1) Where are you from? Why?
I was born in Hong Kong in the same hospital ward that my sister, mother, and father were born in (1, 25, and 38 years earlier, respectively). A lot of my cousins, aunts and uncles were born there too. But I’m not sure that anyone in my family would say they were from Hong Kong, although some of them lived on that island for decades. We all thought we would move on eventually, and we all did.
Why Hong Kong? I think it comes down to the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During that uprising, many of the Hindu and Muslim sepoys (native soldiers) tried to overthrow their colonial overlords. For various reasons, most of the Sikh sepoys did not. After the rebellion failed, the British recruited Sikhs in much greater numbers for their Indian regiments. Young Sikh men would travel far from their Punjabi homeland to serve in distant parts of the Empire. Eventually, Sikhs who weren’t soldiers began to leave their homes to find work; it had become part of their culture to travel. My grandfathers were Sikhs who left their villages in the Punjab to work in Hong Kong as a prison guard and a clerk. My father eventually served the British too, as a colonial administrator.
2) Generate a relevant formula.
If N > 1 then C, where N is the Number of stressful occurrences in a given day, and C is a Cocktail at 6 p.m. Since I find many things stressful, I pretty much always need a drink at 6.
Any formula more complex than that is probably beyond me.
3) On the Gonzalez and Leigh LLP website, it says that you have a law degree from Harvard and that you clerked for a state judge in California. What is the relationship between legality and morality? (Are laws founded on/justified by moral goodness, or by something else?)
Ideally there would be a close relationship between the legal and the good, but there often isn’t in practice. Moral principles can be difficult to apply to a complex reality. Other things can push laws and morals apart too, like money, fear, and the limits of human foresight. Then you arrive a place where its apparently legal for a judge to sentence a man to life in prison without parole for stealing a bicycle, or for marijuana possession (if he has priors), or, under President Bush, for American agents to inflict medieval tortures on suspected terrorists, or, under President Obama, for American drones to fire missiles into homes filled with women and children in countries with which we are not at war, because we suspect that a militant might be hiding there too. None of those things seem morally good to me. The only justification in the end is the power of the state.
I’m not suggesting we live in an unusual place in this regard. I think many people, in many nations, at many times, have done terrible things with legal sanction.
4) It also says you specialize in legal writing. Please provide an example of this below, on any subject.
I’ll keep it short, as legal writing tends to be boring. Here is a passage chosen at random from a recent brief:
“Defendants’ motion is predicated on the false assumption that the prosecutors were acting as state officials when they released confidential and misleading information to the media. Yet the allegations of the complaint make clear that the prosecutors were acting outside the scope of their state prosecutorial function when they violated the plaintiff’s privacy rights, as alleged in her 14th and 15th causes of action. Thus, even under defendants’ own reading of the presentation requirements of the Tort Claims Act, the plaintiff was right to bring her claims to the county rather than the state prior to the onset of this litigation.”
5) How do you think fiction should relate to politics, ideally?
I don’t think fiction can be programmatic when it comes to politics. That’s why I don’t think 1984 is a good novel. A writer who wants to argue for a given political platform should probably write blog posts or protest songs. At the other extreme, I’m not often interested in fiction which seems uninformed by any consideration of the context in which it was created. But there’s a lot of room between those two poles, both for fiction that’s grounded in a recognizable social reality, and for writing that’s more fantastic or experimental. In the latter categories I’d think of someone like Jesse Ball, whose fiction takes place in a sort of dark and violent dream (but maybe not a nightmare, because there are many beautiful elements to the life of those stories as well). I don’t think you’d put down “Pieter Emily,” or “The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr,” feeling reassured about the solidity of your own life. If fiction promotes doubt, if it leaves you uneasy and uncertain, I think it has fulfilled the only (modest) political function it has.
6) What is there, and what should we do about it?
I’ve always been a little envious of people who know what is there and what to do about it. Most of those people strike me as being religious, or at least as the types of people who can take seriously words like “career” and “success.” I’m not sure what is happening on the insides of other people. From the outside there looks to be a great deal of suffering and madness. The best people probably try to alleviate the suffering of others. I’m not one of the best people. I just hope, however quixotically, to live quietly, in familial happiness, and eventually write something that justifies my existence.
7) This question is the “visceral” question. Please give us a visceral experience using whatever media you deem fit.
I had a visceral experience of sheer delight this morning, when my daughter, who just turned one, thought it was the funniest thing in the world that I stuck my tongue out at her while she was on the swings. You weren’t at the playground with me, though, so I can’t give you that one. I wouldn’t presume that my fiction could give anyone a visceral experience. How about a link to one of Brice Marden’s “Grove Group” paintings? If nirvana is possible (which I doubt), it may look something like this:
http://z.about.com/d/arthistory/1/0/I/p/cab_pma_09_27.jpg
Rav Grewal-Kök’s fiction has appeared in the Santa Monica Review, was shortlisted for the Best American Short Stories 2008, and is forthcoming in The Ledge. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and baby daughter.
