The most entertaining piece of fiction I read in 2021 was, no doubt, Chang-Rae Lee’s My Year Abroad. It has all the makings of a great Bildungsroman: Baijiu-soaked nights among questionable company, a complicated reckoning with suburban comfort, yoga entrepreneurs of dubious intention, the trials of ersatz fatherhood, and much, much more.
One other thing this book gets seriously right concerns a minor plot point that introduces our main character, Tiller, to his future business partner and benefactor. Tiller meets the serial entrepreneur and high-flying, poofy-haired Pong on a chance encounter, serving as his caddy. This sets off a series of absurd events that, for the sake of brevity, I won’t get into right now. But that initial fairway meeting is something worth digging into a little more.
Caddyshack notwithstanding, there aren’t too many representations of the caddy in popular culture—and even fewer are flattering (Happy Gilmore, fine film though it may be, didn’t do much to help the cause; the most positive portrait of the caddy seems to be in a John Updike story about a preternaturally astute Scottish kid). And it’s true: Caddying is not a traditionally glamorous position. There is slogging of heavy bags which clank about during backswings; there are tense moments when, amid the vagaries of a heated round, you may be subjected to astonishingly complex cursing. But there’s also the chance to rub shoulders with figures you usually would have no business rubbing shoulders with. So it makes sense that the absurd sequence of events in My Year Abroad springs forth from a hastily-arranged round of golf.
…
A few nights ago, I met up with some of my closest friends at a cavernous bar in the East Village. Over tall cans of Narragansett, the subject of our former summer job was never broached; but, in fact, it made the very conversation possible.
I know these guys for a pretty simple reason: We were all caddies. At some point or another, when each of us was around 16 and spending our July days walking over well-manicured grass, in Michigan and Connecticut respectively, we got a serious nudge in the right direction from groups of very kind golfers. They said, in essence, “You should continue doing this, keep your grades up, and stay in touch.” And thus we marched on and kept caddying, shook the right hands, put on our only suits for a somewhat terrifying interview and, later, received a letter in the mail congratulating us on a job well done—and a full scholarship to fund our university studies. Some months later, we met face to face, were shown our rooms in a house full of still more caddies, and the rest is history. That’s the short version of it, at least.
The long version involves sweaty hours hauling irons, learning to give occasional advice about a sport I knew rather little of, and a teenage gig that paid off in an unthinkable way.
So when it comes to portrayals of the role on the page and screen, I’m a little sensitive. But this one got it right!