"Better Half" Sana Krasikoy

            The story “Better Half,” by Sana Krasikoy tells the story of a 22-year-old woman named Anya, who is going through the process of leaving her husband, Ryan, with the help of a lawyer named Erin.  The couple has only been married ten months.  The story starts off with a glass jar being thrown at the narrator by her husband during a fight.  This really depicts the relationship throughout the whole story; it seems like nothing more than glass, bound to shatter.  The marriage wasn’t based on love.  Though there was an emotional relationship, the marriage was established as a “favor” to “marry now and sort out their feelings later.”  The couple experiences fight after fight where Anya forgives her husband time and time again.  Berenice, a Salvadorian at a restaurant where Anya is working, says that “trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it,” and at this point I thought that the story was going to be about how Anya cant escape her abusive relationship.  Then Ryan physically hits Anya over her “working papers.”  This is the final straw.  Anya moves out and gets a restraining order against Ryan, and yet she still gravitates to him.  She even invites him into her new home where they have sex.  Ryan buys Anya flowers, and a juicer, and just when things look as if they are about to turn around, a fight breaks out.  Ryan leaves and Anya eventually moves to New York where she begins taking a marketing research class at Brooklyn College.  Though Anya still thinks she sees Ryan in complete strangers, the reader finally gets a feeling that she has broken the cycle, and that she has finally found peace.

Vocabulary:

Excavated- to make a hole or channel by digging

Ambivalent- having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone

Confluence- the act or process of merging

Writers' Harvest **Extra Credit Blog

            The Writers’ Harvest on Tuesday, November 8 in the Self Auditorium at Strom Thurmond Institute showcased 8 different writers from the staff of Clemson University who read brief excerpts from their own works of literature.

            The first presenter was Mr. John Pursley III who read part of a story he had written.  It was a western in which he had derived the idea for the story form western shows and movies he had purchased.  The main character was the Apache Kid.  I was not fond of his story; or at least not the excerpt he chose to read.  It was hard to follow and was lacking in the action in the form of gunfights and chases on horseback that I have come to expect form a western (I am a big fan of Louis L’Amour’s western novels which are full of this kind of action).

            The second reader was Ms. Lindsey Jones.  She read a story about a three-year-old girl form Haiti whom she had taken in to care for while she was having surgery on her feet (she had misshapen feet that required surgery she couldn’t get in Haiti).  The story takes place while the narrator is cleaning up a mess form carving pumpkins with the child.  I found Ms. Jones a very captivating reader.  She engaged the audience on an emotional level; she appealed to the heart extremely well.  The little girl lived in Haiti with ten other people in a two-room shed.  She knew little English and the narrator had to string a mixture of English words, Haitian words, and a form of sign language together like “laundry on a shared clothesline.”  At times the narrator forgets that the little girl isn’t her daughter; the listener really gets a feeling of strong love between the narrator and this little girl.

            The third reader was Mr. Steve Katz.  He read an assortment of his own poems.  They seemed unrefined to me as an audience member, and not well planned out.  His poems were based on an “alternate reality.”  The titles were like “Alien Love,” “Virtual Gloves,” and “Avatars of love.”  I did not like these poems very much.  They were based on things I didn’t understand and were hard to relate to.

            The fourth reader, Mr. Keith Lee Morris, was the final reader before the intermission, and the final reader I witnessed.  He read an entire short story entitled “My Roommate Kevin is Awesome.”  It was the best of the four readers I listened to, most likely because it was the funniest and most entertaining; the crowd as a whole laughed throughout the entire story.  The story was read quickly and contained lots of foul language.  It sounded like the stereotypical pothead college kid only worried about having a good time.  The story is over a course of seven days, and on each day, a different, strange event happens.  It starts when the narrator witnesses his roommate Kevin hanging upside down in mid air, latter endless amounts of food appear, and Ray Charles even comes back form the dead for a day.  The story’s events are outlandish and yet told in a way that is totally believable!  The events are caused by a feeling of immense boredom, and eventually the avenging angle shows up in a fancy car to tell the two young meant that they have discovered something God didn’t want discovered, and that they must stop immediately.  They stop out of fear, but try and plan a way to try them again in the future.

            I enjoyed the event very much.  I had no idea such talented writers were here at Clemson University.

Bosnia

"The Lazarus Project," by Aleksandar Hemon

            The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon, is told from the prospective of Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer who has gotten a grant and is researching Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant to America accused of anarchy.  The story is told from the present (during Brik’s life) and the past (right after Averbuch is killed).  This makes the story hard to read at times.  The flipping back and forth between time periods interrupts the flow of the separate stories.

            I found most interesting how the characters viewed America as immigrants.  At one point, Vladimir Brik is telling a cab driver of his experiences in America:

“I had served food at the Ukrainian Cultural Center; I had done data input for a real estate broker; I had worked as a teacher of English. I assured him it was very easy to make money in America. I wanted him to think that my life in America was all about hard work, rather than an embarrassing mixture of luck and despair.”

During that same conversation, Brik describes his wife as:

“ A full-blooded American, she was. She took me to baseball games and held her hand on her heart to sing the anthem, while I stood next to her, humming along. She used the national we when talking about the U.S. of A… she often craved cheeseburgers. George and Rachel had bought her a car for her sixteenth birthday. She had the bright, open face that always reminded me of the vast Midwestern welkin.  She was routinely kind to other people, assumed they had good intention; she smiled at strangers; it mattered to her what they thought and felt.  She was often embarrassed; she dreamt of learning a foreign language; she wanted to make a difference. She believed in God and seldom went to church.”

I, as a reader, found the line “she believed in God and seldom went to church” very ironic.  I was a little bit disturbed by the cruelty to the dog where the man and woman throw the dog in a trashcan full of glass bottles and watch as it cuts itself trying to escape the trap.

            At the end of this section, Olga, Lazarus Averbuch’s sister, meets Herr Taube, a lawyer whose client wants Olga’s help.  This grips the reader and pulls them in deeper into the story making them want more.

Vocabulary:

Anarchy - absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.

Deviousness - 1 showing a skillful use of underhanded tactics to achieve goals

Proclivities - a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing

Verdant - green with grass or other rich vegetation.

Yarmulke - a skullcap worn in public by Orthodox Jewish men or during prayer by other Jewish men.

Cowboy Chicken... A Real Restaurant!!

"After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," by Ha Jin

            “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town” by Ha Jin is a story about an American restaurant chain known as Cowboy Chicken that has set up shop in China.  The American manager, Kenneth Shapiro, operates the restaurant, seconded in command by Peter Jiao, a very well educated Chinaman who studied business in America.  The narrator, Hongwhen, is one of several fulltime employees at the restaurant.

            The restaurant goes through several stages in development as it struggles to find its place in Chinese culture.  The store struggles with everything from disgruntled costumers (one costumer claims to have gotten a fly in his food while another wants a refund for the food he has eaten saying that it is a rip-off) to low profits (the store tries to implement a buffet that goes flop because the costumers eat more chicken than the store can afford).  The store finally finds where it belongs due mainly to the efforts of Peter Jiao.  Peter convinces several businesses to hold their business meetings in the Cowboy Chicken restaurant where “because their companies would foot the bill, the business people would order table loads of food to treat their guests to hearty American meals, and then they’d take the leftovers home for their families.  By and By our restaurant gained a reputation in the business world, and we established a stable clientele.”

            Peter also orchestrates a wedding feast in the Cowboy Chicken.  Ice cream and cheesecake is served causing one third of the guest to become ill.  Peter claims it is because the Chinese stomach can’t handle lactose.

            The story concludes itself when the fulltime employees become jealous of Peter’s salary, his large, three story house, and infuriated at the fact that he burns all of the leftover chicken instead of giving it to the hungry.  “Manyou said he had read in a restricted journal several years ago that some American capitalist would dump milk into a river instead of giving it to the poor.  But that was in the U.S.; here in China, this kind of wasteful practice had to be condemned.”  Because of their feelings toward Peter they demand he be fired.  Their request is denied, and they strike the restaurant; when they return to negotiate their wishes, they find that the restaurant is managing just find without them and that they are out of a job.

Vocabulary:

Urbane- suave, courteous, and refined in manner

Countermeasure- an action taken to counteract a danger or threat

Incessantly – without interruption; constantly

Loon- large diving water bird that breeds by lakes in northern latitudes and has a wailing call.

Red silk Sari