Portrait of the artist as a young shithead: "Rubberdust" by Sarah Thankam Mathews

After hitting us with three novelettes in the first half of Best American Short Stories 2020, it was nice (from the point-of-view of someone trying to write about all twenty stories) to get into part two with a shorter entry. This one, "Rubberdust" by Sarah Thankam Mathews, is standard short story stuff, a coming-of-age story with a quick build-up to a conflict in which the main character changes. The change seems to be that the main character (an unnamed character/first-person narrator whose lack of a name is called out within the narrative) goes from being the type of person who reads to escape being a weird kid to someone who writes to try to understand why she feels so weird. 

The story is so approachable, so immediately accessible, the funniest thing about it is when it breaks the fourth wall to talk about the reception the story got in a writing group, where one participant, seemingly speaking for the group, complains it has a "cultural specificity that the narrator doesn't include the audience in on." Yeah, that kind of dumb comment is pretty much every writing group I've ever been in, which is why I'm not in writing groups. 

Because the story more than lets us in on everything we need to know. It's India. Other than that, there's not much that goes on in the story that a reader from anywhere in the world couldn't understand. Some of the words would have been pronounced differently, and the girl's father roots for India to beat Pakistan in soccer rather than for whatever an American father would be doing while watching sports on television. It's a bildungsroman. It's pretty universal. We all did bad things as kids, and the reasons why we did them were a mystery to ourselves. Even the girl's obsession with peeling crepe paper sheets off the softboard is easy to understand. Who doesn't remember obsessing over random objects in a classroom while young? 

The only problem in commenting on this story is that there isn't much room for commentary. It's like commenting on the parable of the prodigal son. There's a pretty easy-to-trace character arc, quick as it is, where the narrator goes from tormented to tormentor, realizes what that means, and then that starts her on a lifelong journey to understand why people, herself included, carry in them the ability to be so terrible. This ability to be awful even applies to the best of us, like Gandhi, she learns. It's not a story of how she solves this riddle, but how she learned to recognize it and begin to grapple with it. 

Okay, I'll say this about it, since the idea of "cultural specificity" came up

The qualifications to be included in Best American Short Stories are these: the story has to have been originally published in either a U.S. or Canadian journal, in English, during the given time period, and the author has to have made either the U.S. or Canada their home. (I wonder, if we're going to use the continental meaning of "American," why we include Canada but not the rest of North America, but let's put that to the side.)

Canada and the U.S. are pluralist democracies. An American story can literally come from anywhere. If a girl grows up in India and then immigrates to the U.S., the experiences that formed her psyche in India are now part of the American experience, too. They're part of what make us us, because Indians who have transplanted here are part of us.

This makes American literature different from, say, Korean literature, which I'll use as a counter-example because it's the national literature I read the most other than American. Most Korean literature takes place in Korea, featuring Korean characters who were born in Korea, who speak Korean, and who interact with others like them. If a story is set outside Korea, it's almost always a Korean ex-pat living there, not someone who is going to move to Korea later in her life. There is almost always something tying it back to Korea. Korean literature, generally, doesn't feel the need to create its own stories about the rest of the world. For that, Koreans read books in translation. 

One effect of this specificity is that nearly any reader is able to call bullshit on anything that doesn't ring true. When you put a character on the Seoul metro, there's no getting anything past an audience where nearly everyone reading has also been on the Seoul metro. And you can't get away with any cliches about the Seoul metro, either, things that everyone has already said about it. You'll have to look at a thing everyone knows about and still find something new to say about it.

That's a different kind of literature than what American literature now is, if by "American" literature we include the stories of things that have revealed themselves to Americans through their interactions with the rest of the planet. America doubtlessly benefits from its diversity. It gives us advantages in business, in understanding global politics, and in the ability to fill niches in our own economy. It brings in new ideas. 

It also, however, develops in educated Americans a felt need to try to understand a little bit of every culture out there. In literature, this means stories that are there to introduce different cultures to American audiences more than they are there to be part of the literary tradition of the culture from which they come. A Korean-American story often wouldn't hold up well within the canon of Korean literature. One reason for that is that stories from a Korean context written for American audiences often necessarily include something that would come across as a cliche or as false if it were presented to Koreans.

A story set in Korea written for an American audience comes across as very different to Koreans than it would to Americans. It's like eating at a Korean restaurant in D.C. frequented by white people versus a restaurant in some back alley of Seoul. Whereas a real Korean is eating some part of a cow I didn't know you could eat, or some fish I've never heard of, Americans are being fed a sweetened-up version of bulgogi, because, you know, you can't expect an American to eat that other stuff. 

This doesn't mean the literature that's now "American" literature coming from cultures all over the world is bad. I like bulgogi. It just means that the stories we are reading written to be part of "American literature" are different from those that exist in the rest of the world, even if they're written by someone with first-hand experience of those other cultures. It's important to keep this in mind when reading a lot of the stories in BASS, because BASS often takes us around the world in its twenty stories. 

None of this really applies to "Rubberdust," though, which is incredibly universal. It could have been set anywhere, or at least anywhere children still use erasers.  

   

Other takes:

Karen Carlson at a Just Recompense, who read closely enough to notice the many mentions of doors in the stoy.