Families – Anton Martin Smith Writer

And so this was the last task to do. The annual greeting card giving. I usually only do one – & it goes to the ‘asian eatery’ (as I call it) – my regular hangout. I get a great personalised $20 deal – for this I am allowed a choice of 4 different items – Nasi Goreng / Sweet & Sour Pork / Works burger / Crispy Chicken. All options come with quality beer – I get Steinlager or Ashahi if its in stock. Nasi Goreng is the ‘go-to’ main. Anyway, I digress.

So I make the greeting card – I have water colors & ink etc. The final image is a ‘fat sunglasses-wearing Santa’ with his shirt off. It’s a ‘bang up’ (i.e. fast & mediocre) job, but at least it’s colorful. In one hand Santa has an opened beer bottle & the other is ‘Santa Sack (full of ‘prezzies’ – that is xmas presents). In a speech bubble Santa is saying that he is quiting while ‘on the job’ because he’d rather go to the ‘asian eatery’. At the bottom of the image there is a rat that has observed it all & says “Santa you lazy bastard”.

So that’s good – card done. I go to drop off the card in person. This card must be my seventh in a row by now (??). Tradition can hem you in – but that’s not usually a bad thing – for the result aimed at is usually the concept of ‘social cohesion’.

So fast forward ten mins & now I am in from of the owner with my card. Because of the language/cultural barrier the main owner lady (lets call her ‘Vicki’) needs me to explain it. I do so & the funny part is her joke that the ‘fat Santa’ is actually me. We have a little laugh. I can laugh at myself pretty freely these days, age helps on this matter.

While this card-giving is going on, I notice that a father & his daughter sitting at a restaurant table for two having food – they are Chinese as well. I have learnt that it is a tradition for travelling Chinese ethnicity folk to visit foreign Chinese restaurants. of course that’s only natural – we westerners like ‘ex-pats’ with burger bars in asia after all, do we not?.

I decide show the card to the little girl & she likes it. I introduce myself. The father is ‘Barry’ who is working at a major university here, visiting from China. His daughter is ‘Angelica’ (not their real names). The ‘asian eatery’ owner – Vicki has given me a box of chocolates (the usual gift in return for the card – that’s pretty nice profit for me! Surely those hand made cards of mine will never be valuable). I offer one chocolate to each both father & daughter – they oblige the small token. I offer another, but the Father who I presume is weight conscious, declines (he is rake thin & I joke that he could use fattening up).

So then some chit chat. Barry askes me a little about what I do & I explain my day job instead of my highest interests (writing, studying, reading, drawing etc), although I do slip in a past Melbourne life in Telecoms for good measure (I guess part of me doesn’t want him to think l I’m a total hick from the sticks’). I am a kiwi & we talk ourselves down – probably a very bad trait, but I now try to combat that a little as I go – after all it’s clearly wise to not hide all your talents.

The ‘convo’ (as the aussies say) is going well. The father – ‘Barry’ says I should visit China some time. I say I’d like to. I don’t mention the truth that my budget won’t allow it. After all now my life is simplified vs a decade ago, when I was a young-ish urban office worker & a semi-frequent international traveler. The polite hello is now at its natural end. We say our goodbyes. They leave to go back to their car to go back to their (temporary) normal lives in the nearby university town in Otago NZ. As they go I wonder if the mother is with them in NZ? I assume so given separation/divorce doesn’t really happen in Chinese culture (unlike it’s normality in the West). Perhaps she is back in China. After all, some people can’t travel at all. And as I’m older I’m more of a homebody that ever (but I am a ‘arty & write-ie’ type – we prefer to travel with mind vs legs).

So that interaction over I think of my stomach. A common trait. I could lose ten kg. I sit & start eating my heavily salted & sauced battered fish sans chips. I have a book on the table – poetry – an old NZ classic magazine Landfall. Landfall is known to be well past it’s heyday, but still has some good writing here & there. It has a crappy bookmark.

Lo & behold the little girl I was taking to with her father just before – Angelica comes back. She gives me a Chinese ornamental book-mark as a gift (the ones housed in plastic). I say thankyou ‘that’s great as I need a better bookmark’. I tell her it’s good to read (I’m sure her dad has this covered, but a little reinforcement can’t but help). The little girl has a real kindness to her. She has a little soft toy lamb in her arms & I ask her if it has a name – she says no, so I say ‘you could call it ‘Bleetie’ – by her slight confused look, I’m not sure if she understood the relevance of my suggestion to the sound a lamb makes. I said thankyou to Angelica & wished her goodbye.

As I put some soy sauce on on my battered fish. As I sat munching on tastiness, I thought that that was a really lovely thing that just happened. It warmed my sometimes too also ‘battered’ weary 47-year-olds heart more than a little. The Chinese in general are not perfect (like any ethnic group), but I admire that they try to be polite as much as possible. We’ve lost that too much in the West I think. They have a lot of other good traits too. They accept hard work with grace, unlike many of us now semi-dazed Westerners. We ourselves aren’t quite ‘down & out’ just yet though.

I hope Barry & Angelica have a good time in NZ. From what I’ve heard I know it’s still not entirely easy to be asian in NZ – especially in the small towns. I also hope the artificial intelligence Barry is working on doesn’t all put half the world out of work by 2030. But then my day job is shifting dirt, cutting lawns & banging nails (and a bit more than that) – so I figure I should be ok at least until age 62 in the year 2040. Who knows maybe I’ll be a proper ‘quirky, niche-partially-sought-after-by-humans, non-AI-cottage -industry-human-writer’ by 2032.

But I know that the future will be what it will be. But today was very ‘humanly nice’, you might say. You just need to string a few days like that in a row I think. It took me a while to learn that, but ‘better late than never’ as the old Western saying says.

I would also like to wish anyone who reads this a Merry Xmas & New Year!

Anton Martin Smith

The Men In the Mountains sketch by M.A. Smith 12.5cm x 17cm

Book Review: ‘THE MIRROR BOOK’ BY CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW

Published By: Penguin

Rating: 4.5 Stars Out Of 5

review by Martin Anton Smith martinantonsmith@gmail.com

WARNING MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

I read this book inside 2 days. This was actually the best book I had read for a while. Charlotte Grimshaw is a well-known novelist & the daughter of a “heavyweight of NZ literature” – CK Stead. This is her autobiography. She is a woman in her mid 50’s her career started in Law but then she quickly left to pursue writing & “the rest is history”.

I have not read any of her Novels but was interested to read the book after a family member read the book & also having read an article which also mentioned the book (or was it a radio interview? It’s a bit hazy).

This book is roughly split between description of/trying to figure out her early life as raised by her parents – the one she saw as a child & the one she has looked back on as an adult. The other half is about an early relationship with a troubled Lawyer who was manipulative & often abusive; her next relationship with her husband & a break up & the swift reunion.

The Book describes how CK Stead her high status father who was also a university professor as well as a writer constructed a “public family persona” that was often incongruent with reality according to Grimshaw. She mentions that her father would often describe their family as essentially “happy normal interesting with a minimum of piety, yet there was plenty of odd things happening to refute this description. She mentions her father would often flip out over small things – such as starting a new bottle of jam before the other was finished. She mentions his bad temper & yelling was appraised by her mother as “particle male energy to be respected”.

She mentions the many affairs her dad had which were swept under the carpet by the family & namely her mother. She mentions that her mother didn’t really seem to like her & often gave people the silent treatment – which Charlotte was exposed too for a period of years. She mentions that she went off the rails as a teenager, including run ins with the law for petty crime, yet this was seen as a positive thing by her selectively anti authority parents (They didn’t like Teachers or Cops in particular).

She talks briefly of a terrible house sharing situation she ended up in after leaving the abusive first love – a bunch of males who eventually kicked her out for upsetting a friend in conversation. She writes that her father & mother seem to automatically favour the male in public sex scandals – indicating they are actually very old fashioned & conservative despite the veneer that a literature family is going to always be “progressive”.

Yes, this book is largely about outing the contradictions she regularly faced. It’s also about “gaslighting” – being told she has lost her sanity when bringing up alternative narratives to that of her father & mother. It’s also about being a mother & wanting to raise her kids differently & with more respect for institutions/authority. She mentions her inability to have close relationships with females & how she goes to a female therapist to help resolve this on top of the therapy she requires to help her answer life’s questions.

This book I believe was almost required to be written – as if Charlotte had to write it to finally “set the record straight” – to remove a monkey on her back. It is as if She wanted to exorcise the spirit that was the fabrication of her early familial life story. A story that was actually a false, self-serving appraisal by primarily her father, but ably supported by her mother.

Writing a book like this takes a lot of guts – her parents are still alive and of very old age. Not many writers would risk massively upsetting their parents & remaining family members by writing a book that lays out the family in a plain light of day. Not many non-writers would even have the guts to talk privately about these matters. This I believe is the reason the book is really good. It’s ‘truth factor’ is huge, mountainous. The reader wonders how much this has affected Charlotte’s current relationship with her parents – although we are told the answer to some of this by the fact that her father has said “I remember things differently”.

This book will make you think about yourself & your relationship with your family. Readers will see a lot of Charlotte’s story in their own families. Many Parents will actively promote a “polished” to “totally fake” version of the family they created & raised – after all we would expect that, it’s it the Parents self-interest to do that after all. But of course, the children will be hurt by extremely false appraisals that cover up the hurt they felt – this book is a testament to that. Many children now adults will sympathise with Charlotte’s experiences.

Many Parents now elderly will recognise their own whitewashing of family history & perhaps will feel embarrassed. Perhaps The Mirror Book will help build a few bridges within middle age children & elderly parents – even if in true NZ ‘sweep under the carpet’ culture specifics may never be raised – & that would be a great thing.

Charlotte Grimshaw showed a tonne of guts to write this kind of warts & all autobiography, and it worked a treat. It also makes me wonder about her father’s work – having not read any of it.

As an aside – this book reminds me (because of the descriptions of the father) of the “They are a bastard but they made good art” phenomenon. Do bastards make better art? Is CK Stead a bit of a ‘Bastard’? Is his work actually really good? I will read at least some of his work in the near future perhaps – I wonder after reading The Mirror Book if I will think to myself am I being deceived here, are his characters wolves in sheep’s clothing?.

The books style is very easy to read – straight, simple & to the point – and that’s why I read it inside two days. The chapters aren’t too long. The book isn’t too long or too short.

The only mild criticism I have is the first 100 pages felt a little laboured, & perhaps 25 pages could have been swapped out for more of what came after the first 100 – i.e. the really interesting stuff. But apart from that minor quibble it’s a solid 4.5 stars out of 5.

It will be interesting to delve into one of her fictional works & see if they are as good as this autobiography.

“The Mirror Book” By Charlotte Grimshaw Is Published By Penguin & is available online & in bookstores.

Tag: Families

“A Nice Moment At The Asian Eatery” (A Blog Post)

Thoughts About “The Mirror Book” by Charlotte Grimshaw (Book Review)