Maia in Yonkers

The story starts out in a panic. Maia is desperately trying to get ahold of her sister, Lela. She is in a frantic state because, “Gogi didn’t pass his interview at the embassy.” It seems as if a lot of work has gone into Gogi getting this interview. “Gogi’s visit has been a fragile thing to arrange. He bears only a minor resemblance to the photo in the passaport. The passport belongs to a boy at his new school. For $2000 the boy’s parents have agreed to let Gogi borrow it, and arranged for an uncle in Mamoroneck to send a formal invitation.” This must be extremely important if they are willing to go to such lengths, and take such drastic measures in order to make sure everything goes smoothly.

When Maia finally get’s through to Lela she has startling news. She tells her that he passed the interview but when Lela asks to speak to him Maia says, “Just don’t panic. He’s at the hospital. I didn’t want to scare you, he smoked something. He was so happy after he passed the interview, I let him go to Dato’s house. I couldn’t tell him no. Another guy was there, painting the place. He gave them some garbage.” She then get’s extremely upset and says, “I can’t control him! What do you want me to do, lock him up?”

She then sets the scene. “Dato, the other boy, Lela tells her, passed out. That was when Gogi dashed into the alley to flag a cab to take them to the hospital. But when he came back to the house, he saw the painter forcing brandy down his throat.” The painter tells him it’s, “so the police will think he got drunk. You know, they don’t dig deep here.”

We are then told that taking care of Gogi was never in her sister’s plans. This makes it seem as though Gogi may have been an accidental pregnancy. “Three years ago Lela was still working in the Finance Ministry. Now she relies on Maia to send the monthly cash: $700, more than enough to keep Gogi enrolled in private school, pay for his English classes and swimming lessons, and cover Lela’s expenses.” It seems as though Maia is the one supporting Gogi, at least monetarily.

Better Half

The story starts out with an explanation of the couples’ fights. We are told that, “they were both twenty-two and married ten months.” Things were taken too far when Ryan, “grabbing the glass jar off the counter and tossing it with a heavy dead pitch at the wall behind her head. It crashed a foot from where Anya stood, shattering glass and spilling change.” This shows the change from their verbal fights to the start of something more physical.

We are given the background to the couples relationship. “Ten months earlier they’d driven to the country courthouse in White plains, just two weeks after Anya’s mother had called from Dolsk to say her father was recovering from a heart attack.” We are then told that Anya hasn’t seen her parents in a year and might not for another two to three years. This can put a huge strain on a relationship and cause large amounts of stress and tension between a couple. Despite all of this, “it was time for a favor: marry now and sort out their feelings later.” This seems to explain why they are fighting. If they got married before sorting out their feelings, these bottled up feelings were bound to come out later. They couldn’t expect that marriage would just fix everything.

Something that stuck out to me was when Anya said, “She’d expected the hard part would be getting Ryan to agree, to offer something more than an ambivalent moan.” It is really sad that she feels as if she has to convince him to marry her. It should be a mutual decision, and something they both want, not something that is forced on them.

The story then jumps to Anya’s past, when she when to Kennebunkport to work for the summer. She met a man named James, who, “all season she’d found James’s ponytail and overuse of her name to be on the lecherous side of friendly. She’d fallen for both early on, and all that had stopped her from going to bed with him was the fact that one or another of the work-travel girls was always willing to stay at his parties.” She seems to be guarded and have a wall up. She also seems to be a bit reserved. We are then told that, “in her heart she still believed in being pursued.” This shows a side of elegance and class to Anya. She has traditional beliefs and isn’t going to settle for anyone.

When Anya went back to try to get her resident papers the woman behind the desk, Erin, asked Anya about her father and then said that she may get to see him very soon. Anya informs us, “It was the same thing she’d said the first time Anya had come into her office, right after she and Ryan were married and Anya had wanted to start applying for her resident papers.” This explains why Anya and Ryan were so rushed to get married. It seems as though Anya needed to marry Ryan to become a resident, and be able to go back and visit her sick father.

Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

This story starts out with a man dreaming about writing a poem and about his father coming to visit. When she wakes up, he realizes his father has arrived early. He says to himself, “It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.” This makes us believe that he hasn’t seen his family in some time, and also may allude to a small estrangement between he and his father.

We are shown that it seems there is a definite distance between him and his father. He seems to have moved to Iowa and away from his Vietnamese heritage, while his father is still very “old school”. His father says, “A day lived, a sea of knowledge earned.” The son then says, “He had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it.” My hypothesis about them being estranged was proven later when we are told, “I hadn’t seen him in three years”, referring to his father.

He then tells us a little bit more about the situation and says, “The truth was, he’d come at the worst possible time. I was in my last year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; it was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much.” We are then introduced to someone named Linda, who appears to be his girlfriend. He says, “I told her my father doesn’t know about her.” She said nothing. “We just don’t talk about that kind of stuff.”

In order to cure his writers block his friend tells him he needs to write about Vietnam. He tells him, “Ethnic Literature’s hot. It’s important too.” He doesn’t go for it and replies, “I’m sick of Ethnic Lit.” Instead his friend Faulkner says, “he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

We are given some history on the relationship between him and his father. He tells us, “My father was drawn to weakness, even as he tolerated none in me. He was a soldier, he said once, as if that explained everything. With me, he was all proverbs and regulations. No personal phone calls. No female friends. No extracurricular reading. When I was in primary school, he made me draw up a daily ten-hour study timetable for the summer holidays, and punished me when I deviated from it.” He concludes by saing, “I learned to hate him with a straight face.” This explains a lot about why the things are the way they are between them, and how their relationship has suffered as a result of how his father acted when he was growing up.

He starts to think about his past and what his father had done for him, and also how he had abused him. He says, “here is what I believe: we forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is not made in our name. To my father there was no other name—only mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. His sacrifice was complete and compelled him to everything that happened. To all that, I was inadequate.” It seems as if he feels overshadowed by his father, and he feels like he can’t live up to what his father expects of him.

The Lazarus Project p.29-84

The scene starts with him waiting for Rora at Fitzgerald’s, Mary’s favorite Irish pub, “the place where we connected with her Irish roots by way of imbibing stout.” While he is waiting we are shown an insecure side to him. He says, “whenever I waited for someone, I spent some time contemplating the possibility of that person never coming. I sometimes imagined Mary not coming back home from the hospital; I imagined her so sick of my writerly ambition and the accompanying underemployment that one day she would just decide not to return from work and leave me hanging there until I recognized that my parasitic existence was no longer acceptable to her.” This was a very powerful message, in which he shows us how vulnerable and paranoid he is. He then goes on to say, “expecting Rora to stand me up, habitually anticipating humiliation.” He expects the worst and imagines the negative in life. He is full of insecurities about every aspect of his life.

During the meal, we are shown an insight to his background and how he became the person he did. He tells us, “I was here when the war started; I had odd jobs, until I finally started teaching English as a second language. Then the column gig came in; I wrote about the experiences of my students, not all unlike my own: looking for a job, getting the Social Security number, finding an apartment, becoming a citizen, meeting Americans, dealing with nostalgia, that sort of thing. The column did pretty well, though it paid very little.” This tells us a lot about his past, and helps us to understand his life and how he got to where he is at the present time. He is sort of a “self-made” man, and was able to do very well for himself considering where he came from.

He then goes on to inform us, “Three years ago I married an American woman, and she was great.” He met her at a singles night at the Art Institute, where he says, “loneliness, transnational as it is, had brought us together.” This is a very honest side of him, and shows us a possible vulnerability. He tells us that he has a speech that he often delivers to avoid awkward silences at dinner parties. People are always, “gushing over the neatness of my immigrant story; many would recall an ancestor who came to America and followed the same narrative trajectory: displacement, travails, redemption, success.” This seems to be a common story among immigrants, and it is interesting to me that he has enough confidence to tell this story to a room through of strangers. He then goes on to show a bit of insecurity and says, “I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that I had lost my teaching job and that I was pretty much supported by Mary.” This also shows a bit of his insecurities and that he may be putting on a façade in front of other people.

Something that struck me when I was reading, was what happened when they were eating at the restaurant and the waitress brought them the check. Rora says to the waitress, “Ah, that is too much. Can we negotiate?” “The waitress seemed tired and emaciated, her flaxen hair slipping the grip of a couple of clips, but she smiled. He was a big charmer, Rora was. In my country, charmers used to be as endemic as land mines were now.” This shocked me when I read it…the thought of someone being able to negotiate the price of their meal at a restaurant astounded me. I though it was a crazy concept, one that is definitely not common these days.