In this case the thing I'm about to repeat is how different American letters are from those of most other countries on Earth. The big annual Korean anthology of best short stories that comes out every year--to use one counterexample--comprises almost entirely stories written by people born in Korea about people born in Korea. Understanding deeper, connotative meanings of most stories requires cultural knowledge that the readers of the stories will all share in common.
Because the United States is more much ethnically and culturally diverse, though, our literary canon is constantly being filled with stories written by people from all over the globe and featuring characters from all over the globe. This year's BASS alone has stories in which significant action takes place in Nigeria, China, Afghanistan, Taiwan, and now India.
Korean literature isn't like this. Much like Korean film, which was heavily government subsidized for years in order to guarantee the development of indigenous movies the country could be proud of, the support for Korean literature is generally there in order to strengthen and expand the influence of specifically Korean culture. The country sees to need to apologize for this.
The prerequisites to be considered in Best American Short Stories, as series editor Heidi Pitlor reminds us every year, are:
1) Original publication in nationally distributed American or Canadian periodicals. (This stretches the meaning of "American" to "North American," but not including any other North, Central, or South American countries besides Canada.)
2) Publication in English by writers who have made the United States or Canada their home.
3) Original publication as short stories (excerpts of novels are not considered).
That seems like a reasonable way to define what an "American" story is. It was written by someone living in America for an American audience. Since that's the case, it is not only appropriate, but necessary, that a significant number of selections in a representative anthology of American short stories be by people from and about people who live somewhere other than the U.S. and Canada. We're a nation of immigrants, and the cultural heritage these immigrants have brought with them becomes our cultural inheritance as well. American arts are enriched by the nutrients the cultural tides of the world bring to us.
At the same time as it is enriched by the stories from people all over the world, American literature is also made more complicated by this mélange, just as American democracy is both stronger for its diversity but also more challenging in many ways than democracy in a more monocultural, monolingual society is. It's one reason many conservatives suggest we upend the complexity by enforcing linguistic and cultural homogeneity. That's not the right solution, and it kills all the benefits of a diverse society for a small gain that will probably never even really result in meaningful unity, anyway. But it's understandable it would occur to some people when they look at the complexities involved in running a society like ours, where our culture is something of an amalgamation of all the cultures of the world.
What this has to do with "You Are My Dear Friend"
"You Are My Dear Friend" doesn't require any special knowledge of India to understand what is happening on the surface. Geeta's parents died when she was young. She was then raised in a Catholic orphanage, after which she became an au pair to foreigners working in India. She is working as an au pair for the Bakers when she meets Srikanth, who is much older than her and who has already been married and divorced. He has a grown daughter somewhere. Geeta marries Srikanth and spends her days as aimlessly as she spent them as an au pair when the children were in school. Srikanth, mystified by her lack of direction, suggests she have a child. She is unable to get pregnant, so she ends up adopting Rani from a sketchy adoption center where they don't ask too many questions. Rani is a traumatized child and ends up being too much for Geeta and Srikanth, who send her away to "people who understood her...people used to dealing with girls like her."
I get all that with no more difficulty than I would understand a story about people in Ohio. (And maybe with less difficulty than I followed the people in Louisiana in Stephanie Soileau's "Haguillory." Parts of the U.S. have always been half like a foreign country.) But I feel like I am probably missing significant levels of the story because there are connotations to place names, personal names, and cultural practices that I miss. Jharkand, Odisha, Bangalore. I can look these places up, but I don't know what they might mean to the average Indian without needing to look them up. Bangalore is the big city and Jharkand and Odisha are the sticks, I get that. But is there more I'm missing? I can look up Naxalism and have a sense of it, but I'm sure it has a much deeper meaning to someone in India than it would to me.
One of the main functions the narrative is fulfilling seems to be a critique of Indian society, but in what sense am I the right audience for this story? Even if I understood better what the critiques were aiming at, what could I do about it? Write my member of Congress? That doesn't even do any good for issues in America, so what good would it do about an issue in India? It can serve to educate, of course, and since India is a country of such importance in the world, it wouldn't hurt me to learn a thing or two by reading a story told that gets a little bit into the Indian weeds. But the effect of the social critique is probably lost on me and many other readers in the Americas.
So what can else I pull out of the story?
There is something else at the heart of the story, though, and I don't think it requires a whole lot of specific understanding of anything Indian to pull it out. The life options of the characters in the story are limited or expanded based on the resources, emotional and material, left them by their parents. The Baker girls have love from their parents and Geeta both, as well as riches from their families, and we never worry for their well-being. Srikanth is able to live comfortably off the house he has inherited from his father, a house his father did nothing more to earn than win a lottery. Geeta's parents were poor and died when she was young, but even that brief time with them left her an emotional inheritance that, "despite their curtailed presence in her life, had at least encased her in the solid outline of their love." I know someone close to me who has said something similar. She was raised by her grandmother until she was seven when her grandmother died. But she's told me that things her grandmother told her sustained her through years of being sent from one relative or group home to another after that. Sometimes, even little attempts to share love go a long way.
That's how it is with the maid. Geeta bought her several trinkets when they both worked at the Bakers together. One of those trinkets was a fake silver pendant engraved with the words "You Are My Dear Friend." Geeta only bought it so the maid wouldn't be jealous of Geeta's freedom during the day when the kids were at school. It's cheap and not at all heartfelt. But it means a lot to the maid, who never takes it off and is still wearing it after Geeta leaves the house.
Even a small emotional inheritance can be powerful in providing the necessary resilience and self-esteem necessary to survive. Nobody in the story is more lacking this kind of inheritance than Rani, the girl Geeta and Srikanth adopt. Geeta doesn't get the full story, but it's clear there was trauma, something involving "a weak, protective mother, an absent, unpredictable father, poverty, the looming threat of outsiders, the fear of corrupt authorities."
Rani acts out against Geeta, attacking her first verbally and then physically. One particular obsession for Rani is Geeta's jewelry. The girl wants Geeta to send her jewelry to Rani's mother. Rani thinks Geeta is a rich woman and that she can use her riches to help her mother. "Always it was the same demand. She wanted Geeta to send jewelry to her mother. Geeta lived in this big house, she was rich, so there had to be jewelry. Where was it?"
Geeta tells Rani that she may one day give Rani jewelry, but if she does so, it will be for Rani, not for her mother.
So here, I'm about to apply the little bit of Indian cultural knowledge I have, which is probably exactly the right amount of "a little learning" to qualify as a dangerous thing. India is especially enthusiastic about gold. Families hoard it. It has significance in religious ceremonies, but it is also thought to be a secure form of wealth. Passing on jewelry to children, especially gold, is something all parents aspire to do. So when Rani and Geeta are talking about jewelry, they're talking about something of tremendous value, even more than we in the West put on it. When Rani demands Geeta give jewelry to her mother, she is rejecting Geeta as a mother, the person who would pass on the thing of greatest importance. She is saying it isn't fair that Geeta has this wealth, that it should have belonged to her own mother. She is saying it isn't fair that she has nothing to inherit.
I may be so wrong about this that it would be a huge howler to an Indian reader. As the story itself makes plain, Indian culture isn't one thing. Geeta and her husband have to resort to English as a lingua franca, because there are so many languages spoken in India. There might be people in India who don't care at all about gold. But I think the story is leading us to think that Rani, at least, thinks of it as a thing of enormous value.
Geeta ultimately goes along with her husband's wish that they send the girl away. There was much more Geeta wanted to say to her husband about the girl, but she never did. "She had lost the habit of speaking of herself, and now it was impossible to recover the details that could have made her permanent."
Geeta's failure is that she does not realize how precious even her most casual acts of kindness might appear to others, what a powerful inheritance she has to leave. That's what happened with her "Dear Friend" pendant. She could have provided Rani with the kind of "encasing in a solid outline" her parents gave her. Geeta was a good au pair but a bad mother, because as a mother, she bore the weight of passing along self-esteem she did not have to bear as an au pair. In this sense, Rani was right to be angry when she learned of Geeta's gift of the cheap pendant. The point isn't that it was so cheap, it's that Geeta didn't even give something cheap to Rani. She didn't even try, and often, just trying makes up for many imperfections in the effort.
And that is universal. We all have some inheritance of kindness we can pass on, and it might be of far more value to others than we imagine.
Other reading:
In Karen Carlson's take on the story, she ponders something I pondered after my first reading: am I completely missing what the hell this story is about? Karen ponders the possibility that the opacity is the point.
I went with the Contributor's note.
ReplyDeleteI try to avoid even looking at those if I can help it, but sometimes, there's just no getting unstuck.
Delete