Angie Chau Thinks About “Every Little Hurricane”

Quiet As They Come, the debut collection by Angie Chau, gives us multiple perspectives on an extended family of Vietnamese immigrants, beginning five months after their arrival in San Francisco, as eight-year-old Elle recalls a Fourth of July during the summer all twelve of them lived in the same three-bedroom house. One of Elle’s aunts, Kim, becomes the focus of the next story, then her mother, Huong, then her father, Viet, and so on, before returning to the adult Elle in the final story. The shifting points of view give us access to a variety of experiences and insights into how we can still feel out of place even after years of living in the same location. In the story she’s chosen to write about for Beatrice‘s “Selling Shorts” series, Chau touches upon similar feelings of existential alienation and a child’s-eye view of an unsettling world all too close to home.

I relish personal stories. In life, I love listening to secrets, confessions, tidbits of gossip. In fifth grade I started a game with my two best friends called True Confessions. My best friend’s father was a jazz musician and had a sound proof studio behind the house. We stood on the make shift stage, turned on the microphone, and announced the one “true confession” that we would never admit out loud at school. The game didn’t last long. I don’t think my friends were as interested in this same sense of exposed purging. To this day, however, I am a good secret-keeper. Friends, neighbors, and coworkers always come back to tell me more.

In fiction, I crave the same kind of intimacy. I want it to be our world, yours and mine, alone. I want to feel like you trust me enough to reveal something untold to others, something you are uncomfortable about. And maybe through your courage, your vulnerability, through your telling of it, I get to admit things I didn’t have the words for before. I can acknowledge a shared fear or shame, I can ask questions I’ve never asked before.

A story that has inspired me is Sherman Alexie’s “Every Little Hurricane,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Its technical brilliance, dark humor, and sweet sadness, distill a world in all its complexity into one night. Because I had never encountered Spokane Indians or any Native Americans in literary fiction, the story feels otherworldly, both refreshing and haunting. I was immediately struck by how these people were both absolutely foreign, yet somehow familiar.

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14 September 2010 | selling shorts |

Rachel Shukert & Emily Gould @ Greenlight

“It tells you something about me that, in case my acting career proved a failure, my only contingency plan was to publish an international bestseller. I’m sure that you are already aware of this. I just want you to know that I know it too.”—Rachel Shukert

Tonight I’ll be hosting the latest installment in the series of “author/blogger pairings” I’ve been organizing for Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn), and I’m very excited to be welcoming my friend Rachel Shukert to read from Everything Is Going to Be Great, a memoir of how her efforts to make it as an actress after graduating from college led to a less-than-satisfactory trip to Europe for a background part in an avant-garde play, which was followed by an extended “time out” in Amsterdam that turned out even worse—but at least she can laugh about it all now, and so can the rest of us, right?

After Rachel reads, she’ll sit down for a conversation with my former colleague Emily Gould, who has also published an autobiographical book: And the Heart Says Whatever. Although she’s still most famous for her time at Gawker, for nearly a year now she’s been doing a cooking show/author interview series for The Awl called “Cooking the Books” that’s quite entertaining. So I’m looking forward to hearing what she and Rachel have to say once they get started—and I hope Beatrice readers in and around New York City will come check it out.

13 September 2010 | events |