The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 Read online

  When I was about the same age as our student editors, I remember being appalled when then-President Ronald Reagan offered the following statement to explain one of his administration’s most disturbing screw-ups, the Iran-Contra scandal: “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”

  At the time, as an eleventh-grader who was not allowed to turn in algebra assignments without showing her work or term papers without footnotes, the president of the United States saying a falsehood felt true in his “heart” seemed less intellectually rigorous than the average Wham! song. But now that we have a president who can look at aerial photos of a smattering of people on the National Mall and still see hordes, I’m retroactively grateful that even an overly optimistic Hollywood happy face a few years away from full-on dementia like Reagan nevertheless sucked it up and faced an actual fact.

  The Sunday after Election Day, Fareed Zakaria moderated a roundtable discussion on CNN featuring ex-felon and Anglo-Canadian curmudgeon Conrad Black. Baron Black of Crossharbour—his actual and not at all villainous-sounding title—disregarded the preceding months in which the president-elect repeatedly picked on Muslims, Mexicans, and women on the record. Black stated, “The facts are that Donald Trump is not a sexist and he’s not a racist. He won the Republican nomination over the established figures in that party.”

  Playing the Sarah Paulson role, New Yorker editor David Remnick responded, “When I hear [Trump] described as not a sexist, not a racist, not playing on white fears, not arousing hate, when he’s described in a kind of normalized way as someone in absolute possession of policy knowledge, as someone who somehow is in the acceptable range of rhetoric, I think I’m hallucinating.”

  Remnick is at the tippy-top of Americans besmirched by folksier folks throughout the campaign as “the elites.” Or what his magazine’s copy editors hilariously insist on spelling “élites,” with an accent aigu. As George Saunders wrote of the way Trump’s supporters feel “left behind” in the New Yorker article included in this anthology, “To them, this is attributable to a country that has moved away from them, has been taken away from them—by Obama, the Clintons, the ‘lamestream’ media, the ‘élites’ . . . They are stricken by a sense that things are not as they should be and that, finally, someone sees it their way.”

  If I can identify an accent aigu and find applying it to the word “elite” to be weirdly amusing, does that make me an elite/élite? On the one hand, I have a master’s degree and every now and then I write for what the president calls “the failing New York Times.” As an author, I’ve even shared a paperback publicist with the aforementioned Mr. Orwell. (Hi, Craig.) On the other hand, I learned what an accent aigu is when I took French at my Montana public junior high. Then, after public high school, I attended one of the state land grant universities President Lincoln signed into law in 1862 to educate “the sons of toil.” I put myself through said college working at a sandwich joint called the Pickle Barrel, which was about as glamorous as it sounds. On my mother’s side of the family, my sister and I, along with our first cousins, are literally the first generation since Reconstruction to not pick cotton. Walker Evans might have photographed the shack where our Okie grandmother lived. When Ma—we called her Ma—was wallpapering her bedroom with newspapers to keep out the cold, did she ever imagine her youngest granddaughter would one day work up the nerve to walk into the office of the school paper and kick start an inky little life among the swells?

  I wonder how many of the country’s so-called elites come from families that have only been that way for a generation or two. A not terribly elite member of the elite like me got this far almost entirely thanks to public schools, and specifically public school arts programs. It’s worth noting that eight out of twelve of the student editors who argued and labored and questioned and cared assembling this anthology attend public schools.

  If my fellow editors and I learned anything reading all the essays, stories, and poems that went into this book, along with the heartbreaking legion of wonderful pieces we simply did not have room to shoehorn into it because that Ta-Nehesi Coates made so very many good points, it’s that the cheapest, most pleasurable way for a country of strangers to get to know each other and the rest of the world is through reading.

  As novelist Elena Ferrante points out in an interview we have included, “The duty of literature is to dig to the bottom.” While there are a few dashed off Internet items in this collection because immediacy can have its charms, the bulk of this book contains verses and yarns loner misfits (as well as one Supreme Court justice) in quiet rooms put down on paper after much thought, research, pacing, and procrastination, cranking out draft after draft in order to say what they had to say in precisely the way they wanted to say it to their people, the readers.

  In one evocative selection, “I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule,” poet Chen Chen of West Texas writes of being stuck performing a humdrum work task while longing to get home to reread Turgenev. Chen pictures himself walking down a story’s misty Russian hill to chat with old locals. “I’m sitting with the villagers,” he says. And for the length of the poem, he is. Poems, like the words coming out of a president’s mouth, are better when they’re true.

  Sarah Vowell

  Sarah Vowell is the author of seven nonfiction books, including Assassination Vacation and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. An original contributor to McSweeney’s, she has volunteered with the various writing centers overseen by 826 National since 2004.

  TEJU COLE

  ■

  Fable

  FROM The New Inquiry

  It was true that the Adversary had brought other monsters into being. Each had been wicked in its own way, each had been an embodiment of one or other of the seven vices, and each had been strong and difficult to vanquish. Some of those monsters still roamed the land. But what made this new monster remarkable, indeed uniquely devious, was that it wasn’t strong at all. In fact, it was weak. The weaknesses through which the other monsters had been vanquished, this monster had tenfold. The new monster was not moral, but it is not in the nature of monsters to be moral. But the monster was also not beautiful, or intelligent, or brave, or well-dressed, or charming, or gifted in oratory, though usually monsters had at least some of those qualities. The Adversary had sent this new monster out, designing it to derive its strength from one source and one source alone, as in olden days was said of Samson and his locks, so that if that source were cut off, the monster would wilt like a severed flower stalk in the noonday heat. The source of the new monster’s strength was noise. If it heard a bit of noise pertaining to it, it grew stronger. If it heard a lot of noise, whether the noise was adulation or imprecation, it was full of joy, and grew even stronger. Only collective quietness could vanquish it, quietness and the actions that came from contemplation.

  Having thus designed it, the Adversary sent the monster out to Noiseville. “A new monster!” the cry went up, and the monster grew a little stronger. “It grows stronger!” went the chorus, and the monster grew stronger still. And thus it was in Noiseville that the new monster, weaker than all the other monsters ever sent by the Adversary, was the only thing the people of Noiseville spoke about. The sound had reached a deafening roar. In every newspaper across Noiseville, the most read articles were about the monster. On television, the reporters spent most of their time making noise about the monster. On little devices the people carried around with them, it was all monster all the time. If the monster smiled, there was noise in reaction. If the monster scowled, there was noise. If it coughed, there was an uproar of coughing and commentary on the manner of the monster’s coughing. The Adversary was astonished by how well his little stratagem had worked. The monster smiled and scowled and coughed, and learned to say the things that generated more noise. And on and on it grew.

  “But it is so
weak!” the people shouted. “It is not beautiful, or intelligent, or brave, or well-dressed, or charming, or gifted in oratory. How can it grow in strength and influence so?” And if the noise went down even one decibel, the monster did something again, anything at all, and the noise went up. And the people talked of nothing but the monster when they were awake, and dreamed of nothing but the monster when they were asleep. And from time to time, they turned on each other, and were distraught if they saw their fellows failing to join in the noise, for any quiet form of contemplation was thought of as acquiescence to the monster. Other monsters in the past had been drowned out by sufficient loudness. Besides, this was Noiseville, and there was no question of not making noise, there in the home of the loudest and best noise in the world, the most beautiful noise, it was often said, the greatest noise in the history of the world. And so the noise swelled to the very limits of Noiseville, and the new monster grew to gargantuan size as had Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, and their ropes were powerless against it, and there seemed no limit to its growth, though it was but the eighth month of that year.

  ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS

  ■

  One Person Means Alone

  FROM The Missouri Review

  Before Taigu, people warned me: China was a fiercely social country. After I arrived, I rarely went anywhere unaccompanied. I was ushered into crowded noodle stalls and into corner stores stuffed with plum juice, chicken feet, and hot-water thermoses. I often needed help at the post office, with its hundreds of strict regulations and wisp-thin envelopes you sealed with a depressor and paste. Students took me to the White Pagoda and the courtyard of H. H. Kung, the only historical sites in town that hadn’t been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, I’d be invited into my Chinese colleagues’ small apartments, where several generations of the family often lived together. I’d be generously served five kinds of dumplings, the bowl full again before I had the chance to set down my chopsticks.

  In the unheated, Soviet-feeling building where I taught university English, I waited in line with other women to use toilets without doors or stalls. At first, I tried to turn my face away from the others, demurring. But there was no use trying to hide anything about our bodies here: whose stomach was upset, or who was crying, or who was on her period that day. We saw it all. We offered stacks of tissues when someone had run out of their own supply.

  I lived in a tiny brick house, the tiles on my roof painted with evil eyes to ward off badness. I’d often wake to the arguing of an unknown college couple, shouting their insults right in front of my window, just a few feet away from where I had been sleeping. I’d stumble into the kitchen, startled to find a stranger outside the back door, shaking my (was it mine?) jujube tree and picking up the fruits from the ground.

  Like most teachers at the agricultural university, I lived on campus, and I wasn’t hard to find. My thoughtful students showed up on my front stoop, bearing jars of weird, floating grains and fermented vegetables sent by their grandmothers. “If you eat this for six days,” they’d say, “you will be well.”

  The word was out: I was sick a lot. It was my first time living abroad, and the new microbes were hard on my body. In Taigu, there was delicious street food as well as contaminated cooking oil, air, and groundwater. Shanxi province, even by Chinese standards, was an environmental disaster. The coal plants were next to the grain fields, pink and green smoke rising out of the stacks. On a good day, you could see the mountains that surrounded campus. Most of the time, they were hidden by pollution. Particulate matter caked the windowsills in my house.

  People were curious about me. I was asked daily by strangers in the market square what country I was from and why I had come to Shanxi province—sort of the West Virginia of China, except that it was on the edge of the desert—as opposed to the more glamorous Shanghai or Beijing. They also asked how old I was, how much money I made teaching at the university, if I’d eaten that day yet, and, if so, what had I eaten? And why was I “a little bit fat,” they said, but not as fat as some Americans? How often did I need to color and perm my hair? (It was reddish and was curly on its own, I said.) Was that American living in the other half of my duplex my boyfriend? (He was not.) Well, did I at least have a boyfriend in the States? (Sarah, my girlfriend from college, was teaching down in Indonesia, but I didn’t explain her, for obvious reasons.) And, occasionally, from students and younger friends: What did I think of the movie American Pie Presents: Beta House? Was it an accurate portrayal of American university life?

  Eventually, I borrowed my friend Zhao Xin’s laptop so I could watch the pirated version with Chinese subtitles. I was horrified. One of the thankfully forgotten sequels of the original American Pie, it made me squeamish during scenes of a fraternity’s hazing ritual, something about attaching a bucket of beer to some guy’s genitalia. There was also one exaggerated fire-hose moment, a sorority sister experiencing female ejaculation for the first time. As for the question of whether this resembled university life in the United States, I told them, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure. I had just graduated from a small, studious college in the Midwest. Despite its sex-positive atmosphere, things were, all in all, pretty quiet there, with some nerdily themed parties but no Greek life at all.

  In truth, I’d had plenty of sex in college, but that had to be my own business. More specifically, I didn’t reveal my lesbian identity to anyone in China, at least at first. I responded to boyfriend questions with a simple “No.” I didn’t know what the consequences of coming out might be, and I couldn’t take the risk. Keeping this a secret, I’d come to realize later, was part of what made me feel so isolated that first year in China, even though other people surrounded me.

  As a student in America, my life had been pretty communal. Still, like a number of Generation Y, middle-class, considerably selfish Americans, I thought I was fiercely independent and staged myself as the protagonist in my own life story. Very little prepared me for the level of social responsibility and interconnectedness that came with moving to Taigu. One of the first words I learned was guanxi, which can be roughly translated as “social connections,” or maybe “relationships.” If you had guanxi with others, you could count on them for most everything, and they could count on you; if you failed to foster a sense of guanxi, people would resent you or think of you as selfish, even though they might not say it out loud. Guanxi emphasized—or mandated—the whole you were a part of rather than the part you played alone.

  I embraced this idea the best I knew how. My American co-fellow, Ben, and I mounted a disco ball in our living room and started hosting weekly dance parties for our Chinese friends: social activity for the greater good, something students reported as scarce on our small-town, farm-school campus. At these parties, at first, we’d awkwardly stand in a circle. But then the sorghum-alcohol punch we provided began to take effect, and our loopy, arrhythmic movements took over the room. Over time, we perfected our playlist: a mix of American ’80s and ’90s hits and cheesy Chinese pop songs. By our second year in China, our living room floor was beginning to split from people’s dancing enthusiasm. The Americans got a wild reputation on campus. Our parties were on Thursday nights, but then we got a noise complaint from the university’s vice president, who happened to live in a house just thirty feet from our front door. When we showed up on his porch the morning after, with a giant fruit bowl and profuse apologies, he smiled and invited us in, as if nothing bad had happened. Our guanxi, the neighborhood harmony, seemed to be restored.

  Overall, however, I was not the best at fostering guanxi. I often found myself hungry for space between others and myself: a necessary measure to quiet the buzz in my dislocated brain. I’d draw the curtains and hole up in my side of my foreign-teacher duplex, the door to my side half closed. This action was usually perceived as hostile or a symptom of possible depression.

  “Why is she not coming out here?” I heard someone ask Ben on the other side of my door. “Is she sad about somethi
ng? Why is she alone?”

  The word alone in Mandarin can be translated in various ways. The expression I heard on the other side of my door, traveling by myself on a train, or walking down the street solo was yi ge ren. Yi is “one”; ge is a kind of counting word, placed between a number and an object. And ren means “person” or “people.” The expression “Are you yi ge ren?” when translated literally is “Are you one person?” In context, though, I began to understand this as a way of asking, “Are you on your own? Are you alone?”

  Of course, I was rarely 100 percent alone, unless you counted when I was asleep or in the single-person bathroom in my apartment. I had come to Taigu paired with Ben, another recent college graduate, and there were two more Americans living in the house next door to us, doing their second year of the same teaching fellowship we’d all received. Most of our life outside of class involved a mixed group of American fellows and Chinese graduate students, with a few older Chinese undergraduates mixed in. We ate dinner together most nights at the hot pot place, just outside the campus gate, or at one of the noodle stalls at school.

  Every once in a while, though, I’d find myself walking alone in public. I was not afraid: not near my house, not on the other side of campus, not even in the bleak brick-and-mud Taigu village alleys scattered with trash and piles of used coal pellets. There were terrible stories, real or imagined, of people getting snatched up around here and having their organs harvested. There was a line of massage parlors, a sort of red-light district, the neon signs flickering on and off.