Novelist Paul Eggers:

Writing about power, race, and language in refugee camps

Mud figures deeply, oozingly in English professor Paul Eggers’ award-winning novel Saviors, a fierce, funny, and at times overwhelming response to his 1980s experiences as a United Nations volunteer in a Vietnamese refugee camp. His story leaves gritty, stained impressions on the hygienic American mind, tracking muddy memories across our consciousness to an era when boat people floated in newspaper headlines and jungles grew palpably from our own asphalt nightmares.

Saviors (Harcourt Brace, 1998) isn’t a comfortable book, but neither is it a despairing one. Mostly it corners readers with humanness, ensnaring them through troubling portraits of effort and endurance, frailty and frustration. Those portraits, like the Malaysian mud Eggers depicts, level his characters’ cultural playing fields, so that Vietnamese, Americans, Europeans, and Malaysians all wallow in an outward manifestation of turbid human understanding. In his book, as in life, there’s no escaping it.

“It would be false of me to say that I either enjoyed or hated the experience,” said Eggers in his Taylor Hall office, now thousands of miles and some 20 years away from the island camp he calls Bidong in Saviors. “But it was the worst of times and the best of times in combination. There were very harsh conditions there. We had all these power issues and racial issues, language issues. The book deals with the political situation and the power dynamics between cultures. You’ve got the Vietnamese who, because of their weight of numbers, are very important players. But they have absolutely no power because they’re refugees. The Malaysian police and administrators own the island, but the UN is paying the bills. So the UN contingent, also very small in number, has no power except sort of abstractly.

“We were sometimes at odds with the Malaysians, sometimes at odds with the Vietnamese. And sometimes the Vietnamese were at odds with the Malaysians. There were very interesting power dynamics on the island.”

Upon Eggers’ return to the United States, where he and his wife, CSU, Chico linguistics professor Ellen Eggers, settled in Seattle, he made several failed attempts to turn his Asia impressions into narrative. “At the time I just didn’t want to see another refugee for as long as I lived,” he admitted. “It’s called compassion fatigue. It had been a draining though fulfilling experience. And so I went into technical writing, which is probably as far as you can get from refugee work. It wasn’t until the writing program at Nebraska [University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he earned a Ph.D.], about a decade after the experience, that I guess I had enough distance so I could write about it.”

The salutary effects of clarifying distance show not only in his accurate, uncluttered prose, but also in critical responses to the book—various favorable reviews, its selection as a Barnes & Noble discovery, and, more recently, a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. The following excerpt, which catches a volunteer worker musing in an empty schoolroom, justifies such interest:

Did the brain’s function not find its closest external parallel in political propaganda? The brain censored and shaped and made proclamations. It was the State, reproduced along biological lines. But that censored information … where did it go? What truths entered through the senses, only to be cast aside? What ghastly knowledge? When you sat inside a dark tarp shelter all day and stared at empty benches and heard a loudspeaker babble in a language you didn’t understand, you were attuned to different frequencies, to different …

“I smell the demon,” she said suddenly. “The beast.”

Besides teaching creative writing as part of the university’s M.F.A. program, Eggers is working on a second novel, and this fall will publish with Southern Methodist University Press a collection of short stories titled How the Water Feels.

Taran March