Louis Garrel as Professor Bhaer in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women

Last week, my parents saw Little Women. My mother immediately phoned me. “I think Professor Bhaer is Jewish,” she said, her voice vibrating with barely suppressed excitement. I said I didn’t think the facts supported this theory. But several days later, I got an email from her with the subject line “FYI!!!” When I clicked on the link, I saw it was a Forward piece by Eve LaPlante headed, “Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish History on Portuguese Tour.”

I knew her game: my mom regarded this as proof that Alcott, apparently proud of her Sephardic ancestry—which, I read, the family credited with some of its dark coloring—had, indeed, written in a sympathetic Jewish foil for Jo. I couldn’t help but suspect that my mother was projecting; just because she had married a Jewish guy didn’t necessarily mean her favorite childhood literary figure had. “I just don’t see the evidence,” I wrote back, not without regret. “Bhaer is pretty Christian in the later books. He’s probably a 48er. And fwiw, the actor Louis Garrel isn’t Jewish, I don’t think.”

“Look into it!” she wrote back. “You are the Bhaer detective!”

I knew what she meant, and my heart sank. You see, a couple of years ago, in these pages, I wrote a five-part investigation of the Little Women character Professor Bhaer. Why? I don’t know. There was no peg. There was certainly no clamoring demand. The resulting tell-all did not contain any dramatic reveals. Serial, it wasn’t.

It’s never fun to reread one’s own work, and less still when the text in question reveals slightly-younger-you to have been some horrible mixture of visibly mad and really boring. But in light of Greta Gerwig’s reimagined Little Women, with its truly disruptive interpretation of the Bhaer character, it seemed worth revisiting the subject. At least, according to my mom.

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The 1974 edition of ‘Aiiieeeee!’ Photo: Nancy Wong (CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)).

I initially encountered Aiiieeeee! in the winter of 2003, during my first Asian American literature course at Wesleyan University. My professor deftly outlined the major critiques that had been leveled against the anthology over the years—the narrowness of its definition of Asian America, its overtly masculine tone and underrepresentation of women, its American-born, monolingual perspective—and with each contention, I grew more indignant. The magnitude of my indignation was perhaps out of proportion with the size of its source, based as it was on my thin reading of a thin selection: no more than the twelve pages that made up the original 1974 preface. We did not read the introduction that followed, nor the selections that constituted the bulk of the anthology (although we did read two of the excerpted novels, America Is in the Heart and No-No Boy, in their entirety). I am ashamed to admit that not until recently did I actually read the entire anthology, cover to cover. Yet I would venture that this oversight is not uncommon among Asian Americanists of my generation. Indeed, if what defined Asian Americans for the editors of Aiiieeeee! was that they “got their China and Japan off the radio, off the silver screen, from television, out of comic books,” then for years perhaps what defined me as an Asian Americanist was where I didn’t get my Asian America: which is to say, from Aiiieeeee!

In short, students of Asian American literature have often been far more familiar with what is wrong with Aiiieeeee! than with Aiiieeeee! itself. From the earliest days of its publication, many Asian Americans did not hear themselves in the scream of Aiiieeeee!, did not see themselves in the “our” of its “fifty years of our whole voice.” They chafed against what they saw as the editorial limiting of “authentic” Asian Americanness to “Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese Americans, American born and raised.” This act of border drawing, by excluding Pacific Islander, Korean, and South Asian Americans (among others), further contributed to critics’ rejection of Aiiieeeee!’s brand of Asian American cultural nationalism as more divisive than unifying. Read More

An encounter with Emerson’s essays.

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman before the Rising Sun, 1818

There’s a treacherously placed bookstore in my neighborhood. To go almost anywhere from my apartment, I have to pass Walden Pond Books, and it’s next door to my usual coffee shop, so even if I didn’t decide to go in on the first pass, I probably will on the second. Many of the references in my own book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, are ones that I encountered here, in books like Braiding Sweetgrass, Spell of the Sensuous, and The Genius of Birds. The influence is so strong that when I see my book at Walden Pond, I think of it as a mushroom that grew in the store.

This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as an English major, I was quickly drawn into his writing about time and perception: nature was a “mutable cloud, which is always and never the same,” and the task was to “[detect] through the fly, through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species, through many species, the genus; through all genera, the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of organized life, the eternal unity.” There was an acid-trip quality to it that I both recognized and admired.

Reading Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.

I had been primed for Emerson’s vision of transcendence. A month earlier, I’d taken my yearly trip to the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, just north of Monterey, California. My ostensible purpose was to see the migrating shorebirds—including the sandpipers whose murmurous flocks contain more than a little of the transcendental—but it was also just to recover and hear myself think. I had never been much of a public person, and I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity.

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On the fortieth anniversary of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: an unbeliever’s rereading of Christian conceptions of the afterlife.

Still from Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger (2013)

I took one English class in college. The theme was contemporary fiction and, dutifully enough, we read DeLillo, Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Beckett, Coetzee, and—this last author was not like the others—Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Housekeeping appeared midsemester like a kind of anachronism. It was markedly domestic, reserved, inflected with lyricism, not self-serious but definitely sincere in its wonderment. At its first appearance, in 1980, spellbound reviewers praised its humble poetry, its interest in the ephemeral, the fidelity to small-town life.

Housekeeping, now nearing its fortieth anniversary, has returned to me throughout my writing career. Like those enraptured critics, in my first encounters I read for language, for voice, for craft. I loved this book. In graduate school, in a seminar on the literature of travel and trains, my professor recited the opening line to the class with a kind of disgusted glee: “My name is Ruth.” What kind of beginning was this? How had such an otherwise beautifully written book gotten away with it? The declaration—harsh, direct—is perhaps more shocking in the context of the rest of the novel, which proceeds with the gentle indifference of understatement. That opening chapter describes a mass drowning as no more upsetting than an exploratory dive: a train “nosed” into a lake, Ruth tells us, as calmly as a “weasel,” claiming all the passengers within as the water “sealed itself” over their souls. The scene is so soft, so seductive, it may as well have been narrated by a ghost. I remember we spent the remaining hour of that class discussing whether drowning truly was the most romantic way to die. I wonder now if perhaps parting from one’s body becomes more appallingly beautiful when alibied by the suggestion of an afterlife.

Housekeeping was unique among major anglophone novels of the eighties and nineties, a counterpoint to the anxiety and irony of hysterical realism. But it has also proved an outlier in Robinson’s own, formidable oeuvre; unlike her subsequent essay collections and novels, it has not been enshrined as an explicit exploration of her Calvinist faith. It is “about people who have not managed to connect with a place, a purpose, a routine or another person,” wrote the New York Times in 1981. But the detachment goes much deeper than a failure to connect. Certainly Housekeeping “is not about housekeeping at all,” but it is about the “light work” we do to stay alive, on earth, as we wait to join the world beyond. I see now that it is about waiting to die, and embracing death as a return. “Ascension,” Ruth says, “seemed at such times a natural law.” At the heart of the novel lies an unmistakable preoccupation with Christian conceptions of the afterlife.

I myself am uncomfortable about death. I don’t know where to put it. At age nine, I almost died in the kind of freak accident that Housekeeping’s lyricism so gorgeously blunts, an experience that has had a subtle but profound influence on my life ever since. Perhaps I ought to have flinched from a book that muffles the raw mechanics of a death, having once been within hearing range myself. But in fact it is easy to dissociate from that close call. My own accident doesn’t seem like something that happened to me. The memory, like that opening chapter, is muted, a scene overheard a long time ago. I spent weeks recovering in the ICU attached to the university where my parents taught and worked. The blinds were always drawn, and patients tended to slip in and out of consciousness—it was hard to tell if it was day or night, metaphor or real life. Like the characters in Housekeeping, we existed somewhere in between. Perhaps this is why I first loved the book, for the way it made a seduction out of dying. However, I didn’t register its explicit fascination with liminality—its orientation toward death—in my first reads. And now that I do, I question it.

The year after my accident, a fourth-grade classmate was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. This, to me, is the more violent memory. I sat next to him in math. I watched him lose his hair, his composure, his ability to perform simple calculations. He had tantrums over his homework sheets, slamming his fists on the desk. It was a tantrum against the enormity of all that his own body was taking from him—there was no metaphoric potential in this. Then, one day, he gave up. And there, in the giving up, the stories and imagery began. Before he died, he sat beneath a night sky with his mother and pointed into the stars. Will I go there? he asked. She answered the only way a Christian mother can: Yes.

I write novels for a partial living. It should be no terrible leap of the imagination to believe: a little boy finally at peace among the stars. I suspect Marilynne Robinson is able to lean into this scene. But I’m afraid I can’t.

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