Writing What You Know

[Note: This essay was commissioned for a collection on the art of writing that was published in 1999. Each writer selected a topic from a list. The editor was very enthusiastic about my draft; but in the final stages, looking to reduce the overall number of pages, the editorial board decided to cut my piece. The stated reason was that its target audience was “too narrow.”

Eighteen years later, it seems to me that the same issues of representation and whose voice gets heard have again come to the forefront (if in fact they ever went away). There is a hunger out there for underrepresented voices; I have certainly felt it myself. What has changed is that we are no longer at the mercy of the marketing machine — the gatekeepers who control what gets heard and what does not, based on a nebulous image of a “mainstream audience.” With the Internet and this web site, I joyfully bypass the gatekeepers of culture and open my door to whomever cares to visit.  October, 2017]

Here is the essay:

Ten reasons not to write what you know:

1. Your family will disown you (or at least stop telling you all the juicy stuff
   that makes your stories so interesting)
2. Everyone will think that every word you write (about characters based on
   yourself and your family) is true, and that you have an interesting life
        as opposed to an active imagination
3. You’ll get it wrong, and your friends and family will be mad at you
4. You’ll get it right, and your friends and family will be mad at you

If you are a writer of a color, religion, region, sexual persuasion or disability that is non-trendy or passe:

5. You won’t get published until your (race/religion/region, etc.) comes back into fashion
6. You will suddenly become a spokesperson for your (race/religion/region, etc.) even though you are only speaking for yourself
7. You will be pigeon-holed and subjected to quotas (“Oh, we’ve already accepted our (Asian/California/deaf) story this year.”)
8. You will be asked, “So when are you going to deal with more universal themes?”
9. You will be compared to (Amy Tan) and accused of writing about (mother-daughter relationships) regardless of your subject matter
10. Shogun had Richard Chamberlain, but in your fiction, (Asian) characters are not an exotic backdrop for the white male hero who saves the day and gets the girl.  No one will buy the movie rights.

Twenty-Five Reasons To Do It Anyway (tweaked in 2017)

1. The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
3. The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
4. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
5. And the Soul Shall Dance, by Wakako Yamauchi
6. Go Down, Moses, by William Faulkner
7. “Everyday Use,” a story by Alice Walker
8. “Pangs of Love,” a story by David Wong Louie
9. “The Things They Carried,” a story by Tim O’Brien
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
11. “The Spinoza of Market Street,” a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer
12. “The Boat,” a story by Alistair MacLeod
13. Medicine Walk, by Richard Wagamese
14. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
15. A Soldier’s Play, by Charles Fuller
16. Talking to the Dead, by Sylvia Watanabe
17. Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon, by Frank Chin
18. In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez
19. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill
20. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
21. God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
22. The Wash, by Philip Kan Gotanda
23. Tea, by Velina Hasu Houston
24. China Boy, by Gus Lee
25. Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka

Why I Write What I Know

I don’t necessarily advocate writing what you know; I simply do it. I do it without pride or apology. I am not one of those people who feel that there is less art involved because one draws from one’s own experience rather than from research or pure imagination; neither do I feel any particular allegiance to Ernest Hemingway, to whom this advice is often attributed. To me, he was just a big white guy with a thing for guns — not exactly a role model. Rather, I find that writing from my life helps me to make sense of it; and I feel a need to make sense of it lest it pass without, as Arthur Miller might say, the proper attention being paid.

One of the fallacies about “writing what you know” is that it is easy — at least, easier than creating a fiction whole cloth from the imagination. I believe, on the contrary, that it is quite difficult. So difficult that it took me fifteen years to even attempt it. What took so long was figuring out just what it was that I knew, and understanding that it was as valid as what other people know.

I should explain: I was born seven years after the internment camps were closed at the end of World War II, and Japanese-Americans were allowed to come home. Before the war, my family had lived in San Francisco’s Japantown, but when my family returned from the war, they quickly joined the migration out to “the Avenues.” I grew up in the Richmond District of San Francisco in the 1950’s, oblivious to the turmoil that had all but destroyed my parents’ and grandparents’ lives a few years earlier. The Richmond District was an ethnically mixed working class neighborhood, working its post-war way up to the middle class. We were the proverbial melting pot. We watched “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best” on television, and, in our innocence, imagined that these television families reflected the lives of our own families. In actuality, my friends were second- and third-generation Chinese-American kids whose parents ran cleaners and grocery stores, a Jew whose father was a ship fitter and worked nights. My own father was an entrepreneur who imported things “Made in Japan” and sold them to stores in Chinatown. My mother was a housewife. She read to my sisters and me and took us regularly to the Anza Branch Library, where we explored the wider world through books. Ours was a happy family, so much so that when I realized by the age of eight that I wanted to be a writer, I despaired. What could I possibly find to write about? 

Animals, of course.  An avid reader of horse stories, I began to write my own. The main human character in the stories was always a young white boy named Steven, or David. At that time, that’s who the hero in fiction had to be; I had never come across a Japanese-American character in any book, television show, or movie, and it was inconceivable to have a story with a Japanese-American heroine. (Yoshiko Uchida had not yet started publishing her novels about growing up in Berkeley.) Japanese characters would occasionally pop up in movies: the buck-toothed enemy, the servile houseboy, the shy, submissive lotus blossom. I did not identify with these characters — they bore no similarity to me or anyone I knew. I identified with the heroes or heroines, who were always white. Back then, Japanese-Americans didn’t even show up in the history books. In the national census, we were “Other.” But the real stars of my stories were the horses: the filly who kicks rump in the Kentucky Derby; the sight-challenged colt who never lets on about his handicap and breaks his heart over the Big Race.

After straining the limits of the horse story genre, I moved to historical fiction, in which the heroes (young white men named Paul or Mark) fought in the American Revolution, or World War II. I even tried my hand at science fiction; I remember starting a novel (during math period) in which all the characters were mathematical signs. This may have been a manifestation of identity crisis, but I suspect it was simply boredom and an aversion to math. 

The ethnic identity movement in the 1970s made me realize that the most interesting story I could ever tell was the one that no one had ever told me: what it was like to be Japanese in America. The discovery of Japanese films directed by Yasujiro Ozu in the 1950s and ’60s — quiet, domestic dramas rich with human emotion and a distinctly Japanese sensibility — taught me that there was material for literature in my own life. I was hungry to see Asians portrayed as human beings in American literature and film. I wanted to see Asians portrayed as Americans. I wanted to see myself in the mirror. From the standpoint of the dominant culture, Asians were invisible. My mission, then, as a writer, would be to create a Japanese-American presence in American literature. 

Balancing Subjectivity:  Knowing from the Inside Out and the Outside In

But I wasn’t ready to tell the story yet; what did I “know”? I had grown up incorporating the same blind spots as the society in which I was educated — a blindness to the history, perspectives, and contributions of people of color. The American history that I learned in school was about the Pilgrims, Abraham Lincoln, George Armstrong Custer, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In those days, we didn’t study about Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, or Chief Joseph; we didn’t hear about the Chinese laborers who built the railroads, or the Japanese-American soldiers who were the most heavily decorated fighting unit in the U.S. Army in World War II. We didn’t read books by Zora Neale Thurston, John Okada. I had grown up believing the implicit message that assimilation was the ultimate goal (and assimilation meant that everyone should aspire to and be measured by a white mainstream yardstick). Cultural values that were “different” were a liability, to be shed as quickly as possible. So I wasn’t all that sure that I knew, consciously, what it meant to be Japanese-American.

I was twenty-one years old when I sat down and wrote the first draft of “Ohaka-mairi,” a short story about a Japanese-American family visiting the grave of a daughter who had died in a rock-climbing accident. It was my first attempt to write about my own family, and it was four years after the death of my sister Kathy, an event that had changed our lives forever. Yet my family, in our grief, had never talked about it. I did not sit down to deliberately write a story with Japanese-American characters. I wrote for the reasons I always write: I was filled with a powerful emotion of which daily life seems to provide no outlet for expression, and I wanted the reader to feel it through my reconstruction of the events that elicited it. 

I wrote unconsciously, believing that if I were true to the characters, details, and emotions, then the portrait of the grieving family would cross boundaries of culture and race. I hoped that Japanese-Americanness would reveal itself in all its glory, as I couldn’t possibly hope to define it in any conscious, definitive sense. This is what I call “knowing from the inside out.” Writing what you know in this sense relies on the belief that there is a kind of truth in what people do or say, and if you record faithfully enough, the truth will be revealed to you. It also requires the writer to really see what is before his or her eyes, without imposing limited and subjective interpretations that distort the truth.  I believe that writing from the inside out, like contour drawing, can startle the writer with its results. In first drafts, I almost always write from the inside out.

To balance this approach, which might result in a rather narrowly personal picture, or one based on a limited understanding of context and motivations, I also believed that I needed to know “from the outside in,” i.e., to educate myself about who and what I was through external resources. By this time, I was already a college graduate, so I audited Ronald Takaki’s Japanese-American History class at U.C. Berkeley. On my own, I haunted the library and discovered works on Asian-American history that had never been assigned in any American history class through sixteen years of public education in California. I discovered works of literature by pioneer Nisei writers such as John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi, who had never been sent on national book tours or made best-seller lists. I lived in Japan for several years, to explore the source, and to understand what I was as well as what I wasn’t. 

What I gained in Japan was a positive feeling for Japanese culture and values—something that is difficult to acquire growing up in the U.S., where you are surrounded by implicit messages that tell you that you don’t measure up. African-American playwright August Wilson once said in an interview, “You cannot acquire a sense of self-worth by denying your past.” Growing up in the post-war “melting pot,” I had never understood the trauma of the internment that had left its scars in many forms on the Nisei psyche: the strong impulse to conform, the need to prove their Americanness, in many cases a dissociation from all things Japanese. I had been quick to judge and mimic—but by living in Japan and studying Japanese-American history, I discovered the cultural origins and the historical context that enabled me to know, with empathy, just what it was that I knew. 

Writing the Facts vs. Creating the Truth

To convey the truth of an emotion, to create an effect in the reader, it is sometimes necessary to lie. 

While living in Japan, I went back and revised earlier drafts of stories such as “The Loom.” The first draft of “The Loom,” written in 1978, consisted of six purely autobiographical pages that had been triggered by a visit to my mother’s weaving class. A complex tangle of emotions about my mother’s life suddenly began to coalesce around the image of weaving. The story suffered from two major flaws which often plague writing that is autobiographical in nature: high-context incomprehensibility, and unedited detail. By high-context incomprehensibility, I mean a terseness that greatly needed to be fleshed out in order to be understood by anyone besides myself. The draft was written in a kind of shorthand; the structural outline of the story was all there, and changed little through subsequent revisions. However, I needed to go back and open up the story, to provide details to create enough of a context so that readers not familiar with Japanese-American history or culture would not misinterpret my cryptic signals, understandable, perhaps, to another Japanese-American who had grown up on the West Coast. The entire flashback of the mother’s childhood in Japantown, for example, was added in a second draft. 

The second flaw, unedited detail, almost always happens in a first draft.  When you finish the first draft, if you are lucky, you realize what the story is about; then you can go back and take out all those parts that don’t add anything, or worse, mislead. Perhaps they were there in the first draft because events actually happened that way; but they don’t need to be in the story. Once you know what your story is about, you have a better sense of what needs to be there and what doesn’t in order for the story to work.  You don’t have the space in a short story to make mistakes. 

Most importantly, for the story to work on the level of fiction, facts often need to be changed. For example, in “The Loom,” the three daughters try three different approaches to bring their mother out of the protective shell that they perceive she has created around herself after the death of a fourth daughter. The eldest daughter, living in Europe, thinks travel is the solution, and has the mother come for a visit. The youngest daughter, Jo, tired of pretense and denial, tries shock treatment, inviting the mother to visit her in New York, where she will be forced to face the reality that Jo is living with her white boyfriend. The middle daughter, Sharon, gives her mother a loom, which ultimately becomes a means of self-expression and renewal. In early versions of the story, Jo was living in England (where I spent my junior year in college), but Michael Rubin, my writing instructor at S.F. State University, said, “They’ve done Europe,” and suggested that I set Jo’s section in the U.S., but in another city. Geography is thus used to illuminate the effectiveness of each attempted solution, as they get closer to home: diversion, confrontation, and finally, empathy—rather than being arbitrary factual detail. To enhance the illusion of truth, therefore, one must sometimes lie.

Indecent Exposure

After “The Loom” was published, I was overcome with horror at what I had done. I had essentially used the bare outlines of my mother’s life and breathed my own feelings, frailties and imaginings into her form. In that oblivious way that writers sometimes have, I had not even considered how she would feel when all her friends and relatives read this story and assumed that every word was true. To be truthful, I don’t think I actually believed that anyone would ever have a chance to read the story. (In the early years, I had shown a story to a Nisei friend of the family, whose reaction was, “Who’s going to publish this sort of thing?” His remark may have been blunt, but it was right on. For at least ten years, I received a variety of rejection slips from magazines, telling me that my stories were “beautifully written, but not ideally suited to our readers”; or “too young” or “too old” or “not ambitious enough.”) 

But “The Loom” was awarded the American Japanese National Literary Award in 1983, and was published in both Japanese-American newspapers in San Francisco. It was published in the Rafu Shimpo in Los Angeles. And just in case there were any of my mother’s friends who had not yet seen it, it appeared on the front page of the New Year’s edition of the national newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens’ League. Oy-veh!! 

It’s a catch-22. If you write the truth, everyone will know it. If you change the facts, everyone will believe that what you write is true. So there is no way of protecting those you love from feeling that their privacy has been totally invaded. The only thing that would make you continue to write is the conviction that a greater good is going to result from this transitory betrayal. For me, it was the realization that Japanese-Americans’ desire for privacy keeps us invisible. If society at large does not know us, if they do not know our hearts and minds, what will stop them from interning us again the next time there is an economic threat and a war against Japan? If we don’t tell our own stories, who will? Someone who may get the facts right, but twist them, to portray Asians as “the enemy”—someone who feels no sense of responsibility to communities of color and won’t stop to worry about the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes as he makes his way to the bank. 

What also helped to assuage the sting of exposure was the response from readers, many from within the Japanese-American community. When my collection, The Loom and Other Stories, was published by Graywolf Press in 1991, letters arrived from Nisei all over the U.S., saying that my stories had reminded them of their lives. My mother’s friends wrote to her, praising the book (thank you!) and sharing their own experiences. For over forty years, many Nisei had not talked about the camps, internalizing the blame for their country’s betrayal. Like the redress movement in the early 1980s, which began to crack the silence, my book seemed in its own small way to be a kind of catharsis.

If you don’t get this kind of support, and are having difficulty overcoming the feeling that you are a traitor to your family, friends, and/or community, try the humorous approach. I mean, it’s not as if I had written Mommie Dearest.  Essentially, “The Loom” is a tribute to Nisei women of my mother’s generation. However, sometimes grand intentions are dwarfed by those annoying little details. I have also thought of leaving copies of Long Day’s Journey Into Night  and The Glass Menagerie around my mother’s house, great works of literature created by skewering mothers. Your victims will at least be reminded that they are in exalted company.

Writing What You Know vs. Writing What Others Think You Should Know

In his introduction to Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison wrote:

“For I found the greatest difficulty for a Negro writer was the problem of revealing what he truly felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel. And linked to this was the difficulty, based upon our long habit of deception and evasion, of depicting what really happened within our areas of American life, and putting down with honesty and without bowing to ideological expediencies the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness and render it bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable.”

Every writer who comes from a culture that is not well understood by those who determine what gets published has a tough row to hoe. It is discouraging to write what you feel to be the truth, and to work long and hard arriving at it, only to have your work received with comments that to you seem totally off the wall. One agent (a white woman from the East Coast) told me that she was disappointed on reading some stories I had sent her. “Perhaps it isn’t possible for one writer to capture the Japanese-American experience,” she wrote (as if there is only one). I wrote back, “I think it’s possible, and I think I’m doing it.” An editor once said that a particular story didn’t seem “Japanese enough.” I was speechless, as the story was about being American, not Japanese. A writing teacher commented that a Japanese neighborhood described in one of my stories set in Japan seemed “too idyllic”—not that she had ever been to Japan. But I had, and I had lived in that neighborhood. When pioneer Chinese-American playwright Frank Chin’s play Chickencoop Chinaman was first produced in New York in 1972, one critic complained that his characters “didn’t act like Orientals.”

My purpose in relating these anecdotes is not to dump on editors, agents, critics, and publishers, but to encourage you, whoever you are, not to let the unenlightened dictate what and how you write. Of course you need feedback, but you must be selective and learn whose feedback you can trust, whose to let roll right off your back. If you’re gay, don’t feel obligated to write an AIDS story; if you’re African-American, you don’t have to write about boyz in the ‘hood. You are not a figment of some distant Editor’s imagination. Your reality is valid, so go with it.  Write what you know; I, for one, want to hear about it. 

“Pinocchio“: Courtesy of Super Car-Road Trip.fr. Licensed under cc by 2.0