Short stories contain rich literary experience
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A GOOD FALL
By Ha Jin
Pantheon, $24.95
HOW THE INDIANS BURIED THEIR DEAD
By Hilary Masters
SMU Press, $22.50
Short story collections are appearing with more regularity now. Maybe a tight economy has inspired a renewed appreciation for economy with words. That is the essence of the short story: to tell the tale with as few words as possible but as many words as necessary. It’s a hard thing to define, but like most art, it is wonderful when it done well. These two authors do very well indeed.
Ha Jin was born in China in 1956 but came to this country in 1985. He began to write stories about China in English. His 1999 novel Waiting won the National Book Award. He now teaches English at Boston University and crafts stories of Chinese immigrants and the culture shock they experience when they come to America. In the 12 short stories in A Good Fall — all set in New York — he shows how difficult it is for Chinese to overcome the broad differences in language, lifestyle and beliefs they encounter here. Yet he also shows what keeps them coming and why they stay — economic opportunity and freedom.
Like most immigrants, Chinese tend to cluster together when they first arrive. In “Choice,” a young Chinese scholar agrees to tutor a high school girl who lives with her mother in Flushing, N.Y. “The store signs, most bearing Chinese characters, reminded me of a bustling shopping district in Shenyang. So many immigrants live and work here that you needn’t speak English to get around.” The student soon is involved in a torrid affair with the mother, a widow. The daughter is also attracted to him — Mother China and new American China.
In “The Beauty,” a couple, both Chinese immigrants, have an ugly baby. The man is pretty good looking and the woman is a great beauty, so the man begins to suspect that the child isn’t his. The woman has a secret, all right, but it doesn’t involve infidelity — at least with another man. It is Western culture at its most inane — plastic surgery — that has altered her and led to the man’s confusion and ultimate disillusionment. Old Chinese values are not applicable to some American behaviors, so the man has to find his own way through his emotions.
In the title story, a Gaolin monk is lured to a New York temple to teach Kung Fu with promises of wealth and a life of ease. He finds something very different, but when he faces the idea of returning to China in disgrace, he can’t accept the idea and runs away. He is without papers, without money, without a place to stay, but he is in America. He is no longer a monk, but as he tells a Chinese-American friend who suggests he now can have a girlfriend, “Well, I hope that’s something I can learn.” Like other immigrant groups, the Chinese do learn to assimilate and to disseminate. They take from America’s culture and give back from their own, and both are richer for it.
Masters is a subtle writer whose stories delve into the motivations and emotions of people in a variety of situations. In “Shoe Polish,” a concert violinist thinks of her mother — a shoeshine lady who works in a nook at an airport — whenever she is in a terminal. “Often, she would stand across the hallway, beyond the curtain of light thrown on the area, and watch her mother at work — bent over, the broad beam of her posterior presented to every passerby, her arms moving like pistons, her hands brisk and efficient. She was a professional.” The violinist eventually realizes that her mother has polished her as well as the shoes, and she questions what it is in her own life that she must polish.
In “Mourning After,” two older men come up with a macabre version of wedding crashing — funeral crashing. Two men accidentally begin going to funerals of people they don’t know when they wind up at the wrong funeral home for a friend’s service. Before they realize it’s the wrong dead guy, they’ve eaten free food and offered the widow condolences. They decide to continue crashing funerals and not just to cadge a meal. “It cheered me to think we were bringing to these survivors knowledge about the departed that they had never suspected — examples of generosity and endeavor that totally surprised them but that would warm the cup of memory for the rest of their days.”
In “Double Wedding Ring,” a popular quilt pattern becomes a metaphor for two married people carrying on a lengthy affair with each other a la Same Time Next Year — but without the yearlong gaps. As with all these stories, Masters uses beautiful, luminous language to describe ordinary scenes: “A light rain had begun when she burst through the hotel’s revolving door, and she was worried about getting a taxi. She tucked the bag of material and her purse under one arm and ran down to the curb, the other arm raised high, fingers pointing. She ignored the doorman who seemed immobilized by the whistle stuck in his mouth. Luckily, a taxi swung over from the flow of avenue traffic, and she jumped in. She felt lithe and young and just a little lightheaded. She was eager to get back to the quilt and to see how the material she was bringing home would work in the pattern. She was pretty sure the colors would be perfect. She was also eager to get back to her husband.”
The title story is a meditation on place and the physical and how individuals form strong attachments to it. A boy who grew up in a house with his grandfather goes back to old neighborhood to visit the place he remembers, no longer owned by his family. It was a house of “So many recesses and corners, so many perfect hiding places. He often forgot where he had secreted a valued toy, and then to discover it was to make it new again. Perhaps behind a molding or with a cobwebbed niche, a model car or a favorite top might still be hidden.”
Masters offers 14 stories in this collection, each one rich with introspection and observation.
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