I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: WHITNEY-“Far Far Away” (from WILCOvered, UNCUT Magazine November 2019).

The November 2019 issue of UNCUT magazine had a cover story about Wilco.  It included a 17 track CD of bands covering Wilco (called WILcovered or WILCOvered).  I really enjoyed this collection and knew most of the artists on it already, so I’m going through the songs one at a time.

I have only recently heard of Whitney, although I understand they are quite popular.

This is a muted bedroom-sounding recording.  There’s a folky acoustic vibe with acoustic guitar and piano and slide guitar.  It’s weird that the sound is all kind of compressed together making it sound really small.

The (double) slide guitar solo is quite pretty.

[READ: February 9, 2020] “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts”

The title of this story gives you no indication at all what the story is about, which is pretty interesting.

The only connection is that the story is set in Chuck’s Donuts.  We learn pretty quickly that there is no Chuck.  Indeed, the owner never knew anyone named Chuck, but she thought that name sounded nicely all-American.

The owner is a Cambodian woman named Sothy.  The other two women of the store are her daughters Kayley and Tevy (who is four years older an Kayley).  Sothy wonders if her shop should be open 24 hours a day or just normal business hours.  Should she really have her daughters work the night shift?

A couple of weeks ago the night employee quit.  For the summer the girls would work the night shift with her and all the saved money would go to their college fund.

As the story opens at 3AM, a man walks in and orders an apple fritter.  He sits at a booth and stares out the window.  He doesn’t respond to their chitchat, he just looks out the window until he stops looking out the window, then he leaves, fritter untouched.

Kayley wonders if he is Cambodian, but Tevy says that not all Asians are Cambodian.

Three days later the man returns and does the same thing

The girls cant stop talking about him.  They even squabble about him. Sothy sees that the man is distracted by them and that he soon leaves.  But she tells them not to worry, that he’s Khmer.

They desperately want to know how she knows that.  “Of course he is,” Sothy says.

Tevy has been amazed at her parents’ ability to intuit Khmer–whether some is Khmer or emphatically not Khmer–in other people.  But she can never figure out what it is they see that makes them so sure.

The man returns several times and one night Kayey says that he looks like their father.  Tevy mocks her saying that their mom would have noticed if he looked like their father.

Sothy and her husband divorced some time ago.  She learned that he had another family in a nearby own–children and everything,  This was especially galling because she conceded to taking the money for the donut shop from his uncle.  His uncle was a man who had lots of dirty money.  Sothy didn’t want the money–didn’t want to know what horrible things that money had done.  But they accepted the money with the plan of paying back as quickly as possible.  She lives in fear that the uncle is going to send someone after her.

The story of what happens with the money is powerful and the crux of the story

But the story of the man is in the present.  He did not return for several days, but he does come back one night while Sothy is out making a delivery.  She locked the door, but when the man knocked, the girls let him in.  Their condition is that he answers their questions–and buys a fritter.

The questions are ostensibly for Tevy’s philosophy paper–On Being Cambodian.

But the man answers the questions unexpectedly.

Even the first one, “You’re Khmer, right?” has a crooked answer.  he says, “I am from Cambodia, but I’m not Cambodian.”  He tries to explain that his family is Chinese but he grew up in Cambodia.  Despite the fact that everything he does is Cambodian–he survived the Khmer Rouge, he speaks Khmer, he eats rotten fish, and he shops at the Cambodian grocery store.   But he ends by saying that “I live in America and I am Chinese.”

Then he surprises them by saying that they look like they have Chinese blood as well.

Tevy recalls being misidentified as Chinese in elementary school and getting very angry about that.  She gets riled up about the man, but he shouts at both of them to be quiet.  As that happens, a woman bursts in to the donut shop and starts yelling at the man.  “You’re spying on me?” she yells.

The man and woman get into a physical altercation and the girls don’t know what to do.  He starts to hit her and then there is a loud crash.

The end of the story is deadly serious but almost comical in its aftermath.

I really liked this a lot and was surprised how the story unfolded.  I was more than a little disappointed that it ended so soon.