The Fifth Reason
by Yoojin Na
Books are like people; it matters when you meet them.
It was June, middle of winter in New Zealand. I had rented a room with a view of Katherine Mansfield’s “sleepy sea” from a South African ex-pat. Every day, I made a pilgrimage from my windy hilltop to the Days Bay Pavilion, a pizzeria-bar-dairy lauded by Eleanor Catton in the French newspaper Le Monde. There, I sat by the hearth and tried to write, yet the words did not fill the space of my growing solitude.
Frustrated, I drove one afternoon to downtown Wellington and found myself on Manners Street where I came across the bright yellow signage of Arty Bee Books. Inside, I found tables filled with recent releases and staff favorites. I picked up a book, read a few lines, closed it, and returned it back to its place. I repeated this about a dozen times before I held in my hands Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know.
That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it. From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing.
I knew the feeling. In New York, I was horrified at the news—refugee children locked up in cages and DREAMers booted from the only home they’ve known. I knew I was no longer an “illegal”—I had a green card that told me I belonged—but it didn’t feel like enough. My mother warned me not to write more op-eds about Trump. At first, I thought she was crazy. But, later, when my application for citizenship kept getting delayed, I grew nervous.
In the midst of this anxiety, I had met Miles, a handsome ex-Mormon who came to New York via Iowa. We were at a Sohn Concert in Irving Plaza when he leaned in and told me he’d stay home with whatever dogs or kids we might have in the future. This pledge made no sense but we had just started to date, and even though he was moving to New Zealand in a few months, it seemed sincere.
From his drunken promise, I extrapolated a story of us. In New Zealand, we would leave behind our fractured pasts and find our belonging in each other. I wanted us to be perfect equals in domesticity and in writing, like a progressive John Dunne and Joan Didion. In such a partnership, I wouldn’t have to compromise who I am to become a wife and a mother. So, I packed up my life in New York and followed him to the ends of the earth only to discover that this story of us was a myth.
Without Miles, the new life I made for myself in a small coastal suburb felt unbearably lonely. So, I had escaped to Eastbourne, the Hamptons of the South Pacific, in the wrong season.
In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy is on a similar path. She abandons her life in London for Majorca, where she’s spent happier summers of her youth. Like me, she arrives at a resort town in the wrong season. Like me, she’s trying to escape the aftermath of a domestic implosion. Unlike me, she meets a man, a Chinese shopkeeper, who becomes her love interest. But the crux of the book is not in this romantic vignette. Rather, it’s in the journey that Levy makes into her past.
Inspired by George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” Levy explores in four essays the different phases of her life by way of four reasons for writing. In the first essay, “Political Purpose,” she examines the strangeness that motherhood imposes on women.
Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved to be very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic fantasies about our purpose in life . . . We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the societal system, was a delusion.
Levy, who cries on escalators, doesn’t hate her children. She doesn’t hate her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Rather, she hates that a woman must extend herself to assume a domestic role and become a stranger to the person she once was.
But Levy, before marriage, is just as much of a stranger to her surroundings. In her following essays “Historical Impulse” and “Sheer Egoism,” she explores different forms of alienation by recounting her childhood and adolescence. As a daughter of a political activist, she grows up in South Africa during apartheid and returns to England as a teenager. In London, Levy thinks she will finally have a sense of belonging that has evaded her. Yet her new life comes with unpleasant changes—her parents’ divorce and a house in chaos.
Levy copes by escaping to a greasy spoon where she waits for creative inspiration, but all she manages to write is “ENGLAND” on a white napkin. She considers this word with urgency until a waitress asks:
“Where are you from?”
The book doesn’t provide a clear answer. She doesn’t belong neatly to any one place or entity. Like Levy, I stick out wherever I go. Both in Korea, where I was born, and in America, where I grew up, people always ask me where I am from.
I thought New Zealand would be a place where such a question would be less hurtful. Perhaps, a part of me preferred the Middle-earth to homelands that did not recognize me. Perhaps, I subconsciously fell in love with a man all so that I could have an excuse to leave New York. And, even after my relationship failed and my dream of finding a home in New Zealand evaporated, I could not let go of the fantasy that the right person or place would make me belong. So, I kept reading Things I Don’t Want to Know as if reading the map of my own future. I kept reading and hoping for Levy to find belonging with the Chinese shopkeeper in Majorca.
It was dark outside when I finished the book. I sat by the window for a long time, stunned. Across the bay, I could see the lights coming on in Aro Valley where Miles lived. Other nights, I’d play a game with myself and try to pick out his light from the myriad spread across the hills. I re-read the last page:
I rearranged the chair and sat at the desk. And then I looked at the wall to check out the power points so I could plug in my laptop. The hole in the wall nearest to the desk was placed above the basin, a precarious socket for a gentleman’s electric razor. That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket.
Then, I re-read the last chapter, then the whole book.
No matter how many times I flipped through its pages, the ending did not change. And who I was or where I was did not change. I too had a desk in front of a window and a socket for my laptop. It was enough that, on that desk, sat a book with an unassuming blue cover. It was enough that I was accumulating words that mattered to me.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
