On Such A Full Sea by Lee Chang-Rae

Author:Lee, Chang-Rae [Lee, Chang-Rae]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781408705483
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

15

Why, in the life of a community, does a certain happening or person become the stuff of lore? You would probably say great accomplishment is the reason, such as when one of our B-Mor children triumphed in an event for the first time ever in the biannual regional track meet (in the four-thousand-meter event), this against a field of intensively coached, superprimed Charters. We will note the historical significance of the achievement, basking in the reflected glory, for naturally we would like to think how it is emblematic of the best qualities of our kind, even if we ourselves can hardly summon the effort to jog half a block in pursuit of a candy wrapper skittering away on a sudden gust of wind.

It’s our common character on display, which is why we invest so much of ourselves – often totally beyond reason – in particular figures and performers, both fictive and of flesh. And when that display is unsettling or notorious, we can collectively wring our hands and wail and then try to assuage the disquiet in our hearts by more coolly interrogating its antecedents, the conditions and causes of its expression, and debate about how we might curb a future recurrence, none of this cynically posed but subtly servicing the final hopeful notion that This Is Not We.

Yet sometimes, as in the instance of our dear Fan, the talk lingers. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have much actual footage of her, unlike that of the long-distance runner, or even of Joseph niftily curling a shot into the goal. There’s no more to see on our handscreens after that first surveillance vid of her exit, nothing at all, and so the secondary rumor and conjecture continues to root and grow. We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it. Our telling becomes an irrepressible vine whose hold becomes stronger than the originating stock and sometimes even topples it, replacing it altogether.

And while we shall resume our trailing of what happened to Fan et al. after Miss Cathy’s intervention, we feel the need to return at least briefly to B-Mor, where rumors had spread about imminent cutbacks in the production facilities because of the oversupply of fish and now produce and then even some outlandish scenarios about the eventual shutdown and closure of B-Mor itself. For after the price of fish dropped precipitously, so, too, did the prices on our succulent vegetables, the markets of our neighborhoods for a time selling produce by the crate, the obvious explanation being that Charter suspicion of our products had widened, branding even those perfectly sheened and plump tomatoes that Reg and his coworkers would pick to be somehow perilous to their health.

As with what occurred with the falling price of fish, our first impulse was to buy as much as we could of normally very expensive Charter-bound fresh peas and cucumbers and sweet corn, most everyone freezing and salting and canning whatever their households couldn’t consume, so much so that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.