The opening paragraph of a short story published last year in The Atlantic on September 21, 2021, tickled me to no end. So I continued reading Sanjena Sathian's 'The Missing Limousine'. I haven't read the author's debut novel 'Gold Diggers' (2021), which has already landed a television deal with Mindy Kaling.
Working in her brother's beauty salon as a nail technician and eyebrow threader, the protagonist Avanti is deemed competent but weird by her customers on Yelp reviews. So the brother and his girlfriend suggested that she watch The Bachelor, a show which everyone watches, and it would help her with conversation topics, or at least show her what a 'normal' world is. She resigned herself to doing it, and even took notes.
Watching The BACHELOR was supposed to make life easier. I started getting into it a year or so after I began working at my brother’s salon. I had a regular stable of clients, but none was particularly in love with me. The problem was not my skill—I am talented at hair removal and competent at mani-pedis. The problem was our Yelp reviews, which said things like “Good eyebrow threading but that one girl makes you keep your eyes open for a whole minute before she starts and the way she stares makes you think she’s trying to suck your soul out.” Which I thought was dramatic.
Avanti had a success story with an old high school classmate who didn't recognize her, of course. But the session went well with them conversing about the reality show. Then she met Harry Chettiar whose "parents are from Singapore, like David’s; his mother is Chinese and his father is Tamilian and his real name was Hari, but he’d changed the spelling." However, she was more interested in watching the show at his home that having any other real conversation topics or building a relationship with him.
Then Avanti got sucked up into the show that she started to sound a little obsessed when talking to her customers. She watched the premiere of a new season, and was annoyed about the 'missing limousine'. She swore she read somewhere that there would be five Asian contestants this season, but they never appeared in the show. She was on a hunt for said 'missing limousine' of five Asian women. When she mentioned this to the customers, they accused her of being existential and bringing too heavy topics to their salon experience. LOL
It was hilarious. I can't quite understand these reality shows. They're not my kind of show at all. But I guess there're many viewers who're into it. They know every contestant, every rose given and what not. Avanti watched the show with Harry on Monday nights while they have sex. By the end of the story, I was laughing so hard that I couldn't actually read the final few lines. This story is of course not about a reality show or limousines, or the protagonist sending in an audition tape to 'The Bachelor'. This is a fairly witty story that has very nuanced writing which flagged so many social themes, dating in the world today, and what it means to be Indian and American.
After that night, after the tabloids declared that David was hot for the host, after the host sued them, after some of the bloggers finally started to note that there had been a sixth limousine that never showed, and wondered if David P. Li was self-hating and canceled the Asian contestants so he could successfully assimilate into white American society … after all that, David P. Li vanished. People said he got plastic surgery in Korea.
People said he moved to a part of the world where no one had seen the vampire movies or his blockbuster or The Bachelor or Ellen. People said he’d been kidnapped and killed by a crazy fan; people said all kinds of things about crazy fans. People said he’d always been shallow; hadn’t anyone noticed? There were the Bermuda Triangle theories. There was the suicide cover-up hypothesis.
I don’t talk to people about my theories, because I don’t want to be accused of being existential. I now discuss only the properties of hair follicles and clogged pores with customers; these topics cause people to believe I am a salon savant uninterested in chitchat. My Yelp reviews are adequate. All talk is small.
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