Writing as Revenge; Revenge as Justice

I recall Nelson Algren advocating spite as a reason to write. I think there is a very good explanation of this in the following from Anne Cong-Huyen's Elaine Hsieh Chou Is Out for Joyful Revenge. There may also be the only good reason and method I have read for taking revenge.

ACH: In a recent workshop I took with you, you mentioned the role of writing—and of humor and satire in particular—as a form of revenge and recovery. Can you elaborate on what this means for you? Is it about catharsis, about  getting the last laugh? 

EHC: Satire has always been about power. True satire is punching up. When you punch down, you’re no longer writing satire—you’re just being an asshole. The desire to skew power comes from feeling powerless in some aspect of your real life, and wanting to wear the clothes of power, trying it out on the page, because you can’t do that off the page. If you’re not getting actual justice in the real world, how do you ever get a taste of it? We can live an entire lifetime, and never know what that feels like. Fiction is a healing and therapeutic space because it is an even playing field where no one, at least on the page, can stop you from exploring what accountability looks like for you. That’s something we talked about in that class: Rebranding revenge so it’s not negative. Revenge can be beautiful; it’s another way to access justice. 

Specifically with Disorientation, I realized that—without a time machine—I’d never get payback for how Asian women have been portrayed by the West for centuries. When we’re born into this world, what’s really painful is that all of us think we’re individuals, right? And that people will see us with all the three-dimensionality with which they see themselves. But being a racialized person is to slowly peel back the layers of what’s come before you, and realizing, oh, I was born into a world where “Lotus Blossom” and “Dragon Lady” narratives have dominated for 200 years. I didn’t consent to these narratives and yet they’ve shaped how people see me—and I mean this in the most literal sense, to the point where my safety has been put at risk. 

Realizing that I could never seek true revenge—not just for me, but for every Asian woman who’s been harassed, assaulted, and raped and murdered because of these myths that we are subservient and hypersexualized—I had to seek revenge another way. In that sense, Disorientation is equal parts love letter to Asian women as flawed individual humans, and revenge on why the need to prove such an obvious fact exists in the first place.  

sch 83/31