Thursday's Special Is...Repeat After Me!

REPEAT AFTER ME by Rachel DeWoskin

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Rachel DeWoskin has been lauded for her “razor-sharp descriptions” (The Wall Street Journal), her “considerable cultural and linguistic resources (The New Yorker), and her rare ability to offer “a real insider’s look at life in modern China” (The Economist). Now DeWoskin, author of the hilarious and poignant memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing, returns with a new novel about a young ESL teacher, a troubled Chinese intellectual, and a very unexpected New York romance.

Aysha is a 22-year old New Yorker struggling to put pieces back in place after her parents' divorce and her own shattering nervous breakdown. With her college career on hold, she teaches English to foreigners just to keep her own days straight until a young Chinese student named Da Ge walks into Aysha's classroom fresh from Beijing and challenges her shaky stance until upside-down and right-side up become impossible for either to identify. From rollicking performances in ESL class to dinner dates in Chinatown, Da Ge takes Aysha on a tour of her own world, and at first seems to offer an escape from grief in the form of a bewildering, exhilarating romance. But reeling from the recent Tiananmen Square massacre and electrified by American culture shock, Da Ge also turns to Aysha for a kind of comfort she can't identify and he ultimately can't accept. When he asks her to marry him, his secrets turn out tragically familiar. As Aysha tries to collect, understand, and honor Da Ge's words, her exploration gives all of us a view into how we recover from trauma, both personal and political -- only to find ourselves in the most astonishing places.

An intercultural love story that spans decades and continents, from Tiananmen Square’s June 4th to the World Trade Center’s September 11th, New York City's upper west side to the terraced mountains of South China, Repeat After Me is a manic story of love and misunderstanding, of fantasies and frenzied cities. Funny, irreverent, touching and provocative, Rachel DeWoskin’s novel is above all an exploration of how to write your own story, how to decide where the record begins.

Excerpt from REPEAT AFTER ME

I met Da Ge on a Tuesday afternoon in the fall of 1989. New York was orange and confident then, leaves breezing the curbs and towers poking above the skyline. I was teaching English as a second language at a school called Embassy when he arrived two weeks and fifteen minutes late. He stood in the doorway watching the class with an expression it was hard to identify—some combination of grin, smirk, and sneer. I thought he might be shy.

“Hi,” I said, “come on in.”

He didn’t move. “I’m Da Ge,” he said, hacking the G out of his throat. Dah Guh. I thought maybe people mispronounced his name all the time. Or that he was a chain smoker and couldn’t speak without choking. When he looked up, it was from the tops of his eyes, with the sullen affect of a teenager.

“The G is hard,” he added. “Dah. Guh.” I smiled, delighted that he knew the difference between a hard and a soft consonant. Maybe he’d be my teacher’s pet.

Although I must say he didn’t look the part. My students and I stared at him, curious. He was wiry, wearing ill-fitting jeans held up by a metal belt. He had a double-breasted navy blue wool coat, which although clearly expensive, gave him a bird-scaring affect. A scar extended from his left cheekbone to his jaw, raw and raised enough to seem recent. His hair flopped over his eyes, and he pushed it out of the way several times. He had the cumulative undereye shadows that mark a real insomniac, and surprisingly shiny shoes. He carried a blue backpack.

When he turned to take a seat, I noticed that the backpack had a cartoon duck and rabbit on it, both wearing spacesuits. Planets floated by. Under the duck were the letters “Ur,” followed by a hyphen. Under the rabbit it said, “anus.” It took me a minute. Uranus! It was a teachable moment; I should have explained why it’s safest not to hyphenate certain words. But I was too chicken.

“Hi, Da Ge,” I said. “I’m Aysha Silvermintz. You can call me Aysha.”

He didn’t respond. I turned to the class.

"Run,” I said.

“Ran,” they said back to me.

“Tomorrow?”

Someone said, “Will ran,” someone else, “Running!”

“Ingyum,” I coaxed. “Tomorrow I . . .” She looked away.

“Someone help her,” I said. No one responded.

“Da Ge?”

“What?”

“Do you know the future tense of run?”

He stared at me lazily, moving his eyes from my shoulders down to my waist and then back up. I felt something like irritation rise hot to the roots of my hair in a blush.

“Run,” he said. I tried to mask my annoyance.

“What does it require in front of it?”

“Something to chase.”

So his English was too good for my class. I decided to let him carry the backpack for the rest of his life.

QUESTION:
What is the best language slip you’ve ever said or heard?

PRIZE:
A copy of Repeat After Me and a special surprise gift.