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Introduction
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Ed Lewis writes a world that transcends war, peace and the strange combined turbulence of racism, poverty and madness that makes up America in the 21st century. With deft strokes he gives us characters that haunt us like black and white photos: Jet-setters, troubled teenagers, Vietnam Vets, migrant workers, and ordinary people. His stories are inhabited by the Americans of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. One wonders how a Hollywood producer dipped his fingers in the unearthly fissuring fabric of the American everyman. Lewis gives us union workers, Cesar Chavez, the migrant labor movement in California with startling color: “The color in front of me changed, first to chartreuse then abruptly to a bright orange. I looked up. The line of trucks outside Campbell’s Tomato Soup plant went on as far as I could see. Crushed tomatoes covered everything. The bright orange began to mix with the dull, dark red liquid that flowed from the tomatoes. It smelled like blood” (33). The stories remind one of Harold Pinter, the world is always slightly off kilter. The fabric is full of desire, secrets. Secrets clearly fascinate this author. One of the most haunting stories is of a Colonel who marries a Vietnamese woman his father, a general, refuses to acknowledge. After his father’s death, he shows his wife a letter written in 1969 describing the atrocities of the war including the events of Mai Lai. His wife Sung Hee cannot touch him in his grief. He is out of reach. In the end, the splintered fragments of the American ix psyche are what we are left with and a grief we are not equipped to process. A man who has returned from war, finds his father living among crazed racist killers, and attempts in thought particles to sort it out: “Maybe it was Post something-or-other Syndrome the intern told him he had. Christ knows there was plenty to cry about, but he hadn’t shed one tear the whole time there. It wasn’t that he never cried—he was always self conscious about the way he teared up at the movies—but there was a good reason he couldn’t in Vietnam. The women, the old men, the children, they never cried when their villages were littered with corpses, never called out in pain, even after a grenade tore a limb off their bodies. Not ever, when one of us could see or hear them” (101). Ed Lewis has created a collection of American stories that reflect the landscape of distinct cultures and the underbelly of a troubled psyche. America has not come to terms with our history, diversity, languages, or the two hundred years (fast growth for a country). Some of the stories point to unbearable longing, some to chasms between class and race. Others like light moving across the trunk of a tree in a dark forest, move toward the possibility of humanity rising above itself. America has yet to grow up. We have emerged a stark, starving demanding adolescent who doesn’t know who they are or what they want, just that we do want and that we remain uncomfortable in our skin. —Kate Gale President, PEN USA x [34.228.168.200] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:49 GMT) Masquerade This page intentionally left blank. ...