Character Sketches: Shenzheners

Shenzheners by Xue Yiwei

Linda Meith Publishing Inc. 

Pp. 176

Considered to be the Chinese Dubliners – the dedication is “To the Irishman who inspires me” – this is a collection of short stories about the people who live in Shenzhen. The young city of Shenzhen has grown astronomically to become a major metropolitan centre; a city in which everyone is a newcomer. The author writes of teachers, taxi drivers, dramatists and peddlers; we see their relationships with their family members and their environment. The prose is crisp and sparse, accompanied by simple but expressive line drawings by Chinese illustrator Cai Gao.

The blurb on the back of the book jacket claims it is, “The first book in English by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei) but on the front are the words, “Translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk”, and the acknowledgments at the end refer to “translator Darry Sterk, who has turned the original Chinese into elegant English with the skill of a magician.” The different spelling of the name may be an unfortunate typo, but the whole thing is a little confusing, especially because language and pronunciation play such a big part in the stories.

Translation battles continue between characters; “I said it was a straightforward line. I couldn’t think of a need to translate it any other way.” The unnamed, omniscient narrator considers their words carefully when describing The Dramatist. “The neighbours called him a weirdo. But I felt that weird was the wrong word for him. From the start, I felt that eccentric would be more apt.” In other stories, specifics of pronunciation place a person in a strict class hierarchy. “Most of my classmates had worse pronunciation than mine, not to mention my teacher, a lady for whom even vowels were a challenge.”

There are aspects of the Chinese culture that are specific to the place, although they are not always remarked upon. One character casually notes, “I reached under my bed to retrieve the envelope with my yearly allowance, which Chinese children receive every Chinese New Year.” We recognise the element of childhood competition in everything from reading and swimming to mastering languages, maths or chess. One character reminisces, “I was a prodigy the whole city had taken note of. I was the apple of my parents’ eye and the centre of public and media attention. I was a role model, and example other parents held up when assessing their own children, a pair of exceptional coordinates on the grid of achievement.”

Most of these characters are male, and the ones who are female are sketchy. The Taxi Driver reflects, “He had never much cared about the expression on his daughter’s face, or about her existence. He was the same with his wife. He’d never imagined that they might cease to exist.”

Apparently The Dramatist had once written a one-act play about a city bus stop. There were no protagonists in the play, just people arriving and departing, as they did every day. He said that he wanted to express the absurdity of life by means of repeated departures and arrivals.” The city bus-stop may be the perfect metaphor for this collection of stories – we only see the outlines of the characters as the stories are remote and distant as if in this society of digital hyper-connectivity, no one knows anyone else at all.

Shenzhen: the tech capital of the world

Simply Exhausting: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Scribner

Pp. 270

Writer David Nicholls has described this Pulitzer-prize-winning book (in a quote printed on the cover) as “An extraordinarily rich and detailed portrait of both a marriage and a community.” And he’s right. Similar to Lake Woebegone Days or Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café, it is the story of the village – the inhabitants; the relationships; the gossip and the surprises – told in a gentle, meandering style. But it is also nostalgic and elegiac in tone (reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine with focus on crucial social networks being actual rather than just virtual, particularly in our post-lock-down world) while melancholy and loneliness are achingly prominent.

Olive is a retired schoolteacher, married to Henry, who used to be a pharmacist, and with a strained relationship with her son who didn’t turn out to fit into the mould she had made for him. Opinions range among the community, and people view them differently. Olive is probably a Highly Sensitive Person, based on her reaction to stimulus. She understands the needs and motivations of others although when it comes to her own actions, she is not always so self-aware.

Set in the town of Crosby, Maine, the landscape plays a Hardyesque part in the characters’ feelings and experiences. Autumnal colours are encouraging: “It was early September and the maples were red at their tops; a few bright red leaves had fallen onto the dirt road, perfect things, star-shaped.” Winter hues are not: “The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.”

The novel comprises thirteen short stories that are interrelated but discontinuous in terms of narrative, although the community is everything to itself. Throughout the community, the school and the church remain as focal points, which could be considered both good and bad in a current climate. One character reads in the newspaper, “They were making a film about the towers going down. It seemed to him he should have some opinion about this, but he didn’t know what to think. When had he stopped having opinions on things?” Among the stories, told in the third person free-indirect style (where the language takes on the aspect of the character), there is a funeral reception for adulterous husband, a hostage-taking in a hospital, an anorexic girl spurned by her boyfriend, and an alcoholic lounge pianist reeling from a toxic relationship. The inhabitants of another house only go out at night to preserve their privacy after a family tragedy.

Parochial and insular, the novel is not about global events or political or social issues, but personal battles with nostalgia and loneliness. One of the characters connects music with memories of the past and realises, “She had never liked music. It seemed to bring back all the shadows and aches of a lifetime.” Olive struggles with an introverted/ extroverted personality familiar to many. “She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.”

If there is a message – and I’m not sure that there is – it is to cherish the moment and be ‘present’ but not in a pumped-up-business-speak way. “Life was a gift – one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren’t just moments, they were gifts.” Olive knows that “loneliness can kill people” and she divides her life into what she thinks of a ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts’, considering that one needs a balance of the two.

Not all of the characters are likeable – not even Olive, who connects them all – but they all have hopes and dreams, at least in the beginning. There are hints of hopefulness towards the end of the novel, but it is overwhelmingly a little bleak and defeatist. As Olive sums it up, “Dying. Not dying. Either way, it tires you out.”

A Stranger Comes to Town

Astray by Emma Donoghue

(Picador)

Emma Donoghue’s collection of fifteen short stories is all about changing situations; leaving places and immigration. In her afterword she explains, “By long tradition, Irish writers emigrate. Not always, of course, not nowadays – but still, many of us fly the coop. It’s a small island, after all. It’s rare to find Irish writers who haven’t spent at least a few years abroad or who don’t pass half of their time at foreign universities.”

Whether it is the elephant handler in Man and Boy who has to take his charge from a zoo in England to a performing circus in America, or the woman in The Widow’s Cruse who pretends her husband is dead and presents his will, allowing her to come into a fortune and emigrate as a widow; all of these characters explore new worlds. 

All of these people, and they are usually women, remain outcasts in their new country. In Last Supper at Browns a white woman in Texas kills her abusive husband and goes on the run with her slave. In The Long Way Home a nomadic woman returns straying husbands to their wives who are trying to raise their families.

A man is tortured by paranoid hallucinations in The Lost Seed, and accuses others of lewd acts in a puritan community (Cape Cod 1639) in which he is despised. A boy becomes a ‘man’ in The Hunt when he is forced to rape a girl he has befriended as a casualty of war. Emma Donoghue explains the dual meaning of her collection: “Straying has always had a moral meaning as well as a geographical one, and the two are connected. If your ethical compass is formed by the place you grow up, which way will its needle swing when you’re far from home?”

All of the tales are based on true records, whether from diaries, letters, or newspaper cuttings, from the bunch of counterfeiters whose party is infiltrated by an undercover agent when they break into Lincoln’s tomb in The Body Swap, to the woman in The Gift who gives her child into what she thinks of as foster care until she can afford to support her, but meanwhile the family with whom she is placed adopt her as their own. No one wins in this heartbreaking situation, told through letters to the agency from both sides.

Emma Donoghue explores all these disparate tales and draws them together with themes of belonging, alienation and difference. Everyone is a traveller through life; we are all a little bit strange; and we all deserve compassion and to grant it to others. We may all be straying sheep, biblical or black, but hopefully there is a welcoming fold for all of us.

Friday Five: Short Stories

The announcement of Alice Munro as the recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature has caused a minor flurry of interest as she is known pedominantly as a writer of short stories. Short stories are often considered the poor cousin in literary fiction, although many authors of full-length novels also excel at this discipline.

Meanwhile, the shortlist for the eighth annual BBC national short story award is comprised entirely of female authors. The chair of judges, Mariella Fostrup, suggests that the format is 'suited to the innovative brilliance of female writers'. This is clearly a contentious comment designed to create controversy. A such, it is not far removed from the patronising notion that women write short stories because they can only a snatch an hour here and there between rearing children and cleaning houses and their poor little brains can't cope with anything on too grand a scale.

When living in New Zealand, I read a lot of Kiwi short stories and I liked very few. The problem from my perspective was that they weren't actually stories with beginnings, middles and ends. One author stated she preferred to think of them as 'short fictions' as she felt the 'structured semantics of storytelling were tyrannous and restrictive'. In this case, you are not writing a story. At best, what you have is a poem; at worst, a creative writing exercise. Suffice to say there is much debate as to what defines a short story.

A good short story is a good short story, no matter who writes it. When I was a child I was incredibly impressed by Oscar Wilde's fairytales, Aesop's fables, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and Enid Blyton's accounts of pixies and goblins. I read my way through stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood. I progresed to Greek mythology and the Bible.

My parents gave me a book of Saki's short stories to read as a young woman: I can't thank them enough. Edgar Allan Poe tortured my nights and expanded my mind. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her tale of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' exposed me to an empathetic world I had never previously imagined. There are so many short stories that left lasting impressions, but I will attempt a truncated list.

5 Favourite Short Story Writers:

1. Roald Dahl - going from his children's stories to his adult shorts was a revelation. I haven't touched royal jelly since.
2. Alice Walker - her world is not my world, but she welcomes me in through her short stories.
3. Stephen King - his stories are so well constructed and the format suits the horror genre.
4. Edith Wharton - similar to the above, the glimpse of ghosts in her short stories are tantalisingly terrifying
5. Jon McGregor - earlier this year I read This Isn't the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You: it was the best collection of short stories I have read in a long time.

One of Laura Beckman's illustrations for Roald Dahl's Royal Jelly