Rich imagery—“drizzle swayed in the wind like endless tangled threads,” “the streetlights were swimming in my eyes”—displays...
First collection of short fiction in nine years from expatriate novelist Ha Jin (A Free Life, 2007, etc.).
All set in Flushing, N.Y., all concerned with the Chinese immigrant’s experience in America, these 12 stories are unified in geography and theme, uneven in richness and depth. The opening piece, “The Bane of the Internet,” is one of the slightest, suggesting in four pages that the speed and amount of communication offered by e-mail aren’t necessary benefits for a Chinese immigrant with relatives back home. Many other stories also resemble fables or parables, with generic titles and plot twists reminiscent of O. Henry. “Beauty” shows that quality to be not what it appears, and not merely skin deep. “Choice” concerns a series of (you guessed it) choices, as a graduate student opts for the humanities and deprives himself of the support his parents would have offered for a more professionally focused education. He finds a tutoring job to pay the bills and is torn between his teenaged pupil and her mother, an attractive young widow, but the climactic choice turns out not to be his. “Shame” invites the reader to find autobiography within its narrative, as a student’s changing relationship with his former professor inspires a first novel in English. Generational tension bristles through “Children as Enemies” and “In the Crossfire,” as elders prove resistant to the assimilation that younger Chinese-Americans are more likely to embrace. The title story is the most powerful, as an immigrant monk on the verge of suicide finds despair leading to redemption. “You can always change,” he learns. “This is America, where it’s never too late to turn over a new page.”
Rich imagery—“drizzle swayed in the wind like endless tangled threads,” “the streetlights were swimming in my eyes”—displays the author’s poetic gifts, but some of these tales belabor the obvious.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37868-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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