asianamlitfans | Neela Vaswani's Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories

I finally finished a book! Neela Vaswani's Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories (Sarabande Books, 2004) is a wonderful collection of stories that ranges widely in form, characters, locations, and themes.

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The collection has thirteen stories, and as I read through it, I wondered about the choices Vaswani made in sequencing them. I thought of Jeffrey Partridge's argument in his book Beyond Literary Chinatown about David Wong Louie's short story collection. Partridge discusses how readers' expectations (as imagined by author, publisher, and marketers) play into the way Louie's short stories are ordered, beginning with the ethnically recognizable stories (that is, stories about characters that match the ethnic background of the author and stories that generally are "about" being an ethnic American) and moving to different kinds of stories. Partridge notes how Louie's own writing actually began with the stories that were less explicitly marked by ethnic difference, but those same stories were moved towards the middle and end of the collection (and hence, the stories were not ordered according to first publication or even time of writing).

I felt that Vaswani's collection made a similar move in that the first few stories were set in India and often had a kind of fabulist feel (the mystical land). Even in the first four stories, though, there is a deliberate playing with people of different ethnic backgrounds, often in the figure of mixed-race children (Indian/white). With the fifth story, the collection moves to the United States, and interestingly is about an Indian American child (whose family had come most recently from Malaysia, we are told later) told from the perspective of a white woman who is the child's teacher. From this point on, the stories become more and more different from each other and from the standard short story form. Some of the stories read like a series of memories or significant moments ("Five Objects in Queens" and "The Pelvis Series," for example) while others veer off into writing that is not just prose ("Bolero" has sections in poetic verse and "An Outline of No Direction" is a bulleted outline). All in all, though the stories seem very different and don't necessarily fit together completely, I enjoyed the way the stories created different narrative forms and expected changing ways of engaging with the words.

My favorite stories were: "Bing-Chen," concerning a mixed-race Chinese-white man who goes to get his hair cut at his Chinese mother's "girl" (hairdresser); "Bolero," which engages with classical music in ways that suggest the importance of alternative genealogies of "South Asian American" (the idea that there are cultural influences that inform the writing beyond just "South Asian folklore"); and "An Outline of No Direction," which was just fascinating to think of as a story in an outline, centered around the idea of the cardinal points (North, West, South, and East), so fruitful for thinking about location and identity. I can definitely see myself writing more on these stories someday.