Entry 14: Snippets of L.A.
Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha (2019)
Stories we tell about L.A.
Steph Cha has said she writes about crime for what it reveals about society, as well as certain times and places. We look to the past to understand the present. Your House Will Pay is set on dual timelines: the events leading up to the Uprising of 1992 in Los Angeles and a separate timeline set during 2019. As Americans, Cha believes, we must ask ourselves: how much of this history do I own?
South Central Los Angeles in the early nineties is rife with internecine gang warfare. To blunder into the wrong neighborhood wearing the wrong color — blue or red — could spark violence. Meanwhile, hard-working Korean immigrants seek refuge in their communities. Soon the violence inevitably comes for them, too.
Cha’s title references Shakespeare’s “a plague on both your houses,” and, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, every character possesses a “fatal flaw,” everyone is culpable in the violence that occurs. When a Korean woman is shot, her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Grace, learns that her mother herself once shot and killed a young Black teenager, Ava, mistakenly anticipating a robbery. The jury decided it was manslaughter and no jail time was served. Meanwhile, Ava’s brother, Shawn, and cousin, Ray, are drawn into gang activity and petty crime, and both have served jail time. Ray in particular stumbles when he is released, his re-entry is not an easy one. Grace’s sister, Miriam, is a writer steeped in social justice issues. But Grace has never paid much attention to current events. Her awakening is sudden and brutal. She visits the family whose fate has been intertwined with her own for nearly thirty years. Bless her heart, she keeps trying to talk about it. There are no heroes here, there are no villains. The systems we count on to protect us from harm and punish transgressions are imperfect because the people working in them are imperfect. How do we allow people to recover from their transgressions? What does it mean to punish, what does it mean to pay for what you’ve done? If someone is killed, is there any way this can be made right? These are thought-provoking questions. George Floyd, Ahmed Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, the list goes on and on. Violence and retribution aren’t the answer; we need alternate outlets for pain and rage, and better policy solutions to address poverty, despair, and violence. Talking may not be enough. But it’s a start. ****
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2019)
Having enrolled two of my children in a performing arts school — as so many in our Los Angeles community have — this book is insightful about a particular milieu. It’s a coming of age story, a story of revenge and an exploration of how artists reconfigure reality to suit their purposes.The book’s portrayal of female sexual ambivalence is fascinating, a theme touched on in the short story, “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person which appeared in The New Yorker in December 2017; see also the rejoinder by Alexis Nowicki in Slate ( https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/cat-person-kristen-roupenian-viral-story-about-me.html ) providing a timely discussion about the role of appropriation in art and fiction.
But, back to Trust Exercise. The novel includes a clever scene at Skylight Books in Los Feliz — a touchstone for Angelenos.
Sexual ambivalence, especially as experienced by minors, is icky to read about. In the first section of Trust Exercise, a teacher and an older student (how much older isn’t at first clear) engage in sexual activity with two younger girls. This takes place during the eighties, when this behavior wasn’t understood as sexual predation in quite the same way as it is now.
Choi masterfully undercuts the older men. Like many young girls (Sansa in Game of Thrones) Choi’s young female characters possess a poignant degree of sexual naiveté. What’s fresh and new is the way Choi powerfully eviscerates the loutish male characters. She sexually humiliates them. Her portrayal is wickedly funny.
The two older men are British, and there’s something squeamish about the sexuality of these British men that smacks of an obsession with the nursery. (Prince Charles a la ‘Tampongate’ anyone?) Rather than portraying these sexual predators as powerful, their sexual prattle and juvenile antics are infantile. Choi’s portrayal drains the characters of any power they might otherwise possess. She makes us laugh queasily and wince.
In the second section of the book, these events, and characters are revisited so that they are understood from an artist’s perspective, and from an adult’s perspective, too. *** Recommend