Jan. 13, 2010 - Issue #743: Broken Embraces

Hop Scotch

A GOOD FALL

Old versus new: A Good Fall examines the conflicts of the immigrant life

Each of the stories in Ha Jin's A Good Fall (Pantheon, $29.95) feature Chinese or Chinese-American characters living, working or visiting relatives in Flushing, a part of Queens with a large Asian population. Each concerns the struggles of immigrant life, with work, language, money and status. Many touch on writing and academic life, which was what brought Jin to the US—he first came to study at Brandeis back in 1985 and eventually resolved not only to stay but to write in English after Tiananmen Square. These stories sparkle with intimate knowledge of a very particular milieu. The reader feels immersed in a world rather than hosted. Things are described rather than explained. Jin, most famous for his novel Waiting, which won the 1999 National Book Award, crafts prose that is spare, unimposing and above all clear, the words of a writer who refuses to take his facility with words for granted. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine what Jin's work would have been like had he not began writing in English—the rigour one's urged to employ when using an adopted language is indistinguishable from the rigour that defines Jin's style, which uses stiltedness and transparency as methods of heightening authenticity.

When I think through the stories in A Good Fall, so many of them grounded in the conflict between nostalgia and reinvention that lies at the heart of immigrant experience, I think about the way Jin conjures different kinds of distance. In the brief, opening, sketch-like story "The Bane of the Internet," a young waitress is being coerced by a sister still living in their Sichuan village to lend her a huge sum of money to buy a fancy and unnecessary car. "I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home ... but the Internet has spoiled everything—my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby." This sentiment is echoed in a more substantial, emotionally complex tale called "Temporary Love," in which two married Chinese who have secretly lived together in the US while their spouses remain back home must finally break up. One of these lovers feels oppressed when "the weight of the two families, despite the distance of an ocean and a continent, came back to her all of a sudden. She was still young, yet when she thought of her family she felt aged ... "

In other stories Jin proves surprisingly sly in his evocation of the distance that exists between cultures and their lingering ideologies. In "Choice," a young student named Dave, who is established early in the story as unconcerned with his parents' unhappiness with his career choice, is only gradually confronted with the limits of his rebelliousness when, despite his falling in love with an older woman, he realizes he could never marry her because she's infertile and he couldn't bear to disappoint his family's expectation that he have grandchildren. The needs of the individual are in constant conflict with those of the family and of cultural tradition, yet the choices available to Jin's characters are rarely so clearly divided by US or Chinese stereotypes. Most of these characters are exiles, sometimes in a literal sense, almost always in the sense that their moral foundation has fallen away from them, and their various longings, their urges and ambitions, are unmoored from what now looks like the simpler dictates of their past. In some cases, such as that of the grumbling grandparents in "Children as Enemies," there isn't any choice to be made at all—the characters are stuck. This sort of story lacks tension, but it's hardly a chore to dip into it for the 10 or so pages Jin uses to carefully paint his portraits.

Many of the strongest tales here, such as "Temporary Love" and "An English Professor," which concerns an aging academic whose career has been mangled by politics and who decides to stay illegally in the US, resound with the experiences that are essentially archetypal or emblematic, while Jin's specificity and disinterest in tidy resolutions invest them with something richer than mere allegory. Yet I find myself especially fond of at least one story that seems to have slipped past the fortress of A Good Fall's sturdy thematic architecture altogether. "A Composer and His Parakeets" has a pleasingly goofy title and a rather comical narrative to go with it. Essentially a tale of friendship, it concerns a young composer, feeling insecure about his gorgeous actress girlfriend traveling abroad for work, who finds himself taking comfort in the company of the bird she's left in his care. Some of Jin's finest scene setting can be found here, whether it be in the evocation of a rainy morning—"Outside, the drizzle swayed in the wind like endless tangled threads ... "—or of two men strolling along a Staten Island beach with the pet parakeet flitting merrily around them. Jin writes so vividly about living with this bird that he may just be ready to take on stories that expand his imaginative powers beyond the trials of Chinese immigrants. That bird seems perfectly at home wherever he finds himself. V

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