4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Memoir of Divorce and Xenophobia, Narrated by a Clam
CLAM DOWN: A Metamorphosis, by Anelise Chen
The narrator of Anelise Chen's off-kilter new memoir isn't Anelise Chen. At least, not exactly. Instead, the events of the book — Chen's divorce, a soul-searching trip to New Mexico, a reckoning with her family history — are told in the third person, a deliberate artistic choice that grants Chen 'a top-down view,' she writes, 'like seeing yourself from the perspective of a map.' Oh, and the protagonist of her story happens to be a clam.
Yes, we are talking about the humble shelled sea creature, tight-lipped and tasty in chowders. On the page, it's not as strange as it sounds. 'The clam and her husband were sitting on a bench overlooking the East River,' reads a typical sentence. Chen adopts her clam persona after she notices that her mother keeps texting her to 'clam down' rather than 'calm down,' an opportune typo she seizes on and runs with for roughly 350 pages. Like clams, she too 'swallowed whatever was bothering her and worried it under her tongue until it gleamed.' As her marriage falls apart, Chen transforms — emotionally, at least, even if she isn't literally confined to the ocean floor.
'Clam Down,' then, is an exploration of the clam state of mind, and the benefits and great costs of shutting oneself off from others. It's a personal story, but its ambitions radiate out to familial and eventually even societal questions. What does it mean to be part of a certain family, or Asian American, or a clam? For Chen, these identities are all linked.
Her father, Henry, also exhibits unmistakable clam-like tendencies: 'withdrawing, closing, retreating, hiding.' During her childhood, he spent a decade living alone in Taiwan, apart from his wife and daughters, attempting to create an ultrasecure accounting software named — incredibly — Shell Computing. 'Certainly, if she's a clam, it's because he's a clam,' she realizes on a visit home. 'They were all shut tight against one another. It was the classic Chen family coping mechanism.'
To tell her story, she must tell her dad's; and she does this masterfully, with a novelist's ability to enter another person's head (Chen's previous book, 'So Many Olympic Exertions,' is a novel that deftly blends fiction and nonfiction). 'Clam Down' includes entire sections written from Henry's point of view, convincingly plunging the reader into the mind of a put-upon husband and father. 'For almost her whole life,' Henry grumbles about his daughter, 'whenever she need something big, she always wait until last minute in order to force me to give it for her. Almost like, you know, hostage situation.' Chen's rendering of a certain kind of Taiwanese American dad is almost painfully accurate: the blend of petty criticism and implicit affection, aggravated and funny at the same time.
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