Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales

When we think about Asia, it’s really easy to romanticize the life, the people there — I think. It’s easy to be aggravated by the Starbucks even while we’re heading there to get Frappucino because good lord, it’s hot and I’m jet lagged and there is nothing that would be more reassuring right now than caffeine and air conditioning and yes, I am speaking from experience, this means YOU, Singapore.

I think it’s also nearly impossible to create any kind of real picture of the young woman who’s making your coffee, to imagine where her family is from and how maybe, this is a really good job for her or hey, maybe not. And maybe a little too much cable TV has made it possible for people who have no idea what California looks like to aspire to a life that has no rice paddies or water buffalo or arranged marriages. I think it’s easy to be annoyed by the culture clash we perceive as outsiders, but there’s no way we can get inside the head of the guy who built my Nikon so he could send a kid to college, for example.

This rambling mess of thoughts is what I took away from reading Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales by Eleanor Bluestein. Yup, I got a review copy and I really enjoyed it. It’s a collection of short stories about the people of Ayama Na, an imaginary country that’s maybe Cambodia, maybe somewhere else, maybe cobbled together out of bits of Southeast Asia. Though I had the opportunity to ask the author about this imaginary place, I passed on that intentionally, I didn’t want reality to color my vision of what Ayama Na looks like, though I did patch it together in my own head, using pieces of Vietnam and Cambodia.

The characters in the stories are all wrapped in the culture clash of Southeast Asia’s modernity — the would be monk who works construction, a fast food restaurant worker protecting her family’s honor, the artist railing against caring for her dying father, the aspiring actor who knows The Godfather by heart… they’re all walking the razor sharp line between their historic culture and the roles assigned to them by that society, and the pull of modern life. Even the American artist, bugged out, gone crazy, and maybe even worse, gone local, in the underground society of beggars and whores, embodies the collision, head on, of two models of living that seem incompatible and yet, coexist.

I couldn’t read this book from a distance. I kept thinking about the kid in the cafe in Hanoi. I complimented his English and when he thanked me, he told me he’d studied it for a few years now in university. “What are you studying?” I asked. “IT,” he responded, “you know, computer science.”

Why not? Just because I was in the middle of a city that looked nothing like anywhere I’d been, where the noise and the sights and the smell were so overwhelming that I could not take it for more than a few hours at a time, why couldn’t this kid be a future computer nerd? There’s no good reason at all. The only reason I was flustered was that he did not fit my narrow imagined view of what his life could be like.

Eleanor Bluestein’s characters remind me of that kid. They carry all the weight of their imaginary history, but also, they face forward, into whatever modern life is going to bring them, be it french fries or computerized toys or a husband hand picked by the family. The book is a great read, I enjoyed it tremendously.

Get yours on Amazon here or hey, you can have mine. Leave a comment, bonus points if you tell me about a culture clash character you’ve met on your travels. I’ll pull a name and send some lucky person the book.