Writing, War...and Crayons
"I have seen war. I hate war."--Winston Churchill
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Caveat Lector: I'm going to get personal. I refer to some of my own stories, but the references are as spoiler-free as I can make them, assuming you're worried about such things.
I was saying to my sister the other day that I was afraid of being typecast as a military science fiction writer, and she said, "Dear, it's too late." She's probably right, if it matters. There's a reason I keep returning to themes born of war in my science fiction and fantasy.
War is something I obsessed over in middle school, when I was captivated by medieval pageants and chivalrous knights. Then I started doing research for my first (bad) novel. I learned about the lack of hygiene, the Children's Crusade, the effects of boiling oil and Greek fire. I learned about the droit de seigneur and a peasant's diet. I learned about the Black Death. I can't count the number of romanticized ideas I lost. That lesson, though, extended into my readings in other eras and areas: there are no simple answers, and everything (probably) has an ugly underside.
It may seem strange that war is the focus of my writing, which itself is the focus of my life. I didn't grow up with blood-stirring family histories of World War II or Vietnam; my relatives are mainly in medicine and allied fields. My parents never discussed current events or politics while my sister and I were growing up, though I learned of the Kuomintang and "the sun never sets over the British Empire" from my mom years before I encountered them in school. The most violence I've ever been involved in was getting thrown into some holly bushes while trying to stop some bullies from messing with my sister.
On the other hand--
I spent four years of my early life in Seoul, and two of those years were at the U.S. military base at Yongsan. My dad served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army. I remember looking at a stranger in camouflage next to our car for several seconds before realizing, Oh, that's Dad.
Growing up in Seoul was growing up in war's shadow. One of the first things you learn is the difference between "peace" and "armistice." The Korean peninsula is still technically at war, hence "armistice" or "cease-fire." Seoul is, of course, five minutes from the Demilitarized Zone by missile or airplane.
There were other stories, too. My mom's family hails from near the Manchurian border, but they fled South after the end of World War II, when the Japanese occupation was broken. My mom's father had escaped military service by pursuing studies at a university in Tokyo. I didn't know for years that this implied her family had been collaborationists in the occupation's no-win game, in contrast to my father's grandfather, a minor, illiterate rebel against the Japanese.
My mother was born shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War. She told my sister and me the story: during the evacuation of Seoul, her mother made the decision to abandon the baby girl. Another woman, who had watched, came up to my grandmother with the baby and said, "You forgot this." After that, my grandmother didn't have the heart to abandon the baby again, despite the hardship she must have foreseen, and so I'm here today.
War? I know of no soldiers in my ancestry, which is more a function of disrupted records than anything else, but war's shadow has unfolded inexorably in my own history. (As I write this, I pray that the Korean peninsula will not reignite in the coming year, though the news doesn't leave me optimistic.) [I've since learned that a great-grandfather fought against the Japanese invaders, but he died long before I was born.]
In "The Hundredth Question" I wrote about the problem of identifying an "enemy." In the world's wars, many have been cast into the position of Enemy. If only it were as simple as good and evil, as in many fantasy novels that abrogate moral responsibility by color-coded protagonists and antagonists. I have been guilty of this, too. It is something I'm working on.
"Echoes Down an Endless Hall" asks: At what price victory? At what price defeat? They are not new questions, and my answers are not new, either, despite the technological trappings. Nevertheless, the highest praise that story received was from a critiquer who was a Vietnam War veteran. He said it worked, but needed to be more visceral. Sex, sweat, death: these things matter to soldiers under fire. Until then, my conception of war had been as a cerebral exercise. It's another tendency I'm trying to banish.
"Alas, Lirette" and "Counting the Shapes" fail in many ways to address their themes, which are, respectively, "DADDY!" and "MOMMY!" In the first, a father abandons his daughter for the sake of a war; in the second, a mother embroils herself in war for the sake of her son. Oh, yes. Duty and abandonment of family, of which war is but one instrument.
My last published tale is "The Black Abacus," which is a game of ethical chess through macroscopic quantum effects, and a "final exam." Another guilty secret: I am one of the world's worst chess players, but I cannot help responding to the metaphor. We collapse the chess games in our minds when we choose, and choose to act; existence is in some sense a "final exam," whether your answer is in three sentences or a hundred murders. At what point does decision become murder, and at what point does war become massacre? Whether my written answer coincides with my actions, I may never know.
Writing is ethical commentary, military or otherwise, inept or not. Of course the situations and characters are contrived. Isn't it convenient that Rapallion has a Red Knight, or that an Edgar Kerzen ends up with a Rachel Kilterhawk? If it weren't, I wouldn't have written either story.
But the world too, is contrived--by us. We have far less power over our societies than the writer does over her writing. We also have far more, because what we do counts. I have no guarantee that any story I write will influence the world's trajectory, and that's as it should be: that decision is in the reader's living hands.
Why do I write this now? I'd meant to write something along these lines for almost a year, but it never got off the ground. It was a few months after the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001, and I'd had a dream. I was in elementary school again, coloring in a U.S. map with crayons. Only upon waking did I realize I'd been crayoning red and orange flames over New York. That's what my writing seemed like: a child's crayons, bright but impotent.
Only here, in the moving now, was I ready to write this. It's likely that it's still too early. Nevertheless, if I await perfect understanding, I will never be ready; and so here I am with my crayons, warning of the perils of fire in the only way I know how.
--Yoon Ha Lee, 25 December 2002 (yes, on Christmas, because war doesn't always pause for holidays or religious observances): for my family, Joy Kim, and all those who have known war, whatever its shape. [Minor revisions since then.]
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