Miss Me Forever Hits “Home” with Bhutanese Protagonist

Tulsi Gurung is in a jam. that could be the abridged version of Erie native Eugene Cross’s latest novel, Miss Me Forever, in which his likable protagonist gets put through the paces. A more nuanced look at this highly readable story, set in Erie and Pittsburgh, might be that the orphaned Nepalese immigrant who arrives stateside from Refugee Camp Goldhap to live with his grandfather is a survivor — a survivor of ethnic cleansing and forcible exile, a survivor in an adopted country wary of outsiders, and a survivor of Northwest Pennsylvania’s brutal winters, among other things. In short, he’s easy to underestimate and readers will be hard-pressed to root against him.

For those needing a primer, the East Asian country of Bhutan, ranking high on the “happiness index,” was also home to a long-established Nepalese minority. According to Amnesty International, after the Citizenship Act of 1985 was introduced, some 86,000 people, mostly Nepali-speakers from southern Bhutan, lived in refugee camps in Nepal. Many were forced out of the country. Countless of these, pejoratively branded “lhotshampa” by the Bhutan government, have since fanned out across the globe; approximately 7,000 refugees resettled along the Route 51 corridor in Pittsburgh, and thousands more have made Erie home.

It’s against this backdrop that the novel begins with Tulsi arriving in Pennsylvania in 2008, greeted at the airport by Pastor Ken. From there, he’s introduced to American culture on TV, at the Millcreek Mall and on the soccer pitch, where a moment of racism rears its head. Tulsi’s acculturation takes place in fits and starts as he navigates a teen nightclub, and his first American friendship. The novel also demonstrates his character’s growth as the years go by, including a pivotal move to Pittsburgh to pursue work, becoming a blackjack dealer at the Rivers Casino. Cross illustrates well the less glamorous side of Tulsi’s work when he writes of the players as “only speaking to curse him for bad runs. Most of them never tip and refuse to even acknowledge he exists. For them, he is not a man but a machine, a robot that makes dreams come true, or shatters them.”

Tulsi’s own dream is to be reunited with his older sister, Susmita, whose journey comes through as epistolary. Her letters reveal personal hardships set against an eternal optimism that runs through the family. It’s a move that mirrors Nettie’s letters to Celie in Alice Walker’s classic, The Color Purple, where the possibility of reunion was a tension played to the hilt. With Cross now writing for Hollywood, Miss Me Forever bears the hallmarks of a story that would play well on the small screen, giving readers a taste of the hardships and triumphs faced by many of those in our midst who seek to build new lives.