Caught in Laos’s Civil War, Three Friends Endure Lasting Trauma - The New York Times

RUN ME TO EARTH
By Paul Yoon

How long does it take for us to feel settled and secure where we live, to exist freely in our spaces, in a particular moment in time? Three children, Noi, Prany and Alisak, contemplate their future in a half-destroyed house that has been converted into a makeshift field hospital in war-torn Laos at the end of the 1960s. Around them, American bombing raids continue day and night as the civil war intensifies. Acclimatized as they are to the brutal realities of war, the three friends just manage to hang on to a shared innocence, even though they sense that their lives are likely to become even more difficult. What they do not yet realize is how the pain of their wartime years will spread its tentacles, reaching out across continents and over decades and pulling others into its depths.

Paul Yoon’s richly layered novel, “Run Me to Earth,” begins with a fierce indictment of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia, a brief author’s note providing the context: In the course of nine years, in an attempt to contain the spread of communism from Vietnam, American aerial missions made “the equivalent of one bombardment every eight minutes, 24 hours a day.” About 30 percent of these cluster bombs failed to explode on impact, blighting the landscape (the presence of these unexploded bombs is a constant menace in the novel, affecting the characters’ every move). But like everything else in “Run Me to Earth,” simple explanations give way to deep nuance, and the single, obvious threat of American bombs is replaced by a more complex set of dangers that imperil the three friends’ safety: the unreliability of allies, the specter of betrayal and, above all, a past that continues to entangle them, confusing their sense of the future.

Throughout the novel, beauty and violence coexist in a universe that seems by turns cruel and wondrous. Caught in desperate situations, the characters often resort to desperate measures that become almost instinctive, as if they have ingested so much of the war that savagery is now a way of life. Faced with a man refusing help for his family, a woman known as “Auntie” swiftly slices open his leg with a knife, thereby securing them all safe passage across the border with Thailand.

Elsewhere, trawling through his memories of the war, from early childhood to a long imprisonment, Prany recalls how a farmer once picked up a live grenade to shield Prany and others from certain death. But the memories of such vivid suffering are infused with those of tenderness as he recalls, in the same breath, his relationship with his father, “the secret poet,” who had a love of writing. Even as he remembers the farmer’s shirt ballooning with the impact of the detonation, he recalls waiting in a tree for his father to return home, the way “his father always slowed and reached up to grab his son’s bare feet before driving on. Their eyes meeting. The touch of his father still there on his heels, like the brush from a feather.” Like many of the other characters in the novel, Prany will be driven to acts of violence, but even the most extreme excesses of war cannot extinguish his memory of love.

[ Read an excerpt from “Run Me to Earth.” ]

Caught in the worst of the bombardments, the three young friends find sanctuary in their connection — a sanctuary that will be torn apart as they navigate their way through the future. Together with Vang, the kind, cultured doctor who runs the makeshift hospital that has become their wartime home, they attempt to flee the atrocities but are pulled in different directions by the tides of history. After many years, they and the people they have known in Laos find themselves in New York, Spain and rural France, each unsure what has happened to the others. Twenty years after the war ends, Khit, a woman who was close to Prany during the war, hears about Alisak and tries to track him down, but is unable clearly to articulate why she is doing so, or what she hopes to achieve when she finds him. What exactly did she feel for Prany, and he for her? The war in Laos has not merely denied her the clarity of her teenage emotions, it has also colored her entire life as an immigrant in America, infusing her marriage with a melancholy she cannot quite define.

For Alisak, with whom we begin and end the novel in vastly different circumstances, life is a long process of healing the wounded, first at the hospital in the war-scarred plains of Laos, and later in a farmhouse in France owned by a man with distant links to Alisak’s past. There, he helps others recover from injury and attempts to settle in his new country, but he is incapable of achieving intimacy with anyone, and soon slips silently away. Alisak is haunted by the loss of his friends and his homeland and the loose ends of his life, and from his story and that of the other characters, Yoon has stitched an intense meditation on the devastating nature of war and displacement.

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Caught in Laos’s Civil War, Three Friends Endure Lasting Trauma - The New York Times
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