It was so fun to sit down last week with novelist Aimee Liu (the author of Glorious Boy, among other best-selling novels, and of the Substacks MFA Lore and Authors for Democracy) to talk about war, memory, and the human-scale work of peace-building.
A few things we covered:
Dehumanization is the first act of every war. Aimee’s point was blunt: you cannot drop a bomb, or intern a family, or silence a scholar, on someone you still see as human. Fiction’s job, and ours, is to keep undoing that work one story at a time.
“Slicing” isn’t just a diplomatic tool, it’s a literary one. We talked about how Aimee’s novel’s worm’s-eye view of WWII in the Andaman Islands does exactly what I describe the best diplomats as doing and encourage all of us to do as everyday ambassdors: it cuts a vast, abstract conflict down to a single family, a single child left behind, and makes the stakes legible again.
One relationship at a time is not a small strategy. Nuclear war has been averted, more than once, because one scientist picked up the phone to a counterpart on the other side. Aimee and I both came up in an era when US-China scholarly ties were routine, and both watched them go quiet. Rebuilding even one of those relationships is a real, doable act of everyday diplomacy.
Moral injury runs in both directions. Perpetrators and victims of a war crime carry damage that doesn’t resolve with treaties or elections, a theme that also came up at last month’s Salon on Argentina’s reckoning with its dictatorship. Everyone also go read Barbara Nickless on this!
Please share your thoughts with Aimee and me. We’re eager to continue the conversation!
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