I get the sense that immigrant fiction as a genre already felt dated by the time I started writing. But if I love the endless domestic fiction of bored, lustful white people who hate their suburban hells and their Subarus and their families, why can’t they love my domestic fiction back? I want to write about my life in the suburbs, too, being raised mostly by my grandma while my parents worked. Talking back to her, being beaten by her, hating her, loving her, being with her.
Writing food as an immigrant body is always fraught. Food memory in so-called immigrant fiction has its own constellation of cliches all of which can and have been commodified, translated into English, sentimentalized on the internet (do you remember the jokes around cut fruit that haunted Asian diaspora Twitter a few years back?), used to sell cookbooks and TV shows. Food is the salve of the immigrant child brought to them by their otherwise stoic, silent immigrant family in the popular imagination.
There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed at first blush like a strange thing to say. Isn’t personality supposed to be something more than a mere gesture? Aren’t gestures, a form of non-verbal communication, supposed to convey aspects of one’s personality in the first place? The phrase eluded me for a while until I thought of it as describing what it might be like to be an actor — and, of course, Gatsby was always playing a role of his own invention — which is about constantly making successful gestures, which ultimately add up to creating a genuine personality, albeit fictional.
A text time-stamped 1:19 a.m. early Wednesday read, “I think it’s over, man.” It was a Los Angeles–based colleague at The Messenger. He’d received an unanticipated direct deposit and the sum totaled his unused vacation days. I guess in addition to good weather they have some solid labor laws in California. In New York City, I was laid off without additional pay. Plus it was raining.
It is a cool morning in March and I am wading along a muddy path, part of the vast, ancestral grounds of Knepp Castle in southern England. The scenery looks ancient and dramatic, a patchwork of well-trodden grass, deep puddles and tangled scrubs, studded with majestic, bare-branched oak trees. High up in the crowns of the trees are huge storks' nests the size of tractor wheels, their dark silhouettes contrasting with the pale blue sky. White storks glide through the sky and land in the nests, while others sit and warm their eggs. Every now and then, the air is pierced by a joyful clattering sound as they greet each other.
"We sometimes describe this as stork headquarters," says biologist Laura Vaughan-Hirsch, gesturing at the nests around us. She leads the White Stork Project at Knepp Estate, which started in 2016 and is part of a wider stork reintroduction project in southern England. As we talk, a stork in one of the highest nests climbs on top of another: "They're mating," says Vaughan-Hirsch. A short while later, a clattering sound is heard from the nest, which is, she explains "all part of the bonding".
The straw-headed bulbul’s population across its range in Southeast Asia has been decimated to meet this demand. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) currently lists the bird as critically endangered. The species is believed to be already extinct in Thailand and likely Myanmar, as well as likely extinct on the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. The populations in peninsular Malaysia and Indonesian Borneo are also declining rapidly.
The only place to buck the straw-headed bulbul’s declining trend is the city-state of Singapore. The highly urbanized island nation has emerged as an unexpected haven for the species, where the bird’s population is slowly, but steadily, increasing, thanks to over three decades of conservation actions.
That idea about falling into a cliche seems important in this book and in Thomson’s writing more widely. There is always a tension between the austere avant-gardist and the crowd-pleasing storyteller. How to Make a Bomb is a novel about a midlife crisis, elevated and rarefied by its protagonist’s exalted view of himself in a literary and historical tradition of suffering men.
As I read John Gray’s Feline Philosophy, I couldn’t help thinking of the concluding lines of Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”—“A poem should not mean / But be”—revising them for Gray’s subject: A cat should not mean, but be. Cats, as Gray explains, have no problem just being. It’s humans who are driven to mean, to lead purposeful lives that matter. Can you conceive of a cat finding satisfaction in cutting off two seconds in its record time of dashing through the rooms of a house or proudly wearing a new Gucci collar or being promoted to managing pet? Gray makes the point: “If cats could understand the human search for meaning they would purr with delight at its absurdity. Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them. Humans, on the other hand, cannot help looking for meaning beyond their lives.”