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^{Permutations (detail), 1976. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (South Korean, 1951–1982). Black and white, 16 mm film on video, silent; 10 min. Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.}

There is a plastic quality to memory in the hands of Ken Liu. His short stories are lucidly aware of the artifice that fiction provides, the malleability of imagined historical occurrence. Perhaps it is a truism to speak of the relationship between memory and the imagination, for what we remember so often forms the substance of what we create. Liu’s stories, however, play with the interaction between fiction and memory in ways I perhaps hadn’t seen them before: with respect to East Asia and its diasporas.

Two stories stand out. The first, a display of memory as fantasy in “All The Flavors”, an imagined history of Chinese miners who laid down roots in Idaho. The second, a display of memory as made tangible in “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, where a physicist devises a way to allow people to experience a one-way trip to a particular moment in time, never to be replicated again.

The former dances between the historical story of Guan Yu, a prolific general during the War of the Three Kingdoms, and Lao Guan, christened Logan, a community leader of the Chinese miners in Idaho City in 1865. Lily Seaver, a white American girl, is the first to witness a confrontation between the miners and the notorious Missouri Boys, gangsters whose attempts to lay claim to a mining area are thwarted by the deadly precision of a rock thrown by Logan. Out of this emerges what Liu envisions to have been a cordial relationship between the miners and the city’s white inhabitants: Logan regales Lily with the tale of Guan Yu’s ascension and military prowess, she tries mala tofu only to be stopped before placing a piece of dog meat in her mouth, and she learns to play wei qi as Logan eats watermelon seeds.

Liu deftly sets up the expected encounter with racial prejudice, only to sidestep it through the assuaging comments of Jack Seaver, Lily’s father. Every complaint levied by his wife Eleanor about the “Chinamen”—eating as little as possible, whiling away time telling stories and singing songs, squeezing into shophouses to save on rent—is followed by Jack’s rebuttal that they are “industrial, frugal, clever, happy with each other’s hardships, and willing to bear hardships”.[1] The zenith of Liu’s expression of historical fantasy is in the city’s coming together to commemorate Chinese New Year:

All the rumours about the Chinese New Year celebration were true. The children’s pockets were filled with sweets and jangling coins, and the men and women were laughing as they enjoyed the feast that had been laid out before them. they had to shout to make one another heart amid the unending explosions of the firecrackers and the music blasting from the brass band. [2]

The jubilation that accompanies the Idahoans’ acceptance of Chinese practice, the exhilarated collision of superstition and ritual, is part of Liu’s imagined heroism of immigration. As the men recount their journey from San Francisco to Idaho, they inscribe themselves mythically with reference to Guan Yu:

Wasn’t Lord Guan Yu once an outlaw? Didn’t he teach us that the gods only smile upon those who take fate into their own hands? Why should we settle for having nothing for the rest of our lives when we know that we should have enough strength in our arms to blast a path through mountains and enough wit in our heads to survive an ocean with only our stories and laughter?[3]

This ethos of a resolve and yearning, a courage and insistence on possibility, make the fold from Chinese mythology to the self-making, self-reliant mythology of American ruggedness. It is reiterated in a speech given by Logan to his comrades to persist:

You feel that lift in your heart? The lightness in your head? That is the taste of whiskey, the essence of America. We have been wrong to be drunk and asleep. We should be drunk and fighting.[4]

Here is where memory plays as fantasy: Liu draws on the archival memory of the Chinese presence in Idaho, melding the courageous militarism of Guan Yu and the intoxicating whiff of possibility. His Chinese immigrants are lauded and accepted, drawn into the fold of community, and left to see their cultural perpetuity halted by the introduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the illegality of intermarriage between the Chinese and the whites. The memory of the Chinese presence in Idaho is the substance of Liu’s fiction of community, the buried precedent to his own legitimacy as a Chinese American, his parents migrating a century later.

In the latter story, “The Man Who Ended History”, the impetus is less one of imagining the substance of memory, but more the tangible retrieval of it. Framed as a documentary, with an assemblage of transcribed interviews, hearings, and eyewitness accounts, Liu tells the story of Dr Evan Wei, a Chinese American historian who develops a technique with his Japanese American wife, physicist Akemi Kirino, to allow “people to travel back in time and experience history as it occurred” through the discovery of “Bohm-Kirino particles”.[5]  As a pair, one particle “shoots away from the Earth, riding the photon that gave it birth and traveling at the speed of light” while the other ”remains behind, oscillating in the vicinity of its creation”.[6] His objective is to provide irrefutable evidence that the Japanese were culpable for crimes against humanity through Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit, during the occupation of China from 1937 to 1945. Memory ceases to exist strictly in the discursive realm of testimony and text, as the story details:

The Bohm-Kirino particles allow us to reconstruct, in detail, all types of information about the moment of their creation: sight, sound, microwaves, ultrasound, the smell of antiseptic and blood, and the sting of cordite and gunpower in the back of the nose.[7]

The effect of time travel, however, is irreversible, a journey that can only be made once for a viewer to absorb a “staggering amount of information”.[8] Wei accords the opportunity to travel to the descendants of those who suffered egregious abuse, many from mainland China or of mainland Chinese descent. The details the shattering of frostbitten arms, bodies cleaved in half, vivisections, and horrific sexual violence. The trajectory of Liu’s story is such that these witnesses, being untrained in a kind of forensic acquisition of knowledge, return without the clarity such a historical project would demand. A fictitious history professor, Victor P. Lowensen, declares that Wei has

abdicated the responsibility of the historian to ensure that the truth is not ensnared in doubt. He has crossed the line that divides a historian from an activist.[9]

In doing so, the tangibility of memory is abandoned to subjectivity, left to replay in gory and emotional recollections. If Liu’s story about the Chinese in Idaho pursues history to augur an imagined belonging, his story about time travel and Imperial Japanese atrocity raises questions about history as a project driven intrinsically by justice. Fiction is necessarily swapped for reality, even within the fictive structures of time travel. The zeal of seeking truth is cemented in the story’s closing lines:

The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.[10]

I write this less as a critical review of Liu’s work. Some have argued that his work tends toward the sentimental or the saccharine, especially in putting forth an ultimately conciliatory view of history. These pretences are not for me to address, for as a reader I found myself immersed in these stories precisely because of their willingness to seek reconciliation with historical fact, to provide feasible plugs to continuing questions of irresolution. In doing so, I thought of not only the racialised eradication of specific East Asian groups within the United States, but also of the generational memories of war that most of us of East Asian descent bear with us.

Even before the dividing line of American immigration history in 1965, many of us whose ancestors emigrated know they did so for reasons of instability and poverty. The genesis of Asian America in the twentieth century, even with its presence in the 1860s, can be attributed to the displacements engendered by war: World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. The latter two are more directly attributable to the intervention of the United States. Asian American activists argued in 1965 that the carnage wrought upon Vietnam must be seen in the context of the twentieth-century occupations of the Philippines, Okinawa, and Korea.

The detritus of war animates such work as Theresa Cha’s 1982 magnum opus Dictée, as well as Ocean Vuong’s prize-winning collection Night Sky with Exit Woulds (2016). With poetry, they are perhaps less beholden to the strictures of narrative prose in quite the same way as Liu, and their poems reflect that kind of optical and subjective destabilisation. I suspect that this may come down to an individual memory of trauma, for Cha and Vuong’s families fled to America from wartime situations while Liu’s arrived as professional scientists. The scarring of war on the memory remains, and the poem becomes a rehearsal of compounded trauma, defined by Cathy Caruth as

the response to unexpected or overwhelming violent events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return in flashbacks and other repetitive phenomena[11]

Cha and Vuong’s engagements with wartime memories emerge from this trauma as well as the melancholic sense of loss inherited through geographical displacement.[12] We see this in Cha’s depiction of the 19 April uprising of 1960 in Korea, a demonstration against rigged elections conducted by authoritarian regimes:

The stinging, it slices the air it enters thus I lose direction the sky is a haze running the streets emptied I fell no one saw me I walk. Anywhere. In tears the air stagnant continues to sting I am crying the sky remnant the gas smoke absorbed the sky I am crying. The streets covered with chipped bricks and debris. Because. I see the frequent pairs of shoes thrown sometimes a single pair among the rocks they had carried. Because. I cry wail torn shirt lying I step among them.[13]

The tactility, the vividness, the sensory cacophony of the trauma of violence are retold in Cha’s frenetic run-on sentences and decisive single words. And yet, memory enacts a certain kind of paralysis, carried through the journey engendered by displacement from Korea to America. She writes, “Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search”.[14] Memory is the crucible of a Korean American identity formation, however much the fallout from war smoulders in the mind.

The memory of displacement is not dissimilar for Vuong as he recalls his departure from Saigon. In his poem “Immigrant Haibun”, he writes:

When we left it, the city was still smouldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered from the bombed bakery.[15]

The trauma of loss  is grounded in concrete detail, a juxtaposition of stillness and violence: the city “still smouldering” and causing ”White hyacinths [to gasp]”, and the pigeons ”pecking at bits of bread scattered from the bombed bakery”.[16] As with Cha, the vividness of these scenes remain in the child’s memory, quiet markers of devastation amid the “Otherwise […] perfect spring morning”.[17] In his wartime memories, Vuong locates the origins of his subjectivity, mediated by the experience of a collective displacement.

And this displacement persists, whether geographically or psychologically, in the psyches of many of those of a certain generation. Those of East Asian descent inherit a kind of mourning, the knowledge that whatever socioeconomic advancement that was achieved in the past half-century or so came from a place of survivalist desperation. It governs the continuing political instincts of a nation like Singapore or subsists in the persistent han of those who trace their origins to the Korean peninsula. It is even, as Tash Aw describes, that the old stereotype of Asians is that we were all “poor”, and somehow that is the shadow that casts itself over a bitterness or peace with the past.[18] To live in dignity is to put to rest the shame of hunger, humiliation, colonial oppression, and the fear of violence.

The memory of pain occasionally breaks through to the peace that I’ve grown up with. On a trip to England, my Malaysian American and South Korean grandmothers had a conversation about living under the Japanese, translated by my bilingual mother. The former, as a British colonial subject, remembered the crippling defeat of the British at Japanese hands, while the latter, as a Japanese colonial subject, never learned English because it was the tongue of Japan’s enemies. Simmering beneath, perhaps, was a joint recognition that family and friends were slaughtered on the basis of ethnic suspicions, and that they subsequently lived with the material deprivation engendered by armed conflict. The burst of economic activity, whether at the level of the immigrant family or a beleaguered country, is mired in the aftertaste of sacrifice.

Perhaps where I’ll end is with one question: is it easy to forgive? Memory dredges up the possibility of old grievance. I have known this directly in working on the Decolonise English campaign in Cambridge—the temptation remains to hold so many at the present culpable for the sins of the past because of the violent legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and expansionism. This sometimes manifests in more concerted contests, such as the trade war between Korea and Japan, or even in the spasms of militaristic violence between ethnic groups across Asia and the rest of the world. Reading Liu, Cha, and Vuong perhaps provides models by which we can temper the role that memory plays in arbitrating present action, not least when the conflicting impetuses of forgiveness and revenge are so hard to abandon.

Perhaps I have yet to know the lividity of suffering an irreversible loss inflicted by another person. Forgiveness is a daily process of renewal, one that matures in the practice of memory itself. It’s little wonder that the injunction of Christ is to forgive an unlimited number of times for the reflex is unnatural. And yet, it is only forgiveness that yields new possibilities, the laying aside of old hurts, and the willingness to live in the knowledge that certain stories are told, such as Liu’s, to expand the imagination of those who seek to forgive. For those of us to pay tribute to the dead, not simply to imbibe the inherited grievance of unwanted sacrifice, but to consider each day what it means to pursue peace.

November 2020

Bibliography

▚  Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma Narrative and History (US: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).
▚  Hua Hsu, “The Stories We Tell, and Don’t Tell, About Asian-American Lives”, The New Yorker, 17 July 2019.
▚  Ken Liu, “All The Flavors” in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (USA: Saga Press, 2016), 250-331.
▚  Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (USA: Saga Press, 2016), 376-437.
▚  Lisa Allardice, “Tash Aw: ‘It used to be that Asia was poor. “Asians are rich” is the new clich锑”, The Guardian, 13 April 13 2019.
▚  Ocean Vuong, “Immigrant Haibun” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds (London: Penguin Random House, 2016).
▚  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

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[1] Ken Liu, “All The Flavors” in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (USA: Saga Press, 2016), pp. 250-331 (307).
[2] Liu, “All The Flavors”, 324.
[3] Liu, “All The Flavors”, 322.
[4] Liu, :”All The Flavors”, 323.
[5] Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (USA: Saga Press, 2016), pp. 376-437 (381).
[6] Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, 378.
[7] Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, 382.
[8] Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, 382.
[9] Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, 421.
[10] Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, 433.
[11] Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma Narrative and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91.
[12] Hua Hsu, “The Stories We Tell, and Don’t Tell, About Asian-American Lives”, The New Yorker, 17 July 2019.
[13] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; repr. 2001), 82.
[14] Cha, Dictée, 81.
[15] Ocean Vuong, “Immigrant Haibun” in Night Sky with Exit Wounds (London: Penguin Random House, 2016; repr. 2017), 13.
[16] Vuong, “Immigrant Haibun”, 13.
[17] Vuong, “Immigrant Haibun”, 13.
[18] Lisa Allardice, “Tash Aw: ‘It used to be that Asia was poor. “Asians are rich” is the new clich锑”, The Guardian, April 13, 2019.

How to cite: Chan, Jonathan. “On Memory.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/30/on-memory.

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor of poetry and essays. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Landmark, 2022), which was named a 2022 Book of the Year by SUSPECT. Previously a participant in the Singapore International Film Festival’s Youth Jury & Critics Programme, his writing on film has appeared in Stories Journal, Film Criticism, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. More of his writing can be found at here. [All contributions by Jonathan Chan.]

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