Gish Jen: More Stories

Caution: this is a long post that's mostly summary. Not really a review!

Gish Jen, Thank You, Mr. Nixon.
Published February 1, 2022.

Gish Jen's new collection of short stories portrays a number of characters at different times of their lives. The action spans the history of China from the date Nixon's visit in 1972 until now. It illustrates the lives of Chinese immigrants to America in the 20th century, and the fate of their relatives who did not leave. Every story stands on its own, and every story connects to the others. All reflect both irony and a kind of bitter sorrow. The descriptions of the suffering of the family members who were left behind is especially vivid and poignant.

The first story, which gives the book its title, is a letter to President Nixon (in hell) from a Chinese woman named Tricia Sang (in heaven). As a child, Tricia had greeted Nixon when he visited. She then lived a long life under changing conditions in China. Her description of her life readies the reader for the vast changes that happened as China opened up and changed over the decades. "The more we thought about it, the more we felt you were the best enemy we had ever had, Mr. Nixon," she wrote (p. 11). 

The second story, "It's the Great Wall," takes place shortly after Nixon's visit, and describes a visit to China by an American couple, Gideon and Grace, and Grace's mother. Her mother, Opal, had fled China, and raised Grace in New York, and Gideon was not Chinese at all -- he was a descendant of Dutch Jews from the Caribbean. These tourists are required to take a guided and heavily chaperoned tour, but allowed briefly to visit Opal’s family and her mother's final resting place in a hall filled with tens of thousands of urns with cremated remains. Gideon and Grace's daughter Amaryllis is a pre-schooler left behind, but reappears in the later story "Amaryllis" at the age of 40. 

The contrast between the life Opal has had in America and that of the relatives left behind is evident — 

“The stories were hard to believe—not only of people being humiliated and terrorized in every way but of people being turned in by their own children. Who were these animals that had broken into Opal’s father’s study and ripped up his priceless paintings? What were they, that they had thrown her father into the river and left him to drown, that they had bound the hands of her mother and sisters, and forced them to watch as his body floated out to sea? And could all this really have been happening while Opal was trying to figure out what a Jell-O salad was?” (p. 46)

“Duncan in China," the next story, is about Duncan Hsu, an unsuccessful child of Chinese immigrants to America in contrast to his brother Arnie, already mentioned as a business partner of Tricia in heaven. "Almost as soon as Duncan reached Shandong, he knew that he had come for naught, that the China of the early 1980s had more to do with eating melon seeds around a coal heater the size of a bread box than with Song Dynasty porcelain." (p. 55). 

"A Tea Tale" is about a couple who want to create a tea-importing business — and get rich. Characters, including both Tricia and Duncan, from the earlier stories are involved, as the couple give up trying to deal with Chinese entrepreneurs, business practices, and legal issues. By now, it's the era of Tiananmen Square protests, so the background politics and characters' awareness are different. The story continues four years later. And the following story begins "Arnie Hsu the success, brother of Duncan Hsu the failure, had his own import-export business." (p. 118). And we see what patience with Chinese ways can accomplish (I guess).

"Gratitude" is about parents and children  – obviously. It begins at about the time of the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong in 2003. The family of Tina Koo, who has three daughters, will figure in many of the subsequent stories. Her daughter LuLu has already appeared: wife of Arnie Hsu. Tina's daughter Bobby is running away from her successful job, and Tina is chasing her. 

Food in these stories is often very vivid -- here's a passage from Tina's meal with Bobby when she's trying to get her to return to her successful life in New York:

"They had noticed that the fish in the tanks were not like the fish in Hong Kong, jumping out of the water; and sure enough, this fish tasted half dead, as if it had been eating hamburgers. The lobster, too, was strangely chewy, and who had ever seen such shrimpy shrimps? Plus it wasn’t only the seafood you didn’t really want to eat. An egg white dish that in Hong Kong would have been soft as a cloud was here more like a doormat. You had to chew chew chew before you could swallow one bite." (p. 143). 

Several of the later stories are about a different character, Arabella, who is studying law. Her law school colleague narrates the story "Mr. Crime and Punishment and War and Peace," about her efforts to get a job. Another food passage:

"I had picked a local hippie restaurant with every variation of tofu and brown rice possible, and with four kinds of kale smoothies. We tried all four. Then we tried three of the Buddha bowls, and then an udon-miso thing, and all the world glowed with warmth and antioxidants until I told her about the grease." (p. 158). 

Arabella becomes an immigration lawyer and plays a role in a later story, which has new characters and also connects a bit to Tina and her husband.

"No More Maybe" is more of a stand-alone story, which appeared a few years ago in the New Yorker. (I blogged it here.) It has one little connection to Tricia and her successful business, and how she taught students and aspiring entrepreneurs about business of clothing manufacturing. "We were all so sad when she got sick." (p. 226). 

And the last story is once again about Tina, her good daughter Betty, and her lost daughter, Bobby. The time frame comes right up to the present.

Why did I write such a strange synopsis? Because I found the incredibly numerous threads of connection so challenging, although every story was so satisfying and insightful. Every story tells a story! And I haven’t given away a single plot.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

"The Resisters" by Gish Jen

The Resisters by Gish Jen.
Published February 4, 2020.
This review contains spoilers.

Baseball and knitting are two subjects that do not interest me at all. Unfortunately the usually wonderful author Gish Jen chose them as a centerpiece of her newly-published book The Resisters. Well, I made the best of it, and tried to enjoy the dystopian world Jen has invented. I managed to like her main characters despite how much time is spent describing their love of baseball and knitting. I even tried to be positive about baseball trivia. I did like many little jokes such as characters named Beetle Samsa and Joe March— and I was sure I missed many more of these jokes, especially the baseball ones.

What do we fear will happen to our world? You name a fear, it’s already happened in Jen’s dystopian world. The members of the family at the center of the novel belong to a despised class of people who no longer have jobs, but whose obligation is to eat industrial food from food trucks to keep the economy going. As a family they grow their own vegetables and avoid the probably poisonous food truck food — in fact they are active in protesting some of its worst excesses, and attempting to adjust to the many ways they are excluded from education, culture, and an all-around satisfying life. Their view:

“We would not eat the food purveyed by the ubiquitous mall trucks. Of course, the mall-truck food—NettieFood, as we called it—was free. In fact, we Surplus received Living Points for eating it, as we did for consuming generally: what with the efficiency boost of Aunt Nettie, the Netted overproduced wildly. But might those endless trays of dumplings and calzones and taquitos contain a mood-and-mind mute that amounted to a love sap—the ultimate aim of which was to reduce our numbers or, as we Surplus put it, to winnow us? Let’s just say that our household grew our own food, thank you, and that we shared it with our friends, who viewed it as lifesaving.” (Kindle locations 164 ff)

Another fear in our world, climate change, has already happened in The Resisters. However, the characters have adapted to it, finding seeds that will grow in their small garden in the heat, protecting their skin from the sun, and figuring out how to deal with to constant gusts of wind, temperature changes, and huge storms at sea.

More fortunate than some of the other members of their disadvantaged class, the central family have a house to live in, as well as a garden. However, the house is constantly under surveillance by a semi-intelligent system that they call “Aunt Nettie.” Needless to say, she’s a greatly extended version of Siri or Alexa, and embodies all the worst potential that pundits are projecting right now. Aunt Nettie can read the characters' minds, sort of, but they complain about "how little an algorithm understands people." (Kindle Locations 3278-3279).

Many technology fears experienced by members of our society (now, in 2020) are fully realized by theirs, which seems to be around a century in the future. Everyone is constantly watched. Punishment for not going along with the authoritarian system can be small or can be extreme. The worst is semi-disguised euthanasia. Moreover, the ever-present household robots are part of the reason why the underclass members have no jobs: automation has taken over. They don't even have the satisfaction of making their own beds.

The privileges of the upper classes aren’t fully described, though they have rewarding jobs, better living conditions, and access to education. Nevertheless, they also seem to live with omnipresent computer control. In fact their work is designed to expand it. The main example of this extreme technology, beyond the surveillance and the terrible industrial food situation, is rampant medical experimentation including things like embedded chips and “enhancements” to one’s body and one’s mind, mostly involuntary or forced by manipulation of one’s will.

That’s pretty much the dystopian situation in the book. Gish Jen does a great job of bringing to life all the dysfunction that our own pathetic future might hold. She vividly creates examples of excessive totalitarianism, nationalism, classism, racism, capitalism for the sake of making money with no respect for human life, institutionalized protection of sexual predators, medical misdeeds, thuggish characters flaunting their guns, and above all the tyranny of computers gone amok.

In contrast, the courage of the main characters and their friends in finding secret meeting places where they can play baseball and creating a sense of community with pot-luck meals, a variety of deliciously described pies, and more, is impressive. Or as the Washington Post reviewer says: "At its heart, the novel is about the act of resistance and its attendant forces of courage and hope." (Review by Diana Abu-Jaber, February 17, 2020.)

Overall, Jen's dystopian world is only a kind of background to the plot, which is entirely about playing baseball. I read it tolerantly, but I couldn’t get excited about all the descriptions of how the central character learns to be the world’s greatest pitcher, and about the detailed presentation of the games she pitches, her admiration for other pitchers of the past: I did know the name Satchel Paige, but so what. It’s just not really my kind of book, which is sad because I really liked Gish Jen’s earlier novels.

Another great thing about the book's vision is how so many news articles reinforce its vision of a dystopian future in our computerized world. Somehow, for example, the following paragraph about the way that AirBnB has made people in Cuba unhappy reminded me of the way the characters in the book suffered as they tried to avoid being swamped by smart robots and surveillance devices —

"In 2018, when I reached out to Airbnb's customer support and tried to discuss these issues related to emotional labor, the answer I received was that these issues were actually caused by the lack of proper access to the internet; that access to the internet was increasing and Cuban hosts would have a better experience when interacting with guests. This response shows us exactly how Silicon Valley operates — it operates on techno-solutionism, in which the solution to people's problems is actually more technology, as if technology that people use were not embedded in a network with different power structures." -- From Salon.com:  As Airbnb grows in Cuba, locals suffer the emotional burden of entitled tourists by David Nemer.

This review by mae sander copyright © 2020 for maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

Comfort food in two stories

"At noontime the next day she made Zach tomato soup from a can and a grilled cheese sandwich. He bent his head close to the bowl and ate half the sandwich with his thin fingers, then pushed back the plate. When he looked up at her with his dark eyes, for a moment she saw him as the small child he'd once been, before his social ungainliness had been fully exposed, before his inability to play any sport had hindered him irredeemably, before his nose became adult and angular and his eyebrows one dark line, back when  he had seemed a shy and notably obedient little boy. A picky eater, always." (The Burgess Boys, p. 33)

Elizabeth Strout's novel The Burgess Boys tells a story of three middle-aged siblings in crisis: Susan, her twin brother Bob, and their older brother Jim. Susan's son Zach is in trouble with the law and as the three siblings attempt to protect Zach, they reconnect. Individually and separately they relive their past lives, their various marriages both failed and successful, and their memories of their own mother, Barbara. Susan and Zach always seem to eat ready-made food, frozen pizza and the like, and it never seems to comfort them!

Bob, Jim, Bob's ex-wife Pam, and Jim's wife Helen all live a fairly glamorous life in New York, having escaped from small-town Maine where Susan and Zach still live. Several scenes take place at dinner parties and tony restaurants -- but the past is important. In a flashback to the relationship of Bob and Pam, Bob describes his childhood with Jim:

"Whatever I ate, he wanted to eat the same thing. 'Tomato soup' he'd say, when Mom asked what he wanted for lunch. Then he'd see I had vegetable soup, and he'd say, 'No, that's what I want.'" (p. 106) 

Before Bob and Pam were married, she was close with the family, including Susan and Barbara.  Their life at that time is characterized, again, by food:

"While the Burgesses seemed to have no knowledge of, or interest in food (there were meals of scrambled hamburger covered with an unmelted sheet of orange cheese, or a tuna casserole made with canned soup, or a chicken roasted without any spices, not even salt), Pam discovered that they loved baked goods, and so she made banana bread and sugar cookies...." (p. 107)

Sad people, but it's a good book about sad people. Elizabeth Strout's earlier book Olive Kitteridge introduced me to her great talent for presenting characters. To wrap up this very brief review: I think this quote summarizes a great deal about the book: "No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is." (p. 254)

"No More Maybe"

Illustration of Gish Jen's story
by JooHee Yoon.

Unrelated except by very contrasting comfort food is a newly published story, "No More Maybe," by Gish Jen. It just appeared in the New Yorker this week.

The narrator of "No More Maybe" is a young woman who recently immigrated to the US from China with her husband, an academic. She describes how his parents are visiting her to help with a baby that she's expecting in two months. Her narrative succinctly and effectively portrays the four characters: husband, mother-in-law, father-in-law, and narrator. They argue, they eat meals, they talk of many things comparing life in the US and China, and their relationships are very interesting. A final interchange with an American neighbor also shows Gish Jen's penetrating ability to observe people.

The mother-in-law's comfort food -- designed to be perfect for a pregnant woman -- especially portrays the contrasts between the western-educated people and their more folkloric Chinese background:

"Actually, I help a lot when she cooks for me. Especially, I help with the shopping and the chopping. But she does the planning and the cooking, because my baby will be born in two months now, and she wants me to eat all kinds of special food. On the outside, my mother-in-law is a modern sportswoman. But inside she is a traditional type. So I take American prenatal vitamins and calcium and DHA, of course. But also she feeds me steamed egg porridge with rice, and millet porridge. I have a glass of milk, red dates, fruit, and nuts every day. Tofu and bean sprouts every other day. And a lot of soups: pork-rib soup with lotus seeds or Chinese yam. Hen soup with mushrooms and more red dates. Soybean-and-pork-trotter soup. Even swallow’s-nest soup, which is very expensive. Because I am in my seventh month and my body has heated up, and because my mother-in-law has an app that says it’s O.K., I am allowed to have some cooling foods I could not have before. For example, some of her blueberries with a little ice cream. In China, there are pregnant women who eat a lot of blueberries. They think it will make their baby’s eyes shiny and round. But my mother-in-law says that is illogical thinking. She will let me have only a few."

Gish Jen is a very wonderful author, and I have been looking forward to reading this story -- I follow her on Facebook and she talked about editing it! One quote from this story also seems designed to summarize its theme: "No more maybe, in other words. Because that is just what happens. One day it is maybe, and then you just know."

More on "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles"

Continued review of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee. Chapter 7: "Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People; or, The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989."

Before I sat down to formulate my thoughts on connections between Jews and Chinese food, I searched my pantry for Kosher Chinese products. Out of several jars and bottles, two displayed the Kosher certification mark (the OU and the OK symbols at lower right in both pictures). My chili garlic paste, hoisin sauce, and rice vinegar had no such marks. Nor did Japanese ponzu or Thai fish sauce, but they're not Chinese anyway.

I guess this is evidence for the obvious: Jewish cooks make Chinese food. As Lee points out, there are lots of non-obvious things about the love of Jews for Chinese restaurants. Early in the 20th century, she points out, Jews and Chinese as immigrant groups lived in neighboring New York areas. Both were non-Christians in a Christian land, and they shared their non-observance of major holidays. This leads to one traditional Jewish Christmas dinner -- having Chinese take-out or dining in Chinese restaurants. Why? All the other restaurants are closed.

Further, Lee claims that as a dairy-less cuisine, Chinese cooking is easier to make simultaneously authentic and kosher. My adventure in the pantry makes me doubt this: the lack of kosher condiments would be as challenging as separating milk and meat. Vegetarian/dairy pizza and pasta are also kosher favorites. Not to mention the ubiquity of shellfish and pork in Chinese food -- though the old joke has it that anything is kosher in a Chinese restaurant. I'd look further for an explanation.

Lee traces references to Jewish-Chinese dining to 1928, citing a secondary reference to an article in Der Tog, a Yiddish newspaper. I think this was probably the article "The War between Chop Suey and Gefilte Fish," cited by Hasia R. Diner in the book Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Diner's study has an even earlier reference to Jewish-Chinese food links. She writes that the Jewish pattern of "going out to Chinese restaurants emerged quite early. In the 1890s the American Hebrew, a magazine oriented to the English-reading middle-class traditional Jews reported on the trend and criticized it." (p. 2o5)

The Kosher Duck Scandal of the chapter's title gets a lot of attention. For me, it's the least interesting part of the whole book, as it's really more about competition between Jewish groups and interests that aren't part of my life. In keeping with Lee's wide-ranging interests, though, she does document the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in such areas as producing the small packets of soy sauce that come with Chinese takeout and even in occasional ownership of Chinese restaurants. I think there's a lot of material on Jews and Chinese food that could be explored. I hope Lee will get to it in some future book, but skip the minutia of kashrut and its politics.

The bond between Jews and Chinese is deeper than food, I think. In the chapter titled "American Stir-fry" Lee discusses the question of Chinese identity. She discusses the word hua, "the distilled essence of being Chinese." This concept ties together Chinese throughout the world, no matter what language or culture they have adopted or how little of the Chinese language they know: "as though one day we all might return, as though departure from the homeland is only temporary, even if it may last for generations upon generations." Sound familiar, anyone?

In the fiction of author Gish Jen, another second-generation Chinese-New Yorker, Jews and Chinese people have startlingly many things in common. Jen's book Mona in the Promised Land creates Mona, a wonderful Chinese-American teenager. The book is a very funny story of her life and effort to convert to Judaism. It's another way to look at this same interesting question. Like Hasia Diner, I think fiction is a wonderful source for understanding immigrant experiences, though not one that The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is based on.