A Good Fall by Ha Jin
(Hardcover: Pantheon Books, November 2009; Paperback: Vintage, October 2010)
Jessica Wang
If people recognize the name of my hometown, Flushing, Queens, they usually recall that Fran Drescher, aka “The Nanny,” is also from there. A couple of people have even expressed relief that I don’t share her accent. As you could imagine, I’d love to have another cultural reference to use when speaking of my hometown, and I wouldn’t mind it being Ha Jin’s short story collection A Good Fall. The individual stories are subtle yet captivating, and are all the more powerful when considered up against the other stories in the collection.
A Good Fall focuses on the Chinese immigrant experience in Flushing, which is New York City’s second-largest Chinatown. The characters of the twelve stories are young, middle-aged and old, male and female, and vary in how much they’ve become acclimated with their new home. The first story, “The Bane of the Internet,” establishes that the collection is very much about the modern day immigrant experience. The protagonist, a woman who left her sister behind in China, initially rejoices when she and her sister begin to correspond via e-mail. She soon discovers, however, the downside to the more frequent exchanges. The narrator’s bluntness is amusing, and makes it clear that A Good Fall isn’t going to romanticize anything: “Certainly I wouldn’t lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball—nothing would come back.”
Maybe it’s because it follows the bluntness of “The Bane of the Internet,” but it’s hard not to be charmed by the second story in the collection, “A Composer and His Parakeets.” The title character of the story becomes attached to his actress girlfriend’s pet parakeet when she leaves to film a movie. Out of all the stories in the collection, “A Composer and His Parakeets” is the quietest and the least dramatic, but its tenderness holds the reader’s attention.
Just as “A Composer and His Parakeets” balances the blunt narrative voice of “The Bane of the Internet,” other stories balance each other. The narrator of “Children as Enemies,” an elderly man who has immigrated to live with his son’s family, bemoans his grandchildren’s decision to change their names so that they sound more “American.” On its own, the story seems too familiar: ungrateful youngsters, long-suffering elders. But the next story in the collection, “In the Crossfire,” flips the situation. The protagonist of this story, with whom the readers sympathize, struggles to keep peace between his mother, recently arrived from China, and his wife, who is of Chinese heritage but is Americanized. The antagonistic character in the story is the more traditional mother, a reversal from the previous story. Likewise, the consecutive stories “Shame” and “An English Professor” both deal with Chinese professors of English literature (who may be stand-ins for Jin, currently a Boston University professor), though the point-of-view employed in “Shame” is of a former student, while the narrator-protagonist of “An English Professor” is the professor himself.
There’s one notable imbalance in A Good Fall, however. Jin’s male characters tend to be wonderfully complex, such as the composer in “A Composer and His Parakeets,” the monk in the title story who attempts suicide when threatened with deportation, and the protagonist in “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry” who befriends his three prostitute housemates. Even a secondary male character in “Temporary Love” surprises readers when he does not fly into a jealous rage over his wife’s infidelity, but manipulates her guilt to his advantage. But other than the female home health aide who is the protagonist of “A Pension Plan,” Jin’s female characters seem closer to stock characters. This is most apparent in “In the Crossfire,” with the overbearing mother and the none-too-supportive wife, but the issue also exists in other stories.
Still, Jin is mostly successful at showing that the immigrant experience, with fellow immigrants and Asian Americans and with Flushing itself, is a varied and complicated one. Flushing’s place in our cultural imagination isn’t going to rival Manhattan—which is what many people think of when they think of New York City—anytime soon. But with its multidimensional representation of Flushing and understated but good stories, A Good Fall can hold its head up high.
Jessica Wang is currently a MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a family memoir. She received her BFA in Writing from Emerson College.