 Thank you so much. I want to thank you for extending me and the Bear Life Review, this opportunity for us to debut. It's quite befitting. The topic of today, tonight's conversation, it kind of evokes the themes the journal is all about. So thank you for that to Led Quig and the San Francisco Public Library. I'm also very grateful and I feel quite privileged to share stage with these amazing writers and I hope that tonight, if anything, I will be diverting. I know we live in a very dark time in which humor is a very expensive thing to find. So tonight, at the very least, we should have a bit of irony, something that we can laugh about. So I will begin. Of course, the title of the talk, Immigrant Writers Responds from itself, it entails a lot of things that are not subtle questions and problems. Namely, immigrant writer, what is that? Namely, what is the role of the immigrant writer, but also what is an immigrant writer? The lumping of the two words which have histories that are complicated. The conflation of that hyphen is not easy. So I will begin this conversation with tackling of that particular designation. So what is an immigrant writer, but more specifically, what is the role, if there is one, of an immigrant writer? What does that entail? So you guys, by all means, enlighten us. I'm going to just bring up something that I thought about on the way over here. Nabokov was an immigrant writer, but nobody called him that. That was never a definition of who he was in the public sphere. He was always in exile, which we all are in one form or another, but that has now shifted to becoming the immigrant writer. And thinking about Nabokov, I thought about the ways in which his Russianness and his living in America all served one thing, which was that he was a writer. And I feel like in today's atmosphere, we are immigrants first, in the public eye. How we consider ourselves varies, but how we are seen as immigrant first and then writer. And I am annoyed by this. Well, I'm struck by a statistic that I just looked up today, which is that between first generation and second generation immigrants, we have about 26% of our population. And that's a pretty significant percentage. It's actually not one I had looked up before. For myself, I'm first generation. I was born in Iran, but mostly raised here. But some of my family members are second generation, so we have a wide range in our family. But given that we're such a significant percentage of this country, we're a minority, but we're a pretty fat one. I don't think there should be a singular role for whatever the role of an immigrant writer is, because I'm all for the freedom of the imagination. I think it's kind of sad that this ombre is making bad ombres out of us, because we shouldn't be sort of put into a basket of whatever, what is that expression, whatever, deplorables, whatever. Because I think what happened is you're basically being politicized into responding to Trump. But as a writer who came from Vietnam, who lost a country, who was a refugee and not even an immigrant, but someone who fled, I have dealt with this issue of being migratory, someone who crossed borders, someone who watched the plight of refugees being treated badly long before Trump comes to power. So for me, the fight had been long and hard and challenging. And so I refuse to let this man dictate what my imagination tells me. And so that I will respond to what at core is beating in my heart and translate into something that is aesthetically comprehensible for the rest of the world. And if that is my form of resistance, so be it, but I will not let him dictate my voice. I agree. But there is an issue, namely that you are called to respond as an immigrant. And I don't think the title of the talk is inappropriate, notwithstanding our different reservations as artists, as writers. The truth is historically maybe the postmodern has kind of rendered that particular dispensation of the writer irrelevant. But the author has always been the person or the voice which cartographs the conscience of the community. So it has a moral dimension, not just a creative one. And especially as a community that is attacked, that is relegated to this state of precarity, where if you leave the country, even if you have a green card, you might not come back. Even if you're born here and you happen to belong to one of those bad groups that the president wants to banish from the country, you are troubled. And so the role of writing is no longer innocent. And so the writer is no longer a free agent who can pursue the stuff of the imagination. There's a radical call for you. And especially given that way here, I mean, not every immigrant gets to come and sit here and talk about these issues. The very gesture that has been extended to us to be here has ethical and obligatory dimension. Namely, how do we make use of this space as writers that are called immigrant writers to kind of evoke the plight of our community, right? Whatever that is. And that I think can compromise your creative freedom. But I think that is critical at least. So there's no really dodging the question of the immigrant writer, right? We must account for the immigrant in the designation. Immigrant not as a writer as well. I don't know what you guys think, but when I think of myself, which is rarely selfless as I am, I'm a mother of two very small children, so I have no choice. But the way that I like to think of myself is as a story teller. And there is no dodging of the moral and ethical ramifications of our having a public voice. Like you said, not all immigrants are sitting up here on the panel. And so when I whittle it down to the essence of storytelling, then I began to see my responsibilities clearly. Like Walter Benjamin said, you know, the storyteller is responsible for bringing the wisdom. So to be a storyteller in this particular moment in history, in this particular geographical place is to go against the news. Because the news is this crazy noise that is filling all of the space. And it is without wisdom, completely without poetry, completely without wisdom. It is now increasingly without truth and fact. And so the writer has to go in and the storyteller has to harness all of those energies and bring them in, in the simplest, most entertaining form, in a way that kind of crosses all of these designations. Because I'm not writing a story, no offense, for Anita to read. Because Anita and I have a very similar, not super similar, but somewhat similar lives, you know, more similar than me and the person next to me on the bus. I'm writing a story for the person next to me on the bus to have that connection. And so Trump or no Trump, I will say his name. Are you on peril? Yes, I know. Though my Google home device is already recording many damning things that I have said against the administration. So this notion of having to tell the story to get as many ears as possible to sort of bring as much wisdom as I can get into the conversation is what I kind of wake up to go to work for every day. Because the hysteria is not serving anybody. And I know like if you think about previous hyphenated writers, you know, civil rights activist writers or anti apartheid writers, like it was the storytelling that pushed those things through the mess. James Baldwin, for example. So I don't know, I kind of, I try to go into that instead of engaging in the call and response of Twitter or the kind of constant ugliness that takes place every time Trump himself tweets. Adding to that, I'll say that for me it has meant an investigation and an elongation of my hyphen. In other words, I've called myself an Iranian American writer, but now I'm also thinking of myself as an Iranian, Lithuanian American writer. And there's a reason for that actually, which is that my writing investigation has gone back into my Lithuanian family and the fact that they were refugees to this country at the end of World War II. So actually after Trump announced the Muslim ban, what I did oddly enough, perhaps, is I got in my car and I drove to the Richmond shipyards. Most of you will probably know that at the shipyards, the victory ships and the liberty ships were built that were used in World War II. And there's one ship left called the Red Oak Victory, which people can tour. So I went on a tour of this ship alone in the middle of the day, the only person there, because it was precisely a ship like that that carried my refugee family from Germany to New Orleans at the end of World War II, actually five years after World War II. And so in terms of the role of the immigrant writer, I can only speak for myself on this topic, but for me what it's pushed is an investigation of things like not just my own family, but refugee policy, what it was like then and of course what it's like now. So just a quick figure that may be of interest at that time, 400,000 refugees were permitted into the United States as part of the Displaced Persons Act, which was pushed by Harry Truman and really celebrated him. He basically said, I think this is going to be great for our country compared to what we have now, which is we have what 100,000 refugees permitted under Obama and now they're estimating about 60,000 will be led into this country under the current administration this year. So what I see and what I am writing about and feeling deeply is a real diminishment of our generosity towards others in situations particularly of war and destitution and misery. And so what I'm hoping to do at least with this essay and with my thinking about the past and the present is use this as an opportunity to think about and hopefully for others to think about as well, what do we want to be as a people and are we able to be generous in the way that we used to be? As American you mean. As Americans. Well as you were talking I was thinking about my own biography which I wrote about my first book and how much of the generosity of America at the end of the Vietnam War allowed this massive population of Vietnamese to come in and I've written about issues of comparing Vietnamese say compared to Syrian refugees who now perish at sea and get very little attention or you know the same kind of largesse that my population, my people did 40 years ago but the battle that I've been fighting had always been this idea of inclusivity at the time when you're ignored and misunderstood. So the space had always been over what define an American I think and Trump is not new but what he is is he's intensify this idea of this monolithic American as make America great again is really subtext for making America white again. I mean that's kind of understood without much you know research is understood because that's his key word to his constituents. So there is this idea that the identity of the American person has been shrinking but the reality is that we are becoming more complicated all the time and so for me I want to point out that that while on the political level there is this contraction of that identity but on the cultural level we're expanding because if you're pessimistic looking at this kind of political power you're missing the other dynamic which is called cultural everyday life and I can just name just like personal friends of mine who've made incredible inroad into American letters I mean Viet Nguyen won the Pulitzer he and I went to Berkeley together Ocean Vuong won the Witt what is that big poetry award another friend of mine she's a Hmong and she won the Whitman Award three friends of mine who are Cambodian and Chinese and Vietnamese you know made award-winning films so it's if we just look at this political structure that is claiming to define who we are of course it feels very pessimistic but if you look on the cultural level in fact we become even more complicated than that narrative is telling us and that's where the strength of literature really lies is to point out that no these hyphens are not just between you know Iranian and and America but hyphen between Lithuanian American you know in Persian and probably a lot more and that pluralism is a reality not a political idea it's everyday life lived just this morning someone sent me an article how Vietnamese sandwich now it's like the number one sandwich in the US the banh mi and then he was so proud and I had to point out to him that you know 80% of that is borrowed by a colonizer the French you know we just add cilantro and some chili sauce in it but but we made it ours right but um but whatever it is it is both yours and mine and that's the thing about culture is that it cross-border without having trying so hard whereas when you think on the political level suddenly you're Republican and I'm Democrat and I think the role of literature at least in some part is to sort of show the complexity of that greatness in between and if it's very successful you come out and say all right an immigrant is also me you know I'm not the he's not the other part of him is me I'm eating his sandwich right now right that's the room humor for you yeah I agree and I really admire your optimism um I feel my role obliges me to push back which may underscore a pessimistic strain in me but I want to push back a little bit farther because even though America you know it's you're right the cultural landscape or dynamic it's almost indifferent uh to all the political kind of limitations that I impose you know by calling you what or that but there is this fact this infinite proliferation of hyphens you know your Lithuanian Iranian American why the need for that then right what kind of calculus necessitates that you and it's not just for everybody right I think the Lithuanian in your family doesn't have to declare I'm a Lithuanian American they're just American because they're white and even make America great again we should say make America white again it's kind of like like a misnomer because America's still white very much in a way that matters right so why the need for hyphens why the need for these you know every day there's a new dispensation as a black person it was the N word it was slave now it was african-america and now it's black it keeps changing so the logic of designation namely exclusion persist right and no matter how the Milton pot occasional sense of universal relevance there is that special place to which you are relegated and that is something that we need to to think about but let's move away from that because I want to talk about it that's not fair you can't just say that and not let us respond you can respond to that too but like as somebody like okay like as writers right would you however hard even soundly however strong my argument for a claim to universal kind of citizenship in the republic of letters I will always be a Sudanese writer if that fails an African writer if that fails a black writer right that will always haunt my work yeah right and that we can look at it from the force which necessitates this designation but also what does that do for me as a writer whose work will always be seen through the lens of as another what does that do for how I deploy use or appeal even imaginatively to my past as Sudanese as African as black at least there an ethical consideration in how we write about our about those communities even especially imaginatively because I think the imagination is given too much license sometimes that it doesn't account for the responsibility of writing about those communities so you are your fiction is historical sometimes and it's read by mostly Americans I would assume maybe Iranians too so as you explore that material and try to fashion it into a relevant kind of engagement like do you feel a lot of strange or do you question your right to invoke or evoke that history especially when it's going to be published in a place in which you're always going to be the Iranian American and how it's going to be kind of consumed and subsumed and made use of do I question my right to engage with the material or is the material yours just by virtue of you coming from there now that you're writing as an Iranian American slash Lithuanian American right that's the question tricky tricky question so maybe it will help to give a little context because as as many people know since the Iran and the United States have had this complicated and difficult relationship for decades I'm a person who has come of age during that process so I had the opportunity to be in Iran before the Islamic Revolution and to spend about six months there during that period and then also to witness it after the revolution and of course to see the changes in the relationship that took place between the United States and Iran as a result and those changes resulted in a lot of political ill will for reasons you many of you know of course so for me as a writer dealing with the historical material I see it not just as being about that topic those topics that I chose to engage with in the novels but also about engaging with that complicated relationship between the US and Iran and which unfortunately continues to not be good and and so so it's a it's a longer for me it's been a long conversation about how to grapple with those political problems but to do it in the context of a novel and to do it in the context of trying to discuss and describe aspects of the Iranian experience that I felt were being overlooked by a media that was focused primarily on the negative basically about Iran and the problem when you come from a country that has been essentially blacklisted by the United States is that people stop going there and so they're stopping relationships with the other country they're stopping marriages and student exchanges and business deals they're stop being the sense of humanity of the people in that other place and so I feel like my work has been about bringing that humanity to the to the fore for my readers by the way the book is published in 31 languages now so my readers are Americans but they're also all those other languages as well and and and trying to to grapple with the dilemmas of being Iranian in this age Lela do you have a comment do you want to rephrase that question one more time so I can get angry again which is a kind of I suppose I suppose my question is the ease of continuity of the past once you enter the United States and you become oh what right do I have right well I guess you do have a right but also thank you um you did a nice job of being kind okay so it is completely my right because as you have decided for yourself that you are South Sudanese and then African and then black it's more like imposed but I have no choice there you go as you said at the very end I will be black is that these are my inheritances my as a writer you want to go to the deepest well to begin if you go to the shallow wells your work is not going to resonate and so when I sat with myself at 26 or whatever it was dropping out of med school and filmmaking and however I came to writing I wanted to go to the deepest well and my American self was not a deep well partially because I wasn't born here and I came here at five and also partially because the Americans did not give me in their history a place for myself I am part of the jet age migration I am not part of the Ellis Island steamboat migration I am not part of the Chinese who were brought here to work as slaves I'm not part of the Africans I am part of this newer migration that had no history to it except for what my family carried around with them in their stories and their food etc etc and so I went further because I could not write from that it was not enough and so I went back as far as I possibly could to which I have access to to which I have the right and I did not get everything correct I still have Kurdish people from Turkey and Syria and Iran and Iraq writing me emails telling me that in the first book my presentation of the family living in this small village was totally wrong and the father would have sat here and the mother would and I'm like okay so I did not get that that's nice but you feel vindicated don't you but I was gonna write it anyway because I write fiction so get out of my way you know like I am not a non-fiction writer and I'm not a journalist and this will come from some hodgepodge of mythology and inheritance and dreams and imagination and that will make the book but what it is as a hyphen hyphenated person is it is my announcing of presence of self among you so hyphen or not this book will sit in this house and it will go into a stranger's hands and it will do the work that I cannot do when I meet you at the grocery store and I will not meet the person who reads it most likely but then that will be a small chink in the news narrative in this terrible vilifying that happens fiction will do the work of wisdom and whether or not I got it completely factually culturally right writing you know 1919 and Karaman Shah or not I'm not too concerned with you know my calling was to bring the past forward make a story relatable and now that I've started writing present and it is engaged the hyphen as my character is Iranian American and trying very hard to be just American in interviews and in conversations largely white journalists and reviewers have always been like why aren't the white people better represented in this story that's interesting and I'm like great this is a conversation I think this is where we want to start talking like you're willing to engage with a possible uglier side of yourselves you know let's talk like because of this and this and this you know but yeah I think that the we can go as far back as we want and claim it as fiction writers we are all fiction writers and well I mean the question is harder but I want to give a context a bit too right because even in non-fiction right there is I like this about writing because it's still writing and because the fact is really in the world when it's on the page the kind of like reproduction of it is a whole different process and a creation really and I like how you're talking your book about how when you speak in English there's a kind of liberation right you are unburdened you're kind of freed from all of these like strings of history and past and the traumas that attend them to really be funny and be cute and savvy and you talk a little bit about how in school we were just you know with Chinese girls and yeah with this handsome funny witty guy when you spoke English thank you for that interpretation but talk about that but also respond to this because you're writing non-fiction so I write both non-fiction and fiction so therefore I I I think there is a problem with authenticity in in non-fiction because you get fact-checked for one thing so that's problematic especially right for magazine I get fact-checked all the time and it gets really complicated so in that sense you have to be historically accurate but regardless you can choose you know as a writer and as someone who fled from a country where you're you're not allowed to think freely I think I really am for the idea that you can choose any topic you want any theme you want and certainly any character you want just because you're from another place that doesn't mean that should be your topic by de facto you know it should be that if you're into NASA and traveling to Mars it doesn't matter if you're from Iran or Vietnam you should be able to write about Mars you know I mean we'll be slightly harder to get yes right I agree but that's a different topic you know on the other hand this whole idea of immigration and immigrant writers especially we talk about immigration um it it comes to pass that we have to bring our past with us because for when you talk about the piece when I wrote in in perfume dreams when speaking English it liberated me but it only liberated me only so long before I ran into a wall in which the English language didn't reach back to the war to my childhood to the trauma and beauty of that world in which I had felt like a dream and faded away because I had become an American and until I put the written language not the spoken language but a written language to cross back to over the Pacific Ocean to reach back to that Vietnamese kid I wasn't free either and so for me it wasn't just about fighting you know in the space of imagination so the American who I am but also for myself to actually say I'm this and that and you know this hyphen is going to stretch really far you know as if I'm going to reach toward myself you know and that self is complicated because constantly changing but it also has to acknowledge its past right I mean it wasn't a Baldwin that say who can who which of us escaped can escape oh my god I'm gonna terribly paraphrasing it the past and who you know how's the past is wrapped up in you in any way so you know if you cannot escape the past then make a good story out of it yeah I mean I don't know who said that is it Kennedy or Shiran who said that the exiled is either a poet or novelist because that's what you have to do especially because you inhabit this friction and and you can be either bad as a way to kind of if you are so well disposed to kind of bridge the gap or if you're a little bit of a naughty minded person just you know even widen it yeah by sheer insistence of the impossibility of reconciliation yeah there's there are more questions that I want to ask that we're running out of time one of them is we don't have to answer it but it's really like they really extreme eloquence of the non-native speaker which we have displayed here uh American don't speak English that well and you guys no it's true it's true it's true I'm editor I know this I read their manuscript all the time and but but the eloquence because it's something that I think I think about a lot the eloquence of the non-native speaker which comes from this conscious effort to master the language and the problems that attend that right but we're not gonna do that we're going to open up for it yeah we're going to open the space for the audience to ask questions and yeah all of us or me oh that's so hard one book or the one I'm thinking about right now that's true thank you I like that start with you oh um um I do not know I mean um when I have a hard time writing and I feel very stuck there are a couple of things that I go back to over and over again one of them is as I lay dying by Faulkner um because he takes such great liberties as a native speaker to really master the language and um I go back to the stories of Scheherazade just because I am constantly needing to be reminded that writing is a seduction and I have to seduce my reader and I often go back interestingly because I write in English and not in Farsi to the Bible which is the beginning of all musical English um so the Old Testament you know the first 300 pages I can't read beyond that but those are the texts Moby Dick is on my mind wow which may seem funny because I get really seasick I don't sail or anything it's a total macho book because it's only about guys I don't think there's a single female character in there except maybe a barmaid or something but it's the craft of it that I really admire um not just the fact that he somehow gets away with talking for 10 pages about whale line and you read it but that the way he deploys the plot in the characters is so incredibly um full of technique I think that book can be studied really fruitfully for uh for how to write a novel uh and the ending which I would love to mention here but I won't because you may not have read it but it's brilliant it's brilliant the way it ends so uh you know it's really hard for me to pick one book because I just but but I will say that I love particularly the big fat 19th century novels I have so many favorites and they come and go but I think if I I think I'll laugh right now would be um love in the time of cholera and it has nothing to do with my kind of writing but when I read Marquez work um especially that book I get lost in in the world of of description of sensuality of the beauty of poetry um but I think you know what that book achieved for me at least is and the kind of books I love are the kind that sort of has this generous vision of the world in a way that old decrepit couple in the time cholera falling in love which is sort of like at the end of their life you know and they're fed it in the old and they probably couldn't get it up anymore but uh and yet he had turned them into giddy teenager at the end of their life and that's really hard to do and then you you know you root for them even as the world falls apart and you know and that kind of vision is hard to do the same way I would say say Lolita because if you say what's that book about it's like this guy who basically raped a little girl and the moment you say that that's the end of you're wanting to read that book because it's like oh my god he's a monster and yet literature what it does it it it confounds you it makes a monster into a real three-dimensional well-rounded human being with his delusion but you know he thinks he's in love and by the end of the book yeah he should go to jail but you cannot condemn him because part of his delusion is maybe part of yours too about something else and so then you're kind of like how can this book do this to me right and so I think books that have that ability to force you see the world from completely different eyes make make the other so much more real than you know the you know stranger but someone you actually know you know I like some of the books you guys mentioned love of time of color the morbid dick and the bible of course I'm Catholic guys so I have a thing for the bible it's incurable my favorite books I'll the first book I ever read I think I was 11 and I had just learned Arabic and it was the only book by an African that had ever read and I was steep in Arabic literature medieval and modern and so it was always weird like I'm either a slave in the show like in novels or the poetry or that's it that's the only presence like no I'm I'm not that and so when I wrote a chibi of course it it changed everything so the African trilogy by chibi is probably my favorite book of all time not only because it's just a masterful work of prose but also his insistence on you know on kind of evoking the African world or reality not even African or the world of his fiction and it's not it's not really concerned with a response to the West it's really its own thing I don't even think it's a realist fiction at all like it's a myth that he tries to stage to open the door for other African writers and of course Tony Morrison who's another I think they work together in that kind of strain at this radical resistance of the wide image you know dictating the terms of creativity or fiction writing so I like that and of course V.S. Naples house in Musibus was just because it's funny I just keep laughing and it's absurd and of course he's a master prose writer yeah so that's just books that I'm thinking about right now but there's a long list of non-fiction stuff philosophical stuff but those are my top three I would say so if Trump exiled me I would take those with me I was wondering if you have seen any changes in the way your work has been received with the changes in the way the United States sort of regards itself I mean we are so much a multicultural society but for such a long time particularly outside of California there was the standard of the white male writer as the exalted writer and that seems to be changing somewhat I think there's much more embrace of writers from different cultures with different things to say particularly in the last 10 years and I don't I'm wondering if that's impacted your work and the reception of your work at all or you still feel like you're sort of battling down the doors to get recognition well you know it's interesting because you were saying you know you've seen so many of us are seen as race this race and this particular background but the moment you're famous that's not true anymore like for instance Morrison wouldn't be in the African American studies section should be in the best dollar section you know I mean but if you are less well known then somehow your social study and this is a kind of weird dichotomy that we have in this country where if you're famous enough you're not gay or black or Asian you're famous you know and then the rest of us are put in this cubicle of sociology you know which to me has always been very strange because in fact I have read books written by non-Vietnamese because I wanted to know what life is like you know in in the other shoes in the other life you know so I don't think of sociology I want to live that life I live want to experience all those things you know whereas sometimes people read my work and they say now I learned so much about your people and I'm thinking well just me I wrote about it is my people didn't write that book right so it's just my interpretation of my people you shouldn't claim to you know my people want to know my people go live in San Jose for 10 years right but but you know that's the problem is that you're suddenly representative because you write about your own experience sometimes but you you know it shouldn't be that way you you want to live that life that is told through that story you know I think I agree with a lot of what you're saying and I think that I don't think I think there's a great welcoming for the stories from other places I think that the great success of something like Kite Runner has really opened the doors for people from all over the world to have a voice in publishing and I feel like I myself am a recipient of this open door policy in the books that I write and the ones that do get published what sort of I feel like I'm working against all of the time is the fact that if I would like to write a story about a mother camping in the Grand Canyon that has nothing to do with being Iranian that story is not going to get published you know and if I want to write a book about a Vietnamese woman who happens to live in San Jose people are going to be like what is wrong what has happened to her like what are we going to do with this book because we can't match the identity of the writer with the content and that is aggravating to the nth degree because I maintain that a white writer male or female could do that right and has done that and I don't mind I mean not that I don't mind the appropriation but I'm not one of those who like is going to get up and like freak out about it write whatever you want but I think that should be true of everybody not just the hegemonic powers in the publishing industry um and that just drives me nuts on a sort of regular day-to-day basis I think you've covered it so um considering the title of this conversation um do you think the voices of all writers will change in any way will they become sweeter will they become stronger will they be more violent or do you think this is just a blip in our political arena which will not have any impact on the creativity of novelists or writers in any form I I think it is not a blip I think many writers are going to feel the need to respond in one way or another I mentioned the essay I've been working on previously I I'm not normally a non-fiction writer so but I felt that it was urgent to try to address this in my own small way just because of the times and similarly although I've written two previous historical novels I'm currently working on a novel set in the past couple of years that is not exactly about what is happening but where all the characters feel the fear and anxiety of the current era I think that as a novelist what I don't want to do is just write about what's happening now and that's it because it's not necessarily the most long-term or universal thing to write about I think what one wants to do often as a novelist is write something that that feels like it could be read far into the future but but for me to capture the feeling of now which is a feeling of fear and anxiety for immigrants many immigrants and for many other people as well is is what I want to incorporate into my next work and so I'm setting something in the present basically which is not something that I would have done or what what I thought I was going to do but that I feel I feel I must do right now so I'm not sure any of us can answer for all writers but I can certainly answer for myself and I feel it's essential right now I have to say that I don't know if this happens to you guys but this notion of writers responding to Trump like I can sit up here as a person and respond to Trump in my political citizen self but when it comes to my artistic self I cannot consciously sit down at my desk and write a story against Trump or against this administration or against the situation my imagination does does not work that way my creativity does not and then this last book that I wrote which is about a young man who identifies as American and then radicalizes and joins a fundamentalist organization in the Middle East I had these instances of racism against him as he was growing up in Southern California he passed as an American he changed his name he had all American friends and there were these instances of racism and they were it's minor but they were intense and my publisher this is before the election in November wrote back to me and said you know some of these are a little unbelievable and I was like well that's ridiculous because these are so gentle and so subtle that you know I would have to erase them for them for you to consider them believable after the election during the book's revisions he wrote to me and he said I would like you if you could to intensify the instances of racism in the book and I said some language that I will not repeat here because I am a lady and I'm a lady right now and then I proceeded to leave it as it was and ever since that conversation this notion of me as a writer creatively responding to the regime has been like effectively doused you know I can't even begin to engage in a story fashion with what I am feeling maybe because the moment is too heavy and you have to do it from the future or at a distance and also because of that exchange right so I've been you know teaching some writing workshops for a graduate student in my programs and some of them are young and they feel like they need to take up the mental and fight with every last stop of their energy but they don't they're very scattered because they want to do everything protest going out right this this and do this play and and and I always have to tell them that what my professor told me years ago was choose your battle right you you may have all this anger as a citizen as a human being but you need to know what your artistic strength is and if you if you're gonna fight 10 different battles you're gonna lose probably all of them but if you're gonna focus on your what your strength is and decide if this is your form of resistance and in a way it's very hard to measure that resistance because it's not necessary direct but who knows if it's you know not grow five years from now and has an influence on the way we think of ourselves at our time so therefore don't be over filled with anxieties I have to be a direct respond unless it's dear Donald Trump as a open letter or something right that you basically need to find your inner strength see the world as you see it rather than be told what it is and be leaving that vision and build up that vision so that it says something important to you first and foremost you know before you can help the world I mean for for me maybe because I take Trump very seriously but also not just Trump but what his election has occasioned all over the world very seriously creatively speaking it's also freeing a different way but I'm going to do that it's for me I'm questioning a lot of things a lot of formal aspects of a realist novel when a president like Trump you know doesn't believe in facts doesn't believe in the so-called in truth or any truth for that matter except one which serves him I think that's a problem for a fiction writer and for me that means really in technical terms that the grammar with which we mediate meaning which connects all of us in the mediation of meaning has been rendered irrelevant and so there's an opening there's a space where we need to kind of manufacture a new way of talking about what is true because fiction might not deal in facts but deal in truth all of which I kind of like rendered obsolete right now and also because I love this country is the only place in which I have felt a semblance of humanity I could go to school and go to college and write and tell a story and sit here and from just even though he's you know he's transient his policies are not he kind of just with just his inarticulate words rendered all of that irrelevant like dude sorry but the last 10 years were a fluke right and that that kind of power even if he's transient cannot be ignored and for me it has an immediate personal debilitating effect really yeah because I have you know my agent and other people pushing for a memoir but how do you talk about that because America has always served a purpose for the likes of me you know it's a place to which escaping you know you spend decades in the refugee camps awaiting resettlement to come to a place where you can actually finally you know well I'll say something because I think I wrote something similar to this but it wasn't during Trump administration it was right after I'm at 9 11 and the atmosphere in this country was exactly how you describe it it was people started reporting on on their neighbors and you know I remember writing about this one Pakistani family that was reported because they were making a curry in the backyard and and the smell had sort of invoked this fear from neighbors who thought it was some kind of toxin it would turn out that they were making a lot of curry for a wedding and and it turned and and they and they were raided because of this so this fear was not new this fear Trump maybe the the current result of this accumulated fear but the fear had been around since those towers came down and we hadn't been the same since then but but I made a point then and it's been a while so I don't remember exactly how I said it but I always talk about how contradictory this country can be and usually I have a dollar bill to show you because there is this ego that clutches on one town on the you know arrow the cluster of arrow but on the other is what is that that olive range you know of peace and to me had that had always represented the kind of contradiction of this empire because one is this necessity of you know resources and power and dominance over the world but then there is the ideal in which you and I can sit in front of a crowd and talking about what America means and so in a way you hold this contradiction in your head as you maybe mourning the the shift in the the ether but the ideal is what we fight for the ideal is what we want to render true even as we accept that the reality is the turning dark right and maybe the bottle never ends because the the bird doesn't let go either one but I think if we put our strength and our energy you know creativity toward rendering that ideal world however you interpret that it's something that the role of artists can do but ideal preserves the the recurrence of this kind of thing this kind of hiccups historic interruptions the return of the dark right and I think as a creative writer I always resist even the belief in the ideal was necessitated by existential kind of realities right namely the threat of war of displacement of poverty and maybe Trump is a woke up call that no matter the nation and its civil rights and its laws the nation is a cancer in the sense and its ideology in particular it's always reversible and so that was one of the question I wanted to ask we are quick to celebrate the American right the projected American it's ideal but perhaps that's also the thing to which we're addicted that kind of make us susceptible to these kind of betrayals right perhaps as creative writers we need to find a language that always keeps the ideology at arm's length that doesn't necessarily evoke it or subsume it or try to celebrate it too much because the disappointment is it's a lot and it's not just but it's part of life the disappointment you can't not have that it's to have this thing that I think you're talking about is to constantly remain cynical and I am not the most hopeful person on this panel I can tell you right now I am a pessimist and perfectly happy as one but this notion that you can't then America is is a fall stream in many ways and built on the backs of slaves after a complete demolishing of an entire continent of people of course it's not gonna pan out these are not historical hiccups this is a toxin that is gonna sail through forever in this country's history pessimism aside but we are on this panel together and we are all you know dressed and fed and safe for the most part and that and we have this ability to tell stories without being put in prison right which is huge which is not true of anybody that I know with creative license in Iran right you know the filmmakers who I admire who go forth to make these beautiful testaments who have to use children as their protagonist because they cannot use adults because of the regime they are constantly on house arrest they have to live in exile so here we are with these abilities to tell these stories which I you know honor and respect until we cannot and then my pessimism will come back the thing that I think is very interesting about what you said though that is you know call to arms for everybody but especially the storyteller is now that Trump has introduced this non-truth this constant language of fluid reality basically the double speak of Orwell in that empty space where there is nothing stable the storyteller has to step in and lay the groundwork for how we know how we are going to talk to each other and so I have not been able to write because for many reasons but one of them is that okay I am a storyteller and all I want to do is tell the story that's going to get the Trump voter to turn into a puddle if the reader that is I'm just saying my optimism will step in now if they read say they read or you know watch TV I'll make a TV show or whatever medium I have to go to but this idea that like I cannot keep writing for you know the liberal Caucasian female book group which I do love because they have paid all my bills for the last 10 years but I mean like the storyteller that space where Trump has decimated fact we do have to step in and we have to be like okay we've always thought fact was garbage and now here is this other kind of poetic truth but how am I going to get you Trump supporter to listen to me who like you know enemy you know axis of evil whatever they're calling us now sanctioning people like that is the challenge and it's such a big thing to carry but it does as a writer as a creative person it's like the challenge like how are you going to tell that beautiful story like she has actually like told that story that saved her life every night every night over and over again and it's gonna if it comes to that I gotta like go and like sharpen my storytelling skills to be like when you come to deport me with my passport you know like I have a story that's that's like the pessimism washes aside and the art steps in isn't it strange I'm the youngest member of this panel I'm the most pessimistic yeah characterized it yeah but it's I guess you know it's maybe it's the Catholic in me this is a lame motive guys for the whole conversation yeah I guess it's I'm just for all the kind of darkness that kind of shades my response I'm speaking in tradition of Beckett right at this kind of recognition of of of the radical not meaninglessness but the radical stability or state of precarity that we all live in but Beckett was a humorist oh yeah of course you know so at the end of all of it it was absurd you can you can laugh with tears that's fine right but there's a sense in which the ideal can sometimes soften the rough edges of existential kind of chaos and that is what I'm resisting because perhaps if we don't try too hard to belong meaning we don't let the optimism of the ideal of the host country subsume the rough edges of our experience our paths of our attempt to belong perhaps that might be a more honest or enterprise as opposed to trying to kind of soften and beautify the ugliness of it all I feel like I don't see that in fiction sometimes it's it's it's an ugliness that is well articulated that is not inflected in the form in the language and maybe we should kind of go back to the modernness and go to the level of the materiality of speech itself right the materiality of the grammar and so language itself has to be called into question right grammar itself has to be questioned and its capacity to because our duties not so much till our story is beautifully but also to evoke our sufferings without any blemish without any kind of like you know sublimation an easy one that is so that's my interest and of course it's all pessimistic but I think it's a part I think it's an element of the attempt to relate because sometimes I think like Americans don't even get it like what it takes to come here no they don't and so that's part of the calculus right that we have to engender somehow but you know I would say that I don't write with such a big audience in mind I write because it's like a story that like I was telling my sister and my cousin the other day it's like I had to dream and this family was making their way to see the sea at the end of lens and and they live in Oakland but they don't know the way there because they're poor and and this dream was nagging at me and I didn't know why and to have to write it I don't think intellectually I mean unfortunately that's not what I do when I create a story I create a story because it speaks to me on a visceral level and when it does it carries its own weight its own demand the intellectual idea may come along at some third draft and fourth draft when I might say something like about our current situation but it's it's always the story and whether it's good it makes you weep it makes you say aha about the human condition that never changes but you can of course you know cater it to the contemporary time if you want to to say something about our time but the skeleton of the story the suffering it's as old as your Adam and Eve in the fall right because if you write about refugees when Adam and Eve lose a house and run away from the first country they didn't run they got pushed out they got pushed out yeah they got exiled from the first house right it was a big tree um so uh with a snake is the name right so so I mean stories are as old as time right it just it's it has to be good it has to last you know and I would say one more thing is that that one of my you know years ago Robert Olin Butler wrote this book called strength sent from the mountain which I imputed in price and from the point of view of Vietnamese and then people asked me like how do you feel about that and I say well you know as long as he gets away with it if it's good it gets away with it right and some of the stories did but not all anyway um and I wrote a short story in birth to paradise housing which it was a white kid who talks about this refugee kid comes in instead of from the point of view of the refugee kid I got the white kid to talk about the stranger into his classroom and I thought it was one of the most successful pieces I ever wrote because it freed me to say something and what's so fascinating about that piece was that it was used in the post-war literature format in uh Tufts University New Orleans and this one grad student who was starting to be a teacher wrote me and said uh I after I read your short story I went out to the backyard and I wept why because I was grown up really poor and this kid who came in he smelled and he was even poorer than me so I bullied him and now I read your short story I hadn't thought about it but I need to find him to apologize so I shared it with the professor who was teaching that class and he said congratulations your short story made the bully cry and I thought what maybe that's what it should be for rather than like this larger idea that I'm fighting for America this bully finally cry for the Vietnamese kid I think it accomplished something and maybe I'm modest that way but that's enough for me I think that's a really good point and another point which is related is that the minute fiction becomes preachy readers withdraw and I've noticed this tendency in myself I just gave a reader something to read and she was telling me she liked x y and z but then there was this one preachy part which I felt was preachy when I was writing it but I really wanted to make that point and and you know and and that's not what makes literature that's literature you want to read so I think it's a it's a really tricky position to be in if you want your work to be read in the future and also if you want your work to be resonant the way you were describing to all kinds of people but it does require excising that preachy stuff thing we have room for one more question and that's it no someone raised their hand raise your hand who won't have someone raised their hand sorry oh just stretching my students all the time pick them then they have to say something um I actually have a question so then like what do you kind of see for yourselves as um artists and thinkers and global citizens in the next four years what do you kind of see that being like at the end of this term um where do you kind of see yourself if that's a relevant question to you and your work I'll jump in uh the thing I've been saying to myself a lot lately is do a little more uh and what I mean by that is this I feel I feel that we many of us got kind of comfortable under the Obama administration but we're not in a state of comfort anymore and so it does require I think doing a little more whether it's with our own work in what we address and how we address it or whether it's other things so for my part I took training yesterday to become a union steward at my college uh thank you so do I have time for this no am I really eager to work on grievances at my college and know the contract back and forth well but here's the thing uh organizing at the grassroots level at a college is a powerful thing to do we just we just got our first contract and it's gone into effect in July uh but a union isn't strong and we aren't strong until we organize so I feel like doing that although perhaps it seems unrelated to storytelling or unrelated to writing actually it is part of of this feeling of wanting to do more even if it's not convenient for me even if it's time consuming for me so I can contribute to this this bigger question in this period I'm going to have a slightly weak answer to this because then the four years is such an overwhelming prospect and I'm spending all of my energy trying to pacify North Korea um so you know my karmic energy is all headed in that direction to just calm everybody down as much as possible so boring that um yeah this so the one hopeful thing that happened in the last election on election night was that um my parents as well as many Iranians many Vietnamese many Chinese many Africans who just came to this country um many South Americans live in Orange County um my parents moved there when I was in college so I've never lived there but I've visited a lot and in this last election it was the first county in the entirety of the United States to switch from traditionally Republican to Democrat yeah they were the only county to go the other way and the reasoning for this was that in the last 30 slash 40 years the immigrant influx has been so intense that many of my brother's white friends have moved to Arizona and like the neighborhoods are just filling with immigrants from all over the world of every socioeconomic range but largely middle class and wealthy which is a testament to the sort of you know money talks and bullshit walks kind of idea in this country and so they have managed to swing the voting in that county to what favors them and what favors a kind of pluralism that I think was perhaps our dream intention for this country not the intention of the founders who were slave owners but the intentions of us sitting in this room is that we dream of this pluralism and Orange County represents it and I think if there's a way in the next four years or in the next two years even to help empower immigrant voices either through my students or through my work or through workshops and to try to get that conversation started and maintained then I will feel like when the ship sinks I didn't do nothing like I didn't do something so so the the website new america media that I co-ed it is really dedicated to immigrant rights and and the new thing that we have added on is coverage of hate crimes and the rising of hate incidents so as a journalist I I constantly have to fill my social duties duties and so I never have worried about that as but I've never seen that as an artistic part of my life I'm working on another book of short stories and a novel and that to me is the the larger perspective of our time and looking at kind of homeless kid who Shanghai himself across five different countries just to find his place in the world and to me that speaks closest to my own identity but there is that social duty you know getting people to write about hate crimes and in the communities and stuff so that's that's the hat that I put on every day when I go to work but in term of what moves me in in the world of art and dreams it's it's very personal but of course you know you bring your full humanity to bear so I have all the confidence that it will reflect our time I think I'll be editing a journal that is devoted to writing by immigrant refugee authors I want to recognize David and Ellen can you guys stand up please because they are doing good work so we have a new journal called the bear life review and our first issue will be in spring but I think for the foreseeable future that what we're going to be doing that's what I'm going to be doing and then of course working on you know this endless project I've been working on for five years a novel maybe five more years one heart maybe then I will have learned what to say because I don't know yet yeah so that's the but four years is a long time it's not also a lot of time creatively speaking yeah so that's the trajectory of the next few years I think we we're good I'm sneaking up behind you to say thank you for the most amazing panel tonight I was in tears a couple times I want to thank our panelists our moderator Newell Andrew Anita and Laleigh I also also want to thank the San Francisco Public Library for letting us do this here free of charge for youth people it's a wonderful cultural and literary exchange and to the Litquake staff and to everybody who had anything to do with tonight thank you so much you if you want to see it again it'll be on the San Francisco main library's channel on YouTube tell your friends because I just think this was a fantastic evening and thank you all for Owen Louise Herrera bless you thank you so much for letting us be here thank you for coming