Thematically, “Coconut Flan” is a story galvanized around identity. Doria is in Guadalajara and has lost her passport. Queue panic and a trip to the consulate. But then we see Doria mirroring herself against all that she sees, the cupped massage bruises of the woman in front of her at the consulate, her horrid replacement passport photos, observing (again) the battered woman from the consulate on the beach, and wondering if she’ll be recognized, although she knows she’s ordinary. The passport photos and the identification itself drive the story forward, but there’s less momentum than a wooden sleigh in dry grass meandering downhill to nowhereville.
Doria is childlike and isolated in the beginning. She’s an outsider in a foreign country, being treated like a non-citizen by her own country. Put on hold when she calls the Embassy, given the cold treatment by the man at the consulate, and even lied to by her countryman, whose existence in the story is both a cultural touchstone, Americans are bad actors abroad, loud and cantankerous, but seeing someone from your own country should bring about feelings of home and togetherness, but this encounter only alienates her more.
I consider all this, and then the title of the story comes into view. Why coconut flan? There’s a moment in the story where Doria and her husband are eating at a restaurant where the aforementioned loud American makes conversation, and his aggressiveness ends when he walks away, only for them to be given some coconut flan by the waitress, courtesy of Kevin, the loud-mouthed American. This disjointed entrance by a foreigner into this story and the land, languidly stretches to identity, and Doria even comments about how encountering a loud, boisterous person like this is always disheartening, especially when you learn that you share origins. The flan is also surprisingly good, sweet, and delicious — the opposite of the encounter with Kevin.
The story’s shape remains in flux throughout, never really gaining a solid footing. Doria sees herself in one way; she’s Narcissus gazing at their reflection. Her internal misery is tossed about like the ships that keep appearing in the story, only to be forgotten and sail away.
Is this a story about being isolated and entrenched in one’s stereotypes, or is it a story of chance encounters and misguided opportunities? Perhaps it’s a tale about how we never truly know our partners. There are shades of feminism, where Doria is relegated to the back of the taxi to listen to her handler husband, who converses too quickly in Spanish for her to understand. And maybe that’s the point of it all. We’re in the backseat, trying to make sense of all that happened.