Happy Stories, Mostly

By Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Tiffany Tsao

In their stunning fiction debut, queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements.

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Happy Stories, Mostly introduces “one of the most important Indonesian writers today” (Litro Magazine). These twelve short stories ask what it means to be almost happy—to nearly find joy, to sort-of be accepted, but to never fully grasp one's desire. Joy shimmers on the horizon, just out of reach.

An employee navigates their new workplace, a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers; a tourist in Vietnam seeks solace following her son’s suicide; a young student befriends a classmate obsessed with verifying the existence of a mythical hundred-foot-tall man. A tragicomic collection that probes the miraculous, melancholy nature of survival amid loneliness, Happy Stories, Mostly considers an oblique approach to human life: In the words of one of the stories’ narrators, “I work in the dark. Like mushrooms. I don’t need light to thrive.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781952177064

Book preview

Enkidu Comes Knocking on New Year’s Eve

With the rain, the river rises and rises, bringing brown water to our front door: the dry yellow dust on the car browning in the damp; the blue welcome mat creeping out through the narrow garage, then the rusty green gate, able to return home only if we recall it should be there, only if we recall it exists; and the mayflies hovering over the surface of the water. From this black window do we eyeball it all. Then, faintly, the terrified yowl of a cat from who knows where. Then the widow who lives at the intersection, in a blue rain jacket, wading through the water, following its flow. We know the sun is watching us watching everything, with its eye bigger than this blue eye, this orb on which we all stand. But then, a tug at your T-shirt. A tiny hand and a summons to come down to breakfast. Someone is waiting for you below, they say. Someone who has been searching for you for a long time. An okay, and I’ll be down soon. Then a head peering in—your cue to get up from your seat and leave the movie theater, down the sloping path, like when you have to pee … But how swiftly it all flew by and is now no more, they say, face shrouded by the blackout, opening the door to let in an end.

A Bedtime Story for Your Long Sleep

The first time I took a short story writing class, I was asked to tell the saddest true story that I’d ever heard. And so, I told the group how I had once been turned down for a job as a kindergarten teacher after being asked to tell the saddest of the sad true stories I’d heard, whereupon I’d responded with the story of Alarm Man. I’d heard about him from my late mother—she and Alarm Man came from the same town. I told the recruiter for the kindergarten job how Alarm Man, who couldn’t wake up without an alarm clock, had forgotten to set his alarm the night before his first date with my mother’s friend, whom he’d spent seven years loving desperately from afar. Alarm Man didn’t wake up that day, and my mother’s friend waited at the theme park ticket booth until sundown. My mother’s friend assumed it was all a big prank and ended up dating some other guy. Fifty years passed and Alarm Man slept on until, one day, for no clear reason, he was startled from sleep. He found his bed blanketed in hair, the roots of which he traced all the way back to his own head. He cut the hairs, and as his reflection revealed itself, he received another shock: he was now old and frail. He realized what had happened and remained at the mirror, weeping without end. Then he remembered the date with his beloved. Frantically, he dried his eyes, showered, dressed neatly, and left for the theme park. He got lost along the way, of course. Only hours later, and after stopping several people to ask for directions, did he find the place. It was now a shopping mall. He began crying again, on the roadside this time, filled with sorrow and regret. Once again, he thought of my mother’s friend and immediately set off to find out where his beloved lived—though of course, his beloved was in fact someone else’s beloved by now. Apparently, my mother’s friend had moved away and so Alarm Man went to my mother instead. Alarm Man began to tell her everything, broke down crying in the middle, continued his story, and eventually asked for my mother’s friend’s address. My mother told him the facts as they stood: her friend had died two years ago from prostate cancer. Alarm Man wept once more, this time on the divan in our sitting room. He felt he had nothing to live for anymore. Then he said he was hungry, and after eating an enormous amount, he went home and was never seen again, I told the recruiter, bringing my story to a close. The recruiter frowned and asked whether it was a true story, and I nodded, and he asked how Alarm Man could have possibly survived without eating or drinking anything for fifty years, and I replied that I, too, wasn’t sure about the scientific explanation behind it, but that was what had happened. The recruiter then asked about Alarm Man’s origin story and the time before Alarm Man had been called Alarm Man, and I answered truthfully that my mother had never told me anything about that. There was a long silence. He couldn’t have survived, the recruiter said, before informing me that I hadn’t got the position. I cried all the way home because I had really needed that job to pay for my mother’s medical treatment. Only when my mother died a month later, along with the full story of Alarm Man—I’d never felt it was the right time to ask her about it—did I realize that my rejection from the job had actually given me a story that was even sadder. Even worse than experiencing genuine misfortune, to my mind, was telling someone about it and being considered a liar; for isn’t the denial that a massacre happened even more tragic than the massacre itself? And I thought to myself: If I’d told the recruiter about how I’d been turned down for a job as a kindergarten teacher because my story about Alarm Man had been thought not only untrue, but utter nonsense as well, why then, I’d have gotten the job because at least one layer of the story would have made sense—that I’d been turned down for a job as a kindergarten teacher. But how could I have told it? After all, during the interview, I hadn’t been rejected yet. And I also thought to myself: If the tale of me telling the story of Alarm Man and being thought a liar was sadder than the story of Alarm Man itself, wouldn’t the tale of me being thought a liar after telling a story of me telling the story of Alarm Man and being thought a liar be even sadder still? I felt that such a story would prove useful someday—a bottomless pit of sorrow-bricks for me to mine, to build my Babel Tower of misery. Maybe one day I could tell the story to someone who could fall asleep only if they heard a sad tale. With my story’s help, they’d be able to slumber in peace for a very long time. Forever perhaps. And so, from that point on, in order to make the story even sadder, I decided to start taking writing classes—where questions like What is the worst thing you’ve ever experienced? and What is your darkest secret? are routinely trotted out to be answered by people, a portion of whom are sure from the start that it is they who have the most miserable experience, the strangest secret, the wildest imagination, to the point that, from the start, they won’t take much interest in the story I’ll tell them, much less in me.

So What’s Your Name, Sandra?

Four months after the death of her one and only son, Mama Sandra would take a trip to Mỹ Sơn, Quảng Nam, Vietnam.

She’d leave Jakarta on a Friday morning in early October, changing planes in Kuala Lumpur. The ticket was cheap. After the two incidents a few years back, Malaysian Airlines was always offering special deals, including on the KUL-HAN route. But having no privileges when it came to keeping well informed, Mama Sandra was ignorant of this fact. Instead, she saw the price and thought our Father in Heaven had given the idea His blessing. Receiving this divine signal with outstretched palms, Mama Sandra promptly liquidated what remained of her annual leave: nearly twenty whole days. Her supervisor, a thoroughly Javanese man from Solo, was aware some recent tragedy had befallen his underling. So he signed off on the matter without asking too many questions.

There wasn’t much that Mama Sandra knew about Vietnam: it was communist and, like Indonesia, a member of ASEAN. She’d only stumbled across the Hindu temple ruins of Mỹ Sơn, those remnants of the ancient kingdom of Champa, by chance—because she’d stayed up until three in the morning killing time online, lingering over search results for the English words my son.

Her son’s name was Bison, and wouldn’t you know, she’d enjoyed calling him Son for short; even though Son also reminded her of Sonia, which was the name of some of her favorite big-screen Bollywood actresses.

Her decision to go to Vietnam hatched several hours later, when she woke up, head heavy and throbbing. She made straight for the kitchen, with all its clutter and its colonies of cockroaches hiding beneath the washing machine’s plywood board base. She put a pot of water to boil over a low flame, lifted the blue plastic food cover on the dining table, and reached for a banana so ripe it verged on black, twisting till it came off the stem.

She chewed deliberately, then rose slowly to her feet and retrieved the first aid kit on top of the fridge. She needed Panadol—the extra strength ones that Bison used to take. They came in red strips, sheathed in plastic blisters that glinted like glass. The texture of the plastic-welded foil reminded her of the small metal file attachment on nail clippers. The pills looked like bloated grains of white rice and tasted bitter, like medicine should. Of all the painkillers she’d tried, Mama Sandra had found that these were the most effective.

When the caffeine in the pills began to kick in, clearing her head, she began her daily ritual, her usual routine—at least, since that fateful middle-of-the-night when a friend of Bison’s, another college student from the kos where he was staying, kept calling until she finally got out of bed to answer the phone. The ritual was this: sob uncontrollably over the death of her child, her firstborn, her only, her beloved anak siakkangan.

After about twenty minutes, Mama Sandra dragged herself from the table to the stove and made some instant coffee. While waiting for the sugar to dissolve, she picked up the mountain of dirty clothes on the floor and stuffed them into the washing machine. She took out Bison’s old suitcase from the storeroom—a seventy-two-litre-capacity American Tourister that the kid had taken with him when he’d left for college, fifty-five kilometers away in Tangerang. Then, as she sipped her coffee, she phoned Betris, her promising young niece who worked at the ministry of foreign affairs. Mama Sandra declared her intention to get a passport.

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Mama Anton’s jaw dropped when she heard about the travel plans. She and Mama Sandra came from the same small town in North Sumatra and were both active members of the women’s choir at the local Batak Protestant Church. Mama Sandra, like practically everyone else Mama Anton knew, had never been abroad. Mama Anton herself had only ever heard tell of what lay yonder from her twins, Anton and Antonia, who would take weekend excursions around Southeast Asia and return with tales of how everything was cleaner elsewhere, and more orderly, and more expensive, and so on. Mama Anton suspected her kids of exaggeration. They knew she had a fear of flying. She’d even have made her occasional pilgrimages back to their hometown, Harian Boho, by bus if she could.

Post-funeral, however, Mama Anton had been staying over at Mama Sandra’s a lot and she’d seen with her own eyes how Mama Sandra, curled up like a kitten, would cry in her sleep. How she’d call out for her late son—Bison! Bison!—her hands clutching at empty air, just how Mama Anton imagined Job from the Old Testament grieving for the loss of his children. And so Mama Anton pronounced herself in support of her friend’s crazy plan.

I’ve already picked up the passport, Ma Anton, but what should I tell Amang Pendeta? asked Mama Sandra, recalling their pastor. They were at choir practice and the director had just begun talking about the church party that coming weekend in celebration of Gotilon, the Batak harvest.

I hope Amang Pendeta won’t mind, Mama Sandra murmured uneasily. Lucky for her, Mama Anton was at her side. The woman had known Bison when he was no bigger than the joint of her pinkie. And they’d been friends since Mama Sandra had first moved to Bekasi in 1992—all alone and anemia-pale, baby in a sling wound around her right shoulder, skin and bones from a diet consisting mainly of rice with saltwater soup, sleepless with fretting about how to pay the rent on her home in the Snug and Simple Housing Subdivision (a.k.a. SSHS).

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