Stories of Wonder, Fear and Kindness From the Moth
This content was originally published by MICHIKO KAKUTANI on 3 April 2017 | 9:57 pm.
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Dori Samadzai Bonner recounts how her family made its way out of war-torn Afghanistan in the early 1990s with forged papers, and how her father — who had been tortured there and feared for his life — had to beg an American judge for asylum in the United States.
Photo
Catherine Burns, the Moth’s artistic director.
Credit
Aly Nicklas
Louis C. K. describes a visit he made to Russia in 1994 because he was burned out and lonely, and “because when I was a kid, I used to read Russian novels, and I loved them.” (“I would open all the windows so I would be cold. I wanted to be cold like they were.”) He realized, after a miserable, surreal trip, that he’d gone there “to find out how bad life gets” and how funny it still is.
Hasan Minhaj recalls developing a crush in high school on a pretty girl named Bethany, who asked him to go to the prom with her — his American dream come true! Only when he arrived at her house, he saw the captain of the water polo team putting a corsage on her. Bethany’s mother explained that since they would be taking a lot of photos, they didn’t think that he would be “a good fit.” In other words, Hasan — who is the son of an immigrant from a small town in India — thinks that the “prom wasn’t an event for people that look like me.”
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The stories here, for the most part, have translated seamlessly to the page. Though they are all relatively short — average Moth performances range from five minutes to 12 minutes — most possess a remarkable emotional depth and sincerity. The stories vary greatly in tone and voice — by turns, raw, wry, rueful, comic, elliptical and confiding — but there is little sarcasm or snark. The emphasis is on communicating with the audience, with sharing an experience, a memory, a moment of grace.
Moth stories can be seen as part of the oral tradition dating back to Homer, but the personal nature of the tales — and their air of spontaneity — owe as much to stand-up comedy, blogging, talk-show anecdotes and group therapy. They are not random reminiscences, however, but closely focused, finely tuned narratives that have the force of an epiphany, while opening out to disclose the panoramic vistas of one person’s life or the shockingly disparate worlds they have inhabited or traversed.
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In “Unusual Normality,” Ishmael Beah — who lost his family to war in Sierra Leone and became a child soldier at age 13 — relates how he was adopted by an American woman when he was 17, and how he attempted to fit in at school in New York. For instance, he did not tell his new classmates why he was so adept at paintball: “I wanted to explain certain things, but I felt that if they knew about my background, they would no longer allow me to be a child. They would see me as an adult, and I worried that they would fear me.
“My silence allowed me to experience things, to participate in my childhood, to do things I hadn’t been able to do as a child.”
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Other stories pivot around a relationship between two people: the scientist Christof Koch and his longtime collaborator Francis Crick (who together with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA); Stephanie Peirolo and her son RJ, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after his car was struck at a blind intersection; the actor John Turturro and his troubled brother Ralph, who lives at the Creedmore Psychiatric Center in Queens; Suzi Ronson, a hairdresser from a London suburb, who cut the young David Bowie’s hair, joined his tour and went on to become a music producer; the filmmaker Arthur Bradford and his friend Ronnie Simonsen, who has cerebral palsy and who became obsessed with meeting the actor Chad Everett, who played a doctor on the old TV show “Medical Center.”
One of the most moving tales is “Fog of Disbelief,” by Carl Pillitteri, who was working as a field engineer on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station in Japan when a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the island in 2011, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl; it left some 18,490 people dead or missing and led to the evacuation of more than 300,000.
After checking on his crew and colleagues, Pillitteri was most concerned about the older woman who ran the restaurant where he ate five, six times a week. He spoke no Japanese, she spoke no English, and he and his friends knew her, fondly, only as the “Chicken Lady.” The little building housing her restaurant was badly cracked by the quake, and she was nowhere to be found — even months later, when Pillitteri returned to the exclusion zone from America to look for her. Eventually, he enlisted the help of The Japan Times in tracking her down, and learned that her name was Mrs. Owada; the name of her restaurant, Ikoi, meant “rest, relax, and relief.”
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Finally, almost a year after the quake, he received a letter from her: “I have escaped from the disasters and have been doing fine every day. Pillitteri-san, please take care of yourself. I know your work must be important. I hope you enjoy a happy life like you seemed to have when you came to my restaurant. Although I won’t be seeing you, I will always pray for the best for you.”
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