Hello again! Thanks for your feedback this past month. And a warm welcome to new subscribers! This is Author Abroad, a newsletter on reading, writing, and reflections from a life abroad. This month I’ll be talking about the inspiration for The Golden Land, what it’s like living on two continents at once, and some provocative books, essays, and interviews I’ve read over the last few weeks.
Writing
This past week, I was invited to give a talk about The Golden Land at a local library. I am often asked in interviews how I came to write a novel about Myanmar, so in talks like this one, I focus on my experience living there and how that experience inspired the novel. My family was lucky to live in Yangon for six of the ten years in recent history that the country was not ruled by a military dictatorship. It was a time of great hope and investment in the future. People were finally beginning to express themselves freely and to pursue dreams that seemed impossible before. Many former citizens, who’d been living in exile, were returning home at last.
When I arrived in Yangon, I immersed myself in the culture by reading as much as I could about the country, taking language lessons, attending cultural events, and asking lots and lots of questions. The more I learned, the more questions I had. There were two phenomena in particular that I couldn’t get out of my head. The first was what it must have been like to live under a military dictatorship on a day-to-day basis. What happens when your neighbor or your fishmonger or someone in your own family belongs to the hated regime? How do you navigate those relationships?
The second question that I wanted to explore was how it feels to return to your home country after living in exile for an extended period. Having lived abroad for almost 30 years, I can sympathize with this to an extent, but it’s different for me because no-one is preventing me from returning home. In the case of Myanmar, many of those returning from exile had been away for decades. I wanted to explore what it means to be physically separated from the place where your memories are set, especially where those memories are troubling or unresolved in some way. These are some of the themes that led me to write The Golden Land and which I discussed in my talk last week. I’m happy to report that the talk was a success, and that everyone who attended was very interested in, and concerned about, the situation in Myanmar today.
Life Abroad
Believe it or not, I’m back in the US again. I returned earlier than usual to see my daughter graduate from her Master’s program and decided to stay and enjoy the beautiful summer months here in Massachusetts. As pleased as I am to be here, this divided life continues to disorient: Two different households, two different sets of friends, two different climates. Different clothing, different concerns, a different rhythm to my days—it’s no wonder I feel scattered.
I was just starting to feel settled back in Dhaka when it was time to leave again. But this time, I’m determined to keep up my Bangla lessons (via Skype) as well as my efforts to learn about Bangladesh through novels and other resources. And the universe seems to be helping out: On the flight here, I watched a new Italian television series called Bangla about a young Bangladeshi-Italian man, who falls in love with an Italian woman while living in Rome (a place I have also lived for several years). The series tackles the inevitable misunderstandings and moments of connection that occur when two different cultures meet. And just last week, The New York Times published this photo essay on the growing Bangladeshi population in New York City. Although most of the article is about men😡, I was encouraged to read about the work Bangladeshi-American women are doing to create new spaces for themselves.
Reading
The first of three novels I read this month was Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang. Yellowface is a novel about a young, white author, who steals, and publishes under her own name, a book about Chinese laborers during WWI that was written by her recently deceased Chinese-American friend. In the story, the release of the plagiarized novel leads to a flurry of social media and other book-related debacles. A quick read, Yellowface is a smart, funny book that explores the uglier side of the publishing industry, complete with Twitter storms, accusations of cultural appropriation, and the twin writerly preoccupations of jealousy and imposter syndrome.
As it happens, Kuang’s own views on the question of cultural appropriation, as expressed in this recent Guardian article, are similar to my own:
“Concerns about ‘who has permission to tell these stories, or who has the right, or who is qualified’ seem like ‘the wrong questions to ask…We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters,’ she continues. ‘Otherwise all we could ever publish are memoirs and autobiographies and nobody wants that.’ For her, more interesting is how authors approach these stories: ‘Are they engaging critically with tropes and stereotypes that already exist in the genre? Or are they just replicating them? What is their relationship to the people who are being represented?’ And, ‘most importantly, does the work do something interesting? Is it good?’”
Amen to that!
Continuing my exploration of Bangladeshi literature, I also read Lajja: Shame by Taslima Nasrin (translated by Tutul Gupta), which was written in response to the 1992 anti-Hindu riots in Bangladesh. While the story at the core of the book is fictional, Nasrin dedicates a large part of the book to chronicling true historical events, including widespread rape, murder, property-grabbing, and other forms of prejudice against Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. Although Nasrin was raised Muslim, her experience treating victims of sexual violence as a gynecologist led her to renounce her faith and embrace feminism and humanism in its place.
Released in 1993, the book caused an uproar in Bangladesh, selling over 50,000 copies in the first six months alone. The government of Bangladesh quickly banned the book, and a fatwa was issued calling for her death. Thirty years later, she continues to live in exile in India and to receive regular death threats. The book is disturbing but essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the nature of the religious strife and misunderstanding in Bangladesh (and the world). As one of the characters exclaims (paraphrasing Jonathon Swift): “We have so many religions that teach us to hate each other. But there are not enough religions that preach love.” Indeed, the situation feels impossible, and the case for humanism urgent. In Bangladesh, it’s the Muslim majority persecuting non-Muslims, while in India, the Hindu majority persecutes non-Hindus, and in Myanmar, the Buddhist majority persecutes non-Buddhists. In all cases, women are the ones who suffer the most.
Last month’s Dhaka bookclub pick was Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which has since won the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction and co-won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Narrated by a smart but desperately poor Melungeon boy called Demon, the novel is a modern-day adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Through Demon’s eyes, we explore the joy and hardships of growing up in rural Appalachia, the failures of the foster-care system, and the impact of the opioid crisis on this population. At 560 pages, the novel is on the long side for my current attention span (I kept looking at the percentage read on my kindle and being shocked that I had not yet reached the midway point!), but I loved the voice. Here’s a sample:
“I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.”
I recommend Demon Copperhead to anyone who wants to understand the opioid crisis in the United States.
That’s all for this month. Thanks for reading and please tell some friends if you feel like it😊
Liz💕