Hesitation, Authority, and Building the World As You See It

Graffiti of a wooden rowboat in black on a wall.

This week I learned about Bengali magicians working to preserve their mentor’s home. I’ve been reading folktales about jealous queens and urban studies papers about the development of Dhaka high rises. Photographs, art pieces, old magazine ads -- I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of research.

Research is actually a very exciting part (says the eternal nerd). Like research for an academic paper, I am starting wide and then narrowing my focus based on what calls to me. Unlike research for an academic paper, I don’t actually know what I’m looking for or how much any one thing will influence the end result. Tabla music could teach me how to set the tone and pace of the novel. I could write my characters into the black and white photographs I’ve been looking at. Or both, or neither.

You can probably already see how easy it is to get overwhelmed.

I have a huge set of possibilities – and responsibilities. I agree with Wonderbook author Jeff Vandermeer: sometimes fantasy worlds are easier to construct than real ones. In the real world, I feel clogged with my assumptions and reactions. I’ve read empathetic and complex depictions of Bangladesh and the United States by now, but I’ve also read a lot of generic national histories, a lot of savior narratives, and a lot of just factually inaccurate pieces (several travel guides come to mind). And sometimes instead of absorbing the research, I get seduced by the image that I have for my characters, based on whatever approximation that I’ve read in other novels. There’s a difference between a pastiche of techniques and Frankenstein’s monster.

I needed a way to systematically think about the way I was creating worlds and the characters that inhabit them. Someone online suggested a series of essays called Writing the Other, and I inhaled them. They gave me the much-needed structure for how to go about research; they offered ways to re-evaluate and interrogate myself as I am drafting. Most importantly, they gave me back some confidence in my process.

One can never absorb all aspects of a society. Our social position – class, gender, race/ethnicity, to name a few – changes our access to materials and experiences. There’s no such thing as an impartial observer. I hold that tension in my head all the time as I write, hoping of course that it pushes me as I write my wriggling first draft.

Research Update: Layers of Analysis

I'm coming up on the end of my stay here in Bangladesh, and I must admit that it's been a very up and down ride. High points (like learning Bengali, spending time with family, seeing amazing locales, shopping, learning a lot) and low points (like getting your arm partially eaten by a cockroach - literally the worst). But one thing that has been consistent throughout is the work I've been doing, not only on my own projects, but on my larger goal of researching perceptions of madness/mental illness.

Research Wrap-Up: Asian American Psychology Project

I am pleased to announce that I have completed my project for the Active Mind Emerging Scholars program - check out my blogging over at the Active Minds website and the research zine that I made for this fellowship! You can read about my initial work, my process, and my full findings over at their blog.

It was a great opportunity to research something that I've become increasingly more interested in throughout this year; Asian American women and their relationship to therapy and psychology is mostly confined to classes such as Cultural Psychology. But the ways in which culture and intersections of identity relate to how people approach services (in my research, college campus mental health services) cannot be confined. They affect the day to day decisions we make about our own health based on many factors not just related to race or gender, but to expectations and personal experiences as well. As my research paper asserts, much of the work goes into making counseling and other services more accessible through recognizing that different pressures exist for these groups and finding ways to address them that better the infrastructure of the resources as a whole.

Anyway, it's been a fascinating and fantastic ride that has now come to a close, and I invite you to check out the proceedings!

Research Update: A Village Near the River

These past four days, I have been conducting my very first interviews on Bangladeshi perceptions of madness and mental health - I jumped in feet first with some of (what I consider) my most challenging interviews with people in Bahadurpur, a rural village in Kushtia, Bangladesh. These villagers spoke no English and often had troubles understanding the questions we had set up, even through the translator. Background noises of screaming babies and goats abounded and there was even a brief rainstorm (as it is the beginning of monsoon season) that interrupted one of our interviews with persistent rainfall on a tin roof.

Aside from the interviews themselves, the location was hot and the power often went out, making even the available fans shut off. Bugs, lizards, frogs, you-name-it got into our sleeping quarters (and onto my toothbrush, ick!). But we made it out alive - despite a very real scare that we would be hit by a bus on the drive back to Dhaka - and with some very good material to be translated.

Also, in spite of my complaints above and the other zillion small challenges of being in the village, rural life can also be astonishingly beautiful. When not working on research, I got to watch some of the clearest lightning storms of my life and see the bright stars at night, walk through groves of all types of fruit-bearing trees and play with docile goats (who act a lot like cats, believe it or not). I'll describe all this in more florid language to come in my Friday fiction (ooh, spoilers!), but all in all, the trip was a tiring, mildly stressful, but ultimately rewarding excursion.

Learn more about my research.