but she believes that the “American had taken her face.” The rest of the story details the other things that are taken from her as a result of American interference in Southeast Asia. Soon after her father’s imprisonment and death, she sees a monk set himself on fire and die, and when she moves to her uncle’s house, he rapes her during the Tet offensive. After the Communists take her uncle away, she is on the streets. At age twenty, she is “befriended” by Sergeant Plunkett, who gives her food for sex and gets her pregnant. Dr. Yin, who performs the abortion, also implants opium in her breasts; and Plunkett sends her to America, where he promises to meet her. When Plunkett does not appear, she decides to have the implants removed. She is surprised to find out that the surgeon who is to do the surgery is Dr. Yin, who has been “expecting” her. When Tan loses her identity through two operations designed to “improve her” and is sexually exploited, she becomes both the real and the symbolic victim of Western exploitation.

“I-80 Nebraska, m. 490-m. 205”

On a section of Interstate 80 a rebel trucker named Ryder P. Moses leads his pursuers, fellow truckers obsessed with finding him, on a chase that ends with his deliberately driving his tractor-trailer into the concrete support of an overpass. Moses, whose name ironically suggests he is a leader of the people, becomes a phantom driver, a legend on westbound 80, which Sayles describes as “an insomniac world of lights passing lights to the music of the Citizens Band.” While the narrator occasionally comments on the action, the narrative is primarily a series of Citizens Band conversations by truckers and Moses, who is “breaking every trucker commandment.” The gossip about him is as erroneous and widespread as are the suppositions about the identity of the Great Gatsby. Moses, who identifies himself as the Paul Bunyan of Interstate 80, scares and thrills the other truckers with monologue induced by drugs and devoted to condemning American culture. Just before he crashes, Moses says, “Going west. Good night and happy motoring,” a bitter echo of a 1960’s ad for Esso gasoline and an ironic farewell to a world gone bad.

The Anarchists’ Convention

The six stories that comprise the second part of Sayles’s collection of short stories are linked by Brian McNeil, a high school basketball player who drops out of school and hitchhikes across the United States. The stories, which may have been intended as episodes in a picaresque novel, take Brian from high school sexual initiation (“Bad Dogs”) and basketball success (“Hoop”) to California, where he sees his future (“Golden State”). Brian’s story, which closely resembles Sayles’s early life, includes a short farewell to his mother (“Buffalo”) before he leaves. In “Fission” Brian encounters an obese drug-dealing woman whose family farm has been lost to agribusiness and a mad recluse whose fear of missiles has led him to build an underground bomb shelter for his promiscuous daughter and himself. Farther west in Wyoming, Brian meets Cody Sprague, whose futile entrepreneurial efforts cast some doubt on the American Dream, and a group of Native Americans, whose plight reflects their treatment by white America (“Breed”). Finally in “Golden State,” Sayles ironically uses the familiar term for California to suggest that what Brian finds on the Pacific beach is not golden at all. When Brian, whose alcoholic father had praised the Pacific, gets to the city by the sea, he sees coins in a pool. Almost destitute, he dives into the pool only to discover that the pool is too deep and the illusory money is beyond his reach. The theme of illusion resurfaces when he meets two alcoholics at the beach: Cervantes (an allusion to Don Quixote’s failed idealistic quester) and Daniel Boone (an allusion to the idealistic pioneer whose quest ended at the Alamo). When Brian leaves them and returns to the pool, he finds Stuffy, another alcoholic attracted to illusory money, dead by drowning. In a sense, Brian sees himself in the pool.