A Funny Thing Called Love

By Nancy Chan

In March 1948 in a small town on the outskirts of the least sophisticated borough of New York City a young girl is born into a society that will in 10 short years explode, marking the start of the cultural revolution that swept across America upending the old structures in society and one’s inner stability. Hiding in plain sight was the sexual revolution.

Whose responsibility was it to inform this girl about the changes in society or was it too big for parents, teachers and ministers to wrestle with it?

In the world in which she grows up her parents are the actors and she is only a member of the audience, to be seen and not heard, encouraged not to speak. Yet, she experiences the silent influence of patriarchy, gender discrimination and class divisions as a vise and decides to rebel by surreptitiously exploring the one avenue that comes naturally, her burgeoning sexuality and becomes a victim of her own folly.

The end of her spiritual unconsciousness comes when she leaves the tribe and commits to the talking cure, a brand of therapy made famous by Sigmund Freud.

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” -- Zen Proverb

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663243171

Nancy Chan

Nancy Chan has a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University and has worked for The New York Times Company and other Fortune 500 companies in corporate communications.

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Copyright © 2022 Nancy Chan.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4318-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4317-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915507

iUniverse rev. date: 10/26/2022

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In memory of Edward Louis Greene

W hen World War II ended in 1945, there was a sense of euphoria and liberation in America, but it was short-lived when the White House, with the help from the media, launched the cold war against Communism. The year I was born was 1948, when American artists and writers were beginning to realize that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only ended the war but also ushered in the dark side of the postwar era. The horrors of the German concentration camps were revealed. The Iron Curtain descended on Europe, and in 1950, a new war began on the Korean peninsula.

On the domestic front, J. Edgar Hoover conjoined the Red Scare with his hateful pursuit of homosexuals to launch the Lavender Scare and used Senator Joe McCarthy to do his dirty work by harassing vulnerable writers and artists, suppressing innovation and radicalism. Conformity and commercialization were the result.

Instead of deploying costly standing armies, in 1953, President Eisenhower issued the New Look doctrine, advocating use of covert activity and the manufacture of nuclear arms to deter enemies, and protect regions vital to our national security interests. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union followed suit, building bigger and more powerful bombs, threatening massive retaliation if its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe were compromised.

I recall the difficulty I had getting Mother’s attention when news of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 seeped into our home. I tried to have a conversation with her about it, but she was in a hurry assembling care packages in the kitchen and thinking about the safety of our relatives. Where is Hungary? I wanted to know. She was exasperated, and I felt frustrated. My questioning was getting us nowhere.

I lived in New York City, the epicenter of culture and possibility, but the Staten Island town where I grew up had its heyday during the latter part of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, when it was a vibrant company town of close to a thousand people at its peak, with mostly German, Austrian, and Hungarian immigrants. In 1836, Balthasar Kreischer, the nineteenth-century brick baron, came to this country from Bavaria, Germany, and built a successful business manufacturing bricks from the rich clay deposits found in Charleston, formerly known as Kreischerville. The clay was plentiful and close enough to the surface to be easily exploited.

The street I lived on ended at the shoreline of a heavily used tidal strait separating New York and New Jersey; it had been home to the petroleum and chemical industries. Six million gallons of raw sewage flowed into it every day. Following the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, the Standard Oil Company of New York (SOCONY) was founded, and in 1935 Port Socony, a mammoth oil port, was created on 257 acres in southwestern Staten Island. It handled 250 million gallons of petroleum products annually and transshipped oil from oceangoing tankers and river barges for distribution throughout New York and New England. We lived several blocks away from