“Are we inside?” June murmured, her eyes shiny pieces of coal. “Are we here?”
He said yes.
“It must be beautiful. Is it beautiful?”
It is beautiful, he whispered, not hearing his own voice. This is our place.
NOT YET.
She was running for the train. The very last car. It was moving away from her, it seemed, at an insurmountable speed. Voices were calling for her to run. Run. Not to give up. She had no shoes on her feet-when had they fallen off?-and the ground beside the tracks was gravelly and sharp. Laced with burrs and prickly weeds. But she had no mind for the pain that had taken her over now. Her legs were working, straining, madly pumping beneath her like pistons, pushing her to make this brief sprint she had been running the whole of her life. She could not look back. She loved them all but she knew if she looked back she was done. She would come to a stop. And she did not want to stop, not just yet. Not now. To crave anything, alas, is to crave time. She was simply hungry for more. The wheels of the last car squealed and flashed; it was accelerating, about to pull away. In defiance she leaned forward and cried out, suspending her breath, and reached for the dark edge of the door. The world fell away. Someone had pulled her up. Borne her in. She was off her feet, alive.
Acknowledgements
THE AUTHOR GRATEFULLY acknowledges the support of several institutions during the writing of this book: the Punahou School in Honolulu; the American Academy in Rome; and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
Chang-Rae Lee
Chang-Rae Lee (born July 29, 1965) is a first-generation Korean American novelist.
Lee was born in Korea in 1965. He emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old. Raised in Westchester, New York, Lee attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in English and from the University of Oregon with a MFA in writing. He worked as a Wall Street financial analyst for a year before turning to writing full time. Lee teaches writing at Princeton University, where he has served as the director of Princeton 's Program in Creative Writing.
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The Surrendered Page 47