Strangers in a Strange Land

You

've probably met someone like Mandy. She's a Manhattanite who now lives and works in Bangkok but has never bothered to visit the Grand Palace, because she dismisses it as too touristy. When her moneyed family visits from the U.S., she wrinkles her nose in the lobby of their five-star hotel and shivers, because she claims she's not used to air-conditioning. She has just enough Thai to order a dish she knows won't be on the hotel menu, and when her mother idly wonders at the notion of eating noodles for breakfast, Mandy shoots her a smile both pitying and self-righteous.

Characters like Mandy are easy to ridicule, and in Nell Freudenberger's short story The Orphan, part of her debut collection, Lucky Girls, the author satirizes with efficiency, content to let her targets hang themselves with their own words. But Freudenberger is after more than the easy comedy of young Americans in old Asia. She seeks the unseen forces that bind together families—both biological and artificial—no matter how far apart their individual members roam. At the orphanage where Mandy works with AIDS-afflicted children, the suddenly tender daughter hands an infant to her squeamish, confused mother, Alice, who stares back at the grown child now drifting unfathomably far from her. Those are the sudden moments of near understanding that Freudenberger captures throughout this satisfying and promising exploration of what binds us when we're untied—and footloose—in bewildering foreign lands.

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Before the title story of the collection was published in the 2001 debut fiction issue of The New Yorker, where Freudenberger worked as an editorial assistant, the 26-year-old had taught English in Bangkok and New Delhi. Four of the five stories in Lucky Girls are drawn from her experiences living among Americans in Asia. In the title story, about a young American woman drifting in New Delhi after the death of her married Indian lover, Freudenberger hits the telling detail again and again, as when her narrator looks at the Taj Mahal and catches "the unexpected view of something everyone in the world has seen a thousand times." In The Orphan, Alice muses that Bangkok is "like a dream of Los Angeles," which at the same time "reminds her of the Mexican Day of the Dead." The loose anarchy of every visitor's first experience of Bangkok mirrors the emotional chaos engulfing her characters. When the narrator of Lucky Girls, who has lived in India for five years, is confronted by the scornful children of her lover's wife, she is left feeling "conspicuously white," highlighting the unbridgeable divide of culture and color and experience.

It is those gaps—the spaces that separate souls—that concern Freudenberger. In The Orphan, as Alice watches her dissolving family, she "thinks of the incredible frustration of not knowing things, and of knowing that they can't be known—the incredible privacy of other people's experience." Thankfully, we have writers like Freudenberger to narrow the lonely spaces and reveal the possibility of connection.