→ May 7, 2021
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Minari.

Minari was the last film we caught before the Oscars, completing our run through the eight Best Picture nominees (and all of the Director and Acting nominees, except for Hillbilly Elegy). Nominated for six films, with Youn Yuh-jung winning Best Supporting Actress, it is a lovely, funny slice of nostalgia base don writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood, and gives a different take on the immigrant experience in America.

Steven Yeun stars as Jacob Yi, who moves with his wife Monica (Han Ye-Ri, formerly of Hello My Twenties!), daughter Anne, and son David (Alan Kim), the last of whom is Chung’s stand-in in the film. Jacob has brought his family to rural Arkansas, where he intends to build a farm and grow traditional Korean produce he can sell to restaurants and the growing immigrant communities of the American South. He and Monica will work as chicken sexers to earn enough money to get the farm started, but Monica isn’t on board with the whole farming plan, and the whole family has trouble assimilating until Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn) arrives to help Monica take care of the kids and provide substantial comic relief.

What happens from there is almost beside the point, although there is certainly drama to come, and the family will be forced to confront the cracks threatening to tear them apart, to choose how they’ll respond when everything is on the verge of falling apart. This is far more a study of its characters, of Jacob and David specifically, and of its time and place – Arkansas in the 1980s, in an overwhelmingly white community that by and large welcomes the Yi family, even if sometimes they don’t exactly go about things in the best ways. Chung’s script is full of heart, and empathy for its characters – there really are no antagonists here other than the vagaries of nature and fate.

Chung tells the story mostly through David’s eyes, although there are a few scenes with his parents by themselves, and the growth of the relationship between David and the grandmother he doesn’t know becomes one of the emotional touchstones in Minari. The movie takes its name from a resilient, edible dropwort, also known as Korean watercress or Chinese celery, that David’s grandmother plants on the banks of a stream near the family’s farm; in addition to the metaphor of the vegetable itself, water, or the lack thereof, is one of the recurring symbols of Minari, showing up right at the start when Jacob encounters a charlatan with a divining rod but refuses to pay him for his “service.” Soon-ja is unflappable, even as David rejects her at first, and her often coarse humor is one of the film’s best facets, and a surprising contrast to her dour, reticent daughter’s exterior affect.

Minari‘s magic is in how Chung manages to take something so small and make it feel so broad and universal; nearly everything in this movie is about the Yi family and what happens within their household, right up until the one big dramatic twist at the end – and even that event functions as another way to explore and demonstrate the way the family holds together. The story is sweet, sometimes bittersweet, but not saccharine, and full of heart. It’s frequently funny, between Soon-ja’s witticisms and the extremely eccentric farmhand Paul (Will Patton), and its tragedies feel real, not forced.

Youn’s win for Best Supporting Actress was well-deserved, and there seemed to be no real pushback before or after her victory. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (for Yeun, who deserved the same honor for Burning but was snubbed), and Best Original Score. I loved Minari, but wouldn’t have voted for it in any of the other categories, just because it was up against two movies – Nomadland and The Father – I liked a bit more. It did, however, make my top 5 among 2020-eligible movies; I’ve seen everything from that cycle I intended to see except for First Cow and a couple of international films. So here’s my almost-final rankings for 2020:

1. Nomadland

2. The Father

3. A Sun

4. Minari

5. Promising Young Woman

6. Wolfwalkers

7. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

8. Judas and the Black Messiah

9. A Personal History of David Copperfield

10. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

11. Collective

12. The Nest

13. Boys State

14. Palm Springs

15. One Night in Miami

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→ March 20, 2020
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made the longlists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive), both in the same year that Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of auto-fiction, On Earth is a difficult and unsparing read that’s probably better from a critical eye than it would be in the eyes of most readers (mine included).

Written as a series of letters from the protagonist, Little Dog, to his abusive mother, now that Little Dog is an adult, On Earth goes back to Little Dog’s childhood, to stories his mother and grandmother told him from before they left Vietnam, and to his adolescent years, when he first fell in love with a local boy named Trevor who became addicted to opioids. Little Dog is closer to his grandmother, Lan, who helps take care of him and tries to protect him when his mother becomes violent, and who helps him get to know an American veteran, Paul, who became her husband and Little Dog’s surrogate grandfather. The novel bounces around in time between those three settings – Vietnam, his childhood, and his relationship with Trevor – but hurtles towards multiple deaths that define the end of the novel, and the way it’s constructed, the story unfurls as a tapestry that weaves grief and memory together for a somber and often depressing read.

Entangled with those themes is Little Dog’s three-pronged intersectionality – he’s an immigrant, a person of color, and openly gay, all of which are true of Vuong as well. Little Dog also arrives in this country unable to speak English, and he becomes the first member of his family to learn to read, which makes the entire conceit of the novel as a series of letters to his mother more poignant or a little bit farcial. On Earth is more interesting as a new entry in the long tradition of immigrant fiction, especially given how many variables are different – how extreme the fish-out-of-water aspect is when his family ends up in Hartford, Connecticut; the added challenge of his sexual orientation at a time when society was more bigoted than it is now, and with a mother who doesn’t really understand it; and his mother’s work at a nail salon, a haven for exploitation of women who’ve immigrated here from east and southeast Asia.

There’s plenty to dissect in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but Little Dog himself is too much of a cipher – even with all of the details we know about him as a person – to make this slight book connect with me. I sympathized with him, but never empathized with him; perhaps it’s the nonlinear narrative, perhaps it’s the dispassionate way in which Vuong writes, which always seemed to keep me at arm’s length. There’s a scene in the novel where Vuong describes something in explicitly physical terms, but never grapples with the emotional impact of it, during or after. That seems to be emblematic of the work as a whole. In the end, Little Dog seems to forgive his mother, to arrive at some sort of understanding, but I still wasn’t sure how he got to that point even with 240 pages leading up to that point.

Next up: I finished Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina and started Jo Walton’s Lent.

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→ March 13, 2020
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Everything Inside.

Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Everything Inside just won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday night, her second NBCC win (her memoir Brother, I’m Dying won the NBCC’s Memoir/Autobiography award in 2007) and the most notable award she’s won yet for her fiction. Each story in this slim, beautifully-written volume revolves around Haitian immigrants to the United States, the cultural shifts they experienced, and the challenges of settling in a country that still has racism and xenophobia in its DNA.

Born in Haiti, Danticat emigrated to the U.S. at 12 years old, and every story in this book revolves around that immigrant experience, especially those of Haitians who emigrated to Florida and move back and forth between the two countries, either physically traveling between them or feeling the pull of one from the other. (Danticat’s Wikipedia entry says that “Although Danticat resides in the United States, she still considers Haiti home. To date, she still visits Haiti from time to time and has always felt as if she never left it.”) Every one of these stories in Everything Inside feels drawn from something very personal to Danticat, as if they’re not just conceived and written but lived-in, so while there will always be a comprehension gap for readers like me (white, Anglophone, U.S.-born to U.S.-born parents) who don’t share her experiences as an immigrant or person of color, several of these stories still pack enough of an emotional punch to connect.

“Dosas” revolves around a home-health nurse whose ex-husband calls in a panic because his new wife – and former affair partner – has been kidnapped in Haiti and he can’t raise the ransom. (In Haiti, a ‘dosa’ is a girl born after twins.) This complex web of relationships, between the protagonist and her ex and between the Haitian diaspora and those who stayed behind (or move back and forth between the countries), colors her decisions and threatens her job as a live-in nurse to an elderly patient with kidney disease.  “Sunrise, Sunset,” originally published in the New Yorker, contrasts two women, a mother and her daughter who has just become a mother herself, as the former faces creeping dementia while the latter grapples with a stark postpartum depression, which culminates in a terrifying moment that confronts the erasure of memory, individual and across generations. “Without Inspection,” the closing story, follows the thoughts of a man who has fallen on a construction site and is heading to his death, during which he thinks about the family he leaves behind and the improbable way in which he arrived in the United States, saved on a beach by a Haitian woman who goes there each day to try to help migrants who barely make it to the shore when their transporters dump them to swim the last mile.

“Seven Stories” is the standout in the collection, perhaps in part because it’s so different from the other stories here. The Haitian-American protagonist, Kimberly, visits an old friend who is now the wife of the Prime Minister of an independent island in the Caribbean, where the elite live in luxury, abetted by corruption, amidst shantytowns and abject poverty. The story of how her friend survived the assassination of her father, himself once Prime Minister, and returned to the island unfolds over the course of the story and diminishes the dichotomy that first appeared to Kimberly when she arrived on the island. The story ends with a wedding and celebration in a village called Maafa – which I assume is an allusion to Ma’afa, a term referring to the “black Holocaust” where European and Arab peoples enslaved Africans and continued to oppress them through colonialism and imperialism – and Kimberly reflecting on how her friend’s life has been anything but simple despite her evident privilege, while Kimberly herself is an outsider (on an island where there’s prejudice against Haitians) viewing the island’s injustices through a different lens.

I’ve read four of the five books shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Fiction this year, and would have voted for either The Nickel Boys or Feast Your Eyes over Everything Inside, but with the caveat that I know there’s an aspect to this collection that I likely can’t fully appreciate because of my background and identity. (I’d vote for this book over The Topeka School.) It’s still a worthy winner, just not my top pick.

Next up: About halfway through Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ July 9, 2018
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Exit West.

Mohsin Hamid first gained global notice for his 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which became a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won numerous smaller awards for the Pakistani author. His 2017 novel Exit West has been nearly as acclaimed, making the shortlists for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award, and even earning a nod from Barack Obama as one of the best books he read in 2017. Working with just a hint of magical realism, Hamid gives us a clear-eyed look at the refugee crisis from the perspective of a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who fall in love in their unnamed, war-torn country (resembling Afghanistan), and manage to escape through a portal, only to find themselves transient through various stops where refugees are less than welcome.

The only gimmick Hamid employs in the book is the doors, these magic portals that appear and allow people to slip through them and emerge somewhere completely different in the world, at least until authorities find the door and attempt to block it. This allows Hamid to focus on the problems refugees face of resistance from native populations, of the obstacles they face toward assimilation, and of the strain the displacement puts on relationships, while skipping the just as real problems of getting out of the original country and, perhaps, dying en route to somewhere else. The horrors of migrants packed on to tiny, un-seaworthy vessels, or crammed in the back of overheated trucks, are legitimate, but including that part of the refugee experience might overwhelm the parts of the story Hamid wants to tell – the way wars or famines create populations of homeless refugees searching for little more than a safe place to live and work, much as they may have had before the crisis hit.

Nadia and Saeed live ordinary lives in what appears to be a moderate or even progressive Muslim country, with Nadia living alone as a liberated woman who has cut off her conservative family. The two fall in love just as the country begins its collapse, with fundamentalist rebels encroaching on their city and eventually taking it over and enforcing Taleban-like rules on the populace. (Hamid never names the country, the religion, or any of the forces, but the details he does provide sound an awful lot like Afghanistan under the rule of the Taleban, while the movements of the refugees after they exit through the first door resemble the flight of Syrians during their civil war.) After several small incidents drive Nadia from her apartment into Saeed’s home with his father – Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet in the street – they hear of a door that will allow them to escape to somewhere else, beginning a journey that will take them through several doors, to Greece, to England, and eventually the United States, an odyssey that changes them both as individuals and alters the nature of their relationship, permanently, by the time they find a permanent home in California.

Although the primary hook in Exit West is the magic of the doors, which boil down the leave/stay decision to one of money and family, the strongest element of Hamid’s narrative is the tapestry of mundane details of the itinerants’ lives once the social contract of their home city begins to dissolve. There’s a run on a local bank, and in the throngs of people crushing to get to their money, men grope women in the crowd, including Nadia, knowing well that there will be no repercussions, an early sign that without that social contract people will behave like animals. Refugees grasp at what might, to us, seem trivial details that reinforce their humanity – a warm meal, an actual shower, possession of items we take for granted.

At each destination, Hamid presents a different vision of the refugee crisis, none more potent than his version of London, where a military attempt to remove migrant squatters fails, and a new partnership between the natives and the refugees emerges, not merely a détente but an attempt to create a better life for everyone. These are interspersed with brief scenes of other people who pass through doors in search of safety, freedom, or merely something different, presenting the doors as metaphor rather than merely as a plot device to skip over the brutal conditions of migration.

The displacement takes a toll on Nadia and Saeed as well; neither character is the same by the time their journey ends, at least for now, in California. Nadia is also the more interesting and well-developed of the two characters, both at the start of the novel and by the time the two have evolved over the course of the book. The power of Exit West, however, is that the theme applies to any characters forced by circumstance to leave everything behind and step through the first door that appears – without any idea where they’ll end up.

Next up: I just started N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the final book in her Broken Earth trilogy that began with The Fifth Season.

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→ June 21, 2018
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The Other Side of Hope.

Note: I’m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I’m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.

I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel’s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I’m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven’t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I’ve ever seen. And that’s before we even talk about the sushi scene.

The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikström and Khaled Ali don’t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikström is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled’s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikström’s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.

The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can’t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn’t do anything. It’s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn’t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurismäki, who also directed 2011’s Le Havre has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn’t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikström plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.

Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikström attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled’s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikström, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.

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→ August 24, 2010
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Unaccustomed Earth.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, and her writing revolves around Bengali families in the United States who retain at least some of their non-American identity, but her writing is more American than most fiction by contemporary authors born in this country. Lahiri’s stories are richly textured, written in intelligent yet easy prose, showcasing her incredible skill at encapsulating human emotions through plot events large and small, and her overarching theme of Bengalis feeling adrift in a foreign country and culture seems central to the American experience regardless of the characters’ nation of origin. Her first published work, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if anything, her second story collection, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth is even better, more assured with stronger characterization.

The title story, which leads off the collection, is one of the most subtle stories in the book, dealing with Ruma, an Indian mother married to a non-Indian man, whose widowed father comes to visit her in her new home in Seattle. She is still grieving from the sudden loss of her mother, and now must deal with the question of whether to invite her father to stay with her, per Indian (or perhaps Bengali) custom, even though she has never had a close relationship with him and believes her husband is less than thrilled with the idea of having his father-in-law living in their spacious house. Ruma’s father, meanwhile, has begun a quiet affair – so quiet it barely merits the term – with another Bengali woman, also widowed, and does not wish to reveal it to his daughter or to give up his peripatetic new lifestyle. Lahiri allows both characters to narrate the story, creating two distinct voices, moving the story along by magnifying tiny events in their lives during the father’s visit and establishment of a new relationship with his grandson, surpassing anything he ever developed with Ruma. The story’s conclusion is extremely un-Hollywood, yet more effective for its realism.

Unaccustomed Earth closes with a three-part novella titled “Hema and Kaushik,” which returns to the twin perspectives of the collection’s title story by tracking two young Bengalis through three stages of their lives – a brief period in their teen years when Hema’s family housed Kaushik’s on the latter’s return from India to Massachusetts; Kaushik’s difficulty in adjusting to a major change in his family situation while he’s in college; and an unlikely reunion between the two in Rome with the two in their late 30s. The novella is more about Kaushik (the boy) than Hema, with the latter serving more as a lens to examine Kaushik’s character, and how a few major events in his life shape his choices in adulthood, including his inability to grieve and his difficulties in forming lasting relationships with women.

As much as I may praise “Hema and Kaushik,” it wasn’t the star of this particular show. I don’t read many short stories because I often find it hard to get emotionally invested in a character or a plot in ten or twenty thousand words, but “Only Goodness” was easily the most affecting short story I’ve ever read, for personal reasons. The story opens by telling us that “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol,” a clue to the guilt the sister would later carry for her brother’s alcoholism, even though the addiction and downward spiral was almost certainly inevitable. An uncle with whom I always felt close was a lifelong alcoholic, something I didn’t know until late in my teens, and his periods of recovery never lasted and were punctuated by disappointment and frustration on the part of the rest of his immediate family. I remember too well the phone calls I’d get from him at odd hours in the late 1990s, about some get-rich-quick scheme he’d found or a penny stock on which he wanted my opinion, and the fact that I was not equipped to handle him in those states, or even fully aware of what the calls truly signified. Eventually, I drifted out of contact with him, talking maybe once or twice a year, hearing of him through my parents, until the day in spring training of 2005 when I got another call that he had taken his own life the night before. Rahul lives to see the end of “Only Goodness,” but Lahiri paints an accurate portrait of the devastation a grown child’s alcohol problem can cause and the false hopes and crushing disappointments it can cause, while still giving the reader enough insight into Rahul to feel some empathy, until the climactic event that caps the story.

“A Choice of Accommodation” chronicles the gradual decline of a “mixed” marriage (between an Indian man and a non-Indian woman) by watching the couple over the course of a single day and night at someone else’s wedding; I’ve criticized many writers here for badly-written sex scenes that feel like they were written by teenaged boys, but Lahiri wrote one of the few I’ve ever read that didn’t make me cringe – perhaps it simply needed a woman’s pen – although as the conclusion to this story the device felt a little hackneyed. “Nobody’s Business” is actually told from the perspective of the shy American roommate of an Indian woman on whom he probably has a small crush; he finds out her mysterious boyfriend is having an affair and is left trying to decide whether and how to tell her about it. The story itself works, with a technologically quaint solution, but the constant parade of suitors that the girl, Sang, faces – all men seeking an arranged marriage through her parents – provided a level of exasperating comic relief. The weakest story for me – still above-average if you’re looking for grades – was “Heaven-Hell,” told by an Indian girl about her mother who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, develops a crush on a Bengali graduate student who rooms with the family for several months, and even thatt story features a classic Lahiri oh-by-the-way twist at its end.

Interpreter of Maladies was brilliant and worthy of the recognition it received, but I can’t say I was as moved or involved in its stories as I was in those of Unaccustomed Earth, and her ability to create tension in short stories that revolve around emotions rather than action is astounding, reminiscent of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the novels of Marilynne Robinson, two of the best American writers of the last hundred years. And I think it’s fitting that someone of a non-traditional background should emerge as one of the brightest voices in 21st century American literature, one who speaks to the experiences of an entirely new wave of immigrants who spend much of their lives living in one country while trying to maintain the cultures and traditions of others.

–

Before Unaccustomed Earth, I read John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy. However, it’s not a complete, standalone novel; it weaves together the stories of five people in the U.S. in the late 1910s, but their paths just start to cross near the book’s end and nothing is resolved enough to merit a real review. I’ll write them up when I finish all three parts, which appear as a single entry on a few of the greatest-books lists I follow.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur.

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