‘They Told Us Not To Say This’ by Jenn Alandy Trahan

They Told Us Not To Say This by Jenn Alandy Trahan, 2018

The magic trick:

Making the specific universal with an inclusive narrative voice

I love a good 90s nostalgia story. Especially if it quotes SWV, which this story does.

And actually the SWV thing is important here. It’s one of the many, many details that make up the narrative. And these details are very, very specific to a specific kind of high school experience. Filipino-American Vallejo, California late 90s.

By nature, that isn’t going to automatically connect to a large audience. But the story doesn’t cater to a cliched mainstream crowd. It sticks to its details, but instead shares them with a narrative voice that assumes familiarity. Jump in, this is your story too, the narrator seems to say.

And that’s quite a trick on Trahan’s part.

The selection:

Our parents said no boyfriends until we were thirty. They didn’t talk to our brothers like this because they wanted to bend down and kiss all their titis every day. Sons got brand-new Honda Preludes on their sixteenth birthdays. Our moms took wannabe directors to Circuit City and bought camcorders that ended up in corners collecting dust. Wannabe rock stars got Fender Stratocasters and we felt like those street performers in the city who stand on overturned milk crates and hope for quarters in an open guitar case. Still, we sang a cappella by our lockers on breaks. We wanted to be En Vogue, Xscape, TLC, SWV. Anytime Brent Zalesky walked by we got so weak in the knees we could hardly speak, you know? We wondered if we’d still know him when we turned eighteen, all of us desperate for him in our cotillions. Rosyl Manalo’s mom said throwing a cotillion would be a waste of money, but she also bought a big-ass Louis Vuitton hobo and filed a police report like it was a missing person when it got stolen from her shopping cart at the Canned Food Grocery Outlet. I had never seen her cry so hard before Rosyl told us, not even when she thought someone kidnapped me at Service Merchandise.

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