And then we came to the end. Of BASS, and maybe the world.

The last story of the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology, "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esmé Weijun Wang, is the only story in the collection that somewhat directly takes on what everyone knew was the big deal in America in 2017. (The stories for the 2018 BASS collection were all originally published between January 2017 and January 2018.) "Terrible Thing" is set just before 2017 begins, on the day of the election of Donald Trump.

Although every year when the anthology comes out, there are some introductory remarks that try to place the contents within the context of what is happening in America, both politically and culturally, it's difficult for the anthology to really keep pace with contemporary trends. Many of the writers in this anthology said it took them years to write the stories that appear here, meaning most were written before Trump was president. After the stories were written, it took months or even years sometimes to find a publisher, followed by the wait for the story to actually come out. For BASS, there is then the additional wait of determining which stories published in 2017 will make the 2018 volume, then pushing out the anthology. It's strange that a medium with so little equipment and manpower required to produce has such a slow turnaround time. Many television shows--art that requires hundreds of people--managed to respond to the Trump election within months. South Park did it in weeks.

But here was a story in which the presidency of Donald Trump formed a major part of the plot, making it unique within the 2018 anthology.

Plot

Wendy Chung is suffering from hallucinations. She has a hard time getting others to understand it's not depression, it's hallucinations. Wendy began having these hallucinations a few years after Becky Guo--the only other Chinese girl in Polk Valley--was murdered. Becky was drugged and then hanged from an impossibly high tree. Wendy ended up getting involved in trying to help Becky's parents to get the tree cut down so it wouldn't stand as a reminder to them of what they'd lost. She was seventeen when this happened.

Because it is difficult for Wendy not to identify with Becky, and also because nobody ever figured out who the murderer was or--more importantly--the reason for the murder, Wendy has never been able to rest easy since then:

"It could have been any of them who killed Becky. It would have been any of them. As long as the murderer was free I would not know who had sedated and hung Becky from that high branch. I would not know why or how the killer had done it, and because there seemed to be no reason for the act I would have to keep my head bowed. If she had not been killed in part because of her race I could, as the saying goes, breathe easier, but I could not assure myself of that any more than I could wipe off my own face." 

Wendy is considering getting electro-convulsive shock therapy to zap away her hallucinations. The procedure comes with risks: she might not be able to form new memories. All of this is happening on the day of the 2016 election. The anxiety everyone feels over the election is making all of Wendy's symptoms worse.

It's especially poignant to read this story here, in the last week of October 2018. Although generally, I've felt like liberal concerns that Trump's election would mean an increase in hate crimes against minorities were overblown, this last week has certainly seemed to make those fears seem valid. We've seen two black men shot at random in a grocery store, a series of bombs sent off to liberal political figures, and now a mass shooting of a synagogue. I don't want to get into a digression here about Trump's role or responsibility in all of this (it seems especially problematic to try to pin an anti-Semitic attack on Trump). Maybe Trump hates these white supremacists as much as anyone and is just too bumbling a speaker to state his hatred of white supremacists without also qualifying his dislike in needless and ranting ways. Maybe he's really secretly cheering these guys on. The point is that as long as people don't KNOW where he stands, they, like Wendy, have a right to feel unsettled and unsafe. The current president brings nothing so much as uncertainty.

This story isn't like the others, so I'm not going to review it like the others

A big part of me instinctively felt revulsion to this story. It's not because I don't think Trump's election represents one of the worst moments in American history. It does. I watched it unfold from the couch with my son. It was the first presidential election he was really old enough to grasp. We fell asleep watching, but not long after I dozed off, he rolled over and kicked me in the head, which was a perfect metaphor to describe what the election felt like. I couldn't get back to sleep that night, which made the weirdness of it all the next day that much stronger. Trump's election was, in my mind, a more profoundly disturbing event than 9/11. 9/11 just made it clear that we weren't as safe as we thought we were. But 2016 made me question more than what kind of threat we faced from outside; it made me wonder who we ourselves were.

That being said, I've seen more than my share of conservative memes gleefully laughing at liberal tears following the election, and "Terrible Thing" seemed to play into the hands of those who think everyone who was upset by the election felt that way because we get triggered by anyone who disagrees with us.

I might have felt like this in November 2016, but no fucking way was I going to show it.

(I hope the following is not "ableist"-- a concept I only sort of understand and only partly agree with the recommendations of to the extent I understand them. If I am wrong, I am open to correction.)

Wendy is, in fact, an actual psychiatric patient. Wendy's life and choices and experience are valid and worthwhile. They are not made less so by the way she has responded to trauma or the fact she is seeking help. But it does cast Wendy--and by extension, anyone who found Trump's election deeply unsettling--as a victim. It plays into the narrative that we are unable to respond to adversity with anything other than falling apart, becoming bed-ridden, needing sedated or, in Wendy's case, having our brains electrocuted to where we can't even remember anymore.

This is an unfair way to look at it, I know. Wendy has a right to feel afraid. Many people in America have a right to feel afraid. Even if the risk they face is marginal compared to what many people in the world face every day and get through, it's the uncertainty that gets you. Being unsure what others think of you can eventually drive you slowly insane, especially when an endless news cycle keeps reminding you there are people who don't like you. This is an important story to tell about life in Trump's America. Yet, maybe because it was the only story directly addressing Trump in the collection and wasn't balanced out by another with someone, say, fighting back with useful and practical action, I was a little disappointed in it. Not that it's Wang's fault what else happened to be in the anthology. For what it is--an aperture into the mind of someone suffering from something it's hard to believe would still be a social illness in 2016--it's effective.

So that's it

I've tried to give some kind of helpful thoughts for all twenty stories in the 2018 BASS, thoughts that might help get others past some hurdles and get into thinking about these stories on their own. I'm going to attempt to do my own version of the "what does this collection tell us about the big picture in American literature" question in the next few posts. I hope I've helped somebody to enjoy these stories more than you would have otherwise.