A See-Sawing Anticipation of Being Seen
The 2023 novel ‘Safe Colors’ by Thaddeus Rutkowski
I like literature that probes a question deeply without necessarily resolving it. Safe Colors by Thaddeus Rutkowski invites readers to step inside its silences and gaps that yawn wide like doorways and to try to slide the puzzle pieces or balance two ends of an equation that never quite reconcile. It feels as though this child is waiting to be seen accurately by others at least as much as he is actively trying to understand himself.
Though Safe Colors is billed as “a novel in short fictions,” the endearing, sympathetic narrator shares a name with the author himself. It will be published in November by New Meridian Arts.
Identity in a biracial family
The narrator Rutkowski’s mother is Chinese; his father isn’t. Growing up in a mostly white town in northern Appalachia, he’s constantly reminded by white kids that he looks Asian and that this limits him. (For example, they’re sure he can’t be nicknamed after Jesus’s cousin.) Meanwhile, Asians don’t think he looks Asian at all.
He learns to hunt and fish, but he isn’t rugged, and others impolitely inform him that he’s “gay,” a “fairy.” Sometimes his world tilts uncomfortably. The story hints that many beings are captive: dairy cows, duckling, mouse, and a fictional kidnap victim on TV.
The narrator’s father is an artist, frustrated and unfulfilled. He states half-truths to which the mother offers level-headed corrections. One of the most revealing passages, and one of my favorites:
When he got home from the local bar, my father complained to my mother about my siblings and me. ‘They are not my children. They are your children. They are Chinese children.’
‘They are American,’ my mother said.
‘That’s the problem!’ my father shouted. ‘I moved here to live apart from society, but they are ordinary Americans.’
‘How so?’
‘They want things.’
‘But we don’t have things.’
‘That’s what I’m saying! We have no things to give them!’
We readers, from an outside perspective, can surmise that the father would have more time for his art if he spent less time drinking, that he’d appreciate his wife and children more if he were less racist toward them, and that he could better manage his own material possessions if he weren’t as reliant on his wife’s income. That’s one way of looking at the information we’re given. The mother could have picked those battles, but doesn’t, at least not in this novel.
The father’s existential battle is rooted in his conflicting desires for ambiguity and clarity. He wants to “live apart from society” but can’t escape the nation within whose borders he still lives. He clings to his own racial self-understanding and sees his children’s interests as oil to his water. He doesn’t know how to guide his children because he doesn’t know how to guide himself.
This, too, is a trick of light
The poignant novel reads like a memoir with multiple scenes polished to carry a similar tone, as in a dream. Though the vignettes speak to discomfort and shame, they are never so heavy as to lose their quirky humor and skeptical disorientation. Rutkowski’s wise poetry book, Tricks of Light, is also like this.
That’s the way it is with many questions of identity, isn’t it? We keep asking those questions, turning them in our hands, and with each rotation there’s a slightly different feeling, a slightly different meaning.
