A Good Fall: Stories - Hardcover

Jin, Ha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307378683 ISBN 13: 9780307378682

Publisher: Pantheon, 2009

Synopsis

In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom was published in 2000 ("Finely wrought . . . Every story here is cut like a stone."—Chicago Sun-Times), National Book Award–winning Ha Jin gives us a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America.
 
With the same profound attention to detail that is a hallmark of his previous acclaimed works of fiction, Ha Jin depicts here the full spectrum of immigrant life and the daily struggles—some minute, some grand—faced by these intriguing individuals.
 
A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so that they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts to defect with the help of a reluctant former student. All of Ha Jin's characters struggle in situations that stir within them a desire to remain attached to be loyal to their homeland and its traditions as they explore and avail themselves of the freedom that life in a new country offers.
 
In these stark, deeply moving, acutely insightful, and often strikingly humorous stories, we are reminded once again of the storytelling prowess of this superb writer.

About this title

About the Author

HA JIN left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of five novels, three story collections, and three books of poetry. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Marie Arana The novelist Ha Jin knows a thing or two about captivity. In "Waiting," which won the 1999 National Book Award for fiction, he described the 18-year anguish of a soldier in China's Revolutionary Army, longing to be free from an unhappy marriage, waiting to consummate his relationship with the woman he most desires. In "War Trash," which was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, he told of a Chinese prisoner of war in Korea, negotiating the political labyrinths of the camps, yearning to return to his homeland. The characters who populate his books share a single scarring experience: They are hostages to circumstance, prisoners of faceless institutions, victims of tyrannies they are powerless to control. Now, in "A Good Fall," his most recent collection of stories, Ha Jin puts his captives in America and turns a new prism on the question of freedom. Ha Jin is no stranger to America. Leaving China in 1985 to take up a scholarship at Brandeis University, he found himself witnessing the historic events of the Tiananmen massacre from the tranquil vantage of a small town in Massachusetts. The ferocity of that crackdown and the sudden sting of dislocation made an instant and deep impression. He decided to produce his future works in English so that there would be no doubt about what he intended to say. What he has intended to say has blossomed into an array of English-language works that have won him considerable recognition: a volume of essays, three books of poetry, four collections of short stories and five truly probing novels. Among these, no work is like any other; each reaches into a new province of bondage. Whether his characters rail against industry or marriage or war or even a strange and bewildering culture, the subject at hand is our very human impulse for liberation. In the title story of "A Good Fall," for instance, a young Buddhist monk who teaches martial arts in New York is unexpectedly fired by his unscrupulous master. Sick, penniless, threatened with forced repatriation and unable to utter a sentence in English, the ocher-robed alien wanders the streets of an affluent city, searching for deliverance. In "The Beauty," a young father is jealous of his beautiful wife, alarmed by their ugly baby and anxious to rid himself of the predations of cuckoldry. The tables turn -- as do his notions of betrayal -- when his wife makes an unexpected confession. A very different notion of freedom rules in "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry": In it, a hapless driver for a gaggle of prostitutes dreams of springing one of the women, running away with her and making a better life elsewhere. Several of the stories reflect the American environment Ha Jin knows best: the unforgiving world of university academics. In "An English Professor," for instance, an expatriate scholar becomes a victim of his own ambush when he realizes that he signed his tenure request with the nonexistent word "Respectly." For days, he agonizes over the reaction that that simple typo will trigger: Why on Earth is a Chinese man teaching English here? At the heart of this book is the alienation any immigrant feels in an unfamiliar land. No confinement, no prison, the author seems to say, can match the isolation of life in a foreign culture. America may be the mecca of opportunity, a dynamic agent for change, a place where hard work can redeem any beginner, but it is also a ruthless master. A newcomer may welcome that rare and precious second chance, but the attendant sacrifices can be brutal. America's gods -- ambition, success, the coveted green card, money -- can be as cruel as any jailer. In short, the storyteller's art is richly on display here. Ha Jin has a singular talent for snaring a reader. His premises are gripping, his emotional bedrock hard and true. But in "A Good Fall" he doesn't always succeed in the delivery. Anyone who travels these pages is sure to stumble on inelegant locutions. To wit: "The two sides, somehow knowing most of the authors' real names despite the pseudonyms they used, argued furiously and dished out muck that should have remained undisturbed in the cellars of their opponents' past." Or: "I made myself busy to quench my miserable feelings." There's more than a whisper of awkwardness here. Perhaps more disturbingly, the very last sentences of every one of these stories is weak, lacking a sharply cut finish. But there is no doubt that in "A Good Fall" Ha Jin captures a new, growing slice of America. It may not be as eye-blistering as the perspective he offers in his novels about China, but there's something arresting about the view. You might even call it: captivating. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From National Book Award–winner Jin (Waiting) comes a new collection that focuses on Flushing, one of New York City's largest Chinese immigrant communities. With startling clarity, Jin explores the challenges, loneliness and uplift associated with discovering one's place in America. Many different generational perspectives are laid out, from the young male sweatshop-worker narrator of The House Behind a Weeping Cherry, who lives in the same rooming-house as three prostitutes, to the grandfather of Children as Enemies, who disapproves of his grandchildren's desires to Americanize their names. Anxiety and distrust plague many of Jin's characters, and while the desire for love and companionship is strong, economic concerns tend to outweigh all others. In Temporary Love, Jin explores the inevitable complications of becoming a wartime couple or men and women who, unable to bring their spouses to America, cohabit... to comfort each other and also to reduce living expenses. With piercing insight, Jin paints a vast, fascinating portrait of a neighborhood and a people in flux. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In The Bridegroom (2000), his last collection of short stories, Ha Jin, a National Book Award winner, captures the paradoxes of life under China’s Communist regime. In his new stories, sharply etched works remarkable for the contrast between their directness of expression and complexity of feelings, he creates a mirror-image set of tales about a Chinese immigrant community in Flushing, New York. Ha Jin’s ear and eye for Chinese American life are acute, as is his sense of how one life can encompass a full spectrum of irony, desperation, and magic. The advent of e-mail enables a sister in China to blackmail her sister in America. A struggling composer develops a remarkable rapport with his absent lover’s parakeet. Marriages come under duress, one due to the almost surreal insensitivity of a visiting mother, the other to the husband’s suspicions about his wife and the strange truth they reveal. A classic story about grandparents from the old country appalled by their Americanized grandchildren is balanced by the startling title story, in which a young kung fu master and monk achieves an unforeseen form of enlightenment. The quest for freedom yields surprising and resonant complications in Ha Jin’s sorrowful, funny, and bittersweet stories. --Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Bane of the Internet

My sister Yuchin and I used to write each other letters. It took more than ten days for the mail to reach Sichuan, and usually I wrote her once a month. After Yuchin married, she was often in trouble, but I no longer thought about her every day. Five years ago her marriage began falling apart. Her husband started an affair with his female boss and sometimes came home reeling drunk. One night he beat and kicked Yuchin so hard she miscarried. At my suggestion, she filed for divorce. Afterward she lived alone and seemed content. I urged her to find another man, because she was only twenty-six, but she said she was done with men for this life. Capable and with a degree in graphic design, she has been doing well and even bought her own apartment four years ago. I sent her two thousand dollars to help her with the down payment.

Last fall she began e-mailing me. At first it was exciting to chat with her every night. We stopped writing letters. I even stopped writing to my parents, because she lives near them and can report to them. Recently she said she wanted to buy a car. I had misgivings about that, though she had already paid off her mortgage. Our hometown is small. You can cross by bicycle in half an hour; a car was not a necessity for her. It’s too expensive to keep an automobile there—the gas, the insurance, the registration, the maintenance, the toll fees cost a fortune. I told her I didn’t have a car even though I had to commute to work from Brooklyn to Flushing. But she got it into her head that she must have a car because most of her friends had cars. She wrote: “I want to let that man see how well I’m doing.” She was referring to her ex-husband. I urged her to wipe him out of her mind as if he had never existed. Indifference is the strongest contempt. For a few weeks she didn’t raise the topic again.

Then she told me that she had just passed the road test, bribing the officer with five hundred yuan in addition to the three thousand paid as the application and test fees. She e-mailed: “Sister, I must have a car. Yesterday Minmin, our little niece, came to town driving a brand-new Volkswagen. At the sight of that gorgeous machine, I felt as if a dozen awls were stabbing my heart. Everybody is doing better than me, and I don’t want to live anymore!”

I realized she didn’t simply want to impress her ex. She too had caught the national auto mania. I told her that was ridiculous, nuts. I knew she had some savings. She got a big bonus at the end of each year and freelanced at night. How had she become so vain and so unreasonable? I urged her to be rational. That was impossible, she claimed, because “everybody” drove a car in our hometown. I said she was not everybody and mustn’t follow the trend. She wouldn’t listen and asked me to remit her money as a loan. She already had a tidy sum in the bank, about eighty thousand yuan, she confessed.

Then why couldn’t she just go ahead and buy a car if that was what she wanted? She replied: “You don’t get it, sister. I cannot drive a Chinese model. If I did, people would think I am cheap and laugh at me. Japanese and German cars are too expensive for me, so I might get a Hyundai Elantra or a Ford Focus. Please lend me $10,000. I’m begging you to help me out!”

That was insane. Foreign cars are double priced in China. A Ford Taurus sells for 250,000 yuan in my home province of Sichuan, more than $30,000. I told Yuchin an automobile was just a vehicle, no need to be fancy. She must drop her vanity. Certainly I wouldn’t lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball—nothing would come back. So I said no. As it is, I’m still renting and have to save for the down payment on a small apartment somewhere in Queens. My family always assumes that I can pick up cash right and left here. No matter how hard I explain, they can’t see how awful my job at a sushi house is. I waitress ten hours a day, seven days a week. My legs are swollen when I punch out at ten p.m. I might never be able to buy an apartment at all. I’m eager to leave my job and start something of my own—a snack bar or a nail salon or a video store. I must save every penny.

For two weeks Yuchin and I argued. How I hated the e-mail exchanges! Every morning I flicked on the computer and saw a new message from her, sometimes three or four. I often thought of ignoring them, but if I did, I’d fidget at work, as if I had eaten something that had upset my stomach. If only I had pretended I’d never gotten her e-mail at the outset so that we could have continued writing letters. I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home—you could restart your life on your own terms. But the Internet has spoiled everything—my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby.

Four days ago Yuchin sent me this message: “Elder sister, since you refused to help me, I decided to act on my own. At any rate, I must have a car. Please don’t be mad at me. Here is a website you should take a look at . . .”

I was late for work, so I didn’t visit the site. For the whole day I kept wondering what she was up to, and my left eyelid twitched nonstop. She might have solicited donations. She was impulsive and could get outrageous. When I came back that night and turned on my computer, I was flabbergasted to see that she had put out an ad on a popular site. She announced: “Healthy young woman ready to offer you her organ(s) in order to buy a car. Willing to sell any part as long as I still can drive thereafter. Contact me and let us talk.” She listed her phone number and e-mail address.

I wondered if she was just bluffing. Perhaps she was. On the other hand, she was such a hothead that for a damned car she might not hesitate to sell a kidney, or a cornea, or a piece of her liver. I couldn’t help but call her names while rubbing my forehead.

I had to do something right away. Someone might take advantage of the situation and sign a contract with her. She was my only sibling—if she messed up her life, there would be nobody to care for our old parents. If I had lived near them, I might have called her bluff, but now there was no way out. I wrote her back: “All right, my idiot sister, I will lend you $10,000. Remove your ad from the website. Now!”

In a couple of minutes she returned: “Thank you! Gonna take it off right away. I know you’re the only person I can rely on in the whole world.”

I responded: “I will lend you the money I made by working my ass off. You must pay it back within two years. I have kept a hard copy of our email exchanges, so do not assume you can write off the loan.”

She came back: “Got it. Have a nice dream, sister!” She added a smile sign.

“Get out of my face!” I muttered.

If only I could shut her out of my life for a few weeks. If only I could go somewhere for some peace and quiet.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307378683
• ISBN 13: 9780307378682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256