A mosaic of stories about state- and self-imposed silence and what it means to find your voice.
The 14 stories in Chin’s debut collection are centered around Malaysia: the people, culture, and country. Interconnected (sometimes loosely, sometimes overtly) by characters, the stories also share themes like patriotism, censorship, personhood, and art as protest. In “When Starbucks Came,” a woman contemplates her unfulfilling relationship in the wake of the coffee chain's opening a store in Taiping. In “A Malaysian Man in Mayor Bloomberg’s Silicon Alley,” a young man living in America returns home to vote and struggles with his dueling identities. When asked by the American woman he’s dating for one thing only true Malaysians would know, he replies: “we either think we are the best country in the world, or the worst country in the world.” These stories exist in the gray area in between. Corruption and state violence exist in the same world as forbidden family stories and “rain-betting.”Isabella Sin, who serves as the throughline for the collection, is first introduced in “Though She Gets Home” when she goes to her first protest and is later arrested for writing “inflammatory…pornographic” poems. An unexpected twist slowly revealed over the course of a few stories leads to the final tale, “So She Gets Home,” which sees Isabella home from the “country’s most notorious prison.” In the wake of her detainment, she is trying to navigate the Venn diagram of her identity: how others define her and how she defines herself. The idea of becoming who she is meant to be leaves the sometimes-devastating book on a hopeful note.
A haunting, surprising, and rebellious collection that contains multitudes.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-93693-216-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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