Dear Reader,
When I was in college, I studied abroad a semester in Finland. I packed two very large bags, one a soft-sided carry-on that converted to a backpack and the other a very large duffel bag. (They were brand new, chosen by me, and I had firmly rejected anything with wheels. I’d rather carry it, I said.) And my mother took me to the airport to send me off. She waited at the gate with me, and hugged me, and we waved to each other until I disappeared down the jetway. This was when you didn’t need a boarding pass to go through airport security, and anyone could meet anyone at the airport.
In fact, this was late August of 2001.
I lugged my bags from the Helsinki airport to the train station, and took the overnight train to Joensuu, a university town in the Karelian region on the eastern side of Finland. A Finnish student met me at the train station, showed me around, gave me some advice on where to shop and what resources were available for international students. I started classes a few days later.
On September 11, 2001, I had just finished classes for the day, and I went to check my email on a shared computer in the hallway. When I logged out of my email, I was taken to the provider’s landing page, full of top tips to lose weight and celebrity gossip and sports trivia — and right in the middle of the page, a brand-new article with a picture of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. It had just happened. I remember a sort of confused daze — what is this? is this real? — and then another student said the news was on in the lobby down the hall. And I went and stood with two dozen other people, watching a Finnish news anchor in a blue and green plaid sportcoat, and it began to sink in, began to be real. I had been in Finland for less than two weeks.
I have been thinking of the Ukrainian students who are studying abroad right now. It is not the same thing, I know. I cannot really imagine what it’s like to know a full-blown war is going on at home. But I do keep imagining, hoping, that their fellow students are being very kind to them, unflinching and supportive and simply kind. As my fellow students once were. That is what I remember most vividly, even more than the grief and the frightening uncertainty — as the fall wore on, there were bright birch leaves like gold coins, and sitting around together with coffee or cider and maybe a cake someone made, and such kindness.
My friends were German, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Portuguese. One good friend was Russian-Lithuanian, her family a living history of Russianization in the Baltic States. I took classes on Baltic history and Russian history while I was there, learned about the ways that Finland sought to maintain its independence balanced between empires. I learned a little Finnish, not very much, but I could at least say simple things like “How much?” and “Thank you” without Finns wincing.
I lived in a shared apartment, about a mile and a half from the university. There was a bus, or you could walk or bike along a trail through the woods. I got a bike from a local guy who regularly fixed up old bikes and sold them to students. It was red, and a little too tall for me, and very heavy; and I was sort of glad to have the excuse of winter to stop riding it. Mostly I walked everywhere, miles and miles of walking.
At the end of my semester in Finland, a friend and I took a trip to Spain. We had booked plane tickets and a first night in a hostel, and everything else was by the seat of our pants, but it all worked out. At the end of our trip, my friend would be going back to Joensuu, while I was headed for a few days to the UK and then home to the US. I had shipped a few boxes home, but I had my trusty luggage.
That huge wheel-less duffel bag, it turned out, was a deeply terrible choice. It was very full and enormously heavy, and I was constantly shifting it out of other people’s way or trying (not very effectively) to minimize its footprint. And I carried it for miles. Not the entire trip, fortunately — I was able to store it with a hostel where we stayed early early on in Spain. But then I had to deal with it when I flew on to London and then took a train to Shrewsbury, then was able to leave it with a friend’s family while we made a trip to visit another friend in Aberystwyth. (These were friends I’d made at my home university in the US, when they were international students.)
This morning, I watched a video, about four minutes long, of residents being evacuated from Irpin, Ukraine. There were parents with children, and elders. Some people had dogs; one had a cat in a carrier. Some were carrying bags, and a few had rolling suitcases. No one had a giant absurd duffle that carefully contained everything they might need for weeks and months ahead; they must have been asked to bring only necessities. Many women had purses, which looks like an odd sort of luxury to be carrying in an evacuation from a war zone; but most of us who carry a purse can tell you that it’s pretty much a miniature bug-out bag. If I grabbed nothing on the way out the door but my purse, I would still at least have some basic hygiene and first aid supplies, a nail clipper and a multi tool, my ID and insurance cards and credit cards, a couple masks, a couple pens, sunglasses, a few reusable cloth grocery bags, a charging cable and a power bank. And a purse is a familiar weight that’s generally comfortable to carry for extended periods of time. For miles, if you need to.
I know people in the US whose families arrived as refugees. I have had a few conversations where people touched on that experience, or shared some little piece of their story. Yet I now I’m a little ashamed to admit that I never really properly thought about what it must have meant to go through that. Because they were now safe? Because that experience was past? I wonder if there is any such thing as the past.
I know someone who is the parent of a trans child in Texas, where the governor recently pressed state agencies to investigate parents of trans children for abuse. Her family was already planning to move to another state, in part for better access to gender-affirming health care and in part to escape yet another hurricane season. With Hurricane Harvey and the slow pace of rebuilding, then the last two years of pandemic, her kids haven’t been in a normal school classroom since 2017. While they are waiting to finalize the move, they had to have a family conversation about what to do if Child Protective Services knocks on the door. She doesn’t think it will happen, but just in case she is ready to grab a bag and her child and make a run for it. She appreciates the privilege of flight being a plausible option, the privilege of being able to afford to move, the privilege of being able to sit on a doctor’s waiting list for months and months. She says to me, “I know it’s not the same, but it kind of feels like we’re either climate refugees or political refugees.” She laughs as she says this, in a lost sort of way. I tell her that she has my support, if there is anything at all I can do. She says, “If you know any pediatric endocrinologists, that would be helpful.”
I know that I’m rambling. One more: Last September, straight-line winds blew through my town and knocked down dozens of huge old trees. It blocked roads and took down power lines, but it was the devastation of all those broken and shattered trees that broke my heart. It is not at all the same. This was a freak act of nature. And amazingly, no one was hurt. It was devastating, and it could have been so much worse.
T.S. Eliot wrote, in Little Gidding,
We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.
Let’s return to that trip to Spain twenty years ago: the second week, we found our way to a casa rural on a terraced hillside in a little village, overlooking orange groves and well-loved houses and the occasional clothesline full of flapping laundry, all lit up by the crisp December sunshine. And I remember looking out at it all and thinking, how is it that people fight and hate, when this exists in the world? As if greed and selfishness should burn away in the sunshine, or melt in the rain. In fact I still believe it, in the teeth of all that continues to happen: that there is terrible stupidity and waste perpetrated by the greedy and selfish, which at heart is a failure to open one’s eyes and see the world for what it is, as it actually is, as plainly before us as it ever was.
The sun is out today. The sky is very blue.
To choose to see beauty and kindness is to fight for the fate of the world.
And with that, I think I will segue to the book I have to share with you: A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall. There are a lot of very serious themes in this book, and yet every heavy thing is held so kindly, with such compassion and care, that it is not a heavy story. Indeed, it is delightful, full of wit and humor. It evokes beauty at every turn: in the personal empowerment expressed in the detail of an embroidered glove or a pretty pair of shoes; in the strength and courage that it takes to be a better person than you were; in the ways that simple expressions of care can create breathtaking intimacy.
This is a historical romance, featuring a trans heroine, set in England in 1818. We learn that before the book opens, its main characters were close friends who met at school, grew up together, then fought together against Napoleon. Both were grievously injured at Waterloo, and one presumed dead. For the latter, this turns out to be an opportunity for a new life, and Viola Carroll recovers from her injuries and discreetly returns to her family under her new name, taking on the role of paid lady’s companion and leaving her old identity dead on the battlefield. She assumes her friend, the Duke of Gracewood, will mourn his lost friend and move on, but two years later, Gracewood is mired in grief and drink and laudanum. This is where the book begins.
End to end, this was an impeccable and exquisitely executed historical romance. Not only did I adore this book, but it made me better love every book I’d read before which gave me the context to appreciate this one. If you are not a reader of historical romance, the key to the genre (apart from the romance) is that it takes characters whose desires and motivations are familiar and recognizable to a contemporary audience, then places those characters in a reasonable facsimile of a historical setting. And that setting frequently serves to allow the characters to swan around in pretty clothing and cast heated looks across candlelit libraries and so forth, but it also permits authors to do some interesting things with social dynamics to explore some unseen or forgotten bit of history, or to illustrate parallels to today’s world, or both. With this book, Hall fulfills that promise to the fullest.
Here are just a few tropes of the genre which were employed beautifully in this story:
* A lady with a secret, who must choose to be true to herself;
* A man grappling with an unloving upbringing, learning how to give and receive love — as a friend, as a brother, and as a lover;
* Characters returned from war, having seen things and done things they now must live with;
* The highly gendered expectations of what is appropriate or accessible for ladies and for gentlemen, and creative ways of recasting or defying those expectations;
* Action taking place in settings including a cold and severe ducal estate, and an airy and modern London townhouse, and a turn about Vauxhall Gardens;
* The threat of compromised virtue and a midnight chase to avert disaster;
* Definitely some swanning around in pretty clothing, to excellent effect;
* And the triumph of love, in all the ways.
I also loved it that there was no sense of imminent threat at every turn that Viola might be outed, and that she was known to and accepted by the people most important to her. In the reading group guide appended to the book, Hall notes that it was one of his goals “to write a historical romance with a transgender heroine in which the fact that the heroine is transgender is not the main source of conflict or narrative tension.” I thought this was brilliantly done, not heavy-handed or artificial, not disregarding the challenges faced by Viola but not playing them up for dramatic effect, and building tension and story in other dynamics between the characters and in the challenges they face.
A Lady for a Duke releases May 24, 2022 and is currently available for pre-order. It is really good.
With love,
Beas
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