I recently read a new genre for the first time: sci-fi. Specifically, Becky Chambers’s sci-fi novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
I had no reason for avoiding sci-fi novels. But by the same token, I’d also never been drawn to them. I had little interest (or talent) in science courses in school: I took the required physics, biology, and chemistry classes, and even went one step further, taking a biochemistry class in my junior year of high school. But I never felt much love or passion for them.
In fact, the biochemistry class caught me off guard as my first encounter with a subject that didn’t come naturally to me. I ended up hating the course — no matter how the material was explained to me, I just couldn’t find a way to organize it in my mind. I got a good grade in the class, but only with a great deal of frustration and rote memorization. When given the chance in college to ignore one academic subject in my distribution requirements, I thought of that biochem class with the same distaste you feel for a meal that gave you food poisoning and left all science courses behind.
So I was, obviously, never the STEM whiz in high school.
But my best friend Jamie was.
She was as attracted to the sciences as I was to the humanities. She competed on the math team (the only team at our college prep school, by the way, that cut people off its roster) while I entered poetry recitation contests. She helped me understand calculus, and I helped her strengthen her essays. We developed a running joke that if you disassembled us and stitched our parts together, you’d end up with a Frankenstein-style super-student gifted across all disciplines.
On more than one occasion, Jamie and I have tried to verbally retrace the steps of our early friendship — an endeavor about as difficult as trying to map the precise boundary between beach and sea.
We start with the cross country team, which we joined at the beginning of ninth grade. But sophomore year is where we remember our friendship gaining momentum. We both recall one particularly weird chat between the two of us on a class trip in San Francisco, where we took turns giving fake suggestions for conversation topics:
ME: Do you want to talk about the symbolism of the color white in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and how instead of signifying purity, she actually uses it to talk about death?
JAMIE: Nah, but do you want to talk about the Intermediate Value Theorem? Like how a line passing through two values also, by necessity, has to pass through every value in between those two points?
ME: No, thanks. Maybe we could talk about the metaphorical resonance of the green light Gatsby stares at across the bay, and what it says about both the futility and necessity of human hopes and dreams?
And so on.
I love this memory both because it’s precisely the kind of energetic, earnest pretentiousness you only see in teenagers of a certain type, and also because whenever Jamie and I talk about the beginnings of our friendship, we always mark it as an important milestone. Despite the fuzziness of other details, we know that by this time we were already out in deep waters.
And I think it also speaks to another facet of our friendship: our mutual delight in our differences. We enjoyed this confluence of similarities and variances. For the rest of high school, we remained incredibly close friends, almost always together — to the degree that sometimes, despite our very different appearances (Jamie’s both taller and has much darker, straighter hair than me), a classmate would call one of us by the other’s name. I secretly loved this. It thrilled me to have a friend so close, our compatibility received accidental confirmation from others, too.
We even had similar ambitions for college. None of our applications overlapped institutions (just a lucky accident — unless we subconsciously avoided competition that could’ve turn toxic for our friendship), but we were both drawn to prestigious, competitive colleges and universities far away from Oregon. After we graduated, I briefly lived with her and her family for two weeks while my parents settled our family’s move from Medford to a Chicago suburb. And then we said goodbye: me bound for Middlebury in the fall, her for Brown.
Where, gradually, distance warped our friendship in the way it does. We still texted and called regularly, and visited each other in Vermont and Rhode Island, but the ratio of shared to unshared experiences grew.
And now I live in Japan, where I spend much of my time around students and colleagues who share little of my background, language, or culture.
It was Jamie, of course, who recommended to me The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I found more of my own life reflected in its pages than I’d anticipated. About a third of the way into the novel — after we’ve met the crew of the Wayfarer, after we’ve had glimpses of the myriad alien species populating its universe — Becky Chambers makes us privy to a conversation between Sissix the Aandrisk and Dr. Chef the Grum, two of the ship’s non-Human crew members.
Sissix craned her neck up to make sure the door was fully closed. “Do you ever get tired of Humans?”
“On occasion. I think that’s normal for anyone living with people other than their own. I’m sure they get tired of us, too.”
“I’m definitely tired of them today,” Sissix said, laying her head back. “I’m tired of their fleshy faces. I’m tired of their smooth fingertips. I’m tired of how they pronounce their Rs. I’m tired of their inability to smell anything.”
And the complaints go on. What is, of course, striking — and entertaining and charming — in this scene between two aliens venting about Humans is how unexpected these complaints are to us as readers. How invisible these faults are to our own eyes — or nose, in the case of humans’ evident “inability to smell.” And that’s precisely the rub of cross-cultural interaction: what is so natural to you produces friction to others, often without your awareness.
The scene continues:
Dr. Chef gave a rumbling chuckle. “It seems your diagnosis is more complicated than just a premature molt.”
“How so?”
He smiled. “You’re homesick.”
She sighed again. “Yeah.”
This scene is so familiar to me. Living in Japan, I’ve participated in conversations just like this with friends: in our homes, our cars, over group chat, on Zoom. There’s a certain delicacy that has to be seen to — checking to make sure the door is closed before you begin — but the need to regularly vent like this is real and undeniable. So, too, is the knowledge that all these small annoyances wouldn’t be so aggravating if you weren’t also under the stress and pressure of inhabiting a space non-native to you. Social forces like these and others are just as much the focus of this sci-fi novel as the interstellar physics involved in the construction of galactic byways.
Later in the novel, the ship makes a stop at Sissix’s home planet, where she has the opportunity to reconnect with family and old friends. The visit is restorative, but also temporarily leaves her with an even more acute sense of homesickness. As she grapples with it, she thinks:
Still, perhaps it was better that way. If she stopped caring about her hatch family, being away wouldn’t hurt, but cutting those ties was unimaginable. Besides, without leaving, she never would’ve met all the friends she’d made elsewhere. Perhaps the ache of homesickness was a fair price to pay for having so many good people in her life.
It strikes me now that Jamie and I are coming up on ten years of knowing each other. Our friendship is unique in my life. All my other friendships from high school have faded away, and all my other close friends appeared either in college or here in Japan.
Which is why I think there’s a comfort in our friendship. A flexibility that allows for this coming and going. After getting off the phone with her a few days ago, I reflected on the remarkable sense of ease we still have with each other despite the years of distance and the occasional lapses in communication. In a friendship, you have the latitude to quietly wander and then return without penalty. You’re allowed to come and go without fear of breaking contract, because the bond that keeps you together — shared experience and affection — isn’t much affected by the lapse. I’ve changed a lot since high school, and yet when I spend time with Jamie, I feel more of a kinship with that earlier self than I do anywhere else. Our friendship holds space for it. And to me, our friendship is all the more valuable for its resiliency to the distance.
I hope you enjoyed spending this time with me. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the choice for my fourth reading category: a recommendation.
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This post was delayed due to my temporary lack of a computer. So to get back on schedule, you’ll be hearing from me again in one week with a post on Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson for my fifth reading category: a reread.
Hope you are & stay well.
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3