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Looking Inside My Heart

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Jen Hyde | Longreads | November 2018 | 22 minutes (6,055 words)

 

The women sit on stools behind four glass partitions in rows of 50, their eyes pressed into the cold eyepieces of their microscopes, sewing bovine pericardium tissue to surgical steel with loops of polyester thread. I’m entranced by the rhythm of these women at work, the fluorescent lights that hang over their heads, and the blue hairnets that match their uniform scrubs. I tell myself, They are real, their labor is real. I feel like I’m looking into a glass vitrine and I must stop myself from mistaking this room for a dream. Each stitch is so small I cannot see their handiwork with my bare eye when later I hold a sample in my hand. This is where they make bioprosthetic heart valves, the very device sewn into my own heart.

The facility, Edwards Lifesciences, in Irvine, California, is 20 miles from my childhood home. I was born with a heart murmur at Anaheim Memorial Medical Center on a late July afternoon in 1985. Shortly after, I was sent by ambulance to Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, where I was diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, a rare condition involving four heart defects. After two weeks in the NICU, the pediatric cardiology team recommended an open-heart surgery to correct leaky pulmonary and tricuspid valves and to close one of the two holes at the bottom of my heart. The murmur and the other hole, they told my parents, would likely always remain.

When I was 25 and visiting my parents for Christmas, I was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. The cardiologist told me that the left side of my heart had dilated and that I needed to seek further medical help. I was a graduate student living in New York City, six months shy of heart failure.

This is where they make bioprosthetic heart valves, the very device sewn into my own heart.

In a corner office that overlooked Brooklyn and the East River, a heart surgeon recommended an open-heart operation to repair my pulmonary heart valve using a bioprosthetic bovine valve. Typically, the bovine valve is used in older patients, my surgeon explained. Made of the pericardium tissue of a cow, the valve will calcify over time. Unlike the mechanical valve, the bovine valve doesn’t require medication. Your quality of life will only get better. A few months after our meeting, I underwent my second open-heart operation, then went about my life in New York in what felt like the same body I’d had before the surgery. My bovine heart valve was invisible to me. I paid $3,000 for the surgery with money I’d earned babysitting and as an office assistant at an architectural studio, and with significant help from my parents. My dad’s insurance, thankfully, covered the rest.

***

The Edwards Lifesciences Irvine campus sits off Red Hill Avenue, largely indistinguishable from the dozens of other office parks on both sides of the street for miles in either direction. The interior of the Edwards campus is sun-filled and temperate. Sarah Huoh, the director for global communications, meets me at the front entrance. Her blonde curls and blue eyes surprise me. Her demeanor is bubbly and warm. As she leads me through the campus, we pass employees in business casual and employees in scrubs. Framed artwork made by employees and patients alike line the walls of the offices. A reminder of where the valves go when they leave the manufacturing room, Sarah tells me.

I was a graduate student living in New York City, six months shy of heart failure.

To get to the production building, Sarah takes me through the center of the campus, through a courtyard where the sound of cars along Red Hill Avenue is hardly audible — a hush among the rustle of the flora and the birds flying from plant to plant. The courtyard is trimmed with succulents and birds of paradise.


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Inside, Sarah tells me that here the valves are sterilized and serialized. Only after they pass many safety inspections are they transported, under federal regulations, to hospitals throughout the United States and internationally. Most of the assemblers are women, Sarah explains. Many of them have prior experience as seamstresses, but that experience isn’t a requirement to work here. I try not to observe them through the glass, but I stare. I stare at the symmetry of their rows of workstations, their identical white lab coats, the rhythm of their elbows moving up and down with each stitch they make as they peer into their microscopes. I’m fascinated by how deeply their handiwork is sewn into my own life. My mother sewed in Indonesia, I tell Sarah. She emigrated here in the early ’80s.

Many of our assemblers are immigrants, Sarah tells me. This can be a great job for someone who doesn’t always work in English, and many of our employees tend to stay with us for a long time. Some have been here for twenty years. They like to cook for one another, and they really take care of each other.

I’m fascinated by how deeply their handiwork is sewn into my own life.

I sense how proud she is of who Edwards employs, and the pride bubbles within me too, because everything about the medical device inside me is reflective of the kind of American I am — a biracial daughter of an immigrant mother and second-generation-American father. We are a single-income, thoroughly middle class family. My first surgery was paid for with help from state grants for children’s health. We lived in a ’60s “starter” tract home in a subdivision off Imperial Highway in La Habra. My home was multicultural and multilingual largely because my bedridden Indonesian grandmother and her Latinx and Indonesian caretakers also lived with us. I built my own identity on binaries: In high school I was the only half Chinese Indonesian student. I wasn’t Asian enough to hang with the other Asian American girls. My best friends were white, and I coveted everything about their home lives and their ability to mix and match fashionable weekend outfits from Target, Nordstrom, and Delia’s. Even though we shared everything from AP English notes to six packs of Smirnoff Ice, I never felt entirely at ease in the world we inhabited as young women. Only now, moments before Sarah will introduce me to the women who sewed my valve, do I feel at ease in Irvine. I hadn’t expected my valve and this place to hold such hybridity within it.

Sarah points to a few assemblers at one end of the facility. In this area technicians clean the pericardium tissue, she explains. After it’s washed, they’ll spread the tissue on a flat surface and take something that looks like a cookie cutter and cut out the leaflets. The leaflets are then sewn onto a structure made of steel that comes from a factory in Switzerland with polyester thread that comes from France.

Only now, moments before Sarah will introduce me to the women who sewed my valve, do I feel at ease in Irvine.

Because I’ve never seen my own bioprosthetic heart valve, I couldn’t imagine its global origins or the human hands that had put it together until I peered into this room.

I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing. Every inch of their bodies are covered in medical garments. Sarah instructs me to put on a pair of latex gloves, then places a sample of my own valve in my hand. I hold it to my eye to study the stitches, but I have trouble seeing a single one. I can’t feel the textures of the valve with my gloved hands; it looks machine made.

Even as I hold it now and observe the women at work on the other side of the glass, it seems like a work of fiction that the valve inside my body had been assembled by them. And yet, as I hold the valve for the first time, despite my disbelief in the very existence of this room, I feel a deep gratitude for these women and their labor. That the object now inside me had been made here, had brought me here to Irvine made me wonder what else I couldn’t see about my own life.

Sarah guides me through a door at the far end of the room. Here, four women from the assembly line have come to meet me. In the changing room they store their bouffant caps, masks, and gloves and emerge in jeans. They look just like my own mother; Asian and Latina women in their early 40s to late 60s. I wonder, had my mom been formally educated, would she have sought out assembly work here?

I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing.

Sarah turns to one of the women: Angie, I think this is your first time meeting a patient.

It is! Angie says, I cannot believe it! She could be in her early 40s. There’s a reddish tint to her hair and a bit of green in her eyes. They are hazel, like mine, and I wonder if she’s also made this silent observation about how alike we appear to be. I lean in for a hug, but Angie does not lean in as far. When we pull away, I nod to the others. It is rare for sewers to meet their patients, Sarah explains. It’s rare for patients to reach out to us.

I’m holding a gift, a bunch of Fino lemons from a tree in my parents’ yard. This morning, my mom helped me nest them in a basket; I added a jar of local Inland Empire honey and herbal tea. My mom gathered a handful of lavender from the backyard to give the basket some color.

Sarah tells me that you like to cook for one another, I say.

The room smells like latex and iodoform. We stand in a semicircle, surrounded by the valve prototypes. The women’s faces are backlit by the lights hanging above their assembly room workstations. I explain the contents of the basket slowly so as to draw out this moment for all of us to process together, unsure of whether my gratitude for their work was accompanied by relief, bewilderment, or both. Where will this conversation go? I wonder.

Angie asks me, Are you from here? I know the hard edges of her consonants. For my mom, a th is a t. When a hearth is a heart or heard.

Originally, I say. And you?

We are from Vietnam, Angie explains, pointing to Mary and Pham. I’m from Mexico, another woman chimes in. She’s petite and doe-eyed, in her mid-40s, I think, and I see both exhaustion and peace in her eyes. I’m Fabi, she says, extending her hand to me.

Pham and Fabi are the managers of your team, Sarah explains. Pham offers her hand to shake mine. I’m so glad you are healthy, she tells me. I shake Pham’s hand and apologize to everyone for my dry, chapped fingers. I tell the women that they are the reason I’m so healthy, and that I’m just beside myself and don’t know what else to say because I don’t. There is no place to sit. I’d love for us to sink our bodies into a curved surface. I sense that none of us wants our exchange to be so formal, but in the moment, with limited resources, I blurt, My mom is from Indonesia, and she sews, too!

Angie says, Oh so you are Asian, too!

Yep, I say. I wonder if she feels bewilderment or relief or annoyance by the connection I’m bringing forth, because it makes the most obvious thing about her appear to be our only commonality.

I hand the basket to Mary, the oldest woman in the group. I do this out of respect for her age, and also because she’s smiling. I sense she may not have comprehended the entirety of my story about the origins of these lemons, that — like with my own mother — the tactility of the gift may say more than what I’ve said in words. Mary smiles and her eyes brighten. The other women peer into the basket. I look again at Angie. Fabi brushes her hand over the lemons. Her fingers move gently across the rinds. Your hands are so delicate, I tell her. Fabi smiles and stretches her hand out in front of us as though she’s admiring a fresh manicure.

I wonder if she feels bewilderment or relief or annoyance by the connection I’m bringing forth, because it makes the most obvious thing about her appear to be our only commonality.

Delicate hands are necessary for all of the small stitches that go into the valves, Sarah adds. Everyone laughs, and Mary stretches her hand out. We all have a look. They’re so youthful! I tell Mary. She blushes.

We dip our heads into the basket to take in the scent of the lemons and lavender, and I make an effort to maintain focus on these women, our semicircle, their hands. I had come with the intention of understanding the nature of the valve inside me more fully, but that fullness has taken on a different form. I knew my heart valve was a foreign object, and I had imagined it was made by foreign hands. But these women were not foreign to me. They look like my mom. They perform life-saving labor, and I wonder about the possibility of our shared experiences of living here in Orange County.

Our meeting is exceptional, Sarah tells me, because they have just finished their workday. Have I prolonged their labor now by obliging them to stay and speak with me? I hope we can meet again, I say as we say goodbye.

I knew my heart valve was a foreign object, and I had imagined it was made by foreign hands. But these women were not foreign to me.

***

My mother emigrated to California in the early ’80s. A Chinese Indonesian woman from Sumatra, she is the adopted daughter of an affluent Peranakan family. Her mother had a hair salon on Jalan Sutomo Road in Medan, a city in central Sumatra, and her family also owned and operated a sewing school just above the salon.

My mother’s two older sisters were educated as a medical doctor and pharmacist, but my mom was never sent to school. Instead, her adoptive mother trained her as a hairstylist and an embroidery teacher. She began working in the salon at 10 years old. When her sisters moved to Jakarta, my mother worked in the salon until her mother closed it and moved them to Jakarta, too. There, she received an invitation from her cousins to come visit the United States. My mom tells me that her sisters paid for her plane ticket to the States and that as she packed her bags for a six-month trip to California, she sensed she wouldn’t return to Indonesia. Her sisters took care of her financially until a year later when she married my dad. Two years after that, I was born.

Until I moved to New York, my parents and I lived in La Habra, a city on the border of Los Angeles and Orange County, whose motto is “A Caring Community.” Our neighbors were Bolivian, Japanese, Chinese, and white. My parents purchased our home in 1990, but they never updated the orange and yellow Moroccan-inspired ’70s linoleum in the kitchen or the orange and avocado carpets in our bedrooms. Apart from a large bamboo-and-glass dining table that my dad surprised my mom with for their anniversary one year, much of the furniture in our house was second-hand — cast-offs from other family members when they updated their homes. Whenever a new-to-us piece of furniture came inside, the item that it replaced was given a new spot in the house: An entertainment stand became a table in the entryway; a display cabinet in the family room became a storage unit for wrapping paper in my closet.

The prized feature of our home was the 27 rose bushes that lined our front and back yards. My mom had grown more than half of them herself with clippings she collected from our neighbors and the gardeners at Our Lady of Guadalupe, where I attended grade school. My mother learned Spanish from the women who cared for my grandmother and practiced it at every opportunity: buying fruits and meats at the Northgate Supermarket, with the owner of King’s Taqueria where we stopped for carne asada tacos, with our Bolivian neighbors.

I learned other languages by watching my mom use the vocabulary she knew to initiate conversations and to use the conversation to acquire new words, new relationships to words, and to the people who helped her find them. I peppered the language in my head with the little Bahasa phrases that enter the English I use when my mom and I speak to each other. It is my first language and her third. Adoo — can you believe it? I’ll begin.

Relationships, I was taught, are more important than the environments that surround them. If I went over to a friend’s for dinner, my mom would send me with cuttings from her garden that she placed in water bottles wrapped in colorful tissue paper — nosegays from one mother to another. As I gave the nosegay to my friend’s mom, I questioned the utility of the reassigned furniture in my house. I wondered why our dishwasher was only ever used as storage for the plastic water bottles she collected to gift her roses and if I would ever meet another person whose house resembled mine.

***

In the Edwards parking lot, I pull my phone out to queue up directions back to my parents’ house. I have seven missed calls from my mom and a text message: I’m going to Super King to get spinach and bananas. Can you pick me up?

Super King is an international discount grocery store one dial-a-ride phone call away from my parents’ new house. When my dad is at work, my mom calls this chauffeur service for senior citizens to bring her to the market for a 50-cent fee. The size of a soccer field, Super King stocks foods from a variety of cultures, and my mom goes at least once a week to practice her Spanish and to stock up on Chinese eggplant, lacinato kale, sliced jackfruit, marinated chicken thighs, handmade flour tortillas, and anything else in season and on sale.

Inside, the air bites the back of my neck. I hadn’t dressed for the arctic temperature of warehouse food preservation. I start my search in the produce section, but I cannot find her sphere of black hair or her shopping cart, full of this week’s specials. I begin a lap around the store and find her asking the butcher to slice the beef thinner. Are you almost done? I ask. I’ve been driving for an hour.

Thirty minutes later, she’s assembling a jigsaw puzzle: each of her fifteen plastic bags belongs to a specific spot in the trunk. Double-bagged steak can cradle a carton of eggs, but an Italian eggplant? Never. An Italian eggplant, like a watermelon, is a corner piece so that its weight will only roll onto the edge of the trunk, which sits lower than the farther edges that abut the backseat of my Chevy Prizm. We are only going a few miles, I say. Assisting her would be futile. We measure time differently.

In the Super King parking lot, I’m pained by the love that governs her labor and assembly and adheres to a family food budget, and I say, Adoo, nothing is going to get ruined in the trunk! She’s protective of her little collection of perfect ingredients. She’ll use them to create the dishes she tells me are my favorite: pandan spicy eggplant, wine beef, and sautéed kale. But I’ve never craved those dishes. The need for them was another feeling entirely.

I’d only spent 10 minutes with Angie, Mary, Fabi, and Pham, and already I long to know them more deeply. I also know I must long with caution, that wanting time is different than creating it. I watch my mom shift her bag of onions for the third time and think, If I could just throw all of this in the trunk, drive home, and — open sesame — the potatoes and cantaloupe didn’t knock into your mint and rosemary, would I create a future of efficient grocery shopping or destroy it?

***

When I was 2 years old, two holes in my heart were repaired in my open-heart operation. In these surgeries doctors treat your bones as elastic bands, bending your ribs and sternum to reach the arteries they will mend. You are awake before and after your surgery, but it is difficult to remember exactly what happened; you are put on a bypass machine that pumps your heart for you, pushing oxygen to your brain in quantities that can cause permanent forgetting.

Sometimes I want to use a word but only see a deep enclosure when I close my eyes, and I wait there until the word reveals my past world.

The first time I envisioned the playroom in the hospital, I saw a large bear dressed as a clown, white bookshelves, and a wheelbarrow. I focused on the the bear for a few minutes, trying to see his face, but instead I saw my mom holding out a spoonful of steamed spinach that she scooped from the Tupperware she still uses today.

***

In the assembly room at Edwards, Sarah told me that the the pericardium heart sac — the tissue used in my heart valve — can be traced back to the group of cows it belonged to. The closest I’ve come to knowing mine is learning that my valve is made of tissue from two cows: one from California and another from Minnesota.

Pericardium is a membrane that keeps the heart safe — as the ancient physician and philosopher Galen called it, perikardion, around the heart. The membrane encloses the muscle and roots of the heart’s four valves, both in the human and the cow. Our own pericardium protects us from the shock of a sudden movement, such as tripping or falling. A viral infection or a heart attack could damage it. So can external violences.

The bovine tissue was considered material waste before the biotech industry found a use for it in the human body. Now each day, some workers in the slaughterhouse slip a cow’s heart out of its sac and spread it on a table. Here, they separate the membrane from fatty tissue and prepare it for cold ship to Irvine. When it arrives, the assemblers who are not sewing receive and wash it until the tissue is neither bovine or human but pieces patterned on the table for the next step in assembly.

In order to sell a medical supply, a farm must adhere to medical safety regulations: The cow must be carefully fed and exercised. A farmer must know its origins. A cow in natural conditions can live upwards of 15 years. For a valve, it is slaughtered at or before 24 months.

In a 2014 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Bard College, Yale University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science estimated that cattle use 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water than other livestock. Their collective secretions produce more methane than gas or oil production. Before the development of bovine valves, pericardium tissue was another waste in the process of harvesting beef. Now it is another form of income.

I try to make contact with the suppliers of my bovine tissue, but Sarah tells me they often prefer to keep quiet. I don’t persist. Instead, I watch a video that Sarah sends me. It is an Australian news segment on the use of tissue from cow hearts to treat heart conditions, in which an Australian cardiologist praises the technology inside me, saying, It was as if the sky had cleared.

Later in the video two slaughterhouse workers pull a cow’s heart out of its sac like a hospital birth. One holds the muscle’s weight, the other lifts it toward the ceiling like a chalice. They work expertly in a metal room sectioned off from the cow carcasses that hang in rows. Cool pink skin stretched over an animal’s rib cage, a sternum excavated, the organs beneath it mostly gone to waste.

***

My mom doesn’t know her biological parents. She’s never mentioned a curiosity about her origins, only that she was told that her biological mother died giving birth to her and her father grew sick shortly after. He brought her to her adoptive mother, asking that she raise my mom and teach her a trade. She knows she was born in 1949, in Medan, and that as a child she chose September 20th as her birthday. She chose the name Katherine for herself in the mid-’60s when the Indonesian government forbid Chinese Indonesians to keep their given names. Only her sisters and my cousins still call her Kim-Tju. I didn’t know why she could not easily ask questions about her birth parents like I did — Don’t you want to know? I pressed. Giving birth is a painful experience, she once told me, but raising a child causes a lifetime of pain.

Once, my mom told me that when she was 12 and had learned to sew dresses, she left the salon one afternoon to buy fabric for a new outfit she had designed herself. But when she came home, the Javanese nanny that lived with her family advised her to hide what she’d bought. It would enrage her mother. Her mother scolded her for not asking permission. She never described the color, the weight, or the print, as though giving it language would bring on the pain of being a child, or of being adopted. I cannot equate the pain of her childhood to anything I felt in mine. I cannot imagine spoon-feeding a woman who once told you that you had the face of a horse, but I watched my mom do this for my grandmother after she became paralyzed from a stroke in the winter of 1991 and came to live with us.

Unintentionally, my mom passed some of her pain onto me when she prohibited me from shaving my legs or wearing makeup until one day in my junior year of high school when I emerged from the shower with blood running down my shin, having shaved off two inches of my own skin with a rusty disposable Schick razor that I had been using in secret. After that, she helped me explore my personal style. If I wanted to replicate the studded dog collar I saw at Hot Topic, she would show me how to lightly dab the hot glue onto the black faux-leather ribbon I’d bought. For my junior prom, we rode two busses to the Brea Mall to look for a dress. She picked through the price tags on the sale racks and expressed her concerns about finding a supportive 36DD bra to go with the strapless, sweetheart dresses I was drawn to. We ended up walking through the mall’s parking lot to a TJ Maxx in the shopping center across the street where we found not only a prom dress but several pairs of wide-leg cargo jean shorts that I deemed “cool” and she deemed “reasonably priced.” When it was time to head back to the bus stop, I insisted that we walk around the mall rather than through it. It’s quicker to go through Nordstrom, she said.

No, I insisted, it’s faster if we go around it. She wrapped her arms around the large TJ Maxx bag. I’m sweating from this plastic. These clothes are heavy you know, she insisted.

Well then let me carry them, I said, reaching out to take the bag.

No! she barked, turning the bag away from me as though my discount clothing was a swaddled newborn she was guarding from an unfit mother. It’s too heavy for you.

We both knew I’d made us take the long route back to the bus stop. We both knew she insisted on carrying my new clothes because she was afraid that in the heat and with my heart condition something bad might happen.

How do you think this looks? I asked, insisting I was fine and that anyone who happened to see us walking together would think I didn’t care that my five-foot, 90-pound mother was balancing a shopping bag the size of her own body, while I, her able-bodied teenager, towered above her, ambling about completely unencumbered. Who cares what people think, she said. Anything bad could happen to your heart, and then what? You want that?

We both knew she insisted on carrying my new clothes because she was afraid that in the heat and with my heart condition something bad might happen.

I didn’t believe her side of our argument, but then I did not survive the mass killings of ethnic Chinese in the mid-’60s in Indonesia. Her own father was taken for a day and her mother paid for his safe return to their family. Her neighbor was also taken by the Indonesian military for questioning. He also came home, she told me, and the blood from the finger they cut off dripped on the road as he walked to the house.

I still can’t comprehend these stories, but since I visited Edwards and began learning about the different people who’d handled the materials in my heart valve, I return to them again and again. I would love to meet the person who slaughtered my cow and the person who prepared that pericardium tissue, but it seems impossible. I could be sad, or I could see their anonymity as a way to understand how my mom feels about her adoption, and her mother. She is content knowing the family who raised her and kept her alive.

***

Three months after my first visit to Edwards, Sarah invites me to attend their first Patient’s Day. I bring my mom with me because I want to show her where my heart valve was made. We are two of 50 guests — other patients and their caregivers, Edwards employees, and nonprofit partners. The day focuses on ways we can help new patients through advocacy work. I volunteer to assist the American Heart Association with a new support network. I become a Heart Valve Ambassador, a voice from the recovery room and beyond — a survivor — who can assure someone about to undergo open-heart surgery that they are not alone. I sign up because I want to tell these new patients, Right now, another person is making a device that may save your life. I want my mom to meet these women, but because the event is so large our meeting is a brief blur. In front of the vitrines that look into the manufacturing room, among a few other patients also meeting their sewers, Edwards employees and reporters, my mom and I shake hands with Mary, Fabi, and a woman I had not met before, Marta. We only have time to say thank you and hi again. Later, The Orange County Register will run a photo of the two of us waving to my sewers. When I look at the picture, the glass window between us feels thick.

Months later, I’m still thinking about my sewers. I wonder what brought them to the United States, what their families are like, if they really were seamstresses in their previous lives.

I call Sarah to ask if my mom and I can bring food to the women who assembled my heart valve and am surprised and delighted that she loves the idea. I call my mom and ask her if she would like to have lunch at Edwards with the women who made my valve. I would love to, she says happily. It’s really special, you know, to really know who made your heart valve, to see where they work, to meet them.

Can you make lempar ayam, and gado gado and selat pohpia? I ask her.

Adoo! she says. It’s too much work. You can just buy them and say we made them.

But if you make them and I watch, I’ll know how to make them, too, I explain, because I want the lunch to be an opportunity to learn skills she has not passed onto me. To her, domestic labor is right up there with carrying my shopping bags. I only know the tradition of making lempar ayam is an inheritance of the culture I was born into, unlike my heart defect. I want to know how to make this shredded chicken and coconut rice roll because what I know of my maternal lineage ends with my mother, and I believe that her culture, like tradition, can be adopted, like taste, to which one can adapt. Adoo, if that’s what you want, she sighs.

Sarah suggests we come to Edwards in late July after she’s checked the women’s vacation requests to be sure everyone would be on campus. She sends me pictures of a few conference rooms we might have lunch in. I send her the menu and the color scheme for the table setting that I have in mind. In our email exchanges this lunch becomes an event of the season.

***

The night before, I watch my mom shred cabbage and boil melody potatoes to make gado gado. I watch her grind another shallot and thumb of ginger in a mortar with a smooth, palm-size pestle. She pours the peanuts in once she’s made a liquid paste.

I want to know how to make this shredded chicken and coconut rice roll because what I know of my maternal lineage ends with my mother, and I believe that her culture, like tradition, can be adopted, like taste, to which one can adapt.

Around 1 a.m. her pot of water comes to a boil and she reveals another secret: If you can’t get to Chinatown, you can use spaghetti noodles. She flash-fries them with pork and celery using chopsticks to make a menagerie in her serving dish.

I print and bind her recipes into pamphlets to give to everyone tomorrow. When my mom finishes cooking, I open the pantry to find large containers to transport her noodles, lempar, gado gado, and selat pohpia, a Dutch Indonesian canapé of vegetables inside a deep-fried, cup-shaped cracker. Stacks of McDonalds cups and Cool Whip and Knudson cottage cheese tubs fall all over the floor. Why do you keep these when we can afford Gladware, I scream. I’m in her kitchen, not a catalog. I know the reasons, and that I can’t ask her to tell me why every time I open a cabinet.

To save and give everything to your children. To not have ownership over a thing. To discover coupons. To be a registered alien. To be told go back to your country. To ride public transportation. To lose the doll’s clothes you sewed in a flood in your hometown. To never have seen your birth certificate. To know someone else in your family has. To have worked in your family business. To be afraid to interview. To know how you arrived and to be thankful you did not die in your life’s process. I know this like I know we’ve been up for too long, it’s past my bedtime, and I’m upset because I can’t undo my choice to remain awake.

My mom nestles her dishes into a cardboard box while I roll two yards of kelly-green felt across our living room floor and cut out a leaflike pattern to shape a table runner. Tomorrow, we’ll lay the food on top of this runner and serve it on designer paper plates.

Mom, I say, as I twist my left thumb around the pair of right-handed scissors I’m using, tomorrow, it will be helpful if you can make everyone feel comfortable.

Yeah, OK, she says, shifting the dishes around the sheets of folded paper towels she’s tucking into the corners of the box so they fit perfectly. I know, she assures me.

Sarah meets us in the parking lot. She guides us to a sunlit conference room where three square coffee tables have been pushed together around an L-shaped sofa to create a dining room. I unpack my runner and begin setting the table while my mom arranges the layers of gado gado on a glass plate. The women arrive in scrubs, and I’m glad I’d thought to bring kimonos — welcome gifts — to help them feel as pretty as the table we’d set for them. Angie hands me a large double-stem white orchid plant and I place it on the empty side table between the two couches. Pham tells us she can’t stay, so my mom quickly makes a plate of food for her while I help her choose a kimono.

The kimonos, the kelly-green table runner, the gold chargers, the food, the flowers — there’s much to take in, to admire, to start conversation. There’s another woman I did not meet on my first visit to Edwards last year. She introduces herself as Rita, a supervisor on my heart valve team. I’m struck by her radiant olive complexion and how close in age we appear to be. As we settle in on the sofa, I overhear Angie telling my mom that she memorizes her friends’ phone numbers. If you write them in your phone, and you lose your phone, you can’t find anybody, she says.

I’ve heard this before. Do not tell family secrets to anybody, my mom demands. I hate her complacent, immigrant wisdom, but I listen to Angie to see her reasoning.

Angie is an Amerasian. A Vietnamese, biracial American. She tells us that she came to California with her husband and son who drive freight trucks across America.

Fabi asks everyone, If you could go back to one minute in your twenties, what would it be?

My life was very terrible, Angie begins. I am an orphan. I’m so lucky America brings me here. When I come here, I try to work. I try to learn. She tells us that when she first arrived she rode in a taxi. On the freeway it got a flat tire. It sounded like a bomb, she shares. She’s laughing as she thinks back to her reaction. I don’t speak English, she explains. I screamed: I don’t want to die! The taxi driver said calm down. My language he doesn’t understand. He said calm down and I’m so scared.

Rita takes us to an earlier time in her life. At fourteen years old we came to America from Baghdad. We left Iraq in 1993 so I saw the Gulf War, survived the whole thing. When we came here we lived two minutes from Disneyland, and on my first night here I heard the fireworks and and thought we were being attacked again. I ran to my room, underneath my bed, and thought oh my god the Americans came back!

As she shares her story, the music from the Disneyland Electrical Parade plays in my head, and I recall the crowd gathering for the show and how easy it is, when you are young, to feel lost on Main Street when it is dark, and how those fireworks, when you are small and alone are loud, bright, and last an eternity.

Until this day, the fireworks go on every night and everything comes back, Rita continues. You know, Disneyland is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, but I really hate Disneyland.

Mary shares that she is a boat person. In 1980 she left Vietnam with her husband and four children. On a small boat with 139 people. She stopped in Indonesia for a month, then set out for Florida. She and her husband each held two babies on our lap. When I arrived, I couldn’t stand, she says. She came to Edwards in 2001. Everyday I go to work and then I cook and take care of the children, she continues. I want to go to school, but I don’t have time. Two of her children are at UC Irvine and one is at Pomona.

As we continue chatting, Mary grows quiet. I learned English from my children, she says to my mom.

Me too, my mom tells her. Thank you for saving her life, she adds.

We are eating off of compostable Wasara plates designed in Tokyo, placed atop gold craft-paper chargers. Here we are strangers sitting close to one another, drawing ourselves closer. Past their handiwork inside me, and our laughter around us, is a heart’s life expanded that could — at any moment — begin to deteriorate.

When I first came here, Angie tells us, I hate this job. I felt, I can’t do it. Sewing is hard. She tells us that she watched a video about an Edwards patient. Produced by Edwards, such a video would contain a patient’s journey through heart valve disease and would include a personal message of gratitude to employees from patients and sometimes their family members. When I looked at the video, Angie tells us, I looked at the patient and I felt like I must do this job.

Fabi tells me, When I first started to do the visual audit of the valves, to verify that the stitch is in the right place, that the tissue is in good condition, I felt dizzy. I said please God, give me patience — but the inspector who taught me to do the visual audit said Fabi, just take your time.

Nobody, I think, is born with the patience to sew pericardium tissue to a metal frame. I look over at Mary. She is telling my mom, We’re almost the same age. I’m about to be 70! I sew the very small valves now, the ones the size of your little finger. I sew them very slowly.

Rita says, I know that there is a lot of violence going on around the world, that people are hurting and killing each other. We’re in a crisis right now. It might not hit home directly, but it’s important to live your life daily and let the rest just go with the flow.

I think of them holding my heart valve under a microscope, turning it around and around to look for mistakes, for reasons to start over.

For years I have slowly been letting go of the belief that there is a being who makes people hate based on skin color and belief. That violence is unstoppable, or that to resist violence is to be enlightened. That there is a ranking system to kindness.

Toward the end of our lunch, Angie and Fabi begin sharing pictures of their daughters. Fabi’s daughter has just dyed her hair fire-engine red. Her bangs sweep across her left eye. She smiles, confident, in control of her own presence. She loves to play with colors, Fabi tells us, seemingly unenthused.

I think of them holding my heart valve under a microscope, turning it around and around to look for mistakes, for reasons to start over.

I’ve worn my hair down today, so I lift it up and spin around — to my mom’s surprise — to show them my newly shaved undercut. My mom’s not a fan of this either, I tell them. The room swells with more laughter. I look over at my mom and see that she’s placed her hand on Mary’s back. They appear to be moving between the group conversation and their own intimate one, and my heart swells as I look at them, then at the food on the table, at Fabi, Rita, and Angie. Here is the facet of Orange County that I’d hoped to finally see. Here, around this table, among my mom’s foods, I watched my mom care for Mary with the same attention I felt she smothers me with. There was a motherliness to her actions, but I also saw her shaping community with these women, and that I was building myself into this community, too.

Later that afternoon, in the car, my mom tells me she’d barely eaten anything. I hadn’t either. We were too busy listening to everyone’s stories. I have some steak at home, she says. The thought of it and the thought of the lunch we’d just enjoyed are enough to sustain us for the drive home. The two of us are at ease as we slow into rush hour traffic and everyone on the freeway comes to a brief standstill.

***

Jen Hyde is the author of Hua Shi Hua,华诗画 [Drawings & Poems from China], Ahsahta 2017. She is currently at work on Murmur, a 2016 finalist for the Creative Capital Grant in Literature.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Talking to Big Baby

Getty / Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Longreads

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,966 words)

 

Amazingly, the fall weather arrives on the first day of September this year. It is not yet Labor Day, but it’s chilly on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The angle of the light has changed; last week it was still the light of late August: warm and glowing. Now it is a sharper ray, a crisper beam that strikes the gum-stained pavement that rolls beneath my daughter Lydia’s scooter.

We are on the way to the playground, but I have to get a jacket hemmed, so we stop at the dry cleaner, where my daughter dances and chats with herself in the mirror, and the tailor, haloed in perfume, remarks on how cheerful she is.

Sometimes she is,” I say, deploying the weary tone parents use to field remarks about their good fortune — the one that straddles pride and modesty and grace while assuring people that in raising our children we do endure a measure of strife.

There is a jar of Tootsie Rolls on the counter. Lydia asks for one, but it’s much too early in the day for candy. We bargain, and I tell her she can have one “later.” She pockets her treasure and we exit the cleaners.

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Eating to America

Naz Riahi | Longreads | November 2018 | 20 minutes (5,095 words)

The last meal I ate in Iran was a stew of cow tongue on white rice, its grains elongated by steam and enclosed in a perfect crispy tadig (crust), stained golden with saffron.

“What are you cooking?” I asked Shee Shee, my mom.

“Beef stew,” she lied, knowing I hated tongue.

It was May 19, 1990. The Iran-Iraq War had ended less than two years before, but the remnants of war — lack of provisions, jarred nerves from years of bombings — remained. Khomeini had died less than a year before. We’d thought his death would usher in a freer era, but not much had changed. I was 9 years old and we were at my aunt’s two-bedroom apartment in Tehran. My maternal grandparents were there, as well as my uncle, his wife and my four younger cousins. They’d all come for one last meal together, to say goodbye and to see me and Shee Shee off to our new life.

A few days before, we’d left my childhood home in Karaj (a suburb of Tehran) for the last time. I’d packed a couple of my favorite toys — a Barbie, a Cabbage Patch Kid — but had to leave most everything else behind — Mini Mouse, books, a dollhouse, my beloved Disney cartoons. Most of my toys and clothes, along with Shee Shee’s things, had been sold to friends and neighbors. What was left, my aunt promised to safeguard for me. Shee Shee had packed her favorite hair rollers — which 30 years later she still travels with — all of our photos, and Baba’s uniform, two pairs of his pajamas, his dog tag, his wings and his papers.

That afternoon, as our car pulled away from the only home I’d ever known, I turned around and waved goodbye. Pushing the lump of tears back down my throat, I made a silent promise to the house that I would come back as soon as I could and live there again.

Six months earlier, Baba, an esteemed navy captain and for nine months a political prisoner, had been executed. Shee Shee would later say we moved to America because she didn’t want me to grow up in the shadow of that tragedy, of my father’s death. But at the moment it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like if we didn’t leave, we wouldn’t survive. She picked the U.S. because we already had family here and she picked May 19 for our departure, because it’s my older brother, Shabab’s birthday (he, too, was living in the States).

On that last night, at my aunt’s house, the mood was somber. Our escape was not the beginning of an adventure, but an abandoning of everything known, everyone loved. When the stew was nearly done, its aroma moved from the kitchen through the living room and into the master bedroom, where I was lying on the bed, listening to a Googoosh tape. Cow tongue smells like rot when it’s cooked. I’d been duped.

“Dinner’s ready,” Shee Shee called. I walked out of the room to join everyone I’d been avoiding for fear that I would cry in front of them, or worse, that they would cry in front of me.

Shee Shee carried the rice, already flipped over on the platter, out to meet the stew on the dining room table. Cooking the perfect Iranian rice takes practice, but making the perfect tadig is a combination of luck and instincts — one never knows if the crust will hold, if it will be thick and crispy or if it will burn or fall apart.

After dinner my uncle drove us to the airport. Our suitcases smelled of pistachios, salted and soaked in lime juice, and saffron — the best saffron in the world is Iranian — which we’d taken as gifts and to stock our new kitchen. As the airplane took off, I looked down at the lights of Tehran, wondering if my house was somewhere down below looking up at the sky for us.

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Beyond “Rumble”: Talking with John O’Connor About the Other Link Wray

David Warner Ellis/Redferns

Most stories about guitarist Link Wray focus on his 1958 radio hit “Rumble,” a vaguely menacing, instrumental rock song that had no predecessor. They talk about how he punctured his amp with a pencil to get a grittier sound, maybe about the way his slick-hair, rockabilly, leather jacket look predated Elvis’. For the Oxford American‘s new music issue, journalist John O’Connor focuses on Wray’s lesser known masterpieces: the three albums fans call the shack sessions.

Despite the influence Link Wray’s instrumentals had on rock and roll on both sides of the Atlantic, from The Who to Jimmy Page, nothing brought Link much financial security or relief from the grueling life of touring tiny holes-in-the-walls. To retool his career and break free from the instrumental rock genre where he made his name, Link and his brothers started jamming in the early 1970s in the family’s rural chicken shack. The sessions mixed blues, folk, gospel, and country, featured singing, and produced rootsy music that sound like no other in Wray’s vast catalogue. Yet somehow, few people have written about this milestone in his creative life. O’Connor’s story “Mystic Chords” stands alone in the Link Wray literary canon. O’Connor talked with me about Link, journalism, and writing this epic story.

If I read your story correctly, you didn’t know much about Link Wray before researching this article. How did you find him and the story of his shack albums?

You read it correctly. My friend Dacus put the song “La De Da” from Link Wray on a mixtape a few years ago (“mixtape” isn’t quite right, but you know what I mean, a Dropbox thing) and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I’d always thought of myself as educated about obscure ’70s rock or Americana or whatever you want to call it. I’ve got a hard-and-fast rule in record shops about buying LPs from ’71, 72, 73 ─ precisely the Shack era ─ if the price is right, and especially if there’s a funny-looking dude on the cover. So I was embarrassed that I’d never even heard of Link. And puzzled. I mean, how was it possible that I made it into my 40s without ever hearing Link Wray and the other Shack records? What else had I missed? All this stuff came up online about him having invented the power-chord, and how the rock gods all worshipped him: Townshend and Page, Dylan and Young. My embarrassment deepened, as did a curiosity about Link. That he was Native American added a layer of intrigue, because at that point, besides Robbie Robertson of The Band and Buffy Sainte-Marie, I probably couldn’t have named a single Native American musician, I’m ashamed to say. Actually, I could’ve named some: Karen Dalton, Jesse Ed Davis, Jimmy Carl Black, who played with Zappa. But I just didn’t know they were Native American, which is weird. This was all very maddening to me. Then, trying to find out more about Link got to be pretty dispiriting pretty quick. So much of what was written about him seemed cursory, half-baked, or worse. I had two early conversations with folks ─ Greg Laxton of the now defunct website linkwray.com, and Sherry Wray, Link’s neice ─ that convinced me basically everything I thought I knew about Link was wrong. Greg put me in touch with the producer Steve Verroca, who nobody had heard from in years. The story was writing itself.

Wow, that’s a strong start. When writers have questions that they’re compelled to answer, things get interesting, and the stories that result can have more urgency than ones that arise solely from a desire to tell a story. So when you started searching for answers, was there just a dearth of information about Link? Or a lack of humanizing detail?

There were a couple of starting points, like Jimmy McDonough’s article, which came out not long after Link’s death. He knew Link and seems to have talked to everyone else who knew him. It’s a fun read. But it’s also a tribute, as McDonough admits, a piece of hero worship, and therefore limited. And it came out twelve years ago. There wasn’t much else. Link didn’t give many interviews. Not by choice. He just wasn’t asked. This partly explains why so many of the stories about him are recycled and/or patently false. When he died, some obits referred to him as “Frederick Lincoln Wray.” At no point in his life was he named Frederick. It was also said that he had one son, when he had four. Anyway, that stuff’s easy to check. What’s nearly impossible to dissect is all the family conflict and bad feeling that endure over Link’s publishing rights, and the competing narratives, some of them legal in nature, about Link and his legacy. It’s still very raw for these folks.

Producer Steve Verocca is a key player in this story. Was he surprised you found him? And what happened when you started talking to him?

Greg Laxton got me in the door with Steve. I think he was skeptical. But Link’s music is also Steve’s legacy, in a way, and he was ready to talk. He had a pretty successful and multi-tentacled career, but as I say in the piece, Link sort of presides over it all. After we talked a couple of times, Steve hinted that he had some Shack-era stuff he was willing to share with me, but he wanted me to come to Virginia to see for myself. He didn’t say what it was, only that my mind would be blown. I thought maybe he had some outtakes or something. He surprised me there. But this speaks to your question above, too. My two principle sources were Steve and Sherry Wray. They disagree on essentially every point. Not just about Link. They’d disagree about what time of day it is. By the time I started talking to Steve, I’d already spent a lot of time on the phone with Sherry. So what happened when I started talking to him was my head started really spinning.

As a journalist, how do you build trust with a skeptical source like Steve Verocca? 

By talking to them, being patient, listening. People, generally, want to talk, even to complete strangers about incredibly personal stuff. They want their versions out there. You just have to be patient. Most people will go their entire lives without anyone ever asking them what they think about something. Nobody’s ever asked them for their opinion about anything, ever, and then suddenly you come along.

So Steve Verocca and Sherry Wray’s accounts conflict on nearly every point. As a journalist, how do you negotiate that sort of conflict between sources, especialy when they’re your two primary sources?

Checking with other people as best you can. I forget what the journalism rule is, something like cross-checking with two or more sources, or trying to. I offer a caveat in the piece along the lines of, I’m just trying to find a plausible centerline here. You know, looking for the path of least resistance. I’m on the outside looking in. Link’s dead. His brothers are long dead. Almost everyone who knew him or played at the Shack is dead. So I’m kind of at the mercy of secondhand stories. Maybe a good way to think about it is like a conversation between two people who’re both monologists and waiting for the other person to shut-up so they can resume talking and finish what they were saying. You’re a moderator, but one who’s also speaking to a dozen other people who’re weighing-in about what’s being said.

Link fans will salivate to hear that a whole fourth shack album exists and remains unreleased. In your piece, Verocca says he’d like to release this “When the time’s right.” Do you know if he has anything in the works? Are you going to help get that music out there? Do I sound like a crazy fan here? It’s just, when a person reaches an advanced age, biology has sort of made the time right.

I hope he releases it, but I don’t think he plans to do it anytime soon. A mutual friend reminded me the other day that Steve’s an old school record biz cat. Releasing stuff digitally just doesn’t register. He wants a physical product. And the chances of that are probably pretty slim, unfortunately. But you never know. Steve loves this record. It’s his favorite Shack record. He’s very proud of it. So it follows that he’d want people to hear it.

You admit you’re not a fan of “Rumble.” Now that you know so much more about Link and his music, and have listened to about everything he recorded, what do you think of his earlier, better known rock instrumentals?

I mean, I know what this stuff must’ve meant at the time, given the context. A few years before, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” was No. 1 on the Billboard charts, a runaway smash hit! So, obviously an improvement. Which is the understatement of understatements. But it’d require some time-travel on my part to really appreciate “Raw-Hide” and “Jack the Ripper” and the rest.

You Can’t Escape Everything in the Ivory Tower

Photo by J.B. Hill via Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)

At Tin House, Jaclyn Gilbert explores the emotional legacy her father heaped on her, and how she coped as so many of us do: by turning the pain inward, and writing it on her own body. For her father, Jaclyn is an extension of his failed marriage and a debt to be managed rather than a daughter to be loved — something which she long understood instinctively, and her father found ways to drive home explicitly.

An hour later, when I opened the attachment, I found a copy of my parents’ original divorce agreement from the nineties.  I was eighteen by then, of legal age to change the terms my mother had negotiated when I was six.  If I signed, he would no longer have to contribute toward my or my sister’s college tuitions.

The pain and shock I felt in that moment is still hard to explain.  It wasn’t as simple as the question of money, of refinancing my education.  If it were, I would have signed in a heartbeat.

It was the fact of what I represented to him.  Debt, the object of a war he’d lost to my mother and was still searching to recover through me, his eldest daughter.  It was his plotting over the years—as if every time he’d asked me to ignore his absences during visits, his neglect when he wasted afternoons calling his bookies, his insults—he’d been preparing me for this larger acquiescence.  And yet to voice my anger would be to become my mother incarnate, a barrier to his complete financial freedom.  Signing this document not only meant choosing his story over my mother’s, but it meant doing so at my own expense, denying my autonomy.  The conditionality of his love blurred the document on my computer screen. My body seemed to be spinning into tiny pieces, no longer centered, no longer believing in myself as someone individual, separate, or whole.

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The Making of Nirvana’s Most Vulnerable Album

Kevin Estrada/MediaPunch/IPX

In the 25 years since Nirvana last performed, we’ve seen a slew of posthumous releases and documentaries. One of the most enduring monuments to the band’s brilliance is their 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. Yes, they played a rare acoustic set. They played Leadbelly and David Bowie covers, and were joined by the Meat Pupppets. But the show contained an affecting vulnerability that still cuts right through people like me, who are old enough to have watched the show when it first aired. Kurt laughed. He talked with the crowd. The audience wasn’t moshing or jumping around. Fans were enchanted, especially when Kurt spoke with them one-on-one after the show. Unplugged became one of the band’s best selling albums. For The Ringer, Alan Siegal talks with the musicians, producers, and fans who made this historic night happen.

Craig Marks (editor, Spin): When he did “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” it wasn’t one of those things where a month later, or a week later, or a year later, you’re like, “That was great,” even though you didn’t really know it at the time. You knew the dead second that it was happening that you were witnessing something phenomenal. You didn’t really even know he had it in him. It was that good.

Bobcat Goldthwait (comedian-filmmaker): When they did that song, I remember the hair standing up on my arm.

Beth McCarthy-Miller (director, MTV Unplugged): That song told a thousand tales. It felt like he was singing all the pain that he had through that song. It was crazy.

Charles R. Cross (journalist-Cobain biographer): You get the sense that he’s just gonna fall apart, it’s like a car without its wheels, and yet, in the end, he plows through it.

Gillian Gaar (journalist): The thing he did, and he did it in a number of Nirvana songs, you’ll notice, [is] where he’ll be singing full bore, going all out, but then in the final verse he’ll go up an octave. And then really ratchet the energy up.

Scott Litt (producer, MTV Unplugged in New York): It fucking killed me—particularly where he paused before the end and gasped.

Amy Finnerty (Vice president of music and talent, MTV): The breath in between the breath. He made time stop. Time just stopped.

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Insomnia: To Pursue Sleep So Hard You Become Invigorated By the Chase

Telling time at night using a nocturnal, 1539. Hulton Archive / Getty

Marina Benjamin | an excerpt adapted from Insomnia | Catapult | November 2018
| 8 minutes (2,134 words)

Sometimes the rattle of a clapper sounds over your bed. Or a ghostly draft lifts the hairs on the back of your neck, cooling your skin; or there’s an upstroke, feather light, along the inside of your forearm. A sudden lurch, maybe just a blink, then a sense of falling upward and it is there. So are you.

If we insist on defining something in terms of what it annuls then how can we grasp the essence of what is lost when it shows itself? And how can we tell if there is anything to be gained by its presence? This is the trouble with insomnia.

When I am up at night the world takes on a different hue. It is quieter and closer and there are textures of the dark I have begun paying attention to. I register the thickening, sense-dulling darkness that hangs velvety as a pall over deep night, and the green-black tincture you get when moisture charges the atmosphere with static. Then there is the gently shifting penumbra that heralds dawn and feels less like the suggestion of light than a fuzziness around the edges of your perception, as if an optician had clamped a diffusing lens over your eyes then quizzed you about the blurred shapes that dance at the peripheries of your vision. In sleeplessness I have come to understand that there is a taxonomy of darkness to uncover, and with it, a nocturnal literacy we can acquire. Read more…

The House on Mayo Road

Dougal Waters / Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Dur e Aziz Amna | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,986 words)

The spring I turned 12, I moved to an all-girls school, and my family moved from a tiny two-bedroom in the outskirts of Pindi to a huge house in the heart of the city, 30 minutes from Pakistan’s capital. I remember walking into the vast emptiness of the new house, my shoes leaving imprints on the dusty floor. It was a January afternoon in 2004, and the sun came in through windows we would later find to be full of cracks. The garden sprouted weeds. My two brothers and I ran upstairs, knowing our parents would take the downstairs bedroom by the front door. There were two rooms on the second floor, both with their own bathroom. I told my mother, “Ammi, I’m the eldest, I want the bigger one.” She glared at me and said, “We’ll see.”

As we moved in over the next few months, I understood why Ammi had been in a foul mood. For me and my brothers, the house meant lots of space. It sat a stone’s throw away from GT Road, the historic highway that once ran from Kabul to Chittagong. It had a garden in the front and a yard in the back, large enough for us to set up a badminton net. For Ammi, the move brought months of scrubbing, washing, organizing. “Don’t think they ever cleaned this place, the old bastards,” she said under her breath as she threw a pail of water onto the grimy marble floor, the air alive with the smell of wet dust.

Built in the 1960s and given to senior employees in Pakistan’s civil service, the house was meant for officers who would hire an entourage of help to sweep the cavernous rooms, take cobwebs off the high ceilings, clean the furry grit that collected on the fans, and water the wild jasmine that bloomed every March, turning the living room fragrant. The lady of the house, the begum, often stayed at home to supervise and entertain. My mother had gotten her first teaching job months after I was born, charming the nearby school principal by telling him that Anna Karenina was her favorite book. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” she told me years later. “I never finished the book, but that was its first line.” I turned the sentence over in my head, a bit miffed by Tolstoy. I felt like we were happy in our own way.

In the years to come, Ammi continued teaching English at a school nearby. She would come home later than us most days, then take a nap during which we tiptoed around the house, knowing that even the slightest sound might disturb her. Once, when we went to wake her up, she made us lie down next to her and asked, “Do you wish you had one of those mothers who stayed at home all day and took care of you?” We gave emphatic nos, because we thought Ammi was quite all right.

Soon after we’d moved in, the house splintered into two worlds. There was the world downstairs: that of morning parathas, Quran lessons, and structured TV hours (one hour a day, from 8 to 9 p.m.). Here, we came dressed in our ironed school uniforms: a maroon tunic for me, white shirts and maroon ties for my brothers. Here, we acted like the good kids our parents knew us to be. After guests left from dinner parties, my parents sometimes said, “Did you see their kids? So ill-mannered.” We, on the other hand, sat in a tight three-headed row in the drawing room, speaking when spoken to, taking no more than two kebabs even when offered.

At 9, we were sent to bed, the staircase a portal to the other world. Despite my initial desire to bag rooms, we had all taken to sleeping in the bedroom my brothers shared, its walls a freshly painted blue. My room was sea green, my favorite color, but we were conscientious kids, and my parents said it was wasteful to keep two fans going. For several hours each night, we sprawled around on the bed, sometimes talking but often not. The room always had dozens of library books lying around. In a childhood shaped by discipline, books were one thing we were allowed to be obsessive and unruly about. The librarian at my mother’s school always let us check out 50 books at a time. “Jamila’s kids, such readers,” she’d marvel to her colleagues.
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This Month in Books: ‘When Will I Be a Winner?’ or, ‘Mr. President, I Have a Headache’

A bunch of men. Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

“We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again.’ You’re gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We’re gonna keep winning.’”

—Donald Trump


“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

—George Eliot


Dear Reader,

In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s short story “The Hospital Where,” the narrator, when he is young and living in poverty, sells his soul to the Twelve-tongued God in exchange for literary achievement. But years later, he still doesn’t know what winning feels like, and wonders when it will happen to him:

I wanted to ask, When will I be a winner? And though the thought never reached my throat, the Twelve-tongued God turned to me just before disappearing through the double doors, and said, “When you win something.”

His triumph, it turns out — over life, death, other writers in a short story contest, whatever — is tautological. That is, it is not assured until his has written it down. Writing become a fantastical act, reflecting back on real life, healing wounds, curing the sick and floating the… well, also floating the sick. (Honestly, you just have to read it….)

History, the saying goes, is written by the victors. Or, more to the point, writing a battle is an easy way to win it. Howard Hughes, the playboy, director and billionaire, paid gossip columnists to spin or kill stories about him, as billionaire playboys are wont to do. Karina Longworth, author of a new book on the women of Hollywood’s Golden Age, tells Rae Nudson that women had to watch powerlessly as even their attempts to tell the truth were used against them:

If you don’t have a lot of power, then you probably don’t have access to getting the gossip columnists to spin things the way you want them to. And so your version of the story doesn’t get told, or the story that you don’t want told gets told… And I mean you see Faith Domergue is an example — where you see her picking up the phone and calling these gossip columnists and being like, “That thing you’ve heard about Howard being involved with Lana Turner is not correct.” And the gossip columnists who were being paid off by Howard Hughes will report this, but in this completely mocking way where it’s like, “poor little Faith.”

Longworth scoured Hollywood’s archives for the truth behind the “history,” discovering what seems almost like a demon at work in the history books:

There’s one man who’s pulling a lot of these strings, and he starts pulling strings in 1925, and then he just pulls more and more and more strings over time.

Which is not to say I’m promoting some sort of a “great man” theory of messing with the truth — for instance, sometimes it can be a bunch of men! As historian Colin G. Calloway writes in The Indian World of George Washington,

Historians of the early Republic… often treat Indian affairs as tangential or even irrelevant. In fact, federal officials devoted much time, attention, and ink to conducting diplomatic relations with Indian politicians…

Probably more books have been written about Washington than about any other American, but few of them pay much attention to Indians, let alone consider the role they played in his life. Certainly none of Washington’s biographers have shown any particular interest or expertise in Indian history…

Washington’s life, like the lives of so many of his contemporaries, was inextricably linked to Native America, a reality we have forgotten as our historical hindsight has separated Indians and early Americans so sharply, and prematurely, into winners and losers.

Or, as Karina Longworth put it: “I think that certainly these are tools that the powerful can use against the powerless.”


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Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All is a book about people who hold just such a power, though they seem almost oblivious to it. Reviewer Will Meyer tells us the book’s origin story: in the heart of the Disneyfied world of Ted Talks, “thought leaders” and philanthropy as self-help for rich people — that is, at the Aspen Institute “ideas conference” — Giridiharadas stood in front of all those “philanthropists” and gave a talk that “took aim at what he dubbed the ‘Aspen Consensus,’ an ideological paradigm in which elites ‘talk a lot about giving more’ and not ‘about taking less.’” Through storytelling and live-action philanthropist-role-playing, the wealthy elite have built “a culture of privatized change-making, where un-elected elites…. try to tinker with problems they likely had a hand in causing.” And yet, even as they pat each other on the back for ‘doing good,’ “there is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history… But it is also, by the cold logic of the numbers, among the more predatory in history.” In his review, Meyer points out that if the rich really want to ‘do good,’ they should become class traitors FDR, and raise their own taxes, a history which Giridharadas’ subjects seem completely unaware of and which even Giridharadas himself seems shy of bringing to their attention — he clearly thinks it will not convince them, even though, truthfully, it is the only thing for them to do.

Class problems need to be written before they can be solved, is sort of the idea. When it comes to bookstores unionizing for better pay and working conditions, you’d think booksellers, at the very least, wouldn’t have trouble getting their side of the story written down — and their battles won — given their extreme adjacence to the literary world. But not so, Rebecca McCarthy discovers during her investigation of bookstore unionizations, because “embarrassingly absent from conversations surrounding bookstore labor have been the voices of authors” and publishers. Telling the history of a flurry of bookstore unionizations in the ‘90s and early 2000s, she writes:

“Despite a huge community of poets and writers in the Twin Cities, the struggle of booksellers and bookstore workers at one of the largest bookstores in town seemed to be off the radar of 99% of the local writers,” Mark Nowak wrote for the Poetry Foundation, years later. “I was even the chair of the Political Issues Committee of the National Writers Union local at the time and the most I could muster from them was a resolution of support (which I had to write myself) — not a single NWU member would show up at the Borders pickets, either.”….

“The relationship of the literary community and the working class is a pretty problematic one in general I think,” Nowak told me over the phone. “So it really wasn’t surprising, but it was disheartening…. we had pictured forming some kind of umbrella organization for bookstore workers who were trying to organize and we wanted to produce a book that was a history of those organizing drives, but unfortunately we never found a publisher for it.”

Film critic W. Scott Poole, in his book about World War I and the origins of the horror genre, also has something to say about writers and reality and winning — although there weren’t really any winners in World War I, just a generation preoccupied with the lifeless, unmourned bodies of their friends. He describes at length the post-WWI movie Waxworks, which is about a carnival, “a nightmare dimension in which a young poet in this age of disillusioned poets takes a job from a showman.” Poole explains that this writer, too, is able to write things to life, but instead of a misguided effort to cure the sick, he just falls right in to one of capitalism’s most workaday pointless activities: spending too much time and energy on enacting his boss’s fantasies:

The poet will work in service of the dark carnival, writing narratives for each of the empty-eyed figures in the showman’s wax museum. In the cavernous tent the waxworks begin to move and act out the dreamlike tales of horror the poet imagines. These dark imaginings revolve around tyrants inflicting torture…

Which reminds me of what Sarah Perry said during a discussion with Bridey Heing about her new novel Melmoth:

So many of the great atrocities in the world are carried out by perfectly ordinary people who think of themselves as being good people, but who sign the paperwork or don’t speak up when they should speak up.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Karina Longworth on the Women Caught in Howard Hughes’ Hollywood Web of Gossip

Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in "Stage Door" (1937), Getty / Howard Hughes, Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rae Nudson | Longreads | November 2018 | 13 minutes (3,545 words)

 

Listening to Karina Longworth’s conspiratorial drawl on her podcast “You Must Remember This” feels like you’re about to hear some really great gossip at a party. It’s my favorite podcast, partly because I love stories about old Hollywood, which she studiously researches and shares, featuring legendary figures like Clara Bow, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. But mostly I love it because of the way Longworth critically views each of her sources and dissects old studio narratives to discover the story closest to the truth.

Her new book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood, takes that sharp critical thinking and applies it to pilot turned filmmaker turned hermit Howard Hughes and the women he groomed and abused during his lifetime. Step by step, Longworth illustrates how Hughes created and maintained his millionaire playboy image, often at the expense of the careers and well-being of the long line of women he used to prop up his lifestyle. Hughes’ actions are sometimes so horrifying it sounds like an urban legend, told to would-be starlets to warn them of the horrors of men and Hollywood.

Hughes basically held women hostage, stealing years of their lives and careers by keeping would-be actresses off the screen and in his debt. He kept a staff of people to spy on and manipulate young women, like Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, and countless others. He held meetings with censors where he calculated just how much of Jane Russell’s breasts he’d be able to show on screen in the film The Outlaw. One woman, a 19-year-old named Rene Rosseau, attempted suicide a few months after arriving in Hollywood, saying that Hughes keeping her from working was partly to blame. She survived, but her career didn’t. Read more…