Kayu Putih, Northeast Jakarta I wake up on New Year’s Day to a world underwater. Or at least it feels that way: the neighborhood has sunken overnight in an opaque brown liquid dotted with moving heads. Two women move…
I started writing “Flood Days” as a work of fiction. I had always wanted to tell this story of leaving my home country, but had never quite figured out how to do so. Every time I recounted the events to friends and family, I shifted the details ever so slightly. I was afraid of exposing myself: my privilege, my opinions, my right to an opinion in the first place as someone with my privilege of leaving. I’d alter my story based on who I was with and how I imagined they would respond to certain details. So when I sat down to write “Flood Days,” I experienced that same instinct—an urge to sanitize parts of the story that cast me in a poor light or felt too pessimistic. I was wrapped up in notions of what a good story was meant to do or the moral framework it was meant to uphold.
What resulted from that first fictional draft was a first-person account of my departure that was in many ways factual, but that to me felt dishonest and flat. It was from writing that draft, though, that I became interested in the metanarrative around storytelling and deception. Why did I dress up or omit certain aspects of the story and not others? Why do any of us do that when we recount our stories?
I decided to turn the story into an essay that directly addresses my deceit. Here, I still write as an unreliable narrator. I fib and elide and mask the same details as in my fictional draft. But I also give space to the deception: what do I instinctively fictionalize, and why?
I’m far from the only person who has experienced the impulse to “clean up” their personal narrative; but there’s a danger in that, too, in the assumption that we need to package our stories to hide the shame and make them palatable to others for our stories to ever be understood. It was my hope that, in telling “Flood Days” as a broader story about storytelling and deception, I’d be able to write with a level of truth that neither pure fiction nor fact-telling would be able to achieve on their own.
MAY TENG is an Indonesian-American writer based in New York. May’s fixations include fragmented narratives, portraits of place, boundaries and borders, and collective memory. Her writing is featured in AGNI and Literary Hub and has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Civil Society Institute, a Periplus fellowship, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. May holds a BA in English from Georgetown University and attended the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Nonfiction Writing, where she taught creative writing. Find her on Instagram @maytengo.
