“Elmhurst”
by Han Ong
from the July 25, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
I‘m glad to see another story by Han Ong in The New Yorker. He’s had one in there now in each of the last four calendar years, and I think he’s deserving of the attention. For those who don’t know, for much of his writing career, Ong wrote plays, and has done so for several decades. It was only recently that his fiction started to appear in The New Yorker.
Often his experience as a playwright comes out, either in the way he sets the scene or in the dialogue, and I think it’s works well in the short fiction.
Here is how “Elmhurst” begins:
Is the boy in the window attempting telepathy with Shara? If not, why won’t he look away? His head is three floors up, a postcard. But he’s found the sun. Solo, while the other windows on all sides of him feature multiple scowlers, some holding out their cell phones to record.
As above, so below: Shara, on the sidewalk, stands amid scowlers, too. Ranters and chanters. Giving everything they have to this mass protest. On one side of her is her mother, and on the other her seven-year-old sister, Rosie.
Shara and her sister are their mother’s hostages. At least her sister is too young to be entrusted with a placard. There is no such exemption for Shara. The sign her mother carries is in Mandarin. She doesn’t understand or care that carrying those foreign characters is worse than being housed in the repurposed hotel they are gathered in front of. It marks her as even more alien and fugitive than those whose presence here she and her friends and, by extension, Shara, are protesting this afternoon in Elmhurst, where Shara lives a dozen blocks away with her mother, her father, her sister, and her grandfather.
That doesn’t say much, but it does establish the scene. I can almost feel myself in the audience, wondering what these characters are up to as they start to move about the set.
Please feel free to leave any thoughts you might have below!
Sometimes adding a supernatural dimension to a story doesn’t work, but I felt it did here. Amidst a very interesting view into the competing interests of various socio-economic-racial groups (Chinese and Central American working class are opposed to a hotel converted into housing for the homeless who are Black and Latinx), there is a dimension involving telekinesis and telepathy. This continues to weave well into the overall fabric and produce, dare I say, a golden epiphany (this makes sense to those who read the story)?
The supernatural dimension here gives Shara’s situation a tiny bit of hope. This story seems based on true events concerning groups of people who continually find themselves in conflict with each other. The situation is very sad and some readers are familiar with these demonstrations or opposition to repurposed hotels that could be in Elmhurst, the Upper West Side or East Side in New York City. I think Ong is pretty fair minded concerning these people, about how they feel and the obstacles they face.
Readers often see these stories in newspapers, television news and different media and sometimes can be overwhelmed by such terrible situations seen almost daily in the New York Post and other media.
By detailing one family’s or one daughter’s experience, Ong captures the bleakness of their existance. Shara’s relationship with the fantasy guy reads like adolescent games that girls and boys play on dating websites or among each other seeming to always try to seize control gain an advantage over one another any which way.
So the supernatural dimension invites the reader into a hopeless world with an itty-bitty of grace.
It is depressing but the grandfather and the supernatural dimension allow readers to empathize with all the various people because the one thing that all groups of people share is hope that their condition, their position in society and their possibilities or any shred of potential will somehow improve either they themselves or where they are in life. Maybe the best part of it is that Ong invites us to try and understand them. And he makes them seem very human and vulnerable just as they must be in real life.