PAUL YOON
Photo by Peter Yoon
Paul Yoon is the author of two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year. His novel Snow Hunters won the Young Lions Fiction Award. In this interview, he discusses his lyrical new novel Run Me to Earth. The book focuses on the lives of three orphans who try to survive the devastation of war in 1960s Laos.
Interview by Tyler Nesler
What initially attracted you to the setting and time period of Laos of the 1960s and the conflict between the Royal Lao Government, the Pathet Lao, and the secret U.S. bombings there?
I had been working on and researching stories about the trauma of conflicts, of being forced to flee, survive, and start over again in another environment for about seven years—starting with Snow Hunters, my first novel, and then The Mountain, which focuses on this theme globally. I had always intended to work on a trilogy, and it was while researching The Mountain that I discovered what happened in Laos, which was not really a part of the history books I was learning from when I was growing up. Writing always begins, for me, with a desire to learn, to be educated, and that’s where it started: I wanted to learn about what happened there.
What was the impetus of the three orphan characters (Alisak, Prany, and Noi)? Are they and the ruined French colonial mansion that serves as a makeshift field hospital based on any particular real life figures and local settings?
Not really, no. Although my grandfather started an orphanage after the Korean War, so I’m sure that had a lot to do with it. My father’s a retired physician, so hospitals and doctors have always been in my life—as have the orphans my father grew up with: very few photos of them exist, and I think the inability to imagine their faces always haunted me. A story is never about one thing; it’s always multifaceted and many-headed. So in many ways I was exploring Laos and the bombings but also exploring my own family history as well.
The bonds and personality dynamics established between Alisak, Prany, Noi, and the doctor Vang are crucial to setting the tone and story threads for the remainder of the book across several decades. What particular challenges did you face when building these essential interpersonal foundations in the first part of the book?
I knew my protagonists were children. And I knew a doctor, no matter his good intentions, was hiring them to risk their lives every day in a kind of insane way. I was also aware that perhaps the insanity was no more than the situation they all had been living in for years. I struggled a lot with that. Of creating characters who were, and would turn out to be, both wolf and sheep, so to speak. Where there was a lot of culpability and selfishness everywhere but also a lot of good intentions and heroism and strength. Of always trying to stay true to the complexity of a life, I suppose, regardless of the unimaginable situation around them.
Run Me to Earth, Simon & Schuster, 2020
When you began the book, did you plan on expanding the storyline over a long period of time, or had you initially thought of keeping the narrative focus on the orphans when they were young and working at the field hospital? What were some difficulties in taking these expansive time periods and distilling them into briefer segments?
I’m always interested in writing books that present a really vast canvas but do it in the most minimal way possible. What I knew going in was that I wanted to write about the bombing campaign the U.S. undertook in Laos during the Vietnam War, and I also knew I wanted to write a weird sequel to my long story in The Mountain called “Still a Fire” because I had never felt really done with those characters and that setting—that story is set in France, post-WWII. So I knew I had Laos on one side of the canvas and France on the other, and it was a matter of how to create a path between them. And then, after that, figuring out the other sides of the canvas, what was above, what was below, what exactly that path was, etc.
Throughout the narrative, the characters hang onto things in order to find something secure in the midst of so much chaos and instability (the orphans talk about the fantasy places they go at night, Vang has his elegant and measured piano playing, Auntie has her methodical sewing and clothing repair).
When writing the book, how important was it to you to explore the ways that people grasp for sanity and stability in the midst of so much insecurity? Were there any particular literary works that influenced your approach with this book?
Part of this, I confess, was that I myself needed some kind of anchor while I was working on this book. We inhabit our work. It’s hard not to. And when you’re researching and writing a book about a bombing campaign that lasted nine years in a country the size of Utah, it affects you. I began to create objects in the narrative to keep me sane and stable. Every time a piano recurred, I held on to it like a raft. So I brought that to my characters, trusting that they needed it, too. In terms of work, this book was really influenced by Anuk Arudpragasam’s magnificent The Story of a Brief Marriage. I was also reading Miriam Toews’s Women Talking while working on a draft of this. And I’ll always be indebted to the books of Michael Ondaatje and Nadeem Aslam.
The ways in which characters react to cycles of violence are contrasted both by acts of violent retribution and acts of grace. When Prany and Vang are finally freed from their time of imprisonment and torture, they locate their interrogator/torturer and enact a shocking revenge on him which ultimately leads to their own undoing.
However, characters such as Auntie, Khit, and Alisak often display a kind of grace or benevolence towards others even though they have also suffered terrible injustices. What was it like to balance the interplay of different reactions with these characters to trauma and injustice? Did you try to seek a kind of equilibrium of tone between both violent and graceful episodes/reactions?
I think this cycles back to the idea that a story is never one thing. It’s essential, for me, to attempt to capture the widest spectrum on the page. That could be evoking all the layers of characters, as I mentioned before, the same way that we are layered humans, with a wide-range of feelings and attributes and flaws and goodness, but it can also pertain to the spectrum of the story itself. I felt that if the world I was building contained great violence then it must also contain the opposite. If it contained grace, as you said, or beauty, then it must also contain the opposite. And everything in the middle. And so on. I was always thinking of how to create as many layers as possible in that world. Because, again, that feels true to the real world.
The book has a close third person narration which shifts to different characters at various intervals of the novel. What do you think the advantages are of focusing closely in third person on characters versus writing them all in direct first person voices? Did you ever attempt that approach, or is writing in third person more of your natural default? How do you think this book would have impacted the reader differently if it was written in first person?
This is my opinion and my opinion alone, but whenever I experience really great first person novels or short stories, there is that sense that the story needs to be told, to an imaginary listener, to me, the reader. It is a kind of sharing. This act of sharing, for the most part, didn’t feel true to the characters I was building. They were trapped in a world that was in many ways an unfathomable box they couldn’t get out of, and I wanted to evoke that as strongly as possible. I wanted to evoke their isolation and the trauma of that isolation, and I thought third person would do a better job of presenting this. Later on, though, we essentially have long monologues, a conversation between two people, and of course that was intentional—voices calling up after that box has been shattered and left behind.
What attracts you to the aspects of dislocation and to exploring the complex ways characters deal with lifelong traumas? Do you think you will continue to explore these themes in future writings?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this these past weeks. I’ve devoted over seven years of my life—and three books—exploring facets of migration and conflicts and the rebuilding of identities and lives, and I keep telling myself that I’m done. I have nothing else to contribute to this at this point. But then a part of me wonders: Do we spend our lives tackling one thing, the same thing, over and over again, but in different ways? Are we ever done?
Purchase Run Me to Earth
Read more about Paul’s other books The Mountain, Once the Shore, and Snow Hunters
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Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.
