The Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary, about sixty-five kilometres southwest of Toronto, is home to around sixty-five rescued farm animals, including pigs named Hercules, April, and Len, a goat known as Diablo, and a cow whose moniker, Pouty Face, perfectly matches her cuddly demeanour. These animals have come from a variety of places: some are from petting zoos, some have literally fallen off of trucks, and one was abandoned at the sanctuary’s front gate, presumably because its owners could no longer care for it. Other animals hadn’t been cared for at all—two of the sanctuary’s eight sheep were found, still squirming, on a farm’s so-called dead pile, where cast-off cadavers are heaped. Many of the animals at the sanctuary are factory-farm refugees, raised expressly to be consumed. At Happily Ever Esther, they will instead live out their natural lives in comfort and safety.
The animals, or “residents,” as the owners of the sanctuary prefer to call them, inhabit the twenty-hectare farm: the pigs stay in the main barn plus one fenced-in hectare of roamable forest and one of pasture; the chickens overnight in a sun-dappled enclosure also inhabited by two Muscovy ducks and a couple of garrulous peacocks; a few cows, a horse, and a donkey occupy a four-hectare paddock; and a colony of rabbits lives in a condo-like complex known as Bunny Town. But Happily Ever Esther’s eponymous resident lives in neither barn nor paddock. Rather, Esther, a 650-pound, six-year-old pig, shares a farmhouse with the sanctuary’s proprietors, Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter. She has her own bedroom, just off the entrance to the house, though the room has become a bit dingy—the broadloom is stained, the cupcake-patterned wallpaper peeling—as a renovation, which will open her room to the backyard, is imminent. But Esther usually prefers the sunroom, where she can snooze on a tattered, queen-size mattress. The first floor of the house could, in fact, be called Esther Town—paintings and photographs of the pig cover every wall, and porcine sculptures and other tchotchkes occupy most corners. On a shelf above Esther’s mattress are copies of the books that Jenkins and Walter have written about her, as well as a throw pillow emblazoned with “CHANGE the WORLD.”
I don’t want to downplay the underrepresentation of Asians in pop culture—it is stark and it is depressing. But carping on The Joy Luck Club as giving unreasonable prominence to one woman’s experience and imagination obscures the fact that Asian American men can and do tell their own stories. It’s time for Asian Americans to finally forgive The Joy Luck Club for the sin of being the first and only and instead start to think of it as what it has been all along: a brave and beautiful film in a canon long overdue for more.
Whenever I encountered a story about religious quests, I went through the same arc of raised hopes and crushing disappointment. In Bums, Ray Smith encounters the Buddhist poet and adventurer Japhy Ryder, a close simulacrum of real life Zen scholar and poet Gary Snyder. Ray, an alcoholic, semi-homeless wanderer, finds purpose in Ryder’s exhilarating, whirlwind leap through centuries of Zen mystical tradition. They climb the Matterhorn, get drunk, compose poetry, throw wild San Franciscan parties, and eventually part regretfully; Ray Smith still wants to be a lost boy of America, riding the rails, while Snyder is moving to Japan to study his religion in a more serious and authentic way. At seventeen, it was the first time I had read American literature that used Zen as its metaphorical backbone instead of Judeo-Christian principles. Instead of Christ metaphors and prodigal sons, there was the non-duality and emptiness of the Zen poetry and sutras I’d already been reading on the side. Zen is an exhilarating rejection of all the domesticity and obligation, a renunciant tradition that demands its followers cast aside illusions and all self-regard. Monks and nuns are called “home-leavers,” and the Beats fit that perfectly. In the fifties, on the jittery fringes of a monolithic culture, America was ripe for a spiritual awakening. Zen could serve as the engine for sexual, political, and social liberation, and its exploration by figures like Snyder helped to usher in the free love and the radical countercultures of the sixties.
The English novelist Rose Macaulay once sagely described croquet as “a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancour”. Smack goes the mallet against the ball and off it flies, powered by your politely simmering rage. It’s an underlying sense of this absurdity, perhaps, that makes croquet such an effective device in Thomas Jones’s debut novel. The book begins and ends with the game played by a group of thirtysomethings, uneasy in their friendships and not entirely comfortable in their skins. Jones notices seething excitations beneath the niceties, small acts of sabotage and determinations of desire that ripple through each roquet.
Violent stories, one argument goes, inevitably endorse violence. No matter how much pacifist moralizing a writer brings to a war story, it will always play up the thrill and clamor of battle to some degree. And a murder tale will always stoke our voyeuristic urge to witness violence. That’s not so much because we love violence as much as we love story — the rush of bloodshed is wired to the comforts of a familiar narrative arc.
So what if you bent that arc, or even turned it into a pretzel? What effect does a violent novel have then? Those questions are at the core of “The Arid Sky,” the stellar English-language debut of Mexican-born author Emiliano Monge. By leaping forward and backward in time across most of the 20th century while following one man’s violent life in a dusty mesa town, the novel strips away anything that might be construed as heroic. Instead, it evokes a sense of terrible acts constantly repeating in one place, history grimly folding back on itself. It’s a traditional western cut up and turned into an M.C. Escher print.