Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates

Imagine, if you can, what it would be like to find yourself in a new country, unable to speak the language, unable in some deep sense to ever be at home, and yet to realize at the same time that what was your home is now closed off to you forever. This is just the condition that six year old Su-Jen and her mother find themselves in when they immigrate to a small Canadian town in 1957. Su-Jen’s father has lived in Canada most of his adult life, having arrived before the second World War to do whatever work the lo fons (white ghost people) would not do, and send money back home to his family in China. Unable to return to China or to get his family out when the Japanese invade China, he returns home after the war just long enough to marry for a second time, this time to a woman who has lost her husband in the war, both of them with children from their previous marriages. The above description is just a sketch of the complicated circumstances and family tangles described in Judy Fong Bates' novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café.

In many ways this book is very plainly, even simply written. I have become so spoiled by the intricate word-weaving of so many wonderful writers that I almost skipped over this little book after giving it the rather cursory fifty to a hundred page trial I give to most books that do not immediately grab my attention. I had read other books about Chinese immigrants in both Canada and the U.S.; I understood something about how difficult it would be to be a child suspended between two worlds, expected to succeed in a new language, a new world, expected to accommodate, even to be assimilated into the new culture, and yet also expected to remain true to the values of another time and place. Maxine Hong Kingston in Woman Warrior had given me some sense of how it would be to live in that tension between two worlds, expected to belong to both. But what Fong Bates does in this novel is to bring the reader closer to an understanding of what it must have been like for the parents of such children to, in a real sense, sacrifice their own lives in order to make a new life possible for their children.

Even while in China, Su-Jen’s mother marries for a second time to a much, much older husband not out of love nor even out of a need for companionship, but in order to provide for her son from a previous marriage. She then convinces her new husband that he must return to Canada while he still can when the new Communist government begins to make it more and more difficult for citizens to immigrate, deciding not to tell him about his child she is carrying, fearing that he will then refuse to leave. Finally, almost seven years later, she follows him. This move, too, not for herself, but for her daughter, Su-Jen. Had the two remained in Toronto, with family who had immigrated before her, at least there would have been a sizable community of Chinese with whom the mother could communicate, talk with about home, commiserate with about the hateful lo fans, but instead she is immediately whisked away to a tiny town, Irvine, fifty miles outside Toronto where the only other Chinese people are her husband and his brother who have bought and now run the café. Su-Jen will go to school in Canada, will learn the language quickly. As she says, “I played, thought, and dreamed in the language of the lo fans.” But her mother insists that she is too old to learn a new language. “Whenever she talked about happy times, they were during her childhood in that distant land.”

In the café, they make food for white people that they, themselves, would never eat—not only the egg rolls and bland chow meins and other so-called Chinese food, but French-fries and club sandwiches, big slabs of beef and mashed potatoes. And only after all the customers leave, after they close for the night, do they prepare for themselves the food that their customers never see.

But while her mother protects her from the insults and bullying of the sei gew doys (dead ghost kids), exhorts her to stay away from the poison food that they eat and the money they waste on worthless toys, nevertheless everyone in her family realizes that it is the lo fans who have the money and the power.

The adults in my family were always comparing Chinese people to lo fons. While we made fun of them, we all knew how powerful they were; they were the ones who lived in houses with backyards and drove cars. They were the important people in town, the teachers, the policeman, and the doctors.

And although in one breath her mother would show her contempt for the ghost children, she could in the next say, “Su-Jen, she is almost a hoo sung, a Canadian-born. She speaks like she was born here and she reads many thick books.”

Difficult, indeed, to be caught between two worlds, admired because of her success among the lo fans, and yet criticized for abandoning the values of her own people. But worse for her mother who exclaims over and over, “I’d be better off in China fighting for my life, here I just die a slow death.” Although still a beautiful and relatively young woman, in this small town her mother is simply the Chink’s wife, and if her beauty is ever noticed or remarked on, it is only by drunk lo fans who see her as a sexual object. Because of her mastery of English, Su-Jen sees and hears what her parents do not, hears her father called Charley, and burns with shame at the wide smile he gives in response.

When I was a child living in Irvine, I had wanted so much to have what other children had: piano lessons, to be sent to camp, to be taken on a holiday, all things that cost money. I thought my parents gave me so little. It has taken many years for me to realize how wrong I was, to understand the depth of their sacrifices.

At the time I was blind to how they tried to protect me in what must have been for them an alien world ... For my mother the act of living here was in itself an act of love, my mother had given up her own life out of love for me ....

When Su-Jen, at about twelve or thirteen, asks her father how he can stand the daily insults from his customers, the grinding hard work that never seems to get them ahead, his response is simple, “I tell myself that this is not my home. They are not my people.”

I have not yet mentioned that besides the difficulties for this family living always as strangers in a strange land, there were also secrets—secrets that Su-Jen could tell to no one, not even her best friends. I don’t intend to tell you those secrets; you must read the book to discover them, but the secrets add another layer of meaning to this novel, and to the bitterness her parents, especially her mother, had to swallow daily.

To the people in Irvine, we must have seemed the perfect immigrant family. We were polite, hard-working, unthreatening, and we kept to ourselves. As far as the townsfolk were concerned, there was nothing about us that would upset the moral and social order that presided over them. Even when things started to go wrong, we blended so seamlessly into their everyday life, we remained invisible.

You must read the book in order to discover the secret. Once I gave this story a chance, allowed the plain language to accomplish its understated ends, I literally raced through the second half of the book. I’m glad I stayed with it; I think you will feel the same if you read it.

Pearl by Mary Gordon

“Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation which is one of the most passionate forms of love.” This is Mary Gordon, quoting George Sand, and talking to all of us from her perch at the end of the 20th century about the strange and frightening world she finds herself in. Mary Gordon is always an incredible writer, but at least for this reader, the content of her novels is uneven, sometimes profound, sometimes merely heart-wrenching, but always with close attention to human relationships and questions of how we ought to live. Gordon’s latest novel, Pearl, is one of her great ones. If there are no answers in it, at least there is a long, agonizing list of questions about where we are and where we are to go from here.

This novel begins with Pearl, a young American-Cambodian woman just over twenty who has chained herself to the American Embassy in Ireland, careful to have starved herself almost to death before setting the cuffs and chains in place, and knowing precisely how long the combination of dehydration and starvation will take to finish off the bit of life left in her.

When you have decided you will die—which is a different thing from knowing that you want to die and different, too, from the idea that you no longer want to live—when you’ve come to that point, nothing is difficult. You are in love with your own lightness. You grow radiant to yourself. Transparent. You can take in anything and nothing can be taken from you.

This is who I am.

But this is really only the backdrop, the hook the author uses to draw us into her examination of the last seventy-five years or so. Once she has told us about Pearl, about just how close to death she is, she leaves Pearl there, chained and half delirious, and begins to fill us in on the history that has brought Pearl to this place at this time. And not just the history of Pearl, the daughter of Maria, whose Jewish father converted to Catholicism and began a successful business selling religious relics, but also of Joseph, whose father left one afternoon to buy cigarettes and never came back—leaving behind the unlovely, Polish immigrant girl Marie who had been his ticket out of Poland via an arranged marriage. Of course he also leaves behind his two year old son, another encumbrance he no longer needs, and thus Joseph’s mother becomes servant and housekeeper to the relatively well off Seymour Meyers, whose wife has died suddenly leaving him to care for Maria. Joseph and Maria grow up together, almost brother and sister, and due to the generosity of Seymour, even go off to university together to lead quite different lives, bound by their pasts, and even more by their mutual love of Pearl.

In fact, this is an incredibly complex novel, in terms of both characters and events. I see the novel as nothing short of Gordon’s almost frantic attempt to remind us of the bloody wars of her own lifetime—of Viet Nam and Cambodia, of Ireland, of the lingering horrors of World War II. As I read this novel, I could not help but be reminded of Carol Shield’s final novel before her death, Unless, in which she has a young girl resign herself to a life on a street-corner of Toronto, sitting speechless, day after day, a sign around her neck with a single word emblazoned on it, GOODNESS. In that novel, too, the frantic mother and father try so desperately to understand their daughter’s act, wanting so badly to save her, to understand what could have brought her to such desperate resignation. I am convinced that both Shields and Gordon are using the symbolic acts of the two girls to try not only to shout a warning, but to make some sense out of where we are and what we might do to change the world we find ourselves in. I can’t remember which feminist it was who responded to Kate Chopin’s novel, Awakening, in which the apparently well-off woman and mother ends by walking into the sea by saying, “No Kate, the answer is not walking into the sea.” Indeed not, but then what is one to do?

In the novel I am discussing today, Gordon uses a technique often condemned by critics, that of an omniscient author, a narrator who sits on the sidelines, interrupting the stories of the various characters to tell the reader what is really going on, to fill in on all that the characters don’t tell us, or don’t know, or don’t want to remember. I think the technique works very well here. I find myself much more interested in Gordon’s take on the world than on the little story she is telling, and if the story of Pearl is just a hook the author uses to reel us into her commentary, that is fine with me; I can use her wisdom, her insights, her skillful questioning. I don’t mind the hook.

Besides the political reminders Gordon gives us, of what happened in Cambodia after the U.S. left Viet Nam, of the bombings and madness in Ireland and England over the past twenty years, the ghettos on fire in this country, she also has so much to tell us about religious orthodoxy, about the phenomenology of religious life. At one point the omniscient narrator remarks, “It has occurred to me that sometimes a story is more a tone than a tale.” Yes, and this novel is much more a tone than a tale. The tone is one of oppression, of chains either real or symbolic. We hear of a young girl from a fiercely orthodox Jewish community who is, though reluctantly, allowed to go to college in order to come back to her community as a teacher of music. But while away, she falls in love with the music of Bach, who her family and community see only as the musician loved by the Nazis, and not only does she love Bach’s music, she yearns to perform it, in spite of the fact that her orthodox family thinks it a grievous sin for a woman to sing in front of men. When she finally announces her perversion, insists that she will listen to Bach, will sing publicly, she is disowned; they sit shiva for her, declare her dead to them now as a daughter.

But, of course, Gordon does not reserve her critique of religion to Judaism, she also understands on a deep and lived level the sort of shame that Catholicism can engender. Poor Joseph, after the Buddhist monks in Vietnam set themselves on fire to protest the war there, cannot sleep for nights. He feels the flames, and yet is too frightened to protest, fearful of losing his scholarship. And his misery is intensified by the sexual longing he has for Devorah, the Jewish girl who loves Bach, “…he is aroused and full of self-hate for his arousal,” his guilt about his sexual longings merging with his guilt about the war. He and Devorah both live a sort of religious crisis “which is not fashionable to be having in the bloody smoke-filled autumn of 1968. Maritn Luther King has been shot, Robert Kennedy has been shot, Vietnam is on fire, the ghettos are burning; who can be thinking about religious crisis?” But if Gordon is critical of religion, of the needless guilt and shame it induces, she also understands the benefits of religious community. Like Iris Murdoch, another writer-intellectual who finds that morality, itself, requires her to abandon the religion she was raised with, she sees the ways in which it is an abandoning of family, of community values. And she finds herself at times of desperation wondering about the urge to pray. Like Murdoch, Gordon seems finally to think that what we need is prayer without god, “even when you are not a believer, when you’ve staked your life on having left belief, in the name of justice, in the name of truth.”

There is so much in this book; I have only barely scratched the surface. This is Mary Gordon at her very best; if you read nothing else of hers, read this one.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

If you have read any of my reviews in the past, you probably realize that once I find an author I like, I tend to read up all of their work pretty quickly, or at least read them until I think I have learned from them what I can. This has definitely been the case with the intriguing and troubling author, Mary Gaitskill. I have talked to you before about her two collections of short stories and her recent novel, Veronica; today I am going to talk about her other novel published in 1991, Two Girls, Fat and Thin.

Some of my reader friends who have taken my advice and read Gaitskill have returned the books to me, often only partially read, asking me again just why I have thought her important enough as an author to recommend her to others. Yes, they have agreed, she is a wonderful user of the language; yes, she does come up with metaphors that are striking, surprising, sometimes beautiful (though in a distorted or twisted way). Yes, she certainly describes well what life must be like for some young, beautiful girls/women who get sucked up into the world of modeling and/or the sex trade. Yes, she provides a window into the lives of young street kids in New York City and San Francisco. But her characters are often so sad, the lives she describes often so bleak and desperate, and with so little suggestion about how things can be made better. Defending her to one such skeptical friend, I pointed out that she tells us so much about how sado-masochism plays into the sexual lives of some people and how our knee-jerk rejections of all forms of S&M are blind and misinformed. Perhaps, he agreed, but she seems to go on and on with her descriptions, and one can only take so much of such stuff or learn from it. What is her point in the continuing descriptions? How is the information she gives us helpful or hopeful?

Certainly, as I read Two Girls, Fat and Thin the above questions returned to me over and over. I almost put the book down early, but could not quite do it. USA Today calls the book “darkly, erotically compelling,” and another commentator talks of Gaitskill’s “brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace.” I can’t say I see the book as erotic, but I certainly see the acid, and I certainly see the grace. She is a stunningly honest writer, holding nothing back—not bad language, not rather horrific scenes.

As in Veronica, this is book about a relationship between two women, one who is slim and beautiful, the other fat and intentionally unstylish. The women, at least on the surface, seem to be about as unlike as any two people can be, and yet there is a kind of alliance that forms between them. Both have been sexually molested as children, and their sexuality has formed out of that molestation. The immediate cause of their meeting is a shared interest in a controversial intellectual, Anna Granite, who is quite obviously based on the equally controversial Ayn Rand. Dorothy, the fat and unlovely woman who finds a kind of salvation in the works of Granite, and in fact comes to work for Granite as a kind of secretary, answers an ad placed by the younger, beautiful Justine Shade who is a writer wanting to write an article about the once famous but now almost forgotten Anna Granite.

Once we are introduced to the two main characters, the novel proceeds in alternating chapters to tell us about the childhoods of the two lead characters, and only at novel’s end are their separate stories brought together, again via their mutual interests in Anna Granite.

The first time I wrote this piece, I felt obliged at this point to go off on a critique of Ayn Rand and the naïve and pernicious form of selfishness that she endorsed. But this novel is not really about Rand; it is about the odd bond that forms between these two women as a result of their shared interest in the Rand-like character. What Gaitskill seems to realize and wants to point out, and what I had never noticed in my earlier readings of Rand, is that for the fifties and sixties when Rand’s work became famous, there is a rather strong feminist current in her work. Rand urged women not to see themselves simply as extensions of their men or of their families. Her female characters are at least as strong and authentic as her male characters; it is not surprising that women who had been abused by their fathers, their husbands and boyfriends found a message of hope and strength in Rand. Women are not simply the helpmates of men, are not simply to be used by men; it is not a virtue for women to submerge themselves in the needs of others. Dorothy comes to see that a healthy sense of self-interest is not the same as selfishness, and that it may be a requirement for sanity, for salvation.

Indeed, when towards the end of the book, Dorothy rushes to Justine’s apartment to confront her about Justine’s rather scathing article on Anna Granite, she finds that the beautiful Justine is in many ways a victim of her beauty, of her sexual appeal for men, and that in truth she has no more real and caring friends than the dumpy Dorothy. In fact, Dorothy rescues Justine from an S&M scene that has gotten out of hand, and quite literally throws the man, naked and protesting, out of Justine’s apartment.

Then I realized she was crying. Tears dropped from her chin onto her folded hands, and she trembled small and hard. She sat erect and contained, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her robe and gulping discreetly. I didn’t comfort her because her body did not invite it. But I sat with my heart opened to her, feeling her heart mournfully opening to me, sending me the messages that can be received only by another heart, that which the intellect can never apprehend.

And so there is almost what you would call a happy ending to this novel, a kind of resolution in which these two quite different women open out to one another, see one another for the first time, see how each is in many ways simply acting out a life fashioned by her past. There is at least the hint of a budding friendship, a suggestion of a brighter and less lonely future for both.

I still can’t be sure what I’m getting from Gaitskill, and yet I know if she publishes again, I will read what she has written. Her voice is very much here and now, and when her stuff is sad, it is a sadness of the here and now world we live in. I am glad to have heard her voice. I cannot shake the sense that I am learning something important from her.