Jan 19, 2021
On Worldbuilding and the Question of Resistance
In fiction, you can feel good about resistance without actually resisting anything.
Matthew Salesses was adopted from Korea and is the author of two novels, THE HUNDRED-YEAR FLOOD and I'M NOT SAYING, I'M JUST SAYING, and three books forthcoming: DISAPPEAR DOPPELGÄNGER DISAPPEAR: A NOVEL (Little A, August 2020), CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD (Catapult Books, January 2021), and an essay collection (Little A, August 2021). In 2015, Buzzfeed named him one of 32 essential Asian American writers. He teaches fiction writing and Asian American literature at Coe College.
In fiction, you can feel good about resistance without actually resisting anything.
The satisfaction people take in free will comes not from their ability to choose, but from their ability to feel like they’ve chosen.
In my family, race itself did not exist. If I wanted to be real, I could not experience what was not real.
If the world responds to our silence and not to our love, then it teaches us that silence is a condition of our development.
