Customer Reviews

A Good Fall: Stories

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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."

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.

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.

For the most part, recent Chinese immigrants are in the middle of a huge culture clash: Chinese tradition meets American consumer culture. Here is my overview with a star ranking for each story:

One. "The Bane of the Internet," a slight story about a woman's sister caught up in consumerism and enslaving herself to debt. Two stars.

Two. "A Composer and His Parakeets," a strong story about a man, a composer, hopelessly in love with an aspiring actress who is consumed by her career. He bonds more closely with his girlfriend's parakeet than he does with the woman of his dreams after his girlfriend charges him with baby-sitting the bird while she advances her acting profile, taking an overseas acting job. Five stars.

Three. "The Beauty," a strong, often funny and sad story about the self-destructiveness of jealousy and the trickery of images. Five stars.

Four. "Choice," a tormented love story about a tutor who falls in love with his student's mother. 5 stars.

Five. "Children as Enemies." A slight story, more of an exposition and monologue from a grandfather's point of view as he expresses his bitterness over the Americanization of his grandchildren. 3 stars.

Six. "In the Crossfire." A tormented marriage resulting from an imperious mother-in-law who imposes her Chinese traditions on her Americanized children. 5 stars.

Seven. "Shame." A young man befriends his former college professor who defects from China only to find that the professor is not as grand as the student once thought. Like "The Beauty," this story focuses on illusions and chimeras. Four stars.

Eight. "An English Professor." A slight, disappointing tale about the anxieties of getting tenure. Two stars.

Nine. "A Pension Plan." A caretaker has little money and must marry one of her senile patients just to survive. Like "A Good Fall," the story focuses on how poverty causes us to make desperate choices. Four stars.

Ten. "Temporary Love." A tormented love story about two Chinese immigrants committing adultery while being roommates while their spouses are still in China. Very strong. Five stars.

Eleven. "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry." A poor laborer falls in love with one of his roommates, a prostitute, and finds that he and she must face a serious dilemma. Five stars.

Twelve. "A Good Fall." A monk and kung fu trainer is being exploited almost to death by his boss and finds he must be born again in America to rise from the ashes. Five stars.

This book is a collection of short stories about Chinese immigrants and their new experience settling in New York. Some are relatively new transplants, while others have been in the US for many years. The process of immersing self into a new culture and place, while retaining cultural traditions and personal beliefs, is complex and bewildering to many of the characters.
The first compliment has to go to Ha Jin's prose: clear, clean and crisp. Each story is astonishing in its simplicity, deceivingly so. Because none of the stories and life experiences are simple. He writes beautifully, making you care for this odd mix of people so much with so few words. I appreciated how he didn't feel the need to over-explain the complications, he's expecting his readers to have some basic knowledge about Chinese culture. Yet he still adds nuances of depth to these characters so you come away with new understanding of them and their plight, both individually and collectively.
For example, the Chinese have the well known reputation for respecting their ancestors far more than the American norm. While assimilating into American culture, some walk a fine line between behaving like everyone else or staying close to their cultural heritage. It's not simple at all. An overbearing mother appears for the most part to be an obnoxious insertion into her son's life, yet she is behaving in the norm. What is fascinating is how he relates to her, trying to respect her and her value system while keeping the peace with his wife. In the end, he makes a painful choice, because the two cannot be blended. Grandparents clinging to their past battle with grandchildren who only see their future, and in the middle a couple try and maintain respect and reasonableness for both generations.
In "A Composer and His Parakeets", Fanlin finds that his new role as pet sitter for his girlfriend's parakeet has more depth and meaning than his relationship with her. He finds inspiration, as well as happiness and contentment, by simply caring for the small needs of the little pet. He realizes that just as she had pawned the bird off to him, soon she would leave him. As he composes, his work actually improves significantly as he can openly express himself and not hold back
"The Bane of the Internet" shows the suffering of a newly immigrated woman who has to deal with the ease of keeping in contact with her family back home, one she thought she had escaped. While I laughed at some of her plight, the reality of her complaint is all too true.
In "An English Professor", we watch a fully competent Chinese professor drive himself insane in his attempt to get tenure because he finds a typo in his application. The lengths he goes to in his desperation and pain, his paranoia and his lack of confidence are by turns humorous and tragic. Underlining it all is the intense drive to succeed and to save face, a theme that runs through many of the stories.
A few things surprised me. In immigrant communities, the newspaper business is still alive and well, a collection of news and trivia and anecdotal events that serve as background and a connection to culture. I found it fascinating that once immigrants have entered the US, they eagerly seek association with other immigrants from their past, even if these ones were not of their previous `class' structure (who they would never have sought out back home). Their focus on financial and social standing remains, yet they desire to gather as family members to interact in the old ways.
As I read, I kept thinking of the phrase "what to keep". Every single character in this has to make that decision, in small decisions and in large, in order to get what they wanted from the new land and remain faithful to their values. Ha Jin illuminates the complications and makes these lives and decisions of these ordinary people a fascinating chronicle of personal sacrifice.

Completely captures the struggles of Chinese immigrants. Masterful style in its simplicity and beauty. Real life drama without melodrama. Another great achievement for Ha Jin. More notable as he is a non native speaker of English.

This was the first time I purchased a book that was used. I chose almost new and it came like it was brand new. The book itself was very interesting and gave the reader a new prespective on immigration and how a person coming from china and moving to america adjusts to all the different cultural changes. The author wrote several short stories that were all cleaver and interesting.

My personal favorites were the title story, "A Good Fall," about a Buddhist monk's unimaginable struggles with poverty and injustice as a Chinese immigrant living in New York, and "A Composer and His Parakeets," in which a musician forms a funny, touching bond with a parakeet.
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Though I do not think this represents Ha Jin's best short fiction works, nevertheless it is a quality collection os stories about immigrant life in New York. Like other reviewers state: it is difficult to really imagine what that life is like without having lived it (as Ha Jin did). I recommend this as a great look into the reality that so many Asian immigrants must face every day. Bravo for telling us these tales.

Asian-American characters somewhat assimilated into American society. The stories and characters were believable, leaving you in some cases to sympathize with their dilemmas I am a Ha Jin fan and found that this book was easier to read than his longer novel War Trash.