Summary

In “Inheritance,” Chee offered a short reflection on his father’s early death and, in particular, how it proceeded to shape his later relationship with money. He began by discussing how he efficiently managed the budget of a weekly charity dinner at a Unitarian church in Manhattan for the homeless. He noted that “the calm with which I did this every week was not visible in the rest of my life,” and that, indeed, he was reckless with his own money by contrast: he lived with boxes of unpaid bills, collection notices and letters from the IRS. He traced this carelessness in his life back to the moment of his father’s death, and the trust fund that he inherited and quickly squandered. (Because his father had no will, the state of Maine automatically transferred a portion of his estate into a trust...