SEVEN DAYS | february 07-14, 2007 | feature 29A
The Floral Gallery
Wine Tasting February 13, 3-6pm
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1/24/07 12:55:10 PM
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If Choong makes us want to read on through passages like this, it’s a testament to her talent for evoking a world fractured by cultural, class and gender gaps, yet somehow still united by myth, psychobab-
Hollywood reference points in Nin’s personal mythology. But the novel suggests that mixing it up, personally and culturally, isn’t always a bad thing. “You have no sense of land,” a mysterious stranger tells
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FireWife is the debut of a talented writer who has a knack for alternating between floridly sensuous prose and plainspoken abruptness à la Jamaica Kincaid. ble and pop culture. Like many young people today, Nin is equally comfortable discussing the life of Buddha and the modern myth of The Matrix. She lusts after a generic alpha male she refers to as “Russell Crowe.” And when she seeks enlightenment from the divine, she finds that “God has the speaking voice of James Earl Jones and Judi Dench in one body.” Some might say there’s something “imperialistic” about the power of these
Nin. “You feel as though you belong to everywhere and therefore nowhere at all.” Global citizen though she may be, Nin doesn’t live in a Babel of miscommunication. The stories of “nameless girls and women,” echoing and building on her own, root her in a tale as old as time.� Got a comment on this story or an idea for another one? Contact Margot Harrison at margot@sevendaysvt.com.
FROM FIREWIFE: December 31, 1981. We were at Good-Grandma’s Tapioca House in the village of Terong that afternoon because my Other-Grandma, the Godzilla, had thrown Mama’s clothes from inside Kinta House onto the main street of Kinta at 12 p.m. sharp. Mian, Liang, and I were playing Lost in Space on the Kinta main street pavement at that exact moment. The last day of the year, school ended earlier than usual. All the Kinta town folks and children were home early. Like us, they saw Mama’s clothes shooting into the street, propelled and sustained for an unusually long time in the noon air by the simple rage of my Other-Grandma. She was a tiger. I asked Mama once if I could change to be a rabbit like her or a dragon like Mian or a horse like Liang. Mama explained that tiger has many kinds. You can be a good one. She didn’t say you are a good one. She said I can be a good one. Can Be is dangerous and can be bad. Underneath Mama’s airborne clothes, I saw the neighbors’ eyes piercing from the deep shadows in their living rooms through the gaps in their front doors. The eyes had teeth. Sharp ones. I saw the gaps of their front doors turn into the gaps of their front teeth, out of which gossip would self-sprout and self-feed. Mama left her clothes untouched on the main street that day. We left our chalk-drawn spaceship sitting apologetically on the sidewalk. We made a line walking down the main street heading toward Good-Grandma’s Tapioca House in the next village, fifty stone-throws from Kinta House. Kinta people’s eyes had teeth. They nibbled at my feet. A blind-white noon. Windless and peopleless, the street smelled faintly of smoked rubber, and stray dogs stood like amputees. Hissing crickets hissed us along. I wished we were on horses, like the cowboys with long chins in Bonanza, vanishing into the end of their Main Street, into sunset, into justice, into a happy The End. But we walked.
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