Book Musings: A Disobedient Girl

Alexander Books is one of my favorite bookstores in the city. That it is lovingly independently owned is evident in the purposeful haphazardness of its layout and the cursive charm of staff recommendations that punctuate its shelves.

When I worked South of Market, this store was my Corporate American Refuge, where I logged hours upon hours browsing shelves and clutching discount paperbacks. And what discounts they were! From shiny self-help books to shaky fiction debuts; from obscure biographies to pulp-filled mysteries - and, if I was lucky, the occasional lesser-known Oates or Lessing novel - I culled and amassed until I found them spilling off shelves and creeping their way into my kitchen cabinets. Some moderately thought-provoking, a few magical, most utterly mundane - but each an experience, in and of itself.

It was in this mess of discounted paperbacks that I found Ru Freeman's "A Disobedient Girl," which oscillates between the stories of Latha, a young servant with a charming sense of entitlement, and Biso, a mother who flees her abusive husband for the refuge of the Sri Lankan coast. As all respectable contemporary books do, the novel explores "issues": the institution of family, socio-cultural and gender politics, love, and violence - political, domestic, and symbolic. Said issues were mostly unremarkable - after all, most novels have them. What piqued my interest were the teasing glimpses of war-torn Sri Lanka and the further investigation those glimpses demanded.

Latha's story takes place in Colombo, a trade hub well-known to the Ancient Romans, Arabs and Chinese for its position along Asia's silk passage. Along with the rest of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known until 1972, Colombo was tossed between Portugese, Dutch and British rule until the country achieved independence in 1948. For Latha, Colombo is a place of oppressive convention, explored through the relationships between mother and child, servant and master, and male and female. Whom one may or may not marry; what one may or may not do; to whom one may or may not belong are vitally important distinctions within her world and Colombo's boundaries. For Latha, opportunities to escape her caste come only intermittently - and always demand of her both sex and pregnancy.

Ptolemy's map of Caylon, 1st Century AD
Source: http://www.bergbook.com/

Biso's story Freeman punctuates with warfare. Arising from ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations, Sri Lanka's civil war lasted 26 years as the Tamil Tigers fought for independence. Their assasinations and suicide bombings prompted 32 countries to denounce them as a terrorist organization, while many condemned the Sri Lankan government's defense methods as civil rights violations. War's brutal violence killed over 70,000, devestated the country's economy, and all but destroyed what might have been one of Asia's most prosperous tourism industries. Biso's journey to the coast, set against a backdrop of political unrest and domestic abuse, is itself punctured by 3 acts of violence, all of which destroy only the weak and vulnerable: young children, subservient women, fractured families, and the elderly and impoverished. Biso's greatest threat, however, lies not in the violence of civil war, but in the symbolic West with its disposable wealth and hypnotizing power.

The novel and its protagonists are undeniably charming, and almost as intriguing as those snippets of country, war-torn and West-infected as it appears in stolen glimpses. Intriguing enough, one might suggest, to add Sri Lanka to one's list of countries to visit.

Love for the Loin

Over the years I've heard colorful and varied explanations of the Tenderloin's wonderful name. Most often delivered is that the neighborhood's crime and corruption earned it the title of San Francisco's "soft underbelly." Older residents twinkle and recount stories of police offers receiving "hazard pay" bonuses simply for being assigned to the neighborhood - bonuses that allowed them to afford the pricier cuts of tenderloin steak. My favorite attribution is the reference to the not-so-tender loins of the prostitutes that walk the streets - in full daylight, no less.

Yet the neighborhood's storied past and chaotic present have a uniquely San Franciscan charm - one that I feel a kinship to, perhaps unsurprisingly. It is, in essence, a neighborhood of performance:
Of ACT, Curran, and Orpheum, San Francisco's most expensive prosceniums
Of the Warfield and the Great American Music Hall whose jaws descend upon veneered crowds for hours at a time before spitting them out, wizened and exhausted.
Of the brothels and whore houses of the late 1800s, and the heartbreaking day-glo strip clubs of today.
Of speakeasies it harbored when prohibition made it necessary; of those it advertises now that nostalgia makes it good for business.
Of The Maltese Falcon's Sam Spade and his (and Hammet's own) apartment at 891 Post Street - just steps from my studio.

And of its inhabitants - its glorious inhabitants - addled by drugs, ravaged by poverty and mental illness, jaded by prostitution, addiction and despair. They mutter and shout and laugh maniacally and stare, and while one might easily dismiss their ramblings for madness, after three of four strolls down those ravaged streets one can't help but be rattled by the raw truth of their despair.

This is my Tenderloin: the one whose streets have been decorated by the likes of graffiti royalty Banksy and Twist:



This is my Tenderloin: the one where hipsters rummage next to Vietnamese grandmothers for beets at the Heart of the City farmers' market (and aren't these just the most enormous beets you've ever seen?):

This is my Tenderloin: where a row of trees outside City Hall can remind me of the streets of Paris:

This is my Tenderloin: where a sense of humor is not required, but it certainly makes aimless wanderings a little more entertaining:

And this, too, is my Tenderloin: The Tender, a glorious website about a glorious neighborhood.