Among the many things I liked about Mendell Station by J.B. Hwang is its realistic portrayal of working-class life. Delivering mail is a working-class occupation; it isn’t glamorous, it’s repetitive and physically demanding. Few Stanford graduates would seek this work out, though Miriam does after the death of her friend, Esther, and a crisis of faith that makes continuing to teach Scripture at a private Christian school unbearable. In her early thirties, her life at loose ends, Miriam voluntarily becomes a cog in a system that runs on endless rules, demanding supervisors, crushing volumes, chaotic staffing, and ancient equipment.
Set during the COVID pandemic in San Francisco, Miriam and her mostly immigrant co-workers are declared “essential” and do their work while most of the population shelters in place or works remotely. Every worker at Mendell Station knows which routes are plum and which are brutally long and unforgiving, with steep hills, stairs to every front door, and mail slots low to the ground. Some neighborhoods receive more packages than others. Newbies like Miriam must pay their dues and bear the hard routes; they’re also the first to be farmed out to other stations, like the hellish Townsend station. Climbing, stooping, and bending hundreds of times each day takes a toll. What Miriam discovers, along with sore feet and aching muscles, is camaraderie with her co-workers, all of whom understand the effort it takes to grind through a shift only to return the next day to do it all over again. Carriers help one another, often without being asked; it’s them against the absurd rules, barking bosses, and the ceaseless tide of mail and packages.
Mendell Station is spare, less than two hundred pages, but in no way does it feel restricted or abbreviated. Esther and Miriam’s friendship is its heart. They met as teenagers. Their Korean families are quite different, Esther’s more outwardly prosperous — she’s raised in a two-story house, Miriam in an apartment a few blocks away — but neither household is serene. Esther’s parents fight so raucously that the police are often summoned, while Miriam’s mother is volatile when she’s not narcoleptic. Miriam’s father is disabled, and the family survives on public assistance and help from their church community. No stereotypical Asian tiger mothers here, pushing their daughters to be perfect and driven.
“Esther never flinched at anything I said about my dad’s illness or my mother’s strictness, nor did I when she told me about her dad’s drinking or her brothers’ illegal shenanigans. We flitted back and forth between the serious and the light without interrupting the flow of chatter.” The girls bond over family dramas while negotiating high school. Although Miriam’s sincere Christian faith puzzles Esther, it never comes between them. They leave Los Angeles together for the Bay Area and their separate schools, get together on weekends to drink, party and discover their sexuality. The slightly more experienced and free-spirited Esther says, “Everyone’s an idiot when they’re having sex.”
The most poignant parts of the novel occur when Miriam writes letters to Esther, spilling her grief on paper. A few of these letters dip into deep thought territory, like when Miriam tells Esther that the idea of hell always felt correct: “I harbored a constant dread that my life was being pulled into it. I saw how people died of starvation while literal tons of food and crops were burned to control prices, how a bottle of wine was worth more than an enslaved child, how plastics and poisons floated in our blood. Every day without pause people did atrocious things.”
Faith, doubt and loss happen all at once.
Ritually slipping these letters into envelopes, Miriam addresses them to Esther’s childhood home, stamps them, and then crosses out the stamps with her Sharpie, writing dec, short for “deceased” across the front. Each letter is placed in Miriam’s post office satchel where they will become worn and tattered, made damp by the rain.
For a debut novel, Mendell Station is remarkably assured. Hwang doesn’t put a word wrong. I look forward to reading what she conjures next.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
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