Tag: #MidlifeCrisis

  • Short Story Review: “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeleine Thien

    (The short story, “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien appeared in the December 20th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Over the past year, I have been asking myself, why do I like short stories so much? I would rather read a short story collection than a novel. I think it is a very challenging form of storytelling that fails more than it succeeds. For a writer to make a reader care about a story in a thousand or so words is impressive. To make a reader identify with a character is the same space of words, well, that’s impressive.

    “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien is a story about a character going through a midlife crisis, and I am not being flippant with that description. As a white male entering the early stages of midlife, these stories have a certain appeal to me. (In fact, I would dare argue that there is a whole unidentified genre in literature of novels about white men going through a midlife crisis, which normally involve affairs, children and/or a spouse who no longer understands, and ends with a death.) I feel like Thien took all of those midlife crisis tropes, and with her character Lu, feed them in and created a different but also familiar result.

    I don’t want to give anything away with how the plot unfolds, because of the language that Thien uses to describe situations, and also Lu’s use of phrases from Cantonese that are translated into English. I loved the words that were crafted for this story, and how they transferred the feeling of loneliness, of life passing you by, and questioning the decisions one has made, and that search for happiness, however fleeting, but also being adult enough to know that momentary pleasure should be let go, and not thought about again.

    Lu is not like me. She is a woman, immigrant from Hong Kong, English is not her first language, she is a mother, working a corporate job in, what I think is, Vancouver, and in a marriage that is not fulfilling. But, I could understand where she was coming from, what she was feeling, and how she viewed life. I was especially taken by a sentence in the last paragraph:

    One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken – to live freely, to not be subdued – also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick tangerines around.

    I understood where Lu was in her life. How ramifications from past decisions can shape how we evolve to the next version of ourselves, even though some emotions never ever leave us, no matter how much we change. All of that is a few words.

  • Difference Between Midlife Crisis and A New Career?

    I had drinks with a friend last night at a local bar, and I am still amazed/anxious about going to bars, but was happy to do it. The friend and I are close to the same age, have weathered the pandemic with our families, and now that we are on the other side, we are both looking to do things differently with our careers.

    He told me about his endeavors and opportunities that he is hoping break his way. He also informed me that his old career came knocking, and he has been hesitant to jump back in. Going back for him would be lucrative, but it would also mean doing the same old thing and expecting a different result. Fair enough.

    He asked me about what I was doing, and I pretty much gave him the same answer. I think I was a little more blunt by saying, “No more working for or with assholes.” (Which reminds me of a rule/guideline when it comes to interviewing people for a position; If a potential employee tells you that all the people at their last job were assholes, usually that means the potential employee was the problem. So, maybe I was the asshole?) Really, what I meant was no more toxic work environments.

    And as I walked home, a thought came into my head; Isn’t this just a midlife crisis? We are both forty, life hasn’t work out as planned, so we are trying a new career in an effort to get things moving again. The only thing we are missing is a divorce, a sports car, and dating a twenty-year old.