The China from Buenos Aires: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him
A short story by Patricia Park from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.In ‘The China from Buenos Aires’, an Argentine Korean student struggles to find her place in New York City.Edited by Tracy Chevalier, the full collection, Reader, I Married Him, brings together some of the finest and most creative voices in fiction today, to celebrate and salute the strength and lasting relevance of Charlotte Brontë’s game-changing novel and its beloved narrator.
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The China from Buenos Aires
Patricia Park
Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016
The China from Buenos Aires © Patricia Park 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008150594
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173432
Version: 2016-03-16
Why is Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much?
Jane Eyre is “poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects; the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And “Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.
Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up this line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken it to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.
All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.
Tracy Chevalier
EVERY DAY IN A classroom in Harlem, Teresa would daydream about food: the smoke-filled steakhouses back home, with short ribs drizzled in parsley sauce, charred provolone, and soft white bread etched with grill marks; the pizzerias with their crimped empanadas and thick onion wedges, instead of the thin, floppy slices here with cheese like chewing gum. New Yorkers, it seemed, could not make a decent pizza para nada.
During college lectures on biology and history, her mind wandered back to Argentina as her ears failed to grasp the nasal whine of her professors’ unintelligible English. With the other international students she sat through ESL classes where they listened to cassette tapes of slow, crisp, vacuum-sealed speech that they were made to imitate with wide, exaggerated movements of the mouth.
During breaks the students would cluster by country. Initially the Koreans looked at Teresa’s face and parted their circle; when she opened her mouth and infantile Korean poured out, their circle closed again. A huddle of Hispanic students referred to Teresa as china in the Spanish they thought she could not understand; she told them in her perfect porteño accent, “I’d rather be a ‘chink’ than an indígena.” A fight might have broken out if the students hadn’t been called back to class. From then on they stopped calling her china and started calling her bicha arrogante.
After each class Teresa took a graffiti-covered subway to the Upper West Side diner where she worked off the books, peddling fare like “bagels and lox”, “pastrami on rye” and “coffee regular”. Waiting tables served as a better primer for the English language – in all its uses and misuses – than any of her college classes. After work she would return to the room she shared with two girls from Sri Lanka and China, exchanging no more than a laboured “Hello” and “Goodbye”.
Argentina had fallen on hard times. Coming to America during the fat Reagan years had been her father’s idea, despite Teresa’s protests. Her life was plenty rich in Buenos Aires – she never wanted for friends, boyfriends. At the airport in Ezeiza, her father had kissed her forehead and said, “Better to suffer now while you’re still young. Not when it’s too late like Mamá and Papá.” Her mother had far more practical words: “Don’t get yourself into any trouble.”
