Why Fiction? Isn't Non-Fiction a Better Way to Learn about Other Cultures?

When we plan to travel or move to a new place, it's natural that we want real, tangible information.  What's the weather like?  Where are good restaurants?  What do the locals do for fun?  Are there safety concerns to be aware of?

We scour the Web for answers and might even check out a few books, probably all non-fiction.

If we want to dive a little deeper, we might try to find local media sources -- online newspapers where we can read about what's going on in the place we are going to visit soon or are interested in.

Maybe we'll also search YouTube for videos from this location, and maybe we'll look for bloggers writing about it.

If we are really motivated (and planning to spend a lot of time there or spend a lot of money for a one-time trip), we might delve even deeper, buying not just guidebooks but books that tell us about that place's history, politics, and social problems.

But what about fiction?  It's easy to overlook fiction when doing research about a new place or trying to learn about a different culture.  We want real information.  Hmm... a real mistake.  Here are a few reasons why fiction is a great way to learn about another culture:

1. Fiction is fun!  It's way more interesting than plowing through a non-fiction book on politics by an academic author.
2. Fiction gets at the heart of culture.  Culture isn't about maps or good hotels or places to avoid.  Culture is about what's important to a society or people within that society.  Culture is about the way people think and what they worry about, what they dream about, what they hope for.  The only way to really learn these things is to know people from the culture, and in many cases, it may be difficult to get to know someone in a short time period from the culture you are trying to learn about.  Fiction can provide a faster insight (albeit not as deep) into the lives of "real" people.
3. Fiction gives us insights into daily life.  It's hard to really get a sense of what daily life is like by reading a guidebook, a book about politics, or even the news.  Fiction presents us with the lives of several different people who live in a particular culture.  We can learn fairly quickly which behavior and activities are considered "normal" and which are not.
4. Fiction helps us identify the things that are hard to identify.  If you ask someone to define or explain a culture, they will usually find this request difficult.  Think about it: how well could you answer a question like, "What's important to people in your culture?"  We tend to think about the variety within our culture and stumble up, unable to have a clear answer.  But someone from another culture simply wants a general overview: what is typically considered "normal" for people to find important in your culture?  A list of these things is bound to forget some and also bound to be confusing.  Fiction, on the other hand, presents us with tiny moments from life -- dilemmas that characters face, conversations, arguments, dreams, strange happenings.  Through reading about these experiences, we are likely to notice a few things that strike us as surprising -- things we would not expect to hear about or think about or do in our own culture.  It's these little tidbits -- the tiny things no one in a culture really thinks about -- that are what culture is often really about.
5. Fiction helps us develop an empathetic relationship with someone from another culture.  When we read fiction, we tend to identify with the protagonist (or perhaps in rare cases, with another character instead).  In this way, fiction offers us a view into another lifestyle.  It makes us consider why people do the things they do and what we would do in a similar situation.  It helps us feel more compassion for people who are different from ourselves, and it gives us practice trying to understand different viewpoints.

These are just a few reasons.  If you have others, please share them!

Where Are You Running To?

I stumbled upon the anthology Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers at a library book sale a few months ago.  This chance encounter has proven to be a positive one because it's a fabulous book that has helped remind me of the importance of exploring international as well as domestic fiction.

I haven't finished the anthology yet, but I want to write a little about the first story, Where Are You Running To? by Ma Jian.  Ma Jian is a Chinese author whose work has been banned in China and who now lives in London.  He has had several novels published in English.

Where Are You Running To? is a melancholy story in which running serves as a metaphor for searching.  All of the characters in the book are running -- searching for themselves, their pasts and their futures, and the truth.

The protagonist is Zhao Chunyu, a chairwoman of the neighborhood committee who was sent to a labor camp with her husband when she was young and "rehabilitated" in 1981.  These character traits are so casually a part of the story that it forces the reader from outside China to acknowledge the differences in their own personal and cultural history and that of China and many Chinese people.  This is not a story that could be set in another place.  It is definitively Chinese, and the characters in it have experiences that may be mirrored elsewhere but are specifically Chinese.

Chunyu's daughter, Xin, suffered from bone cancer and died because in their poverty, they could not afford expensive medical treatment, and no one would help them.  This, despite the slogan painted on the hospital's cafeteria wall: Cure the Sick and Heal the Wounded; Practice Revolutionary Humanism.

Chunyu's son is running away from her, and she is chasing after him.  She is trying to turn him into the star pianist that Xin was, but he does not enjoy playing the piano, nor is he as good at it.

Most of the story recalls memories of Xin's last days, when the family pushed her around in a cart and begged for money.  They were criticized for "creating such a commotion," and are told by the police that the paper they are using to tell Xin's story is the size of a poster, and it is forbidden that members of the public write things on a sheet of paper that size.

Again and again, the presence of this family is tolerated -- first by the hospital and then by a luxury hotel -- but then they are pushed aside by those who have money and power.  There is a sense that these are average people and that others do not want to be bothered by problems and sadness.  People want to pretend that everything is okay, and so they ignore and push aside this family and their sad story.

Late in the story, Chunyu is mistaken for a prostitute when she tries to hide behind a tall man during the chase of her son, and "she feels so humiliated, she wishes she could bury herself beneath the ground."  Yet again, she suffers a disgrace and affront to her sense of self, yet she keeps going because she has no other choice.

In the end, it is Chunyu who is taken away by running, and her son begins to chase her: "A sense of freedom that she's never experienced before courses through her body.  At least she feels that she has caught up with herself."  The world becomes clearer to her as she runs faster and faster, and "she wants to catch up with her past."

There is a sense, in the end, that the world was more ordered, understandable, and empathetic in the past, before the changes that sent them to the labor camps and turned the country on its head.  Chunyu seems to be flying away to a future she wished for when she was a child, not the life she ended up having, and her son finishes the story by trying to figure out where it is she is racing to.  A child of this new world, he would not understand her dreams of the future any more than she could understand his.

Welcome

I'm glad you decided to join me on this blog.  I'm a writer of fiction and creative non-fiction, and I started this blog to share my thoughts and writings related to different cultures.

Writing Cultures.  What does that mean?  To me, it has a couple of meanings:

• Writing about different cultures -- one's own, or a foreign culture.
• Reading writing about different cultures -- again, one's own, or a foreign culture.
• The culture(s) of writing itself -- what it means to be a writer, who writes, what a writing community is.
• Short snippets of writing -- like "cultures" of different bacteria used to test for diseases.

I hope to share information, links, and writing related to all of these topics, and I hope you'll join me.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to leave a note on the blog.  I'd love to hear from you!