The Tempest (Stars Playhouse 2023)

 

I have seen The Tempest a number of times over the years - most recently as a Lego stop-motion film shot during the pandemic lockdown by Bakersfield College. Many years ago, I saw a version at The Empty Space, featuring much of what eventually became the theater faculty at BC. I mention this one, because the role of Prospero was played by Bob Kempf, a local actor, teacher, and mentor, who sadly passed away recently at far too young of an age. As a co-founder of The Empty Space, and as the teacher and mentor of two generations of local thespians, he has left an unforgettable mark on local theater. As one who has enjoyed his work for a quarter of a century, I know he would be proud of his legacy. 

 

I hadn’t thought I could fit in this performance, because December for us musician sorts is crazy enough as it is. However, the fact that a friend was in it, and also that my youngest had to analyze one of Prospero’s speeches for 7th grade English, made me take a look and find an evening we could fit it in. My decision was further confirmed when another friend who does theater saw it and raved about the production. I got tickets for the younger three kids as well. 

 

I was not disappointed. This was wonderful production, excellent from top to bottom and side to side, from the all-star cast to the imaginative costumes. 

 

As I have mentioned in previous posts, Stars Playhouse is a small industrial space with at most 40 seats (depending on the configuration for a given play), and no true backstage. It reminds me of The Empty Space’s old location. Because of this, staging has to be creative, and more done with less. I have seen a number of plays there over the last three years, and I have to say that it has maintained a high level of artistry as well as creative choice of plays, from ancient to last year. (Recently Bernhard/Hamlet, for example.) 

 

I hadn’t seen any Shakespeare there, although I know they have done it in the past. For a play like The Tempest, with its storm and swamp and large scale, it didn’t seem to be an obvious choice for a tiny space. But Shakespeare is what you make it, and it can seem fresh every time if done creatively.

 

In my last review of a production of this play, I didn’t say much about the plot - or plots, really - so I figure I might touch on the necessity of keeping everything straight. 

 

Prospero, the exiled duke of “Milan,” was usurped by his younger brother, Antonio, with the help of Alonzo, the king of “Naples.” I use quotes because the cities are not only just convenient fictions, but because Shakespeare’s geography tends to make zero sense…the “coast of Bohemia, anyone?” Banished from his kingdom and stranded on a remote island, Prospero and his daughter Miranda have lived for many years. He has learned magic, and rescued captive spirits from the clutches of a witch, Sycorax. Among these is Ariel, who is Prospero’s chief servant. Sycorax left behind a half-human monster child, Caliban. 

 

When the play opens, Prospero has summoned a storm to wreck the ship carrying (conveniently) his nefarious brother, the king of Naples, the king’s son, the king’s devious brother, and a loyal old nobleman, Gonzalo. And also the comic relief - the jester Trinculo and the drunkard butler Stephano. 

 

Through Ariel’s magical assistance, the occupants of the ship all come safely to land, broken up into several groups. 

 

The prince, Ferdinand, comes to consciousness to see Miranda and fall in love with her. (Thus creating a valuable political alliance for Prospero.) The king, usurping duke, and the other nobles are stranded without food and only their bickering to keep them company. Trinculo and Stephano run across both a butt of wine and Caliban, to much hilarity. 

 

For Prospero, he has several goals. First, to unite the couple in marriage, thus securing his connection to the king. Second, to regain his dukedom. Third, to humiliate his brother (and to a degree, also the king and his brother.) And fourth, to get off the island. Oh, and he has also promised to give Ariel his/her/their freedom. 

 

It’s kind of nice being a magician and all at a time like this. 

 

The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, at least of the ones he wrote by himself. It is considered one of the late romances, or arguably one of the problem plays. It was originally listed as a comedy, but it is in quite a different vein from the earlier ones. It also is just…different. It has all the magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it is a lot darker. The ending could easily have been tragedy, but ends instead with grace being extended to the wrongdoers. 

 

That’s enough to get the idea of the play. For this production, the expository portions of the play were cut to the bare bones, just enough to understand the backstory. For the most part, the major characters were there, but the extras were limited mostly to magical roles. Again, limited space requires a smaller cast. 

 

The costumes were wonderful, particularly the spirits in their rather oceanic colors, Ariel as a Firebird, and Caliban as quite the fishy creature. Oh, and also Ferdinand’s absurdly large codpiece. 

 

The Tempest has a lot of songs in it, and this production expanded that to an entire soundtrack, performed by one of the spirits on electric guitar drenched in reverb and chorus, a little percussion, and ethereal melodies for the text of the songs. It combined to give an unworldly vibe to everything, feeling almost underwater. The blues and greens of the lighting added to this atmosphere. 

 

And then, there was the cast. A lot of the usual suspects, and I mean that as a compliment. There are a number of local actors who are in a lot of plays, and who have serious talent and dedication to their art. 

 

To start with, Prospero was played by Don Kruszka, who not only acts, but runs his own puppet theater. I also worked with him back in 2017 when the Bakersfield Symphony combined with a group of actors to put on Andre Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. We ended up talking because his character had to sit in the orchestra and pretend to play. He was a lot of fun to work with, just a down to earth guy. 

 

I really loved his work as Prospero. There are so many ways to play the character, none of them wrong, but I think that Kruszka’s version was the most contemplative and haunted one I have seen. Which is why it fit that at the end, rather than dramatically break his staff, he just muses in his last monologue, then quietly sets the staff on top of his coat and walks away. Throughout, his performance was excellent and consistent in character. 

 Ariel (Natalie Underwood) and Prospero (Don Kruszka)

Also in that production and in The Tempest was Karl Wade, in the role of the treacherous brother, Antonio. It’s not a big part, but Wade is pretty much good in any role. 

 

My friend from book club, Josh Evans, played Sebastian, who, along with Antonio, conspires to murder the king and his allies. The two of them get to snark and conspire and generally make themselves unpleasant. Which they did rather well. 

 

Steve Evans (who I don’t think is related to Josh), played the king with gravitas - less of a treacherous spin and more of a realpolitik situation. Scott Deaton brought an earthy optimism and common sense to the part of Gonzalo. 

 

I think this is the first time I have seen Xavi Elizondo in a major part. He was hilarious as the drunk Stephano, and had good chemistry with the jester, played by Alex Singh. (Also in the first major part I have seen him in.) 

 

Stephano (Xavi Elizondo), Trinculo (Alex Singh), Caliban (John Spitzer)

 

John Spitzer serves as artistic director for Stars Playhouse, and is one of those actors I will see in anything - he has incredible range and is always riveting in any scene. For Caliban, he made the part unhuman, with bodily movement that was pure monster, making his lanky frame all knees and elbows and writhing motion. His voice combined the naivety with the cunning that the part requires. Just great work. Spitzer also directed this play, and deserves credit for the consistent vision. 

Ferdinand (Jaspreet Singh), King Alonzo (Steve Evans), Miranda (Riss Halbwachs)

Ariel was played by Natalie Underwood, who brought a contortionist twist. She is a dancer, and incredibly flexible. Her use of space - including vertical space - made her seem a real sprite, not an earth-bound human. Great chemistry with Kruszka too - the genuine affection that the two have, even given the unequal power and the desire for freedom. 

 

The young couple was played by a pair of up-and-coming young actors, recently seen in both Shakespeare plays at BC this year. Riss Halbwachs, most recently seen as Rosalind/Ganymede in As You Like It, played Miranda with the kind of innocence the part demands, but also with a certain sexual hunger that made Prospero’s concern for her purity quite believable. 

 

Ferdinand was played by Jaspreet Singh, who, as I have mentioned, seems born to perform Shakespeare. His high tenor voice is so clear and unhurried, and his diction transparent - but also, he talks in iambic pentameter as if it were normal, everyday speech. I’m serious, it is just beautiful to listen to. This makes three Shakespeare plays for him this fall, so a lot of lines and three very different parts. He’s one to watch - he’s a student at CSUB, but already acts like a veteran of the stage. 

 

I haven’t mentioned all of the minor parts, but I thought that everything that contributed to the overall vision was present, and nothing present that detracted from that vision. Every motion, every set rearrangement, every line. 

 

From start to finish, this production was enjoyable. In keeping with the smaller space, it was understated and intimate, rather than bombastic and epic, and I think that really brought out the family psychodrama that is the true core of the play. 

 

This play makes 22 live theater productions I have seen this year, 14 of those locally. Our local theater scene is really a treasure - and it survived Covid and is thriving again, with full houses. Like any town, Bakersfield has its advantages and disadvantages - our air is crap and there are a lot of MAGA assholes rolling coal. But our local arts scene has it going on, and I think the pandemic had some positive effects. Audiences realized what they were missing, and returned in full force. And our local artists have raised their ambitions and their game, truly bringing it with every production. 

 

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

 Source of book: I own this

 

When the Library of America came out with a Maxine Hong Kingston volume, I decided to buy it. While I collect most of my books used, I will occasionally purchase a new one, particularly from minority or female authors, to encourage publishers to increase diversity.

 

Maxine Hong Kingston is a bit controversial as an author, so I figured I would start out with a look at the controversy and my take on it. The basic idea is that other Chinese and Chinese-Americans have accused her of exaggerating the misogyny in Chinese culture, catering to Western stereotypes. In addition, she has been criticized for using Chinese mythology in her writing, but modifying it (again, supposedly to be more acceptable to Western readers.) 

 

She has disputed both of these, and made the counter accusation that her critics (most of whom are male) are all too eager to silence the voice of a woman who criticizes her own culture. Which is, well, kind of the point of her writing about misogyny, right? 

 

I will chime in here with a few observations of my own. First, “but my male relatives weren’t like this” is definitely not a defense. In fact, one of the members of the misogynistic cult group my wife grew up in came on my blog recently and did the whole gaslighting thing just like this. Your good experience does not make another person’s bad experience go away. Kingston experienced some really bad misogyny within her family, and the community she grew up in. 

 

Second, Kingston points out a very important truth about the particular cultural practices that maintain misogyny. Specifically, the practice that a woman becomes part of her husband’s family when she marries. The parents of the woman lose a child, so to speak, while the parents of the man gain a child. This makes girls into a liability rather than an asset. I’ll talk a bit more about this later.

 

Third, this misogyny and cultural practice is widespread within Chinese culture even today, despite some attempts of the revolutionary communists of the past trying to change things. This has led to a significant imbalance of the sexes - a shortage of women, so to speak. 

 

As to the second issue, I am at a bit of a loss to understand the belief that mythology needs to be static. Honestly, this is a huge problem in my former religious tradition - once the stories got written down, they became “inerrant” and unchangeable. For the ancient myths of any culture, there is no “one true definitive” version and never has been. There have always been different versions that change over time to meet new cultural needs. It’s literally how myths work. (I am using a broad definition of “myth” here - something can be both rooted in historical events and be a myth. Much of every holy book is this kind of material - stories told for a purpose, not as literal fact.) 

 

So, my own conclusion is that Kingston is fully within her rights to draw on cultural myths and reshape them for her own artistic purposes. In fact, some of the most compelling writing of our own time has been the reimagining of myths for a new era. See: Madeline Miller.  

 

So, that initial discussion out of the way, what sort of a book is The Woman Warrior? It is difficult to nail down its genre. It is, to be sure, a memoir, and autobiography of sorts. But it also combines multiple perspectives, mythology, and what the author refers to as “Chinese talk-story,” where the past, present, and myth can be combined. 

 

Probably the best way to explain this is that Kingston cannot simply tell her story without a lot of context. What she experienced and what she did make sense only in light of her family and culture, her specific situation, and the stories she was raised on. 

 

White male authors often like to imagine that they can tell stories “objectively” - divorced from any cultural baggage. This is malarkey, of course. What is really happening is that white males are allowed to assume that their particular cultural baggage is universal, the norm from which everything else is a deviation. I’m not meaning this as a diss to white male authors - I read plenty of them, and some are more self-aware than others. It’s just the, well, cultural baggage. 

 

For Kingston, so much of her experience is driven by her reality as a female child in a traditional Chinese family, while at the same time being an American child. 

 

The book consists of five long chapters, each of which can stand alone as a short story. They are all interconnected, but look at separate segments of the story of Kingston’s family. 

 

The first chapter, “No-Name Woman,” is a story that Kingston was told as a child. Her father had a sister that is never talked about. Back when the family lived in a village in China, the men went to America to earn money. In order to lure them back, they were married off to village girls the day before their departure. One of these women was this sister. Her husband was away for several years, during which time, she became pregnant. When the villagers found out, they destroyed the home and fields of her parents, because she brought shame. The next morning, she was found dead with her newborn in the village well - a suicide. 

 

Kingston tells the story as it came from her mother’s voice, then goes back and reimagines other ways of telling the story. Was the woman raped? Entirely plausible. Was this a love match? Maybe. Since the father of the child was undoubtedly part of the mob that destroyed her house, how was he able to sacrifice his lover to protect himself? 

 

In the end, Kingston realizes that this woman doesn’t even have a name - nobody ever said her name. The fact that she was so thoroughly forgotten is chilling, and thus the author concludes that this is the real tragedy of the story - and the reason she tells the story now. 

 

The concluding passage really stuck with me. 

 

My aunt haunts me - her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging down and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute. 

 

The second chapter, “White Tigers,” is a retelling of the legend of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior who took her father’s place in battle. Kingston imagines herself in that role, finally being given the respect she deserves, and transcending her assigned role as a female. At the end, she confesses that she lacks even the courage to stand up to her racist boss, let alone save China as Fa Mu Lan did. But there are similarities. 

 

Disney’s film, Mulan, is loosely based on the Fa Mu Lan stories, which date back to the 6th Century. Kingston’s version is a lot of fun to read. She makes it into a lyrical prose-poem, with landscapes both natural and emotional. Throughout, her own yearning to somehow earn the love and respect of her family is palpable. And then there is that return to reality. 

 

My American life has been such a disappointment. 

“I got straight A’s, Mama.”

“Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.”

I could not figure out what was my village. And it was important that I do something big or fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums. You can’t eat straight A’s.

When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, “Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,” I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stop.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. ‘There’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls.’”

 

Oh man, so much to unpack here. It relates to my own experience as well. 

 

Let’s start with this: when a child acts out, it isn’t because the child is “bad,” but because the child is stressed. Kingston wasn’t throwing tantrums because she was a bad girl, but because she was being insulted and disrespected. But, due to cultural expectations, a “good” girl was expected to remain silent, compliant, and submissive. 

 

Note: this is not to say that children are never bad. Or that poor parenting can reward bad behavior, thus reinforcing and amplifying it. But most behavior by children that is deemed “bad” is a response to something in their lives. Often just being at a stage of development, or being tired or hungry. This was something I had to learn as a parent, in large part deprogramming from the way I was taught to think about children. The teachings of the false prophets my parents and so many like them followed said that children were inherently evil - selfish and rebellious - and that the role of a parent was to teach them unquestioning compliance, submission, and silence, by punishment from the parent. 

 

I was thinking a lot about this lately, after an incident with my mother, where it became clear that we were still having the same argument we had when I was a child. The only acceptable response I could have to anything she did was silence and compliance. Any discomfort that I caused was always my fault. And it still is, as far as she is concerned. 

 

The other thing that this passage illustrates is the way that the cultural practices related to family affect how children are treated. I noted above the practice that daughters belonged to their husband’s extended family, and thus were seen as a cost, not an asset. They eat food, but then go on to benefit another family. Why invest in them? Maybe you can sell them, if you have too many? 

 

This too intersects with my own family experience. I probably should do a whole post someday on the way my mom latched on to fears, then made sure that those fears came true. 

 

One of those fears was essentially the opposite of traditional Chinese cultural practice. In her view, when your daughter married, your family gained a son. Whereas when your son marries, you lose a son. Male children belong to the in-laws, if you will. 

 

And lo and behold, my mom did her best to alienate her daughters-in-law and favor her daughter to ensure her fear would come to pass. 

 

I think that this expressed itself in the way I was treated, particularly as a teen. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t value me, but that they didn’t invest in the relationship the way they did with my sister. I was less valuable than she was, because I would just be stolen away by my eventual wife. The most important relationship was always the one with my sister, and thus she would be kept happy, even if it hurt or harmed me. I believe this is one reason why I didn’t have a chance at normal college, and why they never built a relationship with my wife. (My sister has some narcissistic traits, and does not like competition.) 

 

More generally related to this chapter, I have a couple of other observations. First is the difference in how misogyny is expressed in different cultures. There are, to be sure, similarities, but some fascinating differences. 

 

In the ultra-conservative, authoritarian fundamentalist subculture my parents increasingly embraced during my teens, women are not outright devalued the way Kingston describes. Rather, the misogyny expresses itself primarily in a rigid set of gendered roles and expectations. This, in turn, results in some women being devalued, while others are privileged. 

 

Because the ideal of “femininity” is an idealized 1950s white suburban housewife, those who have the economic privilege to be full time stay-at-home moms are given elevated status. Those who either choose to work outside the home or who must work as economic necessity (whether due to poverty or divorce or widowhood) are devalued. As the “tradwife” movement is making increasingly clear, this is inseparable from the white supremacist goal of making lots of white babies. The value of women - even the privileged ones - is tied to their reproductive capacity. 

 

The second fascinating fact surrounding this chapter is Kingston herself. She cited Orlando by Virginia Woolf as one of her favorite books. I haven’t yet read it, but it is about a person who lives first as a man and then as a woman. It is considered a pioneering work about sexuality and gender. For Kingston, who did not consider herself transgender as we understand it today, did fantasize about being able to be human without the social and cultural limitations of being a woman. My wife is in the same category - she is comfortably cisgender but chafed at the limitations that she was expected to accept within the cult group she grew up in (and later that my mother tried to impose on her.) In a world where women have options, there is probably less of a desire to become male for that reason alone. 

 

Again, this chapter closes with a great passage. 

 

The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The ideographs for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance - not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words - “chink” words and “gook” words too - that they do not fit on my skin. 

 

Kingston’s difficult relationship with her mother (which, as subsequent chapters will illuminate, is complicated) is to a degree the central fact of this book. Unable to fight back in other ways, she fights with her words. They are her weapons, her revenge, so to speak. 

 

I very much feel the same way. As a child, I had to just take a lot of things - sibling favoritism, medical quackery, a cult, denial of college opportunity - with very little I could do to fight back. Words were all I had. And to a degree, they are all I have now. I cannot make my parents accept and respect my wife and kids. I cannot go back in time and keep them out of the cult. I can’t change the sibling favoritism. And I certainly am not going to go pay back for the corporal punishment by hitting my parents. Words are all I have, and really all they can do is help warn others. 

 

And, like Kingston, I am refusing to let words stick to me like they used to. I am not “rebellious,” I am not “too flawed for any woman to truly love,” and I am not one who “never takes responsibility for my actions” - that one is pure projection, as I have come to understand. 

 

Moving on to the next chapter, “Shaman,” this is where the book starts to make Kingston’s relationship with her mother a lot more complex. 

 

It turns out that her mother, left behind in China while her husband was in America, decided to go to medical school after her two children died. (We never learn what happened, but they died young, and she was left alone for a decade and a half.) She completed school and became essentially a midwife and village doctor. 

 

Then, when her husband decided she should come, she was brought to the US, where her credentials had zero applicability, she struggled to learn the language, and ended up doing drudge work at the family laundry business rather than enjoying the status and fulfillment of her previous medical career. 

 

Ooof. So, maybe part of her mother’s hostility toward Maxine was displaced anger at her own loss? It seems plausible. I certainly would have been pissed about it. And I can tell you my wife would not have simply dropped her life to go make more babies with a man who spent 15 years on the other side of the world. 

 

Anyway, this chapter recounts the stories that her mom told about medical school and her life afterward. It particularly focuses on a time when she intentionally stayed in a room that was supposedly haunted, and then spun a whole ghost story out of it which she used to gain status and respect with her classmates. It’s pretty wild, and it isn’t clear at all that it was all made up - her mom seems to have genuinely believed in the existence of ghosts, but dang she sure spun things to her advantage. 

 

Kingston herself observes that what women really want is independence, and Communism, particularly at first, attempted to give them that. (See Wild Swans for more about this.) 

 

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. 

 

This is something to keep in mind when it comes to the goals of the reactionary right wing. Women (and men too!) mostly want a job - something that gives them income and purpose - and some space of their own. The fact that this is more available to women than before is a significant reason that marriage rates have declined. Men have not adjusted to an egalitarian world, and many of them still think they are entitled to have a little female servant with benefits. That women would prefer not to is unsurprising. (Don’t worry: if marriage adjusts like it has in the past, people will still get married. Just not to entitled dickheads.) 

 

The medical school experience sounds a bit…different. Just like I am sure that our own medical schools teach a lot of stuff that sounds odd to other cultures, the Chinese schools taught a bit of stuff that seems odd to us. For example, studying ancient texts “as old as the Han empire, when the prescription for immortality had not yet been lost.” That’s a fun bit of universal human mythology right there. Funny how people kept misplacing the most important recipe in existence…

 

There is one final thought from this chapter:

 

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

 

I didn’t write down any quotes from chapter four, “At the Western Palace.” However, I do want to mention it, because it is a truly heartbreaking story. Kingston’s mother’s sister has been left in China then Hong Kong for 30 years. Her husband came to America, and never brought her over, leaving her alone with her young daughter. Later, the daughter comes to America and starts her life, before being able to sponsor her mother. 

 

There is a good reason why she hasn’t been summoned by her husband: he has taken another wife and has another family. He has, however, faithfully supported his first wife in style in Hong Kong. 

 

When the aunt comes over the US, she has difficulty fitting in. Kingston’s mother insists she confront her husband, which she resists. The eventual confrontation goes spectacularly badly, and leads to a rapid decline in mental health for the aunt, who ends her days in an institution. 

 

Perhaps the whole episode is a brilliant lesson in the idea that maybe trying to run other people’s lives is not a great plan. 

 

The final chapter is “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” It starts off with Kingston’s memory of bullying another girl at school. From there, it recounts several other instances from her childhood, and ends with the story of the female poet Cai Yan. 

 

There are a few lines here that I thought worth noting. First is a truth about being an immigrant community in a racist society. 

 

Don’t report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. 

 

This could lead into a whole discussion of why the right-wing approach to undocumented immigrants actually increases crime. When law enforcement is the enemy, crime goes unpunished and unprevented. 

 

Kingston was told she had her tongue frenulum cut as a child, supposedly as a cure for her unwillingness to talk. As Kingston explains, however, her reluctance to talk was actually connected to the fact that people didn’t listen. Her parents didn’t listen, white people didn’t listen, nobody listened to her. 

 

In her story, she creates this list of things she actually wants to tell her mother about herself, but every time she starts to say them, her mother ignores or redirects her to something centering on the mother. 

 

Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat….If only I could let my mother know the list, she - and the world - would become more like me, and I would never be alone again. 

 

I never did a formal list like this, but I have had, for a long time, a list of true things about me I wish I could tell my parents. And that they would listen. Things like how I wasn’t actually a rebellious teen - I cared so deeply about pleasing them, but I was deeply frustrated by the decisions they made that negatively affected my life. Things like how their focus on obedience kept them from hearing my hopes and dreams. Things like how I didn’t tell them they were wrong (when they very much were) out of spite or unkindness, but because they were wrong about things that I cared deeply about and that directly affected my life in a way it did not affect theirs. Things like how long I tried to preserve some part of our relationship, only to see it eaten away bit by bit along with my respect for them as they embraced increasingly toxic religious and political ideologies. And how I really hoped for so long that if I could just explain myself better, if I could just show them who I was, they would give me love for who I was, not for who they thought I should be. 

 

I too feel what Kingston feels, when she finally lets loose with some of the truths, including “Not everybody thinks I ‘m nothing.” And also when her mother responds with “I knew you were going to turn out bad.” And “Who’d want to marry you anyway? Noisy. Talking like a duck. Disobedient. Messy.” 

 

Oh, man, have I heard those all from my mom over the years. And pretty much repeated lately. (Except the marriage one - I think I deeply disappointed my mom’s expectations by marrying a beautiful and intelligent and assertive woman. She truly believed that I needed to change my entire personality - to become less “difficult” - before any woman could love me.) 

 

For Kingston, she eventually did make that escape. She graduated from Berkeley, and eventually taught there. She married a man and they have been together since 1962. Hey, she even got herself arrested in her 60s for protesting the Iraq war. (She was right, by the way.)

 

That is the way of life. We are born, we grow up, we separate from our parents. Some of us successfully transition to a healthy adult relationship with them. Some of us are unable to do so. Some of us write about the journey. 

 

The Woman Warrior is a bit of an unusual book, but it was fascinating to read. It brings out a lot of complexity of culture and gender and relationships, as well as the inevitable conflicts which come with cultural change, whether as the result of immigration or just the passage of time and the evolution of culture. 

 

Kingston was not and is not a “well behaved woman,” and, indeed, I find her sort to be my favorite kind of woman, both in my personal life and in my reading. 

 

Fuzz by Mary Roach

 

Source of book: Borrowed from the Library

 

It has been a while since I read a Mary Roach book. Part of the problem here is that I had previously read all of her books. Until this one came out, and then it was popular at the library. Anyway, now I read it, and it is definitely time for her to write a new one. 

 

Here are the others I have blogged about. Bonk is not included, even though that was the first one I read, because back in the day, I was worried about talking about sex on the blog lest I scandalize my Evangelical friends and family. These days, of course, I would write about it anyway - I haven’t participated in church since soon after Trump’s election (and have no interest at this point in going back), and certain Trumpy family members cut us out of their lives when I pushed back on the racism. So whatever. Anyway, here is the blog list:

 

Grunt

Gulp

Packing for Mars

Spook

Stiff

 

***

 

In some ways, Fuzz is a bit different than other Mary Roach books. This is because her other books have focused on humans entirely, rather than on animals or other organisms. For this one, she looks at the interaction between human society and animals and plants, and what happens when animals cross the line into what we humans consider criminal behavior. 

 

This ranges from homicide at the beginning of the book to petty theft at the end. 

 

Along the way, she looks at the ways that humans in our modern time seek to limit the unpleasant encounters between us and nature, preferably in ways (these days at least) that do not end in extermination of other organisms. 

 

Hence, we try to prevent bear attacks by not leaving food or garbage around, to give one example. Rather than just exterminate the bears, which is why California no longer has Grizzly Bears.  

 

As Roach notes throughout the book, the issues involved are complicated, and there are rarely great solutions. Bears have a disconcerting ability to return to their old territory - even several states away - or get hit by vehicles while trying. Birds are too smart to stay frightened for long by decoys. Invasive species seem impossible to remove once they get established. 

 

Throughout the book, Roach continues her dedication to find the weirdest, grossest, and craziest stuff - and to participate in as much of it as possible. 

 

Her research takes her all over the globe, from the US to India to New Zealand and more. 

 

The book is best read, and not explained, but I do have to quote the best lines - Roach is wonderfully witty, with a dry sense of humor. 

 

Elephants sometimes kill the way cars kill: by being large and running into - or over - something much smaller.

 

This is in the section on how India is trying to reduce elephant homicides - the problem exacerbated by habitat loss. The vast majority of the deaths were not intended by the elephant - it just got spooked and ran over a human. 

 

Then there is this one on the problem of ranching on a planet where other animals exist. India seems to have a healthier approach to this than American ranchers, who are the biggest obstacle to reintroduction of wolves to the ecosystem. 

 

Shweta translates for me. “He likes leopards even though they sometimes take his livestock. He says this is its natural prey, and he is acceptable to that. He does not support anyone who does killing.” In the words of an American rancher I met last year who is also, improbably, a mountain lion activist, “When you have livestock, there’s going to be some deadstock.”

 

From the chapter on monkeys:

 

The Wildlife Institute of India is a thrown-down cluster of concrete buildings connected by outdoor walkways. Because these corridors have no walls, rhesus monkeys from the neighboring forest can occasionally be seen walking along behind or beside the humans. Neither species pays the other much mind, as if the monkeys, too, have meetings to get to and photocopies to make. 

 

When Roach researches mountain lions, she spends a good bit of time with Justin Dellinger, a tracker and total character. He came from such a small town in South Carolina that any time he wanted to ask a girl out, he first had to check with his parents to find out how closely they were related. 

 

As the first in his family to go to college, he is a source of parental pride, and a little melancholy. He explained to them that he “had to disperse for genetic purposes.” 

 

I thought the chapter on falling trees was fun. I have been too close for comfort to trees that have come down. Not as in, actual danger to me, but close enough to get spooked. It’s a hazard of hiking in the woods. This whole passage is excellent:

 

What a Douglas fir does, it does very slowly, and that includes dying. Possibly the least attractive feature of a nine-hundred-year life span is the century or two spent dying. Decomposition drags on for another hundred years or so. A tree is the rare organism to which the comparative deader is often and accurately applied. A recently dead, or “dead hard” conifer progresses to “dead spongy,” then “dead soft,” limbs and top rotting and dropping off, until the last piece of standing trunk topples and the tree enters the final classification, “dead fallen.” At some point in its protracted twilight, a tree that stands near a road or path or building may earn a new classification: “danger tree.” Because if it falls, anyone it lands on will spend a very, very short time dying. 

 

There is an entire chapter on toxic plants, which is also fascinating. It starts with the Rosary Pea, which contains abrin, arguably the most potent phytotoxin in existence. Although, like the Castor Bean, it is somewhat difficult to digest, so it’s theoretical deadliness exists mostly in the possibility of purifying the toxin. Humans would then do the murder, not the plant. Anyway, Roach’s brain goes to a certain place regarding this plant. 

 

Possession of anything over a gram of abrin is a federal crime. Possession of rosary peas, however, is legal. The internet has thousands of rosary pea necklaces and bracelets on offer, as well as crafting websites selling the beans in bulk to people who make these items. But oddly, no rosary-pea rosaries. 

 

Something I did not know is that the common beans we eat for food are also toxic. At least if eaten raw. They cause gastrointestinal distress. Which does make one wonder who is actually eating raw beans, and why? Perhaps the same sorts Roach mentions who shove beans up their urethra for “sexual gratification.” In one case, the beans made it all the way into the bladder, where they, predictably, swelled up. Roach describes the case report, which includes the softened beans in a surgical basin after the extraction.

 

[M]ore appetizing than most things removed by forceps in a surgery suite, but probably not, owing to the urine presoak, more delicious. 

 

There is another chapter on the problem of birds. Specifically, birds eating crops, or just sitting around in large numbers and crapping. I had no idea that people used to blow flocks up using dynamite. This turned out to be ineffective, actually. The problem with birds - and indeed most pest animals - is that reproduction increases when you kill them. Nature finds its balance pretty rapidly. It was this musing that caught my eye, though. 

 

Were Meanley and Neff, like Joe Browder, simply men with a hatred of crop-raiding birds? And/or a love of setting off bombs? Bird-bombing seemed to peak after World War II. I began to wonder if it was the product of some lingering zest for combat, some wartime hangover of misplaced patriotic zeal. 

 

Actually, there are multiple chapters on birds. Because birds can definitely be pests. There is a whole section on gulls, which apparently will destroy stuff for the hell of it - a lot like humans. 

 

Why would a gull do this? Was there a biological motive? Are some species just dicks?

 

In the case of gulls, I am inclined to say that they are just dicks. In an unexpected twist, part of the gull research involved the Vatican, which has both a problem with gulls at events and a policy regarding humane treatment of animals. So yes, Roach interviewed multiple people at the Vatican for the book. 

 

I follow Tornini’s gaze to the massive wall that surrounds the Holy See. A gull glides over. There’s your symbol of peace, I think to myself. A bird, any bird, soaring over walls, ignoring borders! Peace, freedom, unity! It’s possible I’ve had too many espressos. 

 

And then, there is the attempt to use lasers to scare birds. Roach’s quip is hilarious. 

 

Could keeping birds away be as cheap and easy as pointing to graphs on PowerPoint slides that no one understands?

 

Roach also discusses the use of poison and baits to kill pests - particularly invasive species. The key is to make the poison specific to the species you want to kill, or to make the bait unattractive to every other species. It’s a tough challenge. And then there is Roach, who does crazy stuff. 

 

So far the challenge seems to be the bait. In a lush tropical environment, a bait has to be extremely tempting to compete with the natural food sources. Aaron hands me a bottle of Goodnature bait, a chocolatey-coconutty goo that smells, but does not taste, delicious. It’s like eating suntan lotion, I tell Aaron. 

“You tried it?” His look combines horror, confusion, and pity. “You want some gum?”

 

Related and also pretty funny is the bait used for the invasive Brown Tree Snakes on Guam. The winning bait turned out to be:

 

Eventually a winner emerged: “mouse butter” on a core of potted meat product. “We reverse-engineered Spam,” Kimball told me with understandable pride. Spam is cheap, keeps for at least a week, and doesn’t attract ants - and the snakes, like the humans of Guam, are inexplicably fond of it.

 

Cue Weird Al…

 

Well, there you go. Classic Mary Roach. I recommend all of her books. 

 

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Source of book: I own this

 

This is actually the third James McBride book our book club has read, starting with Deacon King Kong and then Five-Carat Soul. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is McBride’s latest book. 

 

Like his others, in this one, McBride tackles some really heavy issues - racism, mistreatment of the disabled, the Klan, poverty, and violence against children. But as he always does, he manages to tell his story in a humorous and lighthearted way, keeping the coincidences right on the ragged edge of implausible, and ending with hope and community. 

 

I don’t think that I have ever done this before, but for this book, I will recommend reading the acknowledgments at the end, because he explains the inspiration for the book there. After reading it, you will see how one of his heroes in real life is represented in several of the characters in the book. 

 

The way McBride tells this story is interesting. We start off in the 1970s, when the demolition of an old black neighborhood for new condos leads to the discovery of a skeleton in an old well - with some red fabric and a mezuzah tchotchke on a necklace. The cops question the old Jewish guy, Malachi, who is the last of the Jews living on Chicken Hill, but he won’t tell them anything useful. Before they can come back, a hurricane floods everything, destroying the evidence - and afterward Malachi is nowhere to be found. 

 

And then, after that, we don’t hear much of anything about this body until much later in the story. The book flashes back to the 1930s, and spends the first third of the book describing characters and their back stories. It seems like there isn’t really a plot, until we find out that an explosion seen at a distances has made a young boy deaf. His mother has now died, and the State wants to put him in a mental institution. 

 

Who can keep the kid out of there? Well, it takes a village - or at least a neighborhood. But mostly Chona, the polio-crippled Jewish proprietor of the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, and, more reluctantly, her husband, Moshe. 

 

From there, things happen pretty fast, and I won’t spoil them. 

 

The Chicken Hill neighborhood at that time consisted of two main groups. The Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, and the African American diaspora from the South. These groups mostly kept to themselves, but were brought together in a way by the kindness and generosity of Chona. 

 

The larger town that Chicken Hill is part of has other residents too: other immigrants, from Italy, Ireland, and other European nations. And the old guard - the white people who consider themselves special because their ancestors came on the Mayflower (at least that’s what they claim - who knows if it was true or not.) 

 

The book is told by an unnamed and semi-omniscient narrator, but it looks at things from the points of view of numerous characters. None of the characters knows everything (and literally nobody knows about the body in the well), so all perspectives are incomplete. Ultimately, that includes the narrator and the reader - there are a number of questions which are never answered. Others are hinted at, but never explicitly stated. 

 

McBride draws on his own heritage for this story. His African-American father died of cancer months before James was born. He was raised by his Jewish mother, an immigrant from Poland, in Brooklyn’s housing projects. It was, shall we say, a very multicultural upbringing. Because of his parentage, he was exposed to both Jewish culture and religion, and the Black Christianity of his preacher father’s family. All of these things make it into his books. 

 

There is a lot going on in the book, and the fun is in discovering not merely what will happen, but how the various characters will contribute. 

 

McBride isn’t preachy, but he definitely puts his own philosophy into the book. Often this is in the voice of a character, but sometimes, the narrator breaks the fourth wall and just says stuff to the reader. (That’s how you get a complaint about electronic devices in a book set mostly in the 1930s.) Everything is characteristic for McBride - you can tell it is one he wrote within a few paragraphs. 

 

There are so many great lines in this book. Here are the ones I found the most interesting. The first comes when Moshe is trying to get advertisements for his Klezmer concert at his theater published in surrounding cities. (His theaters host both Jewish music and - scandalously - Black performers as well.) One of the recurring issues in the book is that Jewish immigrants are not monolithic - they don’t even speak the same language. Some speak Yiddish, others the languages of their country of origin - Lithuanian, Polish, German, Russian - and few of them are great in English. (At least the older generation - immigrant kids always pick up the new language well.) 

 

Because of this, a Yiddish advertisement gets sent to The Baltimore Sun by accident, and a teenage Hungarian intern is given the task of translating it using his very limited knowledge of Yiddish. 

 

Thus, the original, which read, “Come see the great Mickey Katz. Once-in-a-lifetime event. Family fun and Jewish memories. Red-hot Klezmer like you’ve never heard before.” - comes out as, “Mickey Katz is coming. Once a life, always a life. Watch the Jews burn and dance and have fun.” 

 

Yeah, that’s not….quite right. 

 

Moshe falls in love with Chona, and they get married. She inherits her parents’ store. Moshe wants to move out of Chicken Hill - as the other Jews are once they make enough to afford a better neighborhood. 

 

“You don’t have to spend your life selling kosher cow meat and onions to coloreds. Let’s close the store. The Jews are leaving the Hill. Let’s follow them.”

“Where?”

“Down the hill to town. Where the Americans are.”

“Which Americans?” 

 

Oh, that is the question, isn’t it? And so much so these days, when the Trumps of the world say “American” but mean “white.” 

 

Malachi is an interesting Jewish character, who can’t entirely decide if he hates living in America more than living in Europe. He finds America too dirty, although we never really find out what he means by that. But there is another thing that Malachi says that is fascinating:

 

“I think the Negroes have the advantage in this country. At least they know who they are.” 

 

The villain of the book is Doc Roberts, the local doctor - and leader of the Klan in town. He is more complicated than just a villain, though - that’s true of all of McBride’s characters. In many ways, though, he is a stand-in for MAGA sorts and other white supremacists who think they mean well - the type that has unfortunately been a common sort of American for centuries. Here is how McBride describes his angst as he ages. 

 

He’d seen his youth vanish, his town crumble, the blood of his proud white fathers diluted by invaders: Jews, Italians, even niggers who wandered Chicken Hill selling ice cream and shoes to one another while decent white people fought off the Jewish merchants and Italian immigrants who seemed to be buying everything. Not to mention the Mennonites in town with their horses and buggies. And the Irish at the fire company. And Greeks mumbling their business at diners. And Italians kicking ass at the dairy. And niggers from the Hill wanting factory jobs instead of being maids and janitors like they were supposed to. Now Jews were buying homes on Beech Street, making plans to build a bigger Jewish synagogue, and what’s more, they were polluting the town’s good white Christian teenagers with Negro music - jazz - brought to town by none other than Chona’s husband, yet another Jew who owned not one but two theaters. Where was America in all this? Pottstown was for Americans. The Bible had said it. Jesus! Where was Jesus in all this? Doc felt his world was falling apart. 

So a few years after medical school when friends approached him about attending a meeting of the Knights of Pottstown to spread good Christian values, he agreed. And when that Knights of Pottstown meeting actually turned out to be the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan instead, he saw no difference. The men were like him. They wanted to preserve America. This country was woods before the white man came. It needed to be rescued from those who wanted to pollute the pure white race with ignorance and dirt, fouling things up by mixing the pure WASP heritage with the Greeks, the Italians, the Jews who had murdered their precious Jesus Christ, and the niggers who dreamed of raping white women and whose lustful black women were a danger to every decent, God-fearing white man. 

 

It is sad to me that this way of thinking hasn’t gone away, and now is the central “value” of one of our major political parties, which has gone full-on Fascist in their desperation to “preserve” the white America they think we should be. And, of course, claiming Jesus and the Bible in support of their racism. 

 

But the times keep a-changin’ whether you consent to it or not. Moshe finds this out later in the book, when he realizes that public taste in “negro” music has changed. Out is the old swing stuff, in is the new Latin-infused fusion. After he guesses wrong about which of two acts to make the headliner, the leader of the new hot band explains to Moshe the problem, who seems puzzled about all the “Spanish” people.  

 

“To you, they’re Spanish. To me, they’re Puerto Rican, Dominican, Panamanian, Cuban, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Africano, Afro-Cubano. A lot of different things. A lot of different sounds mixed together. That’s America, mijo. You got to know your people, Moshe.” 

 

McBride also paints the African-American community as far from homogenous. One guy, for example, is described as a “Booker T. Washington-type proper Negro,” while the folks on Chicken Hill are viewed by the residents of a neighboring town as “uppity NAACP sorts.” 

 

I won’t spoil exactly the context, but Fatty (the Black juke-joint proprietor) and Big Soap (his Italian buddy) end up with a midnight task that is nowhere near legal, but also not exactly wrong. (Depending on your perspective.) As they set off, Soap’s fellow Italian, Miss Fioria, senses that they know something about the occurrence between Doc and Chona that they aren’t telling, and sends them off with a warning. 

 

“So what did she say then?”

“She said God is watching what we do.”

Fatty sighed. “I’d rather have Him holding me to charge than her.”

 

Nate, the good man with a dark past and a smoldering temper, warns his wife about talking too much about the event. 

 

“Goddamnit, you’ll sport real trouble fooling with these white folks’ lies. Stay out of it. Can’t nothing be done.” 

 

Nate has done time in prison, so he understands when he says “Differing weights mean differing measures. The Lord knows ‘em both.” Justice is not equal. 

 

Miggy, the fortune teller from the lower-class neighborhood, also expresses an interesting opinion. The Lowgod family (which makes up nearly all the neighborhood one way or another) has been employed at the local mental institution, in part because they are willing to put up with the gross stuff. 

 

“And most of your colored workers out there is from the Row. You know why? Your basic Chicken Hill colored wants to eat their food off the high fryer. They aiming to be high siddity like white folks. But pretending to know everything and acting like you’re better than you know you are puts a terrible strain on a body. It makes you a stumbling block to your own justice. Your basic Lowgod don’t care about that. Us Lowgods understand that when them patients at Pennhurst throw their poop at us, or pisses on the floor, or spits at us, they ain’t got no peace. They understand what most people in this land don’t: that you can’t restore what you ain’t never had. Living on a land that ain’t yours, pretending to know everything when you don’t, making up rules for this or that to make yourself seem big, that puts a terrible strain on a body. This land don’t belong to the people that rules it, see. And it’s made some of ‘em, the best of ‘em, the most honest of ‘em, it’s made ‘em crazy.” 

 

I also thought a line from Bernice, Fatty’s sister, who has a bunch of kids from different fathers, about the lies we parents tell ourselves sometimes, was good. 

 

“But I’m no worse than these other mothers out here who pray, ‘Lord, let my child be wise and good’ when they really mean ‘Let this child have more power and money than I have.” 

 

I’ll end with a humorous exchange between Big Soap and Fatty. 

 

“Soap, you wanna make some dough?”

“No, Fatty, I wanna wander the earth spreading joy and life. Of course I wanna make some dough.” 

 

I definitely enjoyed this book. James McBride is reliably excellent and thoughtful, and hopeful and humorous in the bargain. We need as much humanity as we can get in these hateful and dehumanizing times. McBride, coming from hard times as he did, is able to see past all the horribles and find the love and hope. 

 

***

 

I keep forgetting to mention that James McBride also played saxophone in The Rock Bottom Remainders, a touring band consisting of writers, including Dave Barry, Amy Tan, and Stephen King. I read a lot of Dave Barry as a kid and young adult, and learned about the band from his column. I finally got around to reading my first Stephen King novel this month.