When we turn away from the news, we will confront a startling loneliness. It is the loneliness of life. The loneliness of thinking, of having no one to think for us, and of uncertainty. It is a loneliness that was always there but that was obscured by an illusion, and we will miss the illusion. We will miss the illusion that we had a place in history, the sense that we were celebrities ourselves, actors on the grand stage. We will miss the voices and images that came to us daily and convinced us they were our friends. We may, if we listen closely to the echo inside this loneliness, hear the expectant beating of our own hearts and understand that what we longed for, what we asked for, and what was given us was a story—a story of such grand metaphysical proportions that reality could never meet it. Reality could only meet it by inflaming itself, and this was the danger—the danger that made our hearts beat faster and the story grow stronger. Then we will see the news for what it was: the narrator of our national epic. “The news of the day” was the next chapter in an evaporating book. And we will miss tuning in each day to hear that voice that cuts boredom and loneliness in its solution of the present tense, that like Scheherazade assures us the story is still unfolding and always will be. I don’t know whether we can give it up. We may need it too much, miss it too sharply. We may never get to the quiet place where we can read a poem, because this will mean distinguishing happiness from pleasure and understanding that happiness means boredom, means loneliness. Means life among one another, in the world: a place where drama subsides and horizons of time stretch to months, to years. Are you not bored already? Who will narrate our epic now? Will we have one? What will bind us? No one knows. What we do know is that some part of us longs for our dreams to come true. Dream of monsters long enough and you bring them into being. We make what we imagine real. And who then reminds us—and what must happen before we remember—that the drama we want in our stories is not the drama we want in our lives?
Though in some ways the front-page decisions have become secondary in today’s 24-hour news cycle, many reporters and editors still measure their success by how many of their stories land there.
It is still a tradition in the newsroom to commemorate a reporter’s first front-page story with a metal plate of the page used by our local plant. (So far, no one seems satisfied with a screen grab.)
When I walked through the restaurant’s double doors for a shift early last December, I noticed a small Christmas tree bearing the weight of candy canes and small carryout cartons. Two thousand napkins folded with bulk paper napkins sat nearby, on emergency reserve. One thousand more new plates had been ordered in anticipation for Christmas Day’s service; so had more forks, more spoons, more glasses. Fifteen hundred ducks were ordered for just Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, nearly 3,000 egg rolls, crab rangoons, and dumplings made. The bar section is usually an area of respite for the family when there’s the odd break, but the days before Christmas, it becomes a storage and organizing area where deliveries stack up and the new dishes rest in their crates.
Despite the restaurant’s history and the long history of Jewish families eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas, Christmas at Princess Garden is only a 10-year-old tradition. It started when families, mostly Jewish, asked if the restaurant would open for them during the holiday. “I came to America and started working at 19, and now I’m 66,” Robert says. “I’ve seen customers get married, have kids, and then seen those kids bring in their own kids into the restaurant. We’ve fed people through birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Princess Garden is their family gathering restaurant.”
“What are you, Tessa?” the little girl was asked. We think we know our friends intimately, as “other selves” as Aristotle also described it. But this can be a damaging illusion, closing off discovery. I am fortunate. McWatt is a storyteller who in Shame on Me has given me the means to rediscover her: a gift that every reader of her eloquent and moving book can share with me.
It has always been like this: I slept
in a pack on your belly, wanting
to knit myself into your lobe and herd.
I needed to get down into you.
Not for that city of the level sun,
Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze –
The shadeless, sleepless city of white days,