Search Results for: Love

Towards Chinatown

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Melissa Hung | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,316 words)

Two days after I learn that my mother has cancer, after my sister tearfully tells me over the phone, “This might be mom’s last Christmas,” I go to San Francisco Chinatown.

I didn’t grow up in a Chinatown. It is not my home. Yet when I think of my mother in Texas, I feel pulled towards Chinatown’s tightly packed stores and no-frills restaurants.

So, leaving an appointment on a December afternoon, I board a bus heading east. The bus is an electric one, powered by cables strung above that guide it down a one-way street through a quiet residential neighborhood. Tidy three-story buildings line the route, their bay windows jutting out. When the bus crests over a hill, I catch a glimpse of San Francisco Bay between skyscrapers in the distance, a little over a mile away. The water shimmers like a mirage even though it is real.

Then, we rumble downhill and we’re in Chinatown. The bay windows are gone. Instead, laundry hangs out to dry on fire escapes and from clotheslines threaded across open windows. Children walk down streets holding the hands of their mothers. Older women dressed in purple and pink puffy jackets, sun hats, and sensible shoes tow hand trucks with bags strapped onto them. Elderly men in gray jackets and baseball caps wait at bus stops. Everyone seems to be carrying something: a backpack, a tote bag or two, a purse worn cross-body, a pink plastic bag in the crook of an elbow.

I step off the bus and walk to the Chinatown YMCA for a swim. Most of the pools I frequent are harshly chlorinated. Open your mouth while submerged in them, or worse, accidentally swallow the water, and you realize immediately your mistake. But here the pool is saltwater, soothing on the skin. As I swim freestyle down the middle lane, joy rises through my body like a buoy. This surprises me — that after two days of feeling terrified about losing my mother, I am capable of joy. I swim for 35 minutes, then listen in on the chatter of aunties in the locker room as I change. Technically, I am eavesdropping, but I don’t think of it that way. They are talking loudly enough for everyone to hear, the way my Po Po used to talk.

In Chinatown, I manage in my clumsy Cantonese. I speak the language and I don’t. My pronunciation is decent, but my vocabulary is stunted. Some words come easily. Others I grasp for. They exist just beyond my reach the way the details of a dream tease the waking mind.

With my hair still damp, I walk around the corner to a bakery with a yellow awning to buy a cha siu bao. I favor the baked ones with a glazed crisp exterior over the fluffy white steamed ones.

“Yāt go cha siu bao,” I say to the woman in an apron behind the counter. One pork bun.

“Baked,” I add.

I know the word for baked in Cantonese. Guhk. I’ll remember it later, but in the moment of the transaction, I can’t retrieve it quickly enough.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks during an interview on May 18, 2010 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Connie Bruck, the San Francisco Chronicle Staff, Justin Heckert, Kent Babb, and Rob Harvilla.

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Death Proof

Sony Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  8 minutes (2,183 words)

At the start of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 best seller about the 1969 Manson murders, there’s a “Cast of Characters.” The list includes all the people who investigated the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends and the “family” to which their murderers belonged. Their “casting” is a crude example of how the dead can be appropriated by the living for our entertainment. “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you,” the book promises in its ’70s twang. Tate and all the others who died so that tagline could live hover behind the whole enterprise like unnamed specters.

Quentin Tarantino was only a child in the late ’60s, an innocent among Hollywood’s innocence lost. His latest film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, is set around that time, and he calls it his “most personal,” a “love letter” to Los Angeles. “I think of it like my memory piece,” he recently told Esquire. “This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was six years old then. This is my world.” In Tarantino’s ’69, a paunchy Leonardo DiCaprio plays a stuttering, aging Western star named Rick Dalton, who alternates driving around the city with his hotter stuntman Cliff Booth — Brad Pitt, somehow better-looking than ever — and drunkenly weeping in his trailer over his waning career as the hippies and film auteurs elbow him out of town. Bubbling up through the narrative like champagne effervescence is newcomer Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), not saying much, not doing much, her sun-lit beauty coming off as little more than a contrast to the storm ahead.

Tarantino explained that the film’s “good-hearted spirit” is supposed to leave the audience asking how Manson fits in: “It’s like we’ve got a perfectly good body, and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus.” What he didn’t explain was that he had the antidote: that in “the Quentin universe,” he interrupts Tate’s death, preserving her like a butterfly in his own showcase of history. But we kind of knew that already, because it’s what he always does. Tarantino is the god of his own nostalgia, fossilizing what he remembers of his past into a signature masterpiece, narrowing history into a vehicle for his own edification. Read more…

On Silence (or, Speak Again)

Illustration by Homestead

Elissa Bassist | Longreads | August 2019 | 26 minutes (6,529 words)

He knew I’d write this. He said so years ago. He was a well-known author and editor — at least in certain major cities — and I was an unpaid volunteer for his literary magazine.

I remember we were at a mutual friend’s book party when he told me what I’d do: that I would, one day, “take him down.” Six thoughts banged into my mind: 1. He thinks the worst of me. 2. So he admits he’s done something to me and to others worthy of a public takedown. 3. He knows I am so desperately hurt that I would expose him. 4. How much dirt does he think I have? 5. This is why I shouldn’t go to parties. 6. I won’t be the one to take him down; he’ll take himself down, eventually.

I’ll show you!” began the imaginary one-sided conversation I had with him later that night when I was alone in my apartment. “I’ll never say one word! To anyone! About anything!”

It was an effective silencing technique.
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Shapes of Native Nonfiction: ‘The Basket Isn’t a Metaphor, It’s an Example’

Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2019 | 21 minutes (5,681 words)

 

The question of “craft” is central to the new anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. It’s there in the title itself, with its emphasis on shapes and shaping, but beyond that, throughout the anthology there is a recurrent interest in the question of craft and crafting, both in the sense of the writers’ craft and in the relationship between writing and other kinds of crafts.

In early June I reached out to Washuta and Warburton about doing an interview with them about the book. In the conversation that follows, we talked about the form and style of the twenty-seven essays that make up the book, as well as how European and non-Native attitudes towards literature and craft can hamstring an understanding of Native storytelling and writing.

Among other things, we discussed the idea of the basket as a figure for the essay — the book is organized around four sections, each of which takes its name from a term related to basket weaving: “technique” (for craft essays), “coiling” (for essays that “appear seamless”), “plaiting” (for “fragmented essays with a single source”), and, finally, “twining” (for essays that “bring together material from different sources”).

But in Shapes of Native Nonfiction, the basket is not only a metaphor; as Warburton notes below, is also often intimately related to storytelling and genealogy. Throughout our conversation, we returned again and again to a distinction between metaphor and literal meaning. It’s a distinction that in non-Native writing informs a long-standing and durable binary, but is for many of the writers here, a binary that’s not only unproductive but actively reductive.

This is only one of the various binaries that these essays break down or reconfigure. The twenty-two writers featured in Shapes of Native Nonfiction present a wide range of approaches, each one both sui generis and part of a long, interwoven tradition. In what follows, Washuta and Warburton discuss how the book came to be, how they arranged it, and how the various pieces in the anthology connect with one another. Read more…

Take Me Away

Longreads Pick
Source: The New Inquiry
Published: Jul 29, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,948 words)

Memories Dressed Up With Wishes

Illustration by Homestead

Grace Linden | Longreads | July 2019 | 8 minutes (2,211 words)

The year is 2017 in Siri Hustvedt’s seventh and most recent novel Memories of the Future, and the premise is seemingly straightforward. The novel opens with its protagonist, S.H., a 61-year-old successful author, thinking back on the year when she moved to New York City over three decades earlier. It begins, like so many other stories and dreams, with the memory of a young woman moving to New York holding fast to the hope that this was the start of her life:

Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel. When I arrived in August of 1978, he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility, an embryonic creature of my imagination, which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I think I was hoping to discover myself in him, to prove that he and I were worthy of whatever story came our way.

The beginning, like many beginnings and like life itself, is extraordinarily ordinary. S.H. recounts how, that summer of 1978, she found a small apartment on 109th Street in the Upper West Side. She remembers outfitting her new home with two place settings in the hopes of conjuring a lover. She smoked and drank a lot of coffee at the Hungarian Bakery and tried to be the type of person who interesting things happened to or, at the very least, who got to witness interesting things happening first-hand. She was lonely but didn’t want to leave, and instead was determined to lose herself in the rhythms of the city she had long loved even before ever really knowing it. Read more…

Driven to the end

Longreads Pick

Urged from a very young age to excel, Olympic cycling medalist Kelly Catlin committed suicide at age 23. ‘“I suspect a large part of why I am the way I am — both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ — is our childhood environment,” she wrote. “We are triplets. And we are, none of us, truly functional. … Those parched for affection from a young age do not quickly heal. I shall say no more.” “So what do I want?” she had written. “Love.”’

Author: Kent Babb
Published: Jul 29, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,052 words)

‘My Teachers Said We Weren’t Allowed To Use Them.’

Connor Pope / Unsplash

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | July 2019 | 11 minutes (2,868 words)

Consider the semicolon. It’s beloved by some and assailed by others; in the annals of punctuation lore, no other symbol has sparked as much debate. A handful of years ago it was even the subject of a very funny parody song by The Lonely Island and Solange that poked fun at hashtag rap. (Though, in fairness to the semicolon, the song’s punchline is that it was using the semicolon incorrectly all along.) In her new book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, Cecelia Watson ventures into the long history and usage of semicolons, and the results are tremendously enlightening.

Semicolon is a slim book, but it deftly covers a lot of ground. Watson explores the origin of the semicolon, demonstrates how it’s gone in and out of linguistic favor over the centuries, and thoughtfully explored how a host of disparate writers — including Rebecca Solnit, Irvine Welsh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — have memorably used it in their work. Watson also explores some of the surprisingly severe impacts the semicolon has had on society, such as the semicolon in a Massachusetts law that wreaked havoc on the state’s alcohol consumption, or the way the semicolon in a judicial sentence caused one man’s life to hang in the balance.

I talked with Watson about the origins of her book, the role typography played in it, and how semicolons can improve your dating life. (No, really!) An edited version of our conversation follows. Read more…

Searching for The Sundays

Hayley Madden / AP

David Obuchowski | Longreads | July 2019 | 35 minutes (6,336 words)

 

What makes a band your favorite band? Is it the quality of their songs? Is it their politics? Is it because they pioneered a certain sound? An emotional association? I don’t know. Any of those are valid reasons for crowning a band as your favorite.

For most of my life, starting in high school through my 30s, the Smiths were my favorite band. And to be sure, I still love the Smiths. But a few years ago, I came to a simple and somehow comforting realization: My favorite band is the Sundays.

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