Entanglements of writing as a Southeast Asian and writing as an indigenous person
An excerpt from our “Writers on Writers” conversation with Ploi Pirapokin and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.
SEA Lit Circle x Ploi Pirapokin x Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
from the community archives
On December 3rd, 2023, we at SEA Lit Circle (SLC) sat down for a video call with speculative fiction writer and essayist Ploi Pirapokin and fiction writer Sterling HolyWhiteMountain to chat about their experiences in writing and publishing in the US and to see how the perspectives of a Southeast Asian writer and an indigenous writer intersect. Ploi hails from Thailand and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Hong Kong; Sterling grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in the US and teaches at Stanford University in California. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation.
Steph (SLC): Have you experienced writing something that you wanted to write but felt that there were conventions that told you to write it in a certain way? For example, in this community, we’ve received short stories for workshops where the main character doesn’t change at the end—a static character—and authors have told us that their professors tell them that their character has to change. “That’s how a short story goes,” according to these professors. But the authors feel that that’s not the story they want to tell. Do you have a similar experience? I bring this up because, Sterling, in your story “False Star” in The New Yorker—someone can argue that the main character doesn’t change. Or perhaps the change is not very apparent; the main character just feels more confident at the end.
Ploi: I think it was my MFA professor, ZZ Packer, who made it clearer for me. When you tell a story, you’re conveying that something happened, and the thing that happened has made it so that you cannot relive that experience without the knowledge of what had just occurred. So this idea of change means that it—this story, these events, these relationships—must impact you in some way. I think the word “change” or “transformation” or “shift” is misleading because you can definitely have a tightening of a point of view. So at the beginning of your story, your point of view may be 80 percent, and by the end of the story, it’s 100 percent. That’s still some kind of impact or change. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you agree with something 80 percent at the beginning of the story and that you must disagree with it at the end. Let’s say you have a story about a relationship with a mother. There’s a fight, and your character decides not to make up. That’s still a choice. That’s still a shift if, at the beginning of the story, your character was thinking, “Should I make up or not?” There’s this kind of movement from the beginning that shows that what just transpired has impacted the protagonist in some way. So sometimes I think your protagonist doesn’t make the right decision or doesn’t change—but that’s still a decision.
Sterling: I’m a strange person. A lot of the talk about short stories that I heard when I was in workshops when I was younger didn’t make any sense to me. So I had to find a different way to think about things in a way that made sense to me. People talk about characters changing, and it never made any sense. I tried to do that sort of thing, and it never worked. The way I think about it now is that it’s not so much that characters change, but that things happen over the course of a story that reveal things to the reader that they did not know before. So in “False Star,” the main character gets the truck. It’s not so much that the truck changes him. The truck brings something out of him that was already there. My experience with people is that most of the things we end up becoming are already either in us or are inherent potentials in us. And it takes certain events to bring things out of us that are already there, things that otherwise may not come out of us.
Steph (SLC): Do you have “rules” or best practices when quoting people who may not have English as their first language? Do you “break” the English or not? In fiction or nonfiction, maybe you’re trying to be accurate or truthful by doing that, but you might also offend people.
Sterling: I come from a troll culture. Blackfoot people are constantly trolling each other, so it’s become a part of my writing; that’s the way older Blackfoot people are. That’s changed a lot, actually—unfortunately. I’m old enough to have had a lot of experience with older Blackfoot people who aren’t here anymore, and a lot of them were first-language Blackfoot speakers. And historically, and until relatively recently, Blackfoot people placed an extremely high value on telling the truth. So I grew up hearing people speak that way, so I’m not just going to pull punches, I’m not going to sugarcoat things. That’s going to make some people mad. But if I want to be true to myself and where I’m from, I actually have to write that way.
I’m extremely sensitive to language and the ways that people speak. That’s just who I am. I remember really thinking hard about language when I was like five years old. I was trying to figure out what are these words and how do they work. The other thing is that I heard a lot of different accents and ways of using English when I was growing up, because the older people that were around me when I was a kid were first-language Blackfoot speakers. So they had a very different way of speaking English than people my age. What they were doing was transporting the syntactical and grammatical rules of Blackfoot into English, so there were certain ways they would use English that were very interesting, and you hardly ever hear that anymore because almost all of those people are gone. But I remember hearing it when I was a kid, and it was fascinating to me. I didn’t know why, I just knew that some people spoke differently than others. At a certain point, I realized it was because they were speaking English as a second language. The speech is not actually broken. They’re speaking their first language, and they’re trying to translate into a second or third language.
I have a fair number of students in my creative writing courses who have English as their second language. They’re usually very worried about making mistakes on the page in English, and I tell them not to worry about it. Grammatical mistakes can be fixed. It’s not a big deal. To me, what’s important is that they get what they’re trying to do onto the page in a way that feels right to them. They have a different sense of rhythm or cadence that a native English speaker would never come up with, and that’s interesting to me. I think it’s important to have those kinds of voices in English or any language.
Ploi: English is also a combination of so many languages. It’s always growing and changing. For me, in nonfiction, I always tell people, including my parents, that I’m writing about them. I don’t show them the piece until it’s accepted for publication and they can’t really change it. But I feel it’s important for my integrity that the people I write about have a chance to see it and understand my point of view about them.
And when it comes to writing different languages or the different ways people talk, it’s about being clear on the point of view—who is the person hearing? Someone who doesn’t speak English fluently doesn’t hear themselves not speaking it fluently. The way we interpret and express narrative comes through a cultural lens, and language is so limiting. We find a way to express that. Sometimes it’s easier in English, but then, it doesn’t sound right to a native speaker—but that doesn’t mean it’s not right. You’re just figuring out the tone. I went to school in Hong Kong; it was a British school, so everything was really formal. The writing was very formal, the vocabulary very high. But that’s not how people talk now, right? That’s how Dickens spoke. But even in England, there were different dialects and things like that. So I’m thinking, how can I do that with what I know or what I want to talk about? How can I represent an Eastern Thai accent, like the accent of someone from Isan? How do they sound to someone from Bangkok? Their lives aren’t tethered to stocks or bonds; they’re worried about life and time. So to me, it’s understanding narrative and time and figuring out how I can express that.
Sterling: One more thing to add. The reason that it’s really important to me to get onto the page the different ways that the people where I’m from use English is that, that has not existed on paper. No one has ever written about the people I’m writing about, who are in the place that I’m writing about. I’ve never really thought about it until tonight, but it’s true. I want us to exist in fiction, and one of the ways to do that is to capture the different ways that people there speak and use English and sometimes throw Blackfoot terms, and the generational differences—the way older people will use English as opposed to much younger people who have had way more exposure to TV and pop music and film than the older people. I still hear them there. And I want people who are there to recognize and see themselves or the people they know.
Toni (SLC): One of my favorite authors Patrick Rothfuss—he wrote The Name of the Wind and The Kingkiller Chronicles—said something in an end note that I think about a lot, and I want to know what you think about it. He suspected that a good story doesn’t need stakes that high, that we have the big bad wolf, but he wanted to write a story about the good wolf—that stories can still be interesting and important with characters that maybe aren’t as dark or situations that aren’t so traumatic. Obviously, he comes from a different background than most of us here, so what would that mean to you in your writing? What does alternative or not-so-typical writing that involves goodness or ideals look like?
Ploi: Nonfiction is my way of dealing with issues, for lack of a better word. I usually go to it when I’m stuck on my fiction. Fiction—speculative or fantasy—is so much harder because not only are you making shit up, you have to make that shit believable, and believable in that world. So for me, what does it mean when something doesn’t have big stakes? It doesn’t mean that there’s a lack of stakes. Maybe the stake is not life or death, but there are plenty of other stakes that we face in our lives. I think of goodness. I think it is a hard choice to be fair, to be morally fair and just, and to be kind. I lost a childhood friend at the beginning of this year, and it’s been very difficult for me. But one thing I will say about my friend group is that there were so many moments where we could have all lost it and screamed at each other. But we worked really hard not to. To me, that choice of eating our own egos—it’s still full of stakes. Nothing we do will get the friend that we lost back, but choosing to be kind to one another and seeing that each one of us is hurt—I think that is a big stake. It’s not life or death, but you could stand to lose so much more if you, say, don’t see that someone is trying to look at the bright side of things or to do good.
Also to your point, I think sometimes the white dominant heteroculture says some really dumb things about writing. “We don’t have to write about big things.” Well, that’s nice. “I don’t have an audience I care about because I write to everyone.” That’s nice. I just feel like it doesn’t apply to us, it does not speak for us.
Can I quote Ted Chiang? He’s a science-fiction writer who wrote “Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the film Arrival. He defined fantasy as “real-world problems set in a different world.” That’s what fantasy is. The different world makes us escape our ideas of this world; we might be able to see different things play out. So I feel like that’s the good wolf. You can still have a story about the good wolf and someone doing morally right things or trying to be just, but there are still stakes in that. I think it’s easier in fantasy or science fiction than in realist fiction to have a morally good or just character without everyone shitting on it in a workshop, like, “Boo, why is he so nice?”
Sterling: Part of it is that in the US after World War I, people saw such unbelievable violence and death, so the tragic mode became the dominant mode of fiction in the US. It still is. It’s changing right now, but for about the last 80 years, it was tragic. The fiction that I was reading in the beginning, when I first started writing, was largely—almost all of it—in the tragic mode. When I was getting my master’s in creative writing, I reached a point where I realized that I was having a really hard time writing about where I’m from, in a space that felt right to me—because I was writing in the tragic mode about my reservation. And it was very dark, and I didn’t know if that was our reality. It wasn’t funny at all, and the thing is, where I’m from, we’re really funny people. We teased each other all the time. And I couldn’t figure out how to get that into fiction. At a certain point, I realized it was because I was writing in a purely tragic mode, and that wasn’t working for me. It didn’t feel like I was writing what I know, or the people I know, or the place I know. Most American readers think that native people are tragic; they don’t understand how many of us actually enjoy life quite often—more than Americans do. And we laugh more than most Americans do, and we tease more than most Americans do. And they don’t know about us. So if all I was doing was writing a tragedy, I was actually confirming ideas that Americans had about us. I didn’t want to do those ideas, first because they’re stereotypes, second because they’re not real; they’re not realistic. Of course, tragedy is part of life. Everybody experiences tragedy, but there’s more to life than that. It took me most of my 30s to figure out how to make my writing into something that allowed me to be funnier, to get the humor that I wanted onto the page. One of the things that I’m most proud of is that I figured out how to do that. My fiction actually has a lot of humor in it, and people have told me that. But I couldn’t do that 15 years ago. I didn’t know how, I didn’t do it at all. My fiction was extremely serious.
Maybe it’s helpful to think of it as having two basic modes of writing fiction: you have literary fiction, which is the tragic mode or the tragedy. But then there’s the picaresque. No one in America ever talks about the picaresque. But Don Quixote is a picaresque. And picaresques tend to have a lighter tone. They tend to be funnier, and they tend to be much more episodic, like a series of adventures. They tend to be about people who are neither good nor bad people—they’re just people who mess up a lot.
Ploi Pirapokin was born in Thailand and raised in Hong Kong. Her work is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Art and Craft of Stories from Asia: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic, and more. She has received grants and fellowships from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Creative Capacity Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, Kundiman and others. A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she currently teaches at the Writers Program at UCLA Extension, WritingWorkshops.com, Story Studio Chicago, and the University of Hong Kong.
Website: ppirapokin.com
If you’d like to send Ploi a tip, you can do so via PayPal.
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain is a Jones lecturer at Stanford University, where he formerly held a Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.
Twitter/X: @MrHWM Substack: @aphoristic
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