June 10 & 17, 2019 Issue

This week’s issue (“The Fiction Issue: Border Crossings”) has an interesting section called “Another Country” comprising five pieces: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Hereafter, Faraway”; Orhan Pamuk’s “Geneva, 1959”; Min Jin Lee’s “Stonehenge”; Jennifer Egan’s “Hard Seat”; and Dinaw Mengestu’s “Poorly Mapped.” Each piece is an account of an experience that the writer had while living or traveling in a foreign place. All are terrific. Here are a few samples:

In the photos, I look like the son I will have forty years later. We are walking between two rows of rubber trees, their monumental trunks and canopies forming a natural cathedral. They tower over my mother as my mother towers over me. We are unaware that within a year or so, fleeing the Communist invasion, we will be walking again, this time for hundreds of kilometres, with thousands of others. I will become a refugee for the first time, my mother for the second. [“Hereafter, Faraway”]

It had been a happy time for me since I’d learned to read and write, the year before. I’d read aloud every advertisement and piece of graffiti that my eyes landed on. I had kept this up in Geneva, reciting any agglomeration of letters I came across: MARTINI, PICON, ESSO, HELVETIA. Words like these, and numbers, had been the foundation of my mother’s French lessons that summer. But I was having trouble now picking any of them out from the language that was spoken in the classroom. At home, every word had been like a strange and unique bird. But at school the words seemed to swoop across the sky like a flock, no single bird distinguishable from the whole. [“Geneva, 1959”]

It can’t be true that the whole class had light-colored eyes, but, as I remember it, a dozen pairs of lovely blue, green, and hazel eyes looked at me with surprise and pity because I hadn’t heard of the prehistoric stone configuration. They didn’t mean to be unkind. I’m sure of that. But, in their attractive, polished faces, I saw that Stonehenge was as familiar to them as having a gun held to my face was to me. [“Stonehenge”]

Ah, the hubris of the young English speaker whose knowledge of Chinese consisted, in my case, of being able to count to ten. Not a word, or even a letter, much less a brand name, in English was to be seen in Guangzhou. To buy train tickets to Kunming, we had to ask someone at our hotel to write “Kunming” in Chinese on a slip of paper, which we slid through a mousehole-shaped opening to a ticket seller, along with some yuan, in exchange for tickets whose multiple pages evinced an ominous complexity. [“Hard Seat”]

The guards made me delete the photos I had travelled seven thousand miles to take. They shooed the crowd and me away and then disappeared behind the palace gates. Rather than turn toward home, I followed the man who had come to my aid down a long, winding road. I had no idea where I was going and was soon lost in an intricate network of unnamed streets, alleyways, and footpaths that my map would never have been able to account for. When I finally reached home, long after the sun had set, my aunt wasn’t angry so much as amused by my misadventure. “I told you,” she said, “not to leave alone.” [“Poorly Mapped”]

Another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is Han Ong’s short story "Javi." It’s about a fourteen-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who persuades a famous eighty-two-year-old painter living alone in New Mexico to hire him as a helper. He soon becomes her companion. The painter is identified only as “the painter,” but she’s a dead ringer for Agnes Martin. Ong’s conjuring of the painter's thinking, talking, and painting is transfixing. He puts us squarely there in the studio with her and Javi. Here’s his description of her painting:

She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas. You’d think, given the narrow range of her material and motifs, that the paintings would look like the same thing over and over, but it’s striking how much variation can be wrung out of a subtle shift in color, or a different spacing between the parallel lines, or even the thickness of the lines. Sometimes, drawing these lines, she becomes so mesmerized that her tongue hangs out like a dog’s, and her eyes glaze over, as if some inner spirit had become dominant.

That “She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas” is brilliant. The whole piece is brilliant, blending life and art, or, as Ong says, "life-life" and "art-life."