Alexander Chee
If you died and no one knew your stories, something more than you has been lost
Ican say I was probably always going to become a writer. As a boy, I loved stories perhaps most of all. First as the nighttime ritual with my father, who invented them out of whole cloth, taking the stuffed animals on my bed and making voices for them at bedtime, bringing them to life. Or with my mother, who told stories of her family. The graves in the family graveyard came to life under her attention. I remember when her great aunt died, one part of her grief came in part at the thought of the stories that were as yet unrecorded in her, lost to death. It taught me a lesson: that stories mattered as much as anything. That if you died and no one knew your stories, something more than you had been lost.
The other stories my father told me were his stories of his life in Korea during the war, but these came only sparingly and only ever as warnings or lessons in toughness. He told them to me as he taught me to box in the basement.
They were mostly of him. I learned of his family’s stories in large part through my mother, who treated them like another family resource to be secured against oblivion. And
so, after he died, this included stories of him.
I know many families are like this. A writer does something more. They take what everyone else does and they go a little further; they write it down. They look into it for what may have gone unnoticed. As a child, my teachers regularly
called my mother in for conferences, telling her they were afraid I didn’t live in the real world. I was in books too much. They wanted me on the playground and making friends. But I had done that and that had not gone well. I had met kids who called me racist words that shocked my mother when I asked what they meant. Or sung songs about my slanting eyes or had muttered “ching chong” when I walked by. The teachers meeting with my mother weren’t prepared to protect me from this. They were the reasons my father was telling me stories of toughness. I was facing the legacy of the war that had marked his country, by then some 20 years after it had begun. And so I was reading all those books because I was living in the real world more than my teachers were and, if I could answer them now, I’d remind them that books are also, it turns out, the real world. “Who do you write for?” I am asked sometimes. I used to say I wrote for the boy
I was, hoping to find answers in those books at the library. And for those like him. But I also write for those who don’t seem to know how they put that boy in the hands of that man. The man who would change my life forever.
What I know now is that predators look for the weak, the injured, the child without friends, the one who stands out, perhaps too femme or too queer, too weird or too smart for the ease
of those who have spent their childhood dreaming of defending the status quo. The man who began our relationship by telling me how smart I was would eventually be threatened by me and work to isolate me. I was 12; he was 36.
We struggled for four years. And to the extent the abuse I suffered at his hands has shaped me as a writer, it came about because I decided I wanted to show how it was that a culture that isolates the children it deems unworthy should be considered complicit in how those children are attacked and destroyed.
“How does this happen?” people would say back then. They didn’t seem to know that the misogyny that leaves women abandoned by their families and the law, the homophobia and transphobia that makes pariahs of queer children, the racism that says some children are inherently worth protecting more than others, that this is how we are offered up to danger, child and adult both, how we are put in the hands of those who hope to do as they will and never pay a price, because they know no one with any power cares about those they are reaching for. I was marked for what came for me before he even met me. And so I chose to start my story there.