About People from Bloomington,
Written by Kat at Thornfield Hall Redux, and was originally published in Personal Blog,
May 11, 2022

I highly recommend the Indonesian writer Budi Darma's People from Bloomington, a collection of short stories newly translated by Tiffany Tsao. Like Darma, I attended graduate school in Bloomington, a beautiful, idyllic college town in Indiana, so I was curious about this book. Although as a midwesterner I "assimilated" effortlessly, and loved the culture so much I would never have left had there had been any jobs, Darma, a student from Java, was isolated and lonely. I am horrified by the descriptions of xenophobia in some of the stories: even when Americans are friendly, there is a distance between cultures.
Read the full article here.