Honorable-mention winners in the Stanford Fiction Contest are “Chinatown Stories” by Irene Noguchi, '02, and “Yoga for Beginners” by Sarah McCraw Crow, MA '88.
Noguchi's “Chinatown Stories” was very loosely based on the life of her grandfather, who worked as a chef most of his life. “While I never saw him in the kitchens, I always romanticized this vision of him smoking in some humid alley with the steam and clanging of pots rising from the door behind him.” Noguchi's career has been undergoing reconstruction recently: a University of Virginia Law School graduate, she recently left a corporate job to pursue her first love, public-radio journalism, in the Pacific Northwest.
“This touching story,” contest judges Noel and Puchner noted, “manages to evoke an entire lifetime of hopes and disappointments in 6½ pages. The language is somehow both plainspoken and poetic. What begins as a simple monologue becomes a plaintive story about the painful sacrifices of age and immigration.”
Crow lives with her husband and three school-age children in Canterbury, N.H. A magazine journalist, she has been writing fiction for the past year or so.
The judges liked her “unique” and “tightly focused” story about two very different young mothers in 1972 and the “subtle, meaningful shift” away from distrust that occurs “as Prue slowly begins to recognize the smallness of her world, and worldview.”
Crow recalls, “When I was 4 or 5, I had a friend whose grandfather practiced yoga. This was 1970 or 1971, when yoga was fairly unfamiliar—at least to families like mine. I remember hearing that my friend's grandfather had no wrinkles because he did headstands every day. This memory doesn't have much to do with this story, but that's where it came from.”
