identity that has, time and again, made and remade the self?
Stamped is also intended to catalog ideas developed in research. To be stamped, I feel, is to be flattened, stomped upon by the modern colossus crushing anything in its path. So there’s the flattening of the will, the stamping of racial otherness, the reduction of minorities into one-dimensional political identities that we call “resistant.” But then, to be stamped is also to have access. The same stamp that was created through flattening and de-humanizing enables mobility, and some amount of privilege. The very things one tries to escape, the apparatus holding the stamp, also provides inclusion. But what do we give up? What is the price of admission into a space where our actions, our thoughts, our embodiments, are no longer ours? They are not ours in the sense that we are no longer responsible for our actions, our feelings, our anxiety, even our own histories — responsibility has been replaced with the institution, the apparatus, the state, and in that loss of responsibility, what else do we lose?
When I write about travel, I feel responsible again. Responsibility arrives merely in the act of seeing, of bearing witness to the atrocities of the past, and in recognizing the reach of empire today. As Arundhati Roy writes, “the trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” I’m curious in how travelers account for this accountability, when they realize that they cannot go back home, because they know too much to be the person they once were. They have, in a sense, become responsible for who they are, even when they all they want is to be no one at all. (29:55)
To Create, Scholarly
In 1987, Barbara Christian observed that “in the first part of this century, at least in England and America, the critic was usually also a writer of poetry, plays, or novels. But today, as a new generation of professionals develops, she or he is increasingly an academic.” We rarely even use the word “critic” anymore, but have replaced it with “academics” who are critical about everything: critical ethnic studies, critical race, critical queer. But I’ve also known many academics who are artists, many who are also creative writers, many of whom feel that they are always an outsider in literary circles. But I don’t see what’s so bad about being an outsider to an industry wherein 88% of the books reviewed by The New York Times are written by white authors, and 79% of the literary industry identifies as white (the vast majority white women), as do 89% of book review writers.
I wonder, then, what the outsiders can do for creativity, the ones like me, who left the MFA workshop. As Mark McGurl and Eric Bennett have shown, MFA programs emerged during the Cold War to institutionalize creativity in ways that demonized political writing, aggrandized the new Pax Americana, and gained grants and philanthropy from oil tycoons and bank owners like the Rockefellers. The Cold War context helped produce seemingly timeless proverbs of creativity, to “write what you know,” to always “make it new,” to “show not tell,” to write as sparingly and as masculine as Ernest Hemingway — these and other craft-based epistemologies have over time excluded people of color, de-valued socially engaged genre fiction, and debased non-liberal politics. These values were weaponized in Asia, with CIA funded literary projects funneled through programs like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, The Asia Foundation, and many of the literary festivals still in place across the world today. In North America, people of color have also not been shy about criticizing these writing norms, as the author Ken Liu writes “To write from resistance, telling is sometimes far superior [than showing]. “Showing” is great when you’re relying on a shared, implicit understanding.”
I too was taught that these writing techniques were universal, with stories like “Shooting an Elephant” as their greatest examples. But when I taught creative writing in Hong Kong and China, I found altogether different presumptions — one should write about politics, one could never get away with pretending objectivity, one should not be original, but write in respect to tradition, culture, and community. In both China and the Philippines, its great founding fathers were not statesmen but fiction writers — Lu Xun, Jose Rizal. In places like Singapore, it’s not unusual for its most recognized fiction writers and poets to also be lawyers and representatives. Close reading and close attention to form, in these contexts, can be seen as hand-overs from colonial education. Most shocking for me was the belief in many of my students that “literary fiction” was totally banal compared to the radical work happening in science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels, which all carried clear political analogies. At the same time, these writers dare to set the English language adrift, playing with language through pidgins, accents, and hybrid forms.
If one were to take an account of all the publishing houses and literary journals run by people of color, they would find one common trait — the use of academic language and quotations from texts students are likely to read not in an MFA course, but in Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and my own Social Justice Institute. This is true for magazines like Anomaly, as well as science fiction journals like Strange Horizons, which advises for stories written from “non-exoticizing and well-researched positions,” and that “address political issues in complex and nuanced ways.” While these journals may not always be led by editors in the academy, it would be accurate to say that they are far more informed by gender and ethnic studies than the MFA programs housing journals focusing on craft and that remain colorblind in their selection process.
We should understand how prejudices towards telling rather than showing, plagiarizing rather than originality, are part of colonial attitudes carried over from our troubled past. Artistically, our challenge is to keep to the realness of a life, and to do so without fear of being labeled an outsider. In the institution, I am always a writer pretending to be an academic, and in the world of fiction, an academic pretending to be a writer. Harnessing our amateur curiosity by centering ourselves elsewhere allows us to play with categories, because any mixing of discrete disciplines can often result in career-suicide. As Saidiya Hartman says of her own work, creative writing in the academy brings about new homes by bridging theory and narrative, and does not tell stories so much as commits to “a storied articulation of ideas.” It is within the merging of ideas and story that the writer, out of feelings of homelessness and exile, can begin to create a home where they matter.
This blog is a shortened and revised version of a talk given by the author at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute entitled “Decolonizing Travel Writing: Creative Scholarship in Asia.”
