Sarang's Under a Clear Blue Sky

Sarang's latest effort, Under a Clear Blue Sky, offers a piercing, insightful look at the difficulty of advancing in journalism today, particularly for women.  The protagonist, Kelly Walters, is a reporter for a conservative website, and she is covering her first big story since being promoted from its ranks of unpaid bloggers.  In a sense, this is a great opportunity for her, but the assignment requires her to write with a degree of nuance and emotional intelligence that pushes her to her limits.

The difficulty is that Walters essentially has to tell three stories simultaneously.  The first is the story of an entitled, socialistic cadre of pampered fast-food workers, many of them black and/or overweight, but all of them elitist, whose selfish protest for a $15 minimum wage blocked heroic, mostly-white, all-male emergency workers from reaching the scene of an accident at a construction site.  The second is the story of lazy, entitled, unionized public employees (the rescue workers) who, instead of finding an alternative path to the accident site, simply sat in traffic while the hardworking, long-suffering victims of the construction accident bled to death.  The final story is that of the entitled, incompetent, job-stealing illegal immigrants (the workers at the construction site) who are now, along with the relatives of the workers who died, suing the protestors—that is, people who are here legally, exercising their First Amendment rights like the salt-of-the-earth American citizens that they are.  The illegals want to hold them responsible...  for what, exercising their Constitutional rights?  What's next?

Walters tries to keep these storylines from becoming tangled, and mostly she succeeds, but only by carefully separating the strands from each other, telling one story at a time.  This tripling of her workload requires Herculean effort, and Walters' personal life suffers.  Here Sarang is especially sensitive to the obstacles facing women in the workplace, especially professional women who are upwardly mobile but "not there yet"—that is, women who can't yet afford servants.  In a touching scene, Walters is trying to arrange a date by text message, when she looks up and realizes she doesn't have enough quarters to finish drying her load of laundry.  She simply stands, frozen between her smartphone and her soggy clothes, and contemplates the flowers on a tree she hadn't even noticed blooming.

Blue Sky doesn't just cement Sarang's status as one of the most thoughtful writers on women's issues.  It also marks a turn away from the strident anti-didacticism of his earlier work.  We can build a better society, Sarang tells us, if we empower women like Kelly Walters to chase their dreams.  Women shouldn't have to choose between a romantic life and a career in conservative journalism.  Right now, Walters is just a junior reporter learning to give her readers the information they need.  But if she can stick with it, if we can find a way to support women like her through the tough times, then she may bloom into a thought leader and respected political commentator, repaying society's investment a thousand times.