A Good Fall: Stories [Hardcover]

Ha Jin (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 24, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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From Booklist

*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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; Complete Numbers Starting with 1, 1st Ed edition (November 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307378683
• ISBN-13: 978-0307378682
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.7 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #711,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Portrait of the Immigrant Day-to-Day Struggle... December 5, 2009

By D. Kanigan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book has twelve short stories set in Flushing, one of New York's largest Chinese immigrant communities. Author traverses the anxieties and struggles of the immigrants - some young (Monk down on his luck), some old (grandparents despised by Americanized grandchildren), some rich (professionals) and some dirt poor working in sweatshops and as prostitutes. This is not a soothing or uplifting book - but a real gritty portrait of the day-to-day Asian immigrant struggles with assimilation into American life - the loneliness of being without family back home - the hardship of making a living and learning the language - the yearning of finding someone to love.

Unlike other immigrant readings - you won't find them trashing America or wishing to go back home due to the hardship. These immigrants knuckle down and survive - they grind it out in the chase of the American dream - yet can't quite let go of their life back home.

Author has a smooth writing style. I found myself remarkably engaged in the conversational style prose and its captivating simplicity. Jin has an innate ability to capture the details of the living conditions of the characters in each of the stories along with a rich imagery of the neighborhoods. If I had any criticism of the collection of stories, is that their conclusions are often too abrupt and fall off a cliff while others are too contrived - in both cases I was left wanting for a more finessed, nuanced or insightful ending.

I particularly enjoyed the following passages:

"Certainly I wouldn't lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball--nothing would come back."

"At our ages--my wife is sixty-three and I'm sixty-seven--and at this time it's hard to adjust to life here. In America it feels as if the older you are, the more inferior you grow."

"We haven't practiced division and multiplication this year, so I'm not familiar with them anymore." He offered that as an excuse. There was no way I could make him understand that once you learned something, you were supposed to master it and make it part of yourself. That's why we say knowledge is wealth. You can get richer and richer by accumulating it within."

"He still felt for this woman. Somehow he couldn't drive from his mind her image behind the food stand, her face steaming with sweat and her eyes downcast in front of customers while her knotted hands were packing snacks into Styrofoam boxes."

He remembered that when he was taking the entrance exam fourteen years back, his parents had stood in the rain under a shared umbrella, waiting for him with a lunch tin, sodas, and tangerines wrapped in a handkerchief. They each had half a shoulder soaked through. Oh, never could he forget their anxious faces. A surge of gratitude drove him to the brink of tears. If only he could speak freely to them again."

"Rusheng, you worry too much," Molin jumped in, combing his dyed yellow hair with his fingers. "Look at me--I've never had a full-time job, but I'm still surviving, breathing like everyone else. You should learn how to take it easy and enjoy life."

"Without the past, how can we make sense of now?" "I've come to believe that one has to get rid of the past to survive. Dump your past and don't even think about it, as if it never existed." "How can that be possible? Where did you get that stupid idea?" "That is the way I want to live, the only way to live."

"You can always change. This is America, where it's never too late to turn over a new page. That's why my parents came here."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars finely crafted stories speak of the immigrant experience January 17, 2010

By P. J. Owen

Format:Hardcover

This book was given to me as a gift from a friend who I had shared my love of Ha Jin's great novel `Waiting' with. Interestingly, as much as I loved `Waiting', I had never picked up anything else by him! So I was excited to start in on this new collection of short stories.

There are two things that stand out in this work. First is just the pure craft of it. These are exquisitely crafted stories. Jin is an English professor, after all, but the quality of this writing transcends that of the quality to be expected of any old English professor. It is that of a craftsman who has harnessed a great talent to the extent that the work seems effortless. (I'm sure it's not, but that just confirms my point.) His sentences are crisp and business-like, but not at all dull. In fact they almost crackle off the page. It's this blend of traits that makes this, or any other writing, so good.

Second, Jin writes movingly of the experience of the Chinese immigrant in America. The difficulties and hardships these people endure throughout the collection give us an almost instantaneous sympathy for the characters, even ones who aren't all that nice. `Children as Enemies' is about an old couple who are terrorized by their Americanized grandchildren. In `Temporary Love' we see the fall-out of being a `war-time' couple', or men and women who cohabitate in the States pretending to be married while waiting for their real spouses to come from China. In `A Good Fall', a monk is pushed to extreme measures when his `master' kicks him out of his temple, penniless, and without having paid him a penny for his work. Each story, whether they center on this theme or not, uses a different component of it in some way.

My favorites were `A Composer and his Parakeet', in which a composer reaches his inner self while baby-sitting a parakeet; `The Beauty' in which a jealous husband investigates his wife for cheating and finds that she's deceiving him in a way he could have never imagined; and `The English Professor' in which an anxious professor up for tenure re-evaluates his career choices and goes through a mini-mid-life crisis.

But there really isn't a bad story here. I highly recommend this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superlative! January 21, 2010

By Cary B. Barad

Format:Hardcover

This is one of the best short story collections to be published recently. It is comprised of highly literate, yet down-to-earth tales of enchanting, humorous, thoughtful and infuriating characters who will undoubtedly provide readers with much enjoyment and many insights into human nature. The "exotic" quality of a large but little known ethnic group (Chinese-Americans and immigrants) adds to the learning experience. Very well done and highly recommended.