Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova

This is a true story that caught the national media by storm. No pun intended! 

 I have diverged from my usual blog posts as Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova is not a literary work. Ty Gagne is not a writer by profession. It is the story that is more intriguing than the writing. It is a gripping human interest story. It hits close to home in many ways and I needed to write about it to process my own emotions.

On the 15th of February, in the year 2015, 32 year old Kate Matrosova of NYC attempted a solo traverse of the summits of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Her plan was to undertake a light and fast traverse through several peaks in the Presidential Range. In other words, she intended to pack lightly but move quickly on the trails and begin her descent back the same day instead of camping overnight. She had a satellite phone, a GPS device and a personal locator beacon. Her husband was going to pick her up that very evening on the other side of the range. Kate Matrosova was an experienced hiker and physically fit. She had previously summited four of the seven highest peaks on each continent and was targeting Mount Everest next. She would have successfully scaled the summits on any other day. It just so happened that she chose the worst possible day to hike. 

A Nor’easter storm veered off its predicted course making it an extremely dangerous day to hike. Kate was mentally prepared for setting off in cold weather. Perhaps she was seeking a day with frigid temperatures and snow to train herself for Mount Everest. But she was unaware that the storm in the forecast was going to hit sooner than predicted. She had checked the weather the evening before but had embarked on the hike in the pre-dawn hours before the morning forecast was issued by the Mount Washington Observatory on what turned out to be the worst winter blizzard day that season: 

In the clouds with snow and blowing snow. White out conditions. High temps dropping to -20F. Winds NE shifting NW 45-60mph rapidly increasing mid-morning to 80-100mph with gusts up to 125 mph. Wind chills 65-75 below zero.

The following day rescuers found her frozen body. She was blown off a peak by the wind and had died of exposure.

Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova is a detailed account of the ill-fated winter hike written by Ty Gagne, a corporate risk management executive and a certified wilderness responder. With data retrieved from her GPS and with the aid of photos, maps and venn diagrams, he meticulously pieces together the events leading up to the discovery of her frozen body the following day. He retraces her route and imagines her thought processes. He also follows the trajectory of two other guided hiking groups that set off on that day and unlike Matrosova, decided to turn back. The second half of the book describes the rescue and ultimately the recovery operation by brave and dedicated individuals who were risking their lives too in the treacherous weather and who grappled with the same decisions that Kate Matrosova had to face.

Gagne explores the psychology of risk. What makes us take the decisions we do? Gagne uses Matrosova’s story to analyze risk in the workplace. He tries to understand what could have gone wrong in her decision making. He withholds judgement though he points out her errors. He starts the book by giving an example of a hike he went on where he himself made mistakes. 

Above is a map from the book of Kate Matrosova’s projected route through the White Mountains.

Kate was dropped off at the Appalachia parking lot in the wee hours of the morning by her husband, Charles Farhoodi. She started up the Valley Way Trail and got up above treeline in tough conditions taking more time than usually required. She took a left off the main trail to climb up to the top of Mount Madison and then descended back down to join the main path and took a left on to the Star Lake Trail to tackle the next summit. She was already far behind schedule. She was hiking against 85 miles per hour winds but instead of abandoning her hike and turning back, she started climbing Mount Adams.

But less than 150 feet from the summit, ‘An impenetrable wall of wind’ finally prompted her to turn back and abandon the rest of the hike. Unfortunately it was too late. She would have become hypothermic by that point and unable to keep up with the winds which by then were approaching over 90 miles an hour and the temperature with wind chills were reaching close to -100F. At some point, in desperation, she activated her personal locator beacon but to no avail. It seems like she was hurled off the peak by the strong winds and probably hurt or unable to walk any more. I can’t even imagine how panic-stricken she must have been while waiting for help!

As her PLB erroneously reported multiple locations, the initial rescue team went looking for her on the wrong side of Madison and returned at 3 a.m. with no luck. The search resumed on Monday morning with a larger rescue team including the New Hampshire Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter and a civil Air Patrol Cessna airplane. The rescue teams on the planes had to call off the search because of poor visibility. Her body was finally found by a ground rescue team 150 feet downslope off the Star Lake trail, close to the location indicated by the first signal from the beacon. It is likely she would not have made it even if the initial coordinates had been correct.

Matrosova had a solid plan with ways to opt out if she needed as is apparent in the map above. But why did she go solo in the dead of winter? Why did she not have sufficient gear? She had no sleeping bag or bivy sack and not even snow shoes with her and though she carried crampons, she does not seem to have used them. And why did the weather forecast not deter her in the first place? But having set out, when there was a point where she could have decided to turn back, what made her continue to scale the next peak despite the deteriorating conditions? She had done a winter climb to Madison Col a month earlier with her husband and they had camped up overnight in the mountains but they had to abandon going on Mount Adams as her husband could not keep up with her. Could it be that she did not want to miss the summit a second time having come all the way? Gagne delves into all these questions as he tries to analyze Kate Matrosova’s mindset.

Although Gagne was not among the team of rescuers, he pieces together the events that led up to the tragedy to analyze if it could have been prevented if other choices had been made. I wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that he uses her personal story to discuss risk management in the workplace. Yet it was a very engaging read and I was on edge the entire time even though I knew how this would end. The last chapter has a different tone from the rest of the work which is more factual. On the anniversary of her death, Gagne goes on the same hike that Matrosova had attempted and feels her ghostly presence in the mountains.

Kate Matrosova’s story affected me deeply. I am from New Hampshire and I know these mountains. I’ve hiked on some of the trails albeit in more forgiving weather. A friend from out of town who has hiked to Everest base camp remarked that scaling Mount Washington was even more challenging. The trails look deceptively simple because the mountains are at a much lower altitude. You don’t have to deal with the oxygen shortage that you encounter on a Himalayan trek but the terrain is still treacherous because the weather patterns are unpredictable in these mountains.

Kate’s story made me think about the power of Mother Nature, a force so formidable that it is still beyond human control in spite of the technological advances we’ve made, and it also brought many questions to mind:

What causes people to pontificate and pass judgements on others without understanding or compassion? The story went viral and invited a lot of vitriol. People were making conjectures about Matrosova’s behavior and character accusing her of being stupid, overly ambitious, and even of suffering from hubris as if she were a character from a Greek tragedy. She is not here to defend herself. These mistakes could have been made by anyone. She probably underestimated the changing weather conditions in the mountains. And who knows if hypothermia had clouded her judgement?

When there are so many similar stories, why do some stand out and capture the world’s attention? There have been close to 200 known fatalities within the Presidential Range. Most recently on Jan 19, 2024, an experienced hiker died on a solo hike in brutal conditions succumbing to frigid temperatures and harsh winds. His story died down with him and with the storm. Kate Matrosova was an accomplished young immigrant from Siberia who lived the American dream by getting a great education and achieving corporate success. She was an investment banker in NYC who was not only rich but very pretty too. Are these the reasons that made her story more noteworthy? 

And last but not the least, how to do you balance risk versus reward? Do we not have to be willing to take some amount of risk in order to live our dreams? Where do we draw the line between living a fulfilling life and recognizing our limits? Kate Matrosova’s story haunted me from the beginning. I found myself thinking about her for weeks after reading the book. Would I have ventured out in those conditions? I am a cautious person by nature and even I know that all it takes is a split second decision for things to go awry. I view this incident as a cautionary tale and I would recommend this book to outdoor adventure enthusiasts.

Ty Gagne brings up important points like developing soft skills and knowing when to make alterations to your original plan to avert a tragedy of this nature. He also talks about the advantages and disadvantages of going with a group as opposed to going by yourself. Kate never had to think on her own before as her previous hikes were guided trips. All these lessons apply not only to decisions taken on adventures but also when you you are faced with quandaries in life wondering whether to turn right or left and risk it all or play it safe. Kate undoubtedly made mistakes but she was also unlucky. Don’t we all struggle with similar decisions from time to time which make us exclaim, ‘But for the grace of God go I”?

Isn’t there a bit of Kate Matrosova in all of us?

The Bell Jar

Trigger Warning: Depression, Self-harm, Suicide, Suicide Ideation, Rape Attempt

I had been avoiding reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, although it has been lying on my book shelf at home for decades. Who wants to read about a young woman’s mental breakdown especially when you are aware of the heartbreaking outcome in the life of the author she parallels? I remember being intrigued enough to read reviews about the book but they only strengthened my resolve to avoid it. A reviewer on Goodreads wrote that she preferred childbirth to reading this novel. I don’t know what made me finally muster the courage to read it but I am glad I did for it spoke to me as a woman and also educated me about mental illness. Besides, it wasn’t all doom and gloom as I expected it to be. Apart from being an insight into mental illness, it is also a commentary peppered with humor and satire on the American society of the time.

The Bell Jar describes the slow unraveling of the mind of its narrator-protagonist. Unlike her friends who come from wealthy families, Esther Greenwood is a brilliant student from a modest background who excels in high school and college by winning several awards and scholarships. At the age of nineteen, she was one of twelve young women selected to intern for a month at a New York fashion magazine. One would think that she would be thrilled to party and live the glamorous life of the rich and famous but she feels a sense of disconnection with her peers and a general disenchantment with life .

Esther Greenwood has a non conformist attitude towards marriage and motherhood and is ahead of her time for a woman living in the 1950s. She is in a relationship with Buddy Willard, a young medical student, but hates that she is expected to be pure while he has had sex with a waitress. She finds the double standard revolting and is eager to lose her virginity which “weighed like a millstone” around her neck, partly out of curiosity but mostly to get even with her boyfriend. To achieve that goal, she goes to any length even putting herself in dangerous situations with men she barely knows.

She is expected to marry Buddy but that would mean she would have to relinquish her ambitions of being a poet. She hates the thought of being tied down to the drudgery of domestic duties which would surely be “a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s…” She wants to break free from these constraints and forge her own identity in a male dominated world. There are so many opportunities dangling in front of her but she is paralyzed by indecision for if she picks a path, she will have to forgo others.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

More than sixty years later, the fig tree metaphor still resonates with women. It has struck a chord with Gen Z women who grapple with the same feelings of isolation and existential angst and cite the passage frequently on Tiktok. Although women have come a long way since Plath’s time and are able to pursue many options, they still struggle with their choices wondering if one decision will rule out other opportunities.

Esther’s behavior starts becoming erratic as she feels more and more alienated from Buddy and from her friends. She is rejected from a summer writing course which is a tremendous blow to her ego as she has always been an outstanding student with many academic laurels. She slowly stops eating and refuses to wash her hair and change her clothes. She has trouble reading for words seem to jump off the page. She takes sleeping pills as she is unable to fall sleep. She starts hearing her own voice. She has obsessive thoughts about suicide and before long is admitted to a psychiatric clinic. It is terrifying to see how quickly Esther spirals down and is pushed over the edge.

She is institutionalized in an asylum near Boston where she undergoes electric shock therapy without anesthesia and is given insulin injections for treatment. The book highlights the stigma attached to mental illness and the limited scientific understanding of the condition at the time. Her mother, although well meaning, thinks of her depression as a passing phase. Esther’s doctor is arrogant and condescending. It is only when the sponsor of Esther’s college scholarship pays for Esther to go to a private hospital that she starts receiving state of the art care under a more compassionate lady doctor.

 Esther constantly thinks about how to kill herself. She is almost rational and methodical in her approach thinking of different scenarios that would work. The bell jar is the metaphor for the depression that traps her. It also symbolizes the suffocation experienced by women restricted by patriarchal expectations. There is no doubt that Esther Greenwood is Sylvia’s alter ego and her life parallels Plath’s own struggles with mental illness and societal expectations. There is a scene where Esther decides to write a novel and states:

“My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.”

Plath’s heroine Esther wants to write a book about a character who is modeled after her, and Esther, in turn, mirrors her author. Interestingly, the name Sylvia is also composed of six letters.

The Bell Jar is an eye-opening read about a certain time in American society raising interesting issues about feminism and mental illness and its treatment. Despite the feminist leanings, I have to point out that there are racist and sexist undertones which are problematic and which would be considered offensive today. There is a passage where the way Esther treats a black male attendant in the hospital made me quite uncomfortable. Of course Esther is a fictional character but I can’t shake the feeling that along with her mental illness, she shares some of the prejudices of her creator.

Sylvia Path was essentially a poet. The Bell Jar was the only novel written by her. In my opinion, she was a far superior poet to a novelist. The reason the work was groundbreaking and is still relevant today is for its raw and authentic description of a girl suffering from a depressive episode and for opening the door for a more open dialogue on mental health which was a taboo subject. Esther Greenwood is a woman who resembles her creator and who could very well be the same person except for this one little harrowing detail- she survived her suicide attempt while Plath succumbed to her demons.

And although Esther recovers in the end, you are still left with the doubt if she is going to be okay. The bell jar has lifted but is hovering above her and can still descend on her.  

“How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” 

The first edition of The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

The Bell Jar was published in England on January 14, 1963, under a pseudonym and just a few months before Plath took her life. It would be published seven years later in the US under her own name. Sylvia Plath would have been 91 years old today had she still been alive. How much more would she have accomplished in the remaining years if only she hadn’t plucked herself out prematurely from the fig tree of her own life?

P.S. I am writing this blog post after a long hiatus; I have been under a sort of bell jar of my own though thankfully not of the serious kind suffered by the author. Hopefully the New Year will see me posting more frequently!

Leaving Time- The Pain and Pangs of People and Pachyderms

“I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room – but eventually, you learn to live with it.“

I live in New Hampshire and Leaving Time is the first book I’ve read by Jodi Picoult, a prolific author from our state. Interestingly, my brother who lives in India has read each and every book written by her. I read the book with my book club and my brother warned me that it is not the book you choose to introduce yourself to her work. And of course, he turned out to be right! 

 The ending which took me by complete surprise ruined the story for me. Picoult is famous for her unpredictable twist endings. This book too had a twist ending but it seemed far fetched to me. It called for a total suspension of disbelief. I actually found the story gripping; I couldn’t put it down. And that’s why I felt cheated after being hooked for so long. I almost threw the book across the room in exasperation.

Thirteen year old Jenna is on a quest to find her mother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was only three. Her parents Alice and Thomas Metcalf were research scientists who ran an elephant sanctuary in gasp …NH of all places! (According to the book, elephants can survive cold temperatures, although keeping elephants in the cold is a subject of heated debate in current times.) Alice was last seen at the elephant sanctuary on the day her co-worker Nevvie was found dead. No one knows if Nevvie was trampled by an elephant or if she was murdered. Alice is found injured and unconscious not too far away from Nevvie’s body and taken to the hospital but she runs away from there on regaining consciousness. She does not contact Jenna and a missing person report has never been filed for her.

As Jenna grows up, she is curious to find out what happened to her mother and to reunite with her. She is on the internet trying to get any information she can and studies her mother’s research journals hoping to find some clue there. She does not believe her mother has abandoned her. Her grandmother is quiet about the whole affair and her father has been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the incident took place. She is on her own and ends up enlisting help from two dubious characters; Serenity who was once a celebrity psychic with the ability to talk to spirits but whose skills are rusty now as her two spirit guides seem to have have forsaken her, and Virgil Stanhope, an ex-cop turned private investigator who was on her mother’s case but missed some of the clues and who is now a miserable alcoholic on account of the botched investigation.

The book is narrated in the first person from the four alternating perspectives of Jenna, Serenity,Virgil and Alice and switches back and forth between the past and the present. The transitions were seamless but it could be because I felt that the voice of the four characters was practically the same. Alice details events that led up to the fatal day. She was a scientist who was doing field work at a reserve in Botswana to study grief among elephants and met Thomas Metcalf on his brief visit there. A romantic tryst and an unexpected pregnancy forces her to leave Africa and to marry Thomas and move to an elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire where he works. It does not take her long to discover that her husband is severely mentally ill. Meanwhile she develops a closeness with a co-worker Gideon who is married to Grace, daughter of Nevvie. Oh the tangled web we weave!

Alice was a research scientist who studied the behavior of elephants. As someone who adores elephants, I loved reading about them. I was moved by their capacity to love and grieve. The term given to the way members of elephant herds take care of each other’s offspring is ‘allomothering’. Elephants are intelligent, sensitive and compassionate creatures who never forget. Some of the research information on the pachyderms could seem too factual but Picoult inserts fact with fiction to raise awareness about the plight of elephants worldwide in captivity who experience great psychological trauma when separated from their babies. She also wants to illustrate the parallel between elephant behavior towards their calves and Alice’s relationship with Jenna. I wasn’t too moved by this analogy as in spite of being a caring mother, Alice was also careless and irresponsible in some ways.

A herd of wild Asian elephants in Bandipur National Park, India

At first I was confused by the title of the book which didn’t seem relevant to the plot. It refers to how Jenna felt when her mother Alice would put her down for a nap. It was literally ‘leaving time’ as her mother was temporarily leaving her. The duration of the nap is also when Jenna left time from existence. So if we have left time when asleep, couldn’t the same be said for when we are dead? To avoid spoilers, I will not elaborate further on this theme but the book does raise interesting questions about the concept of time.

Alice remarks that ninety-eight percent of science is quantifiable but there still remains that two percent of behavior or phenomena that cannot be explained by science. The issue I had with the book is that Picoult allows the two percent to dominate the narrative making the ending seem ridiculous. Is Alice dead or alive? Was she responsible for Nevvie’s death? Will mother and daughter reunite? All the answers come together in an absurd ending that I didn’t see coming.

How did I miss the elephant in the room?

Have you read Jodi Picoult? Which book of hers would you recommend I read next?

  

 

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart is a raw and brutal account about salvaging a relationship with your dying mother and grappling with your mixed race identity with food bridging the gap to help you both cope with your loss and and straddle two cultures. Michelle Zauner is an indie rock musician of a band called Japanese Breakfast and this searing memoir is an extended version of an essay she wrote for The New Yorker in August 2018.

Michelle was brought up in Eugene, Oregon by her Korean mother and white American father. She had a troubled relationship with her mother Chongmi and it only became worse during her teenage years of rebellion. Everything changes when Chongmi is diagnosed, when she is fifty six years old, with stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma in her stomach. Michelle, who is twenty five at the time, realizes how much her mother means to her and suddenly the roles are reversed. She is her mother’s caretaker and through all the pain and suffering, she finds comfort in Korean cooking and bonds with her mother through food.

I recently lost my mother and I could relate to Michelle’s loss. I could see myself in Michelle- in the eagerness to please and also in the pain of seeing someone wilt before your eyes. She feels guilty about not appreciating her mother until it is almost too late. She tries to be more Korean than ever to make amends and to assuage the guilt, for a connection to her Korean heritage is by extension a connection to her mother.

Chongmi was far from perfect. She was critical, a perfectionist, a shallow woman who only cared about appearances. But yet when Michelle learns that her mother is dying, she transforms overnight from a rebellious youngster into a dutiful and loving daughter. She finds healing through food and specifically by exploring her Korean heritage through food. H Mart is a Korean grocery store chain. The book starts with her breaking down in the store as the aisles remind her of her mother’s cooking.  

“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.” 

She wants to make it up to her mother before it is too late. I found it heartbreaking to see this young woman try so hard to win her mother’s approval. Interestingly, I discussed this book at a book club where there were many women of Asian origin. We were from China, Taiwan and India and we could all relate to the mother-daughter relationship. And all of us women unanimously declared that our emotionally distant mothers showed their love through cooking and feeding us. It seemed like there was some common cultural conditioning that resulted in our mothers’ attitudes and behaviors.

There are such vivid descriptions of Korean food in the book that if you are someone who enjoys the cuisine, it will leave you salivating. I think this memoir would have been perfect as a cookbook with personal anecdotes and stories accompanying each recipe instead of just an outpouring of grief. The writing is lyrical on the whole. One passage where Michelle Zauner compares the process of fermentation to stored memories, stood out in particular to me:

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.
The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.” 

Michelle captures the challenges of being a bi-racial kid who desperately wants to fit in with her American peers. She is the only Korean -American in her small rural town. One can sense the internalized self-loathing and shame about her race that she experiences during her teen years. She does not speak Korean well and is removed from her culture other than the annual summer trips to Korea where she spends time with her relatives. She moves to the East Coast for college and as a struggling musician in NYC blends in with her white peers and has a white boyfriend. Immigrants and their children know this feeling only too well- of belonging and yet not fully belonging.

“I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone whole.”   

With her mother’s impending death, it dawns on her that she risks losing the tenuous link she has to her culture. She scrambles to learn the language and learns to cook following a YouTube blogger.

Michelle had a lot of resentment and anger towards her mother but now that she is dying, she sweeps everything under the rug and is filled with love and tenderness for her. I have to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t suffered from cancer! It was painful for me to see her experience her grief but it was even more painful for me to see her idealize a mother who was flawed in many ways. To make her mother happy, she even guilt- trips her boyfriend into marrying her just because she wants her mother to attend her wedding before she dies. She even admits in the acknowledgements that she tricked her husband into marrying her.

Writing a memoir is tricky. It requires vulnerability, honesty and courage. And sometimes that means that you cannot refrain from airing your dirty laundry in public. I couldn’t help feeling that Michelle treated her father unfairly. He was an alcoholic and had many shortcomings but he had some redeeming traits too – he was the sole provider of the family who took care of their financial needs and he nursed his wife during her illness and loved her in his own broken way. Michelle reveals that her father had an affair and it makes me wonder if her mother would have liked this in the open. The dead are not there to defend themselves. And not unsurprisingly, she is now estranged from her father.

The book hit close to home for me. It appealed to me as I could relate to the perspectives of both the mother and the daughter. I could identify with Michelle’s grief and the realization that our mothers love us in their own imperfect ways and with Chongmi’s situation as an immigrant parent raising first generation American children caught between two cultures. Making peace with your parents is a wonderful thing but if only Michelle had acknowledged her mother’s flaws and recognized the emotional abuse and yet felt compassion for the woman withering before her, it would have been a much more introspective and nuanced perspective of their relationship!

Death as a Suitor

Death and the Maiden by Egon Schiele, 1915

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don’t know. These opening lines from Camus’ L’Étranger (The Stranger) have been playing and replaying in my own mind at this time. I lost my mother a few months ago and I have lost track of time. I wonder what day of the week it is or what the date is on the calendar. These words of Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger could reveal his indifference or sense of detachment or just the fact that death is meaningless. On the surface, he seems unmoved by the death of his mother but he cares more for her than he lets on. I think the sentiment behind the opening sentence which has been analyzed to pieces by critics, is somewhat lost in translation. Instead of “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don’t know’, a better translation would be: “Today, Mama died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The word ‘Mother’ gives an impersonal tone as opposed to the more familiar ‘Maman’ and the order of the word ‘today’ slightly alters the meaning of the sentence. 

Anyway, I will save Camus for another day. I haven’t blogged for a few months as I have been living in a daze. Since May I have been on a rollercoaster ride- I had a wonderful trip to India where I met my ailing mother after 3 years and after postponing my trip twice as the pandemic had messed up my travel plans. The trip was followed by both my daughters’ graduations and then the whole family ended up getting Covid. Three weeks after I returned from India, my mother passed away. It was uncanny. It was almost as if she were waiting for me before crossing over. I went back again for a short trip to attend the funeral rites of my mother. 

I lost my father at a young age and have always been afraid of mortality. There is even a name for the condition- thanatophobia or death anxiety. I would avoid thinking or talking about death but since my mother passed away, I have been contemplating the prospect of our demise and accepting it as part of the human condition. I have been reading the poetry of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore who in 1913 became the first non European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was always conscious of the inevitability of death. His lost his mother at a young age and his beloved sister in law, his wife, his daughter, and youngest son all predeceased him. For a poet around whom death was hovering constantly, there had to be something to hope for, to believe in a life beyond death. 

Death for Tagore was but one small event in the cycle of life. He was deeply influenced by Hindu philosophy and mysticism and believed in the imperishability and eternal nature of the soul. While reading his poems from Gitanjali ( Song Offerings), I was struck by how often he employed the metaphor of the meeting of a bride and bridegroom to describe the union of life and death:

O thou the last fulfilment of life,
Death, my death, come and whisper to me!
Day after day I have kept watch for thee;
for thee have I borne the joys and pangs of life.
All that I am, that I have, that I hope and all my love
have ever flowed towards thee in depth of secrecy.
One final glance from thine eyes
and my life will be ever thine own.
The flowers have been woven
and the garland is ready for the bridegroom.
After the wedding the bride shall leave her home
and meet her lord alone in the solitude of night.( Gitanjali, No.91)

Tagore resorts to bridal metaphors frequently in his work.The soul of a poet is a bride in waiting or a loyal and devoted wife and the Divine Self, the groom. The beloved looks forward to the ecstasy of union and Death is the consummation of the marriage as seen in these lines from The Gardener ( 82) :

WE are to play the game of death to-night, my bride and I.
The night is black, the clouds in the sky are capricious, and the waves are raving at sea.
We have left our bed of dreams, flung open the door and come out, my bride and I.
We sit upon a swing, and the storm winds give us a wild push from behind.
My bride starts up with fear and delight, she trembles and clings to my breast.
Long have I served her tenderly.
I made for her a bed of flowers and I closed the doors to shut out the rude light from her eyes.
I kissed her gently on her lips and whispered softly in her ears till she half swooned in languor.
She was lost in the endless mist of vague sweetness.
She answered not to my touch, my songs failed to arouse her.
To-night has come to us the call of the storm from the wild.
My bride has shivered and stood up, she has clasped my hand and come out.
Her hair is flying in the wind, her veil is fluttering, her garland rustles over her breast.
The push of death has swung her into life.
We are face to face and heart to heart, my bride and I.

Interestingly, Emily Dickinson, Tagore’s contemporary depicts the union of the mystic poet with death in many of her poems. Like Tagore she witnessed the death of many near and dear ones. Never married, she was a recluse. Her poems reveal that she wished to experience wifehood in death.I have noticed similarities in the motifs and metaphors employed by both poets. In Tagore’s Maran Milan (Death Wedding), the speaker addresses death who approaches him surreptitiously: “Why do you speak so softly, Death?Creep upon me, watch me so stealthily? This is not how a lover should behave.” In Dickinson’s poem, ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, Death is imagined as the lover and the poet/ speaker as the bride:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—  
And Immortality.

Death is male and drives a carriage to take the dead speaker on a journey through the different phases of her life before she reaches her ultimate resting place. The poem is full of ambiguity leaving us to guess the intentions of her wooer? Is he going to escort her to a blissful afterlife and have a celestial marriage with her donned in her ‘only gossamer, my Gown- My Tippet- only Tulle”? Is the soft silk the white robes of the bride of Christ or the tulle is just a sheer gown in which she is cold and shivers both literally and at the prospect of her grim ending? Has death come more ominously as a rapist to lead her to her ruin? In Tagore’s poem ‘On the Edge of the Sea‘ a veiled woman arrives in a black horse and lures the speaker/poet to undertake a journey with her which culminates in a marriage ceremony and it is only on the nuptial bed or rather death chamber when her veil is uncovered that she is discovered to be a demon. 

In Dickinson’s ‘Death is the supple suitor’, death is personified as a suitor who appears with bugles in a bisected coach. 

Death is the supple Suitor
That wins at last—
It is a stealthy Wooing
Conducted first
By pallid innuendoes
And dim approach
But brave at last with Bugles
And a bisected Coach
It bears away in triumph
To Troth unknown
And Kindred as responsive
As Porcelain

This poem too abounds in ambiguities. The ‘bisected coach’ is both a wedding chariot and a hearse. Or it could refer to the separation of the soul from the body. Death is again a seductive suitor who woos the poet/speaker slyly. There is both celebration in the air in the form of bugles and a carriage and a morbid atmosphere with death wooing with ‘pallid innuendoes’ and leading the poet/ speaker to her relatives who are as cold as porcelain. 

I am struck by both poets’ mystical preoccupations with death although they represent different cultures and traditions. For Tagore, death is the union of the mystic poet with the divine being and for Emily Dickinson, the sublimation of her passion in a celestial marriage as she becomes the bride of Christ. This kind of bridal mysticism or the eroticization of divine love in the hereafter is also a thème de prédilection with Sufis who believe that the human soul had been separated from its divine source of origin and yearns to return to it. Sufi saints’ death anniversaries are celebrated as ‘urs’ or weddings.

The fusion of life and death as the meeting of a bride and bridegroom is seen in both eastern and western mystical traditions and the similarity and universality of these shared human beliefs stems from our ‘collective unconscious. I’ll end this post with a few lines from the Gitanjali. For Tagore life and death are two sides of the same coin. One can’t exist without the other. Just like an infant frets for a few moments moving from one breast of the mother to the other, death is a transitory moment between two states of bliss:

“And because I love this life
I know I shall love death as well.
The child cries out when
From the right breast the mother
Takes it away, in the very next moment
To Find in the left one
Its consolation.” 

For Tagore, death is not the void or dissolving into nothingness but a continuation of our journey. Who knows what lies in the afterlife or if there is even one but having lost a loved one recently, these lines sure provide me with solace and strength. 

World of Wonders

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments was Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year 2020 and poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book in prose. One could call it poetry in prose as the poet’s touch is very evident in the collection of essays. In each essay or rather vignette, the author focuses on a specific natural wonder from the plant or animal kingdom and connects it to a personal experience in her life. The stunning cover and the gorgeous illustrations that accompany almost every vignette by artist Fumi Nakamura pair beautifully with the writing.

As an half Indian and half Filipino person of color living in the US, Aimee felt quite out of place in school and took refuge in the natural world around her. Her parents were educated professionals who moved around quite a bit within the US. It was nature that helped Aimee get through a lonely childhood whether in Arizona or Western New York, Kansas, Ohio or Mississippi. Life was difficult as a bi-racial first generation American and she recounts how her family was subjected to comments that ranged all the way from ignorant remarks and micro-aggressions to blatant racism.

Aimee makes her way through this hateful world with the help of nature. A tall catalpa tree with its giant heart-shaped leaves and long extending branches served as a green umbrella to provide shade to her and her sister from the sun in western Kansas and also to shelter them from unblinking eyes who were not used to brown-skinned people. The leaves could cover her face entirely if she needed anonymity. The distinctive smile of an axolotl which extends from one end of its face to the other is similar to her sheepish or rather salamander- like smile when a white girl at school tells her what make up she can wear and not wear on her brown skin.

In one of the chapters she describes how in an animal drawing contest at elementary school, she picked the peacock as her subject, inspired by the beautiful peacocks with their iridescent turquoise and jade feathers she came across in her father’s hometown in India. Her teacher told her sternly that she was supposed to draw only American animals as they live in ‘Ah-mer-i-kah’ and she had to abandon her animal of choice and pick another one. She drew a bald eagle perched on a cliff and added an American flag to the picture as well. She ended up winning first prize but the incident scarred her and she writes:

This is the story of how I learned to ignore anything from India….. But what the peacock can do is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.

As an Indian-American, it pained me to see that a teacher caused her to reject her beautiful and rich cultural background. I would have rushed to set up a conference with the principal if my children had to deal with such a prejudiced teacher. But I understand that she grew up in the eighties in a small town and the only way to survive in those days was to ignore and fit in completely to be accepted. Eventually as she grows up, she learns to love what she pushed away with embarrassment during her childhood and on her wedding day chooses a peacock- hued saree as her outfit. The sarees on the dance floor worn by her and her guests flash in the light in reds, violets, teal and turquoise reminding her of a bird of paradise.

The essays are mostly in chronological order tracing the trajectory of her life as she completes her education and settles into a career, falls in love and marries, has children and finds a place she can call ‘home’. She has a strong bond with her family. It is the world outside that is hostile and frightening. Just like the red-spotted newt that spends years wandering the forest floor before it decides which spot to settle in, she wandered from state to state before putting her roots down in Mississippi.

For the most part, the author seamlessly weaves the natural world into her personal stories but sometimes the connections she makes between the exterior world and her interior state of mind are tenuous and facile. A corpse flower with its stinking smell reminds her how to clear out the weeds of the dating world or the touch-me-not plant teaches her to fend off predators by folding inward and shutting down. Her son opens his wee mouth in amazement and wonder and she is reminded of the ribbon eel drawing water over its gills to help it breathe. 

The first few essays were wonderful and informative. My interest was piqued when she referred to obscure flora and fauna. For instance, the colorful glass bangles that she got as a gift from her grandmother in India remind her of a comb jelly which flashes mini rainbows in the darkest oceans. I immediately googled the creature as I wanted to find out more about it. But unfortunately some of the later chapters had almost an encyclopedic feel to them and I felt I was reading a Wikipedia entry.

She also keeps hammering the point that she is brown-skinned. I can understand the trauma she must have endured as a child but why have a chapter entitled “Questions while Searching for Birds with my half- white sons…”? She has already told us she is married to a white guy. Is there any need to keep reinforcing the color of skin when there is no relevance? Also the writing evoked mixed reactions in me. It vacillates from lush and lyrical paragraphs describing succulent cara cara oranges or the chattering of bonnet macaques to clumsy phrases like “…after an especially plus amount of warm rain.” I am also nitpicky about grammar and some chapters have typos and errors like ‘another boatmen came up’ or ‘they busted out laughing.’ The book would have benefited from more fastidious proofreading and editing.

In spite of these annoying features, it is a gentle and meditative book that reminds us to savor the world around us. It is also a call for conservation entreating us to save our fragile planet. The author brings up the fascinating but sobering fact that fourteen new species of dancing frogs were discovered in Kerala, in southern India, only to be endangered almost as soon as they were discovered, due to erratic monsoon patterns. There are thousands of unnamed extinctions in the natural world when species become extinct even before they have had a chance to be discovered. She bemoans the fact that children have lost touch with nature and are glued to their phones or games. I was surprised when she mentioned that out of 22 students in her poetry class, 17 said that they had never seen a firefly although they lived in a town where fireflies were common. Aimee Nezhukumatathil asks us to slow down and look for fireflies:

I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. 

World of Wonders is a paean to nature and its amazing diversity as reflected in the millions of species that make up life on earth. If only we would also embrace this diversity within our own species!

Interior Chinatown

There has been a spate of violent attacks targeted against Asians and Asian- Americans in recent times. However Anti-Asian harassment is not new. Although exacerbated during the pandemic, the prejudice is rooted in a long history of discrimination towards Asian-Americans since the earliest Asian immigrants came to the US centuries ago. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020, is a satirical novel on the Chinese-American immigrant experience. The most unique feature of the novel is its unconventional format.

The characters of the book are part of a procedural cop show called ‘Black and White’ and the book itself is written in the form of a screenplay for a TV show. It is divided into seven acts with scene headings and even presented in the Courier font used in scripts. ‘Black and White'(ostensibly a spoof of ‘Law and Order’) has a charismatic black man and a beautiful white woman in the lead roles of detectives. Willis Wu, a Taiwanese- American has the role of ‘Background Oriental Male’. He is relegated to the background as all Asian-Americans are in the formulaic world of Hollywood. They only get bit parts and are sometimes reduced to playing props and corpses.

Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy.

The Golden Palace restaurant in Chinatown serves as the set for the television show. Willis Wu, his friends and parents live in SRO ( Single Room Occupancy) apartments directly above the restaurant and are all Asian American extras. Their highest aspiration is to become ‘ Kung Fu Guy’ emulating an ‘older brother’, one of their gang who has made it. To land the coveted role of ‘Kung- Fu Guy’, Willis Wu practices martial arts and perfects his fake accent. In other words, he tries to fit his stereotype. He eventually makes his way up to ‘Special Guest Star’. Even Willis’ father’ Sifu’ was once ‘Kung Fu Guy’ but is now ‘Old Asian Man’ and his mother has been demoted from ‘Seductress’ to ‘Old Asian Woman’. These immigrants with their dreams and struggles are trapped in Chinatown just as they are trapped in these roles. The real world is only an extension of the entertainment world.

An elegant paifang or archway marks the official entrance to Chinatown in most cities. It is symbolic as an entryway for immigrants settling there. But the book cover design shows vertical bars that resemble a prison under the pagoda-like structure. The title Interior Chinatown is the description of the setting written on the script and could also refer to the claustrophobic lives of the residents living in humble conditions eking out a hand to mouth existence. They live in a physical and mental prison. And a metaphorical one too for they are also trapped in prisons of prejudice and stereotypes.

While reading the book there are times when you don’t know where the reel life ends and the real life begins. The boundaries are blurred between the two for Hollywood is nothing but the microcosm of the macrocosm. White people raise their voices and speak slowly to Asian people as if they won’t be able to understand anything they are saying. Asia is seen as a monolith. Every Asian is believed to be from mainland China. They are all lumped together just as all five of Willis Wu’s housemates are lumped together.

According to a witness, as the first man hit Allen in the temple, knocking him to the ground, they said, “This is for Pearl Harbor.” Young Wu thinks: it could have been him. Nakamoto says: it should have been him. All of the housemates realize: it was them. All of them. That was the point. They are all the same. All the same to the people who struck Allen in the head until his eyes swelled shut. All the same as they filled a large sack with batteries and stones, and hit Allen in the stomach with it until blood came up from his throat. Allen was Wu and Park and Kim and Nakamoto, and they were all Allen. Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam. Whatever. Anywhere over there. Slope. Jap. Nip. Chink. Towelhead. Whatever. All of them in the house, after that, they should become closer. But they don’t. They don’t sit around the table anymore, comparing names. because now they know what they are. Will always be. Asian Man.

Willis falls in love with Karen, a mixed race actress who used to play the role of ‘Ethnically Ambiguous girl’. They get married and have a daughter together. She receives an offer for a show of her own with a part included for Willis but he refuses to get out of Chinatown and give up on his ‘Kung Fu Guy’ dream. They get divorced and she moves to the suburbs with their daughter. When Willis eventually gets the coveted role of ‘Kung Fu Guy’, he wonders why he even wanted it. He will only be perpetuating the stereotype. How much of the racism has he internalized? In order to be accepted, you have to live according to the script. You live to fit into the stereotype and it then becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy. In his quest for the fake role of ‘Kung Fu Guy’, he has lost the real life role of family man. He leaves Chinatown to rejoin Karen and his daughter and is tried in court in the ‘Case of the Missing Man’ for running away from the role assigned to him with who else but his successful ‘older brother’ as his defense lawyer. The unusual court case culminating in the denouement is a brilliant tour de force by the author.

  The script format is occasionally interspersed with disturbing facts about the history of anti-immigration laws in the US and narration in the second person when Willis reflects on his life and on his parents’ lives. The use of the second person creates instant empathy in the reader. There is a moving passage where Willis’ father sings at the local karaoke bar. As an immigrant myself, I could relate to that feeling that even if you have left the country, it never leaves you.

If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.” 

Yu ingeniously exposes the marginalization of Asian Americans through the lens of ‘Black and White’, the clever title revealing how we view the world with no nuance, no shades in between. There were two things that bothered me slightly about the book; the first the implication that black people are more visible than Asians and are treated the same as white actors, and, the second, the focus on just the working class diaspora without any mention of the more successful Asian immigrants like the author himself. The only accomplished immigrant we come across is this mystical ‘older brother’ who seems to represent an ideal. In this aspect, the book seems a little dated in its depiction. Is the author guilty of the same kind of ‘Generic Asian Man’ portrayal that he is criticizing? Or was that deliberate to reinforce the premise of the book? Nevertheless, it is an ambitious and brilliant book both thematically and stylistically that makes us think more deeply about race, identity and assimilation.

Letter From Peking

I love diving into lesser known works of famous authors; you never know what pearls you might come up with. Letter from Peking is one such pearl of a book written by the legendary Pearl S. Buck. She is most famous for The Good Earth, a novel about rural pre-revolutionary China that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. She went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938, earning the distinction of being the first American woman to be honored with the award. I may be one of the rare readers who preferred Letter From Peking to her popular and award winning novels. Letter From Peking, published in 1957, has an unusual plot and a sad and haunting tone. I was moved to tears several times while reading.

The story is about long distance love and a family caught between two countries, two continents and two cultures. The setting is Vermont and the novel is written in the form of a dateless diary with a lot of flashback to Peking. Elizabeth has been separated from her beloved husband for five years and has been raising their son alone on her family’s farm in Vermont. While studying at Radcliffe College, she had met Gerald MacLeod, a half-Chinese half-American doctoral student at Harvard. They got married and returned to Peking where they spent many happy years together until the rise of the Communist regime when it was no longer safe for Elizabeth and her son to stay there. Gerald is the President of the University in Peking and it is not clear if and when he will return to the US to join his family.

Elizabeth leads a quiet life in Vermont managing her farm and devoting her days to her son Rennie and Gerald’s father, Baba, a Scotsman from Virginia whom she is looking after in his old age. The caretaker of the farm and his wife, the single doctor who takes a romantic interest in Elizabeth and summer residents are among the few people who revolve in their orbit. She pines for her husband and reminisces about the beautiful love they shared. In fact, they were each other’s first love. “The first run of maple syrup, John Burroughs says, is like first love, “always the best, always the fullest, always the sweetest, while there is a purity and delicacy of flavor about the sugar that far surpasses any subsequent yield.”

Now she lives on the strength of her memories and on the hope that they will be reunited again which seems like a dim prospect in the political climate of the time. She reassures herself:“Gerald has not deserted me nor I him. We are divided by history, past and present.” Letters are the only form of communication between them. They have to be sent clandestinely as communication with westerners is banned by the Communists. At first fairly frequent, they start dwindling in number until a final one comes along. The contents of the last letter are not revealed till the end.

Although not a widow, the sad reality is that Elizabeth is one in many ways. I felt a lot of sympathy and compassion for her. Can you imagine not seeing your spouse for years and living life without knowing if you’ll ever meet again? There is so much uncertainty coupled with the loneliness but yet Eve as Gerald used to call his beloved Elizabeth, takes it all in stride with so much grace. There are men vying for her attention but she fends off their advances staying loyal to her husband. I think what appealed to me in the book was the gentleness in the tone despite the sadness. There is something very moving about Elizabeth’s serene acceptance of her situation and resignation to her fate. Her loneliness is described with poignancy:

Oh, the awful silence of the valley at night! No one comes near me and I am as alone as though I lived solitary upon a planet. Here and there in the distance a light burns. It means a house, a home, two people, perhaps children. The oil lamp burns yellow in Matt’s little house, and far down at the end of the valley the bright single light is the naked electric bulb that never goes out above the office door of Bruce Spaulden. I know, too, the intermittent flares of summer folk. None of them burns for me. Sometimes I light every lamp in my empty house and a stranger passing by could believe the house is full of guests. But I have no guests.”

I loved the Vermont setting and its juxtaposition with Peking; the grandeur of Chinese civilization offers an interesting contrast to the gentle beauty of Vermont and captures the essence of the novel. Elizabeth cherishes her husband’s Chinese heritage and wants her son to appreciate it too and wants him to have a life partner who would accept and understand it too. Baba lives in the past and still wears Chinese silk robes and reads Chinese books. As Elizabeth says, he still lives in the world of Confucius and Chinese emperors. I think that’s an important distinction- there is the grand old China- one of the oldest civilizations of the world and the new Communist regime which is entirely different. Her father-in-law is the only link to her husband and it is interesting that though Baba and Elizabeth are not Chinese by blood, they are proud to be linked to the rich culture.

Being quarter Chinese, Rennie, on the other hand, wrestles with his identity. Which country do you claim as your own when you can’t embrace both? It was a period of Sino-American geo-political tensions and there was a real fear of China and suspicion of anyone favorable to it and a similar distrust on the part of the authoritarian Chinese government towards Americans. Besides, in those days mixed families were not as common. Rennie has to choose between America and China and sadly between his mother and father. Unlike his mother, it is not so easy for him to forgive his father and it is safer for him to reject his heritage.

He falls in love with a girl in the neighborhood named Allegra and he is worried that revealing his Chinese identity will keep her from liking him. Elizabeth is harsh and judgmental about his relationship with the white girl. She wonders how Rennie could love a girl whose heart can “only hold one cup”. Pearl S. Buck beautifully depicts the complicated mother-son relationship.“Yet no mother can save her son. She can only watch and wait and wring her hands.” I thought her feelings arose from her loneliness. Her son was the only constant person in her life and she seemed jealous like any over protective mother. But later on I realized that maybe she was on to something as she seemed to readily accept his relationship with Mary, a girl she thought to be better suited to him and who would understand and embrace his Chinese heritage.

Gerald and Elizabeth’s relationship is tender and sweet no doubt, but I felt that she could have been idealizing it at times. Time and distance can make you lose perspective. When a person is absent, we tend to focus on their positive qualities and overlook their flaws. We only remember the good times. The bitter truth is that Gerald chose his country over her. Gerald’s patriotism and love for China prevented him from leaving his country. He had the opportunity to return to the US with her but didn’t and then it became too late. Even her son points it out to her but she is in some kind of denial mode. She continues to be fiercely protective of him.

I was struck by the dignity and poise Elizabeth had in the face of suffering but I do think she had a slight ‘holier than thou‘ attitude- she felt that no relationship could compare to this sublime love of theirs and she is steadfast in her belief that this true perfect love can withstand barriers of time, distance, race and culture. Her attitude seems like a coping mechanism. She needed something to cling on to, to give her hope to continue waiting.

In spite of some annoying traits, Elizabeth is on the whole a sympathetic character and I think it is because she is a lot like a modern day single mom who is self-reliant and has to raise her son singlehandedly. She is an independent woman who lives alone, works hard and makes her own money by managing a big farm by herself. She interacts mostly with men and like a single woman sometimes has to deal with their romantic interest in her. She also takes care of her father-in- law like a lot of women who end up taking the responsibility of caregiving. I am not going to reveal what happens in the end; what the final letter disclosed and whether Elizabeth is reunited with her husband. I hope I have piqued your curiosity enough to want to read the book.

When Pearl S. Buck died in 1973, former President Richard Nixon called her “a human bridge between the civilizations of the East and the West.”Though there are critics who believe that she perpetuated stereotypes about the Chinese, there is no doubt that she was instrumental in making China and the Chinese real and relevant to many people. This ‘pearl’ of a novel is more than a story about interracial conflict. It is a story about the love a woman is capable of- a love in its myriad complex forms-the undying love that she has for an absent husband, the protective love she has for her son, the filial duty and affection for her in-laws and most of all the love for a country that she has no ties of blood to but has embraced with her heart and soul. Imagine all this tumult of emotion soaked up in the quiet and gentle beauty of Vermont!

Have you read this novel or any other novel by Pearl S. Buck? And have you enjoyed reading any lesser known works of popular authors?

 

The Innocents Or Not So Innocent Abroad

Click on the link below to access a hypertext map that traces the route of The Quaker City excursion: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/innocent/iamaphp.html

I recently read The Innocents Abroad, a travelogue of a journey by ship to Europe and the Holy Land, undertaken by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pseudonym Mark Twain. When you hear the name Mark Twain, you immediately think of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not many people know that he was a prolific travel writer well before he published his two famous novels. In 1867, he embarked on a pleasure excursion with a group of fellow Americans from New York aboard Quaker City, a retired Civil War ship, for a five and a half month long trip around the Mediterranean. At the time he was a travel correspondent for the San Francisco newspaper, “The Alta California” and sent dispatches about his travels to them and to “The New York Tribune” and “The New York Herald” too. The Innocents Abroad was published two years later, in 1869. It was a perfect pick for the pandemic as it let me indulge in some armchair travel! It made me reminisce nostalgically about the places I have already visited and compare notes with his experiences and also made me dream of places I have yet to visit.

Mark Twain’s incomparable humor sets this book apart from the countless run of the mill travel guides. I laughed out aloud innumerable times while reading and at times I was practically in stitches. I would say Mark Twain is right up there with Oscar Wilde as one of the wittiest writers I have ever read! Whether the group is traversing through the countryside of the Middle East on recalcitrant donkeys or horses, looking in desperation for soap anywhere in Europe, having a disappointing shaving experience in France, being dragged up the Pyramids by ‘draggers’ asking for ‘baksheesh’, sneaking into the Parthenon at night and stealing grapes along the way, having a private rendezvous with the Czar of Russia or playing pranks on the tourist guides by acting dumb, every experience is recounted with caustic humor.

The group’s language troubles with the French provides a good example of a humorous quip:

“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. One of our passengers said to a shopkeeper, in reference to a proposed return to buy a pair of gloves, “Allong restay trankeel—may be ve coom Moonday;” and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said. Sometimes it seems to me, somehow, that there must be a difference between Parisian French and Quaker City French.”

I fell over the floor laughing when I read his description of the famed Turkish bath. Turkey was a country that had conjured up visions of the Arabian Nights for him. He had imagined the voluptuousness of the perfumes of Araby, the richness of the silks and carpets and the sensuousness of a luxuriating bath but instead he was in a dark, dingy and slippery corner from where he was taken to a place that resembled a chicken coop and served a Turkish drink which turned out to be the most execrable coffee:

“He took me back and flooded me with hot water, then turbaned my head, swathed me with dry table-cloths, and conducted me to a latticed chicken-coop in one of the galleries, and pointed to one of those Arkansas beds. I mounted it, and vaguely expected the odors of Araby again. They did not come.The blank, unornamented coop had nothing about it of that oriental voluptuousness one reads of so much. It was more suggestive of the county hospital than any thing else. The skinny servitor brought a narghili, and I got him to take it out again without wasting any time about it. Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets have sung so rapturously for many generations, and I seized upon it as the last hope that was left of my old dreams of Eastern luxury. It was another fraud. Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. “

I have only picked a handful of examples from the book of his scintillating wit. Practically every page is full of bantering remarks and railleries. Unfortunately, some of the humor degenerates into appallingly racist and xenophobic comments. At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt for living in a different time when people were not politically correct and when there was no concept of cultural relativity. But as I continued reading, I felt that some of the racist diatribes were offensive. He is disgusted by the poverty around him in Bashan, Syria and describes the crippled, the lepers, the vermin infested children with eye sores and beggars distressed with hunger in very unflattering terms :“They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.”

Some of his remarks are downright misogynistic. “She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.” He comes across a ‘monster headed dwarf’ and a ‘mustached woman’ inside a railway car leaving Milan. He makes it clear that they were not show people for “Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy to attract attention.” Along with the misogyny and racism, there is animal cruelty thrown in for good measure. His ingenious and refreshing wit and the fact that he did not spare anyone- not even himself or his fellow Americans made me forgive him for some of the over top comments. Maybe the book is a product of its time but it is as infuriating as it is funny.

He cracked me up with the descriptions of all the artwork he comes across in Europe. He was not that moved by the famous paintings and sculptures of the Old masters. According to him, it is difficult to admire them when the place is full of them from ceiling to walls. He does not think much of the Hagia Sophia either and calls it “the rustiest old barn in heathendom”. He ridicules the inflated tales of travel writers as reality does not meet the expectations you have after reading their accounts. He is scathing in his criticisms about the Catholic Church and their penchant for obsessively collecting relics including skulls many of which are of dubious origin. It is amusing how a part of the original crown of thorns shows up in every church.

The book inadvertently highlights the stereotype of the ugly American abroad. Every tour guide is called Ferguson and every place Jackson because they can’t be bothered learning new names. There are many examples of American ethnocentrism throughout the book. Twain feels the beautiful Lake Como and the Sea of Galilee pale in comparison to Lake Tahoe. I was shocked that the American ‘pilgrims’ chipped away pieces of monuments and ruins to bring back home as souvenirs! What a different time! We even hesitate to pick a seashell from a beach these days. Twain mocks their behavior but suggests that the reverse would never be tolerated. “Suppose a party of armed foreigners were to enter a village church in America and break ornaments from altar railings for curiosities, and climb and walk upon the Bible and pulpit cushions? However, the cases are different. One is the profanation of a temple of our faith — the other only the profanation of a pagan one.”How preposterous is that statement! The ‘innocents abroad’ even shamelessly flouted quarantine rules. It was interesting that some countries did not allow them to disembark because of cholera or the plague. Living through the pandemic right now made that detail more meaningful to me. Twain makes self deprecating jokes too and lampoons Americans who behave badly abroad: “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.” 

Twain’s prose is rich and lyrical too along with being humorous. Here’s a poetic description of the Sphinx in Egypt:

“The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION—wrought into visible, tangible form…….The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.”

I noticed that Twain and his fellow travelers mellowed down towards the end of the journey. They experienced travel fatigue from having traveled so long and extensively. In fact Twain does not linger over his descriptions of Spain or the places they visit on the way back. The book ends with these oft quoted lines: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Over time, the memory of disagreeable incidents faded away and Twain states that he would happily undertake the same journey if given a chance again.

I highly recommend this satirically humorous account of Twain’s travels. Make sure you are reading an edition with illustrations by True Williams which are as amusing as the text. This is a long book and I took my time to read it. It is informative and illuminating and Twain digresses at times to regale the readers with interesting legends and stories. Although I found the sojourns in Italy and France to be the most humorous, I enjoyed the parts about the Middle East as I haven’t been there. It was fascinating to journey through Syria and Palestine and see all the Biblical places and people come alive. I interrupted the reading to google some of the information and returned to the page lingering over every detail. At one point in the book, he describes Venetians enjoying granita ( a distant cousin of Italian ice) on a lazy Sunday afternoon and I felt reading this book was like slowing down to savor every bite of the delicious granita offered by Mark Twain.

 

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

As another year comes to a close, I reflect on the books that had the greatest impact on me in 2020. In the genre of non fiction, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson is the most powerful book I have read this year. The title itself piqued my interest. The premise of the book is that ‘caste’, a term traditionally associated with India, is a better word to describe racism in the US. As someone who has grown up in India, caste is not just a term I am familiar with, but something that has seeped into every aspect of my existence, knowingly or unknowingly. It is so deeply ingrained in the psyche that often people are not even aware of how they are perpetuating the caste system even if they openly and truly condemn it. In that aspect, caste is very similar to white supremacy and Wilkerson posits that African Americans in the United States are at the lowest rung in a hierarchy analogous to both the caste system in India and the Nazi rule in Germany. She claims that “Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste…. Caste is the bones, race the skin.”

One might wonder if these cross cultural comparisons have any merit for how do we compare 400 years of American history with 12 years of Nazi rule and 3000 years of a complex system of social stratification in India? The three share basic methods of subjugation and the underlying feeling of dehumanization is the same. So caste and not race is the lens though which we should view America, according to Wilkerson. It is not just a matter of semantics but a better framework to understand and analyze the inequities. Wilkerson says that Nazi Germany was inspired by American segregation laws and believe it or not, they thought the American system was too extreme. I have often wondered why people are only shocked by Nazis and their brutality when what African Americans endured as slaves was no less. Even the Nazis thought that determining the percentage of blood that made you black to be too harsh. It is only on reading this book I realized that there was no basis to the one drop of blood rule ( which even black people have come to believe- so deep is the brainwashing or rather whitewashing) and that theory was touted just to keep black people in their place.

Wilkerson delineates 8 pillars of caste that are common across the three societies and gives examples from each category to illustrate her point. Endomagy is one of the pillars of caste I found fascinating as a comparison. She equates the past ban on interracial marriages in the US to the control of marriage and mating in India where traditionally people married into their own caste. Alabama was the last state in the union to overturn the ban on interracial marriage in 2000, 33 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving vs Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in all states. And yet, more than 40% of Alabamians voted against overturning it. Now, in the US and in India, legally you are allowed to marry any one you want. But only 10% of the population in India marries outside its caste and only 15% of marriages in the US are interracial. This number includes Hispanics and Asians as well. The percentage would be a lot lower if it were only blacks. Sadly, the figures speak for themselves.

Another pillar of caste that I found striking to compare is the emphasis on pollution and purity. Black people were considered impure and dirty just as Dalits who belong to the lowest echelons of the caste system in India and whose very shadows were once considered polluting and who often eat and drink from separate containers to this day. It was no different for black people till a few decades ago when they drank water from separate fountains and were not allowed to use swimming pools frequented by white people. Wilkerson cites the example of Al Bright, the only black child on the Little League Team in the town of Youngston, Ohio who was banned from using a swimming pool when his team went on a celebration outing. When parents and coaches protested, he was allowed to float on a raft without his feet touching the water, towed around the pool by the manager only after all the white kids had vacated the pool. This incident took place in 1951.   

The book traces the history of enslavement in the South from 1619 when the first Africans were brought to Virginia to the Civil War and subsequent period when the caste system was perpetuated through the Jim Crow South. Even after the abolition of slavery, the country found ways to keep black people subjugated. Wilkerson describes in detail discriminatory housing policies, unethical medical experiments and horrific lynchings where the white community would come to view the spectacle, collect body parts as souvenirs and send postcards of the event to family and friends. This was an astounding revelation to me for as a recent immigrant, I didn’t fully know or understand the extent of the horrors African Americans were subjected to in the past. I had always viewed America as the leader of the free world. But what a paradox then that the country that espouses the values of liberty and justice for all fails many of its citizens on just those counts? For unless the racism inherent in society is acknowledged and addressed, any claim to be the beacon of democracy rings hollow.

“Americans are loathe to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world. Slavery is commonly dismissed as a “sad, dark chapter” in the country’s history, It is as if the greater the distance we can create between slavery and ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces.”  

We are loathe to talk about past horrors but events that happened long ago still color our thinking. The book depicts current realities too with the backlash to Obama’s election and the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Wilkerson believes that white voters vote against their own self interest when the power they hold is threatened for the reality is that in a few decades, they will no longer be the majority of the population. She goes on to ask this uncomfortable question: ”..if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” In the US, there is controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments whereas Germany has no statues or memorials to Nazi officers and looks back upon the Third Reich as a shameful part of its history. Americans not willing to dismantle monuments is emblematic of the larger unwillingness to dismantle the system.

Wilkerson lays bare some stark and painful truths about race relations with scholarly research and compelling personal anecdotes. She describes how she was viewed with suspicion while traveling business class. She was followed in the airport and questioned by agents on a car rental company’s shuttle bus and not one passenger came to her defense. Throughout the book she employs striking metaphors to drive home her point. She likens caste variously to the foundation of an old house, to a computer operating system, and to a staged performance. “Caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.”

There are some gaps in the arguments Wilkerson puts forth. She tends to view caste as a binary and has omitted the plight of Native Americans and other minorities and does not dwell much on how class operates within caste- for instance how do we explain the success of Asian immigrants in the US who are not white? Some of the comparisons of the treatment of African American to Jews seem tenuous too. The Nazis wanted to eliminate Jews and not dominate them while black people in the US and Dalits in India were needed by the dominant class for economic exploitation. 

In addressing the caste system in India, Wilkerson focuses mainly on Brahmins and Dalits but caste is far from a two tier system in India. It is an extremely complex dynamic whose definition is broader and more nuanced. There are four main castes or ‘varna’. Interestingly, the Sanskrit word varna itself means color indicating that originally skin color was used to determine place in a hierarchy. The four castes are Brahmin, Kshatriya,Vaishya and Shudra or the priestly, the warrior, the merchant and the laborer respectively and each caste is further divided into sub castes. Dalits once known as ‘ untouchables’ and whose work involves removal of garbage and animal carcasses, cleaning toilets and sewers, are the most oppressed group. They are even excluded from the traditional classification and form a fifth caste.

There could be more than 5000 castes and sub castes in India and often a subjugated group also subjugates in turn, those they perceive to be lower on the rung. Besides the caste system is not restricted to Hindus but is practiced in some form or other by Muslims and Christians too. Caste is not the exclusive domain of religion but has insidiously seeped into Indian culture. Wilkerson cites sociological research and discusses the activism of Dalit scholar B. R. Ambedkar but does not take into account current realities in India where the government has implemented affirmative action initiatives for the marginalized and where we witness the evolution of a rapidly growing Dalit political movement to fight caste hegemony and Hindu nationalism as they continue to be targets of lynching and rape.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is illuminating. It inspired me to do some soul searching about my own heritage and my complicity in keeping the machinery going. Call it unconscious or silent bias, in the end the discrimination whether in the US or in India is part of an underlying unspoken system of hierarchy. We have accepted this system and adapted to it. I naively believed that caste was not something that was all that prevalent in urban India where I grew up and was mostly confined to rural pockets of the country. I didn’t care what castes my friends belonged to or what last names they went by. Yet, I was guilty of not protesting when the domestic helpers drank water from separate glasses or were not allowed to use the bathrooms at home. Often in a high rise I would come across separate lifts- one for the residents of the building and one ‘ for servants and dogs’. I remember being shocked and angered by it but not enough to do anything about it. Not only do we need to have empathy but ‘radical empathy’, to borrow Wilkerson’s words, to bring about social change.

Caste is an eye opening book especially for those born into privilege who need to shoulder the responsibility for the inequities in society and work to eradicate the deeply entrenched social malady but the sad part is that not everyone is willing to open their eyes to the truth. Although the book ends on a note of hope, it is a long and tortuous road ahead. And there was a part of me that wondered despondently if it is truly possible to live in a world without any implicit hierarchy of race, caste or class!