A Study Guide for Zadie Smith's "The Embassy of Cambodia"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Zadie Smith's "The Embassy of Cambodia", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535868037

Book preview

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The Embassy of Cambodia

Zadie Smith

2013

Introduction

Zadie Smith's short story The Embassy of Cambodia first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in February 2013. It was released later the same year as a small hardcover volume. The story follows the events of a few weeks in the life of Fatou, an African immigrant working as a servant for a Pakistani family in North London. Many of Smith's works take place in this area, where she herself grew up.

Through flashbacks, Smith tells of Fatou's long journey from Ivory Coast to England. This history is interspersed with her present-day reality, working as almost a slave for an unappreciative family, who are themselves immigrants. As Fatou struggles to assert her own identity despite pressures from both friendly and unfriendly influences, Smith explores themes of suffering, ignorance, slavery, and postcolonialism. In addition to being available as a stand-alone volume, the short story is found in the anthology The Best American Magazine Writing 2014.

Author Biography

Smith was born Sadie Smith in northwest London on October 27, 1975. Her mother was a Jamaican child psychologist, and her father, a British war veteran, worked in advertising. The family's home was full of books, and Smith became an obsessive reader early in life. (In an interview in the New York Times Book Review, she said, I think I was a kind of addict.) Her first aspiration, however, was to become a movie star, inspired by watching old black-and-white movies with her father. Her favorite Hollywood star was Katharine Hepburn. Smith would write later that Hepburn was the kind of woman I should like to be.

When she was fourteen, Smith changed her first name from Sadie to Zadie, feeling it suited her better and sounded more exotic. By her later teen years she had abandoned her plans to become a movie star. Smith experimented with poetry and short stories in high school and, after graduating from London's Hampstead Comprehensive School, entered King's College at Cambridge, thrilled to be attending school where so many of her literary heroes had studied. In her second year at Cambridge, Smith had four short stories published in the university's annual anthology of student writing. One of the stories, titled Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private Tutor, attracted the