Little Failure

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The Soviet system worked best when its adults -- its men, in particular -- were welcomed to stay at the emotional level of not-particularly-advanced teenagers. Often at a dinner table, a male Homo sovietcus will say something uncouth, hurtful, disgusting because this is the teenager's right and prerogative, this is what the system has raised him to be, and his wife will say, Da tishe! -- Be quiet! -- and then look around the table, embarrassed. And the man will laugh bitterly to himself and say, Nu ladno, it's nothing, and wave away the venom he has left on the table.

This goes a long way towards explaining the family that Gary (Igor) Shteyngart was born into, but it's only a part of the picture: not only was Shteyngart born behind the Iron Curtain, but his parents were Soviet Jews, with the pogroms and the Holocaust looming in recent memory. When President Carter brokered a grain for Jews swap in 1977, the Shteyngarts were allowed to emigrate to the U.S., and for the first time, Gary's parents had to explain to the seven-year-old boy that everything he had been told his entire life was a lie -- America wasn't evil, and perhaps, the Soviets were. Being able to openly practise their religion for the first time in their lives, the Shteyngarts enroll Gary in Hebrew school (where he is mercilessly bullied as an outsider; as the Stinky Russian Bear) and even force upon him a botched circumcision at eight. With no friends, no connection to the community, and parents who scream obscenities at each other (and threaten divorce) every night, Gary is, quite possibly, the most miserable little boy in the world.

In Little Failure (the title based on Shteyngart's mother's nickname for him), the immigrant-as-told-by-a-child story is heart-wrenching, the abuse he suffered at his parents' hands revolting (with his father's "hits to the neck" and his mother pretending he didn't exist for days at a time), and it's easy to cheer for Gary to find a way out; gratifying to see that he found a way into society through storytelling. 

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.

But as unlikeable as the parents are, there's something really unlikeable about Gary himself (and I suppose it was bravely honest of him to let himself be seen this way). Although his parents have no television and still eat the cold cabbage borscht and farmer's cheese with canned peaches that turn Gary's stomach, he also spends three hours after school every day with a beloved grandmother who sets him in front of her TV and fetches and cooks for him anything he'd desire. Gary complains about the low level of education that he received at his Hebrew school (where he eventually became a bit of a bully himself), yet his grades were sufficient to gain entry to the prestigious Stuyvesant High School -- and although he strongarms his mother into buying him designer clothes so that he can finally fit in with the mainstream, he promptly becomes a drunk and stoner who neglects his studies and risks squandering his opportunity. He then decides to follow a girl out to Oberlin College (instead of accepting one of his quasi-Ivy League school offers) and becomes "Scary Gary": a kid constantly stoned and drunk and poured into his dorm room every night. I couldn't help but think of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers here, when he explained why so many late 20th century NYC lawyers and doctors were Jewish (because their immigrant parents worked tirelessly to provide their sons with first rate educations in order to launch them into white collar professions). Gary's parents also hoped for him to become a lawyer, and even though it's obvious that that would have been a soul-destroying move for the budding writer, there's an off-putting tone of ingratitude over all these years; like as though he was exploiting both his parents' Soviet Jew penchant for self-sacrifice and the American postmodern nihilism of the time (and even though I appreciate that he was poised between these two worlds, it reads as only fair that he should have placed himself in one or the other: accept the sacrifices and do his best to earn them or embrace hedonism at his own cost).

But not liking Gary Shteyngart doesn't mean that I didn't like this book -- it's sadly funny and far enough from my own experience to be really interesting. I can't imagine transforming from a proud Soviet -- daydreaming about one day gloriously joining the Red Army -- into a Reagan Republican, griping about Welfare Queens and mentally preparing for WWIII. Even though I haven't read any of Shteyngart's novels, it was interesting to see him tying his real life experiences into the fiction he's written (and it may prove interesting to have discovered him in this order). I do wonder at the potential betrayal of writing so critically about his parents while they are still alive (and as I read that they were waiting for a Russian publisher before reading this book, it couldn't have been vetted by them pre-publication), but that seems to be in keeping with the cool détente Gary has arrived at with his family. And one last complaint: early in Little Failure, Gary has a panic attack in a book store when he sees a picture of a church from his Leningrad neighbourhood. He promises to tell the story this picture dredges up later, and when it finally is revealed near the very end of the book, I thought, "What? That's it?" (As a three-year-old, Gary was walking with his father, returning from flying a toy helicopter at the church. As his father was speaking, he made a sweeping arm gesture that hit Gary in the nose -- maybe an accident, maybe because Gary was misbehaving -- and his nose began to bleed. Seeing a picture of the church 35 years later, apparently, brought back a flood of abusive memories.) Don't listen to the naysayers who quibble that a 40-year-old hasn't lived enough to write a memoir; there is plenty to chew on in this book. And did I mention it's funny, too?

Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-watering bunching of consonants (just one i between the h and t and you got some pretty nice “Shit” there), and overall unattractiveness has cost me a lot of human warmth. “Mr., uh, I can’t pronounce this … Shit … Shit … Shitfart?” the sweet Alabama girl at reception giggles. “Is, uh, a single bed okay for you?” What do you think, honey, I want to say. Do you think a Shitfart gets to share a bed?

It's sad but true that I vaguely resent people who have had more miserable childhoods than I had; like it delegitimizes the pain that I felt (except, of course, for those who suffered truly abusive childhoods). Except for the degree of scale, Shteyngart's early years weren't terribly dissimilar from my own (okay, they were, but this is my turn to wallow).

While Gary had a horrible fish-out-of-water experience when he emigrated to the U.S., I had my own upheaval. Although I was born in P.E.I., we moved to New Brunswick when I was 3, and that's where my first memories began. When I was in grade 3, my parents decided to move to Ontario, and while I was young enough to accept that as the next big adventure, my parents went about the transition oddly: first of all, I was conscious of there being no closure around my leaving at school, and I remember telling my teacher on my last day of class, "Well, goodbye. I'm moving to Ontario." And while my mother told me later that it couldn't possibly have happened the way I remember it, I know that my teacher was shocked; that she had no idea it was my last day of school. So, no farewell party or class card signed in crayon scrawls, and because of some delay between giving up possession of our N.B. home and taking possession of our Ontario home, we moved to P.E.I. to live with my Mom's parents for three weeks, and, for some reason, had to attend school there. Obviously, no one wanted to take the time to get to know the freaky girl who would only be in class with them until the Christmas break, and I don't remember being particularly sad not to have made any friends in that time, but I do remember the one project we had to do: I was put into a group (that certainly didn't want me) to diagram the water cycle. After drawing it out on a large sheet of paper and painstakingly labelling the various components, it was decided that we should jazz it up with some paint. I don't remember exactly what I did that destroyed the project (in the eyes of my groupmates) but I do recall that my position in class went from dismissed to despised. But that was only for a couple of weeks. (And parenthetically, we were in P.E.I. for my 8th birthday and the only present I got was a can of frozen lobster from my grandparents. I know I didn't get anything from my own family, but with my well-known love for the delicious shellfish, I wasn't very disappointed. No, disappointment came when my grandmother then made a fairly disgusting lobster pie -- all gooey flour and canned peas -- for everyone to share.) Then uprooted and moved to Ontario -- and our St. John house must have been tiny because upon first seeing the two storey in Stouffville, my brothers and I thought we must be rich (and like Gary in this book, my brothers and I were always a bit obsessed about whether we were still poor, and no matter how much money my Dad ever made, we certainly always lived like poor folks -- and when I've seen this house since, it's so adorably small that I can't even imagine what our former home was like). So, there I was after the Christmas break, the new kid, and it took me forever to make any friends. There were no girls from school living in town (they all took the bus), so no friendships could just evolve naturally as we walked home together or bumped into each other at the plaza, and over the next couple of years, I picked up a couple of freaks like me until, in grade 6, I finally made a real best friend in Cora. I then had some relatively happy years (if you don't count the chaos at home brought on by my delinquent big brother) until my mother told me halfway through grade 9, my first year of high school, that we would be moving to Alberta the following summer. I was devastated. The first few months in Lethbridge were unbelievably lonely and I think that was when I became so scarred that even today I have just given up on making friends. A person can't be uprooted repeatedly, saying breezy farewells to the friends who had rescued her from desperate unhappiness, and casually expect to find new friends like that in the next place she lands. This would, no doubt, explain why, when I left Edmonton many years later, I couldn't even write to Delight -- I had reached a place where letting go was too hard to pretend like anything survives separation. And I haven't had a real friend since then (essentially, since my first child was born). Okay, so this kind of dislocation really doesn't compare to a seven-year-old being brought from Soviet Russia to Queens -- little Gary, who wouldn't fit in with any crowd until high school -- but it's useless to compare miseries: all I know is that I suffered, and in a way, I continue to suffer from these choices my parents made. I know I've said this here before, but when my parents retired back to the East Coast (essentially abandoning us once and for all), my mother explained by saying, "This is where we're from and it kept calling us all those years. You don't know what it's like to be from somewhere; how powerful that is." Yep, my brothers and I don't know what that's like because, really, we're from nowhere; no hometown; no lifelong friends; nowhere we belong. And that's sad.

My mother has it all wrong when it comes to love. She barely hits. She is the expert on the silent treatment...To this day, my mother will launch into a particular childhood aria of mine. Apparently during one especially long period of making me unexist, I started screaming to her, "If you won't speak to me, luchshe ne zhit'!" It is better not to live! And then I cried for hours, oh how I cried. 

Luchshe ne zhit'! my mother likes to replay dramatically at Thanksgiving dinners, her hands spread out like Hamlet giving a soliloquy, perhaps because, in addition to being funny in her mind, the two-day-long silent treatment did what it was supposed to do. It made the child want to commit suicide for her love. It is better not to live! she cries out over her juicy Thanksgiving turkey and her "French" dessert. But I disagree with the efficacy of this technique. Yes, I don't want to live without her love and attention and fresh laundry for a while, but that sentiment passes quickly. Noninteraction does not have the same tried-and-true result as a pummeling. When you hit the child you're making contact. You're contacting the child's skin, his tender flanks, his head (with which he will eventually have to make money, true), but you are also saying something comforting: I'm here. 

I'm here hitting you. I will never leave you, don't you worry, because I am the Lord, thy father. And just as I was pummeled, so I shall pummel you, and you shall pummel yours forever, ve imru Amen. Let us say Amen.

Okay, my mother  didn't use the silent treatment against us, but she certainly ignored us. I don't remember when it started, but at some point in Stouffville, she stopped getting out of bed in the morning to see us off to school. She would eventually start yelling, "You guys ready out there? Better get a move on!", and that was all the mothering we got. One day, for some reason, when I was in grade 7, my mother did get up, and taking one look at me in my messy ponytail (which I wore every day because it was all I knew to do -- it's not like I had ever had a salon haircut by this point), my mother decided that she was going to do my hair -- pigtails, what she called wiggies. I begged her not to -- I was 12 and hadn't worn wiggies in, what, 5 or 6 years? -- but for some reason she thought I looked cute and insisted I go to school like that. And everyone laughed. I mean, they all laughed at how stupid I looked (at an age when the other girls were sporting Farrah Fawcett shags and attempting slutty clothes) and I started crying on the way home at lunch, and with my red and puffy eyes and my wiggies torn out, I begged my mother not to make me go back in the afternoon (I have never recovered prettily from crying and I knew I was a mess) -- and I honestly don't even remember if she sent me back or not. What I do remember: the traction my Mom got out of this story. Just like Mama Shteyngart, my mother delighted in replaying this miserable episode (and many others) from my life for audiences; spreading her hands like Hamlet solliloquizing, "But, Mummmmy, pleeeease don't make me wear wiiiiiigies to school!" How was this a funny story? Humiliation tempered with mockery and I was expected to be a good sport about it. "Look at her," my mother would laugh, "it's like she still hasn't gotten over it!" (I haven't.) And as a further and delightful addendum: one day in grade 8, when my despised teacher Mr. P was sitting on the edge of his desk, trying to have a bull session (his stupid expression) with the class like a regular human being, he said something like, "Oh, my God. Who was it who came to school last year with the wild hairdo? Like crazy things sticking out the side of her head?" And everyone pointed at me and had a great laugh all over again. Mummmmy, pleeeease...

As for the pummelings from my Dad, they were more threat than fact (although my brothers and I had each been spanked or grabbed roughly many, many times). But the threat of violence was very real: For some reason my father went to bed at 8 o'clock, so we weren't really all that old before we started staying up later than he did, and woe upon any child who woke up the bear. Talking was discouraged, and the most verboten thing of all was laughter; oh, how my father hated the sound of his children laughing; it could send him into a chair throwing rage. We would tiptoe around, watching TV at low volume in the basement (two floors down from Dad), but if he couldn't sleep and we heard him stomping in the kitchen above us, it was like the oxygen went out of the room: what's he gonna do? There was mostly slamming and roaring, but the one thing I always feared: Did someone leave a cupboard door open? Did I? That was a real conundrum for a little kid: the cupboards had tight latches, so if you closed them, they made a sound that might wake Dad, but if you left one ajar and Dad came down and saw it, it would send him into a rage. (My mother explained that my father thought open cupboards looked like knives pointed at him and that's what he couldn't bear. Okaaaay.) And that was just at bedtime -- we lived in a minefield with only a barely drawn map for how to survive, and like a mine, our father could go off all by himself; suddenly enraged by some fiddly thing he was trying (and failing) to do, and we kids just tried to stay out of the way, all the time. I can't equate my father's violence with love; can't see the point that Shteyngart was trying to make about his father's pummelings. And again, just because my childhood wasn't as bad as in the book doesn't mean it wasn't bad in actuality. I don't know if I put here before that my mother has, more than once, explained, "We did the best we could, but your father and I were just kids when we had you". And every single time she has said that I internally complained, "No, we were just kids and your only job was to take care of us".

Certainly, I flirted with the idea of being a writer when I was in my twenties, and besides the lack of real talent that would prevent me from testing those waters, there was one major roadblock I could envision: no writing is worthwhile without truth at its center, and my truths might be hurtful to other people. I imagine that every real writer must confront that fact and either carry on or shrink away (and might be why Shteyngart's unflattering book reads like a bit of a betrayal). I know my parents have never been happy people, and with complicated relationships with their siblings, I could never write anything publicly that one of my crazy aunts or uncles might use against them (and I hope I'm not being woefully naive about the likelihood of any of them finding me here). I saw about a month ago that the CBC has a competition called Canada Writes, and what I noted first was that they have a writing competition for creative nonfiction short stories. I daydreamed about what I could write about and came up with two options: a trip I took to P.E.I. when Kennedy was nearly one and the disconnect I felt from the place where I was born; and a conversation I had with my father-in-law after his bypass surgery last year and how it frames the relationship I have with my inlaws. And, of course, I have no interest in writing and submitting those stories -- not only would I prefer the stories to remain anonymous, but the first prize includes a trip to a writer's workshop in Banff and I would feel like a total fraud there. ("So, Krista, what have you written?" "Well, I have a book review blog, and oh yeah, I wrote lots of stories and poems over my years playing Neopets, but that was just for the prizes; the pixels, um...") Of course, I acknowledge that there's no way one of my stories would be selected by Canada Writes -- since my original problem with being a writer is *cough* the lack of talent *cough* -- but I'm not looking to hurt my parents even to he extent of sending an unflattering story out into the void (and have really tried to be as gentle on this blog as possible while still revealing some essential truth about my self).

And where that leaves me is here: I cried while reading Little Failure because I identified with much of it, but unlike Gary, I have neither the access to the great well of pain that makes a writer or the courage to put the real truths of my being out for the world to see. I can't even try to make a friend that I could talk with; I fear no one will ever really know me again (but I also don't fear that fact; I am complacent about keeping myself for me). And if my daughters do read this someday, I don't know if this will go some ways to explaining me or if it will confuse who you think I am. I can't say I know my own mother -- or father -- so maybe that's just the way things are meant to be anyway.