Quitting is for Cowards

A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Chang  is a powerful book about autonomy, obligation, and love in relationships, family, and between sexes, as told through disparate stories of interconnected lives.  

You might say life is a quitter’s paradise. Or rather the difficulties and challenges in life lend themselves to frustrations that could lead one to give up or quit. A Quitter’s Paradise is as much a story about connection building, as it is about the lack of connections, and the stories we tell ourselves to come to terms with our lives’ deficiencies. The book follows immigrants from Taiwan who marry and their adult children’s relationships.

Rita, who has a largely adversarial relationship with both her daughters, admonishes Eleanor: “You think you are escaping me? By getting married? Let me tell you the truth. A woman never escape.” In this book there are numerous stories about relationships covered, some healthy, and some predatory. Eleanor later seems to share her mother’s pessimism,“Once we’d announced the idea to Ellis’s parents, I understood my mistake immediately. Marriage would be the end of me. It was the end of every woman.” Years later, Eleanor reflects on both her personal and professional life, how she “…did not really rule herself or any realm of her life. She inhabited a world that belonged always to someone else.”  

Rita later reveals her own philosophy about life to Eleanor, “Life isn’t about what we want. It’s about our destiny.” She later rescues her husband’s niece Jiajia, from the family factory where she’d hidden for several days, fearing immigration officers were raiding it. She wonders how Jiajia interacted with her uncle and father, “Perhaps Jiajia had only been muted around Jing. Or even around her own father. So many men did not see their own domineering influence on others, she thought.”

They say life is complicated, but perhaps we complicate life by not understanding those around us, by acting on impulse and making choices we haven’t thought through. Eleanor ultimately acknowledges, “There are only two directions: toward love or away from it…To love each other is easy. It’s simply to forgive, to accept without qualm. To understand each other is something else entirely.”