Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Read Free Book Online Page A

was looking for clues on Eunice Park. My beloved was a shy girl by comparison with others of her generation, so her digital footprint wasn’t big. I had to go at her laterally, through her sister, Sally, and her father, Sam Park, M.D., the violent podiatrist. Working my lusty, overheated äppärät, I pointed an Indian satellite at southern California, her original home. I zoomed in on a series of crimson-tiled haciendas to the south of Los Angeles, rows and rows of three-thousand-square-foot rectangles, their only aerial features the tiny silver squiggles that denoted rooftop central air conditioning. These units all bowed to the semicircle of a turquoise pool guarded by the gray halos of two down-on-their-luck palm trees, the development’s only flora. Inside one of these homes Eunice Park learned to walk and talk, to seduce and sneer; here her arms grew strong and her mane thick; here her household Korean was supplanted by the veneer of California English; here she planned her impossible escape to East Coast Elderbird College, to the piazzas of Rome, to the horny middle-aged festas of Piazza Vittorio, and, I hoped, into my arms.
    I then looked up Dr. and Mrs. Park’s new home, a square Dutch Colonial with one gaping chimney, deposited at an awkward forty-five-degree angle into a bowl of Mid-Atlantic snow. The California house they left was worth 2.4 million dollars, unpegged to the yuan, and the second, much smaller New Jersey one at 1.41 million. I sensed the diminution of her father’s income and I wanted to learn more.
    My retro äppärät churned slowly with data, which told me that the father’s business was failing. A chart appeared, giving the income for the last eighteen months; the yuan amounts were in steady decline since they had mistakenly left California for New Jersey—July’s income after expenses was eight thousand yuan, about half of my own, and I did not have a family of four to support.
    The mother did not have any data, she belonged solely to the home, but Sally, as the youngest of the Parks, was awash in it. From her profile I learned that she was a heavier girl than Eunice, the weight plunged into her round cheeks and the slow curvature of her arms and breasts. Still, her LDL cholesterol was way beneath the norm, while the HDL surged ahead to form an unheard-of ratio. Even with her weight, she could live to be 120 if she maintained her present diet and did her morning stretches. After checking her health, I examined her purchases and felt Eunice’s as well. The Park sisters favored extra-small shirts in strict business patterns, austere gray sweaters distinguished only by their provenance and price, pearly earrings, one-hundred-dollar children’s socks (their feet were that small), panties shaped like gift bows, bars of Swiss chocolate at random delis, footwear, footwear, footwear. I watched their AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup account rise and fall like the chest of a living, breathing animal. I noticed the links to something called AssLuxury and several L.A. and New York boutiques on one side, and to their parents’ AlliedWaste account on the other, and I saw that their precious immigrant nest egg was declining steadily and ominously. I beheld the numerical totality of the Park family and I wanted to save them from themselves, from the idiotic consumer culture that was bleeding them softly. I wanted to give them counsel and to prove to them that—as the son of immigrants myself—I could be trusted.
    Next, I did the social sites. The photos flashed before me. Mostly they were of Sally and her friends. Asian kids getting furtively drunk off Mexican beer, attractive boys and girls in decent cotton sweatshirts flashing V-signs at the äppärät lens in front of doily-covered pianos and gilt-edged pastoral paintings of Jesus in blissed-out freefall. Boys roughhousing on their parents’ wide bed, denim jeans upon denim jeans upon denim jeans. Girls huddled together, all eyes on a busy äppärät,