Really, this one line would justify its inclusion: “They got married at the end of the summer, before God and five hundred Korean people in a Gothic church on Wilshire Boulevard.”
It’s a story about the things we have to carry alone, the things we choose to. About the imaginary lines we trace between what we think are our transgressions and the prices we pay for them. About how sometimes there is a need to forgive someone who hasn’t wronged us. About how nothing is ever done. The prose is exquisitely spare—it makes the kind of poignancy possible that is lost the moment an author lays it on with a trowel or indicates what a reader should think. Tan can do with a word, an observation, what Satie could do with a note. The story is laced with many more memorable lines but I won’t quote them. It’s a short story—you won’t expend much energy in finding them and you will be disproportionately rewarded. I don’t recommend you read it in the garden—May-Lan Tan is dry enough to kill your lawn.
First published in The Reader, and collected in Things to Make or Break, CB Editions, 2014, and in a new edition, Sceptre 2018
A Personal Anthology 