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Of course Yi-Yiing would hear the occasional gook word-the most common insult from a prejudiced patient in the emergency room, and from an unseen driver or passenger in a moving car. But it didn’t faze her to be mistaken for the war bride of a Vietnam vet. She had a harder, uphill task ahead of her-namely, moving her daughter and her parents to the United States -but she was well on her way to unraveling the red tape that was involved. Yi-Yiing had her own reasons for remaining undistracted from achieving her goal. (She’d been assured it would be easier to bring her family to the United States once the war in Vietnam was over; it was “only a matter of time,” a reliable authority had told her.)
What Yi-Yiing had said to Tony Angel was that it wasn’t the time for her to be “romantically involved.” Maybe this was music to his dad’s ears, Da
Da
In those three years, Da
As big as the rental houses on Court Street were, Da
Da
“I don’t know how you can write in such a sterile building,” the writer Raymond Carver said of the EPB. Ray was a colleague of Da
“It’s not as… sterile as you may think,” Da
Another writer colleague, John Cheever, compared the EPB to a hotel-“one catering to conventioneers”-but Da
The aesthetics of a given workplace notwithstanding, writers tend to love where they work well. For as much of the day as Joe was safe in school, Da
Usually, writers don’t confine their writing to the good things, do they? Da
To anyone seeing the forty-one-year-old writer’s expression, this exercise was both more meaningful and more painful than a mere title search. To Dot and May, the troubled-looking young author seemed strangely attractive and familiar; waiting for their food, they both watched him intently. In the absence of signs to read out loud, May was at a momentary loss for words, but Dot whispered to her friend: “Whatever he’s writin’, he’s not havin’ any fun doin’ it.”
“I could give him some fun doin’ it!” May whispered back, and both ladies commenced to cackling, in their inimitable fashion.
At this moment in time, it took a lot to distract Da
Too long ago for Da
THEIR FIRST YEAR ON COURT STREET, Da
Those two nights a week when Tony Angel was on the road, Yi-Yiing didn’t stay in the Court Street house. She’d kept her own apartment, near Mercy Hospital; maybe she knew all along that Da