A Portable Magic

Somehow the year is halfway over now, which seems preposterous because I’m still having to remind myself that it’s 2026. It’s actually not terrible right now, temperature-wise, but we’ve already had a fire quite close to us (thankfully very quickly extinguished) and a truly bonkers hailstorm/flood, so it’s been unpredictable!

In Books…

• The Night Watchman: In the 1950s, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa live on a small reservation in North Dakota. Thomas Wazhashk, who lives there, is a busy man. He’s the titular night watchman, guarding a factory near the reservation to support his family, materially not well-off but full of love. He’s also the chair of the tribe’s advisory committtee to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is supposed to earn a salary but the tribe is so poor he can’t bring himself to take it. But it’s in that capacity that he learns that a Mormon U.S. Senator is proposing a new bill to terminate the tribe’s federal recognition. This is pitched as “freedom” for the tribe from government supervision, but it’s all too obvious that it’s meant to actually free the government from its treaty responsibilities to the tribe. He begins to organize a trip to DC to fight this threat to his home and his people. Meanwhile, his niece, Patrice Parenteau, is a worker at the same factory and on a mission of her own. Her older sister Vera left for the Twin Cities with her boyfriend, but hasn’t been in touch in several months. Patrice, whose quest to shed her childhood nickname of “Pixie” seems doomed to failure, is determined to locate her sister and manages to scrape together the time off and the money to make the trip to try to find her. Her brief experience in the Cities is odd beyond anything she might have imagined. These are the two main plot threads, but there are plenty more side stories. Thomas may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a friend who died of tuberculosis at boarding school. A pair of Mormon missionaries come to the reservation to try to to save souls and things do not quite go according to plan. A young Indian boxer nurtures a crush on Pixie. His older, white boxing coach who works as a teacher on the reservation also nurtures a crush on Pixie, but she does not have any interest in his courtship. An Indian grad student endures real poverty as she tries to complete her studies, and finds to her surprise that her research might actually have some useful purpose. It’s an ambitious novel with a wide scope. As I’ve come to expect from Louise Erdrich, her character work is compelling. Thomas, Patrice, their friends and families feel like actual people and I was emotionally invested in what became of them. There are very heavy themes at play here: the effects of alcoholism on Indian families, sexual abuse of Native American women, the hideous legacy of Indian boarding schools, the injustices perpetuated against Native Americans by the United States government, the prejudices against Native Americans held by white people, economic instability in Indian communities, and more. But Erdrich’s strength as a storyteller, her inventiveness and use of humor, keep it from feeling like the tragedy porn or trite “inspirational” pablum (particularly the story of Thomas, based on Erdrich’s own grandfather) that the material could have in less assured hands. What kept it from being truly great, for me, was the dual narrative structure. There are certainly shared themes and parallels between the parts of the work that deal with Thomas and those that deal with Patrice (and obviously they share a time and a place), but the storylines felt too disconnected to me to really make them feel like they should be told alongside each other in the way they were. That being said, this is still a very good book and one I’d enthusiastically recommend!
• No-No Boy: When Ichiro and his parents were sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho, he was asked two questions that would forever change his life. Would he renounce any loyalty to Japan/pledge loyalty to the United States, and would he join the military if called upon to do so? Many young Japanese-American men said yes to both of those questions and did in fact serve in the armed forces, but Ichiro made a different choice. He said no, and went to prison for two years. Once World War II was over, he is released. With no prospects or anywhere else to go, he rejoins his parents, who have bought a small grocery store and live in the apartment above it. He faces a difficult reintroduction to his own community, where many veterans of Japanese heritage express their disgust with his refusal to fight for their country by cursing at him, spitting at him, or even physically attacking him. But one veteran, an old acquaintance named Kenji, is kind, despite having lost most of one leg in the fighting. Another childhood friend, Freddie, also went to prison rather than join up and his despair at the hostility of the world towards his choice leads to self-destructive choices. Ichiro stuggles to figure out a path forward for himself in a world where it seems he may be forever regarded as an outsider and any chance for the American dream might be lost. As a reader who is really drawn to psychologically rich characters, this book was a bit of a struggle for me. Ichiro, and everyone he meets, aren’t really meant to be “real people”. They’re meant to be symbolic of types of people. Ichiro’s parents, Japanese immigrants who have always meant to return to Japan and refused to turn against their home country, are representations of one sort of person who existed at the time. Their dour, austere household is the opposite side of the coin from Kenji’s, who eat pie and love baseball and are full of warmth and love. Ichiro’s brother, Taro, only seems to exist to join the military as soon as he’s allowed to enlist out of shame for his brother’s refusal, there’s no sense of any shared childhood or love between them because they’re not meant to be understood as siblings but as foils. Freddie is an example of what might happen if someone in Ichiro’s position internalized the loathing expressed by others. I intellectually understand why it was written that way, the whole book is clearly meant as an exploration of the tensions around the war, internment, and military service/the refusal of same among Japanese-Americans rather than as a chronicle of a single fully realized person. This was a perspective that had never been written about before this book was published, indeed, it seems that this may have been one of the first books ever published by a Japanese-American writer when it was released in 1957. I had an easier time with it when I stopped being frustrated by it not being the kind of book I would have rather it had been, and tried to appreciate it for what it was. But there’s a difference between appreciating something and enjoying it, and this novel did not bridge that gap for me. It’s hard to affirmatively recommend for that reason, but at the same time, it’s something that I’m glad to have read because I think it’s an important portrait of an era of American history that’s hard to reckon with. It’s absolutely worth reading but it may not be an easy or enjoyable experience.
• How to Say Babylon: As a white American, when I think of Rastafarianism, I think of Bob Marley and dreadlocks and marijuana. After having read a book about Haile Selassie a while back, I did know that the name he was known by during his early life, Ras Tafari, was the origin of the tradition’s name. But I would have been hard pressed to tell you anything else about it, or what it actually means to be a Rastafarian. For Safiya Sinclair, it was all she knew from her earliest years. Her parents were practicing Rastafarians since before she was born, despite opposition to the faith by their own families. Contrary to what one might think, Rastafarians are not well-regarded in Jamaica and were persecuted by police and the government. This persecution fostered a very uncentralized structure to the belief system, the strong patriarchal tendency of which encouraged men to set strict guidelines for the women and children in their own families to follow according to their own inclinations. Despite her father’s always-simmering anger, related in part to his own harsh childhood and professional frustrations in trying to build his reggae music career beyond performing Bob Marley covers for wealthy tourists at resorts, Safiya was close to him as a child…though not as close as she was to her mother, who worked essentially entirely in the home. Under her mother’s tutelage, Safiya and her three younger siblings grew up bright and curious, and she was even able to earn a scholarship to attend an exclusive private school with mostly white students. But as Safiya grew, her strong will brought her into conflict with her father, and as she goes through puberty his protectiveness, wanting to shield her from the temptations of “Babylon” (the non-Rastafari world), becomes an obsessive need to tighten his control over her. The abuse begins as verbal, but escalates to physical. She desperately seeks an escape route, pouring her heartache into reading and poetry. She wants to go to college in the United States, but there’s not nearly enough money for that. A career as a model beckons, the lanky body that made her the subject of middle school taunts being perfect for displaying clothes, but her fear of what her father would do if she cut off her Rasta dreadlocks limits her versatility. When she manages to get her poetry published, she’s able to establish tenuous regular connections with the outside world, including a high-profile much older male poet who genuinely helps her improve her work but whose intentions are not necessary without ulterior motives. Tensions rise as economic pressures mount and the family is forced to constantly relocate, and a final, explosive confrontation helps propel Safiya out of her father’s home and into her future. I’ve come to find with memoir that my ability to connect with the book is highly dependent on the writer’s voice…even what should be interesting can fall flat if I’m not enjoying the prose style. Sinclair’s background as a poet means that this book shines on a prose level, the elegance and beauty of her writing apparent without disguising or prettying up the ugly things she recounts. I’ve gotten much more sensitive to “bad/abusive/neglectful childhood” memoirs since becoming a parent myself, which means a lot of what Sinclair described, particularly the violent beatings by her father, was difficult to read. But I also felt like I learned new things, about Jamaica and Rastafari and how a person can survive brutality with their spirit intact. Sinclair is particularly skilled at rendering her parents as complex, multifaceted people. Her father is not painted as a completely malevolent despite his heinous behavior, but rather a person with whom she had a complicated relationship, close as a child and increasingly alienated as she became older, and who had his own trauma. She does not excuse him, but she doesn’t demonize him either. Her relationship with her mother is even more sticky, encompassing an intense bond of love but also guilt, shame, anger, complicity in abuse. And she refuses to wrap it up in a nice little “I’m happy now, things are great!” bow. It’s challenging subject matter, but despite a bit of a slow start it’s very compelling and I do recommend it.
• The Future Perfect: A daughter is born into a young marriage in South Korea, forever altering its trajectory. The mother experiences severe post-partum depression, eventually snapping herself out of it enough to go with her young daughter to the United States, where she studies architecture. Eventually mother and daughter return to South Korea, where the girl initially struggles to fit in with her classmates but soon re-integrates into the country of her birth. When her mother discovers her fooling around with a boyfriend as a teenager, though, she’s pulled back out of Korea and sent to boarding school in the US, where she works feverishly to live up to her mother’s expectations even as the two argue constantly. College follows, and the gulf between mother and daughter widens, before the pandemic brings them back into each other’s orbit. I’m traditionally drawn to mother-daughter stories, and it’s not that there’s not good material here on that front. But for me, the book’s stylistic flourishes overwhelm its merits. First, it never names either the mother or daughter, which is something that I don’t necessarily hate but can veer into annoying. It’s obviously deliberate here, meant to reinforce the narrative’s commentary on the ways in which both women see each other through the lens of their familial roles, but I still found it more irritating than not. A bigger flaw was the use of second-person singular narration for the daughter. She is always referred to as “you”. This is highly unusual in novel-length narrative and rarely successful. It feels like it needs to be earned, the author needs to use it in a way that enhances the story. I don’t think Cay Kim quite made it work. If the book had been narrated by the mother, that would have been one thing, but she is continually referred to as “she” throughout. Who, then, is meant to be the narrator? There’s no first-person singular perspective, and the work does not really engage with the idea of an omniscient deity. It’s distracting, and takes away from what would otherwise be a promising if not entirely realized debut. Both mother and daughter are often sympathetic, sometimes not, and the inability to see each other as fully realized humans that drives their conflict is convincingly rendered. The prose is strong, with some lovely turns of phrase. The plot isn’t particularly well-developed, but it’s also not particularly the point. I wish it had been written from a different narrative perspective, I think I would have been able to connect with with it better. As is, I don’t know that I can affirmatively recommend it, but I will be curious to see what she writes next.
• Nervous Conditions: Tambu introduces herself to the reader by telling us that she was not sad when her older brother Nhamo died, and then tells us why. Growing up poor in rural Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe, it does not matter that she is smart and wants to learn. To go beyond a basic education costs money, and that money will not go towards Tambu. Investing in school for a girl, who will be expected to marry and leave her family, would not make sense given that resources are scarce. So when her uncle Babamukuru, who along with his wife Maiguru was educated abroad in England and serves as the dean of the local missionary school, takes one of the children to be educated, of course it is Nhamo. But Nhamo dies, and with no other sons, Tambu gets her chance to go live on the mission with her cousins and go to school. Though she had resented the way Nhamo came to look at their home with snobbish eyes, she too is changed by the small luxuries that come to be familiar to her. She becomes close with her cousin Nyasha, who has been changed by her time in England and no longer fits quite comfortably in her African life. Nyasha is willful, standing up to her father in ways that frighten the more cautious Tambu. But as Tambu grows, she starts to find some seeds of rebellion within herself too. She studies diligently, though, eventually earning her way into a scholarship for an even more prestigious Catholic school, pulling herself that much further away from the world she was born into. This is the first novel in a trilogy and it feels like it, though I am surprised that nearly 20 years elapsed between the first and second book because the story feels incomplete as a stand-alone. Even for a coming-of-age novel, which almost necessarily has an open ending, this one felt particularly in need of a continuation of Tambu’s story. But not just Tambu’s! One of the novel’s real strengths is the way it shows the costs of traditional patriarchal structures in the lives of multiple women. Tambu lives in constant fear that the lucky break that’s been dropped into her lap will be snatched away, not resisting her uncle’s dictates until he issues one she cannot abide and earning his anger. Maiguru, her aunt, is just as educated as her uncle and brings money into the household with her work but is still expected to be subservient to her husband, spending her holidays preparing food that she helped buy for her husband’s family, afforded no choice in the matter. Nyasha, who spent her early childhood in her native country but then lived several years in England, suffers the most from the tension of knowing that the way she’s expected to be is not the same as it is elsewhere for others. She’s perhaps the most direct representation of the effects of colonialism, which otherwise buzzes constantly on the outside of the story, seldom intruding directly into the narrative. Her constant conflict with her father is sublimated into conflict with her own body as she develops an eating disorder, a profoundly Western ailment, even as her relatives depend on her family’s largesse to be able to add meat into their diets. She is caught in between worlds, using her mother tongue only with difficulty. I am very curious what becomes of her, of Tambu, of Maiguru, and the rest of their family, especially as their country changes. This is a slow-moving character-heavy coming-of-age story, light on plot, but if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy (I do!), I’d recommend checking this one out!
• American Street: Arriving in Michigan after nearly an entire lifetime in Haiti was always going to be a hard transition, but when teenage Fabiola’s mother is detained by immigration on their initial arrival to the country in New Jersey, things feel nearly impossible for her. Her Aunt Jo has long been a major source of financial support for the mother and daughter, but it’s only after Fabiola arrives in the small house in Detroit that her mother’s sister shares with her three daughters that she starts to wonder just how all that money was made. Aunt Jo seems to spend most of her time resting, her oldest cousin Chantal goes to community college, and twins Princess and Primadonna are in the same private high school Fabiola begins attending. As Fabiola sets up a vodou altar in the room she shares with Chantal and prays to the deities to help her mother, she becomes aware of more unsettling things around the house…why is Chantal, a very bright high achiever, not enrolled in one of the prestigious four-year universities she dreamed of? Why does Donna (and indeed, her entire family) tolerate the abuse of her long-time boyfriend Dray? It’s through Dray, though, that she meets Kasim, who is kind-hearted and courts her sweetly. When a cop approaches Fabiola as part of an investigation into tainted drugs that killed a white girl in the city’s tony suburbs, offering to connect her with her mother in return for helping connect Dray to the crime, it seems like a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. But things that seem too good to be true, it’s usually because they are. As a Michigander and even a native Detroiter (though my mom and I left the city when I was three), I really appreciated the work Ibi Zoboi did to develop the setting, it felt very rooted in the real place, including a trip to a Coney Island. She also provides a fascinating glimpse into the belief system of Haitian vodou, which is of course quite different than what is stereotyped as “voodoo”.But this book may be the clearest sign yet that I just need to go through the remaining young adult lit on my to-be-read list with a fine-tooth comb and purge most of it, because despite the fact that it’s reasonably well-executed, I just could not really get into it. I found Fabiola a frustratingly shallow character. We begin the book with her distress over her separation from her mother, which is sympathetically rendered and I expected to be the central plot element of the narrative. But it seems to fade into the background quickly as she gets oriented in her new social environment, makes friends, and falls in love, and ends up feeling manufactured to answer the question of why a Haitian immigrant teenager would think to cooperate with cops rather than the emotional core of the story. She also seems surprisingly incurious about her cousins, learning virtually nothing about Chantal despite sharing a room with her until she needs to for plot purposes. Her relationships with everything, including love interest Kasim, are poorly developed. The actual prose is the high point, Zoboi’s writing is lovely. The plot was hampered, for me, by a late turn into magical realism in a way that I’d thought the narrative had previously left pleasingly ambiguous. I likely would have found this much more resonant as an actual teenager, but as someone who has grown up to become the sort of reader I am as an adult, it didn’t quite work. I can’t recommend it for a general readership, but a someone in the correct age bracket looking for stories about immigration would likely get a lot out of it.
• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: Amy Chua’s Chinese immigrant parents raised incredibly accomplished daughters: Amy is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and her sisters include a graduate of Yale Law School and a Harvard M.D./Ph.D. So when Amy became a parent, she was determined to raise her daughters with the same strict standards she was brought up with herself. She emphasizes that what she calls “Chinese parenting”, while common among immigrant parents (particularly Asians), is not exclusively limited to any ethnic group. Rather, it’s defined by holding very high standards and expecting your children to achieve them. This is a book that has been controversial since it was published 15 years ago, but it was short enough and I was curious enough to want to read it for myself. Amy quickly runs through her own background, including marrying a Yale Law professor and eventually becoming one herself (including the story of how she bombed her own initial interview process for a position at the school, only securing one several years later) before turning into the meat of the narrative: the way she raised her daughters Sophia and Lulu. The childhood she describes is something that would bear little resemblance to what many native-born Americans with native-born parents would find familiar. The girls are each assigned an instrument in preschool (piano for Sophia, violin for Lulu), and the lives of the entire family revolve around those instruments. Amy is determined that they excel at music and expects that the girls will work harder than anyone else to achieve that aim. Indeed, stories about the lengths Amy goes to regarding her daughters and music end up being quite a bit of the story. She expects them to practice several hours every day, precluding playdates with their peers and even tracking down pianos on vacation so that Sophia can get time in. While Sophia is a very typical eldest daughter about it all, dutifully complying with her mother’s demands for her playing (and high performance scholastically too, of course), Lulu has to be coerced, badgered, and bullied into working with the violin. Amy is not shy about recounting their constant screaming arguments about practicing, escalating in intensity and seriousness as Lulu gets older. While the “virtuous cycle” (constant practice leads to steady improvement, leading to increased confidence and enjoyment, leading to more practice) seems to work with Sophia, Lulu never ceases to resist her mother. Eventually it all comes to an impasse, and Amy has to decide what price she’s willing to pay to stick to her strict parenting ideals. This is actually much more a memoir of being a parent than a “parenting book”, though Amy clearly believes strongly in the overall parenting method she chose for her girls. There are some anecdotes in here that seem designed to inspire controversy, particularly the time Amy rejects the birthday cards that her daughters made by hand (obviously quickly and sloppily) when they were still quite young. Amy is clearly no fool and I expect she included that kind of material knowing it would feed the discourse and in turn, feed book sales. Those sorts of stories aside, though, I was surprised by how anodyne much of the book was. Amy works, she takes care of the two Samoyed dogs she got despite the strictures against pet ownership she was raised with, she seeks out the best music teachers for her daughters and oversees their practicing, she gets them ready for various high-pressure auditions. I felt exhausted just reading about it, though the writing itself is quite lively and often much funnier than I expected. There was little, though, that I found especially compelling from an “advice I’d take” standpoint, except for perhaps her framing of Chinese parenting as expecting your children to be competent and building their confidence by setting standards that presume that they are capable. She does engage with the criticism that the end goal might seem to be having children who reflect well on her for ego’s sake, arguing that investing so heavily, both in terms of time and emotional engagement, in her children’s success, knowing full well they would argue with and resent her, was much more difficult than going with the flow and cutting them slack that might lead to missed opportunities. There are a lot of ways to show love for one’s children, and doing everything one can to give them the best possible chance to achieve success as defined in one’s culture and milieu is one of them. On the other hand, there are many, many children (including Amy’s own husband) that succeed despite being raised by Western parents. This is not a great book, or even really a particularly good one. It’s much less dramatic than the controversy would lead you to believe. I think aspects of the parenting she recounts would be upsetting to some people. I can’t recommend it, but if you’re curious about it, it’s a quick read.

In Life…

• Home repair drama: We had someone out to the house to give us an estimate on some HVAC improvements, who found a broken pipe, and then the plumber figured out the pipe in question was our main sewer drain and it was very broken in a way that required remediation work, which meant we had to be out of the house until the full repair could be completed…which took nearly a week. I am always thankful for my wonderful in-laws but never more so than this month!
• I was named to a local commission: I’ve been feeling like I wanted to get more involved in the community as C gets bigger and bigger, and a spot on the local parks and rec board opened up, so I tossed my hat in the ring and I was picked! As a very frequent user of the system, and someone with long experience in government processes, this feels like a natural fit and I’m excited to volunteer my time for it!