Hello.
I would like to ask you flatly: What is the point of this piece?
You have a few cutout characters who aren't even given proper attribution (I couldn't tell who was speaking half the time) and just talk. Your language is vague at best; several words I had to Google or completely guess at meaning because they were so steeped in slang that somebody from another area probably wouldn't understand what you were talking about very well, and there's no extra context to give us that desperately needed definition. It's the slang word, then the story is gone in another direction.
Your first few paragraphs were boring and rather difficult to get through; I'd been trying to continue reading past them the past few hours, and I always got distracted. There was no reason to keep reading. No conflict. No thoughts from the character as to why we should care about this situation. Actually, let me rephrase that. There was no situation to care about because of how long you dragged on what was happening. When writing a short story, you must remember the importance on beginnings and how to use them to your advantage.
The lack of conflict continued for the rest of the piece. You had hints. Buried deep under your dinner scene that gave me just enough implications of something rich that I wanted to rip the conflict out of the story and leave all of the extra— the narration, the dinner, the descriptions— behind, and just read about the conflict. But in order to do that, you need to cut this down. Give characters names, personalities, speaking styles, thoughts (especially your narrator, whom I often forgot was a first person narrator because of how little he observed anything in his own voice). Cut everything unneeded. 90% of this story is unneeded, in my opinion. All I see as important is your initial distaste of the "chink", the line about his wrists being so think they could break under firewood, and your mention that the narrator's daughter was also the chink's (but if only you spent more time on that, diving into the root of the conflict and actually having him comment on what he felt about this and what sort of horrible mistake his daughter was making). These are details. These give some sort of emotion, some flesh and blood to this character.
And the ending. Is the old man understanding what the chink is feeling? I hope not, because that just drips with a plot-perfect, long-distance happy ending that was forced instead of being cultivated through the actual plot— which makes the ending even weaker because there didn't seem to be anything to resolve throughout the piece. It's too much introspection too late; nothing in the story had touched greater depths, so a sudden implication that the old man understands something about the chink, after generic lines and prose focused on everything but the conflict at hand, was horribly dissatisfying. It lets me know you could produce something rich, but aren't, for reasons unknown.
To be (more) blunt, this felt like a novel excerpt. Something that has a few thousand words of story before and after it. This would be the dull part to give readers some sort of breathing room as the story moves from one event to the next.
Short stories need to be an event themselves.
I'd suggest looking at this article to turn this piece into an actual story instead of a long description exercise. One of the reasons I'm being so hard on this piece is how much is left ignored in favour of giving a scene with no context and simply capturing a moment in time without much of any details to its name. It acts like an old memory still in somebody's mind: the context is already there, in previous memories; the setting is routine [ie- doesn't deserve a mention because it's so normal]; the people have personalities constructed by event after event in the past.
However, when you take a memory out of its context, readers become hopelessly lost because we don't have the other things in the narrator's mind. And because he doesn't even hint at other memories, this is left floating on a timeline without even implied context. The dinner? Nondescript. It could be happening to anybody. There's nothing to ground it with this narrator, this situation. Which is not good, considering this is supposed to be somewhat of a unique situation.
I can understand you're reaching for the old "racist father hates his little girl's not-white fiance" and are trying to make this as vague as possible because it's, well, old and common. But by leaving it vague and only scratching the surface, you are left with a dry, flat piece of literature that readers struggle to get through and, if they do, have a decent chance of leaving a review like this one. You have the possibility to have so much psychology in here, especially with first person, that it would be a fascinating study. But you never penetrate the surface until the end, and by then it's too late.
Hope this helped. Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
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