A Good Fall: Stories / by Ha Jin

Chineses-American author Ha Jin was born Jin Xuefei in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning in 1956. During his teen years, he volunteered with the People's Liberation Army, spending the majority of his time stationed along the Soviet border. Higher education was largely restricted during the Cultural Revolution (~1966-1976) and much of Jin's schooling during this period was informal, reading as much as he could and learning English through the country's fledgling institutional program. With the reopening of the Chinese colleges in 1977, he enrolled at Heilongjiang University and ultimately received a B.A. in English and thereafterwards an M.A. in American Literature. In 1985, he emigrated to America under a student visa where he studied at Brandeis University, eventually earning Ph.D. in English. With the culmination of events in China leading him to believe that his writing could never properly flourish in a country where both the language and the censorship regulations were obstacles to universal readership, he stayed in America where he began to publish poetry and short stories in English. He has since published two volumes of poetry, numerous short stories and several novels including one, Waiting, which won both the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for best book. A Good Fall chronicles of the lives of Chinese immigrants in America doing their best to cope with disorientation and social unease.

A young recent Chinese immigrant can barely make ends meet and yet she's hounded by her younger sister back home about money to pay for a new car. A lonely, isolated musician takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet, a bird he later rescues to the surprise of everyone. Meanwhile in a contemporary Chinese-American family, young children decide to change their names so that they might sound more "American", largely ignorant to how their decision offsets generations of cultural heritage. At a small liberal arts college, an Asian professor of English, though of Chinese nationality, attempts to formally defect into the US with the reluctant aid of a student. And in the cramped quarters of an urban city dwelling, a young male sweatshop worker tries to get along with his three female roommates, all prostitutes.

Everyone struggles in Ha Jin's world. Some struggle with a desire to remain loyal to tradition and stave off the temptations to indulge in the more opportunistic freedom while others fight just to keep their newfound 'freedom' their own. Of course the ideas of tradition and liberty are themselves dubious constructs in Jin's world where freedom often implies abandonment and opportunity can just as easily mean hopelessness as it does aspiration. Jin's style is fairly minimalist, given to describing people and places with limited characterizations and without elaborative descriptions and his stories are sometimes more snapshot images or sparse vignettes of characters than scenarios with actual story-archs. His overarching premise is telling though. All his characters seem to exist in permanent disillusionment, not only from their difference in physical location but from their very sense of self and identity where their emotional universe has become as limited as their physical surroundings and their living conditions as disorienting as their inner conscious. (FIC JIN)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother / by Amy Chua

"This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” (cover)

The daughter of first generation Chinese immigrants, Amy Chua's childhood was instilled with the virtue of hard work, the value of academic excellence and the efficacy of superior performance achieved through strict attention-to-detail and time-intensive practice. It paid off. She excelled in school enough to get into Harvard where she also excelled, graduating magna cum laude in Economics and again cum laude from Harvard Law School. Currently she's a Yale professor and has a resume which includes a former professorship at Duke and an executive editor position for the Harvard Law Review.

Not without controversy, her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, contrasting the Chinese way of child-rearing and the Western/American approach, probes, among other things, the reason why Asian children do better in school than Americans. Chua states, more than once, that her station and success in life is owed to the strict, uncompromising ideology which her parents adhered to during her upbringing; subsequently, she muses that it's no coincidence that Asian children do better in school than their Western counterparts. Americans are too concerned with self-worth and positive feedback, a system depriving children of the persistence needed to strive toward success. This westernized way of rewarding marginal achievements and too readily accepting failure  a viewpoint inevitably slanted toward sentimentality and self-esteem building, can't compete with the Chinese method more associated with punishing ignorance and extracting perfection, often through seemingly cruel and excoriating maneuvers. Additionally, by placing emphasis on a child's success in things like sports or drama, American parents are actually discouraging hard work in other more academically-oriented areas. 

But this book's not really about grades or test scores. Nor is it a hard-edged, this-is-the-right-way-to-do-things diatribe stressing personal preference or cultural difference. With candid exposition and good dose of familiar humor, it's more about Chua's interaction with her two daughters, how over the years she's imputed to them the same rigid structure her own childhood entailed and how the results have played out. No birthday parties, no sleepovers, no sports, no TV, no portable media devices, no being in school plays, no complaining about not being able to do/have said things, etc. pretty much grasps the gist of the way things work in the Chua's household. Failure to make not only good grades, but perfect grades, can and will result in removal and/or destruction of stuffed animals, dolls or toys. The same goes for not getting a musical solo piece exactly right within a condensed time window. Chua's narrative, strict stipulations and all, isn't as tyrannical as it may seem. Nor is the book a direct challenge to other, less aggressive parenting methods. In Chua's family, as in all cultures and generations, there are conflicts inherent in every parent-child relationship, problems which often have no solution, and stubborness at both ends which tends to escalate tension. There's also love, joy and genuinely heartfelt moments between mother and daughter(s), something making this book a worthwhile read. (B CHUA)