#748 Min- Rebecca Lee

#748 Min- Rebecca Lee

Sarah and Min are students and best friends at college in Missoula. Min is from Hong Kong, a son to an influential family that deals with Vietnamese refugees back home. Min is marrying age and when he returns for the summer his family is to choose a bride. Because his mother, normally the person to recommend a bride, has passed, the father is left to the task. Min asks Sarah to come home with him this summer. She can work for his father and get to see Hong Kong. She agrees, but when she gets there the job the father wants her to do is screen the bride applicants. 

It’s a confusing time in Hong Kong, and it’s a confusing situation for Sarah. Things get more difficult when she befriends a union leader and gets a whiff of the class politics she has fallen into. A large part of this story is about the political landscape of late 80’s Hong Kong, but it’s also about friendship, family and culture. Not least of which is the story about father and son: 

“I wondered how that would be, to be a father and stare across a table, through the crackling candlelight, and see your own face, younger, broadened and transformed by both time and race. How interesting it would be to see the future that precisely.”

Notable Passage: “Only a man who hates his privilege can be trusted with it.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#481 Mrs. Sen’s- Jhumpa Lahiri

#481 Mrs. Sen’s- Jhumpa Lahiri

Eliot has a new afterschool babysitter. He goes to Mrs Sen’s house. She is a very proper, but pleasant Indian Woman, the wife of the Mathematics Professor at the University. Eliot is the only one in her care. They spend the afternoons in normal rituals, he sits eating crackers and read the comics while she meticulously prepares dinner for her and her husband.

Mrs. Sen seems like a very lonely woman. She misses her home, the people, the closeness of the neighbors, the smells, the fresh fish, etc. It might be possible that she watches after Eliot because she likes the company, not that she needs the money. Back home she had enough money to have her own driver.

This story is strong on the senses; we notice the temperatures, the smells, the colors, the touch of other humans, or the lack of these things—in the case of being able to scream and having nobody hear. There is deep, but understated emotion as we find in most of Lahiri’s stories.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank- Nathan Englander

#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank- Nathan Englander

You immediately know two things from reading this title: one, it’s paying homage to the great story by Raymond Carver, and two, the subject matter is going to be pretty serious.

Deb and Shoshana were friend at Yeshiva twenty years ago. Shoshana and her husband have been living an ultra Hasidic life in Israel and are visiting Deb and her husband in Florida. They have a long, tense, emotional discussion over what it means to be Jewish.

Most of it focuses on whether it’s healthy to make the Holocaust the defining characteristic of your life, culture, religion. They tell a story about two Holocaust survivors that realize after forty-years that their camp tattoo numbers are only three apart. The observers expect an emotional recognition of this incredible event—surviving and existing this long after having been so close to each other at the beginning –but instead the man with the higher number just say that it proves that he cut the line back then just as he does now. Meaning, that he wanted his life defined by his own actions not by others from his past.

Obviously, these discussions will cause much debate and anger and tears. The part I found the most interesting was talking about the difference between religion and culture and the dangers of tying one with the other.

“With religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it is ever changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld, you hold them together with glue.”

This was brilliantly crafted with impeccable dialogue. I’ll let others more qualified analyze the meaning and religious aspects of this story.

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#402 White Christmas- Sandip Roy

#402 White Christmas- Sandip Roy

It was Christmas, and this was Amit’s first year away from Calcutta, from home. He was in Binghamton, NY going to school, and couldn’t afford the trip back. He learned a lot this year, mostly about the differences in culture, His school mentor, Satsih, a PhD student gave him advice. “…he was Amit’s authority on all things American, like health insurance, bars, and race.”

It was race that confused him the most, the importance of it, the stereoptypes used by both Satish and his mother. He found that he had his own attractions to race as well. On this Christmas he went looking for something to eat and found himself in a bar alone for the first time. It would be a night of firsts.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#298 The Games Boys Play- Sandip Roy

#298 The Games Boys Play- Sandip Roy

Sumit and Avinash were great friends as children. They grew up and both moved to America. They haven’t seen each other in 8 years and are both back in Calcutta, Sumit visiting and Avinash living with his wife and child.

They were more than  friends before they split, they were lovers. Quietly, secretly, passionately together. But Avinash had responsibilities to his family and took a wife arranged for him by his mother. Sumit was confused and crushed, and tried to write him. But Avinash’s wife, intercepted these letters and herself crushed by the revelation, hid them and never spoke a word about what she knew, it would have ruined her family.

So now, all these years later, they meet again, but with others around, there is little space to speak of the past. “Sumit tensed up realizing he had not just inadvertently wandered into well-worn battlefields, but had also tripped over some mines.”

“He looked at Avinash, mystified that that was all they had left between them. But Avinash’s eyes were opaque. He just kept talking as if anything was better than silence.”

Two men living different lives but sharing the same pain, never having the chance to speak about it, and probably never will. Heartbreaking. Three stories in to this “Novel in Stories” I am hooked. The stories themselves work both independently of each other, but also act as snapshots of a larger whole that slowly comes into focus. Fantastic!

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

#274 Coins- Mona Simpson

It seems that stories about foreign nannies taking care of American children is a popular short story subject. We’ve seen a few by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and we just had another by Edith Pearlman a few days ago. While each has it’s own theme, I find most of them to feel very similar.

Here we have a Philippine live-in nanny. She jokes that people always want a nanny from the Philippines: “Like a BMW…we are status symbols.” I find that way too true to be funny actually. Like the other stories, the parents seem to be loving and well-intentioned, but aloof, guilty, and slightly jealous of the closeness between their children and their employee.

“Dee told me, when I first came here, I don’t need to teach you children. You have been a mother to five…Children they are not hard. But most you need to think about the mother. Here, the mothers are the ones that throw tantrums.”

What a weird system. The nanny is here raising another couples children so she can send money to her own children. Her services are needed because the couple is so busy working to give their own children—the ones they put in the care of a stranger—the best life they can.  Seems we’ve become a satire about ourselves. This has nothing to do with the story, just a thought while this topic keeps popping up in my reading.

Rating: 7-6-6-7 Total= 26

#272 Dream Children- Edith Pearlman

#272 Dream Children- Edith Pearlman

Willa is a live-in nanny for a family on Manhattan’s upper west side. They are a nice family, thoughtful and careing and probably a little over-protective. She notices how controlled their environment is:

“In her country there was a TV in every village bar, and in the island’s capital city even the poorest family owned a set. But in this New York apartment—none.”

She quietly and gracefully takes care of the children, quietly watching her privileged employers and their friends. She gives them comfort and piece of mind, and even though they don’t recognize their lucky place in the world, she is understanding on a very human level. Their neighbor is losing her apartment and with it the office where her dentist practice is. Instead of taking the opportunity to move to a diferent neighborhood and take a position with another dentist office, she is intent on wallowing in self-pity. Willa sees her in a sympathetic light:

“Back home this woman would have been respected. She would not have been forced to work. People would have brought her stew and beer and smokes, and she would have sat on her porch and looked at the sea.”

Two stories in, and although I see grace and shape in her writing, I have yet to feel a personal connection with the subjects or characters in her stories. That happens.

Rating: 8-7-7-6 Total= 28

#271 Strike and Fade- Henry Dumas

#271 Strike and Fade- Henry Dumas

It’s Vietnam era, and you can feel the tension in the street. But, the tension isn’t about the war, it’s about racial injustice; civil unrest that the police call a riot, but the locals call a revolution. Police swarm the neighborhood, and it feels like a siege. Tyro, a neighborhood hero has come back from the war missing limbs, now he teaches the angry youth about rebellion.

“All I can figure is that one day the chips are all comin down…learn to strike hard, but don’t be around in the explosion. If you don’t organize, you ain’t nothing but a rioter, a looter…Don’t riot. Rebel.”

It’s confusion, blood-red anger, and hope for change. Comparing the war in Viet Nam to the conflict in black urban neighborhoods is an important comparison. Dumas creates an emotional, frenetic mood, and the prose is rhythmic and musical.

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33