Prose notes

Tan (b. 1952), Chinese American novelist of The Joy Luck Club, reads this as a lecture-essay about the Englishes she grew up inside. There is the “broken” or “limited” English of her mother — vivid, exact for family business, scorned by clerks and stockbrokers. There is the public English of school, tests, and the writer’s page. Two family proofs that “limited” English has a cost: a stockbroker would not take the mother seriously on the phone, so the daughter had to speak; hospital staff were slow to hear her when she needed a CAT scan for a tumour. SAT-style English once made Tan ashamed of the home tongue. The essay’s mature claim is the opposite: the mother’s language is the language of intimacy, and the writer’s job is to put that music on the page, not to melt it into one “correct” American voice.

Unit 1 sits on every paragraph. Acculturation is the daughter moving through school English while the mother keeps a Chinese-inflected speech. Assimilation is the shame she later refuses. Hybridity is two Englishes in one essay. Multiculturalism is the demand that both be heard as English, not as error. Identity is the writer who will not disown the mother tongue. For RTC (starred): quote a contrast of the two Englishes, or the stockbroker phone, or the hospital, and say what the adult Tan now values.

Murakami (b. 1949), Japanese novelist. “Birthday Girl” (PDF: Birth Day Girl) appeared in Harper’s (July 2003) and then in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. The story is a frame: years later a woman tells a companion what happened on her twentieth birthday. That day she was covering a shift at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo. The manager sends her upstairs with a meal for the reclusive owner, who never appears on the floor. In the room an old woman offers one wish — anything — on condition that the girl tell no one what she asked. She thinks, then whispers. The story never names the wish. In the present she is living an ordinary adult life, still unsure whether it came true, or what “coming true” would even look like.

Urban fairy tale without a moral sticker. Alienation is the job, the closed room, the anonymous city (Unit 1). Identity crisis is the birthday as a hinge: childhood ends in a sentence she will not narrate. Do not invent the wish in an exam. The point is the withheld sentence. A long answer can set this silence beside Szymborska’s discarded faces: both know a life cannot say everything.

Pamuk (b. 1952), Turkish Nobel novelist. Read the New Yorker episode (7 September 2009): it is chapter 3 of The Museum of Innocence, titled “Distant Relations.” Istanbul, 27 April 1975. The narrator Kemal walks with his fiancée Sibel; she spots a Jenny Colon purse in a shop window on Valikonağı Avenue. The next day he goes to buy it. Behind the counter is Füsun, eighteen, whom he slowly recognises as a very distant relative. She is studying for university exams; she helps in the shop. He buys the bag, boasts at dinner; Sibel sees at once that it is a fake. He returns it. Füsun is dismayed — not a real employee, afraid of the owner-relative. She will get his money back if he tells her where to bring it. He names a place that can undo his engagement, his class, his planned life.

Class and kinship do the work. Füsun’s mother Nesibe had been close to Kemal’s mother until a beauty pageant branded the girl; poverty is the “distant” in distant relations. Sibel has studied in Paris, Kemal in America; they are a Westernised Istanbul bourgeoisie for whom a designer bag is a language. Hybridity is that city: Europe in the window, family shame in the back room. Identity crisis is desire arriving from the wrong shelf of the family tree. For RTC (starred): the shop, the fake bag, Füsun’s tears, the address he should not give. Do not retell the whole novel; this paper sets the episode.

Márquez (1927–2014), Colombian Nobel writer of the Latin American boom. Children find a drowned man washed up; the village has no name big enough until the women wash him, sew clothes for a body larger than their men, and call him Esteban. They imagine his house, his sigh, how doors were too small for him. The men come back from the sea jealous, then they too are taken by the story. They hold a funeral so splendid that the village is not the same afterwards: they will paint houses brighter, widen doors, plant flowers on the cliffs so that Esteban, if he comes again, will find a place worthy of him.

Magic realism keeps the dead man and the living village on one plane: no ghost chapter, only a body so large and calm that it changes how people see themselves. Identity is given by a community that needs a name. The drowned outsider arrives from elsewhere; the village answers by making him theirs. The story is not a detective plot. Hold: the women name him; the men yield to the story; the village is beautified by a death; Esteban is handsomest because they have imagined him so. A long answer can set this communal identity against Ali’s private postcard or Murakami’s secret wish.