I originally started writing “Enid” during my failed stint in the United States Army during 2011. It was apart of a series of vignettes that I would periodically post on Facebook statuses describing my dystopian vision of the United States. Originally, it was compromised of three paragraphs briefly describing how Enid was a Chinese immigrant resigned to living in a massive FEMA trailer park, then the scene where she spoke to her father in the airport before leaving for America, and last a scene excluded from my latest drafts where she is purchasing an MRE from a Wal-Mart in hopes of getting a bag of Skittles. In this rough draft there were none of the moments of blockbuster violence I wrote into later drafts, and it dealt more with the banality I felt present in my everyday existence or saw in the lives of others. I had personally lived in a FEMA trailer after Katrina for over four years, and during this time along with my year long service in the Army I had the displeasure of eating a great many number of MREs. Since the meals themselves were so terrible I looked most forward to the candy that was sometimes included in them for dessert. As you can imagine during and after Katrina it became easy for me to imagine a large number of people living life this way. Losing all their material possessions in a disaster, and being left completely dependent on federal assistance from the government. I was fifteen during Katrina, and it played a large role in my formative processes. As 9/11 had before it, as the subsequent War on Terror, and even further along The BP Gulf Coast Oil Spill which I encountered directly working as a shrimper during that time off of the coasts of Louisiana. Not to mention the influence of witnessing through various media outlets numerous world catastrophes, hundreds of acts of terrorism, the revelation of a vast American surveillance network planet wide, the rise of unmanned drone warfare, America’s growing penal system, and so on and so forth. As I wrote “Enid” I was not even so much considering the dystopic future as I was writing about the present everyday world surrounding us, and at that point in time I was actively using social media to effectively have access to an audience of a few hundred people on a daily basis. These vignettes were displayed with news articles, studies that supported their relevance, and a desire to inform people to the possibilities of an unregulated government here in the United States. In the United States, especially in Mississippi where I grew up there is a great deal of xenophobic attitudes present in the population regarding immigration as well as a severe distrust of the real or imagined encroachment of communism from the east upon western capitalistic ideals. With “Enid” I wanted to write about a Chinese girl who had been privileged by the economic boom in China, and grew up in a loving middle class family, and was able to comfortably afford her education at a fine university. This runs contradictory to common Western thought, particularly American thought, regarding China, but the possibility of this happening there has become a reality in recent decades. Yes, for some, and even most China is still an intolerable nation with little regard to outside influence or human rights, but the middle class in China is growing and stateside here in America ours is shrinking and I wanted to explore the possibility of China becoming the new world power. I did not write “Enid” to extol the virtues of Communism, and certainly not Stalinism. It is meant to criticize all modern forms of thought regarding the way that the world is being run including whatever thought processes are at work behind the governments of China and the United States. More than anything I wanted to criticize life as I see it in general. The story does not offer answers, but like “1984” is meant to show its relevant audience an eclectic horror show of the issues they choose to ignore on a daily basis. When I wrote “Enid” for this Creative Writing class I had a small amount of information regarding the world that my character lived in, and a basic idea of where the story might go if it were to continue. The district in which Enid lives is called “Yincang“, because in Mandarin the word “Yincang” means “hidden”. I came up with the idea of a hidden district where thousands of abducted workers could go unseen by everyday citizens using my knowledge of the gulags in Soviet Russia and North Korea, the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the prison systems, CIA Black Sites, and government projects of North America, the slave labor fuelled metropolises of China, and I could literally go on naming and describing places where people actively disappear in this world for pages and pages, I find it detestable and impossible to ignore. Those places are not fiction, but they were the inspiration for the fictional setting of my story. I also thought of the United States’ policies concerning Mexico, and the number of illegal workers from all nations currently employed in the United States. There is slave labor the world over. It is a profitable business, and people can do little to stop it from happening despite their best interests. Enid is meant to represent an American citizen lost in pursuit of the “American Dream”. That somehow by working her life away for a system that is entirely ignorant of her own dreams, happiness, or even existence she may someday attain some semblance of freedom from working for that system. Through the constant displays of violence throughout my story she learns to love and accept the factory she works at making MREs. She grows to hate the idea of a revolution, because she sees revolution as being to blame for all the horror in her life rather than the systems these “terrorists“ rebel against. She comes to accept that rather than being an individual in a society of individuals that she is utterly and truly alone. The one character she finds solace in throughout the tale, Blanch, selfishly commits suicide taking with her one of the last bits of hope Enid has been clinging to in the camp. She comes to see all living people as being slaves or at least adherents to great systems that are far beyond Human control. Thus, her given Mandarin name is “Mei Tian Shi Xian Tong De” which translates in English to “Achieve Pain Everyday”. The name her handlers give to her “Enid” is Welsh for “Soul” or “Life”. To me, she is representative of a Human life struggling to maintain it’s existence on the inside of a machine. It breaks my heart that my character ends up in such a dismal situation, but I too feel the constant weight to give up what others deem the foolishness of my youth. I am told on a daily basis now that the individual no longer has any standing in society, and then contradictorily that the system we all compromise as a whole is sick with itself. That the individual then is a personal representative of the sickness in society. In the beginning, Enid is not representative of the sickness, but a slight glimmering of the cure for the cold of the modern world. She is a product of society, but she chooses to believe in dreams, family, and love. In chasing the “American Dream” she is systematically destroyed by the false promise of the fulfillment of her desires. What Enid seeks in life is not in New York City or California, and it is not in Jinan either. She will never obtain it from working on a factory floor and she could not have found it in pursuit of her education in pharmaceutical medicine. What Enid desires is the embracement of the world, to dream big dreams, to be with friends and family, to find true love, and more than anything to be free of the war, needless work, and bloodshed. By the end she believes that death is the only true freedom from the system, but that is death. She has given up her life at that point, been broken by the world at large, and now lives to repeat the same instances over and over expecting different results. She becomes not only a living corpse, a husk of her former self, but an insane one at that. This is a cautionary tale about what happens when you give up your soul for the immediate world. She could have run to the aid of the children crying in the war torn streets rather than the damning safety of the factory floor, she could have stood in unison with the rebels instead of obediently groveling before the gun of her abductors, and she could have spoken the words that were on her heart rather than hiding them from the machines. Even if it meant dying, what did she have to lose? She was going to die regardless. People die for the wrong thing everyday...why didnt she stand against what is killing the world she once loved rather than spend a lifetime dying for the one she hated?
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 07:50:03 +0000