Fifty Books Project 2023

Here Among Strangers by Serena Crawford

On an afternoon when Catherine was able to duck away from the Quiet Adventures tour group, in between two lectures she was signing for the traveling hearing-impaired, she took a taxi to a village outside of Taipei, to a small English school where she’d once taught.  She’d lived on the third floor in a room with a bare bulb, an electric kettle and a mosquito coil.  There was a hole underneath a loose floor tile, the kind of place you could stash your valuables and return to find them twenty, thirty years later untouched.   (from “Silence”)

Can a traveler ever blend back into life?  Can you ever fully return from where you;ve once been?  (from “Here Among Strangers”)

Here Among Strangers is a book of short stories – winner of the 2019 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.  I received a copy because I did not win that contest.  As usual, there is a risk of sour grapes in my reading of such a book, though it is also a worthy way to asses my own lack of publishing success.  In a nutshell, there is much to admire in Ms. Crawford’s prose – it is dense with well-chosen details so that the reader feels as if he is inhabiting a real place.  Her characters get slightly repetitive, but always feel like fully three-dimensional people, though often with similar difficulties with decision making.  There seems to be an autobiographical element here in that certain character traits, plot developments and settings repeat across stories.  This is certainly a world Crawford knows well, whether she has lived it or not, and she gets it to add up to a world view that holds the collection together.

One of the patterns that repeats is the portrayal of college graduates financing their travels around Asia by teaching English.  In “Silence,” quoted above, Catherine has graduated to working for a travel company that specializes in tours for the hearing impaired, but much of the story involves flashing back to the weeks she spent at the English school she mentions in that opening paragraph.  At that time she had an awkward but intense relationship with the man who ran the school and during this return trip we learn that he was dying and every trace of the school was swallowed up by modernization after he was gone – including the treasure she left under that loose tile, a series of notes he had written to her to improve his English.

Catherine has moved on from her bumming-through-Asia phase, but several other characters are having more trouble with the transition to adulthood.  In “Chinatown,” the narrator was called back from China to take care of her aging mother.  Both women have recently survived tragedies (the death of a husband and the still-birth of a child) and one deals with grief through a severe asceticism – the daughter will not own anything that does not fit into a small backpack – while the other has become a full-fledged hoarder – mom insists that her daughter accompany her to Costco and other stores to purchase random junk.  In “Ocean,” a Father has come to Hawaii because his son has been hospitalized after a surfing accident.  The father’s severe disappointment with his son’s peripatetic lifestyle – he travels to surfing mecca’s endless summer style – is hammered home constantly and our sympathy for the son grows as Dad (an investment banker) slowly learns what a disciplined and simple lifestyle the young man is pursuing.

In “Oasis,” “My Brother’s House” and “Enchanted” the grown-ups who have moved beyond their youthful artistic/travelling phases have been justly punished by the rigors of parenthood.  Granted, I am looking back on my children with rose-colored glasses, but these stories could act as birth control:  parenting has rarely seemed so unrelentingly grim and difficult.  There is not a moment of joy or success that makes the decision to reproduce seem like anything a sane person would want to take on.

These patterns do give a reader a chance to contemplate the arc of life – how we move from our youthful refusal of responsibility towards something more adult.  While that decision is not celebrated here – it is almost always something forced on a person, something to be mourned – its inevitability is taken seriously.  There is also a recurring contemplation of the role of possessions – Catherine and her backpack, her mother and her hoarding, the banker father vs the surfer son, a family, in “Enchanted” trying to raise children and stay true to their youthful ideals, and the school owner in “Silence” whose wealthy parents bought him a school so he could fulfill his life-long dream before he died.  

These themes are brought to their fullest and most graphic realization in the title story, the last in the collection.  A group of young people on individual post-college adventures have united to share an adventure and – having decided they enjoyed each others’ company, have reunited in an impoverished and depressing Bangkok rooming house.   One of their number, Kippy, the kindest and most sincere of the group (“he seemed to be travelling for all the right reasons – to learn more about the world, see what he was missing.”) shows up late.  He is filthy and gaunt and permanently disoriented:  he appears to be no longer capable of taking care of himself.  The group attempts to nurse him back to health (though without engaging any medical professionals) and to arrange for his return to the states, but when nothing works, they give him money and food and leave him to survive the streets of Bangkok without them.  The narrator is thinking back on this event, and on Kippy, from her office at an insurance company.  She gets regular holiday cards from the group, but the “propped-up babies, the plastered smiles, the tinselly decorations … remind me of fish trapped in a frozen pond,” and she cannot stop wondering what happened to Kippy, the purest of the travelers.  It is the strongest story in the collection because the moral questions surrounding their behavior are haunting in a way that the decisions of other characters simply aren’t.

In Here Among Strangers, youthful inexperience involves running from responsibility to someplace foreign and impoverished, only to be forced home where American materialism provides no balm.  It is not a pleasant world, but it is thought provoking and fully realized.