Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Where is home when no one understands you?

Chia-Chia Lin, a graduate of Harvard College, has an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Henfield Prize, an annual award of $10,000 to a graduate fiction writing student. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. 

Her novel, The Unpassingpublished in May 2019, is up for a First Novel Prize at the Center for Fiction in New York City. It is so superior it raises in my mind an impossible question: How will she be able to write a second novel of equal—or higher—quality? Rather than fret over the unanswerable, however, we can take pleasure in The Unpassing we have in hand.

Lin's first-person narrator is ten-year-old Gavin, the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan who speak Chinese and Taiwanese at home. He has an older sister Pei-Pei, a younger sister Ruby, and a younger brother Natty. They live thirty miles outside Anchorage, Alaska, in a decaying house that stands by itself at the end of a gravel drive. "We had lived briefly in Michigan," says Gavin, "but my father had lost his job as a wastewater engineer. He mistimed our move to Southcentral Alaska; we could prove only five months of residence instead of six, and so we missed the first and largest payout from the Permanent Fund . . . which would have meant five thousand dollars." 

The mistimed move is just one of their father's problematic decisions. The five thousand dollars would have been manna to the family which, in the course of the novel, is evicted from their house. (Two weeks later they return to squat in it). When the book begins, Gavin and his classmates have been following the goings-on of Christa McAuliffe. The Challenger launch would be broadcast in class, but the day before Gavin comes home from school feeling sick. At home he roughhouses with Ruby and Natty . . . and falls asleep. He wakes up a week later. He has recovered from meningitis; Ruby has not.

"What happens when young children grieve a sibling?" writes Ruth Lefave in a Rumpus blog. "How do bereaved parents nurture their surviving children? Where is home when no one understands you? Even as Lin’s book explores these devastating questions, her magnificent prose builds an unflinching and ultimately endearing portrait of each character."

Lin does it by showing the characters interacting with each other and with outsiders and with the landscape. It is clear from the first page Gavin is writing as an adult: "During an uneventful part of my childhood, my mother walked into the room with a plate of loose, washed grapes. She collapsed." Gavin and his sister Pei-Pei who watch the grapes roll across the floor do nothing. When a minute later their mother sits up, she says angrily, "I was testing you. Why were you just sitting there? Why didn't you call for the ambulance? What kind of children have I raised? Tell me, do you want to be orphans?" It sets a tone for the entire book.

Gavin is trying to make sense of the world. Adults do things he does not understand although readers do. He makes the mistakes a ten-year-old would make. He loves his mother and father, Pei-Pei, Ruby, and Natty, even when he can be oblivious and when, to me at least, they are not lovable. The Unpassing's story at heart is simple: Ruby dies, the family struggles to stay afloat economically, the parents separate,  Gavin, Pei-Pei, Natty, and their mother leave Alaska. Lin, however, somehow manages to make this story engaging, dramatic, and compelling. 

She does this, of course, is through incident. detail, and language: "Ruby never stayed in her own bed; there was movement in these deep nigh hours. She drifted between our bed like a vagrant, favoring my parents' and Natty's. But once in a while she crawled under the covers with me. In the dark, she rooted in the folds of fabric; her fingers whittled upward. We held hands under my pillow, and within seconds we were out."

Here is Gavin holding Natty, "His fingers would not curl around mine, but he allowed me to hold his fist. For a long time I clutched it, the end of a livelier, the last tangible evidence I was not alone. I wiped my palms one at a time, transferring his fits between my hands. I felt like I was cradling a peeled egg. In the dark the stairs seemed steep, a tremendous way to fall."

When the Rumpus interviewer asked Lin what she's working on now, she said, "I can tell you what it’s not: narrated by a child, set in or near wilderness, a story about immigrants. I hope it will be funny. I’m also thinking about plot, for once. Basically, I want it to be as different from this book as possible." I look forward to it.