Month: September 2014

Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices, by Kristin Cronn-Mills, (Twenty-First Century Books, Lerner Publishing Group), 88 pages

Transgender Lives is a small, but ground-breaking book. Written with junior high and high school readers in mind, it alternates stories from trans* individuals’ live with chapters on topics like transgender health and transgender life challenges. [Note that this book primarily uses the term trans*, rather than transgendered because the identity is much more complex than the term “gender,” which still implies the binary male/female dichotomy, allows.] Opening materials explain that “Transgender Lives helps you understand what it means to be trans* in America while learning more about transgender history, the broad spectrum of transgender identities, and the transition process.”

The book is written to inform and to generate respect. The language is at a seventh grade level, which makes it accessible to a great many readers. The author uses analogies and hypothetical situations to put readers into the kinds of situations trans* individuals face daily:

Awsome! It’s the day you get to apply for a driver’s license. As you fill out the form, you realize you have to choose between the boxes labeled “male” and “female.” But what do you do if you feel neither box fits you? Today you’re dressed like a guy. Tomorrow you might wear a skirt…. Sometimes you identify with both boxes, some days with neither, and someday you might transition from one gender to another. But what do you do now? Do you make a new box? Do you lie?

The brevity of this Transgender Lives means that it won’t provide a definitive understanding of trans* life, history, and culture. It will, however, provide a vocabulary and structure for considering trans* identity—an issue of particular importance to its readers, who may be becoming aware of their own trans* selves or who may be encountering trans* peers for the first time.

The Lotus and the Storm: A Novel, by Lan Cao, (Viking Adult), 400 pages

Island of a Thousand Mirrors: A Novel, by Nayomi Munaweera, (St. Martin’s Press), 256 pages

Witness, in the sense of testifying to one’s own or another’s experiences, offers one of the most powerful reasons for writing: to document events that get swept under the societal rug or that are being lost due to deliberate societal forgetting. I believe that the primary motivation behind this tendency to sweeping under is fear. We fear the cruelties we can inflict on one another. We fear the ways our worlds may be changed when we acknowledge the existence—I would say prevalence, even—of these cruelties. We fear that if we believe the stories of those who’ve survived rape, torture, genocide, then we may become victims of these forces ourselves. Because I understand witness in this way, I am convinced that it is an essential part of ethical living, both individually and communally.

That is why I value the literature of witness, why I’m drawn to poems and books that make for uncomfortable reading. I don’t want to be a part of any forgetting. Several months ago I wrote a review of The Poetry of Witness, an impressive (and hefty) anthology from W.W. Norton edited by Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu. More recently I’ve found myself reading another interesting genre of witness: the fictions of witness.

Witness and fiction may seem antithetical. Witness is the business of truth-telling; fiction is the art of imagining. But as any devoted reader knows, fiction can bear truths every bit as well as non-fiction does. I don’t know how or why writer-survivors make the choice between memoir and novel, but some do and the results can be deeply moving.

Two such novels are Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm and Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors. The first of these looks at life both during the war in Vietnam and for refugees from that war attempting to rebuild their lives in the U.S. Island of a Thousand Mirrors also originates in civil war, in this case in Sri Lanka. These books—both of them recent releases—are very much worth a read, even though the experience of reading them is painful.

The Lotus and the Storm moves back and forth temporally and geographically and employs two voices. The first is a young (at least in the earliest moments) young girl being raised in a life of relative privilege as the U.S. enters the conflict. The second is her father, who was part of the South Vietnamese Army. Both narrators describe their lives in Vietnam and in the United States. Both are articulate and precise in sharing memories and describing the present.

Island of a Thousand Mirrors tells the stories of women from two families: one family is Sinhala, the community (at least before the war) controlling wealth and power, the other is Tamil, working class and without political power. Over the course of the novel, the lives of these two families intersect in unexpected ways.

Both authors experienced the eras and locales that they write about. I cannot tell which parts of their novels are essentially memoir, which parts draw on and reshape memory, and which are “inventions.”  To have a broad understanding of both wars, one would need to read a great deal of non-fiction. But one also will need novels like these that allow a reader to experience these conflicts from multiple perspectives, that witness (and therefore force readers to see) the brutalities of these times and places.

Pick up these  novels. Read them carefully at a time when you are able (to the best of your ability) to place yourself inside them. Open yourself to the witness being offered.

I Am China: A Novel, by Xiaolu Guo, (Nan A. Talese: Random House), 384 pages

I Am China is an interesting puzzle of a book. The author, Xiaolu Guo, is a writer and film maker (she graduated from the Beijing Film Academy), which shows in the structuring of this novel that jumps back and forth in time, moving from perspective to perspective in a way that is genuinely cinematic. Born in China, Guo now lives and writes in Britain, and I Am China presents perspectives based in both the country of her birth and her adopted country.

The Chinese perspectives are embodied in the characters Jian and Mu. Jian is a Chinese punk rocker who was imprisoned after releasing a “manifesto” at one of his concerts, and who is now seeking asylum in Europe. Mu is Jian’s off and on (but mostly on) partner of the last twenty years. Both characters have strong political motivations, but Jian’s politics are confrontational, while Mu’s are more subtle and interestingly romantic. Jian finds politics essential to art; Mu doesn’t.

The British perspective comes from Iona, a professional translator living in London, who has been asked to work with a loosely organized group of letters and journal entries written by both Jian and Mu. Readers encounter this material as she does: in random order and without any suggestion of what its overall trajectory might be.

I found this novel absolutely fascinating for the view it offers into alternative communities within contemporary China. I hadn’t realized China has a punk scene; I certainly didn’t know about the different strands of dissident thought represented by the book’s Chinese characters.

I said at the opening that I Am China is a puzzle of a book. It is a narrative that readers must assemble for themselves, looking for related pieces, rearranging information to create a chronology. This structureless structure is actually one of the book’s strengths preventing it from becoming narrower or more dogmatic.

I Am China is most definitely worth a read, both for the characters it introduces and for the glimpses it gives into the lives of a huge segment of the world’s population about whom we generally hear very little.