Representation Matters, or, a Story in Edits

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I know this veers perilously close to ‘what are you wearing?’ territory, but please, bear with me—What do you wear to sleep at night?

Flannel pjs? Pyjama shorts set? Night gown? Adult onesie?

Growing up in Canada within a lower-class immigrant family, the only pyjama sets I ever got were gifts. I mean, I knew what they were, of course I did. I watched TV. I’d even worn at least one set, when I was maybe two years old. I’ve seen the photo. The before times, when I lived in Hong Kong. Maybe, if my family had stayed, I’d have grown up with sets upon sets of coordinated tops and bottoms, all properly matched together for the sole innocuous purpose of being slept in.

As it was, I grew up with “sleep clothes,” the haphazard pairing of t-shirts and shorts my parents dressed me in for sleep as a child. It never once crossed my mind as strange.

Until I got to a comment during copy edits for In The Dark We Forget, my upcoming novel set in 2018: ‘Nightclothes’ is more common phrasing (in North America, at least). Change?

Before I continue, let me state for the record that I thoroughly enjoyed working with my editors on this book. I’m not just saying that to be politic or seem likable. I genuinely appreciated every bit of the hard work they put into my novel. They were all lovely to correspond with, and the respect was mutual all around. (Full disclosure: when I pitched this essay idea, I’d honestly remembered there being many examples where I had to explain cultural things to my white, male copy editor. But when I went searching for them, I really only found this one point, about ‘nightclothes.’ I think that speaks to this respect.)

As is common in publishing at large, everyone on the editorial team I worked with for this book is white. That fact, of course, doesn’t preclude them from being immigrants themselves, but we all know that not all immigration experiences are created equal. And in this novel, I speak to one version of the Chinese immigrant experience. In fact, I’ve sometimes referred to this book as “the immigrant story you didn’t know you were reading.”

What I mean by that phrase is that In The Dark We Forget doesn’t spend the bulk of its narrative describing exotic foods or navigating the cultural practices and mores of the Chinese diaspora. Though important secondary characters are indeed immigrants, and those experiences trickle down into the lives and histories of the main character, the book is not a multi-generational exploration of the immigrant experience in Canada. Which, of course, is certainly not a monolithic story. The nature of which non-white-centric books get published, however, just makes it seem that way.

Immigrant trauma isn’t the core of my book, but it does provide much of the cultural grounding. In creating the characters for this book, I ended up drawing a lot from the immigrant experiences I know best. Technically, I’m a first-gen immigrant, since I was born outside of Canada, but I was young enough that I was only ever schooled here. So for all intents and purposes, my lived experience mirrors much of second-gen kids. Certainly, that’s the space I most wanted to explore with the main character and her brother in In The Dark We Forget.

Which brings me back to “sleep clothes.”

There is actually a Chinese term for pyjamas. Like many children of the Chinese diaspora, I am sad to say I never learned to read Chinese, so I’m not going to pretend by including the characters here. But I spoke Cantonese growing up, so I at least remember the term. It’s actually two characters in Chinese, but it doesn’t break down literally into “sleep” and “clothes.” That’s just how I translated it in my head. I learned to read and speak English in a kindergarten classroom in Vancouver, BC. Through the subsequent years of my Canadian schooling, I did a lot of weird on-the-fly translations because I never had the chance to attend Chinese school, and my parents weren’t academically-inclined. I had to make it up as I went, and there were a lot of terms I never even thought to check the translations for. There still are, actually. I come up against some of them when I use my sadly rusting Cantonese with my mum.

I don’t claim to have read every Chinese diaspora story out there, of course, but in my readings of such, I’ve encountered a distinct binary. Either the immigrants’ children live double lives, fluently code switching between their mother and adopted tongues/cultures, which, let’s be frank, seems to be the gold standard. Or, they’re culturally and linguistically white, a practice older immigrants encouraged their children to master in order to assimilate and avoid trouble, but which brings a deep and painful cultural dissonance. Plus, the trouble comes anyway.

One of the most brutally beautiful aspects of crime fiction is that we create the crucibles which break down our characters to their very essence. Often, we (gleefully, in my case) tailor those metaphorical crucibles to be precisely the worst things our characters are equipped to handle. At the same time, we also create those same tortured characters. It’s a bit of a mad closed loop, but it’s what we do.

I enjoy the challenge of seeding the characters’ flaws and disappointments throughout the main narrative. My characters don’t go around immediately telling everyone they meet about their past histories, let alone their past traumas. Where’s the (dark, twisted) fun in that?

Not to mention—that’s just not the way most human beings interact with each other. My editors did not need to know my peculiar story of immigrant trauma. I do not need to tell them. Or you. But the trauma remains, embedded, shadowing every interaction. That part is unavoidable. However, it doesn’t exclusively define me. The making of a person, any person, involves so much more than only their specific injuries and pain.

That’s what we do when we—marginalized writers—create marginalized characters who exist beyond only their traumas. We fix that trauma into the back story, tattoo it into an invisible history. It doesn’t mean the traumas don’t inform choices, and bad choices at that. It means that the myriad matters of representation are subtle and discrete from the engine of our narratives.

So, when my white editor asked if I wanted to switch up a term to be more “North American,” I decided I didn’t want or need to unpack the unexamined assumptions behind that descriptor. I knew that the rest of the story would speak for itself.

‘Nightclothes’ is more common phrasing (in North America, at least). Change?

STET, I replied. It’s a cultural detail, from my personal history.

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