“Taste” by Liam Callanan

A story by faculty member Liam Callanan appears at The Spectacle:

Alex was her problem, two ways. One, her problem to supervise in Singapore, and two, her problem in that she’d asked for him, or rather, someone like him, to address the stumblings of previous visits. The authors the State Department had sent before had been old. They were hard to hear and hard to please and did not like visiting schoolchildren. Grace had asked her boss to ask Washington for people more youthful, and State had sent a series of four very young authors. But they almost all had Asian names. Two were Korean American and one was Japanese American. Only the fourth was white, and he was tattooed. The expatriates who attended the first three readings hadn’t seemed to mind, but the Singaporeans felt insulted, she knew. She could see their indignation without even having to read the DID YOU ENJOY THIS ‘TRIP’ TO THE UNITED STATES? comment cards that she collected after each event. Who are Americans to think that Singapore needs to discover Asian authors, is what the Singaporeans thought. They had perfectly fine Asian authors here, rather than these pretenders who couldn’t even speak anything but broad, flat American English.

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