Writing Someone Else's Story
by R. Z. Halleson
In the early 1980s, I had the privilege of chairing a committee that sponsored more than a hundred Cambodian refugees from the Khao-i-Dang Holding Center in Thailand for resettlement in the United States. Over the years, my relationship with these men, women and children changed from sponsor-refugee to friend-friend, and this friendship continues to this day.
About seven years ago Chhalith, one of the former refugees, asked me for help in telling the story of his life as a teenager living under the monstrous Khmer Rouge Communist regime that had taken over Cambodia. I agreed, and the subsequent book with his amazing memoir can be purchased here, or ordered through any local bookstore.
The actual telling of someone else's story and bringing it to and through publication is a story in itself.
At first I had to wrestle with myself about our differences. I am an older white woman who was attempting to get into the mind of a middle-aged Asian man trying to recall his childhood and adolecense during a time of war. Surprisingly, this concern became less important the more we worked together.
Working out an approach to extract Chhalith's memory of events that had happened more than twenty years before became a work in progress. It was trial and error at first as Chhalith began by speaking in generalities of the events that had festered in his mind for so long. He spoke as a man recalling a childhood past, and while this was a good beginning, it wasn't enough. To make the story resonate with readers, we had to find the voice of the child who had lived the events.
For more than three years, Chhalith came to my home once a week on his day off from working at a bank and stayed for six or seven hours telling me his story. I taped the sessions and took notes while Chhalith talked and sometimes drew sketches to illustrate what he was saying. During the rest of the week, I transcribed the tapes and notes into hardcopy on my computer and read copiously everything I could find about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. I took classes about the Vietnam war and its impact on the countries surrounding it. In short, I was doing my homework so that I could probe for the incidents in Chhalith's life that seemed to be a microcosm of the larger events going on all around him.
It was important that Chhalith tell his story his way without regard to any chronology of the incidents that he was recalling. When he came each week to my home to work with me, it seemed that certain past events had been swirling in his mind, and these formed the basis for our interview for that day. Little by little I began to probe these recollections to bring out details such as what did something look like, smell like, or feel like to the touch. I pushed for names that he might remember and the relationships between people. Chhalith and I share an appreciation for systems and structure and this allowed us to examine and describe the various ways that the Khmer Rouge functioned so as to control a nations's entire population immediately after the coup that overturned the central government. We talked about the rice planting and harvest, the different ways that fish were caught, how jungle plants were treated to remove poison, and much more.
Sometimes our sessions together were spent in watching old Khmer videos with him doing the interpreting of the language so that I could understand what was happening. Some videos were in French; a few were in English. Sometimes Chhalith brought Cambodian books and other materials to me, and in return, I loaned him books and articles that I had found.
When our weekly sessions ended, I began to organize the enormous amount of information that I had accumulated, but my attempt to put Chhalith's story in a chronological order was failing, and I was becoming frustrated. In other words, I got stuck! Finally, Chhalith thought it through himself and gave me an outline of how he remembered the events happening. I began to plug the incidents into the outline to create a first draft of an actual manuscript.
I have no idea how many drafts of the manuscript were created, because at this stage a number of different things were going on. Chhalith was making corrections of my writing of the story and in the process was recalling other incidents that were begging to be included. I was updating the drafts to accommodate Chhalith's suggestions all the while revising the content to read better. In addition, I was putting my own editor's eye on every sentence, every word, and every bit of punctuation to make sure that accuracy reigned supreme. Accuracy also included checking Chhalith's recollections against the many outside sources by historians and journalists of that period to be sure that there were no discrepencies that would put his remembrances into doubt.
Choosing a method of publication was in the back of my mind throughout the entire process and, because I belong to the Authors Guild and have access to other sources regarding the publishing industry, I knew that what I decided here was critical to the success of the book. I ruled out traditional publishing almost from the beginning because, for a variety of reasons, an author is the most vulnerable to losing control over his/her own work here. I looked at a number of self-publishing companies and obtained sample copies of their books and found that, while the covers were generally very nice, the interiors were often badly formatted and amateurish. Not good enough.
Ultimately I chose the Print-on-Demand publisher iUniverse with its bookstore-return plan. There were ups and downs throughout the process in working with them, but ultimately I feel that I got a good product. The editing services included in this plan were as good as any that one might find in traditional publishing, and we went back and forth while I considered their suggestions and either accepted or rejected them. Nothing was done for which I did not approve. The book distribution in this plan seems appropriate.
Beginning authors in general don't understand that marketing their books is primarily their own responsibility. Even in traditional publishing, an author is expected to be active in marketing, and if he or she chooses not to do this, the book is not likely to sell more than those copies that are lucky enough to find shelf space for a few months in bookstores before being returned as non-sellers.
Telling someone else's story took about seven years altogether. It was a complicated and fluid process that followed no rules. What made this work for us, in my opinion, were two things: 1) Chhalith was highly motivated to tell his story so that his sons would understand what he went through, and so he persisted through the years that we worked together, and 2) I knew that, although his experiences were different from that of many other Cambodians who have since told their own stories, that the new information about the workings of the Khmer Rouge and the life in the jungle would add to the history of one of the most terrible times ever experienced by any nation in modern times.