aimee liu

I WROTE THIS ON October 22, 1997, WHILE WORKING ON MY LAST NOVEL, FLASH HOUSE. PERHAPS THIS ENTRY EXPLAINS WHY I HAVE NOT PRODUCED ANOTHER RESEARCH-BASED NOVEL SINCE?

A couple of years ago I heard Oakley Hall, writer and director of the Squaw Valley Writers' Conference, talk about "research rapture," that great black hole that looms over the writing process and too often swallows both writer and work. I knew precisely what he meant. Just beginning work on Cloud Mountain, I already had felt myself teetering on the abyss. How to negotiate that edge between enough background information... and infinity?

For better and for worse, my way through has been to research as I write. In many ways this is singularly unsatisfying. Whether writing about Chinese revolutionaries in Japan, or the San Francisco Earthquake, or politics in the first Chinese Republic, or now, prostitutes and nautch girls in Delhi and dak routes over the Karakoram and trade and uprisings in Xinjiang, I never feel that I have sufficient expertise to do my subject justice. I never know enough about terms -- devadasi -- or names -- Gobind vs. Lakshmi -- or places -- Kashgar vs. Srinigar – to feel them trip off my tongue. I have to check and double-check every bit of information used. Just how many days did it take to trek over the mountains from Leh to Kashgar, and through which passes? And I always have the feeling that if I just dug a little deeper into my sources, if I just read one more book (or reread Freedom at Midnight for the third time) or spent another afternoon cruising the Web, I'd hit the jewel that would bring my whole story into focus. The Indian trader in real life, for example, who (like my character) married a Khirgiz tribeswoman and fought in the underground movement against the Nationalist Chinese, only to be killed in the uprising so that his brother felt free to claim the orphaned daughter and sell her into prostitution. This unbelievable set-up really is the juggernaut of my plot, but it would be delicious to have a real life story to base it on. Yes, if I just dug a wee bit deeper into the lore of trade between India and Sinkiang...

On the other hand, based on the flimsy bit of research I've done, I'm convinced this scenario, however farfetched it may seem, is perfectly plausible. I could be wrong. And I could doubtless gain a lot by spending the next three months reading Teddy White and Barbara Tuchman and the State Department briefing sheets from the 40s -- all materials I collected but never quite read while working on Cloud Mountain. But there is also the possibility of being plowed under, of being led down so many intriguing hutungs that my already complicated story will end up in knots.
Bottom line, this is fiction. I don't have to footnote my references, and I don't have to argue through facts for every point. It's not history but a reflection of history, not social science but a mirror of life. Every character, every deed, every consequence is by definition a refraction. There is no danger in knowing too much, but there is a very real danger in finding out too much. The difference is critical, because knowledge can recede and underscore, can deepen the words on the page, while findings tend to rise to the top like cream. They float through, obvious and often heavy, perilously obscuring the substance of the story.

So I waver, find out just enough to enrich but not enough to overpower. It keeps me curious and a little unsatisfied, but this also forces me back into my own story. Ultimately, the satisfaction needs to come from the words I write, not the ones I read. And these words need to be informed but not didactic. Nor can they take information for granted. The reader, after all, knows even less about the Karakorams than I do (although there will always be the experts waiting to sweep down and tear the work to pieces for being underresearched -- as I say, it's a fine line). So I must show them the glacial plains, the sheer chasms to rushing brooks, the icy shafts of wind blowing through the passes. I must reach back into my ultimate resource -- childhood memories of my own excursions in the Karakorams, and bring the place to life. And let everything I've read in books stretch arms to hold and support these memories, but never to replace them.
For here is the crux of the matter. Somewhere, somehow, the story has to be one's own. And research rapture, however intense, can never substitute for live faces, live travel, living smells and sounds and emotions felt. Yes, my plot device is fabulous, quite possibly over the edge, but the woman who owns it is real. The children who scampered across the mountains were real, too. No matter how many books I read, no matter how much I think I've learned, the core of writing has to be personal and immediate and true. For others it may be different, but for me the research must always be secondary to experience. And that experience not only resides in the past but in the act of writing itself.