Dust and Other Stories by Yi T'aejun

Living submerged by the current of the age is like a spirit living beneath the water. They say that even the mulberry fields turn into blue ocean, but it's simply that all things follow the movement of the general current, and it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.

In Yi T'aejun's story "Unconditioned," the narrator witnesses a peasant woman filling up a small creek, pebble by pebble. Later, he learns that the spot was once a lake where the woman's son once drowned, closed off now by a dam. Little by little, the woman fills the remaining water with stones to make it vanish, hoping to free her son's spirit from where it lingers in the lake. In the very next story, "Before and After the Liberation," the author's stand-in, Hyon, quotes the paragraph of the story he's just written. Hyon is a moderately successful writer who struggles with the climate of censorship and intellectual repression that marks the Japanese occupation of Korea: his fellow writers take Japanese names, sprinkle their speech with Japanese words, and write in Japanese. Hyon yearns for freedom, and it eventually comes, but the political uncertainty and division of "after the liberation" brings its own contradictions and difficulties. Where can the writer go to write? Where can one go to be free?

The stories in Dust are all about these contradictions, and the competing social orders that constrict full life and self-expression. Yi (according to the back of the book and the scant information I can find on the internet) is known in Korea as "The One Who Went North," having moved from U.S.-occupied South Korea to Soviet-occupied North Korea, where, far from liberation, he was viewed with suspicion and sent into exile, where his fate is unknown. The title story of the collection is a superb piece of anti-U.S. and anti-South Korean propaganda about a Pyongyang book collector who travels to see his daughter in Seoul. It's a highly anticipated trip, and he brings with him a small nest egg to buy books--something that should be easier in the more literary south--but ends up almost immediately hustled into a prison cell by soldiers under the command of Syngman Rhee. Strings are pulled for his release, but he finds himself at a party with a boorish American general whose main characteristics, hilariously, are his love for steaks and whisky, as well as his enormous gut. It must be said: He got us. Americans rule this not-yet-officially-South Korea, buying up everything with their powerful dollar--including Hyon's beloved books--while inflation keeps basic necessities out of the hand of Koreans.

So, propaganda. It certainly explains a great deal about Yi's choice to flee the South for Pyongyang. And yet, like all great propaganda, there's a deeper truth that may go unnoticed by those whose agenda is propaganda only: where, exactly, is Hyon supposed to go in a divided Korea, where people have become increasingly pressed between two sides? The tragic final ending hardly seems to absolve the Soviet-sponsored North Koreans; any hope of return, or appreciating the North more, is closed off to the ravished writer.

Yi's stories are subtle things. There's a few murders and grisly deaths, but for the most part, there's little drama or melodrama. Resentments and verbal violence bubble up in ways that show us they were always there, beneath the surface of a Korea under the thumb of a foreign power, and then under the thumb of itself. I appreciated the smallness and subtlety of the stories, though I didn't always feel as if I understood the larger history that comes to bear on the characters. One of my favorites was "Tiger Grandma," a story about a stubborn old woman who is the final holdout in a program to increase literacy in her small Korean village. Many of the stories in this collection deal with small people: peasants, local clerks, fishermen, etc., all caught up in the upheavals of Korean history. In their small way, they struggle against the deadening forces of imperial occupation and political repression, but it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.

With the addition of North Korea, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 108!

The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote

A few years ago one of these unextinct Sinixt men killed an elk in his homelands. Then he called the game officials in Canada and turned himself in. They took the bait. When the province pressed charges against him for taking big game without a license, he pleaded not guilty. He cited his aboriginal rights to hunt in his own territory. And now that case is in court, and Canada will have to look at that man, standing in the middle of the room, and all his people around him, and Canada will have to admit that the Sinixt are not extinct. The Sinixt man is very brave. And so is the elk who gave himself. That man and that elk knew each other from long ago; they met in dreams and sweat, blood and forest. The man needed the elk; the people need the elk. Without the elk, there would be no case, no path home, no court for the man to present himself to the state and say: we are alive.

In August, I visited Big Hole National Battlefield in Montana, where American forces ambushed a group of Nez Perce who were in the midst of a "fighting retreat," trying to make their way to the Canadian border to escape confinement on reservations. Big Hole is hallowed ground, still a cemetery, where the bodies of Nez Perce leaders were buried. It's a place you want to walk through quietly. I bought Beth Piatote's book The Beadworkers in the gift shop there. I hadn't remembered it at the time, but I'd read some of Piatote's work in Poetry; I had been struck by the power in her appropriation of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Her collection The Beadworkers is a lovely kind of extended coda to a quiet walk through Big Hole: a loud assertion that the Nez Perce are still here, and their living stories are worth as much attention as their silences, their absences.

The pieces in The Beadworkers are a diverse bunch: some are relatively straightforward, like "Fish Wars," which might be my favorite. In "Fish Wars," a young girl worries that the tense conversations she overhears between her parents mean that, like her friend's parents, they're headed for divorce. When her father is arrested, her white schoolmates taunt her--just another drunk Indian--but the truth is that he's been arrested for illegal fishing, an act of civil disobedience in the "Fish Wars" of the 1970s and 80s in which tribes around Puget Sound pressured the government to recognize their treaty rights. "Falling Crows" tells the story of a young Indian who comes back from Afghanistan missing an arm and leg, and his extended family's attempts to help him adjust to his new existence.

But others are more experimental, like the trio of pieces labeled "Feast I," "Feast II," and "Feast III" that open the book. "Feast I" is a poem that, littered with Salish words, at first estranges and alienates a casual reader. But "Feast II" provides a kind of dictionary or key, elaborating on each term. We read the section quoted above and now we know what it means when Piatote writes, "where wewukiye bugle / in fog-mantled mornings. "Feast III," a story about a pair of women living on the Nez Perce reservation of the early 20th century, seems rather slight and uneventful on its own, but when paired with the other two parts we see the way that the poem, the unfamiliar Salish words of "Feast I," the piecemeal anecdotes of "Feast II," combine in the actual living of a life. 

The most unusual piece in The Beadworkers is "Antikoni," a dramatic retelling of the Antigone myth. In Piatote's version, the brother Polynaikas is a set of remains held in a tribal museum, and the king Kreon is the tribal chief who punishes Antikoni/Antigone for stealing the remains and ceremonially burying them. Interestingly, the piece depicts Kreon as rather understandably trying to navigate the demands of the tribe and the demands of the federal government; NAGPRA--the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act--is depicted as a kind of bureaucratic force that keeps tribal members like Antikoni tied up in red tape and reinforces the very practices it's supposed to solve. Tribal politics are a repeated theme of The Beadworkers; in "wIndin!" a woman works to create a tongue-in-cheek board game that satirizes the greed and self-interest of tribal government. Kreon is something of an accommodationist, who thinks he's doing the best he can for his people under the law, but Antikoni makes it clear that in doing so he has alienated himself from them: "I do pity you, Uncle, for you have long ago admitted yourself / To this prison, a darkness of another name."

Thematically, this is one of the most interesting things about The Beadworkers: its political approach is as much about tribal government as it is the federal government. Given the extent to which Indigenous writers know they are writing for a largely non-Indigenous audience, tribal government tends to be more or less ignored. Piatote does a great job of making a critique that's understandable, even universal. And she does so with a great deal of creativity and innovation.

Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman

At Whitehorse and even before Whitehorse, I was unsettled. I was not right. This is a condition that many people experience after arriving in Alaska. Nothing here is fixed, nothing is any better. Where is there left to go, except out of your mind?

OK, last Alaska book. The stories in Leigh Newman's 2022 collection Nobody Gets Out Alive all take place in her native Alaska, sometimes in the seedy strip malls of Anchorage, and sometimes in the not-so-distant wilderness, tinged with danger, but still accessible to upper middle class Anchoragites who have access to their Super Cub light aircraft. Many of the stories are related, centering on a group of Anchorage friends and their children, all of whom pass various traumas back and forth like chicken pox. These stories revolve around, as best as I can tell, a single and significant adulterous affair that destabilizes friendships and families.

But the truth is, I couldn't really make sense of them. I found myself going back and forth from story to story, trying to figure out whether the character from story Y was the same as the character from story X, trying to see how the pieces fit. Then again, even when I made the connection easily--Yes, I see that the bossy adult Jamie of "The Valley of the Moon" is the same as the beleaguered child on a rafting trip in "High Jinks"--the knowledge did nothing for me. I had the feeling, instead, of a collection of stories revolving around a great absence; in their insistence on dealing with the margins and the fallout rather than the thing itself it seemed to me that the stories had an emptiness at the middle of them. What am I supposed to get out of the "blue bear," a stuffed hunting trophy whose fur is discolored by glacial water or perhaps a blueberry diet, and which the older generation of Anchoragites steal or pass back and forth according to their wounded egos and jealousies? The symbolism of it stands out bright and clear, but the deeper feelings it symbolizes were lost on me.

So, I had a lot of trouble with these. Even on an individual level, I struggled to incorporate the significance of details, or make sense of the way people behaved. If the connection between adult Jamie and kid Jamie was lost on me, it was almost more disorienting to see characters who were the same but clearly not meant to be the same people, as in the troublesome autistic children at the heart of "Alcan, an Oral History" and "Slide and Glide." But certain themes did become clear to me. Mostly, these stories seem to suggest that, despite one's hope for a deeper connection to nature, or to wilderness and raw human spirit, Alaska is no different than anyplace else. "Nothing here is fixed," as Maggie writes in "Alcan, an Oral History," "nothing is any better." The families of the interrelated stories are known to one another because they own cabins on a place called Diamond Lake, which is the staging ground for the rafting trip of "High Jinks" and the crosscountry ski trip of Slide and Glide, each perhaps undergone heedless of the risk toward the youngest children who participate. And in each case these trips do bring out raw truths--enmities laid on the table, loveless marriages lade bare--and yet they don't allow anyone to move forward, or change, or understand themselves any better.

The strongest story, I thought, was the longest, "Alcan, an Oral History," about several road trippers who are making urgent escapes from the Lower 48 to Alaska on the highway that runs from British Columbia and the Yukon into Alaska, and how their stories become interwoven. A poor agricultural student travels with a friend, whom she realizes for the first time comes from a rich but hateful household. An abused woman travels with her difficult children, away from one soured relationship toward another she knows is only doomed. The way that these stories come together, involving a Folger's coffee can full of cash, a souvenir vial of Alaskan gold, and a depressed waitress at a highway truck stop, is ludicrously convoluted, but for the first and only time in the collection, the overpacked narrative is given enough space on the page to develop naturally. Some of these characters will end up in Alaska, and some of them won't--I particularly liked the way that one of the ag school students becomes a famous outsider artist after whittling faces into the trees of a secluded forest--but whether they will or not seems immaterial to the lives they will end up living. Not, at least, in comparison to who ends up with the coffee can of cash.