Products of Our Environment

As writers, we always talk about creating living, breathing characters, not in some Victor Frankenstein sense—we’re not actually bringing anyone to life even if the voices in our heads disagree (and disagree loudly)—but we’re making them feel real. One of the absolutely necessary, though not sufficient, conditions in this act of creation is to make our characters the product of their environment. Yet, we often forget that we cannot claim that our characters are the product of their environment if we don’t accept that we, ourselves, are the product of ours.

I’m often guilty of this, of turning writing into some abstract, intellectual exercise, of removing myself from it. Perhaps, it’s because my day job is analyzing the failings of international economic development (a naturally theoretical endeavor, though hopefully one with practical benefits). Perhaps, it’s because of an inner fear to reveal who I really am, to tell my own truth. Or perhaps, I’m just looking for excuses.

I have struggled on numerous occasions to acknowledge where I come from and how that influences me. As a college kid arriving on Long Island from across the pond twenty years ago, I knew well that passing the SATs with a high enough score to get a scholarship was not the same as feeling confident in speaking the language. And so, while I excelled in my classes, I often shied away from the more social aspects of being a college student as I didn’t want to be judged for speaking with a strong accent. Of course, I can’t say that my struggles matched those of my classmates (and other people) who faced immediate judgment based solely on their appearance. Still, it is a strange feeling being accepted as belonging until you open your mouth, and then you become the other. I’m not even saying it was always or even often a negative interaction. Most of my professors and classmates were interested in where I came from, but the initial conversation was always about where I was born and why I decided to come to the US, rather than who I was and what I cared about. That annoyed me for a while, of course it did; and it lowered my confidence since I was being defined as a token, rather than a human. But then I realized that was also on me as I was refusing to acknowledge that where I came from was a substantial part of who I was.

I was born in Bulgaria at a time when the country was still under a communist regime. Now Bulgaria is a member of the European Union and a fairly developed country (a high-income country according to the World Bank, where I now work) and a member (though perhaps not always a proud member) of the global West. But back then, things were vastly different. Control, structure, rules, and conformity were the names of the game. I was seven when communism fell, so while I can say some things about living under an oppressive regime, I was too young for that to have defined me; it did define the generations of my parents and grandparents, the generations that raised me, so through that secondary channel it did have an impact on me, but not one that a young mind could have rationalized.

I did grow up in the years of transition, though, and that changed or rather defined who I became. It’s difficult to explain communism or the free-for-all, lawless economic transition that followed it to someone who has only learned about it from afar rather than lived it, but I’ll try with a simplified (and as such imperfect) example. Imagine a large grocery store, or a supermarket. Now imagine one where the lighting is not very good, the thick hardboard shelves are worn and yellowing, and the entire store has a musty (but not necessarily unpleasant) smell. You get to the aisle with cereal. The shelves are all packed; there’s no lack of cereal. But here’s the thing. It’s all the same kind, and the most boring one you can imagine. Just oats in a plain gray box. No flavors, no chocolate, fruits, etc. No colorful, friendly boxes with anthropomorphized animals. There’s no choice. You take that box, pay some reasonable price, and go eat it in your kitchen that looks exactly like the kitchen of everyone else you know. That was communism.

Now imagine that same store, same lighting (if there’s electricity and that’s not a given), same smell, possibly the same person working the counter. Only there’s no cereal on that shelf. And it’s the same on all the other shelves. Any item the store has in stock is so precious that it stays behind the counter. Not that there are many items there either, but today there are bottles of sunflower oil and some loaves of bread. You have money, but the cashier would not sell you more than one bottle of oil and one loaf of bread. And lining up again or going to another store is useless because you need a rationing coupon to purchase anything. The next day, you hear the same store in a different part of town now has sugar. Sugar? You can make a lot of tasty treats with it, and you haven’t been able to find sugar anywhere for weeks. You line up with your rationing coupon and so does every other person in town. That’s a few hours of your life right there. For a bag of sugar. That’s what the first years of transition were like. And it is why after living in the US for more than twenty years, I still roll my eyes with incredulity at people who willingly stand in lines for anything—the newest iPhone, a pair of shoes, or what have you.

Let’s go back to that store again. Now, half of it is closed off (or the second half has been walled off and turned into another store). Glossy, colorful boxes are starting to appear here and there on the shelves (same shelves still). Maybe there’s a box of Corn Flakes with that green rooster on it, maybe a yellow box of Nestle cocoa, perhaps even a few cans of Pepsi or Coke, a bar of German or Swiss chocolate. You know, imported goods. And not imported from the Soviet Union or anywhere else in the former Eastern Bloc. Only now, you seldom have the money to afford any of it. You buy the necessities and eat a lot of jarred fruit preserves (still in that same kitchen most other people still have), and maybe from time to time, you get one of those shiny boxes to take home. Ice cream is cheap, so there’s that. Then it turns out the government is incompetent and outright corrupt; they print out money to pay for their debts, and high inflation ensues. That might sound a bit more familiar, but I’m not talking about eggs costing nine dollars in your local grocery store. I’m talking about say a can of Coke costing one dollar on Monday, and three dollars on Tuesday, and then who knows how much by the end of the week. Though what really happens by the end of the week is that can of Coke and all other nonperishable goods disappear somewhere in the back of the store until prices stop jumping like a frog in a pond. Those were the later years of transition.

Yet, those were, and I’m being truthful here, the best years of my life. Even in the darkest of times, there is light. Besides, what sixteen-year-old really cares about inflation? Or about what food they eat for that matter? While in high school, I played the guitar and hitchhiked my way across Bulgaria finding myself in all kinds of trouble (the amount of rotgut I drank is best left out here). I was free. Then I graduated, took the SATs, and came to the US. I go back every year, but I’m now a tourist in my own country (even if I don’t feel that way).

I’ve experienced the last twenty years the way most of you have (if you were born in the 1980s or 1990s). Or rather, I have experienced the same events and have lived in similar places (the East and West Coasts of the United States). But even if I’m now to a large extent the product of American culture, the filter through which I see what happens around me is still distinctly mine, that of a boy born in a town of 4,000 people in south Bulgaria, near the border with Greece and Turkey. It is that of someone whose parents grew up in a society in which an ill-timed joke could send you to prison, and listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones could get you expelled. That of someone who grew up in disruptive and uncertain times.

No wonder I now work in international development, trying to make sure that other people around the world have the opportunity to make their own choices rather than having decisions forced on them (by a regime or by necessity). No wonder I write speculative, often dystopian fiction. For if we do fall asleep at the wheel, even for a moment, the road of freedoms and inalienable rights on which we drive can disappear from under us. And dystopian fiction often contains a message of hope: that even when an oppressive regime tries to shackle you, there’s always community and family and friends and moments of happiness and even joy. And there’s always hope.

It is this hope and search for truth that writing fiction helps me explore. Ferdinand de Saussure, the great Swiss linguist, described two aspects of language as synchronic (the language as it exists at a point in time) and diachronic (the linguistic history or evolution). I find this dichotomy to offer great humility and, at the same time, grandeur to the calling of being a writer. We are small specks in the vast social construct that is the English (or any) language, but we can also mold it and contribute to its evolution. When writing fiction, we can conjure characters and stories and use these imaginary elements to tell the truth—or at least, a truth.

And arriving at a higher truth, I think, should be the purpose of (nearly) all fiction. The stories we tell are just a vehicle. But to tell truths, one needs to be honest with oneself, and about oneself. And I’m not sure I’m always able to do that. Hemingway once said that all there was to writing was to “sit in front of a typewriter and bleed.” For the longest time, I interpreted the quote to be about how hard writing is, the toil required to get the words just right. But now I find it has more to do with the writer’s own emotions: to really write, we have to be vulnerable and open deep wounds within ourselves, and poke at our subconscious with some sort of Freudian rod—often being afraid of what we’ll find and doing it anyway.