Latest news with #clam
New York Times
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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
08-05-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
How a Chinese delicacy got caught in the crossfire of Trump's trade war
SUQUAMISH, Wash. — For over two decades, Suquamish tribal member Joshua George has dived into the emerald waters of the Salish Sea looking for an unusually phallic clam that's coveted thousands of miles away.
Express Tribune
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
In abeyance
Listen to article That a major project had been given a go-ahead without a consensus among the various stakeholders was bound to come back haunting. The six-canal project - the lifeline for the Green Pakistan Initiative that is meant to ensure food security in the country through corporate farming, besides earning much-needed foreign exchange via export of surplus food - has been paused in line with the decision taken at a meeting of the Council of Common Interest held on Monday. As agreed at the constitutional forum, tasked with resolving power-sharing disputes between the provinces, the project will remain halted till the time "mutual understanding is evolved among the provinces". A committee, with representation from the federation and all federating units, will also be constituted to pursue a consensus by allaying the concerns of all provinces alongside ensuring the country's food and ecological security. The decisions taken by the CCI means clam in Sindh where civil society, political parties and nationalist groups were up in arms against the decision to construct six canals to irrigate the barren lands of Cholistan in Punjab as part of the Green Pakistan Initiative, calling it infringement on the rights of low riparian segments of the populace. Divisive though it is, the high-profile project with global reach promises a roadmap to genuine development and significant foreign exchange inflow for a country long mired in a serious balance of payments crisis. But with a major collation partner, the PPP, in aversion, it's a catch-22 situation for the PML-led ruling dispensation. So while a good initiative — currently held in abeyance — risks becoming another Kalabagh dam project, the decisions to be taken at the next round of debate should reflect the supreme national interest.
