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People take a selfie in the Montrose neighborhood on August 25, 2018, in Houston, Texas. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

Bryan Washington | A short story from the collection Lot | Riverhead Books | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,120 words)

 
1.

It started how you’d think, with this whiteboy throwing up in an alley. I’d pulled a job at a taqueria dumping pig guts out back. The cooks gave me grunt work, the way they do when you’re starting out, like when my father had Javi and me pinching the shells off shrimp back in the restaurant as kids. It didn’t matter that I’d been fixing mole in Ma’s kitchen for years; I was short on money.

My managers looked like gauchos. Porno mustaches, bloated frames. They read my name and they saw my face and they pointed to the dishes. One of them told me I looked like a pinche negrito, y probablemente ni siquiera hablaba español, and I wanted to snatch his ears off but then I’d be out of a check.

So I should’ve left the whiteboy outside alone. I had enough on my plate.

But I stayed. Watched him heave. When he finished I came back with a glass of water.

He took me home. Dude had these little hairs climbing his belly. His eyes got wide at how furry my legs are. When we finished he gulped at the air in the room, he asked for my name as we were sliding down the futon, and when he couldn’t pronounce it the whiteboy gave me a new one. Read more…

Our Words Will Save Us and Set Us Free

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Jackson Bliss | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,149 words)

1.

In 2002, when I was living in Portland, Oregon, I got a call from a friend of a friend who worked for an immigration lawyer. One of her colleagues needed a French interpreter in a pinch. Could I help out? I met with the asylum lawyer and a refugee who I’ll call Yacoub to go over a few things in his family history and adapt to each other’s accents. Yacoub and I were listening to words we already knew, but couldn’t always recognize coming out of each other’s mouths. He had a Mauritanian accent and like most West Africans, he rolled his R’s. According to most French speakers, I had a Belgian or Swiss accent. As we spoke, we became victims of dialect, urgency, and defamiliarization, but we pushed on with our flawed cultural exchange because his life depended on it.

On the day of Yacoub’s asylum interview, we met in the lobby of the I.N.S. building. The air was stagnant like in every government building, filled with the weight of human words, confessed and unspoken, official and unwritten, stamped and erased. After all, this federal agency was a de facto dictionary of American citizenship, defining Americanness in the sense that what was called American and what wasn’t (i.e., who became American and who didn’t), was continuously defined, interpreted, and redefined here, not by linguists, philology scholars, or grammarians, but by civil servants carrying suspiciously thin folders that reduced human struggle to bullet points. Above the x-ray machine, the dual portraits of Bush and Cheney practically snickered at me. There could have been dialogue bubbles coming from their mouths that said, Good luck kid. This country isn’t a free ride and we don’t give a shit about Mauritanians unless they bring over a corporation. I grabbed my satchel from the X-Ray machine and took the elevator to the 9th floor, my feet tapping the ground to break up the silence. As Yacoub’s translator, silence meant loss and loss meant deportation. For both of our sakes, I vowed to fight that silence and defeat my own self-consciousness to the very end, so that I could be the advocate he needed. This moment forced me to reconsider the power of my own words.

2.

Eight years earlier, after spending an entire summer in college working on a coming-of-age novel and some shorter nonfiction pieces, my mom mentioned my prodigious output to my brother, who got annoyed and blurted out that my writing was “just a bunch of words.” That slogan became forgotten artillery ordnance in a proxy war of identity, language, and vocation until the first explosion. The delayed violence of those words was disguised to me until the exact moment I tripped over them unwittingly. For seven years, whenever I started seeing myself as a writer, even for a brief moment, I’d hear his barb again and watch the world around me detonate into rubble. The fact that my brother and I have been extremely close since I was in junior high didn’t diffuse the explosiveness of his words. I was too vulnerable to criticism and afraid of failure. I was sensitive to his dismissal because my writing career had always been suspect at best and aspirational at worst. It was only after a stint in the Peace Corps and a series of volunteer gigs working with refugees that I learned the power, the necessity, and the redemption of language, the way it could literally help some people achieve cultural reincarnation in America.
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Girl on the Third Floor

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Paul Crenshaw | Mad Creek Books| May 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words)

 

The upper floors of the Nyberg Building are locked and deserted now, but her ghost is said to live there still. It is not hard to imagine a ghost filtering down the long hall and disappearing into the distance, although I do not know if she walks through walls or simply appears and stands looking sad and lost, perhaps trying to find someone to help her.

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‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’

Illustration by Mark Wang

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and as far east as Augusta, Georgia, began forcing out their Chinese populations. Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, considers it ethnic cleansing.

“The intention … was to round up all the Chinese people in over 200 towns across the Pacific Northwest and drive them out so they would never come back,” she says. Read more…

You’re Just Too Good to Be True

Hulton Archive / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kavita Das | Longreads | February 2019 | 27 minutes (6688 words)

New York City, 1980

Mommy and I had a deal. On our twice-a-week, 45-minute drive to speech therapy, I practiced singing South Indian Carnatic songs, the ones she grew up playing on the violin, and on the way back I was allowed to listen to anything I wanted. So, as soon as we hit the road from our house, she prompted me to begin with sa-pa-sa. Sa is the equivalent of do, the starting note in Western classical solfege, and pa the equivalent of sol, the fifth note above do. Singing these fifth intervals helped ground me in my pitch before I began any song.

Once that was done, Mommy picked from songs she had already taught me during previous car trips, or began a new one. She quizzed me on which raga, or key, it was in, and then we sang the scale of that raga together. Unlike Western keys, ragas might have different ascending and descending scales, which struck me as hazardous. Even if I knew my way up the mountain, taking the same path down might send me careening into a ravine of shame. Then, she began tapping out the talam, or the time signature, on the steering wheel of her deep blue Chevy Horizon hatchback, while navigating through traffic, and I followed along, tapping it out on my thigh or on the vinyl seat next to me. I began to sing. When I forgot a lyric or the melody, she piped up and sang alongside me, and then chided, “Start again and this time concentrate, and sing it correctly.”

We went from one song to the next as we made our way from our home in Bayside, Queens to Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, driving over highways, crossing bridges, stopping at lights, paying tolls. Sometimes we arrived at speech therapy mid-song, and then afterwards, when we got back in the car, instead of switching to my choice, per our deal, Mommy made me finish the song first, which meant I only got to my music when we were halfway home. So, I learned to gauge how close we were to the medical center and speed up my singing so that the end of the Carnatic song coincided with our arrival. This way, the whole car ride back was just for my music.

As soon as we were back in the car, our seat belts fastened, I popped in my favorite tape. It was “The Ultimate Engelbert Humperdinck,” one of the only non-Indian music albums my parents owned, by the first Western musician I was allowed to listen to. I loved everything about him and his music. He spoke to me, an almost-5-year-old who felt she already knew a thing or two about the world — having visited India, Japan, Hawaii, and New Jersey; not to mention endured the pain of multiple surgeries and the monotony of speech therapy for a cleft palate, and the loneliness of being an only child, who was not so much misunderstood as not understood, receiving quizzical looks whenever I spoke. He knew me and cared deeply for me — it was all there in the beautiful lyrics of his songs, and in the way he crooned them just to me. His voice oozed with feeling. It was as smooth and sweet as the caramel squares my grandfather loved so much that he asked me to climb a chair and sneak up to the candy box and fetch him some more.

My absolute favorite song off the tape was Killing Me Softly. Listening to it, I felt as if I was all grown up, sitting in the audience at a small café. I was the person he sang about, who comes undone by the lovelorn songs of a soulful troubadour. I sang out with abandon, the windows down, drowning out city noises. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly. My mother continued to drive as I sang my little girl heart out all the way back to Queens.

I had named my dearest possession after him — my nubby pale blue woven blankie, which stayed steadfastly at my side as I played, before I carried it to bed each night, and which in turn carried me to my dreams. And when my 5th birthday rolled around, and preparations were being made for my party, I instructed my mother to invite Engelbert Humperdinck. My mother assured me that an invitation had been sent to him in England, where he lived and where my parents used to live before they migrated to the U.S. I was so excited, I ran around our basement swinging from the foundation poles, which usually served as the villains I lassoed as Wonder Woman. I could barely believe that in just a few days, Engelbert Humperdinck — I always called him by his full name — would be here in our basement. I wondered what to wear. None of my Indian stuff. Perhaps my powder blue shift and jacket, trimmed with white faux fur. It made me look like a lady, just like the long silk gowns my mother had gotten stitched for me in India. My powder blue number was a hit when I wore it in Japan — while we were snapping photos of the sights and surroundings, Japanese young women were asking my parents if they could snap photos of me in the photo-finish outfits Mommy bought, hand-stitched, or had tailored for me.

I decide that when he arrived, I would give him the frosted flowers from atop my Carvel ice cream cake, a token of my selfless love and admiration. I hoped he would sing Close to You — my second most favorite song, with perfect lyrics for celebrating me as the birthday girl. On the day that you were born the angels got together, And decided to create a dream come true, So they sprinkled moondust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue. Well, hair of black and eyes of brown, but I still believed he meant me since Engelbert Humperdinck himself was no blonde-haired blue-eyed being.

I had taken out the album liner notes from the plastic cassette case so often to stare at the two jacket photos of him that the case had broken. He had a head of shiny blue-black hair that cascaded in waves over his smiling face, culminating in two sturdy pillars of sideburns. It reminded me of Daddy’s hair. Unlike Daddy, though, he didn’t have a mustache, which meant he wouldn’t scratch me when he kissed me on the cheek. His nose was pointy, but not too pointy, and his honey brown eyes seemed to twinkle at me like stars from the nursery rhymes I’d learned seemingly so long ago. Now that I was a 5-year-old, I had graduated from nursery school to kindergarten, from nursery rhymes to love ballads, and from imaginary play friends to real-life music idols. I imagined us holding hands, going to the park, and, of course, singing duets together. And sheepishly I wondered if maybe, when I grew up, we could get married. When Mommy and Daddy weren’t around, I pressed my lips against his in the jacket photo, the way I had seen grownups do in TV shows. I never saw any of the Indian uncles and aunties do it, but I knew it was something other grownups — white and Black — did when they loved someone. When I closed my eyes to make a wish, I sometimes focused on a Barbie doll, but other times I hoped for the chance to kiss Engelbert Humperdinck for real.
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‘Archive, Archive, Archive’: Valeria Luiselli on Reading In Order To Write

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Lily Meyer | Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,198 words)

 

Valeria Luiselli has a roving, curious, collaborative mind. In her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, she merged her protagonist’s consciousness into that of the poet Gilberto Owen. In Story of My Teeth, she collaborated with workers at a Jumex juice factory to create a dizzying, hilarious adventure story. And in Lost Children Archive, her third and most ambitious novel, she invokes a chorus of books, images, recordings, and fragments to tell the story of a family traveling across the American Southwest as the country shatters around them.

The protagonist of Lost Children Archive is an audio journalist starting a sound documentary about the wave of undocumented children arriving in the U.S., fleeing violence in Mexico and the Northern Triangle, a crisis Luiselli last wrote about in her searing essay Tell Me How It Ends. Her husband is beginning a sound project, too: “an ‘inventory of echoes’…about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.” They live in New York with their children, a five-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy, but to make his inventory of echoes, he wants to move permanently to the southwest. The two decide to drive across the country with their children, not making further plans until they arrive in Arizona.

Luiselli writes the road trip in a series of lyrical fragments, creating an archive of the family’s time in transit. She records the landscape, the adults’ fraying marriage, the children’s confusion, the mother’s growing desperation to help the child refugees crossing the border, and the ten-year-old’s determination to help his mother — even if that means running away. Woven through these fragments is another story: seven children on a train north, trying to survive a journey through the desert and into the unknown.

The resulting novel is layered and surprising, able to twist without warning. Luiselli’s archival impulses transform her work into a collage of voices and meanings. Lost Children Archive weaves from mother to son, fiction to meta-fiction, Manhattan apartment to Arizona desert, but it never loses sight of its purpose: to tell the story of a lost family, trying to find hope and certainty however they can. Read more…

‘I Believe That Silence Is Ineffective’: Devi S. Laskar on Invisibility and American Terror

Devi Laskar by Anjini Laskar / Counterpoint Press

Ruth LeFaive | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,671 words)

 

“What does it mean truly, to be invisible?” Devi S. Laskar writes, “Her stillness, her ability to remain calm while high-decibel insults are hurled inches from her face and ears. To pretend nothing has been said. To pretend deafness.”

Laskar’s compelling debut novel The Atlas of Reds and Blues is the story of a second-generation Bengali-American woman who, after remaining invisible, still and calm throughout a lifetime of racist interactions, is pushed over the edge during an unfounded raid on her home. In her refusal to acquiesce, the narrator, known as Mother, is shot by a police officer, and lies bleeding on her driveway. This is where we find her at the beginning of the book. What follows are vivid scenes from Mother’s life depicted in gleaming, lyrical prose — an exploration of persevering as a woman of color, a mother and wife, sister and daughter, as well as a writer, in contemporary America where she is time and again treated as inferior.

The novel builds upon a traumatic incident from Laskar’s own life when agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided her family’s home at gunpoint. Although the legal matter was eventually dismissed, many of her family’s personal belongings were confiscated and never returned. The book imagines a fundamental difference — what if she had refused to be docile and was shot? Read more…

‘I Knew It Was Not My Correct Life, Because It Asked Me To Mute My Voice.’

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,177 words)

 

I first stumbled across Reema Zaman on Facebook where each week she posts Love Letter Monday in which she discusses her life, both the hardships and successes, in an unabashedly self-loving manner. At first it caught me by surprise. I was so unaccustomed to hearing a woman speak well of herself — it felt, well, wrong. But soon enough I found myself sneaking back as if the words were contraband and the act of reading them a necessary revolution. The posts also contain an outpouring of love for the reader. A clarion call for women to turn “wound into wisdom” and “pain into poetry.” To be the authors of their own lives.

Her new memoir I Am Yours continues the call. In an evolving age-specific voice, Reema guides the reader through her life from a childhood in Bangladesh and Thailand with a domineering and unpredictable father, through anorexia and rape while living with roommates in Manhattan and navigating an often degrading and even dangerous life as an actress and model, to emotional abuse while living in a dilapidated barn in the middle of no-cell-phone-service woods with her then husband until, at age thirty, she at last lands a room of her own.

Reema’s prose is as ablaze as her heart. Lyrical, precise, in places frothing with desire or rage or faith, Reema’s unbridling of her tightly-watched self-suppressed voice is not an easy task. Yet it’s an essential one. These are hard stories, let loose at last with grace, sagacity, and dollops of clever humor. At its heart, I Am Yours is a story of hope. Read more…

The Cabin

Photos courtesy of the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lavinia Spalding | Longreads | January 2019 | 13 minutes (3,805 words)

 

The old rancher stood on the porch of my log cabin, shuffling his boots. Then he lowered the rim of his cowboy hat, squinted, and delivered the news I’d been dreading — the news that had probably been inevitable from the start.

Though I say the cabin was mine, I should confess it was really his. The rancher’s. Still, I felt possessive. I’d lived there only months, but I loved the wide covered porch where I’d hung my rope hammock, bought for 20 bucks in Mexico. I loved the woodstove and my nascent ability to make a half-decent fire on a chilly night. I loved the view from my picture window, past bright green fields and golden sandstone mesas, all the way to a distant blue triangle of mountain. A herd of deer grazed insouciantly in my yard each evening, a chorus of coyotes sang late at night. I loved everything about my cabin — especially what it represented: something that had eluded me my entire adult life. Read more…

A Childhood in Cars

AP Photo/David Goldman

Joshua James Amberson | Everyday Mythologies | Two Plum Press | November 2018 | 21 minutes (4,278 words)

 

We became a cars-on-blocks house when I was eight years old. My mom and I lived at the bottom of a hill, in a trailer, on five acres of mostly-wooded land outside of Snohomish, Washington. We owned ten cars. Six of them more-or-less worked. Three were for parts and one—the shell of an early ’60s Ford Falcon—had come with the land.

Vehicles were, in large part, what people in Snohomish spent their money on. Kevin, my mom’s boyfriend, lived in a barely functional shack down a ravine but had a couple of cars, a work truck, and an assortment of half-working motorcycles. This was typical. My mom and Kevin’s friends generally lived in trailers, modular homes, or compact ranch-style houses and owned a broad array of vehicles in various states of disorder. While one car sitting on blocks, waiting to be fixed or salvaged for parts, was barely noticeable within this landscape, having a few felt different.

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