The Days When the World Was Young

Alice in Wonderland (take 2) (Bill Evans Trio)

I live inside a condominium, and this means that every day I see people who are not my immediate kin. A week ago, I wrote about my neighbor; put simply, I don’t like him. I avoid taking the same elevator with him because I don’t like seeing his moue.

I know he is not the only person I avoid: I shun from many people anyway, and if you see me at a party - in the rare moment when I’m at a party - I don’t go around saying hi to everyone. I’m aloof. I don’t enjoy being combative, I merely have hard time connecting with people. Even if I’ve lived in the same condominium for more than ten years, there’s no one from the same building who I regard as a close friend. So, in a way, I don’t always blame my neighbor for being snobby to me. Sometimes I blame Dubya.

I will never forget one girl, though. Let’s call her Ella. I first met Ella more than fifteen years ago, when Super Mario World was just made. She lived on the sixth floor, which is below me, and her mom and my mom were instantly friends the day we moved in our condo. Because her mom was a dermatologist and allowed “consultations” (I don’t know if that is how they call it when someone goes to a dermatologist to have check-ups; I’m dummy about skin care lingo) she was often visited by my mom. One day my mom took me along, maybe so that she wasn’t alone, or maybe because my dad ordered me to accompany her, I don’t know. My mom told me to wait because it takes a while for dermatologists to finish whatever it is they do. So I waited on Ella’s room.

For the longest time I stared around not knowing what to do. After many minutes of awkward silences, Ella noticed that I was the shyest visitor she has had, so she brought out some toys and we ended up playing Uno card games - the only time I ever played Uno card games.

Some days later Ella came to my place, and coincidentally, it was the day my mom brought home two dozens of these transparent cubes with beads inside that you shake and rotate around to solve puzzles. Ella loved playing with those cubes, often going to my place just to play with them. Often we’d go to each other’s places to play with our sundry of toys; sometimes we’d borrow each other’s NES cartridges. Though we didn’t speak with each other much, we became playmates: after all, we were kids who didn’t give much weight to intellectual conversations and we were all about frolicking. We were very fond of each other that my siblings would often tease us as childhood sweethearts, and I often got angry because of them, perhaps because I was denying that I really liked her.

And then one day, less than a year since we first met, she moved out. Her mom said she went to Singapore to study there, but soon her mom also left, and, last I heard, it was because of divorce. I lost touch with her family since then.

It has been more than 15 years since I last met Ella. Ella’s not her real name. I don’t even know her real name, and she doesn’t know mine either. Lately, I often wonder about what she’s up to, perhaps because deep inside I’ve never gotten over her leaving. Will we see each other again one day, as people who cannot recognize each other from the happy times they’ve shared as children?

Life is strange. The fonder you are of someone, the sooner the moment you are together passes.

Illuminating Everything

Okay, 7 days have gone by without new blog posts. I’ve been busy. Moving on…

I finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated two days ago, and I had a more unequivocally positive opinion of it in the entire time that I was reading it than I was with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. There are minor details - the ending, for one - that keep me from claiming it as a flawless novel, but on the whole, I love it. (Also, isn’t the cover pretty? Yes, yes it is!)

If I were to describe the book with just one word, it’s this: fresh. There’s nothing new with Jews writing memoirs of Holocaust survivors, even if oftentimes these memoirs become brilliant-yet-harrowing studies of the human condition. Everything is Illuminated, however, uses quite unusual ways of writing that if you can call it hackneyed, you might as well call Alaska a desert.

The book jumps back and forth between two stories. The first one is the history of Trachimbrod, which is a Jewish village (or what they refer to as shtetl) somewhere in Ukraine. Because this part involves the saga of a family (in fact, the ancestors of the author) and is also told in a surrealist style, it is very reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The other story takes place in the present, and is about the author’s going forth to Ukraine in search of a woman who saved his grandfather from Nazis. The author does not speak Ukraine, so he had a Ukrainian translator named Sasha tag along in the journey.

I like the latter part better because it is narrated by Sasha. He speaks weird English, and he often uses words in improper contexts. He’s so oblivious to how silly he sounds that anyone who speaks intermediate-level English will chuckle, at least, at his idioms. Yet, unlike some “satires” that I’ve read, the humor never gets in the way from the heart of the story, which I won’t talk about because it’s something you should find out on your own.

I recommend Everything is Illuminated. There’s a movie adaptation of the novel too, and I’m going to track down the DVD and see if it’s good enough.