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Three Gorges Dam: On Culture and Forgetting

In 1998, while working in Beijing, I became fascinated by the Three Gorges Dam, a massive project to dam up Asia’s longest river. Envisioned by Sun Yat-Sen in 1919 as a symbol of Chinese power and finally completed nearly a century later, the dam that was heralded by the Chinese government not only as a major source of hydraulic power but also as as an unmatched feat of engineering. Yet the dam promised from the beginning be an environmental and cultural disaster on a nearly unheard-of scale. My research on the subject, along with a thought-provoking encounter with a Chinese geologist on a bus bound for Xian in the summer of my 28th year, inspired my first novel, Dream of the Blue Room. Published in 2003 and set against the backdrop of the Yangtze River during the dam’s construction, the novel centers not only on the narrator’s personal story, but also on the larger story of the dam and the massive erasure of personal and national narratives brought about by the flooding of hundreds of ancient cities. As the narrator travels down the river, she witnesses cities being abandoned, ancient structures giving way to the rising waters of the Yangtze.

At the time my novel was published, the dam had yet to be completed. Criticizing the dam was still unwise for Chinese citizens, who could face severe repercussions for speaking up about a project that had such widespread government support. But as early as 2007,the government run Xinhua News Agency reported that, if problems weren’t corrected, the dam could lead to environmental catastrophe. And this week, The Washington Post reports that the Chinese government is finally admitting its mistakes, as droughts and other disasters are now being blamed on the dam.

As the crisis has worsened in recent weeks, the spotlight has returned to the dam, releasing a torrent of pent-up blame on the project, not only for the drought but also for recent earthquakes, pollution and the hardship faced by the 1.4 million residents who have been relocated for its construction… As a result, in the past two weeks, the government has made rare admissions of mistakes with the project. The most dramatic came last month when the State Council, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, acknowledged “urgent problems,” in a statement intended to counter mounting public anger.

Novels are as much a record of the times we live in as they are a reflection of the author’s experiences in, and fears about, the world, an expression of the writer’s obsessions. Dream of the Blue Room was my first book-length foray into the subject of memory. A massive inundation of water, one of nature’s most powerful forces, threatens to destroy a nation’s collective memory. The Three Gorges as they appear in my novel no longer exist. Many of the towns mentioned in the book are now buried beneath a massive, stagnant lake, their inhabitants eking out an existence far away from the homes where their families lived for generations. The dam threatens the loss of memory on a massive scale. But it may also be the starting point of a new kind of oral history. When the physical things that define us are gone, what are we left with but story? Stories, after all, do not live in things. They live in the words we pass down from one generation to the next. This is not to say that a loss of place by human folly is acceptable, or justifiable. But erasure, sadly, is in our nature, as is the hubris that precedes it.

The Persistence of Memory and the Neurological Origins of Fear

According to an article by Roger L. Clem and Richard L. Huganir published recently in Science Magazine, it is possible to erase fear memories.

When I saw the headline about “Fear Memory Erasure,” my interest was immediately piqued. The things that one obsesses over in private invariably make it into one’s books…which is to say, memory and forgetting were bound to worm their way into one of my books at some point.

Toward the end of The Year of Fog, Abby wishes that she could take a “forgetting pill,” because all of her familiar beloved places in San Francisco are tinged with the difficult memories of her search for Emma. She would like to forget the year that she has just endured, she would like to forget the intense emotions, and the fear, all of it. Because to remember a thing is to relive it, for better or worse.

As it turns out, selective forgetfulness isn’t just a fantasy. Here’s the abstract for the article:

Traumatic fear memories can be inhibited by behavioral therapy for humans, or by extinction training in rodent models, but are prone to recur. Under some conditions, however, these treatments generate a permanent effect on behavior, which suggests that emotional memory erasure has occurred. The neural basis for such disparate outcomes is unknown. We found that a central component of extinction-induced erasure is the synaptic removal of calcium-permeable amino-3-hydroxyl-5-methyl-4-isoxazole-propionate receptors (AMPARs) in the lateral amygdala. A transient up-regulation of this form of plasticity, which involves phosphorylation of the glutamate receptor 1 subunit of the AMPA receptor, defines a temporal window in which fear memory can be degraded by behavioral experience. These results reveal a molecular mechanism for fear erasure and the relative instability of recent memory.

It’s heady stuff, not particularly friendly to the untrained ear, and half of it went over my head; but one thing that stood out to me is the role of the amygdala (Abby delves into this small but powerful structure in the brain in her attempts to understand the complex workings of memory. I delved into it by visiting a neurologist, an odd and infinitely entertaining man with a glamor shot of himself in full medical regalia on the wall of his office, a man who sucked on Mentos during our entire visit, prior to pointing out the rascally amygdala on a model brain perched on his desk). The removal of a particular substance from the amygdala seems to be the key to the removal of fear and the “instability of recent memory.”

Where Stories Begin

Not long ago, I was sitting with my young son, telling him a story, when he interrupted me to ask, “Where did that story come from?”

“I just thought of it,” I said.

He was not satisfied. “But where did it come from?”

“From my imagination,” I said.

“Where’s your magic nation?”

“In my mind,” I said.

Oscar’s question is a variation of the same one I heard again and again from graduate students during my years teaching creative writing, the same question I hear every time I do a reading or visit a book club: where do stories begin?

I imagine every writer would have a different answer. For most, it involves some kind of percolation. Something occurs to you in the shower, or during a walk, or while down in the garage doing laundry. Days later, or weeks or months later, that original idea surfaces in the mind, and something else is layered on top of it. If the idea seems urgent enough, you get yourself to the notebook or the computer and write it down. It is possible to go for months of creative drought, but I’ve learned not to get too discouraged. Humans are born storytellers. I always trust that something will come; eventually, I’ll find my story.

When I’m feeling particularly uninspired, I try to find something mind-blowing to read. Sometimes, if I am very fortunate, I happen upon a book or essay that jogs my imagination, something that loosens the rust around the synapses and gets a story moving.

A couple of years ago, I was about fifty pages into the novel that would become No One You Know. I had a basic plot, and a melange of ideas around which to construct the story. I knew, for example, that I was interested in the fine line between fact and fiction, the way stories shape our lives. I knew that I wanted to capture the spirit of San Francisco, my adopted home. I knew that the story would be told by Ellie Enderlin, a coffee buyer in her mid-thirties who had lost her sister Lila–a math prodigy at Stanford–to violent crime twenty years before. Lila’s murder was sensationalized in a true crime book written by Ellie’s English professor, whose version of events derailed the life and career of a mathematician named Peter McConnell, with whom Lila had been working to solve a centuries-old mathematical puzzle.

During this time, I had lunch in North Beach with a writer friend and teaching colleague–Juvenal Acosta. We got to talking about our favorite books. Juvenal had high praise for Graham Green’s The End of the Affair, and couldn’t believe I’d never read it. I went right out and checked the book out from the library; six months later it was still sitting in my office, full of post-it notes. Eventually I returned it, paid the fine, and bought my own copy. It is one of the most bedraggled books I own. Bedragglement is evidence of a book’s high standing in a person’s life. A book that has been well-loved bears the marks.

The End of the Affair is the story of a love affair gone wrong, with the mystery of the beloved’s death front and center, but it’s also a book about writing, about finding one’s story and figuring out the best way to tell it.

Like most novels, No One You Know grew out of several ideas that had been percolating over a period of time. But ultimately, it was The End of the Affair that provided the opening impulse for the book. Greene’s novel begins with the line, “A story has no beginning and no end. Arbitrarily one chooses the moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Twenty years after the tragedy that has defined her life, Ellie must decide for herself, as we all must, where her story truly begins.

Purchase The End of the Affair. Purchase Our Man in Havana.

This post originally appeared in 2009 on my blog, Sans Serif.

Now available: The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, originally published in 2001 by the University of Massachusetts Press and winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, is now available for Nook, Kindle, and other ereaders.

“The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character…smart and adept…” The New York Times

“This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions has a novel’s heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women’s lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.” ~The Boston Globe

“Richmond’s writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.” Publishers Weekly

The New York Times Book Review:
The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character. Gracie is nearly 30 when we first meet her, sitting in a rented car on the way to the Jersey Shore and just about to break up with her Bruce Springsteen-obsessed boyfriend. Most of the stories circle similar small, critical moments. In the crushingly sweet and brief ”Curvature,” for example, Gracie stands in the doorway of her sister Celia’s bedroom and watches her mother dress the wound on Celia’s back, made by surgery to correct curvature of the spine. A child at the time, Gracie envies the intimacy between her mother and sister and, in those few minutes, recognizes her mother’s capacity for sacrifice and tenderness. In ”Mathematics and Acrobatics,” set years later, Celia and her young daughter, Roberta, witness a bus accident on an icy Georgia road. Celia doesn’t stop to help the victims, and Roberta’s insensitive reaction to the scene makes Celia question both her mothering abilities and her own response to the crash. The settings here — from the Alabama coast to Iceland — frequently shift, as does the perspective; there are stories from the point of view of each of Gracie’s three sisters and a few of her childhood friends…smart and adept.”

About THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS

A series of locations both familiar and exotic delineate the nineteen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the New South.

Michelle Richmond introduces us to a memorable extended family, in which lies come more easily than forgiveness, and parents and siblings conceal the truth as often as they reveal it. In many cases, the women are forced to choose—between family and lovers, safety and self-sufficiency, the religion they grew up with and the reality of the world they have found for themselves.

In “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right,” twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In “Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force,” a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In “The World’s Greatest Pants,” three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.

An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. “Propaganda” finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband’s lengthy absence. In “Fifth Grade: A Criminal History,” adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences. A woman dancing naked on a bridge in San Francisco is the central figure of the title story.

The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in this volume. “O-lama-lama” portrays the scene of a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while “Slacabamorinico” celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In “The Last Bad Thing,” a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.