Two of the main readings this week—The case of Jane Doe Ponytail and Aleppo After the Fall—tried to tell a story about a place as much as about people. In Dan Berry and Jeffery Singer’s piece, of course, the focus is on Song Yang—we follow her life story from her upbringing in China to her entrance into the massage industry and to her death on 40th Street. But what separates this story from, say, the one we read about Skalnik last week, is how much Berry and Singer embed Song Yang into her surroundings. Indeed, Berry claims that the “reason for being” of the piece was in the 12th graf of the piece—which conveyed “All this craziness is occurring in one little place and this city is so large and so complicated, and so distracted by everything else, that it doesn’t even see this.” The rest of the piece is a balance between this craziness and Song Yang’s story, requiring the writers to not crush her under the narrative weight of the place itself.
The piece is often at its best when it zooms out to describe 40th street. The “Night comes to 40th Road” section toward its end is almost novelistic in the saturated description of the street and the women along it. These descriptions bring us into the world that Song Yang inhabited, tell us something about her story in a way that quotes or narrative progression cannot. Something about the constant activity of the city escapes the traditional storytelling format: it is a character that moves somewhat independently of Song Yang’s life, that cannot be contained or controlled by individual human agency alone. Therefore, we leave the piece knowing that although Song Yang is gone, like everything in New York City, the street remains ever-changing as it has always been. That being said, the piece’s chief triumph is arguably making the reader feel Song Yang’s absence during its final scenes. Life goes on; the street takes on new forms. But, we will remember, it does so without Song Yang in the picture. And that matters.
Finally, one of the most innovative elements of the piece that I’d like to discuss more in class is the relegation of attributions to the note at the end of the piece. From a narrative perspective, this is an effective move, as it cuts through all the intra-piece attribution that slows down storytelling progression and mutes affective impact. But from a historical or investigative perspective, it can be a little frustrating, as we are not sure which pieces of information came from which source. It makes subsequent corroboration or elaboration difficult.
Meanwhile, Worth’s main character is a city in more explicit terms. That, I think, may be the reason why I, along with others in the class, grated at the piece at times. The introductory scene is astounding and expertly conveyed, but Worth swiftly moves the reader onto different topics. We are in effect gaining a composite view of the city, stitched together from several vantage points across varying periods of time, to see what it takes for a city to become lost. What we lose in the specificity of one person’s experience we gain in the comprehensiveness of multiple vignettes. Worth’s structure helped at times to convey this composite methodology, but I do think he could have clued the reader in on that method a little sooner—the end of the lede section, for example, lacks a nut graf that could orient the reader to the kind of piece to follow. Where this does create problems is within sections. For example, one section that began with a man who learned his military friends had all been killed then quickly zooms out to reflect on the lack of young men in the street and Assad’s political strategy, before moving to the issue of looting. The bridge between subject and story was slightly abrupt for my liking. Perhaps the unifier was simply: “soldiers’ actions in war,” but I would have liked a stronger orientation to that message. Perhaps the fragmented components of his piece were also intentional in some ways. Aleppo has shattered and Worth seems to be picking up the broken pieces, trying to put them into some shape again. Maybe he doesn’t entirely succeed in creating a cohesive whole, but maybe that’s not the point, because the whole doesn’t exist anymore.
