When I wrote my first novel, gather the weeds, it was just a story about not being able to fit in. When I was in high school, me and my Deaf classmates were brain washed by well meaning parents and teachers to take hearing classes, and speech classes so we can be alike those who are hearings. We tried hard to be like hearings, and once in a while, we show off to each other, how well we get along with the hearings students. I never understood American Sign Language, and grew up on Sign Exact English. We are scarred by our experience of never really fitting in at our high school. Even today, none of us have gone to our high school reunions.

I first learned about Utopia stories when I was reading the Blitherdale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a failed farming commune in 1841. I don’t remember much about that novel except for the silliness of the characters’ dramas. For example, the narrator became sick, and the others coo’ed and ahh’ed over him as he languished away at the commune until he could not take the suffering anymore and had to go home to take a break and then come back. It was as if the characters were playing a marathon children game of ‘House.’ As for Dystopia stories, I did not know that word until 2006 during a lecture on my book. I had been calling it a speculative fiction, a pop science fiction about putting a pseudo scientific theory of eugenics into practice.

I can see how utopia and dystopia stories go hand in hand. To men, The Handmaiden’s Tale, may be utopia while to women, the same story may be dystopia. To teenagers who are enraged at the world, A Clockwork Orange, may be an ideal place where they can thrive while to adults who want laws and order may react in fear and anger toward that book. To teenagers who have no disabilities, gather the weeds, might have been the paradise where they don’t even have to look at those wards unable to live in a perfect world. When I read those kinds of novels, it seem that attempts at utopian worlds end in failure while dystopian worlds end in success. Or utopias end up as dystopias.

Like the mobster boss in Stephen King’s short story, Quitter Inc., said, “When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal. When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell.” The same can be said about stories of utopia and dystopia. For they seem to try and fail or try and succeed on the one and the same goal.