Kuo’s version of Chinese history
Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.
That’s something that every writer of fiction knows. Especially writers of fiction that tackles history. Or politics.
Or both.
Alex Kuo, longtime creative writing instructor, 2002 American Book Award winner and Washington State University’s first writer-in-residence, knows the truth of this better than most.
As evidence we present “Panda Diaries,” (University of Indianapolis Press, 128 pages, $16.95 paper), Kuo’s most recent novel and the September selection of The Spokesman-Review Book Club.
Kuo will read from his book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Auntie’s Bookstore.
A historical/political allegory, “Panda Diaries” revolves around Colonel Ge, a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a member of the Chinese secret service who has been relegated to a remote northern outpost.
In looking back at Ge’s life, Kuo includes the character’s experiences with the indigenous peoples called Oroqens; his ordeal with the People’s Liberation Army; the events that occurred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square; and much more.
Through this combination of plotlines, Kuo gives us his own version of 20th-century Chinese history.
If only things were that simple, though. For one thing, Ge’s mailman is a panda bear.
For another, Kuo doesn’t explore just Chinese history. Among the various references he includes here and there: George Armstrong Custer, CNN, Richard Nixon, the Sylvester Stallone action film “Rambo 3,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Roy Rogers’ palomino Trigger and American bird illustrator John James Audubon.
And then there’s this apparent non-sequitur-type passage from Page 70:
“In equal numbers, the Muslims in China and the Mormons in Utah are being recruited for espionage work by their respective countries. They have until sundown to prove that their ecclesiastical war against rats, mice, locusts, and weevils can be appropriated for their secular war against wolves, bears, pigs, chickens, cows, horses, and other humans, albeit the Mormons had a head start on the first and last in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the early nineteenth century.”
Of course, in writing that is seemingly surreal – or at the very least that boasts elements of magical realism – who’s to say what’s a non sequitur?
That Kuo knows what he is doing is hardly a question worth asking.
Born in Boston but raised in China during World War II, he attended school in Hong Kong before earning his bachelor’s degree at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa.
He’s published more than 300 poems, stories, photographs and essays in a variety of publications (such as the literary journal Ploughshares), won numerous fellowships and taught at several colleges and universities.
A professor at WSU since 1979, Kuo counts among his students noted Northwest writer Sherman Alexie.
Named WSU’s first writer-in-residence in 2001, Kuo saw his short-story collection “Lipstick and Other Stories” be named one of a dozen American Book Awards winners in 2002.
The irony: Some 57 publishers had rejected the book before it was picked up by Soho Press, an independent publisher in New York.
As for “Panda Diaries,” Tarisa A.M. Matsumoto, a reviewer for the International Examiner, the Journal of the Northwest Asian Pacific American Communities, wrote that the novel forces us to “consider our place in the natural world instead of assuming our domain over it. …
“Kuo wants us to remember our history, not trust our stories to chance. … (He) shows us our history, the ugliness of it, and how the hope that we can become better always remains.”
And if he can’t do this through the absolute truth, then there’s always the realm of inspired fiction.