by Bill Moyers
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
Once upon a time, according to a Chinese legend, there were three books of peace. They contained the wisdom human beings needed to live together peacably, but were destroyed by fire. The wisdom within them perished.
When that legend reached Maxine Hong Kingston—one of many tales she heard growing up Chinese American in California—she set out to write a novel called The Fourth Book of Peace. But as she was attending her father’s funeral in 1991, fire engulfed the hills surrounding her Oakland neighborhood. She lost everything to the flames; all that was left of her manuscript was a block of ash.
For a while she thought the fire also had consumed her imagination, but eventually, after much struggle, she began again. The result was The Fifth Book of Peace, retelling the story she had begun to write, and adding an account of the fire, the loss of her work in progress, and her subsequent spiritual journey through myths and legends of the past. The book is written, as one reviewer describes it, “in a panoply of languages: American, Chinese, poetry, dreams, mythos, song, history, hallucination, meditation, tragedy.”
Such inventiveness helps explain how Kingston became a force in American letters with the publication of her first book, The Woman Warrior, still a favorite in college writing and literature classes. China Men, her second novel, won the National Book Award, and was followed by Tripmaster Monkey, another almost magical blend of memory, meditation and imagination gleaned from her parents’ stories of their native China and from Kingston’s own life in California.
Throughout, she remained obsessed with the wisdom of peace extinguished by that legendary ancient fire. For the past fifteen years she has been searching for it in the memories of former warriors who came home from battle traumatized by what they had seen and done. More than five hundred veterans from five wars have participated in workshops at which Kingston and other writers help them turn their experiences into poems, novels, and essays. Some of their finest work has been published in Kingston’s latest book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. She might well have called it The Sixth Book of Peace.
—Bill Moyers
You describe the stories and poems of the veterans in this book as “immense in scope, and in heart, and—amazingly—full of life and laughter. They carried out our motto: Tell the truth.”
Yes. We adopted that motto because these people come home from hell, and they have witnessed, committed, or been subjected to horrendous acts. Their first instinct is to keep it secret. They say to themselves, “I’ll forget what happened. I’ll not visit my experience on my children, my wife, my husband. I will not tell people about what happened.” And holding it inside creates terrible illness and wrong. My task is to help them get it out: “Tell me exactly what happened. It’s okay to talk about it.”
Which is what Robert Golling, for one, did.
Yes. Robert’s job was to escort home to Massachusetts the body of a young soldier, a comrade, and to help the family with the funeral arrangements and to give what comfort he could. The family invites him to stay overnight. Like them, he’s Catholic. He even looks like the boy who was killed. So in a way the family was welcoming their son home.
Read me what Robert writes after that night in their dead son’s bedroom.
Sure.
I thought, I can’t stand here all night. I turned off the light. The street lamplight jumped in through the window, casting a cold edge on all the objects in the room. I looked around at each and every thing without thinking. Each in turn said nothing but waited for some careless touch of its owner. Atop the chest of drawers, a comb and brush still with hair, his daily missal, Catholic prayer book that looked just like mine, a baseball autographed by Ted Williams, ticket stubs.
Quietly, quickly, a peek in each drawer saw socks, underwear, and cigar boxes of childhood treasures. The bottom drawer held sweaters and a shoebox of baseball cards. To the left was a stack of comics. Should I look deeper beyond Mad? Nah, I thought. The Playboys would be in the closet, beneath something his mother wouldn’t touch. I returned all the drawers to their original positions. I’d only touched with my eyes ever so slightly. A guest will look, will look to find the familiar, he will try to be at home. But still I felt strange. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I can barely see it now, thirty-nine years later. It was like seeing a life that was not my life, but was my life. His life cut short, while mine was still in front of me. Michael was at rest, and I must sleep, too. Could I sleep in the chair? No! Slowly, I pulled back the covers further. I turned and sat slowly, very slowly. Trying not to disturb the sheets, I lay back, tucked my legs beneath the sheets. The sheets now cold around me, more goose bumps, alone, cold, I closed my eyes, not moving. I, too, lay at rest. Sleep would come sometime.
And then there’s Sandy Scull, a lieutenant in Vietnam in the late 1960s. He wrote poetry before he went over. I guess he must have been like me—a poet since childhood. But when he came home there were no poems. He had a block. He said he lost his spirit, lost his imagination, and then, finally, he wrote a poem called “Sea Salt”—about coming home. He had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder; the body goes numb, his appetite left him, he felt alienated from his fellow citizens. And he wrote this poem:
SEA SALT
After the Vietnam War, I withdrew
to Nantucket: “faraway isle.”
Hoping to glimpse the boy
before spirit fled the body.
Thirty-three miles of ocean exiling me
from a homeland offering little embrace.
Me and my dog, Christopher. Christ-love
disguised as loyal canine. We combed beaches.
Working for the island newspaper connected me.
Tides soothed with ebb and flow.
A rhythm I could trust. Even eat by.
I fish the last three hours of the east tide.
Buried my toes in the sand, searching
for the texture of littleneck clam
When water was warm, I sailed out solo.
Stripped then slid into the sound.
Looking up toward the surface light.
Christopher’s gaze wavering with wind
and water between us. Breath bubbles
rose, bursting under his nose.
My body now embraced,
a ritual purification in salt.
Dismembered dreams floated closer.
Something dissolved in a solution
that held me. Breathing easier,
I could imagine again.
“Breathing easier”—a physical response that liberated his spiritual voice.
Yes, yes, “Breathing easier, I could imagine again.” So the spirit’s coming in—he’s in-spirited, inspired. His soul returns through meditation, through poetry.
Several of these veterans speak of being “frozen in that moment.” Listening to them, I keep seeing in my mind’s eye the image of slowly melting glaciers of emotion, transformed into something else, something powerful and affirming.
And this healing happens when people are able to tell the truth, when they are able to find words for that human experience.
But it can take thirty, forty years.
Yes, it took thirty years before poetry came back to Sandy Scull. It took Odysseus twenty years to come home from Troy. People have to work hard to return from war. Several of the veterans in this book have been through therapy or became therapists themselves. One of them took a job for thirteen years as a night watchman on Alcatraz. In a way, I suppose it was his atonement for being in Vietnam.
Do you remember the young soldier who had seen his friend burned alive in the war and has never been able to attend a neighborhood barbecue without smelling human flesh?
Yes, that was the story of Hopper Martinez. It was his job to pick up the bodies of his friends. This story’s called “Hopper’s Last BBQ,” and it’s an incredible story of what happens to your senses from the devastation of war. He smelled the barbecued human flesh and he started to salivate. His whol
e body was turning against him. Hopper had to apply to the VA for his benefits, and instead of filling out an official form he decided just to write the story of what had happened to him.
Did he get some help from the officials on the basis of what he wrote?
Yes.
Not all of the writers at your workshops are veterans of combat. There’s Pauline Laurent, who tells you what it was like to be twenty-two and pregnant and to get the news three days after Mother’s Day in 1968 that her husband had been killed in Vietnam. She looks out the window and sees that ugly green army car with the words U.S. Army printed on the side, parked in front of the house. And then she picks up the story:
The men continue to sit in the car. Hours seem to pass before they get out, straighten their uniforms, and head toward my door....
“Good evening,” they say, as they remove their hats. “We’re looking for Pauline Querry.”
“That’s me.”
They look at my protruding abdomen that holds my unborn child and then look at each other in silence that lingers too long.
“Was he wounded or killed? How bad is it?”
More silence. Finally they begin.
“We regret to inform you that your husband, Sergeant Howard E. Querry, was fatally wounded on the afternoon of May 10, by a penetrating missile wound to his right shoulder.”
I’m dizzy. I can’t think straight.
“Dead? Is he dead?”
They don’t answer. They just reread their script as if practicing their lines for a performance they’ll give someday.
“We regret to inform you ...”
The room is spinning. I can’t think, I can’t hear anything. I’m going to faint. Alone ... I must be alone to sort this out. Leave me alone.
Instead, I sit politely as they inform me of the details ... funeral ... remains ... escort ... military cemetery ... medals.
Finally they gather their papers and leave. I politely show them to the door. My parents are hysterical. My dad weeps, my mom trembles. No sound is coming out—her whole body is shaking in upheaval.
After retrieving the dog, I stagger to my room and shut the door. I throw myself on the bed, gasping for air. My heart races and pounds. My unborn baby starts kicking and squirming. I hold my dog with one hand, my baby with the other, and I sob. I’m shattered, blown to pieces. It can’t be true!
No medics come, no helicopters fly me away to an emergency room. I struggle to save myself but I cannot. I die.
Half an hour later, a ghost of my former self gets up off the bed and begins planning Howard’s funeral.
Mom calls relatives. People come over to console me. I just want to be alone. I just want to be alone.
I just want to say that it was a triumph of writing that Pauline was able even to say her husband’s name, Howard. She told us that she was a ghost of her former self once she got up off the bed and started planning his funeral. She said she had been shattered, blown to pieces, and that it was twenty-five years before she began to think she could talk about that day when she had learned of his death. When she came to the workshop and started writing, she said it became easier to tap into the other hard days, like the one when her daughter was born and there was no father at the hospital to celebrate, and when her daughter married and there was no father to walk down the aisle with her. She said writing became a container that kept saying, “Give me more of your pain.”
What is it about a story’s power to change the psyche?
Oh, I am trying to come up with a good answer. I keep saying it’s magic. Story gives shape and form to chaos. A finely shaped story has the same energy as sexual energy, or life energy. It’s like the tide that Sandy Scull wrote about. The ebbing and flowing of tide, of storms, goes through our bodies, goes through our psyches, and there’s “a ritual purification of salt. Something dissolves in the solution.” And story helps us communicate with others. I know that the veterans are writing for themselves, but I always hold up the standard of an ideal that the writer’s job is to communicate, and, I tell them, “No diary writing, no private writing.” These are public acts of communication. And you must tell the story so that you can give it to another person. And when you read it aloud, there’s mouth-to-ear transmission, we are communicating, and we make connections with others and build the community around us. These soldiers can come out of war alienated from everyone. From their families. From our country. From themselves. And this communication helps them rebuild a community and a family around them.
Tell me about Ted Sexauer, a medic. Two tours in Vietnam, one with a line company of the 173rd Airborne. He writes that he became an accomplice to murder.
Well, he was one of the first people to join our group. His post-traumatic stress disorder was very strong, and he has worked for many years to get through the numbness—to feel again. He goes back to Vietnam twenty five-years after he was there and arrives in time for Têt, which is the celebration of the lunar New Year, and he wrote a few lines of a poem called “Poem for Têt.” It’s a very important poem about how the world can cure us.
POEM FOR TÊ
Lang Cô village, Viêt Nam
Lunar New Year, 31/1/1995
This is the poem
that will save my life
this the line that will cure me
this word, this, the word word the one
this breath the one I am
See, when we listen, we breathe in one another’s words. So this poem is about breathing each other, communicating with one another. So you don’t feel so isolated anymore. That’s what Ted told us—he didn’t feel so isolated anymore.
How do the veterans recently back from Iraq compare with those who you began to work with fifteen years ago—veterans of Korea, Vietnam, even veterans of the First Gulf War? Do you find differences in their stories?
No. Of course there are differences in where the war took place. Now, many of the stories in this book are from the Vietnam War, which we lost. It is still hard for the veterans to admit we lost a war. There’s a sense of betrayal, of loss. So yeah, there is that sense of loss, that sense of betrayal. But the human consequences, the way that they think and feel, the trauma of what happened—they’re the same from war to war.
Your own work with veterans was born out of trauma—one that nearly stole your own voice. Oakland was ravaged by fire—three thousand homes destroyed, twenty-five people killed. Your own father had just died, and you were finishing The Fourth Book of Peace.
Yes. 1991. I was coming back from funeral rituals for my father. And I turned on the radio, and I heard that the hills were on fire. And so I got there as quickly as I could, and I made my way up through the flames and over and under the fallen power lines because I was trying to save my book. I was trying to save The Fourth Book of Peace. The only copy of the manuscript was on my desk. And I got there and it was gone.
Everything?
The house, everything. The neighborhood, the forests. And I was standing in the middle of what looked like the land after Hiroshima was bombed, after Dresden, after Hue.
You were so traumatized that you couldn’t write for a while.
I couldn’t even read. I couldn’t read. I mean, this happens to many people, in trauma after trauma. You can’t read. And I couldn’t write, either. But it was not being able to read that was very disturbing.
You have said: “In the shock of the loss, I changed. ... But I wrote directly how I felt: there was no shape, just expressions of pain and loss. It was the way I wrote as a child: to huddle in a corner secretly, away from people, and make sounds, whimper, while writing.” How did you come out of that corner?
I founded a community around me. I brought together veterans who have been through terrible war. We wrote together and created a new community from all that destruction.
So writing became for you again what it had, what it would become for these veterans.
Yes.
A way through the loss.
Yes. Or to understand l
oss and what our lives are like when we’ve been through devastation. When we have participated in events that are inhuman, how do we become human again? How do we re-create ourselves? I kept saying: Make something out of nothing.
You make it very clear that art, poetry, fiction can help us come to terms with trauma. It can help us to heal and all that, but it doesn’t do anything to stop war in the first place. I mean, if a government is determined to go to war, there’s almost no way to stop that government, right? You campaigned against the Vietnam War. When the United States was about to bomb and invade Iraq, you were right there in front of the Bush White House—you and the other women in Code Pink, the feminist organization. And you were reading history and poems and hugging each other and singing.
And the dancers danced, and the drummers drummed ...
And the bombs fell.
And, yes. We used all our tools of nonviolence. We used all our arts. And then, twenty days later, shock and awe. So of course the question is, it doesn’t work? Nonviolence doesn’t work. Art doesn’t work. We did all of this, and we could not prevent the war. And four years later the war goes on.
Do you ever give up thinking you could make a difference?
Oh, yes. I give up. And I feel despair. “What’s the use?” But when I am unhappy, and in despair, and everything hurts, I always go to the writing. I just start setting down those words. And I follow the path that those words take me. They will always take me somewhere, and by the time I get there, by the time I finish a poem, or finish a story, I am a different person.