‘What We Are’
By Peter Nathaniel Malae
383 pp. Grove Press $24
What We Are © 2010 by PeterNathaniel Malae, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, GroveAtlantic, Inc.
I TRY TO FIGURE OUT my American life on a lightless corner of a four-stop-sign intersection in a rainstorm, 3:42 A.M., Friday. I could go forward, backward, right, left; it doesn’t matter. I have nowhere to go, really, but around the city, and have wandered along on foot all night.
I dropped into a dive bar called Blinky’s Can’t Say Lounge for a drink and a Johnny Cash tune on the juke, ducked past the flashing neon signs of the Blue Noodle Cabaret Club to watch the beautiful Maxine do acrobatic flips on the pole, smiled my way to a table surrounded by fake bamboo and ceramic dragons and ate kimchi and kalbi and poke sashimi and drank Hite beer and Japanese sake in a Korean-owned sushi bar called Ga Bo Ja, hustled down the aisles of a twenty-four-hour Longs Drugs and bought candy and condoms and a discount umbrella with Pokémon dancing on the latex, and am now peering up beyond the BBs of rain to the mad gray mass of clouds above, not in wonderment or gratitude or even some momentary bout of depression, not in any poor man’s version of self-condemnation, neither contentment nor elation nor anything within that emotional range, but in a strange kind of nothingness that sat somewhere between my head and my heart and had bothered me for much of the day, like a facial tick you’re conscious of but that won’t go away.
I sit down on the curb and try to chill a bit; no melodrama in this empty hollow of the city. The rain morphs into silver glitter. It looks like the mist of a late-night horror flic on the tube, the haze of a northernmost California lumberjack town. The sheen on the street is oily smooth, black like the shine of leather, slick like a duck’s wet back on the pond. I can see the streetlights flickering past Lawrence Expressway and through the little borough of Cupertino and shrinking into dots at De Anza College.
I’m big and brown enough not to have problems on the streets that I don’t create myself. I could be Mexican or Brazilian or Creole or Persian or mulatto or Afghan, or of darker Mediterranean blood, like Sicilian, Moroccan, Greek, or maybe Serb, and I’m tough to peg with this black and logoless beanie on my head pulled down to the brow, the stalker’s knee-length jacket, blue jeans, and slippers. People can’t figure me out on sight and I’m not sure I could either in a first-ever mirror shot.
What I am, by blood anyway, is half Samoan—I’m certain of that—and half American white, which means (if it means anything) that my mother is of your typically mixed brew of Euro descent: English, Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, Italian, and a smattering of French.
My father used to take my sister and me to the Samoan churches up at Hunter’s Point, a fifty-minute drive from our house in San Jo. This was just before he left for the islands, when my folks were staking cultural claims on their children, like Soviets and Americans planting flags on the moon. I remember one funeral, a big gala affair. Five days long with hordes of big silent men in black polyester ie lavalavas standing stoic and strong, their mitts crossed just under their bellies. I remember the acreage of carnations and roses in the aisles, right out of a Godfather movie. Whenever someone with your own last name would die, you had the responsibility to prepare your cousin or uncle or sister-in-law for the outer realm with the Good Lord. I remember wondering who would send me or my sister off sixty years in the future, if the event would die out first. If Samoans would even be around.
I always felt alone in those churches. I knew that the kids my age and the parents who paid me any attention thought I was diluted, watered down by my mother, too much white blood, an afakasi, a half one. Certain things you can’t reverse, and genetic inheritance is one of them. I couldn’t do much anyway, except be a follower, which I wasn’t about to do, even then. I only knew rudimentary greetings like Talofa, fa’a fe mai oi? and bad words like ufa kefe, and any time I’d hear some elocutory wisdom kicked off in formal Samoan by a visiting high-talking chief matai, his deep, husky, oracular Polynesian voice somehow gentle in its tone, the pews full of three-hundred-pound ladies cooling themselves with woven palm fans, bone-thick youngsters leaning against the walls in red sweaters with red hoods and red picks and red bandannas stuck to their wild black wiry ‘fros, my mind would go to my mother, the one person who was more outside this scene than me. The pure foreigner, slight 140-pound white woman from the Northern California suburb of Campbell, California, lost in the unknowable zone of natives. But she was already long gone by then, had bugged out.
My sister, a year older, looked Samoan as a girl, still does now as a woman. She even got a Samoan name, Tali. I remember her making fun of me: “Paul! Paul! What a white name!” She used to blend right into those occasions. I remember thinking the obvious back then: They like her because she looks like them. Deep down, and maybe not that deep, we’re all phrenologists who fear the albino chimp. How much of Tali’s simple and predictable personality developed in response to their acceptance? Because she had a group to claim in her formative years, and vice versa? At twelve she was wearing T-shirts that read PROUD TO BE SAMOAN, and I always felt embarrassed at her obviousness. How she could wear something like that around our mother, who had entered those churches with the restless yet timid face of a dog seeing the doors of the vet.
Being a half-breed must be part of my problem. When I applied to college out of high school, I didn’t know what to fill in under the category of race. Long distance from American Samoa, my father said over the phone, “Mark Polynesian,” but I couldn’t. Neither could I mark white. I just left the damned thing blank. And that’s exactly how I felt about it: blank. Still do, actually, don’t care either way. By now I know that every culture in the world is equally beautiful, equally ugly. The few years of college I could stand convinced me of that. The few years of prison, too. In either place I was an English major with lots of reading time, lots of watching time.
I quit the daydreaming. I see him spot me from a bus stop across the street, posted up like a light pole. His hightops are out of the 1980s, Velcro straps around the ankle, big Nike swoosh on the tongue. He’s got a hood pulled up over his head, and I can’t find his eyes until he pulls it back and shakes his pointy head in the sprinkling rain. The red and green hair stands out on the ends like a dandelion. From the shoulders up, he looks like a miniature Christmas tree. He looks off and then back at me. He’s on his way over and I don’t move. The distance doesn’t matter; I know what I see way before he reaches me: another suburban zombie on crystal meth.
He’s violently itching one hand and then violently switching to the other. He’s gonna rip through his own damned hand, insane. Sort of sad. Not even within five yards he says, “Wassup, brother? Wassup, brother? Wassup?”
I say, still not moving, “Wassup, man.”
He looks around again. I shake my head. I’ve never used the shit, but I’ve known more than my share of cranksters. Suburb, city, high hills, country, plains, it’s just standard American protocol to see, know, love but never trust your average tweeker. These cats’ll steal from their own mothers, and even if you know one who won’t, he’s still looking over his shoulder like he already did. Always peeking out blinds, hiding behind dumpsters, hanging up the phone in the middle of a conversation. Hooked on an injection of paranoia. He can’t even lie down in the familiarity of his own bed, close himself off from the world, and trust the blackness behind his eyelids.
I say, “You want something, dog?”
He hunches his shoulders, plays the mendicant. “Can you help me with some cash? I’m dying over here, brother, I’m dying.”
He’s husky-necked, sufficiently fat in the cheeks. Early into his journey to the pit. He smiles humbly and has all his teeth. Cauliflower ears, former high school wrestler. A car drives by and he whips around and then back again. In the glare of a struggling moon, his eyes are spinning like a top, but he’s focusing the best he can to press the sincerity of the issue.
“Come on, bro,” I say. “You ain’t dying.”
“I’m dying, brother.”
“Yeah, dying for a fuckin’ fix.”
“No no no no.” He grabs his balls, as if he’s forgotten they were there. He thinks I said fixed. “No, no, brother. It’s okay. I’m all there, man. Right there, that’s right, all there. Everything’s cool, brother.”
“Then you don’t need me.”
“Trust me, brother, I’m dying. I hear the tinny chimes. Help me! I see the reaper, brother.”
“It’s in your head, dog.”
“No, no, no, brother. I’m dying!”
I sniff in some air, indicating a step back from the conversation. Somehow he reads the insinuation and does just that: one step back, though he doesn’t leave. He’s balancing on the curb, heel to toe, and I’m waiting for him to spill over, then jump up and go sprinting down the street. This is the point where anyone else would leave. Not him. Me.
“What the hell,” I say. “I’ll get you some food, man. Come on.”
He thinks it over, as if he has a better offer. Then he says, “Okay, brother. Okay. Where do you live?”
I laugh out loud, it feels good. The rain comes again, in one big orgasmic gust. As it is, I’m probably broker than this cat. “Hey, bro,” I say. “Gimme your money.”
He steps back again.
“Nah. Just kidding, man. Let’s get to Jack in the Crack, dog. I’ll buy you a burger.”
“So you got money then?” he says, and right there I know that unless this crankster has a midnight revelation, we’ll be fighting soon enough over the $3.68 in my pocket.
I say, “Follow me,” and he does, staying a half step to my rear.
We walk through the rain toward El Camino Real. I remember the Pokémon umbrella, pull it out of my jacket, and hand it to the crankster. I don’t think about why it’s taken me this long to use it. He doesn’t say thank you, doesn’t grunt, nod. Doesn’t pop it. He jams the umbrella into the pocket of his pants, a future tradeable good, and looks behind him for the ghosts of the past. All he finds is the Vuong Vu Video Outlet, an Afghan grocery store called House of Khan, and an Exxon station patched with the lights of skyrocketing prices. Each one closed, each empty of bodies. On the horizon the stars glisten behind the blur of the clouds, and if anything opens up tonight, I will welcome whatever comes.
He pulls out a bottle of good vodka from his pocket, takes a shot, repockets it.
I don’t think on his hoarding selfishness. Ravished by greed and cowardice, a man of the streets gets villainous with needs. Breathing in the cool wet air, I drift into the warm realm of remembrance. The earth water seems to stimulate the senses: sky water, ocean water, river water. The Ohlone, I learned in fourth grade, call it the blood of the mother. I always thought that accurate. Just to be there with her, or inside her, at the tips of life’s fingers. Back then, at nine, I used to stand under the apricot tree in our yard and ask the big questions of God. I’d let the rain mix in with my tears. I’d address to the vast angry hanging sky those problems which my Sunday School teacher couldn’t ever answer in front of the class. She’d always wait for the good kids to leave and then take me aside (“Now listen here, young man”), max out on the intimidation of adulthood, buttress her arguments with size and force and a mysterious alliance with my parents. When my folks split and my mother started taking us to the grand old Catholic Church, I addressed those same problems again at confession with Father McFadden, Papa Mac, a real gentleman, cool cat. He’d cleverly reverse the burden of doubt into ten assigned Hail Marys (“Salvation comes from within, lad”). But the core of every question I had was the rational position that I didn’t believe.
My namesake, Paul, had died alone, sanctified in a Roman dungeon, and I, at nine, was certain to the point of excommunication that one either sank or swam when traversing water and that if five thousand people were fed by five fish, four thousand nine hundred and ninety-five people had lied and been left hungry and that dead was dead, however you looked at it and that some people who still lived in grass huts and sat naked around a savage fire at night had never even heard of Jesus. And I’d felt self-pity over this, over my fakery in the face of God.
When I wasn’t struck down by lightning for my lie, the internal lie, the worst kind of lie, my living in itself was the true indictment of holy scripture, tangible proof of my doubt. Though I didn’t know it, I was beginning a fifteen-year journey whose days began and ended with the same longing. The minute you eliminate God, everything else comes down like dominoes. I can see tonight without the haze of zealotry, yes. But I’m not thankful or stupidly proud. The cost for clairvoyance is high and personal and ironical: I yearn to harness the pure, blurred, blood-rushing ecstasy of my species. I desire belief, faith. But I feel nothing worthy of a golden book chalice to save us. My psyche is fine and undaunted. I’m an anti-epiphany, ultra-knowing yet ultra-nothing, the new American.
Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of ‘Teach the Free Man,’ a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, and ‘What We Are,’ winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He has been a Steinbeck, MacDowell and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellow.
Cultural Collide
Peter Nathaniel Malae reads on April 21 at 7pm in Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Room 225–229, presented by the Center for Literary Arts and Reed Magazine. Malae is the author of the novel ‘What We Are’ (Grove Press), winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and the short-story collection ‘Teach the Free Man’ (Swallow Press). Peter Nathaniel Malae illuminates the character of the place and age we live in A conversation with Neal Soldofsky
PETER NATHANIEL MALAE is writing the literature of the Silicon Valley, and right now he is one of only a few ever to do so. In the valley, Malae sees America’s future: multi-ethnic, hyperinformed, confused, confusing and struggling for an identity. In his debut novel, What We Are (Grove Press), Malae sets Paul Tusifale, his intellectually and physically combative hero, on a collision course with almost everything available to collide with in the South Bay.
Paul is half-Samoan, a former high-school debate champion, an ex-convict and a poet, but in all of these labels he can’t find an identity. His ethnicity is complicated by his light skin, his white mother and his United Nations of stepfathers and father figures. He’s too much of a brawler to fit in as an intellectual, and he’s too much of an intellectual to be mistaken for a thug. Over the course of the novel, he struggles to find his place in the kaleidoscope of cultures, beliefs and wants that is the Silicon Valley. In his search, he winds up in a fight during an immigrants-rights rally in Guadalupe Park, in a foot chase through the Pruneyard, at business meetings in the Fairmont, at lunch in Santana Row with his estranged sister.
He tries to be a man of principles, he tries to stay out of jail, he tries to make a success of himself (first in art, then in real estate), but too often he is unable to manage his disappointment with the world and he cannot hold back his criticism and his venom.
Malae grew up in Santa Clara, went to Bellarmine, played football at Santa Clara University and studied literature at San Jose State University. What would appear to be a smooth academic tragedy was punctuated by demons and struggles that have found their way into his fictional characters. In 2007 he published a well-received book of short stories called Teach the Free Man.
I asked him how the valley became such a large subject in the book, and he told me that he had read an article asking, “‘Who will be the next Great American Novelist?'” He went on to explain that America is now so diverse that the task is not just to capture the spirit of one culture but the mixing of hundreds. “So I knew I had to get a guy who held a gang of the world’s stories in his system, contradictory stories that seemingly rubbed each other out, which in turn sorta rubbed him out, and that he had to come from the South Bay, which I viewed, culturally, as being on the fore of the new American folklore, d.o.a.”
What makes Silicon valley so different?
The valley ain’t like New York City, where the 19th/early-20th-century immigrants showed up at [Ellis] and went and built their own communities to keep the integrity of the place they’d just fled … hostile to the death toward other cultures.
[P]eople came to this valley … to get a buck, and what that meant was that because the buck rules, you will, in fact, sit in the same cubicle 40 hours a week with the very enemy your ma and pa hated and feared. … [Y]ou worked a crew with him, you went to Sharks games with him.
This is intriguing as a concept because you’re open to the stories of others. It’s empathy. No one in the valley is allowed to not have empathy. But it also has its problems: principally, when your empathy meter is high, your identity meter is low. [Paul’s] crisis, based on the preceding formula, is that by living here in the bay, where it’s a Serengeti of stories, he doesn’t know who the fuck he is. That’s the new American, spinning on his heels, saddled by stories …
But the idea of place was more than that, too, man, and it goes back to the thematic crisis of the book. He had to be endowed with so much information that for the first time in lit history, you had a protag whose fundamental problem is, “I know too much.” Although the Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on data anymore, this is the place where data started. I needed a place which dually fed the idea of the big American novel (2006, we’re on our way down: the United States leading the world for the last time, Cali leading the United States for the last time, Silicon Valley leading Cali for the last time) and a haven for the techie stuff that opened up the Brave New World, technologically and economically, that we’re in now.
And there was one last thing, and it’s very personal. There is one independent bookstore in San Jo, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. Excluding Books Inc. in Mountain View and Paly, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, you don’t have bookstores down here which are down for the lit writer, particularly the lit novelist.
These people don’t just [not] read because they’re busy playing video games; they also don’t read because there hasn’t been a major novelist writing about it since Stegner’s Angle of Repose. … So I wrote the book a little bit to show that you’ve got some legit stories out here that no one else out there can capture, probably some permanent ones, who knows?
It seems like a big part of what makes issues of information and identity so difficult for Paul is his criticality. For him, all information has to be understood, and just as importantly, judged. He’s sort of this idealist who isn’t really sure what his ideals are, but he’s painfully aware of how few things live up to them.
That’s completely right. … He’s got a major problem: he can deconstruct the ideal/movement/belief/alliance before he’s even set foot in it, before he’s even looked around the room.
That’s the curse, as he views it, of being a highly charged, critical American of this century. … You just smash every structure out there: religion, vocation, culture, romance, family, education, etc., until you’re left there standing with nothing to show for except destruction at your heel. That’s a genuine literary crisis—and worth a book.
It’s also relatively new. It’s new because this is exactly where we are intellectually now. Intelligence is most often demonstrated in nonbelief, in pointing out the sham (this is also, by the way, a sham because no sufficient replacement is offered).
The identity that people choose to have comes by whichever shams they decide to finger. … Even though [Paul’s] big-minded, or so he thinks, he’s short on solutions, the shit’s too big to take on and too far in motion, and all these other beings who think they’ve conquered it have just signed on to a kind of self-delusion, really, the kind that makes for easy novels.
What I realized writing this novel is that it would be false, and thus unacceptable, to make Paul “likable” or have him concede, as other characters in plenty of other novels do, to some easy sentiment. Although he comes off crass, he’s carrying a lot, man. There’s gotta be a lot of friction in having the kind of head and heart he’s got. He’s good at talking, but he’s bad at doing, really bad, because he’s charged with the manic, immediate, crossed-up energy of the age.
One of my favorite parts of the book was when Paul ends up at Leland High School during the ceremony where they’re renaming the football field after Pat Tillman. Paul obviously has a lot of respect for Tillman. Tillman was a thoughtful guy who managed to find something he was willing to take the most serious kind of stand on. And Paul here runs into all these people from different sides trying to claim and reduce Tillman, trying to make him into something both bigger and less than a person.
The thing about the Tillman deal is that he provides yet another example—a modern, Silicon Valley version—of someone whose story you can’t believe in. Before his death, after his death, the story is fraudulent because all of these people are sucking off his guts.
But that’s not the entirety of the problem with Tillman. Paul addresses something that few people will speak to because of the reverence you’re supposed to have about the fallen: Tillman himself didn’t really know what he was doing.
Once he got over there, thrust into the most forward point of a political position, he had big-time doubts about what he’d signed onto. His letter to his brother about enlistment is nothing short of a caveat. In other words, although Paul respects him for taking a stance, he doesn’t quite die, heroically, for the stance, which only reaffirms Paul’s original stance, which is there’s no stance worth dying for anymore.
Maybe there never was, but the illusion was reality, and now the curtain’s been pulled. The medal screw-up by the Pentagon only validates this. He died of friendly fire. This discounts heroism. Yet he got a Silver Star for valor. And then his family undercuts the story by calling for an investigation, while still keeping the medal which was not, as their dispute insinuates, awarded judiciously. They’re furious about losing their son, but they won’t give back the medal, see?
At no point is there a point to latch onto the story. It’s being deconstructed as it goes along, everyone feeding off the guy to hold onto how they view the world.
Ethnic diversity is constantly on display throughout the book, but amid that, the differences between people that are most highlighted are not ones across ethnic lines, but ones between those whothat grew up in American security and comfort, and immigrants who grew up in places a lot less safe and with a lot less wealth. And in that comparison, it’s usually the immigrants who come out looking better. Why do you think comfort is so problematic?
It’s the old trap both ways. You want what you can’t stand, but you don’t really understand that you can’t stand it. Then you get it, and when it really sinks in, and you’re honest about it, you can’t stand yourself. … [It] goes back to the classical things like redemption and beauty and the struggle. Paul doesn’t view the American paradigm as being honorable. Honor is achieved by struggle, which is beautiful, and which always ends, whether you die or not, in redemption. He doesn’t feel as if his inheritance as a 21st-century American provides the chance to have this, and it’s killing him inside. It doesn’t matter that he actually does struggle.
The struggle has to be acknowledged, not so much by him, but by others. This ain’t gonna happen because his struggle seems futile, pointless. In this sense, he’s the symbol of America. This means no real reward because, as he and they see it, no real sacrifice.
That’s what comfort means. You’re on top. For now, anyway, It’s too safe, too flippant, too varied, too silly, too emasculated, too vacuous, too predictable. It ain’t pressed by death or a tangible smashing of the soul. There is no soul at the top. Soul goes back to struggle and keeping at it even if crushed. … Again, it goes all the way back around to the beating up of thyself.
[Paul]’s not a thug. He has a desperate, almost pathetic desire to do something noble. He has goodness. He just doesn’t quite know how to use it, where, in what proportion, why, and until the end, anyway, for whom. This burden results in belligerence and misanthropy, two traits which—again—he doesn’t like to have.
Shit, he’s a spurned romantic. One of the most important lines is when he says something like he loves the human story so much that he doesn’t think the characters are living up to the story. This includes, firstly, himself.
