Would it have been so terrible to just say "San Francisco"?: "In the Event" by Meng Jin

Unlike the last few entries in the 2020 Best American Short Stories anthology, I think I can do justice to "In the Event" in reasonably short order. It's about the futility of planning for surprises, how try as we might by following every recommendation, there will always be things that catch us off guard. 

Chenchen is the planner, while Tony is the let-life-come-to me guy. Tony has learned to go with the flow from his upbringing, which, in a lot of ways, is the new face of America that showed itself in the 2020 election. While pundits focus on groups as though they were homogenous, because that allows pundits to feel like they have some control over the chaos of elections, the 2020 election showed that even groups we think of as predictable are not that easy to forecast the actions of. Latinx voters in Florida aren't Latinx voters in Arizona. Young Latinx voters aren't old Latinx voters. The solid South isn't solid. 

Tony is one of those voters who'd be hard to classify. He's a second-generation Chinese-American whose family lives in South Carolina as the kind of lower-middle-class existence we mostly associate with Trump voters. (One aspect of Chinese American life not examined in this story is the tendency of older Chinese Americans to lean conservative. As one Chinese-American friend of mine puts it, "My family thinks that of course Republicans are racist, but at least they're less racist toward us than they are toward blacks.") 

Tony is anything but a Trump voter though. It's not the 2020 election casting its shadow over "In the Event," of course, since it hadn't happened yet when the story was written, but the 2016 election. Tony had worked himself to near sickness trying to be ready for when Clinton won what seemed to be her sure-thing election. He was helping to design what he hoped would be a revolutionary citizen-government interface. The one time in Tony's life he tried to plan for something, and it blew up in his face. No wonder he's indifferent to Chenchen's attempts to prep for "the big one" we all know will eventually wreck half of California. 

The whole story is an unbroken sequence of attempts to plan for something, attempts that are then ruined. Chenchen is something of an obsessive planner, but the only place she has complete control in orchestrating things the way she wants them to go is in her music, which she retreats into more and more. She's a composer of "electronic folk songs with acoustic sounds," a highly niche type of music that apparently allows her to rely on a lot less collaboration than most musicians do. She dislikes performing at concerts, though, because of how unpredictable the performances can be.

Chenchen strikes me as likely being some type of neuro-divergent person; she has a hard time shutting out sounds sometimes, to such an extent they nearly cause her a panic attack at one point. The world is too much with her in almost every way. No wonder she listens to an audio book about the destruction of Earth. No wonder she speeds the rate of reading on the audio up. She can't wait for the end of the world, because the end of the world means the worst has finally happened, and there's no more need to fret about what might one day go wrong. 

Ultimately, while Chenchen is preparing for all kinds of potential disasters and dealing with the actual ones going on, like how climate change is heating up San Francisco, making summer in San Francisco no longer the coldest winter, as the old joke goes, she misses the personal calamity that's been under her nose the whole time. Tony has feelings for mutual friend Jen, something Chenchen has apparently sensed. The story ends with a low-key disaster she never planned for, one that will almost certainly cause her more emotional damage than all the other events she feared. 

Generally, it was a solid story with a consistent theme that held the work together. It hit a few buttons that tend to automatically turn me off, like how liberals are depicted as so undone by the election of Trump it has us all wandering shell-shocked throughout the Earth, just waiting for the nightmare to end. As though liberals don't realize that politics involves unavoidable losses as well as gains, or as if the election of 2016 was entirely something that happened to us, like a tsunami, instead of something we bear some responsibility for causing ourselves. 

I also don't know why the story couldn't just say Tony and Chenchecn were in San Francisco. From the first mention of the setting, I assumed that's where they were, although I don't really know that much about the city. It's clearly somewhere in California. When I Googled Chinaman's Vista, the spot Chenchen wanted to use as their rallying point, nothing came up, making me wonder if it's a made-up location in the real city of San Francisco. What confused me is that when Tony is talking about the danger of a nuclear attack, he says the real target would be the big-tech companies "in the cities south of them." I thought all the big tech companies were in San Francisco, so suddenly I was trying to figure out where north of San Fran they might be. Tony gives some math saying they'd be about three minutes from the nuclear fallout, and using his numbers, I figure they're about thirty-some miles north of where he thinks the real target would be. I think I finally figured out that what he means is that Silicon Valley, what I assume he meant by his real target, is a bit south of San Fran. I just didn't know that, so I spent a lot of energy trying to figure out the geography. Maybe my failed attempts to figure out where they were was apropos of a story where trying to achieve control over art and history is ultimately pointless.  

Other takes:

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense, who focuses on the idea of control in the story.