By 1920, 8 million Americans owned a car, far more than in Europe, and only 3-6 percent of vehicles were horse-drawn: an astonishing transport revolution. But in America, thanks to the 1908 Model T Ford, car ownership became more affordable. It convinced her husband that there was a market for his ingenious invention.īy 1900, 6,000 cars were sold in Europe. Onlookers were astonished at the vehicle, some “found it so terrifying that they fell to their knees in prayer”.īertha’s daring trip to her mother was a PR triumph and today her route is marked with memorial signs. On the journey, Bertha had to unblock the fuel pipe using a hat pin and use a garter to fix a leaky valve. Bertha didn’t tell him she was going and had to wheel it out onto the road before starting the engine to avoid waking him. Up until then it had only been driven in the courtyard of his workshop and she wanted to show him that it was reliable enough to be used for long-distances. She was driving her husband’s three-wheeled prototype, the Benz Patent Motorwagen.
She was, as journalist Tom Standage notes, “the first person in history to use an automobile in a recognizably modern way – simply to get from A to B”. Rebecca Liu £8.36 (RRP £8.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshopĮarly one August morning in 1888, Bertha Benz set off with her two teenage sons to drive from Mannheim to visit her mother, 65 miles away. His own voice emerges from the book bright, irreverent, and fully formed, while also bringing alive his characters, illuminating what they have inherited, and how and why, against the absurdities and unbearable histories in life, they continue to move onward. His stories move fluidly between heart and humour, cynicism and wonder, speaking to how even in the thicket of historical violence people can and do continue to find moments of grace and laughter. Gay, Cambodian, and not even twenty-six, carrying in my body the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism.” His job – teaching private school students the value of diversity and civic belonging through close readings of Moby Dick – appears to him both stupid and exhilarating.Īfterparties was published after So’s death in 2020, aged 28 eulogies spoke to his preternatural talent.
When a mysterious visitor starts frequenting her doughnut shop, Sothy, mother of two and owner of Chuck’s Donuts (a name she chose because it seemed “American enough to draw in customers”) fears that it is an old business partner coming back for retribution – a man who, “for all she knew, could have bankrolled Pol Pot’s coup.”Įlsewhere, a young man whose life echoes So’s own – born in to Khmer parents who fled the genocide became one of the rare winners of the immigrant dream to attend Stanford University, then found work as a teacher – is reflecting on his fragile relationship with a tech bro in a soulless and gentrified Silicon Valley, and wonders “Here I was! Living in a district that echoed a dead San Francisco. ‘Violence will not solve our problems, and neither will the model minority myth.’” The other adults in Afterparties live for survival, not status, and know the past cannot be wiped clean by climbing the ladder of social respectability. So what are boys like you doing?!” “She tried whacking me again, but I stepped out of her reach” the narrator recalls: “’Please stop,’ I said.
The status-conscious wife of a doctor – the only couple in the community to ascend to white-collar labour – whacks him over the head with a magazine, asking why he did not “become a doctor”: “We escaped the Communists. In one story, a college graduate returns home to work in his father’s car repair shop. Simmering under their lives is a history that feels as immoveable as it is unfathomable, as their families – who moved to the US from Cambodia in the 70s to escape Pol Pot’s genocide – are haunted by the past. Aimless and disaffected young Californians navigate feeling stuck at an age where, so it is said, one ought to be hungry and ambitious and on the move. History bears down like a weight in the affecting and funny short stories in Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So’s debut.