Forget it, Jin, it's Chinatown

A GOOD FALL: STORIES

By Ha Jin

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Like many first-generation immigrants in America, the Chinese-born author Ha Jin is confronted with the inevitable dilemma of choosing between two cultural heritages — that of his Far Eastern homeland, and the country he now chooses to call home, the United States. While pursuing his Ph.D. in English at Brandeis University, the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre made headlines worldwide, prompting him to remain in the United States after completing his degree in 1992.

Jin has since published several novels, short story collections, and poems, many of which have won prestigious American literary awards. His 1999 novel, Waiting, was published to critical acclaim and was garlanded doubly with the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards.  Five years later, War Trash —an epic, bittersweet faux-memoir that chronicles the life of a Communist soldier-turned-prisoner-of-war — walked away with the author’s second PEN/Faulkner.

In his new book, A Good Fall, Jin gives us 12 stories set in the diverse neighborhood of Flushing, concerning us with the lives of Chinese immigrants dreaming about restarting life in the United States. All revolve around struggling individuals who joust with the country’s promises of easier comfort and wealth. All wrestle with the emotional isolation and the ideological rifts that alienate them from this strange new land.  And all emanate a key signature of nostalgic wistfulness for that sense of belonging and security lost when they crossed the transoceanic divide.

Some of these characters are artists who find the unrestricted latitude for expression in America refreshing. Most are impoverished settlers who are culturally obliged to mail monetary remittances to their families back home.  Others are foreign visitors who take well to the idyllic promises of a country characterized by freedom and prosperity. 

One of these is a professor whose publicly distributed verbal snafu inopportunely hovers over his conscience during his imminent appointment for tenure. All of them, however, are bundled by the paranoiac insecurities of living in an environment that puts their linguistic and technical competence on a mettle.

But whereas Jin spirited readers away with the impeccable command he displayed in novels like Waiting and War Trash, this collection unfortunately resembles little of the untrammeled force, the clearly articulated prose, and the meticulously modulated narrative momentum extant in his strongest works.  Instead, these overstuffed stories read like lumpy and cartoonishly farcical studies on the Chinese immigrant, hobbled by a laborious prose deliberately fractured to sound like awkward subtitles from a foreign film.

 “A Good Fall,” the collection’s title story, depicts a young, hapless Buddhist monk who faces deportation when his sponsor cheats him of his salary.  Upon realizing the irony of the American dream, he carps about the people “who bragged about the opportunity found in America and wouldn’t reveal the hardship they’d gone through here.” 

“In the Crossfire” tells of an immigrant couple’s agitated interactions with an accountant’s cantankerous mother, who intransigently lords over their household while accusing his wife of exploiting his son’s salary as a means of getting through nursing school.  As the family and their guests preside over dinner, Shulan, a friend of Tian’s mother, reveals to her that “life here is no picnic and most people work very hard.”

Like so many of Jin’s neurotic narrators, an aging Chinese couple, the heroes of “Children as Enemies” are modeled after old-fashioned stereotypes who grouse about the insouciant attitudes of Americanized children.  Their grandchildren persistently assail them regarding their dated ways, spurn them by changing their Chinese names into “empty” English ones, and back up their “indulgent mother” when she suggests that they “ought to let them develop freely as individuals,” thus estranging them from the deeply embedded sense of family innate to their motherland.

The grandfather tells us that “in America it feels as if the older you are, the more inferior you grow.”  “ This is America,” declares the staunchly traditional grandfather, “where we must learn self-reliance and mind our own business.” 

Perhaps all of these observations are meant to inform readers about these newcomers’ intemperate concerns, but many are written so heavy-handedly that the whole ordeal comes off as a redundant burlesque of stereotypes.

Many of the stories in this volume, while sincerely informing us about these characters’ anxieties and struggles, are embellished with little of the nuances that sympathize readers with an immigrant culture’s uncertain realities.  And although intrinsic elements like the Chinese sense of shame, of an immutable destiny, and Confucian values are externally communicated by the author’s heroes, their transactions with tradition and assimilation are stripped of the complexities that explain their tendencies to drift off into nervous episodes of ennui.

To make matters worse, Jin resolves each of these psychological battles with the trite, silver-lining brand of endings that pledges an exaggerated version of American economic freedom, without distinctions between “high or low.”  In the end, all of these characters wander around Flushing like dour doppelgangers sporting only chameleonic changes of clothes and profession — all obsessed with hauling in barrowfuls of greenback, all griping about the anachronistic datedness of their old culture, and all living through a fragile, initially idealistic representation of American society that is ultimately robbed of its paradisiacal charm.

That the author intentionally punctuates his dialogue with bizarre insertions of the engrish.com variety not only hampers the continuity of his stories, but also perpetuates an unsavory Asian stereotype that highlights an inability to compose thoughts sensibly in the English language. 

Awkward turns of phrase like “I prefer a ripe woman,” “the little fox spirit,” or “he’s a vampire I can’t shake off of me,” while in a sense resembling the poetic license embedded in Mandarin syntax, emerge here as contrived and affected.  Though his intentions to capture these speech patterns are noble, Jin’s discomfiting transliterations do a great disservice to America’s most prominent Asian minority group — a people that have made great strides to be recognized for their outstanding achievements in a country that had officially deprived them of basic rights until the constitution was amended in the mid-20th century.

One of the few stories in this book that essay a more unaffected take on these themes of adjustment and disjointedness is “The Beauty,” which tells of the strained relationship between Dan and his “lissome” and beautiful wife, Gina, when a close acquaintance appears to make unsettling advances on her.  Jasmine, the couple’s daughter, complicates the situation when Dan questions his wife regarding the disconnect between her ravishing features and her daughter’s “homely” looks.  Echoing a bittersweet irony reminiscent of  Jin’s Waiting, this tale of misunderstanding ends in a revelatory moment where perspectives are changed and relationships mended with an arresting stroke of honesty and candor, qualities sadly absent in other stories in this volume.