The Elephant

Aravind Adiga is at it again. Same place, very similar story, it almost reads like a prequel to its much acclaimed and award winning debut The White Tiger. The protagonist Chenayya in The Elephant is a cart puller who seems just like the father of Balram Halwai in The White Tiger. The story has the obligatory man shitting in the open, and to top it off, it has a plum prostitute doing her trade in the open got smeared with cow dung, so bad that the dung got all over her face and into her mouth. So Adiga has a fondness to use animal names as his book or novel titles. I surmise the title The Elephant is an allusion to the stupendous injustice in India.

The Elephant is full of youthful angst and indignation. Just like The White Tiger, except it's much shorter. It appears in The New Yorker.

Story Time: A Man Like Him

A Man Like Him by Yiyun Li, is loosely based on or inspired by an online fodder happened in China some time ago: a daughter using her web sites to expose her father's alleged infidelity and seeks justice online. Li's short story, appears on the May 12 New Yorker, centers on a retired elementary school art teacher, Teacher Fei, who unlike most other online netizens, takes the side of the father. Fei eventually meets up with the father and forms some kindred relationship the brief moment they share in a little diner before they part their way to return to their own places where there are actually nothing worth to return to. The protagonist insists "He has nothing to say about this world." Not so for Li. She seems to be just warming up. She has plenty to say about this world, the Chineseness of Chinese people, their past and present in China and in foreign lands.

The House Behind A Weeping Cherry

"The House Behind A Weeping Cherry," written by Ha Jin, an award winning Chinese immigrant writer, and published by The New Yorker on April 7, is yet another immigrant experience story, set in Flushing, Queens, one of the outer boroughs that has nothing to do with Sex And The City, in fact it's the opposite of Sex And The City, where nothing is glamorous and nobody is self-consciously reflective. The story takes place in a whore house in Flushing and centers on a young man who ultimately falls in love with one of the three prostitutes in the house. In the end, the couple only survives the City by running away from it. It's not one of my favorites, but it does put Flushing in The New Yorker, so it is special, at least to me, a long time Flushing resident.