When we were young

There is a time for every book, I tell myself. I have no idea how I am going to get through all the books that I have purchased and all the books I look forward to reading when they are published e.g. American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee (scheduled for publication on 29.9.2026 ) Certain themes such as identity and education are close to my heart. I read that American Hagwon is about Korean’s obsession with education. I had enjoyed reading Free Food for Millionaires and its opening lines are powerful.

‘Competence can be a curse.

As a capable young woman, Casey Han felt compelled to choose respectability and success. But it was glamour and insight that she craved.’ – Free Food for Millionaires, Min Jin Lee.

I am a glutton when come to devouring books. The thing is you cannot gulp them down as you immerse yourself in the characters, savour the prose although not all writings are created equal. Some writings are more refined and elegant proses require you to pause and ponder, hence I have multiple reads at any given time.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger had been sitting on my bookshelf for decades and I finally read it in 2017. As 2016 was winding down, a friend sent me a link on thirty superb books you should read before turning thirty and The Catcher in the Rye was one of them. I had owned a copy of The Catcher in the Rye before I turned 30. Does that count?

After reading it, I know why I could not engage myself in reading it in my 20s even though it was a book much talked about by friends then.

The story is about Holden Caulfield, an angry and lonely teenager who keeps dropping out of every school he has been sent to. He has just been kicked out of Pencey Prep, a boarding school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania on account that he has not been applying himself and has flunked four subjects and the only subject that he has passed is English. After the Christmas vacation, he will not be returning to Pencey, a school that has a very good academic rating.

The book is written in Holden’s voice. He is only sixteen and he is already struggling with growing up and figuring out meaning of life. Holden has a gentle heart and he is sensitive and kind although he rants about how all these friends and teachers he has encountered at school are such phonies and he uses the words ‘phony’ and ‘jerks’ and swears profanity quite a lot. He gets upset when he sees how fake people are. The story spans three days during which time he went to  the movie and there was this woman sitting next to him cried all through the picture.

‘The part that got me was , there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kind-hearted as hell, but I was sitting next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kind-hearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.’

Holden is generous. He lent his roommate Stradlater his jacket even after finding out that the latter was going out on a date with Jane Gallagher, a childhood friend whom he likes a lot. He was asked by Stradlater to write the essay that the latter had to pass up the next day. He was supposed to write something descriptive about a room or a house. He ended up writing about his brother Allie’s baseball mitt.

‘My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was left-handed.The thing that was descriptive about it , though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He’s dead now. He got  leukemia snd died  when we were up in Maine,on July 18,1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap.’

He loves his younger sister, Phoebe very much and he is very protective of her innocence. Phoebe is really smart and she’s had all A’s ever since she started school. When she asked him to name one thing he liked, all he could think of were the boy who jumped out of the window at school and the two nuns with suitcases and he had sat next to them waiting for a train. They are teachers, one teaches English while the other one teaches History and Government.

Holden is sweet as he thinks about the ducks that swim around the lagoon in Central Park in springtime and he wants to know what happen to them in the winter-time when the lake turns into a solid block of ice, whether they get picked up by someone who comes around in a truck or go south. When Phoebe asked him to name something he would like to be, he wanted to be the catcher in the rye. He was referring to a poem by Robert Burns when he had thought it was a song and his clever sister corrected him. He had thought the words were “If a body catch a body coming through the rye” when the words were “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” Again old Phoebe corrected him.

‘ I thought it was “ If a body catch a body”,’ I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around-nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’ re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and  catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy , but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be . I know it’s crazy.’

Old Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time. Then , when she said something, all she said was, ‘ Daddy’s going to kill you.’

Salinger’s seemingly effortless writing has cleverly described the growing pains of Holden Caulfield who is disillusioned and feels depressed thinking about how hypocritical, pathetic and mean many people are.  I was hesitant to read The Catcher in the Rye probably because  I  did not want  to read  about teenage angst and another one of those coming of age novels  when  I had felt a lot of it in my secondary school days.  I  did not want to be reminded of any of that.  

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is absolutely brilliant and I am truly glad that I had finally read it, thirty years later. If I had read it before I had turned thirty, I would not have appreciated the book and the character would not have touched me  as much as now. Perhaps in my early adult years, I did not wish to be reminded me of my teenage years when I had so much anger about hypocrisy and injustice of things. I read that 2026 marks seventy-five years since The Catcher in the Rye was first published.