The other day when I posted a very positive review about a short story by David Naiman, I tweeted about it and included a notice to David. In turn, he posted a very kind thank you, retweeted it, and then a couple of people following him started following me. (I have 37 Twitter followers now! Imagine!)
Yesterday, Lisa Taddeo "liked" my Tweet linking to a positive review about her story A few weeks ago, I got an email from Eli Barrett when I blogged about his story. While blogging through Best American Short Stories, I got a reply on Twitter from Amy Silverberg, and Jacob Guajardo was cool enough to even follow me.
Posting positive reviews about writers, even if you run a blog that gets maybe 3,000 views a month, is a good way to make writer friends. And if you run a blog and are also a writer struggling to get picked up by a more noticeable venue, writer friends are good to have. Which means when I'm reviewing a story, I have only motivations to post positive reviews and no reason to post negative ones. That doesn't really promote honesty and healthy, vigorous criticism.
Naiman, when he responded on Twitter, noted that almost nobody is doing serious criticism of short stories these days. He's right, and I think I can understand why. Almost all the people reading short stories are writers themselves, so who in their right mind would provide honest criticism? Instead, what you're likely to get--and what we actually have--is an endless back-scratching chain of positive "reviews" that don't really review much. I say good things about you so you'll say good things about me. That's good for networking, but it's not great for the ecosystem of short fiction.
If there's a movie you like and you want to talk about it, you can easily find people online to talk about it with. You can find a dozen Youtubers picking apart the movie at length. If there's a song you like, you can find an online community to talk about it. But if you read a short story, and you want to dig into what it means or what works and doesn't work about it, you're usually shit out of luck. There's a reason I get 3,000 views a month; they're almost all headed to the reviews I've done. Almost nobody cares what I write about my own writing process. My blogging buddy Karen Carlson gets a lot more hits than I do, and she mostly is doing the same thing: reading short stories and talking about them. In fact, if you Google one of the short stories from BASS or Pushcart, she's usually the number one result after the story itself, and I'm often #2.
That's not a great sign for the health of short fiction as a viable commercial and cultural activity. Which is an absolute shame, because there is great fiction being written in America today, but almost the only stories anyone talks about, if they talk about them at all, are the ones the New Yorker puts out. And even that is usually just a day or two of chat on Twitter.
I find writing reviews somewhere between exhilarating and as exhausting as writing fiction of my own. It's definitely a lot more fun to write a good review than a bad one. The bad ones, I don't Tweet about. I feel bad about them. But I feel I need to write them, because without honest criticism, the ecosystem collapses.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Saturday, March 30, 2019
A nearly perfect girl-girl buddy story: "A Suburban Weekend" by Lisa Taddeo
For the first three pages of Lisa Taddeo's "A Suburban Weekend," it's not clear who the main character is. Best friends Liv and Fern seem to have equal weight. They even seem to be near equals to each other when they compare who is more attractive, a pastime they seem to spend a lot of time on:
I had a hard time even remembering which was which for a while, although the story does its best to differentiate between the two early on. Before too long into the story, though, it's clear Fern's story is the central one. Not necessarily because she's the more interesting of the two, but because her needs are deeper.
Fern is depressed. Her parents are both dead, the second one in the last few months. The first look into her interior life we get, she is wanting "to be ground down." Fern has suicidal thoughts, and she is, as they say, "acting out" her feelings in increasingly dangerous, mostly sexual, ways.
She has become numb to most of her life. She has become "a person who didn't care who sat down beside her." The only instinct that survives in her is the one to be desired sexually: "The only thing that had lately survived in Fern was a desire to make men want to fuck her. All men. Every single man she saw. Hot dog vendors. UPS drivers across the street."
There are two remedies offered to Fern in "A Suburban Weekend": psychotropic drugs/therapy and love. The first one seems unlikely to work; the therapist is kind of a dick ("He wore knit ties on top of flannel shirts, like an executive who lived in a tree"), and Fern doesn't take the drugs they give her, anyway. So if there's a remedy that's going to work, it's got to be love.
The primary source of love, as opposed to sex, Fern gets is her best friend, Liv. Liv is a flawed friend. She's jealous of Fern. When Fern talks about her plans for suicide or says she feels like life is pointless, Liv deflects with humor (she's a comedian). Liv has plenty of issues of her own to work on--we find out she takes Adderall, although we don't know for what--and she's a hopeless romantic who spends her life in bars waiting for love to come along and fix all her problems. So it's going to be hard for Liv to be up to the challenge.
But Liv's also got a lot going for her as a friend. She honors the memory of Fern's parents, speaking to Fern in Fern's mother's voice, saying things she thinks Fern's mother would say (even if it's to say Fern looks like a slut in what she's wearing), and forcing food on her too-skinny friend like an Italian mother would.
Fern tells Liv about her plan to kill herself. Fern's been eating one of her mother's exotic Italian candies, lacrime d'amore, every time Fern does something stupid, like having sex with an Argentinian investor in the same room Liv is in. When Fern has gotten through all the candies, she's going to kill herself.
During the discussion where Fern reveals her plan, Liv, in a seemingly off-point comment about her desire for a husband, says she believes that "people can be saved by people who love them." This is the central conflict of the story: can Liv, with all her flaws, love Fern enough to save her? The meaning of lacrime d'amore is "tears of love." Liv, with all of her shortcomings, needs to somehow fill the bowl of love for Fern before Fern can exhaust it.
I usually don't worry about "spoilers" in a review/analysis of a short story. I figure people reading this have usually already read the story and are looking online for what someone else thought of it, rather than looking for a review to know if they should read it. But this once, I'm going to withhold giving away the ending, mostly because I found it to be something rare: a surprise ending that really worked and was genuinely moving.
There aren't a whole lot of girl-girl buddy stories out there. This is one of the best ones I've seen. It's up there with Danielle Evans's sort of accidental girl-girl buddy story "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." When telling a story, one has to take into consideration how much specificity an audience can handle. Do you batter your audience with little details of the life of your character, even things they may not be familiar with, or do you try to keep it to things everyone can understand? What's great about this story is that it doesn't shy away from specificity. It trusts that the readers will be able to handle details they may not be familiar with. Much like The Wire had universal appeal precisely because it dove so deeply into the local reality of Baltimore, this story succeeded by throwing everything about the life of a twenty-seven-year-old woman in New York City at the reader. It turns out that people really can relate new information to things they already know. I felt no obstacles to accessing the interior life of Fern because I'm a man in my forties.
It was a great story with a powerful central theme. Answering the question of whether love is enough to save someone is a story that will likely never get old. It certainly won't get old if it's handled with the skill this one was handled with.
Fern and Liv were always trying to decide who was prettier, hotter, who could bypass the line to et into Le Bain, who looked more elegant drinking cortados at a cafe with crossed legs. The answer flickered, depending on whether they were assessing themselves from far away or up close, and what each was wearing, how her hair looked, how much rest she'd gotten and, of course, who had recently been hit on hardest by tall guys with MBAs.
I had a hard time even remembering which was which for a while, although the story does its best to differentiate between the two early on. Before too long into the story, though, it's clear Fern's story is the central one. Not necessarily because she's the more interesting of the two, but because her needs are deeper.
Fern is depressed. Her parents are both dead, the second one in the last few months. The first look into her interior life we get, she is wanting "to be ground down." Fern has suicidal thoughts, and she is, as they say, "acting out" her feelings in increasingly dangerous, mostly sexual, ways.
She has become numb to most of her life. She has become "a person who didn't care who sat down beside her." The only instinct that survives in her is the one to be desired sexually: "The only thing that had lately survived in Fern was a desire to make men want to fuck her. All men. Every single man she saw. Hot dog vendors. UPS drivers across the street."
There are two remedies offered to Fern in "A Suburban Weekend": psychotropic drugs/therapy and love. The first one seems unlikely to work; the therapist is kind of a dick ("He wore knit ties on top of flannel shirts, like an executive who lived in a tree"), and Fern doesn't take the drugs they give her, anyway. So if there's a remedy that's going to work, it's got to be love.
 |
| Can love save our hero? Stay tuned to find out! |
The primary source of love, as opposed to sex, Fern gets is her best friend, Liv. Liv is a flawed friend. She's jealous of Fern. When Fern talks about her plans for suicide or says she feels like life is pointless, Liv deflects with humor (she's a comedian). Liv has plenty of issues of her own to work on--we find out she takes Adderall, although we don't know for what--and she's a hopeless romantic who spends her life in bars waiting for love to come along and fix all her problems. So it's going to be hard for Liv to be up to the challenge.
But Liv's also got a lot going for her as a friend. She honors the memory of Fern's parents, speaking to Fern in Fern's mother's voice, saying things she thinks Fern's mother would say (even if it's to say Fern looks like a slut in what she's wearing), and forcing food on her too-skinny friend like an Italian mother would.
Fern tells Liv about her plan to kill herself. Fern's been eating one of her mother's exotic Italian candies, lacrime d'amore, every time Fern does something stupid, like having sex with an Argentinian investor in the same room Liv is in. When Fern has gotten through all the candies, she's going to kill herself.
During the discussion where Fern reveals her plan, Liv, in a seemingly off-point comment about her desire for a husband, says she believes that "people can be saved by people who love them." This is the central conflict of the story: can Liv, with all her flaws, love Fern enough to save her? The meaning of lacrime d'amore is "tears of love." Liv, with all of her shortcomings, needs to somehow fill the bowl of love for Fern before Fern can exhaust it.
I usually don't worry about "spoilers" in a review/analysis of a short story. I figure people reading this have usually already read the story and are looking online for what someone else thought of it, rather than looking for a review to know if they should read it. But this once, I'm going to withhold giving away the ending, mostly because I found it to be something rare: a surprise ending that really worked and was genuinely moving.
There aren't a whole lot of girl-girl buddy stories out there. This is one of the best ones I've seen. It's up there with Danielle Evans's sort of accidental girl-girl buddy story "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." When telling a story, one has to take into consideration how much specificity an audience can handle. Do you batter your audience with little details of the life of your character, even things they may not be familiar with, or do you try to keep it to things everyone can understand? What's great about this story is that it doesn't shy away from specificity. It trusts that the readers will be able to handle details they may not be familiar with. Much like The Wire had universal appeal precisely because it dove so deeply into the local reality of Baltimore, this story succeeded by throwing everything about the life of a twenty-seven-year-old woman in New York City at the reader. It turns out that people really can relate new information to things they already know. I felt no obstacles to accessing the interior life of Fern because I'm a man in my forties.
It was a great story with a powerful central theme. Answering the question of whether love is enough to save someone is a story that will likely never get old. It certainly won't get old if it's handled with the skill this one was handled with.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
The rant raised to high art: "Acceptance Speech" by David Naimon
David Naimon sets himself up with a tough challenge in "Acceptance Speech," originally published in Boulevard and now in the Pushcart Anthology. The entire story is told as an acceptance speech for an award. There is no set-up to the speech. We start with word one of the speech, and the story ends when the speech does. It's the sort of premise for a story that feels like it came out of one of those "writing prompt a day"calendars writers sometimes get as gifts. Whether it will work depends on the writer's ability to dazzle with one speech. The story stakes everything on the power of one soliloquy, told without breaks of any kind--not even paragraph breaks.
Fortunately, Naimon is up to the challenge. The narrator of "Acceptance Speech" mesmerizes her audience--us--right away, and the spell doesn't let up until the last word. She's winning some sort of award for gardening, of all things. Along the way to accepting her award, we learn about her philosophy and her relationship with her husband.
She doesn't think of gardening in the sentimental way one associates with gentle grandmothers and their funny gardening hats. Her speech is a "confession," which she likens to the gardener's tendency to go about "unearthing secrets, the subterranean love affair between taproots and earthworms, the unconquerable underground of morning glory networks, the white softness of larvae in the fetal position." Gardening isn't just about growing things to make the world beautiful to her. She sees through this lie into the heart of what gardening really is, just as she rejects the outward cuteness of otters by noting the truth that otters rape baby seals. (By the way, if you Google "otters rape baby seals," Google will shame you by reminding you that child pornography is illegal. Yes, Google. I agree. Please take me off your watch list.)
Gardening isn't about making the world beautiful. It's "an enterprise full of cruelty, a task best suited for sociopaths and tyrants...If not them, what mentality best suits a pastime where we alone choose what deserves to live and what deserves to die, that demands we constantly kill things to groom and nourish the others we prefer?"
Herein, shining through the philosophical rant, is the seed of actual human conflict in the story, the conflict between narrator and husband that seeps out through the speech. The husband is the cheery, optimistic sort. He recycles because he believes it might really save the planet, whereas the narrator, his wife, sees recycling as a "terrible lie," because it is nothing but a "Band-Aid on the open sore that is consumer capitalism." The narrator claims--and insists she means it--that the best solution would be to let humans be fully human and end their lives on Earth sooner rather than later, since it's inevitable we will wipe ourselves out eventually anyway.
The narrator looks to the bacteria that fill the soil she works in for an example, the bacteria she reminds her audience outnumber humans ten cells to one within our own bodies: "I say, let's look to our ancestors and to their ancestral wisdom for the answer. When we place bacteria in a petri dish with an abundant food supply, what happens? They reproduce rapidly, exponentially. They are unstoppable. That is, until they choke themselves to death on their own waste..."
So the narrator thinks humanity is doomed and refuses to be sentimental about it. The husband willfully refuses to see the truth the wife sees, which is why he wants kids and she doesn't. This leads us to the moment of crisis, when the husband confronts the wife by asking her: if you really think humanity is better off dying sooner rather than later, shouldn't you have kids? Shouldn't you have a ton of them? "That would be the ultimate act of filling the petri dish, wouldn't it?" he asks.
In anger, she tears out every beautiful plant in her garden and fills it with the most aesthetically challenged plants she can find. The Sambucus Black Tower. The Snakeroot.
When she has finally ripped out every plant in the garden, including the fig tree the couple had planted together as a symbol of "good luck and fertility," she realizes that this ugly reaction to her husband's insistent and childlike faith was "a terrible lie...a moral sleight of hand."
Her catharsis, her realization, is this: "That nothing did fulfill my philosophy more fully than hominid propagation, even if somehow it also, disturbingly, satisfied my husband's hackneyed hope for humanity's future as well."
She is content to "fill the petri dish." She is accepting the award for her strange garden, we learn, while pregnant. She adopts some of her husband's naivete during the goosebump-inducing peroration:
It's rare that short stories deal in such an honest way with what is really the central questions in life. There is a lot of modern fiction on questions of identity and social justice. These are important questions, of course, but they're not the central question. Nobody will care about social justice if she feels the world is doomed soon, anyway, or that humanity can never really rise about the essential red-in-tooth-and-clawness of nature. What was it that allowed the narrator of this story to embrace, however tentatively and with qualification, optimism for humanity's future?
The best I can tell, it was simply fully embracing the alternative. This is how some commentators read the Book of Ecclesiastes, too: after nihilistic thought piled on top of nihilistic thought, the "preacher"--who is, just like Naimon's narrator, telling a story through a speech--finally collapses into a tried-and-true chestnut of a conclusion. "Here is the conclusion of the matter: fear God and keep His commandments." It's not a very convincing conclusion after so much despair, perhaps, unless you accept that the preacher has earned his soft landing after so much unblinking honesty.
Some people, like the narrator's husband, naturally lean toward optimism. They do so by ignoring many inconvenient facts, but by the end the narrator doesn't see this as something to despise the optimistic for. She also arrives at a well-worn conclusion: go forth and multiply. For her, it isn't so much a surrender after having been though the dark night of the soul as it is a realization that nihilism and optimism, on some level, come out to the same thing.
She has repeated a process our ancestors no doubt had to find for themselves long ago. Some poor soul in the neolithic period, scratching out a tough life from the ground, decided to grow something because it was beautiful. This first gardener was not unaware of how brutal nature really was, how ready to kill. This understanding of what nature really was wasn't a challenge to optimism; it was the source of it. The narrator in "Acceptance Speech" is just repeating an ancient discovery by means of the act of accepting something being given to her.
Fortunately, Naimon is up to the challenge. The narrator of "Acceptance Speech" mesmerizes her audience--us--right away, and the spell doesn't let up until the last word. She's winning some sort of award for gardening, of all things. Along the way to accepting her award, we learn about her philosophy and her relationship with her husband.
She doesn't think of gardening in the sentimental way one associates with gentle grandmothers and their funny gardening hats. Her speech is a "confession," which she likens to the gardener's tendency to go about "unearthing secrets, the subterranean love affair between taproots and earthworms, the unconquerable underground of morning glory networks, the white softness of larvae in the fetal position." Gardening isn't just about growing things to make the world beautiful to her. She sees through this lie into the heart of what gardening really is, just as she rejects the outward cuteness of otters by noting the truth that otters rape baby seals. (By the way, if you Google "otters rape baby seals," Google will shame you by reminding you that child pornography is illegal. Yes, Google. I agree. Please take me off your watch list.)
 |
| Assholes. |
Gardening isn't about making the world beautiful. It's "an enterprise full of cruelty, a task best suited for sociopaths and tyrants...If not them, what mentality best suits a pastime where we alone choose what deserves to live and what deserves to die, that demands we constantly kill things to groom and nourish the others we prefer?"
Herein, shining through the philosophical rant, is the seed of actual human conflict in the story, the conflict between narrator and husband that seeps out through the speech. The husband is the cheery, optimistic sort. He recycles because he believes it might really save the planet, whereas the narrator, his wife, sees recycling as a "terrible lie," because it is nothing but a "Band-Aid on the open sore that is consumer capitalism." The narrator claims--and insists she means it--that the best solution would be to let humans be fully human and end their lives on Earth sooner rather than later, since it's inevitable we will wipe ourselves out eventually anyway.
The narrator looks to the bacteria that fill the soil she works in for an example, the bacteria she reminds her audience outnumber humans ten cells to one within our own bodies: "I say, let's look to our ancestors and to their ancestral wisdom for the answer. When we place bacteria in a petri dish with an abundant food supply, what happens? They reproduce rapidly, exponentially. They are unstoppable. That is, until they choke themselves to death on their own waste..."
So the narrator thinks humanity is doomed and refuses to be sentimental about it. The husband willfully refuses to see the truth the wife sees, which is why he wants kids and she doesn't. This leads us to the moment of crisis, when the husband confronts the wife by asking her: if you really think humanity is better off dying sooner rather than later, shouldn't you have kids? Shouldn't you have a ton of them? "That would be the ultimate act of filling the petri dish, wouldn't it?" he asks.
In anger, she tears out every beautiful plant in her garden and fills it with the most aesthetically challenged plants she can find. The Sambucus Black Tower. The Snakeroot.
 |
| A Sambucus Black Tower. All I can see is the singing bush from Three Amigos. |
When she has finally ripped out every plant in the garden, including the fig tree the couple had planted together as a symbol of "good luck and fertility," she realizes that this ugly reaction to her husband's insistent and childlike faith was "a terrible lie...a moral sleight of hand."
Her catharsis, her realization, is this: "That nothing did fulfill my philosophy more fully than hominid propagation, even if somehow it also, disturbingly, satisfied my husband's hackneyed hope for humanity's future as well."
She is content to "fill the petri dish." She is accepting the award for her strange garden, we learn, while pregnant. She adopts some of her husband's naivete during the goosebump-inducing peroration:
"I..watch a fat tiger-striped slug slide in the moonlight. I decide not to scissor it. Not yet. I decide to leave it whole, as my husband would prefer, leave it unsplit, undivided for yet another moment. But the hum, it is unmistakable. I like to think it is both that I hear, the bacteria and me, the hum of our division, as together we feed the fever and add to the dish. The garden and I, we are so full, so full of life. Thank you for this great honor."
It's rare that short stories deal in such an honest way with what is really the central questions in life. There is a lot of modern fiction on questions of identity and social justice. These are important questions, of course, but they're not the central question. Nobody will care about social justice if she feels the world is doomed soon, anyway, or that humanity can never really rise about the essential red-in-tooth-and-clawness of nature. What was it that allowed the narrator of this story to embrace, however tentatively and with qualification, optimism for humanity's future?
The best I can tell, it was simply fully embracing the alternative. This is how some commentators read the Book of Ecclesiastes, too: after nihilistic thought piled on top of nihilistic thought, the "preacher"--who is, just like Naimon's narrator, telling a story through a speech--finally collapses into a tried-and-true chestnut of a conclusion. "Here is the conclusion of the matter: fear God and keep His commandments." It's not a very convincing conclusion after so much despair, perhaps, unless you accept that the preacher has earned his soft landing after so much unblinking honesty.
Some people, like the narrator's husband, naturally lean toward optimism. They do so by ignoring many inconvenient facts, but by the end the narrator doesn't see this as something to despise the optimistic for. She also arrives at a well-worn conclusion: go forth and multiply. For her, it isn't so much a surrender after having been though the dark night of the soul as it is a realization that nihilism and optimism, on some level, come out to the same thing.
She has repeated a process our ancestors no doubt had to find for themselves long ago. Some poor soul in the neolithic period, scratching out a tough life from the ground, decided to grow something because it was beautiful. This first gardener was not unaware of how brutal nature really was, how ready to kill. This understanding of what nature really was wasn't a challenge to optimism; it was the source of it. The narrator in "Acceptance Speech" is just repeating an ancient discovery by means of the act of accepting something being given to her.
Monday, March 25, 2019
The need for speed in reviews:
I was talking today with a friend about the movie Get Out, since Us just came out. I wrote about it two years ago when it came out, but I still don't really know what I think about it. I also talked with Mrs. Heretic this weekend about the recent remake of A Star is Born. I can't decide if it was a really good movie or just a so-so movie with two really amazing performances. I saw the movie months ago, but still can't make my mind up.
It takes a while for a story to marinate before I can really ingest it. So why do I read a story one day and review/analyze it the next? I guess for the same reason movie or video game reviewers have to post the moment something comes out. It's not quite as urgent for me--it's not like a book has the same life-span as a movie. But if I'm going to get through all of Pushcart or Best American Short Stories, I kind of need to keep moving. So I read, re-read, and then write.
I don't believe most people really have enough perspective on stories after a day to get to the heart of them. If all you need to do is give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on going to see it, that's probably not a problem, but reviewers try to get to the heart of stories all the time without having spent enough time to really see what that story is about.
I'm just wondering how much I'm doing it.
This isn't an excuse, by the way, for how long it's taking me to do my next review. That's more because I have another project I'm working on. It's just something that's on my mind. It's not like I've spent no time or effort trying to get to the bottom of a story, but I do wonder what the right mix of time vs. timeliness is to be effective as a critic.
It takes a while for a story to marinate before I can really ingest it. So why do I read a story one day and review/analyze it the next? I guess for the same reason movie or video game reviewers have to post the moment something comes out. It's not quite as urgent for me--it's not like a book has the same life-span as a movie. But if I'm going to get through all of Pushcart or Best American Short Stories, I kind of need to keep moving. So I read, re-read, and then write.
I don't believe most people really have enough perspective on stories after a day to get to the heart of them. If all you need to do is give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on going to see it, that's probably not a problem, but reviewers try to get to the heart of stories all the time without having spent enough time to really see what that story is about.
I'm just wondering how much I'm doing it.
This isn't an excuse, by the way, for how long it's taking me to do my next review. That's more because I have another project I'm working on. It's just something that's on my mind. It's not like I've spent no time or effort trying to get to the bottom of a story, but I do wonder what the right mix of time vs. timeliness is to be effective as a critic.
Monday, March 18, 2019
Puzzling parable: "The Wall" by Robert Coover
I'm a fan of parables and fables. They are a sadly neglected form these days, largely because anything that smacks of didacticism is suspect. "The Wall" by Robert Coover partly escapes being charged with being didactic by also being enigmatic, although doing so robs it of much of the pleasure that comes with a true parable.
It's a simple story and a short one, and it can be separated into four parts. Two lovers, highly reminiscent of Pyramus and Thisbe from mythology, fall in love with one another while building a wall to separate their two towns. The town fathers of both rival cities have assured their citizens that only a wall can give them freedom, a freedom that requires discipline and sacrifice. In part two, resistance to the wall mounts. The lovers, who had begun their resistance because of their desire to be together, change during this part and begin to focus on knocking the wall down more than on why they wanted to knock it down: "There was no time now for stolen glances, passionate whispers into the wall; the fall of the wall became their life's project, their existence all but defined by it."
After the fall of the wall, we move into part three, in which the lovers realize that, strange as it may be, they miss the wall. The wall had deprived them of their desires, but also been "a stimulus to them." Freedom, however, "had deprived them of their intensity." In part four, the lovers and others who lived through the age of the wall begin to erect a psychological wall, one only they can see. They speak to each other over this imaginary wall.
It is during this fourth stage that the lovers engage in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness dialogue with one another, one in which the lovers, now divorced, try to come to terms with the meaning of the lives they have lived:
So is there a moral, even if it's one the lovers are running from? Whatever the moral may be, it's not a comforting one. They realize they have been using the wall to shield themselves "from anything more disquieting than banter." The moral is something about the "tyranny of time," that walls are destined to be knocked down and rebuilt, but emptiness will last through it all.
Pyramus and Thisbe from legend both killed themselves in an act of tragic misunderstanding. The lovers in Coover's story seem to run from the meaning of the story of their lives in order to prevent a kind of death overtaking them. They recall being told that the wall meant freedom, and now that they feel only loneliness, they wonder if that loneliness itself is the freedom they had been promised.
I didn't find this a terribly enjoyable or insightful story. It's the kind of story a beginning writing student would write. In fact, I wrote one a lot like it 20 years ago. It would never have been published for anyone without a track record, or if it had, it would have been ignored. The parable structure is really nothing more than a cheap excuse to avoid writing a more fleshed-out world or coming up with a narrative where anything is more than just roughly sketched out. You start off wishing for something for a reason, then the something itself becomes the reason, and then you feel empty when you finally get it. That's a pretty familiar story. I don't think the parable form of story really has much to do here. It's not its natural place to shine.
It's a simple story and a short one, and it can be separated into four parts. Two lovers, highly reminiscent of Pyramus and Thisbe from mythology, fall in love with one another while building a wall to separate their two towns. The town fathers of both rival cities have assured their citizens that only a wall can give them freedom, a freedom that requires discipline and sacrifice. In part two, resistance to the wall mounts. The lovers, who had begun their resistance because of their desire to be together, change during this part and begin to focus on knocking the wall down more than on why they wanted to knock it down: "There was no time now for stolen glances, passionate whispers into the wall; the fall of the wall became their life's project, their existence all but defined by it."
 |
| I don't know whether Pyramus or Thisbe's parents paid for the wall. |
After the fall of the wall, we move into part three, in which the lovers realize that, strange as it may be, they miss the wall. The wall had deprived them of their desires, but also been "a stimulus to them." Freedom, however, "had deprived them of their intensity." In part four, the lovers and others who lived through the age of the wall begin to erect a psychological wall, one only they can see. They speak to each other over this imaginary wall.
It is during this fourth stage that the lovers engage in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness dialogue with one another, one in which the lovers, now divorced, try to come to terms with the meaning of the lives they have lived:
Though monstrous, the old wall gave so much meaning to our lives, one said, and the other: Well, meaning, that old delusion. Which, when sought, is just another form of nostalgia. Sort of like love, you mean. No, love, whatever it is, is real in its stupefying way. But it's not enough. No, and there's not much else. That's very sad. It is. Sometimes I cry. We had some good parties, though, which wouldn't have happened without a wall in the way. There's probably a moral, but I don't want to know it.
So is there a moral, even if it's one the lovers are running from? Whatever the moral may be, it's not a comforting one. They realize they have been using the wall to shield themselves "from anything more disquieting than banter." The moral is something about the "tyranny of time," that walls are destined to be knocked down and rebuilt, but emptiness will last through it all.
Pyramus and Thisbe from legend both killed themselves in an act of tragic misunderstanding. The lovers in Coover's story seem to run from the meaning of the story of their lives in order to prevent a kind of death overtaking them. They recall being told that the wall meant freedom, and now that they feel only loneliness, they wonder if that loneliness itself is the freedom they had been promised.
I didn't find this a terribly enjoyable or insightful story. It's the kind of story a beginning writing student would write. In fact, I wrote one a lot like it 20 years ago. It would never have been published for anyone without a track record, or if it had, it would have been ignored. The parable structure is really nothing more than a cheap excuse to avoid writing a more fleshed-out world or coming up with a narrative where anything is more than just roughly sketched out. You start off wishing for something for a reason, then the something itself becomes the reason, and then you feel empty when you finally get it. That's a pretty familiar story. I don't think the parable form of story really has much to do here. It's not its natural place to shine.
Saturday, March 16, 2019
White privilege through a prism...and then a blender: "The Whitest Girl" by Brenda Peynado
The most satisfying kind of story analyses for me are the ones where I feel like I've stated some kind of half-reasonable theme about a story. A theme, to wax pedantic for a second, is not the same as a subject. "Friendship" is not a theme. The story's attitude toward friendship is a theme, something like, "Friendship can be a solace, but also an anchor." While realizing that no statement of a theme is actually the theme itself--else, why would there be a need for a story?--it does feel more to me like I've done my work of analysis when I can at least arrive in the vicinity of some kind of thematic statement.
That's what makes Brenda Peynado's "The Whitest Girl" both such a joy and a frustration to work with. There's all kinds of mortar to build a thematic house from, but there seem to be eleven different blueprints within the story.
That's actually a good thing. This is an absolutely electric story; it's pulsing with raw power. I don't think the writer is even fully in control of the power of this story, which actually adds to its appeal. She's writing about the intersection of race, class, and gender in America, which is about as explosive a topic as we have today. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if all the powder kegs were kept away from the flames. Part of what made this story so instantly satisfying was watching the writer's Zippo get close to the barrels of dynamite over and over, wondering when things were finally going to blow.
But how to wrangle this explosiveness into some kind of statement of theme, some hint of "what it's really about"? You can't approach this story head-on; it will take a little bit of a roundabout approach. I think it might be good to start with why this story is enjoyable first, then extrapolate from what's enjoyable about it to what's meaningful.
The story is about a white girl who comes from a poor family and attends a majority Latino high school. She deals with prejudice, both the well-meaning and the not-so-well-meaning kinds, in a flip-the-script story about race. It called to mind a bad film from the 90s, one that had much higher ambitions than it achieved. The film was White Man's Burden. Essentially, it just took the familiar racial situation in America and flipped it--it was an alternate universe in which whites had historically been subjugated to blacks, and were now, although in some ways better off than they had been, still dealing with the legacy of racism.
The movie didn't really work for me. It has a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes, so apparently I'm not alone. It failed because flipping the script didn't really tell us anything new about racism. It told exactly the same story, just transcribed into a different color scheme. I think the point was to maybe shame white people into suddenly taking racism seriously, as though the sort of people who had stoutly resisted claims that black people still had it bad would suddenly, by seeing a white person have trouble finding a white doll for his kid, change their minds about everything. It was a little condescending and more than a little moralizing.
"Whitest Girl" isn't an alternate universe. It's this world, just a corner of it where racism's logic operates a little differently. White privilege still exists, but this is about a place in the world where one white person is definitely at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It's tempting to be hasty and say the theme of the story is that if the world were reversed and privilege granted to another race, then that race would act much the same as whites do in their current role. But while that may be a tiny bit of what this story's about, it's way more complicated than that. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to make the story lie still long enough to pick out a consistent attitude about race in it.
One reason why is the incredibly effective use of the first-person plural ("we") narrator. "We" are the ones interacting with Terry, the white girl whose parents died and who heads home to a trailer to take care of her many siblings. While one part of "We" might by sympathetic toward Terry, there is always another voice that comes in to complicate what "We" collectively think about her.
The "we" narrator calls Terry a "Frankenstein cobbled together," but so is the narrator. That's why "We" can't really decide either what Terry means or what Terry teaches us. She is "made of what we hated, what hated us, the disinterest and disregard that bunched us together with these disgusting people, with their potatoes and bad music, bad manners, their self-satisfied boredom." From the moment "We" come in contact with Terry, "We" cannot decide what she signifies for us. "We" decide to follow her wherever she goes in order to make sense of her, but the project is doomed from the beginning:
The group cannot decide on the meaning of its surveillance or its aim right at the beginning, so it's no wonder they cannot agree on what they learn from the surveillance. There are a couple of notes the group keeps hitting, however. One is that they are resentful. Although it's clear Terry is poor--poorer than any of them--they still associate Terry with the people who "yelled at us in the grocery store, or assumed we couldn't speak English, or that we were somehow unintelligent." A second reoccurring idea is that Terry wants to be one of them. When they see her stop in the parking lot and almost look back at them, "We" think that "this meant that she wanted to be a part of our lives, that she regretted never inviting us over to her squalid trailer..."
"We" are torn between hating her for reminding us of other white people in society who have privileges we don't share. "We" also look down on her for having less than us, and, assuming she wishes she could be us, work to keep her excluded. Meanwhile, a few of us try to look at her with sympathy.
The notion of white privilege is a key concept in American culture right now. It's also a contentious one. Although most white people would probably concede that being white is, on the whole, more of an advantage than a disadvantage, if you happen to come across a white person who grew up poor or with shaky parents, they will likely bristle at the notion that they had it easy because they were white. They would say that yes, whiteness helps, but the benefits of whiteness can be offset by other things.
In this story, we have Terry's whiteness, which "We" go so far as to call "audacious" whiteness, pitted against her poverty. In society as a whole, being white brings privilege, but in the corner of society in this story, Terry is the other, Terry is the one with no privileges. So while "We" are figuring out what to do with Terry, the whole notion of white privilege is being interrogated by taking it out of its general context and putting it in a very specific exception.
"We" end up with a decision to make. Terry has started dating the janitor of the high school. "We" are all jealous. Ironically, "We" resent the janitor's refusal to treat us in the exotic and sexually stereotyped way Latina women are sometimes treated: "What magic did she have that none of us did? ...We were the color of smooth pecans, our eyes dark and full of mysteries, our plump lips deep purple and moistened." It's maddening to the girls that the janitor doesn't treat them as idealized abstractions, isn't impressed by their "stories about how our families had crossed this ocean or that desert or were pursued by an evil dictator." He has picked the plain white girl, and this shall not stand.
The girls decide to pry Terry away from the janitor in order to ruin their relationship by inviting her to one of the girls' quinceanera. But at the party, they learn a startling fact from one of the older boys there: the janitor was kicked out of his high school for raping a white girl at a party under circumstances almost exactly like the ones Terry is in at the moment. The girls have to figure out what to do. In that moment, it turns out that the nice thing to do and the mean thing to do coincide, so the divided "We" at last can agree on a plan. They finally manage to break the two up, although by the end it's not entirely clear the janitor was really justly accused.
This is likely to be a story that everyone brings their pre-existing ideas of race to. Some people will say it proves that anyone can be a racist given the right conditions. Some will say it proves that white privilege is either a real thing or not such a real thing. Some will say that it merely shows that racial relations are more complicated than we think.
I think a large point of the underlying theme is related to the ever-shifting "We." Some parts of "We" seem to be kind. Some are obviously not kind. In the end, they get the janitor away from Terry, but it's not clear if they did it for good reasons, and it's not clear they even did the right thing. It will never be clear, because "We" is so riven, so full of contradictions, it's hard to figure out what is really motivating the group in power in this story.
And there's the theme. In the larger societal context, in which white people really do have some measure of privilege, white people often complain when blanket accusations are thrown at them. "Not all white people are racist!" they claim. They are, of course, right. But the problem is that "we" white people really are a "We." We may not think of ourselves as a group, but we seem that way to those outside our group. Within our "We," we're many voices, some good, some bad, and we can't even agree on what we all think. And many actions "We" take could conceivably have good or bad motives, such as putting drug offenders behind bars in record numbers. Is this to protect vulnerable black families, or to punish them?
When "We" are of so many different minds, it is impossible for outside groups to make judgments about our motives. While the dominant group watches outside groups to try to understand them, they are watching back. Like the reader in this story, every attempt of someone outside the group in power will be frustrated in an attempt to draw meaning by the sheer abundance of different meanings the "We" is constructing at any time.
Terry decides to go off and live as a cloistered at the end. I'm not sure that's a totally satisfying resolution to the story, but it is a reasonable resolution for outsiders to decide to withdraw from the society they can never hope to comprehend because it does not comprehend itself.
That's what makes Brenda Peynado's "The Whitest Girl" both such a joy and a frustration to work with. There's all kinds of mortar to build a thematic house from, but there seem to be eleven different blueprints within the story.
That's actually a good thing. This is an absolutely electric story; it's pulsing with raw power. I don't think the writer is even fully in control of the power of this story, which actually adds to its appeal. She's writing about the intersection of race, class, and gender in America, which is about as explosive a topic as we have today. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if all the powder kegs were kept away from the flames. Part of what made this story so instantly satisfying was watching the writer's Zippo get close to the barrels of dynamite over and over, wondering when things were finally going to blow.
But how to wrangle this explosiveness into some kind of statement of theme, some hint of "what it's really about"? You can't approach this story head-on; it will take a little bit of a roundabout approach. I think it might be good to start with why this story is enjoyable first, then extrapolate from what's enjoyable about it to what's meaningful.
Contrast to a similar idea that didn't work
The story is about a white girl who comes from a poor family and attends a majority Latino high school. She deals with prejudice, both the well-meaning and the not-so-well-meaning kinds, in a flip-the-script story about race. It called to mind a bad film from the 90s, one that had much higher ambitions than it achieved. The film was White Man's Burden. Essentially, it just took the familiar racial situation in America and flipped it--it was an alternate universe in which whites had historically been subjugated to blacks, and were now, although in some ways better off than they had been, still dealing with the legacy of racism.
The movie didn't really work for me. It has a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes, so apparently I'm not alone. It failed because flipping the script didn't really tell us anything new about racism. It told exactly the same story, just transcribed into a different color scheme. I think the point was to maybe shame white people into suddenly taking racism seriously, as though the sort of people who had stoutly resisted claims that black people still had it bad would suddenly, by seeing a white person have trouble finding a white doll for his kid, change their minds about everything. It was a little condescending and more than a little moralizing.
 |
| Maybe it just needed a dash of Tarantino in it to make it work. |
What "Whitest Girl" did differently
"Whitest Girl" isn't an alternate universe. It's this world, just a corner of it where racism's logic operates a little differently. White privilege still exists, but this is about a place in the world where one white person is definitely at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It's tempting to be hasty and say the theme of the story is that if the world were reversed and privilege granted to another race, then that race would act much the same as whites do in their current role. But while that may be a tiny bit of what this story's about, it's way more complicated than that. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to make the story lie still long enough to pick out a consistent attitude about race in it.
One reason why is the incredibly effective use of the first-person plural ("we") narrator. "We" are the ones interacting with Terry, the white girl whose parents died and who heads home to a trailer to take care of her many siblings. While one part of "We" might by sympathetic toward Terry, there is always another voice that comes in to complicate what "We" collectively think about her.
The "we" narrator calls Terry a "Frankenstein cobbled together," but so is the narrator. That's why "We" can't really decide either what Terry means or what Terry teaches us. She is "made of what we hated, what hated us, the disinterest and disregard that bunched us together with these disgusting people, with their potatoes and bad music, bad manners, their self-satisfied boredom." From the moment "We" come in contact with Terry, "We" cannot decide what she signifies for us. "We" decide to follow her wherever she goes in order to make sense of her, but the project is doomed from the beginning:
We wanted to know Terry's secrets, we wanted to know who she loved, who she hated, what she dreamed of in the bed she shared with her sisters. This is not what we admitted to each other, of course. We said that we hated her, we wanted to ruin her life, or at least get her kicked out of school, and haz mel favor, how dare she?...Some of us protested at our cruelty, but the rest of us framed it as a game. Then it all seemed harmless.
The group cannot decide on the meaning of its surveillance or its aim right at the beginning, so it's no wonder they cannot agree on what they learn from the surveillance. There are a couple of notes the group keeps hitting, however. One is that they are resentful. Although it's clear Terry is poor--poorer than any of them--they still associate Terry with the people who "yelled at us in the grocery store, or assumed we couldn't speak English, or that we were somehow unintelligent." A second reoccurring idea is that Terry wants to be one of them. When they see her stop in the parking lot and almost look back at them, "We" think that "this meant that she wanted to be a part of our lives, that she regretted never inviting us over to her squalid trailer..."
"We" are torn between hating her for reminding us of other white people in society who have privileges we don't share. "We" also look down on her for having less than us, and, assuming she wishes she could be us, work to keep her excluded. Meanwhile, a few of us try to look at her with sympathy.
What's at stake
The notion of white privilege is a key concept in American culture right now. It's also a contentious one. Although most white people would probably concede that being white is, on the whole, more of an advantage than a disadvantage, if you happen to come across a white person who grew up poor or with shaky parents, they will likely bristle at the notion that they had it easy because they were white. They would say that yes, whiteness helps, but the benefits of whiteness can be offset by other things.
In this story, we have Terry's whiteness, which "We" go so far as to call "audacious" whiteness, pitted against her poverty. In society as a whole, being white brings privilege, but in the corner of society in this story, Terry is the other, Terry is the one with no privileges. So while "We" are figuring out what to do with Terry, the whole notion of white privilege is being interrogated by taking it out of its general context and putting it in a very specific exception.
How it resolves
"We" end up with a decision to make. Terry has started dating the janitor of the high school. "We" are all jealous. Ironically, "We" resent the janitor's refusal to treat us in the exotic and sexually stereotyped way Latina women are sometimes treated: "What magic did she have that none of us did? ...We were the color of smooth pecans, our eyes dark and full of mysteries, our plump lips deep purple and moistened." It's maddening to the girls that the janitor doesn't treat them as idealized abstractions, isn't impressed by their "stories about how our families had crossed this ocean or that desert or were pursued by an evil dictator." He has picked the plain white girl, and this shall not stand.
The girls decide to pry Terry away from the janitor in order to ruin their relationship by inviting her to one of the girls' quinceanera. But at the party, they learn a startling fact from one of the older boys there: the janitor was kicked out of his high school for raping a white girl at a party under circumstances almost exactly like the ones Terry is in at the moment. The girls have to figure out what to do. In that moment, it turns out that the nice thing to do and the mean thing to do coincide, so the divided "We" at last can agree on a plan. They finally manage to break the two up, although by the end it's not entirely clear the janitor was really justly accused.
What it all means
This is likely to be a story that everyone brings their pre-existing ideas of race to. Some people will say it proves that anyone can be a racist given the right conditions. Some will say it proves that white privilege is either a real thing or not such a real thing. Some will say that it merely shows that racial relations are more complicated than we think.
I think a large point of the underlying theme is related to the ever-shifting "We." Some parts of "We" seem to be kind. Some are obviously not kind. In the end, they get the janitor away from Terry, but it's not clear if they did it for good reasons, and it's not clear they even did the right thing. It will never be clear, because "We" is so riven, so full of contradictions, it's hard to figure out what is really motivating the group in power in this story.
And there's the theme. In the larger societal context, in which white people really do have some measure of privilege, white people often complain when blanket accusations are thrown at them. "Not all white people are racist!" they claim. They are, of course, right. But the problem is that "we" white people really are a "We." We may not think of ourselves as a group, but we seem that way to those outside our group. Within our "We," we're many voices, some good, some bad, and we can't even agree on what we all think. And many actions "We" take could conceivably have good or bad motives, such as putting drug offenders behind bars in record numbers. Is this to protect vulnerable black families, or to punish them?
When "We" are of so many different minds, it is impossible for outside groups to make judgments about our motives. While the dominant group watches outside groups to try to understand them, they are watching back. Like the reader in this story, every attempt of someone outside the group in power will be frustrated in an attempt to draw meaning by the sheer abundance of different meanings the "We" is constructing at any time.
Terry decides to go off and live as a cloistered at the end. I'm not sure that's a totally satisfying resolution to the story, but it is a reasonable resolution for outsiders to decide to withdraw from the society they can never hope to comprehend because it does not comprehend itself.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
This has now gotten ridiculous
From the Georgia Review, received today:
"Although your manuscript engaged our attention through several screenings, it was not ultimately selected for publication."
This is the Georgia motherhumpin' Review. One of the best journals on the planet. It now joins these other fine journals in having told me they were very close to accepting this particular story, but not quite there:
"Although your manuscript engaged our attention through several screenings, it was not ultimately selected for publication."
This is the Georgia motherhumpin' Review. One of the best journals on the planet. It now joins these other fine journals in having told me they were very close to accepting this particular story, but not quite there:
- Carve
- The Iowa Reivew
- The Common
- Shenandoah
- Nashville Review
That's six journals, any of which would have been a tremendous breakthrough for me, all of whom said they found a lot to like in it, but it wasn't quite there.
I just don't know what to do anymore. As a reader, I look at this story and feel like I just nailed it. I think it's the best thing I've ever written. It's much better than the stories I've published before. It's on a topic that's in the news, and I quite likely have more insight into this topic than any writer out there. If there's a story I really have to tell the world that's worth a damn, this is it. But it's a long story, which means there are a limited number of places to send it to, and I've sent it to almost all of them by now. I have a few more to try, but why would I expect anything different?
I gave it another look this week. I see I had two sections early on where I messed up sentences during a prior edit. That might have hurt its chances, although anyone who got past those enough to read the whole thing probably didn't say no because of those. My judgment as a reader is that the thing is pretty much right as it stands. There doesn't seem to me to be anything more to do with it.
I talk a lot about giving up, but I really don't want to. I love this story. It deserves readers. But if I can't get this one published, what chance do I have of ever having any kind of real audience as a writer? If I'm wrong about this story, I literally have no idea what's worth reading.
I can't believe a story can be considered good by so many journals of sound judgement, but not good enough by any.
Jesus, if I ever have some kind of definitive breakthrough and am looking back through this blog for moments of despair where it didn't look like it was ever going to happen, this is about as dark a one of those moments as I've felt.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
An Analysis of "I Figure" by Kim Chinquee, followed by some thoughts on the place of flash fiction in American literature
For the second time in a row, one of the stories from the 2019 Pushcart Anthology immediately make me think of thematically similar story from the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology. This time, however, I think it's the BASS story that comes off looking like the better of the two.
Kim Chinquee's "I Figure" hits similar thematic ground to "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline, which appeared in the 2018 BASS. Both stories center around young women, 20's-ish, who are making use too liberally of "you only live once" or "you learn by making mistakes, so make big mistakes" kinds of advice.
Chinquee's story is flash fiction, so it doesn't have much time to develop theme (or anything else). It relies on one scene and the imagery evoked in that scene. The narrator is lying on her back, post-coitally, balancing a glass of white wine on her abdomen while her lover the heart surgeon goes off to the bathroom to remove his condom and do the other after-sex things men do.
The act of balancing the wine glass tells the reader two things. First, she's in shape, because she's calling her stomach her "abs" and flexing in order to balance the glass. These are the sorts of things someone used to long rounds of ab exercises would do. She's likely someone who works out a lot in order to be attractive, rather than for personal reasons. We know she's had a lot of boyfriends, because she recalls taking a dog out "first with one boyfriend, then another, then another."
There are three refrains of "I figure" in the story. Twice it's to say she figures what she's doing is harmless. At the end, the formula shifts, and the narrator says she figures she's harmless. With each "I figure," the level of protesting too much grows.
It's a story of a woman making, perhaps, a few too many mistakes. The narrative arc doesn't happen on screen. We figure it will likely happen soon after this story is over. What we see in "I Figure" is a woman who's been deceiving herself, but her justifications are starting to become less convincing to herself. This might be the last time she does something self-destructive and calls it "harmless."
Or, maybe, this is the final act of defeating her own inner voice telling her to get her shit together before the voice gives up and stops trying. Either way, we've got a woman whose youthful "learning from your mistakes" phase needs to come to an end.
Like "Los Angeles," it's something of a critique of a youth culture that glamorizes irresponsibility. It's not to slut-shame women for experiencing and enjoying a sexually active lifestyle, even with many partners if that's what they choose, but it does call into question thoughtlessly engaging in that kind of lifestyle without consideration of whether there might be other ways of living that actually make you happier. It's fine to sing "My Way" to yourself as you go through life, but at least make sure it really is your way.
This is the second flash story to appear in Pushcart this year. It's a good story, although if I were to compare the impact of "Los Angeles" and "I Figure," I'd say I found "Los Angeles" to pack a far stronger wallop. How could it not? With Emma Cline's story, I got to live for much longer in Alice's world (including actually knowing her name!) than I got to live in the world of Chinquee's nameless narrator. It's very hard to be changed by 800 words of fiction. You can receive a glancing blow from it, but not really a knockout punch.
Fiction is sort of like food. You can probably get a microwave meal that isn't terrible and that nourishes you in some way, but to really be satisfied, the food needs to marinate a bit. You need to actually be in the other world.
So why is flash fiction so prevalent? I think there are two reasons, one legitimate and the other maybe a side-effect of the flaccidity of American literature. The first reason is that flash teaches developing (and even experienced) writers critical lessons. It teaches thrift in language, it teaches how to focus on what matters, and it teaches the importance of focusing on tangible, physical manifestations of theme rather than abstract notions in order to tell the story. Flash is a good way to get better as a writer, so we might as well share some of those exercises, just like an etude written to improve musical technique might be interesting enough to play in concerts rather than just in a studio.
But flash's ubiquity might also have something to do with the sorry commercial state of American literature. Most journals survive on the very edge of financial viability, even with an all-volunteer staff and without paying contributors. The only money journals tend to get is from advertising, which is click-based, or from the occasional person buying/contributing to the magazine. (Other income sources include the interest from one-time donations and the entry fees from occasional contests.)
Clicks and contributions both tend to come from one source: family and friends of the people who are published in the magazine. You can get more contributors into an edition if each piece is short. Hence, the popularity of flash fiction.
It may have something to do with why Pushcart picked a few of them. The editors made a note in the introduction of saying they included more pieces this year than ever before. I'm sure a lot of Pushcart sales come from the social networks of writers. Any anthology is going to sell better the more writers it has in it. Flash is one way to get more writers in it.
I'm not really criticizing publishers or editors for doing this. I want hundreds of journals to survive, and they should do what they have to in order to stay alive. Pushcart is good for the careers of the writers included in it, so long may it live. If it's a choice for Pushcart between including two flash stories and being 505 pages long or not including them and being 501 pages long, they should include the two stories. But the inclusion does say something about the choices editors are having to make.
I don't mean to make less of Chinquee's story here, which is a good flash fiction story. But if you are picking the best 100 meals made in America in 2018 in order to serve them to people, you probably wouldn't pick two that were microwave dinners, even if the chef managed to do something with those microwave dinners that was ingenious, given the limitations. But reality has forced editors to put a few microwave meals on the menu.
Nearly every journal outside the elite top 50 or so has to deal with this reality. Even if they don't just accept flash, most have a word limit that tops out around 5,000. Since most journals now only exist online, it's not really a question of space, but it is a question of what their volunteer reading force can get through. Overworked readers are more likely to pick a short piece, because it takes less time to vet it. But by adapting in this way to the reality of the struggling marketplace of serious fiction, many journals are not giving readers what they really look for in serious fiction, which are the stories that take a little longer but are are totally worth it.
I can foresee anger from flash writers asserting that flash really can have as much oomph as a longer story. It can. I don't argue that. Borges has a number of short pieces that are right at the top of my list of stories I think about the most. But it is harder to really hit hard with that little space, and I think the big successes are less frequent. A chef who manages to make a microwave meal taste almost as good as a home-cooked one may be cleverer and more inventive than the chef who makes a meal taste good the old-fashioned way, but I still know which one I'd rather eat.
Kim Chinquee's "I Figure" hits similar thematic ground to "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline, which appeared in the 2018 BASS. Both stories center around young women, 20's-ish, who are making use too liberally of "you only live once" or "you learn by making mistakes, so make big mistakes" kinds of advice.
Chinquee's story is flash fiction, so it doesn't have much time to develop theme (or anything else). It relies on one scene and the imagery evoked in that scene. The narrator is lying on her back, post-coitally, balancing a glass of white wine on her abdomen while her lover the heart surgeon goes off to the bathroom to remove his condom and do the other after-sex things men do.
The act of balancing the wine glass tells the reader two things. First, she's in shape, because she's calling her stomach her "abs" and flexing in order to balance the glass. These are the sorts of things someone used to long rounds of ab exercises would do. She's likely someone who works out a lot in order to be attractive, rather than for personal reasons. We know she's had a lot of boyfriends, because she recalls taking a dog out "first with one boyfriend, then another, then another."
There are three refrains of "I figure" in the story. Twice it's to say she figures what she's doing is harmless. At the end, the formula shifts, and the narrator says she figures she's harmless. With each "I figure," the level of protesting too much grows.
It's a story of a woman making, perhaps, a few too many mistakes. The narrative arc doesn't happen on screen. We figure it will likely happen soon after this story is over. What we see in "I Figure" is a woman who's been deceiving herself, but her justifications are starting to become less convincing to herself. This might be the last time she does something self-destructive and calls it "harmless."
Or, maybe, this is the final act of defeating her own inner voice telling her to get her shit together before the voice gives up and stops trying. Either way, we've got a woman whose youthful "learning from your mistakes" phase needs to come to an end.
Like "Los Angeles," it's something of a critique of a youth culture that glamorizes irresponsibility. It's not to slut-shame women for experiencing and enjoying a sexually active lifestyle, even with many partners if that's what they choose, but it does call into question thoughtlessly engaging in that kind of lifestyle without consideration of whether there might be other ways of living that actually make you happier. It's fine to sing "My Way" to yourself as you go through life, but at least make sure it really is your way.
 |
| Self-destructiveness is great for the audience, but for how long is it great for the self-destructee? |
Flash fiction in American literature
This is the second flash story to appear in Pushcart this year. It's a good story, although if I were to compare the impact of "Los Angeles" and "I Figure," I'd say I found "Los Angeles" to pack a far stronger wallop. How could it not? With Emma Cline's story, I got to live for much longer in Alice's world (including actually knowing her name!) than I got to live in the world of Chinquee's nameless narrator. It's very hard to be changed by 800 words of fiction. You can receive a glancing blow from it, but not really a knockout punch.
Fiction is sort of like food. You can probably get a microwave meal that isn't terrible and that nourishes you in some way, but to really be satisfied, the food needs to marinate a bit. You need to actually be in the other world.
So why is flash fiction so prevalent? I think there are two reasons, one legitimate and the other maybe a side-effect of the flaccidity of American literature. The first reason is that flash teaches developing (and even experienced) writers critical lessons. It teaches thrift in language, it teaches how to focus on what matters, and it teaches the importance of focusing on tangible, physical manifestations of theme rather than abstract notions in order to tell the story. Flash is a good way to get better as a writer, so we might as well share some of those exercises, just like an etude written to improve musical technique might be interesting enough to play in concerts rather than just in a studio.
But flash's ubiquity might also have something to do with the sorry commercial state of American literature. Most journals survive on the very edge of financial viability, even with an all-volunteer staff and without paying contributors. The only money journals tend to get is from advertising, which is click-based, or from the occasional person buying/contributing to the magazine. (Other income sources include the interest from one-time donations and the entry fees from occasional contests.)
Clicks and contributions both tend to come from one source: family and friends of the people who are published in the magazine. You can get more contributors into an edition if each piece is short. Hence, the popularity of flash fiction.
It may have something to do with why Pushcart picked a few of them. The editors made a note in the introduction of saying they included more pieces this year than ever before. I'm sure a lot of Pushcart sales come from the social networks of writers. Any anthology is going to sell better the more writers it has in it. Flash is one way to get more writers in it.
I'm not really criticizing publishers or editors for doing this. I want hundreds of journals to survive, and they should do what they have to in order to stay alive. Pushcart is good for the careers of the writers included in it, so long may it live. If it's a choice for Pushcart between including two flash stories and being 505 pages long or not including them and being 501 pages long, they should include the two stories. But the inclusion does say something about the choices editors are having to make.
I don't mean to make less of Chinquee's story here, which is a good flash fiction story. But if you are picking the best 100 meals made in America in 2018 in order to serve them to people, you probably wouldn't pick two that were microwave dinners, even if the chef managed to do something with those microwave dinners that was ingenious, given the limitations. But reality has forced editors to put a few microwave meals on the menu.
Nearly every journal outside the elite top 50 or so has to deal with this reality. Even if they don't just accept flash, most have a word limit that tops out around 5,000. Since most journals now only exist online, it's not really a question of space, but it is a question of what their volunteer reading force can get through. Overworked readers are more likely to pick a short piece, because it takes less time to vet it. But by adapting in this way to the reality of the struggling marketplace of serious fiction, many journals are not giving readers what they really look for in serious fiction, which are the stories that take a little longer but are are totally worth it.
I can foresee anger from flash writers asserting that flash really can have as much oomph as a longer story. It can. I don't argue that. Borges has a number of short pieces that are right at the top of my list of stories I think about the most. But it is harder to really hit hard with that little space, and I think the big successes are less frequent. A chef who manages to make a microwave meal taste almost as good as a home-cooked one may be cleverer and more inventive than the chef who makes a meal taste good the old-fashioned way, but I still know which one I'd rather eat.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Three kinds of alienation and the 2016 election: "Taco Night" by Julie Hecht
A brief digression: I'm back from a few days off from being "literature Jake," and I've resolved to at least finish analyzing the short stories from the current Pushcart Anthology before deciding if I want to keep doing this. Often in my life, I feel like such a dilettante. While I might be able to pull off an analysis of a short story better than your average college freshman, I'm not really an expert in the sense of being someone who devotes his whole life to literature. But whenever I start trying to become that person, I start to get pulled in the other direction--the other direction being my day job--in which I also do not feel I am a sufficient expert for the responsibility I have. So I vacillate back and forth between making literature my real passion, with the intent of one day also making it how I make a living, or thinking I ought to just, as Yoda would have it, keep my mind on where I am and what I am doing in my current career.
For now, as I said, I'm at least going to finish Pushcart, so on with "Taco Night"
I review stories from the Best American Short Stories collection and the Pushcart Anthology. The most recent edition of BASS was called the 2018 edition, while this version of Pushcart is called the 2019 anthology, but both are actually pretty close to each other in terms of the time periods in American literature they cover. The 2018 BASS picked stories for its anthology that were first published during a time that almost lines up exactly with the calendar year 2017. Pushcart is a few months later off this schedule, so it's not exactly lined up with a calendar year, but it's close. What I'm getting at is that this is the first edition of both anthologies that had a real chance to include a story that confronted the reality of Donald Trump's election in 2016. The last edition of both was too soon after the election.
BASS 2018 had an "election night 2016" story in it, that being "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esme Weijun Wang. I wasn't a huge fan of the story, largely because I thought it focused too much on the hurt feelings of groups of people who were opposed to Trump, leaving it open to the frequent conservative criticism that liberals fetishize victimhood.
It's awfully hard to write a story that really hits Trumpism on the nose. It's a phenomenon most people did not see coming, and it's still playing out. Non-fiction writers are struggling to figure out what it is, what its roots are, and where it is headed. So it would be a tall order for a fiction writer this close in history to the phenomenon to write a story that really did justice to what the advent of Trump as president means in a deeper, spiritual sense for the nation.
I'm not sure Hecht hit it out of the park, but she definitely took a better swing at it than Wang did. Our narrator is about as stereotypical a liberal woman as a character can be. She lives in New England. She believes her intelligence sets her apart from ordinary people. She has no apparent job but still lives well, likely from the proceeds of the job of her husband, who is in New York on election night. She puts a lot of effort into buying the right plants and being a vegan.
This characterization is one of the reasons Hecht succeeds more than Wang: if ever there was a time for liberals to be introspective and examine themselves a bit, it was after November 2016. I don't know if we've done that enough. At least a good part of this story is holding the mirror up to the losing side and asking them to see what role they played in the loss.
But the narrator isn't just a caricature of liberal hypocrisies and weaknesses. There are things about her to admire. The factors that brought us to where we are aren't all just due to liberal hubris; we've all made this bed we're lying in. Parsing through the events of "Taco Night," I can see three types of social alienation that brought us to the boiling point.
Almost the only working people who appear in the book work in some facet of the lawn architecture/landscaping industry. Most of the narrator's interaction in the story is with the owner of a nursery. This man seems to feel mostly regret about his work. He's sort of a smaller version of Trump himself--gifted a business by his family--but he spends most of his time peeved over losing the larger family business, a tree farm, to his brother during a family squabble. This insult has left him hyper-competitive: "...he wanted to sell only tress and massive quantities of plant material in order to compete with his brother." His inventory even gets described in what I have to see as a winking version of Trumpian language: "He did have good plants, and every year there were bigger and better plants and trees."
He hates his job, and he also hates everyone else he knows in the industry. When the narrator pushes him for a recommendation on someone to prune her trees, he tells her that "none of them are good."
The only person who comes close to seeming to enjoy his work is the pruner whom the narrator once hired. He would "spend two days in a big old cherry tree...and then there was always one more twig he wanted to prune." He might seem like a man with exactly the right job, but in fact, his attention to detail isn't love for the work, it's obsessive-compulsive disorder. He has a veritable pharmacy in his car, a pharmacy which the narrator comments is not enough to keep him sane. Ultimately, the OCD pruner took so long doing one job, the narrator couldn't keep him on.
While commenting on the oddity of the OCD pruner, the narrator wonders why he doesn't use "Hispanic slaves" like everyone else in the industry. She quickly qualifies that she means the term as one of sympathy, but at the same time, she'd have, it seems, been happy to have one of the "Hispanic slave" drivers do her work. Or at least she wouldn't have been shocked by it, which says about all one needs to know to realize we're living in a world where nothing about work matches any kind of natural arrangement.
Speaking of nature, people in the story are struggling to find a relationship with nature that works. The narrator certainly appreciates trees and bushes, having the ability to describe and name many of them. But her relationship to nature is entirely circumscribed by capitalism. Nature to her is the parts of nature she can buy. Not just buy, but buy as much as she can: "I keep trying to buy every beautiful plant I see." Eventually, she can't fit them in her house, and she has to return them. As for the nursery owner, nature is a commodity to sell and compete with.
This is the most profound of the three alienations in the story. The narrator happens to hear a man in a restaurant off-handedly ask, perhaps rhetorically, "Why is it so hard to talk to people?" This could have been the whole story in one line. Everyone is constantly failing to communicate in the story. In fact, as soon as the narrator hears this line, she wants to ask for clarification of what the speaker meant, but she is unable to make herself even ask the question.
The narrator shares veganism with the nursery owner. There appears to be nothing disingenuous about their veganism; they're doing it for humane reasons, not to be seen as virtuous. But she can't explain this to the nursery owner's mother when they happen to meet one time. After trying to make the case that they aren't doing it to make the mother unhappy, but out of concern for animals, she eventually gives up. She tells the owner that she "just had a conversation with your mother. I'm all worn out."
At the titular taco night, the narrator is unable to even carry on a conversation with the owner's children, who spend election night looking at their phones. "There wasn't even a conversation I could follow," she complains.
This inability to speak to one another probably describes America now better than any part of the story. The story ends with a reference to a song by another vegan, Paul McCartney: "How can you laugh when you know I'm down?" There was, I recall, no shortage of smugness from Trump supporters in the face of liberal dismay. Could some of this smugness be because we simply could not figure out a way to explain why we were so sad? When we heard, "We survived 8 years of Obama, you'll survive this," did we fail to explain that this was more than just thinking a president might spend public funds on programs that didn't have much benefit? Was their laughter a result of our failure to communicate?
In "Taco Night," the whole world is failing to communicate, because nothing about anyone's relationship to the surrounding world is organic. Even the rituals society follows--in this case, having a semi-regular taco night--don't really make sense. The nursery owner is buying fake sausages nobody likes and giving his kids eskimo pies he himself does not eat. The young people watch their phones while time passes.
Unable to enjoy natural or happy relationships to one another, the characters retreat into various forms of escape. The nursery owner drinks. The narrator watches classic movies. She starts with Turner Classics, a choice that could be seen as reminiscent of a Trump supporter's nostalgia for an America of some hard-to-pin-down past. But even that ends up being too on-the-nose, and she has to switch to the BBC, binge-watching Downton Abbey because it's both British and from 100 years ago, so Trump isn't part of it.
Essentially, the narrator has given up trying to communicate. She can't even talk to her husband, asking him only not to mention the election when he calls from New York.
The narrator never really seems to make a turn or have an epiphany that might turn things around. This is one of those stories that's not about finding a solution so much as defining what the problem is. It does that fairly well, which is why the story is mostly a success.
For now, as I said, I'm at least going to finish Pushcart, so on with "Taco Night"
An upgrade from BASS's election night short story
I review stories from the Best American Short Stories collection and the Pushcart Anthology. The most recent edition of BASS was called the 2018 edition, while this version of Pushcart is called the 2019 anthology, but both are actually pretty close to each other in terms of the time periods in American literature they cover. The 2018 BASS picked stories for its anthology that were first published during a time that almost lines up exactly with the calendar year 2017. Pushcart is a few months later off this schedule, so it's not exactly lined up with a calendar year, but it's close. What I'm getting at is that this is the first edition of both anthologies that had a real chance to include a story that confronted the reality of Donald Trump's election in 2016. The last edition of both was too soon after the election.
BASS 2018 had an "election night 2016" story in it, that being "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esme Weijun Wang. I wasn't a huge fan of the story, largely because I thought it focused too much on the hurt feelings of groups of people who were opposed to Trump, leaving it open to the frequent conservative criticism that liberals fetishize victimhood.
It's awfully hard to write a story that really hits Trumpism on the nose. It's a phenomenon most people did not see coming, and it's still playing out. Non-fiction writers are struggling to figure out what it is, what its roots are, and where it is headed. So it would be a tall order for a fiction writer this close in history to the phenomenon to write a story that really did justice to what the advent of Trump as president means in a deeper, spiritual sense for the nation.
I'm not sure Hecht hit it out of the park, but she definitely took a better swing at it than Wang did. Our narrator is about as stereotypical a liberal woman as a character can be. She lives in New England. She believes her intelligence sets her apart from ordinary people. She has no apparent job but still lives well, likely from the proceeds of the job of her husband, who is in New York on election night. She puts a lot of effort into buying the right plants and being a vegan.
This characterization is one of the reasons Hecht succeeds more than Wang: if ever there was a time for liberals to be introspective and examine themselves a bit, it was after November 2016. I don't know if we've done that enough. At least a good part of this story is holding the mirror up to the losing side and asking them to see what role they played in the loss.
But the narrator isn't just a caricature of liberal hypocrisies and weaknesses. There are things about her to admire. The factors that brought us to where we are aren't all just due to liberal hubris; we've all made this bed we're lying in. Parsing through the events of "Taco Night," I can see three types of social alienation that brought us to the boiling point.
Alienation #1: Alienation from our work
Almost the only working people who appear in the book work in some facet of the lawn architecture/landscaping industry. Most of the narrator's interaction in the story is with the owner of a nursery. This man seems to feel mostly regret about his work. He's sort of a smaller version of Trump himself--gifted a business by his family--but he spends most of his time peeved over losing the larger family business, a tree farm, to his brother during a family squabble. This insult has left him hyper-competitive: "...he wanted to sell only tress and massive quantities of plant material in order to compete with his brother." His inventory even gets described in what I have to see as a winking version of Trumpian language: "He did have good plants, and every year there were bigger and better plants and trees."
He hates his job, and he also hates everyone else he knows in the industry. When the narrator pushes him for a recommendation on someone to prune her trees, he tells her that "none of them are good."
The only person who comes close to seeming to enjoy his work is the pruner whom the narrator once hired. He would "spend two days in a big old cherry tree...and then there was always one more twig he wanted to prune." He might seem like a man with exactly the right job, but in fact, his attention to detail isn't love for the work, it's obsessive-compulsive disorder. He has a veritable pharmacy in his car, a pharmacy which the narrator comments is not enough to keep him sane. Ultimately, the OCD pruner took so long doing one job, the narrator couldn't keep him on.
While commenting on the oddity of the OCD pruner, the narrator wonders why he doesn't use "Hispanic slaves" like everyone else in the industry. She quickly qualifies that she means the term as one of sympathy, but at the same time, she'd have, it seems, been happy to have one of the "Hispanic slave" drivers do her work. Or at least she wouldn't have been shocked by it, which says about all one needs to know to realize we're living in a world where nothing about work matches any kind of natural arrangement.
 |
| I'm ashamed to admit I ate cauliflower tacos the other night, and even though they were the most hipster thing I've ever eaten, I though they were good as shit. |
Alienation #2: Alienation from nature
Speaking of nature, people in the story are struggling to find a relationship with nature that works. The narrator certainly appreciates trees and bushes, having the ability to describe and name many of them. But her relationship to nature is entirely circumscribed by capitalism. Nature to her is the parts of nature she can buy. Not just buy, but buy as much as she can: "I keep trying to buy every beautiful plant I see." Eventually, she can't fit them in her house, and she has to return them. As for the nursery owner, nature is a commodity to sell and compete with.
Alienation #3: Alienation from each other
This is the most profound of the three alienations in the story. The narrator happens to hear a man in a restaurant off-handedly ask, perhaps rhetorically, "Why is it so hard to talk to people?" This could have been the whole story in one line. Everyone is constantly failing to communicate in the story. In fact, as soon as the narrator hears this line, she wants to ask for clarification of what the speaker meant, but she is unable to make herself even ask the question.
The narrator shares veganism with the nursery owner. There appears to be nothing disingenuous about their veganism; they're doing it for humane reasons, not to be seen as virtuous. But she can't explain this to the nursery owner's mother when they happen to meet one time. After trying to make the case that they aren't doing it to make the mother unhappy, but out of concern for animals, she eventually gives up. She tells the owner that she "just had a conversation with your mother. I'm all worn out."
At the titular taco night, the narrator is unable to even carry on a conversation with the owner's children, who spend election night looking at their phones. "There wasn't even a conversation I could follow," she complains.
This inability to speak to one another probably describes America now better than any part of the story. The story ends with a reference to a song by another vegan, Paul McCartney: "How can you laugh when you know I'm down?" There was, I recall, no shortage of smugness from Trump supporters in the face of liberal dismay. Could some of this smugness be because we simply could not figure out a way to explain why we were so sad? When we heard, "We survived 8 years of Obama, you'll survive this," did we fail to explain that this was more than just thinking a president might spend public funds on programs that didn't have much benefit? Was their laughter a result of our failure to communicate?
In "Taco Night," the whole world is failing to communicate, because nothing about anyone's relationship to the surrounding world is organic. Even the rituals society follows--in this case, having a semi-regular taco night--don't really make sense. The nursery owner is buying fake sausages nobody likes and giving his kids eskimo pies he himself does not eat. The young people watch their phones while time passes.
Escape
Unable to enjoy natural or happy relationships to one another, the characters retreat into various forms of escape. The nursery owner drinks. The narrator watches classic movies. She starts with Turner Classics, a choice that could be seen as reminiscent of a Trump supporter's nostalgia for an America of some hard-to-pin-down past. But even that ends up being too on-the-nose, and she has to switch to the BBC, binge-watching Downton Abbey because it's both British and from 100 years ago, so Trump isn't part of it.
Essentially, the narrator has given up trying to communicate. She can't even talk to her husband, asking him only not to mention the election when he calls from New York.
The narrator never really seems to make a turn or have an epiphany that might turn things around. This is one of those stories that's not about finding a solution so much as defining what the problem is. It does that fairly well, which is why the story is mostly a success.
Sunday, March 10, 2019
The Soundless Shadow, Part Two: The Reactionary Who Wrote the Graffiti Is a Low-Level Party Secretary...
Okay, here's part two of the translation of the story I started yesterday. Part one is here. The original Korean of part two is here. There are some passages in here that are more gist than translation, and I left a few small things out. I spent a good chunk of my weekend on this already, and I kind of just wanted to get done. Also, I started wondering about the reliability of some of the facts. How does the narrator know what happened to Kim Yong Hun in prison? But I still got everything in there that matters, I think.
Reminder from yesterday that MSS=Ministry of State Security, the Gestapo charged with spying on North Korea's own citizens in order to quell dissent.
On with the show.
It was a quiet day after the election was over. The people were beginning to forget all about the incident with the graffiti. But then there was a rumor that they'd caught the guy who did it. People relived the incident all over again, and the whole city was in an uproar. Everyone was overcome by extreme curiosity, and they were all talking about it.
To everyone's surprise, it turned out that the perpetrator was a party secretary at a fair-sized company in the city. His name was Kim Yong Hun (name changed for this story). They said his handwriting matched the graffiti exactly. The MSS dragged him off to prison and charged him with being a reactionary and a spy.
I was curious if this were true, so I asked a friend whose husband was in the MSS. My friend said it was correct. I don't know why, but I felt a lot of compassion for Kim Yong Hun, although I didn't even know him. I wished he hadn't been caught, that he'd have gotten away with it forever...I fell into these sorts of regrets.
Kim Yong Hun was a secretary in his forties. He came from a family that had had a good reputation since his father's day, with people who had been active in the party and whom the party had trusted. He also had the trust of the workers at the factory where he worked, and he was known as a faithful person. He'd been acting as a party secretary for almost ten years.
He worked alongside the workers at the factory, sharing in the work, and he carried out all the revolutionary tasks he was given within the party. Everyone judged him to be a diligent person. He had become well-known during his time as a party member. His unusual faithfulness was known even at higher levels in the party, and he had always been treated well as a party secretary.
People talked among themselves. They said that he all his faithfulness had been an act to hide the fact that he was a reactionary and a spy. They said that the party had been mistaken about him. They said it was hard to be sure about someone, and many other things like that.
There were others saying different things, things that the MSS took no notice of. Especially among the man's co-workers, there were people saying he was a good person, and that they were worried he'd been charged with a crime he didn't commit. Some even went to the MSS officials who'd done the investigation, and they all said the MSS had the wrong man.
They all testified that he was an exemplary man who did his best at everything he was told to do. But the MSS didn't believe the workers, and nothing they said did anything to reduce the severity of the crimes he'd been charged with or to help him.
The MSS started interrogating him. They called him several times a day and had him write things in different ways. In the end, they said the handwriting matched. Then, they started beating him when they interrogated him. Kim Yong Hun kept insisting it was not his handwriting. He said he wasn't just being obstinate, but that he was telling the truth.
But no matter how loud he shouted, nobody listened to him. In his isolated prison, they said all his denials that the writing was his were just bluster, and that it did no good to protest. It had all come out of nowhere for him, and he was at a loss to explain it.
MSS bosses were pressing the interrogators to get a confession by any means necessary, so the interrogations continued every day. But nobody was able to get to the bottom of it.
When he blacked out, the MSS would wake him up by throwing water on him, then beat him some more until they were exhausted. He was covered in blood every day. But he would not give in, even if it meant death. If he gave in and confessed, his family's fate would be horrendous.
If he were convicted as a reactionary and a spy, his family would either be thrown into a political crimes prison or be sent off to some unknown place where they'd live like animals. Therefore, he could not give in no matter what.
But before the power of the MSS, Kim Yong Hun was like a candle in the wind. He realized he would never survive to emerge from the prison where they had taken him. Every North Korean knows that nobody comes out again from the MSS's underground prisons. There are people who have disappeared like morning dew because of one ill-advised word spoken while drunk. He knew there was no escape.
In a dark, tiny cell, separated from his family and from everything, he realized he had to meet his fate, and felt confounded by what that fate was. He regretted having committed the sin of being born in North Korea. Regret was useless when he was fated to die, but such was his final cry of lament.
Unable even to move, he went on dying. But the MSS kept dragging him into interrogations. Because of the government threat to dismiss everyone if the matter were not resolved, the officers who had been ordered from on high were even crueler.
One day, Kim Yong Hun realized he did not have much longer to live. He could barely even feel the clubs they used against him anymore. His captors hung up his body, covered in bruises and dying.
"Just admit it. Say it one time. Say you wrote the graffiti. If you just do that, you can live." He faced his fate and with lips barely having the strength to speak, he spit out these words:
"I'm going to die anyway, so do what you want. Hit me. Kill me. I don't believe any of you, so I'd rather just die. So kill me!"
They only got angrier, and said, "You have no right to die until you confess your crimes," and they hit him all the harder. In this manner, Kim Yong Hun, after spending six months in an MSS prison, finally could take no more and he died.
Bodies of prisoners who die in jail are not returned to the families. Nobody knows where they go. According to what MSS officials later said, they shot 2200 volts through his body and burned him until there was nothing left of him. They did not inform his family. Kim Yong Hun could not clear the false charges from prison; his family was tarred with the mark of "political criminal family," and they were banished.
The shadow who had done no wrong, Kim Yong Hun, who knew nothing about the "#1 graffiti incident," was dragged into it suddenly and broken by it.
Reminder from yesterday that MSS=Ministry of State Security, the Gestapo charged with spying on North Korea's own citizens in order to quell dissent.
On with the show.
The Reactionary Who Wrote the Graffiti Turns Out to Be a Low-Level Party Secretary...
It was a quiet day after the election was over. The people were beginning to forget all about the incident with the graffiti. But then there was a rumor that they'd caught the guy who did it. People relived the incident all over again, and the whole city was in an uproar. Everyone was overcome by extreme curiosity, and they were all talking about it.
To everyone's surprise, it turned out that the perpetrator was a party secretary at a fair-sized company in the city. His name was Kim Yong Hun (name changed for this story). They said his handwriting matched the graffiti exactly. The MSS dragged him off to prison and charged him with being a reactionary and a spy.
I was curious if this were true, so I asked a friend whose husband was in the MSS. My friend said it was correct. I don't know why, but I felt a lot of compassion for Kim Yong Hun, although I didn't even know him. I wished he hadn't been caught, that he'd have gotten away with it forever...I fell into these sorts of regrets.
Kim Yong Hun was a secretary in his forties. He came from a family that had had a good reputation since his father's day, with people who had been active in the party and whom the party had trusted. He also had the trust of the workers at the factory where he worked, and he was known as a faithful person. He'd been acting as a party secretary for almost ten years.
He worked alongside the workers at the factory, sharing in the work, and he carried out all the revolutionary tasks he was given within the party. Everyone judged him to be a diligent person. He had become well-known during his time as a party member. His unusual faithfulness was known even at higher levels in the party, and he had always been treated well as a party secretary.
People talked among themselves. They said that he all his faithfulness had been an act to hide the fact that he was a reactionary and a spy. They said that the party had been mistaken about him. They said it was hard to be sure about someone, and many other things like that.
There were others saying different things, things that the MSS took no notice of. Especially among the man's co-workers, there were people saying he was a good person, and that they were worried he'd been charged with a crime he didn't commit. Some even went to the MSS officials who'd done the investigation, and they all said the MSS had the wrong man.
They all testified that he was an exemplary man who did his best at everything he was told to do. But the MSS didn't believe the workers, and nothing they said did anything to reduce the severity of the crimes he'd been charged with or to help him.
 |
| From an NBC story on a UN investigation into DPRK labor camps. Available here. |
The MSS started interrogating him. They called him several times a day and had him write things in different ways. In the end, they said the handwriting matched. Then, they started beating him when they interrogated him. Kim Yong Hun kept insisting it was not his handwriting. He said he wasn't just being obstinate, but that he was telling the truth.
But no matter how loud he shouted, nobody listened to him. In his isolated prison, they said all his denials that the writing was his were just bluster, and that it did no good to protest. It had all come out of nowhere for him, and he was at a loss to explain it.
MSS bosses were pressing the interrogators to get a confession by any means necessary, so the interrogations continued every day. But nobody was able to get to the bottom of it.
When he blacked out, the MSS would wake him up by throwing water on him, then beat him some more until they were exhausted. He was covered in blood every day. But he would not give in, even if it meant death. If he gave in and confessed, his family's fate would be horrendous.
If he were convicted as a reactionary and a spy, his family would either be thrown into a political crimes prison or be sent off to some unknown place where they'd live like animals. Therefore, he could not give in no matter what.
But before the power of the MSS, Kim Yong Hun was like a candle in the wind. He realized he would never survive to emerge from the prison where they had taken him. Every North Korean knows that nobody comes out again from the MSS's underground prisons. There are people who have disappeared like morning dew because of one ill-advised word spoken while drunk. He knew there was no escape.
In a dark, tiny cell, separated from his family and from everything, he realized he had to meet his fate, and felt confounded by what that fate was. He regretted having committed the sin of being born in North Korea. Regret was useless when he was fated to die, but such was his final cry of lament.
Unable even to move, he went on dying. But the MSS kept dragging him into interrogations. Because of the government threat to dismiss everyone if the matter were not resolved, the officers who had been ordered from on high were even crueler.
One day, Kim Yong Hun realized he did not have much longer to live. He could barely even feel the clubs they used against him anymore. His captors hung up his body, covered in bruises and dying.
"Just admit it. Say it one time. Say you wrote the graffiti. If you just do that, you can live." He faced his fate and with lips barely having the strength to speak, he spit out these words:
"I'm going to die anyway, so do what you want. Hit me. Kill me. I don't believe any of you, so I'd rather just die. So kill me!"
They only got angrier, and said, "You have no right to die until you confess your crimes," and they hit him all the harder. In this manner, Kim Yong Hun, after spending six months in an MSS prison, finally could take no more and he died.
Bodies of prisoners who die in jail are not returned to the families. Nobody knows where they go. According to what MSS officials later said, they shot 2200 volts through his body and burned him until there was nothing left of him. They did not inform his family. Kim Yong Hun could not clear the false charges from prison; his family was tarred with the mark of "political criminal family," and they were banished.
The shadow who had done no wrong, Kim Yong Hun, who knew nothing about the "#1 graffiti incident," was dragged into it suddenly and broken by it.
The truth that came to light after he died
So Kim Yong Hun died, and a year passed. A call came from the MSS station in Sinuiju (trans. note: on the border with China, right across the Yalu River from Dandong) to the MSS post in Chongjin City. The Sinuiju police had picked up someone for graffiti. In the process of interrogating him, the criminal had confessed, among other things, to having insulted the "most sacred thing" on several public bathrooms near Chongjin during the 1998 SPA elections.
They sent his handwriting to the Chongjin MSS, who analyzed it. The writing was a perfect match. They did a side-by-side analysis of Kim Yong Hun's handwriting, too. Kim Yong Hun's was similar, but not a perfect match.
Now, the MSS fell into confusion. Kim Yong Hun was already dead, and his family had been sent off. Nobody knew if they were alive or dead. The news that the real reactionary had been caught, and that it was not Kim Yong Hun, spread throughout the city. The rumor that propagated spoke of the cover-up of the death of a treasured person.
The MSS, fearing their own necks would be cut off in place of Kim Yong Hun's family if what they had done became known, covered the whole thing up rather than exonerating Kim's family and releasing them. His family was never freed. They still do not know that Kim Yong Hun's "crime" has been resolved.
People dying like this in North Korea is common. My friend's father got drunk, said something wrong, and ended up being picked up by the MSS and moved to a political prisoner's prison. After less than a year there, he died, unable to stand it. There are many people like this, locked up in political prisons, having done no crime. It's deplorable, but there is no end to it in sight.
Unfortunate souls who have died, rest in peace! But also, keep watch. One day, all things will be set right. I believe the day when your grudge will be resolved will surely come.
Saturday, March 9, 2019
"The soundless shadow": a story that needs a wider audience
As you are all no doubt aware--in fact, I'm embarrassed to even bring it up, since I'm so certain it's common knowledge--the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is holding its general election of the Supreme People's Assembly--more or less its parliament--on Sunday, March 10th. I'm sure you've all had the day marked on your calendars for months.
Just in case you've forgotten, the election of the Supreme People's Assembly, or SPA, is kind of a big deal.
This week, I was reading in DailyNK, the South Korean online newspaper dedicated to North Korean issues. There was a fascinating story written by a defector who had lived over 50 years in North Korea. I can't see that there is an English version on their site, and that seems like a shame, so I've taken it on myself to make an English version.
The story centers around the 1998 SPA elections and a defector's recollection of a harrowing event. I'll let him tell the rest. It's a two-part story. Part one in the original Korean is here. I'll get to part two as soon as I can. Don't hate on me for my translation errors; I started this yesterday and hurried to get it done, since the election is on Sunday. I've taken a few small liberties in places. Without further ado..."The Soundless Shadow":
There are truly many stories spinning around in my head from the more than fifty years I lived in North Korea. I want to tell all of them, but I'll have to settle for telling a few of them here and there, owing to my own lack of energy. So I open my diary of memories, which I've left idle for a while.
In North Korea right now, the whole country is abuzz with the impending Supreme People's Assembly General Election (March 10th). Since the government issued a proclamation announcing the date, the people have been as silent as the dead. The government is taking advantage of this opportunity to act decisively.
This is the moment when the concept of obedience sinks in the most profoundly. The government hangs political signs and the people abstain from all sorts of words and deeds. If the government tells them to contribute to a building fund, they do it; if they are told to contribute money to putting together a polling station, they do it; they simply nod their heads like a chick feeding on honey.
I left North Korea when Kim Jong Un had been in power for two years. I can still see what it was like in my mind's eye as though I were watching a video.
There are stories these days that the government, under the pretext of carrying out a successful election, is heavily controlling the people through the Ministry of State Security. (Translator Note: For Western audiences, the closest familiar analogue to the MSS would be the KGB.) At times like this, I recall a man who, during an earlier election, disappeared, charged with being a reactionary. That was the first time I went to a polling station, and although I've been through other elections since, every election made me remember the sad story of that man.
I recall it was the summer of 1998. It happened in the downtown area of Chongjin, where I was living. (Note: This is in the far Northeast of North Korea.) The people of North Korea, unable to die from the arduous march, just kept on living. (Note: "The arduous march," in this context, refers to the period of mass starvation that took place in the 90s in North Korea.) Groups of vagrant children wandered the city, and flies buzzed on the corpses strewn about. Under that backdrop, political events were carried out, as though nothing were different.
That spring, the government announced that it would hold the SPA election.
At that time, the people, backed into a corner by starvation, had reached a high water mark in their protests against the government. They grumbled that under Kim Jong Il, the country was worse off than it had been under Kim Il Sung, that the people were dying and the government was doing nothing, and they asked what the hell the government was doing.
The party cadres, who had been living well by treating the country as their own property, were forced to face the crisis themselves when the country's cupboards ran bare, and they complained even louder than ordinary people. I remember clearly the face of a woman in her sixties, who had been living the good life as a bank manager, crying out about our helpless government and wondering when "our beggar nation would ever be worth something."
It was in those days that the revolt of the 6th Corps met with an ill fate, and the rumor of that event traveled wide. (Trans. Note: For something of a primer on the 6th Corps' rebellion, see this link. The salient point for this story is probably that the 6th Corps was in Chongjin, where this story takes place.)
That was the situation in which the SPA election was carried out. The country's economy was in turmoil, and the only people able to live off the government rations were those working for the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of People's Security. (Trans. Note: MSS and MPS from here out; the MSS is the Gestapo/KGB and the MPS is the police force, more or less.) In order to overcome the crisis, the government focused more on supplying rations to the MSS and the MPS than even the military. The government only gave regular rations and salaries to the MSS and MPS.
Only the security forces were able to live with boldness in the world at that time. The party cadres were poor just like the masses. People who had dreamed of becoming party cadres faced a conundrum. They asked themselves: "The party members have nothing to eat, so what good is it to join the party? I need to become a uniformed employee like the MSS or the MPS."
It was the dawn of the era of dreaming of becoming a uniformed worker. Party cadres worked feverishly to make their children into uniformed workers. In families where someone had been in the party for a while, they tried to pay bribes to become uniformed workers. Young women preferred to marry men in the MPS or MSS, who had a secure livelihood. These were the same people who had once shaken their heads at work like that of the security services, spying on people and treating them roughly.
The security services members ran scams to increase the rations they drew by adding parents or children from other families to their own register. That's why they were the only ones willing to stick their necks out for the government.
They were on the political front lines once the election notice went out, and they were fierce. They went out among the people to the polling stations, like they did every day. They read the political materials that the government had sent out, and they used a variety of slick methods to head off the plans of any spies. They even stayed at the polling stations at night to keep watch faithfully, and the station was surrounded by a tense atmosphere every day.
Nonetheless, their vigilance could not prevent the appearance now and again of reactionary activity in the election precincts. One of the stories I heard during that time when laughing was not permitted was a story that became a source of laughter for many citizens: a story of someone changing the words on on a sign at the polling center.
Although election officials, including the MSS and the MPS, had stayed up all night guarding the polling center with the lights on, when morning came, the letters on a sign hanging near the entrance to the polling center had been changed.
The words "songojang," meaning "polling center," were written in letters made of wood, but someone had removed the "n" to make it say "sogojang," meaning "place of death."
To call it a "sogojang" was to say the place was one and the same with the home where a funeral was taking place. That "n" didn't just fall off in the wind; it had completely disappeared. Someone had dared to do what nobody would ever dare to do and carried out a bold act under total surveillance.
The people who had stayed up all night guarding the polling center were terrified. They were all dragged in by the MSS and faced close questioning about how this could have happened with them watching the place. The security officials in charge that night were all stripped of their uniforms and kicked out.
The MSS, afraid a rumor might spread, quietly replaced the sign. The strictest secrecy was attached to it. They controlled things from behind to keep it quiet. It was quite a reactionary act, but nobody brought the fact of it into the open. They just carried on as though nothing happened. Afraid of copy-cat actions, they suppressed the whole thing. If they revealed a political act like that, they were afraid it might become a spark that would set off a widespread fire of revolt among the people.
Nonetheless, the citizens who had first discovered the sign talked about it, and the rumor spread, becoming something of a joke.
Ultimately, they couldn't find the person who had changed the sign from "polling center" to "place of death." Soon after, an even bigger event happened.
It was a few days before the election. Suddenly, the city went topsy-turvy. Graffiti criticizing the government appeared on bathrooms in the outskirts of Chongjin. What the graffiti said was kept a secret, so nobody knows what it said. The MSS just called it a "#1 crime."
For them to call it a "#1 crime" meant insulting the most sacred thing. In North Korea, the "most sacred" was a name reserved for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. So that means that the graffiti must have said something insulting about them. It was an extremely explosive act. There was no way to keep an act like that under wraps. If the MSS had tried to deal with this in private without facing such a serious matter head-on, they might have ended up in hot water.
It was reported directly to the central party. Special investigators from MSS and MPS headquarters were dispatched in a flurry with orders to find the criminal no matter what. Rumor spread that if they couldn't find the perpetrator and control the people, then the MSS official in charge of the region and even the MSS chief himself would be fired. That was probably true. There were many MSS officials afraid of being stripped of their uniforms and being put to work as ordinary laborers. A black cloud of uneasiness settled on the city.
They used handwriting analysis. It was enacted over a huge area. Thinking that it might have been someone from downtown Chongju as well as someone from the outskirts, they mobilized soldiers and sent them all over to carry out the handwriting analysis. Schools, factories, businesses, citizens' groups--the MSS and MPS overran all of them.
The MSS showed up in our factory as well. There was an order to gather every single employee. One-by-one, we carried a piece of paper with us to the propaganda room and wrote down the words the MSS told us to. What they were telling us to write was a short little story. People were saying the words of the graffiti were hidden in what they told us to write.
After that, the MSS official in charge was seen meeting often in a room in the back corner of the factory with people providing information. The workers were all uneasy. There was a lot of unhappy muttering about the MSS and how they watch the actions of others.
Everyone said that whoever the person who carried out the "#1 crime" was must have been extremely brave. I didn't know who it was, but I thought of him as a great hero. Whoever it was, he had looked upon the reality of our nation's situation and risked his life. People called the perpetrator the "soundless shadow." The crime was not solved before the election, and only the MSS still worried about it; for regular people, the memory of the incident began to fade.
-----------------------------------------
Translator note: There is a note at the bottom of this story that says that in North Korea, there is a "scribe" assigned to write down incidents and log them into a database. So this person knows a lot about what really goes on. The purpose of this story was for DailyNK to perform this role, using the testimony of North Korean defectors to carry out the role of "scribe." This story is meant to help present the reality of North Korea in a way that strict adherence to traditional news formats cannot.
I will try very hard to get part two done by tomorrow, before the end of the election.
Just in case you've forgotten, the election of the Supreme People's Assembly, or SPA, is kind of a big deal.
 |
| The current SPA in a plenary session from 2017. Photo from BBC. |
This week, I was reading in DailyNK, the South Korean online newspaper dedicated to North Korean issues. There was a fascinating story written by a defector who had lived over 50 years in North Korea. I can't see that there is an English version on their site, and that seems like a shame, so I've taken it on myself to make an English version.
The story centers around the 1998 SPA elections and a defector's recollection of a harrowing event. I'll let him tell the rest. It's a two-part story. Part one in the original Korean is here. I'll get to part two as soon as I can. Don't hate on me for my translation errors; I started this yesterday and hurried to get it done, since the election is on Sunday. I've taken a few small liberties in places. Without further ado..."The Soundless Shadow":
The Soundless Shadow, Part One: Who Insulted the "Most Sacred Thing" Before the Election?
There are truly many stories spinning around in my head from the more than fifty years I lived in North Korea. I want to tell all of them, but I'll have to settle for telling a few of them here and there, owing to my own lack of energy. So I open my diary of memories, which I've left idle for a while.
In North Korea right now, the whole country is abuzz with the impending Supreme People's Assembly General Election (March 10th). Since the government issued a proclamation announcing the date, the people have been as silent as the dead. The government is taking advantage of this opportunity to act decisively.
This is the moment when the concept of obedience sinks in the most profoundly. The government hangs political signs and the people abstain from all sorts of words and deeds. If the government tells them to contribute to a building fund, they do it; if they are told to contribute money to putting together a polling station, they do it; they simply nod their heads like a chick feeding on honey.
I left North Korea when Kim Jong Un had been in power for two years. I can still see what it was like in my mind's eye as though I were watching a video.
There are stories these days that the government, under the pretext of carrying out a successful election, is heavily controlling the people through the Ministry of State Security. (Translator Note: For Western audiences, the closest familiar analogue to the MSS would be the KGB.) At times like this, I recall a man who, during an earlier election, disappeared, charged with being a reactionary. That was the first time I went to a polling station, and although I've been through other elections since, every election made me remember the sad story of that man.
The Soundless Shadow
I recall it was the summer of 1998. It happened in the downtown area of Chongjin, where I was living. (Note: This is in the far Northeast of North Korea.) The people of North Korea, unable to die from the arduous march, just kept on living. (Note: "The arduous march," in this context, refers to the period of mass starvation that took place in the 90s in North Korea.) Groups of vagrant children wandered the city, and flies buzzed on the corpses strewn about. Under that backdrop, political events were carried out, as though nothing were different.
That spring, the government announced that it would hold the SPA election.
At that time, the people, backed into a corner by starvation, had reached a high water mark in their protests against the government. They grumbled that under Kim Jong Il, the country was worse off than it had been under Kim Il Sung, that the people were dying and the government was doing nothing, and they asked what the hell the government was doing.
The party cadres, who had been living well by treating the country as their own property, were forced to face the crisis themselves when the country's cupboards ran bare, and they complained even louder than ordinary people. I remember clearly the face of a woman in her sixties, who had been living the good life as a bank manager, crying out about our helpless government and wondering when "our beggar nation would ever be worth something."
It was in those days that the revolt of the 6th Corps met with an ill fate, and the rumor of that event traveled wide. (Trans. Note: For something of a primer on the 6th Corps' rebellion, see this link. The salient point for this story is probably that the 6th Corps was in Chongjin, where this story takes place.)
That was the situation in which the SPA election was carried out. The country's economy was in turmoil, and the only people able to live off the government rations were those working for the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of People's Security. (Trans. Note: MSS and MPS from here out; the MSS is the Gestapo/KGB and the MPS is the police force, more or less.) In order to overcome the crisis, the government focused more on supplying rations to the MSS and the MPS than even the military. The government only gave regular rations and salaries to the MSS and MPS.
Only the security forces were able to live with boldness in the world at that time. The party cadres were poor just like the masses. People who had dreamed of becoming party cadres faced a conundrum. They asked themselves: "The party members have nothing to eat, so what good is it to join the party? I need to become a uniformed employee like the MSS or the MPS."
It was the dawn of the era of dreaming of becoming a uniformed worker. Party cadres worked feverishly to make their children into uniformed workers. In families where someone had been in the party for a while, they tried to pay bribes to become uniformed workers. Young women preferred to marry men in the MPS or MSS, who had a secure livelihood. These were the same people who had once shaken their heads at work like that of the security services, spying on people and treating them roughly.
The security services members ran scams to increase the rations they drew by adding parents or children from other families to their own register. That's why they were the only ones willing to stick their necks out for the government.
They were on the political front lines once the election notice went out, and they were fierce. They went out among the people to the polling stations, like they did every day. They read the political materials that the government had sent out, and they used a variety of slick methods to head off the plans of any spies. They even stayed at the polling stations at night to keep watch faithfully, and the station was surrounded by a tense atmosphere every day.
Nonetheless, their vigilance could not prevent the appearance now and again of reactionary activity in the election precincts. One of the stories I heard during that time when laughing was not permitted was a story that became a source of laughter for many citizens: a story of someone changing the words on on a sign at the polling center.
Although election officials, including the MSS and the MPS, had stayed up all night guarding the polling center with the lights on, when morning came, the letters on a sign hanging near the entrance to the polling center had been changed.
The words "songojang," meaning "polling center," were written in letters made of wood, but someone had removed the "n" to make it say "sogojang," meaning "place of death."
To call it a "sogojang" was to say the place was one and the same with the home where a funeral was taking place. That "n" didn't just fall off in the wind; it had completely disappeared. Someone had dared to do what nobody would ever dare to do and carried out a bold act under total surveillance.
The people who had stayed up all night guarding the polling center were terrified. They were all dragged in by the MSS and faced close questioning about how this could have happened with them watching the place. The security officials in charge that night were all stripped of their uniforms and kicked out.
The MSS, afraid a rumor might spread, quietly replaced the sign. The strictest secrecy was attached to it. They controlled things from behind to keep it quiet. It was quite a reactionary act, but nobody brought the fact of it into the open. They just carried on as though nothing happened. Afraid of copy-cat actions, they suppressed the whole thing. If they revealed a political act like that, they were afraid it might become a spark that would set off a widespread fire of revolt among the people.
Nonetheless, the citizens who had first discovered the sign talked about it, and the rumor spread, becoming something of a joke.
Ultimately, they couldn't find the person who had changed the sign from "polling center" to "place of death." Soon after, an even bigger event happened.
It was a few days before the election. Suddenly, the city went topsy-turvy. Graffiti criticizing the government appeared on bathrooms in the outskirts of Chongjin. What the graffiti said was kept a secret, so nobody knows what it said. The MSS just called it a "#1 crime."
For them to call it a "#1 crime" meant insulting the most sacred thing. In North Korea, the "most sacred" was a name reserved for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. So that means that the graffiti must have said something insulting about them. It was an extremely explosive act. There was no way to keep an act like that under wraps. If the MSS had tried to deal with this in private without facing such a serious matter head-on, they might have ended up in hot water.
It was reported directly to the central party. Special investigators from MSS and MPS headquarters were dispatched in a flurry with orders to find the criminal no matter what. Rumor spread that if they couldn't find the perpetrator and control the people, then the MSS official in charge of the region and even the MSS chief himself would be fired. That was probably true. There were many MSS officials afraid of being stripped of their uniforms and being put to work as ordinary laborers. A black cloud of uneasiness settled on the city.
They used handwriting analysis. It was enacted over a huge area. Thinking that it might have been someone from downtown Chongju as well as someone from the outskirts, they mobilized soldiers and sent them all over to carry out the handwriting analysis. Schools, factories, businesses, citizens' groups--the MSS and MPS overran all of them.
The MSS showed up in our factory as well. There was an order to gather every single employee. One-by-one, we carried a piece of paper with us to the propaganda room and wrote down the words the MSS told us to. What they were telling us to write was a short little story. People were saying the words of the graffiti were hidden in what they told us to write.
After that, the MSS official in charge was seen meeting often in a room in the back corner of the factory with people providing information. The workers were all uneasy. There was a lot of unhappy muttering about the MSS and how they watch the actions of others.
Everyone said that whoever the person who carried out the "#1 crime" was must have been extremely brave. I didn't know who it was, but I thought of him as a great hero. Whoever it was, he had looked upon the reality of our nation's situation and risked his life. People called the perpetrator the "soundless shadow." The crime was not solved before the election, and only the MSS still worried about it; for regular people, the memory of the incident began to fade.
-----------------------------------------
Translator note: There is a note at the bottom of this story that says that in North Korea, there is a "scribe" assigned to write down incidents and log them into a database. So this person knows a lot about what really goes on. The purpose of this story was for DailyNK to perform this role, using the testimony of North Korean defectors to carry out the role of "scribe." This story is meant to help present the reality of North Korea in a way that strict adherence to traditional news formats cannot.
I will try very hard to get part two done by tomorrow, before the end of the election.
Monday, March 4, 2019
I...might need a break
Late last summer and early fall, I put everything I had into writing six stories I thought were good enough to get published in one of the stronger literary journals. As I've said before, I'm honored when any journal, however small, chooses something I wrote and gives it a home, but I've been at this for five years now, and if I'm every going to get anywhere with this other than it just being a hobby, then I need to get something published in one of the larger journals soon.
I've had a number of positive responses since then, which is way better than I'd ever done before. But none have quite made it. This morning, I got the most expansive response to a rejection I've gotten yet:
That's really, really kind feedback. It's way more than you get from most publishers. And most of it is quite thoughtful and also answers a lot of the questions I myself had about how the story might be read: mostly, is it too slow?
I wasn't quite sure what "the revelation at the end is a bit forced" meant, because I didn't think there was a revelation at the end, really. The main character thinks she might have learned something about another character, but she isn't sure, so rather than take action, she decides to keep watching in a state of hyper-vigilance. That seemed to me to be the natural outcome of a story in which the main theme probably had something to do with surveillance, and the similarities and differences between state surveillance and neighborly looking out for one another.
But if the readers who obviously paid close attention to the story saw something differently, then I must have failed to communicate it correctly. Which means going back and ripping at this story yet again, and I am so deflated and tired, I can't even think of doing it.
So here I am, for the umpteenth time, thinking that maybe the hard fact is that no matter how good I do it, it will never be good enough, and I'm just going to go on being unhappy until I accept that and do something else with my life. At the very least, I think I need a break, and that includes this blog and reviewing Pushcart. So it may be a while before I'm back.
I hate to think that posts like these come off as whining. I don't mean them that way. Anguished, I'm okay with. It's okay to communicate that this stuff is incredibly frustrating, so much that it might not really be worth doing. But I don't hold the world responsible for it. The game I'm playing is very hard to play, and if it's too much, I need to stop playing. I mean only to communicate that the value of playing the game is not always so self-evident to me that I think I must keep playing it at all costs.
I've had a number of positive responses since then, which is way better than I'd ever done before. But none have quite made it. This morning, I got the most expansive response to a rejection I've gotten yet:
We'd like you to know that overall, your piece was well-received by our reading committee. They have some comments and notes listed below. We hope you find them helpful as you continue to revise or resubmit your piece elsewhere.
--COMMENTS--
“This is a moving, engaging story. I cared about the main character, her story, and her well-being right away. The pacing was appropriate: doesn't drag but it's not a race either. Secondary characters are introduced at the right times and their purpose felt meaningful each time. The dialogue read very natural. Despite my lack of cultural context, I understood exactly what the writer meant. The writer chose great moments to explain details to outsiders but to leave enough mystery to place you directly in the cultural setting. It felt like a story that really cared about its characters.
“The ending might need a rethink - the revelation at the end is a bit forced I felt. But I like the sense of dislocation.”
That's really, really kind feedback. It's way more than you get from most publishers. And most of it is quite thoughtful and also answers a lot of the questions I myself had about how the story might be read: mostly, is it too slow?
I wasn't quite sure what "the revelation at the end is a bit forced" meant, because I didn't think there was a revelation at the end, really. The main character thinks she might have learned something about another character, but she isn't sure, so rather than take action, she decides to keep watching in a state of hyper-vigilance. That seemed to me to be the natural outcome of a story in which the main theme probably had something to do with surveillance, and the similarities and differences between state surveillance and neighborly looking out for one another.
But if the readers who obviously paid close attention to the story saw something differently, then I must have failed to communicate it correctly. Which means going back and ripping at this story yet again, and I am so deflated and tired, I can't even think of doing it.
So here I am, for the umpteenth time, thinking that maybe the hard fact is that no matter how good I do it, it will never be good enough, and I'm just going to go on being unhappy until I accept that and do something else with my life. At the very least, I think I need a break, and that includes this blog and reviewing Pushcart. So it may be a while before I'm back.
I hate to think that posts like these come off as whining. I don't mean them that way. Anguished, I'm okay with. It's okay to communicate that this stuff is incredibly frustrating, so much that it might not really be worth doing. But I don't hold the world responsible for it. The game I'm playing is very hard to play, and if it's too much, I need to stop playing. I mean only to communicate that the value of playing the game is not always so self-evident to me that I think I must keep playing it at all costs.
Sunday, March 3, 2019
The model minority having a rough go in the global economy: "Guerrilla Marketing" by Sanjay Agnihotri
The other day, I guy I know from high school posted something on Facebook about why, as he saw it, Chinese people once faced oppression in America but don't now live off social services like, as he believed, many African-Americans did. It was a stupid, offensive, misinformed post, and I'm not copying it here, but it serves to show that along with the negative stereotypes of some groups in America, the "model minority" stereotypes--usually applied to Asian-Americans, who are seen as over-achievers--are also alive and well.
South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan) aren't identified with exactly the same stereotypes as those from Northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, China). South Asians are often seen as Apu from the Simpsons while a stereotypical Japanese-American is an engineer or software programmer. But even Apu is still something of model minority stereotype: he owns his own business, he works hard, he is intelligent, although he's forced to waste his intelligence chasing delinquents out of the Kwik-e-Mart. And after Kwik-e-Mart owner, the next most prevalent stereotype about South Asians would probably suggest doctor or computer programmer.
The model minority stereotype is harmful in its own way to those it purports to describe. However, like with many stereotypes, there is some truth lurking behind those stereotypes, at least in this sense: different immigrant communities tend to target certain markets for start-up businesses, and those types of businesses tend to propagate more than others. That's because one family learns how to run a business, then helps train another to do the same thing, and it passes on until a significant number of people in a particular industry are from one heritage. A lot of Vietnamese-Americans run nail salons. Korean-American used to favor dry cleaning businesses, although that has started to fade a bit. Ethiopian communities, for some reason, seem to get into parking garages, although since your average person isn't going to have the start-up money for that, I'm not sure how this ever came to pass.
The groups that come into this story, a variety of South Asian entrepreneurs, run the stores we often associate with families from that part of the world. They run gas stations and Indian restaurants and a Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts combo. (I once hung out with an Indian-American whose parents owned one of these. He brought me into one and treated me to lunch, which was nice, but while there, I thought he was extremely rude to the old man working behind the counter, who would have been the employee of his parents. I remembered this while reading this story.)
Of course, these family-run businesses really are something to celebrate. Each of them is an American success story. But in addition to the harm that can come from assuming every person from South Asia is a brilliant micro-entrepreneur, there is another dark side to the family-owned start-up, and this is the side that Sanjay Agnihotri explores in his short story "Guerrilla Marketing."
Hapless Vikram needs money in a bad way. His 35-year-old daughter back home finally found a husband, but he needs money for a dowry and to fly home to see her. But money's a big problem. He's got a low-paying job at an Indian restaurant, and he owes the owner money. He lives in an apartment with several other employees of the restaurant, and the owner's wife threatens them all with deportation if they don't tow the line.
Vikram has tried his own hand at entrepreneurship all over the world:
But Los Angeles ended badly, and one of Vikram's debts is from having to borrow money to move in a hurry from LA to New Jersey, where he is now marooned. He lies to his family back home about his prospects. He has to endure the humiliation of working for boorish men who have also somehow succeeded in business where he failed over and over. The bitterness of being on the low end of capitalism's totem pole is that much harder to swallow when you've taken your shots at succeeding and failed, only to work for others who had better luck.
I enjoyed the story. It gave me a look at a world I don't have access to personally. It certainly is an effective critique of globalism, capitalism, and the model minority stereotype all at once. I was a little disappointed by the end, which I found a bit hammy. Vikram ditches his crap job for an accountant start-up company another rich Indian is launching for his son. But it turns out they just want Vikram to walk around in a Statue of Liberty suit and hold a sign to attract customers. (The business is called Liberty Tax.)
It just seemed a bit forced. In order to get Vikram into a suit that will critique American optimism and immigrant dreams, the story has to make us believe this is a good business decision. It isn't. I've seen people at a Liberty Tax around here wearing the Statue of Liberty get-up. They're teenagers. You can probably get them for minimum wage, and they won't have medical issues like Vikram did that make it hard for him to carry a sign in the cold. They could have paid him peanuts and gotten accounting work out of him, which would have generated far more income; it made no sense to pay him to do sign-flipping duties. It was only there for the symbolism.
In spite of that bobble at the end, I thought it was a strong story. There are plenty of criticisms of capitalism out there in the world, and plenty of gritty immigrant stories, but this one managed to be both without being a story I'd heard before.
South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan) aren't identified with exactly the same stereotypes as those from Northeast Asia (Japan, Korea, China). South Asians are often seen as Apu from the Simpsons while a stereotypical Japanese-American is an engineer or software programmer. But even Apu is still something of model minority stereotype: he owns his own business, he works hard, he is intelligent, although he's forced to waste his intelligence chasing delinquents out of the Kwik-e-Mart. And after Kwik-e-Mart owner, the next most prevalent stereotype about South Asians would probably suggest doctor or computer programmer.
The model minority stereotype is harmful in its own way to those it purports to describe. However, like with many stereotypes, there is some truth lurking behind those stereotypes, at least in this sense: different immigrant communities tend to target certain markets for start-up businesses, and those types of businesses tend to propagate more than others. That's because one family learns how to run a business, then helps train another to do the same thing, and it passes on until a significant number of people in a particular industry are from one heritage. A lot of Vietnamese-Americans run nail salons. Korean-American used to favor dry cleaning businesses, although that has started to fade a bit. Ethiopian communities, for some reason, seem to get into parking garages, although since your average person isn't going to have the start-up money for that, I'm not sure how this ever came to pass.
The groups that come into this story, a variety of South Asian entrepreneurs, run the stores we often associate with families from that part of the world. They run gas stations and Indian restaurants and a Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts combo. (I once hung out with an Indian-American whose parents owned one of these. He brought me into one and treated me to lunch, which was nice, but while there, I thought he was extremely rude to the old man working behind the counter, who would have been the employee of his parents. I remembered this while reading this story.)
 |
| I don't even like to eat at one of these. Working at one can't be much fun. |
Of course, these family-run businesses really are something to celebrate. Each of them is an American success story. But in addition to the harm that can come from assuming every person from South Asia is a brilliant micro-entrepreneur, there is another dark side to the family-owned start-up, and this is the side that Sanjay Agnihotri explores in his short story "Guerrilla Marketing."
Hapless Vikram needs money in a bad way. His 35-year-old daughter back home finally found a husband, but he needs money for a dowry and to fly home to see her. But money's a big problem. He's got a low-paying job at an Indian restaurant, and he owes the owner money. He lives in an apartment with several other employees of the restaurant, and the owner's wife threatens them all with deportation if they don't tow the line.
Vikram has tried his own hand at entrepreneurship all over the world:
He was a fifty-seven-year-old accountant with a degree in finance from Baroda University. Since his family's apothecary business in Baroda had gone bust seven years ago, he'd traveled around--mostly in the Middle East--trying to start import/export and other businesses. He'd worked a bootleg tape shop in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia; sold rugs in Ethiopia; paved roads in Dubai; and peddled remote-control toy cars in the alleyways of Kuwait City. Los Angeles was to have been his breakthrough.
But Los Angeles ended badly, and one of Vikram's debts is from having to borrow money to move in a hurry from LA to New Jersey, where he is now marooned. He lies to his family back home about his prospects. He has to endure the humiliation of working for boorish men who have also somehow succeeded in business where he failed over and over. The bitterness of being on the low end of capitalism's totem pole is that much harder to swallow when you've taken your shots at succeeding and failed, only to work for others who had better luck.
I enjoyed the story. It gave me a look at a world I don't have access to personally. It certainly is an effective critique of globalism, capitalism, and the model minority stereotype all at once. I was a little disappointed by the end, which I found a bit hammy. Vikram ditches his crap job for an accountant start-up company another rich Indian is launching for his son. But it turns out they just want Vikram to walk around in a Statue of Liberty suit and hold a sign to attract customers. (The business is called Liberty Tax.)
It just seemed a bit forced. In order to get Vikram into a suit that will critique American optimism and immigrant dreams, the story has to make us believe this is a good business decision. It isn't. I've seen people at a Liberty Tax around here wearing the Statue of Liberty get-up. They're teenagers. You can probably get them for minimum wage, and they won't have medical issues like Vikram did that make it hard for him to carry a sign in the cold. They could have paid him peanuts and gotten accounting work out of him, which would have generated far more income; it made no sense to pay him to do sign-flipping duties. It was only there for the symbolism.
In spite of that bobble at the end, I thought it was a strong story. There are plenty of criticisms of capitalism out there in the world, and plenty of gritty immigrant stories, but this one managed to be both without being a story I'd heard before.
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