A Quote by Ken Liu
The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.
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I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.
When people stop me to say they love 'Workin' Moms,' it's not just that the show makes them laugh or is a great escape - they tell me my, or another, character's story is their story.
I'm not sure if my story will become a movie. Some of my western friends sent my story to people they know in the movie industry. But one consistent response was there aren't any main western characters in my story, so it's unlikely to be made into a movie in English.
If I'm telling an L.A. story, I want to tell a fresh L.A. story and show places that haven't been shown before.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
Faced with today's problems and disappointments , many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.
I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives.
Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.
But I believe in fair trade, and I will tell you, I have many, many friends heading up corporations, and people that do just business in China, they say it's virtually impossible. It's very, very hard to come into China. And yet, we welcome them with open arms.
In 2006, I became the fist American to be allowed to go visit their astronaut center in China in Beijing. I think that it makes sense for the U.S. to work with China in the future and I hope to see, if the political atmosphere between the United States and China allow for us to do more cooperation together, especially in the area of human space flight. I think in the same way that it's help improve the relations between the U.S. and Russia; it would help to improve the relations between the U.S. and China.
If the right idea comes up, and it feels true to talk about somebody being in a truck, and that's the only way to tell the story, then I will reluctantly tell the story that way.
The way I write, I need to tell the true story. I can't just make a story up. So I have to let the things happen to me and allow myself to work through my thoughts.
I think we all are born inside of our parents' narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don't ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories.
Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.
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