No one prepared me for the heartbreak of losing my first language. It doesn’t feel like the sudden, sharp pain of losing someone you love, but rather a dull ache that builds slowly until it becomes a part of you. My first language, Cantonese, is the only one I share with my parents, and, as it slips from my memory, I also lose my ability to communicate with them. When I tell people this, their eyes tend to grow wide with disbelief, as if it’s so absurd that I must be joking. “They can’t speak English?” they ask. “So how do you talk to your parents?” I never have a good answer. The truth is, I rely on translation apps and online dictionaries for most of our conversations.
Sure, Marvel’s newest superhero flick, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, impresses with its high-flying martial arts fight scenes, the usual show-stopping, Disney-caliber visual effects, and a groundbreaking Asian superhero taking center stage.
But for advocates in San Francisco’s Chinese community, the movie’s trailer perked up eyebrows for a totally different reason.
That San Francisco Muni bus—now that was a show-stopper.
The unanimous consensus, and most obvious answer, is movies feel too long now because they have to set up potential sequels. Movies can no longer “just end” and leave some loose threads up to the viewer. Everything has to be resolved in order to set up the next story. “Movies now complete the ending so much that they actually start the next thing,” says one prominent screenwriter. “So many movies now end with the beginning of the sequel.”
Such an odd thing, packing a rucksack. It’s an act of austerity that liberates even as it frustrates. For every item to earn its place on my puny shoulders, it must be life-preserving in some way. I limit myself to 26.5 pounds, casting out the frivolous, the inessential. I check weather forecasts, tear spines from books, put things in—paints, camera lenses, walnuts—then throw them out. Every time I toss away an item, I feel a swift stab of anxiety followed by a ripple of lightness. So that even as I shunt the pack onto my back, I experience a sense of weightlessness. I have become disencumbered. Free. My life whittled down to the bone.
What a treat it is to have this baker's dozen of stories in one volume. The collection is bookended on one end by the title tale, which was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1966, and on the other by a powerful new story, written in 2020, which checks in on a pair of Wolitzer's longtime recurring characters just as the novel coronavirus pandemic hits New York.