It's Time to Rewrite the Rules of Historical Fiction
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When you write a historical novel, one of the most common questions you get asked is, how did you research your book? How, readers and writers alike ask, did you learn about the time you were writing about? Did you visit the places you wrote about? Did you conduct mountains of interviews with sobbing survivors? Did you pore through grainy archival footage to find little factoids no one had written about while locked in the bowels of library basements? There is a curious, almost voyeuristic desire to peer into an author’s process. Historical fiction is lived experience, often traumatic, made legible and digestible by the novelist, and people want to know what kind of instruments the author used to excavate said experiences. They want to see the way the pudding is made; they want to understand the ways you stitched the broken shards of history together.
Indeed, many historical fiction authors have very robust research processes—an almost method-like way of inserting oneself into the core of the narrator’s mind. For her latest novel, A Single Thread, Tracy Chevalier, the bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, hiked 25 miles and learned needlepoint to properly fit herself into the mind of her protagonist, an embroiderer at Winchester Cathedral in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Min Jin Lee is known for her rigorous process, having filled at least ten banker’s boxes worth of notes related to her acclaimed novels Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires.
Now that I’m publishing my first novel—a work of historical fiction set in 1930s and 1940s colonized Malaysia, called The Storm We Made, about an unlikely female spy and the impact of her actions on her three children—I’m facing familiar questions about my research process. The questions seem innocuous enough, and well within the realm of reasonable questions to ask of an author of historical fiction. Friends and well-meaning readers want to know which authors’ research processes I mirrored, whose methods I preferred, whose I found cumbersome. An easy question, a throwaway—something I should have no problem answering. They want to visualize my process. Did I scour old Malaysian newspapers, stain my fingers black? Did I lock myself up studying ancient and fragile tapes to understand what people wore at the time? Did I interview thousands of survivors? And even though it seems simple enough to answer, I admit—I am defensive, crushed by the specificity of their questions, terrified to confront the very simple truth.
Because the answer, I’m afraid to whisper, is I did none of those things.
Six months ago, my UK publisher invited me to speak about my book at events in London and Wales to drum up excitement. My first event ever was at a well-known festival, where typically 200,000 people would attend about ten days of programming consisting of book-related panels, speeches, parties, and interviews. At the signing line, my first ever, where I was signing advance copies of my book, a woman came up to the table. I remember very little about her except that her nails were painted a beautiful forest green. She held out her early copy for me to sign.
“Did you ever go to the labor camp from your novel?” she asked, her green nails tapping against the plastic signing table.
She was referring to the labor camp at Kanchanaburi on the border of Thailand and Burma, made famous by the movie Bridge Over River Kwai. It was at this very labor camp that I placed one of my main characters, a teenage boy who had never faced any hardship before his stint at the camp. Documented history indicates that at this camp, nearly 300,000 Southeast Asian civilians and Allied prisoners of war were subjected to inhumane labor conditions. At least 100,000 people died of starvation, exposure, and torture.
“Because I did,” she continued.
She told me that a few years ago, she had gone on a multi-day tour where she stayed in a camp and visited Hellfire Pass, a section of the railway that gets its name from scenes of emaciated prisoners laboring to build it by torchlight, in what looked like an imagined scene from hell. As part of the tour, she paid her respects to monks at a temple erected nearby, and she reflected on the unfortunate history of the land she was standing on.
“I can’t believe you didn’t go!” she said. “You should go sometime. It’s an experience.”
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As she walked away from me clutching my book, my first instinct was derision. Ugh, I thought. Yet another tourist marching around death monuments to fulfill some morbid sense of achievement. I imagined her green fingernails drumming against the commemorative plaque of death as she exulted in her sightseeing achievement.
But later, I found myself filled with doubt. Had I missed a crucial opportunity for research? I had written a whole character who lived in a labor camp, who socialized with other boys like him, who endured the torture of adolescence while being tortured. My mind had chided the woman with the green fingernails as disrespectful, someone who reveled in her ignorance. But in fact, was I the one who, in not pressing my feet into the dirt that once housed the desperation of hundreds of thousands of men, the one who was thoughtless and disrespectful of the dead, and the survivors?
The first kernel of my book was written in a strange regurgitation. At the end of my first semester of graduate school in 2019, in a class led by the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino, she assigned us a final project—to write a short story based on a prompt.
“Write about someone who does something in a loop, repetitive. Give it stakes.”
I am ashamed to say I was not particularly diligent about this project. The semester was ending and I was ready to be done, plus in grad school everyone got As, so long as the assignments were turned in. I sat down to write, ready to cobble a few scenes together and finish my semester. Instead, five thousand words fell out of me in a two-day fever. I wrote about a teenage girl who had to run through a series of repeated and increasingly dangerous checkpoints during a war to get home before curfew. As she runs, desperate to make it home, she recalls the many difficult moments during the war that had gotten her to this point, praying that she would make it home before soldiers stormed the streets.
Before this assignment, most of my stories took place either contemporarily or in the 90s and early 2000s, all familiar timeframes to me. This was different. I remember being both relieved and tearful after I finished this story. I remember my voice shaking as I read the first paragraph aloud in class. This emotion confused me; I was certainly not alive during WWII, and these were not my recollections. What I had written, in my two-day fever was a scrapbook of stories my grandmother had told me about her life during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories I had clearly internalized, stories that had been gestating in me for years, waiting for the right impetus to make themselves felt. This was the first etching of what has become The Storm We Made, a fever dream of lore that had lived inside me, remembered.
Can memory be research? More importantly, can secondary memory, stories passed down through time, unreliable, malleable—can these stories be considered research? Before the pandemic, when I went home to Malaysia, my then 90+-year-old grandmother would hand me a mug of Lipton tea and tell me the same three stories about her experience surviving the Japanese Occupation of Malaysia during WWII. She would talk about how she was almost killed by an airstrike, about a kind Japanese man who worked at the railway and sometimes secured her family extra food coupons, and about her brother who, while conscripted to a labor camp, was caged in a chicken coop for a year. But each retelling changed a little, and the details were switched—was it only her brother in the chicken coop or was he stuck in there with others? Was it an airstrike or a burning building? Was the Japanese man an administrator or a tutor? Oral histories, as evidenced by the spottiness of my grandmother’s memories, can be unreliable.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine, in her remarkable essay, “On Roots and Research,” writes about how in college, she was afraid to contradict her white professor, who read from a textbook that called the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in 1920s Colorado simply a “social club.” This statement was in direct contradiction to the numerous stories Fajardo-Anstine had heard over the years from her own family, who told meandering anecdotes about the fear and violence the Klan had inflicted on Denver. But because of the inherent shakiness of oral history, Fajardo-Anstine worried that her family stories would not hold up against the professor’s textbook; she felt frozen, unable to defy. Like Fajardo-Anstine, I found myself second-guessing my grandmother’s accounts, setting aside the stories and memories passed down to me over the years. They cannot be accurate, I thought. And, similar to Fajardo-Anstine, there aren’t many records of the time period available for me to verify my grandmother’s recollections.
Then March 2020 arrived, and the world shut down. Libraries were mostly closed, and even the ones that were open felt dangerous to visit when the shelter-in-place order was in effect. Archives were unstaffed. My family in Malaysia had only one duty: the task of protecting my storytelling grandmother, the hero of my burgeoning novel. Once a sociable woman, her life became days of solitude because she had to be kept away from everyone—everyone was a potential carrier of her death sentence.
But still I felt compelled to write. For years when I have talked about my book, I have told people that I wrote the story first—I imagined things that happened and filled them in. But what really happened was I wrote from memory; from the stories I had internalized, but did not realize I carried within me. I wrote about a teenage girl’s friendship with a Japanese civilian that endured for years after the war. I wrote about a boy who disappeared early during the war and returned as a changed man after. I wrote about a mother who mixed gluey tapioca in with miniscule rice rations to keep her family alive. I wrote what I knew, and I was shocked to find that I knew much more than I thought I did. I did have help, though: my grandmother had gifted me her “memory book,” a brown notebook of loose anecdotes she’d started writing down in her older age, afraid to lose her memory. When I was done, I sent my manuscript to my history buff of a father, who did basic fact-checking for me. He reminded me that wartime dishware would have been enamel—not melamine, as I had presupposed. My uncle from Australia sent me a book of photos that he found—some of it government propaganda, but useful for me to understand how buildings looked at the time.
During the writing process, I often felt insecure about what I deemed were my insufficient research skills, my inability to find texts about the Southeast Asian history of occupation. I worried that without a binder of interview transcripts and a multi-page bibliography, I was nothing but an imposter to the genre—a disrespectful neophyte who shouldn’t be allowed into the halls of historical fiction.
Good historical fiction feels immersive. Despite the strangeness of the times, you, the reader, feel as though you are seeing the world through your narrator’s eyes, whether it’s a teen girl trying to hold her family together or a soldier marching to the front—it’s about the ability to become engulfed in the “story” part of the history, to feel the emotion and stakes of the moment, even if time has passed. And what is history if not stories passed down through time? The thing I had to realize was this: there simply isn’t much written about the histories of people living through WWII outside of the Western front. The history of colonized people continues to be written by those who are colonized.
In order to write my book, I had to think of my family and my own ancestral stories simply as an earlier iteration of the research process. Our stories, because they have not been given their due attention, have not yet become history. This meant relying on less “traditional” methods of research. Instead, conversations with my grandmother, fact-checking from a history buff father, and a book of propaganda photographs had to be enough. This is not to say that I did no traditional research at all and wrote an ahistorical novel. The internet helped me fill in dates of major battles. But it was my family who helped me fill in the little things that mattered, the daily life that was lived—the “story” part.
Memories are records. Yes, there is a shakiness to memories and a patchiness to oral history. But the power of fiction is its ability to transcend the wobbliness of facts—to write shaky moments into concrete existence and make them sturdier than the historical event. Memories make for rich fiction because they are specific, personal evidence—yes evidence—of a life lived. As the documentarians of family histories that have remained ignored by the Western sources, we must trust and rely on the stories our families tell us, and on the histories our ancestors have lived. Our stories deserve their place in history, too.
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