I am Kyle's self-indulgence

One of the things I noticed in a number of my high school students this past year is a great resistance to stories with unhappy endings. Many of them even seem to hang their entire judgment of a story on whether or not it ends in a positive way. I wish that I had finished reading East of Eden at the time, because I would have shared with them the following passage.

In the book, Adam is a wealthy man who owns a ranch in California and has a servant named Lee, who is a second generation Chinese-American. Midway through the book Lee tells Adam the story of his parents and how he was born—a story his father had told him when he was young. Lee’s father and mother were married while living in China, but his father left to work on the railroads in America to pay off his debt. The mother secretly disguised herself as a man and came to work on the same railroad, not realizing that she was already pregnant. In the all-male work camp the husband and wife maintained the illusion that she was just another working man (she did not show much during her pregnancy). They made plans to run away to a mountain lake and have the baby in secret. They saved up food and the wife made a swaddling blanket out of scraps of cloth.

It’s a sweet and romantic story, but Adam, the listener, seems to realize it’s at a crossroads: either the parents made it to the mountain as planned and lived happily ever after, or something went wrong. Interrupting the story, Adam says, "I hope they got there." Lee’s response reveals a great truth about the nature of storytelling:

"I know. And when my father would tell me I would say to him, 'Get to that lake--get my mother there--don’t let it happen again, not this time. Just once let’s tell it: how you got to the lake and built a house of fir boughs.' And my father became very Chinese then. He said, 'There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.'"

Adam tells him to "Get on with it," and Lee tells the true ending: his mother went into labor early, while still in the camp; the men then discovered she was a woman and, behaving as animals, did unspeakable things to her. When Lee’s father found her she was dying, and by her request he clawed her stomach open with his bare hands and delivered the baby. Lee closes the story by saying,

"Before you hate those men you must know this. My father always told it at the last: No child ever had such care as I. The whole camp became my mother. It is a beauty--a dreadful kind of beauty."

I think Adam's desire for a happy resolution and, to a greater extent, Lee's remembered request of his father to change the ending, reflects the attitude I've seen in some of my students: they want a nice, neat, happily-ever-after ending that will make them feel good. But I agree with Lee's father. I think that if we tell only the happy endings we do ourselves a great disservice, because the world is simply not like that. It's not that I think there's only pain and suffering in life--quite the opposite. I believe that even people in the most desperate and painful situations manage to find some joy in life, and I think that their joyful moments are all the more beautiful and meaningful for it. Representing that truth in art and literature reveals just how precious this life is. Because the truth is that the people who experience the most pain and suffering are the same ones who fight to hold on to every second of their lives.