Most people have an instinctive fear of revealing their most vulnerable side to others, even to their loved ones. The failure to reveal the vulnerable side often leads to the failure in mutual understanding and communication. As a result, there is the eternal conflict between people’s need for intimate relationships and people’s fear of being vulnerable. Vulnerability thus becomes an important theme that inspire stories such as “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le, “Hell-Heaven” by Jhumpa Lahiri, and “Inventory” by Carmen Maria Machado. A common theme of these literary works is the struggles of human beings to conceal their vulnerability and eternal sadness and loneliness of doing so.
The father-son relationship is often complicated in Asian cultures because it is uncommon to demonstrate affection between men. In “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le, the author gives an account of his childhood memories of his father and the interactions between them in his adulthood. The use of proverbs occurs more than once in the article. The proverbs are a symbol of his father’s character: as a Vietnamese War veteran and a first-generation immigrant in Australia, his father struggled to stay true to his Vietnamese roots.
However, for the author, the proverbs became one of the things he hated the most about his father, who was authoritative and stern on him: “He had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it” (Le, 2009). Apparently, the father-son relationship grew worse as the father acted too dominant and the son stopping listening. What is sad about the story is that the father has tons of tales to tell, but his son would not want to listen because he was too tough on him. Instead of telling these stories that need to be told, both the father and the son chose to conceal their vulnerable side and they grew more and more distant from each other.
The same has happened with the mother-daughter relationship in “Hell-Heaven” by Jhumpa Lahiri, as neither one of them wanted to reveal their vulnerable side to the other. Growing up, the author always pitied her mother as a pathetic Bengali woman who was culturally misplaced and could not find true love and free will. The only person she had true feelings for was Pranab Kaku, who “listened to these stories with interest, absorbing the vanishing details of her past” (Lahiri, 2005). However, her mother’s heart was broken when Pranab decided to marry an American girl.
“My mother stands beside him, one hand placed on top of his head in a gesture of blessing, the first and last time she was to touch him in her life” (Lahiri, 2005). As a daughter or a child in general, it is uncommon for a person to actively try and understand their parents. As the second-generation immigrant, the author desired to run away from her Bengali heritage and become completely American. However, her mother prevented her from doing so and she hated her for that. It was not until her own heart was broken that she began to understand and sympathize with her mother. This is why the author is able to depict the profound sadness of her mother in the arranged marriage.
Different from the parent-child stories, “Inventory” by Carmen Maria Machado describes an entirely different type of relationship: sexual experiences with strangers in the post-apocalyptic setting. Similar to many science-fictions, the author uses a lot of foreshadowing and hints instead of revealing the setting of the story from the beginning. The readers only realize what is going on half-way: “It’s weird to me how much I miss that floral, chemical smell of clean clothes. End of the world, and all I can think about is fabric softener” (Machado, 2017). The smell of the fabric softener, something so trivial and relatable in real life, becomes a symbol of the world before the virus broke out. It also represents the desire for an ordinary life, for skin to skin intimacy.
In the post- apocalyptic world, people desire the company of each other even more desperately, knowing the risk of catching the virus: “‘But the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact,” she said. “If people would just stay apart—’ She grew silent” (Machado, 2017). For survival, people need to be strong and independent. However, deep down, everyone still remains vulnerable and craves the love and care of other people. When most of their loved ones are gone, they turn to strangers for some intimacy and then separate quick in fear of the potential attachment and loss. While the story is set in the post-apocalyptic world, the insecurity mindset is not uncommon in the real world.
While everyone wants to become a strong and independent person, it is the vulnerable side that make us human. In the relationship between the first-generation and second-generation immigrants, the two generations only reached the mutual understanding after the children grow up and experience something similar to what had happened to their parents. If the parents were brave enough to communicate with their children, there would probably be less sorrow and misunderstand between them. In the post-apocalyptic world, and even in the real world, people crave intimacy while being afraid of getting hurt. This eternal struggling between vulnerability and independence is reflected in almost all relationship, and is a defining feature of being human.