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Asanka
In “The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa,” Loretta is a volunteer at the Villawood Immigration Detention Center in Sydney. She used to be a lawyer there and was passionate about her work, but she quit after her husband, Sam, told her the job paid too little and required her to work long hours—conditions that wouldn’t work if they had kids (which Loretta desperately wants). Sam suggested she work for a high-paying firm instead for a years before going on maternity leave, and Loretta took his advice. However, Sam hasn’t mentioned kids again since, and Loretta worries about their failing marriage. Adding to their marital tension, Sam doesn’t understand Loretta’s passion for her work at the center. For instance, when Sam came home and finds Loretta crying over Chaminda’s death—Loretta had been working to have him released, but his release was halted due to lost paperwork and he died by suicide shortly after—he told her she was overreacting. Before his death, Chaminda told Loretta all about Asanka and made her promise to go see him. Loretta does, in the story’s present, but since she’s no longer a lawyer, there’s little she can do to help him. And in fact, she (unintentionally and unknowingly) ends up harming him: Asanka swipes some hairpins and dental floss from Loretta’s purse during the visit and later uses them to sew his own mouth shut. At the end of the story, Loretta leaves the center feeling angry and defeated over her inability to help Asanka (and people like him), yet she also remains ignorant to the role she played his gruesome fate.
Loretta Quotes in Foreign Soil
The Foreign Soil quotes below are all either spoken by Loretta or refer to Loretta. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa
Quotes
In this country, you look at a person and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilizations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It’s taken some getting used to but now Asanka likes it—this casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Tears stream down her face as she watches the cameras flashing and microphones jostling at the other end of the parking lot, where the razor-wire fence adjoins the visiting area. The Mazda windows are closed, but she can still get the gist of the press conference spin. Hopelessness burrows into her chest again, its fingernails digging into her lungs, slowly squeezing the air out.
Fuck Sam, fuck having a baby, fuck her new job, and fuck this stupid fucking car. Loretta doesn’t even know who her husband is anymore. She’s even more uncertain of why she’s sitting here, crying about her husband, in this of all places.
Get the entire Foreign Soil LitChart as a printable PDF.
Loretta Quotes in Foreign Soil
The Foreign Soil quotes below are all either spoken by Loretta or refer to Loretta. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa
Quotes
In this country, you look at a person and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilizations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It’s taken some getting used to but now Asanka likes it—this casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Tears stream down her face as she watches the cameras flashing and microphones jostling at the other end of the parking lot, where the razor-wire fence adjoins the visiting area. The Mazda windows are closed, but she can still get the gist of the press conference spin. Hopelessness burrows into her chest again, its fingernails digging into her lungs, slowly squeezing the air out.
Fuck Sam, fuck having a baby, fuck her new job, and fuck this stupid fucking car. Loretta doesn’t even know who her husband is anymore. She’s even more uncertain of why she’s sitting here, crying about her husband, in this of all places.
