A special shout-out to the editors of this week’s “Money Issue”
for including two excellent pieces on what James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “human actuality.” The “human
actuality” in Lauren Hilgers’ “The Kitchen Network” is the hardscrabble existence
of a twenty-nine-year-old Chinese immigrant named Rain, working twelve-hour
shifts six days a week in a strip mall Chinese restaurant on Maryland’s Indian
Head Highway. Hilgers conveys a deep interest in what is actual – the Fujianese
village where Rain grew up, the way in which he was smuggled into the U.S., the
Chinatown employment agencies, the restaurant where he works, the house he
shares with five co-workers, even the way he thinks (“So, instead of
conversation, Rain occupies himself with the math of a transient cook: the time
it takes to clean the shrimp, the days before he can visit his girlfriend in
New York, and the balance of his debts”).
The human actuality in Peter Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” can
be summed up in three words: women, money, and garbage. The way these three
things are connected in Hessler’s piece is a revelation. Hessler’s subject is Sayyid
Ahmid, a Cairo garbageman. Ahmid collects garbage from Hessler’s apartment.
Occasionally, Hessler accompanies him on his rounds. Reading the first three
sections, I thought the story was going to be about Cairo’s “informal economy.”
As Hessler shows, “Cairo’s waste collection is shaped by tradition, not by laws
and planning.” But in the following sections, after Hessler and his wife visit
Sayyid in his home, the piece branches in a different direction, showing how
Sayyid’s sexist views (e.g., he supports female circumcision) are a product of
Islamic tradition that limits desire to males.
Considering these two pieces from a compositional perspective, I find myself slightly more partial to Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash.” Its mix of subjective and objective is richer. Both articles are absorbing. Both emphasize, in an Agee-like way, human particularity.
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