Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Author:Charles Yu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

INT. GREYHOUND BUS—AMERICAN BACKROADS—DAY

Dorothy rides the bus through miles of highways, perhaps nondescript to some, but to her, this is grandeur. The countryside she pictured, in the country she long imagined. The panoramic scenery, the flatness of the landscape, the rivers and lakes, the gray and blue and silver and pink skies.

It’s enough to keep her occupied, to keep her mind off of the looks from fellow passengers, from the men at the truck stops where they take bathroom and meal breaks. Enough to help her ignore the smell on the bus, four days in early summer crammed in with fifty-eight strangers. It’s the smell of people, and she can work with that. She is going north, to Ohio, and she can work with that, too, moving across the map in her head, like in a movie, her vector of travel a dashed line visibly inching across a map of the continent.

To add injury to the insult of having been kicked out by Angela, Dorothy realizes that her sister has kept all but one of her books (no doubt as collateral for the asserted debt). The sole book now in Dorothy’s possession is a copy of Hamilton’s Mythology. A book she has loved since childhood, when she spied the tattered paperback in a bin in her local library, passed over by all the other kids for its ruined state. It says on the back, published in the U.S.A. She has learned to read this foreign language from this book, this book of myths. She loves each of the little chapters, how they are short, and self-contained, but also all fit together in a larger universe of gods and goddesses, spirits, lower and higher, deities of all types and their seconds, their assistants, their rivalries and hierarchies, their relative powers and weaknesses. Their petty squabbles and sordid doings and secret crushes. Every time she opens the book, she hopes to turn to a new page, a new god, a little tiny thing. She likes the minor gods the best, because they are easier to master, to learn everything about. She can search out and soak up all of the other things that other people had written or said about this minor god, and in that way become an authority on such a god. And when she becomes an authority someday, an expert in her own right, she thinks that maybe she might be able to make her own entry in the book. To create a tiny god from scratch. She has not named it yet.

Perhaps the god of bus rides. The god of sponge baths, or maps, or minimum wage. The god of immigrants.

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