Go Home by Terry Farish and Lochan Sharma

How do people change? Do they? Do I? What kind of experience can cause a change from perceiving outsiders as drug-dealing, dangerous stereotypes instead of welcoming and acknowledging each person as a unique individual?

What kind of experiences can diminish suspicion or hate?

Sometimes a well-told story can, even a short parable. One such story is Go Home, a novel told in two voices by two authors, Terry Farish and Lochan Sharma.

In this novel, the reader walks two paths, hearing one story that is told from two very different perspectives. One perspective is that of the “outsider,” the immigrant, the refugee, who wants to fit in, to re-create home and build a future. The other perspective is that of the “insider,” the long-time resident, born in the U.S. and who fears loss of family, home, even safety because of the new presence of “foreigners,” unwelcomed, hated outsiders.

The two authors of this book have lived this very story. Terry Farish has worked with refugees in different forms since her return from the Vietnam War. She began Go Home based on what she has experienced and observed in her New England community. Understanding war and its many effects on civilians, families and children, has been her life work.

In Terry’s words, Go Home is about:

“a family exiled from Bhutan, who found refuge in Nepal for 20 years, and finally resettled in New Hampshire. I wrote many drafts to find the story. Then I began a 4-year collaboration with a Bhutanese Nepali student. By the time of our last draft, our novel was told in the alternating voices of two characters, a Nepal-born boy and a New Hampshire-born girl.”

Terry describes her journey of collaboration with not only another author, but an author who is from another culture, someone on the other side of political tyranny as his family was.

In Terry’s words:

“Going to Vietnam at 21 was my entry into the world. It was my physical experience of the world beyond my own family, my own college dorm in a small Texas town.

“But it wasn’t just about spending a year in Vietnam. The year became a seed in me of needing to make sense of war, of the Asian culture, and the huge human loyalty of the soldiers. The year grew in me and took me on a journey of reading everything about war, about women and war, from Vera Britain’s Testament of Youth and Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy. These books spoke to me because they weren’t about the war — they were about the impact of war on the lives of refugees who survived war and then attempted to resettle in the US.

“Survivors of war became my teachers.

“Slowly Viet Nam became the study of my life.

“I read the classic Fire in the Lake by an American journalist and then, later, Hanoi’s War by Lien-Hang Nguyen, a Vietnamese-now American scholar of the war.

“There are layers upon layers of coming to understand cultures. Vietnam was my entry, my beginning. Soon I began to realize I had layers upon layers of understanding to discover.

“Many Vietnamese families came to the US as refugees and through them, especially the children, I continued to be drawn into understanding the culture they brought. I was a children’s librarian and when new groups of refugees from other wars came to the city and the families came to our library’s story time, I wanted to understand their experience. I wanted to tell that experience so that American families who hadn’t known war could meet the new kids — in person or in books — and see the larger world.”

Terry, on collaboration:

“I’m a researcher. For all my novels, I’ve done years of research. I’ve traveled to the home countries of people who’ve become new Americans. So much of my research is listening and paying close attention to the stories people tell and language they use.

“So I’ve done long research to write novels such as my novel in verse, The Good Braider about a Sudanese girl who survives war to settle in Maine, USA. For about 5 years I collected orals histories, mostly with teenaged girls from Sudan in Portland, Maine. I traveled to Kenya near the border of Sudan, a country that was still at war.

“I was in the world of oral history and documentary writing because so much of my fiction was about recreating historical truth and experience. Mark Kramer, a guru of literary nonfiction, wrote about the writer’s responsibility in this kind of work. His rule was, “\”Keep faith with your sources. Tell them your intentions with the material they share with you. Be clear about the public disclosures involved.’ This is always in my mind when I write, beginning with The Good Braider and recently, with Go Home. Friendships have been created with many of the people I’ve met through interviews done with mutual respect.

“In working with a co-writer, you become a team with the mutual goal of writing a book. Authenticity is a shared responsibility. You are each other’s source which has a different dynamic than second sources. For instance, Lochan was my guide to understand how a Bhutanese-Nepali father and son, Samir, would relate to each other, that is, how a father would demand certain behaviors and how a son would defer. I was responsible for showing Lochan how a New Hampshire boy, Gabe, could have a very different relationship with his own father, not one of respect. Gabe’s relationship with his father would leave Samir baffled and distanced which became an important part of the plot.”

Terry has given us much to think about, in this interview and in her co-authored novel, Go Home, and also her earlier novel, The Good Braider.

Can one story change how we perceive an unwelcomed stranger? Is that how “seeing” only stereotypes can change? It is one way. In Terry’s books, people change by interacting with “the other,” learning that a stranger has feelings like me, dreams and goals like me, and fears like me.

Certainly the commitment to listening, to being open to what we hear, can rattle the bones of stereotypes. Perhaps listening is the first brave step of allowing ourselves to change.

Nancy Bo Flood MFA, Ph.D.