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Yan Ge, Elsewhere: Stories, Scribner, 2023. 304 pgs.

I became interested in Yan Ge’s work when I came across her on the fascinating public space called social media. We came from the same Chinese province and went to the same university, albeit many years apart. I wondered what kind of stories I would find in her first English story collection. Would she evoke my nostalgia for Chengdu? Would she take me on a journey to a place unknown to me? What was her “here”, if she wrote about “elsewhere?”

The first story of the collection, “The Little House”, is set in Chengdu after the massive earthquake in May of 2008. A Camus-reading fiction writer named Pigeon hangs out with a bunch of poets at a run-down bar called The Little House. The story opens with a culinary lesson for Pigeon—for us, about certain popular Sichuanese hotpot ingredients. I must admit that as much as I love hotpot, I was ignorant about what I cooked and how I cooked them until this lesson. But the culinary lessons are not about food, as we shall soon find out. The writers and poets chug endless Beer Laos, have sex in the quake-safe tents, and try to make sense of life and death—death at the present, after the devastating earthquake, and death from the past that has shaped and still haunts them. They also talk about poetry and fiction, about writing. A poet named Six Times has this insight about writing a story: “when you write a story, you’re essentially creating a dish. You want people to see the meat and the veg and even to smell the fragrances. But they can’t actually eat it. They can only imagine the taste of the food by interpreting the image of it,” and “when poets come into the room, we simply chomp on the fictional dish you’ve created. We eat up the food and shit it out later. And the shit is poetry”. I think a conversation like this could only happen in Chengdu, and it is not a surprise that one of the poets, named Old Stone, is also a chef, and Pigeon has trouble distinguishing his cookbook from his poetry.

The year 2008 is significant, not just because of the earthquake, but also because of the Beijing Olympics. “Mother Tongue”, the only other story set, partially, in contemporary China, travels between the present day and 2008. We have another glimpse of the literary tradition unique to Sichuan: where else could one find a “sonnet on pork?” Pigeon, now living in London, gives us an update on some of the poets and writers we met in The Little House. We find out that in 2008, Pigeon was a sophomore at Sichuan Foreign Studies University, and she was good friends with the couple Vertical and Chilly. The time has moved forward from May to August, and this time they hang out in another pub in Chengdu, run by an Irish guy called Paul, watching the Olympics on TV. Pigeon’s mother is dying. Unable to face the agony, instead of visiting her mother in the hospital, Pigeon talks to her on the phone to allow “the lack of a visual and corporeal substance” to reduce her mother “to a concept” that eases her apprehension. She reads The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, gets irate when Paul speaks Chinese to her, and comes up with an outrageous answer to a question asked by a white woman: “How does it feel to be a Chinese woman?” But the most extraordinary thing that happens is the sudden, temporary aphasia of Vertical on the night when the Chinese Diving Queen Guo Jingjing “claimed her fourth Olympic gold medal…” and “…a drunk man fell from the ceiling fan at Paul’s pub…” What does this mean? Everyone except Pigeon is convinced that Vertical is fine, including the victim herself, who has no “faintest sign of loss, annoyance, or disappointment.” Rather, “…she looked insanely undisturbed.” Perhaps the ability to speak is not as crucial as we think? Is gaining or losing the ability to speak a way to take up a new identity? Is it true that what matters most is what language one speaks, what one’s mother tongue is? Does one become a different person when speaking or not speaking, or speaking an entirely different language? Who gets to speak what language? Chilly and Vertical earn their livings not by their poetry, but as entertainers at weddings and funerals. They perform at Pigeon’s mother’s funeral, he as a flute-playing Taoist priest, and she, now unable to speak, as a peach tree that grows and blossoms. Together, they complete the grand act of “inexhaustible fireworks of peach blossoms” with the flowers exploding, flaring, and burning. A tragicomical visual feast, achieved without speaking any words in any languages.

In the stories set outside of China, Yan continues to unpack words and explore what language, spoken and written, dofor/to us. In “Shooting an Elephant”, a Chinese woman named Shanshan, meaning either “the color coral”, or “moving very slowly”, who was married to an Irishman, looks for China in the local IKEA and befriends a supermarket cashier who had intended to get a tattoo on his arm of the Chinese word Home, but ended up with Tomb, because of one simple dot being misplaced. Shanshan’s memory of her hometown, with “the highway to the airport cutting through the rapeseed flower field and the tall and dense eucalyptus trees murmuring on the horizon,” is a memory I share and the others who have taken that highway en route to Shuangliu Airport, now replaced by the massive new Tianfu. Shanshan has travelled a long way, from Chengdu, where her mother was murdered, to Ireland, to George Orwell’s Burma, where she suffers a miscarriage during her honeymoon. Back to Ireland, where she “wondered if there was anything else in her, other than being Chinese, that screamed to people here that she didn’t belong”, she continues to search what she has lost.

In “Stockholm”, a Chinese writer, a new mother suffering from postpartum depression, travels to Sweden in November to be on “a panel to discuss women writers in diaspora”, trying to reclaim a sense of self while dealing with leaking breast milk. In the fantastical “Free Wandering”, a title borrowed from Zhuangzi, a young Chinese man arrives at a place simply called “The City” and meets a Chinese American man working as a palliative caregiver. Here, Yan playswith the word 鯤 Kun, a fish “in the northern darkness”, “its size so immense that I don’t know how many thousand miles it extends”, and the word 鵬 Peng, a bird the fish Kun changes into, with its back “…so vast that it is a thousand miles long”. When Peng soars and flies southwards, “its wings move like clouds, obscuring the sky”. Both Ku and Peng are creatures from Zhuangzi’s own Free Wandering, a metaphor for the endless possibilities of a young person’s future. Perhaps the young man was a Kun when he approached The City from underground, and he hoped to turn into a Peng when he leaped from the window? After all, The City is a place with a “goddess” like this: “The hem of her robe fans out. The spikes on her crown expand. Her arms lengthen, multiplying, and, at last, dense with foliage—she becomes a prodigious tree, prospering, in the land of nowhere, the wild of nothing”. In “No Time to Write”. A gay Irishwoman, who was born in Singapore and who lived in Shanghai as an adolescent, contemplates the meaning of writing as therapy for accumulated family trauma due to repeated relocation: “Writing is the opposite of forgetting. It’s the ultimate manifestation of remembering. To concretise it with language, to engrave it on stone, to encapsulate it in books, to pass it on and make it eternal.” And finally, Yan’s elsewhere not only includes the physical ones, but also the new world of social media. In “How I Fell in Love with the Well-documented Life of Alex Whelan”, a Chinese girl moves to Dublin when her mother marries an Irishman, ditches her Chinese name Xiaohan and changes it to Claire Collins, meets an Irish boy while both watch a Japanese film without subtitles, and falls in love with his Facebook life after kills himself. Once again, we see the usefulness, or uselessness, of languages.

Two stories in the collection stand out for me, because they are set in such ancient times—1095 and 490 BCE, respectively—in drastic contrast to the other stories. In “When Travelling in Summer”, Shen Kuo, the famous Song Dynasty scientist, escapes a plot, concocted by the emperor himself, intended to kill him. It is a tale about loyalty, perception, and self-preservation. Yan continues her play with the Chinese words, such as 暑, ⽇, 者: summertime, the sun, and the people. Perhaps it is a logographic language like Chinese—the parts and the whole, the obvious and the ambiguous—that makes it possible for Shen Kuo’s “…comprehensive understanding of the universe, his ability to see how everything was inherently connected and how, with perfect timing, the constellation of destinies could be shied with the faintest nudge.” An ability that saves him.

“Hai 醢,” taking up a little shy of one third of the book, is a provocative, and sometimes graphic, story of Confucius and several most famous of his seventy-two disciples. It is a murder mystery with enough twists and turns that it mirrors the long, painful history of China. The story, packed with so many thoughts about language, philosophy, and literature, ideas that have governed China for so long and still do, deserves a thorough study beyond the scope of this review. Perhaps a master’s thesis will do it justice. Hai, or “minced meat”, is Confucius’s favourite dish, but also a method to execute prisoners in a way implied by its first meaning. Zilu is killed this way, but aside from being appalled by this horrendous act, one could also analyse the nature of his killing by applying the teaching of Confucius, as the disciples did in sold-out symposia attended by the masses. In the scenes reminiscent of a Shakespeare drama, the disciples debate why such an act occurred, and who was truly responsible for Zilu’s death. Was the killing yi (justice)? Could it be ren (benevolence)? What exactly are yi and ren? What caused someone to conduct such a terrible act? Were poetry and literature to blame because they made “…people unhinged?” How should they decide if someone is innocent or guilty—by dialectic or by evidence? Confucius taught them that “evidence is for those who fail on dialectic. When we claim a man is sinful and he starts to argue for his innocence, his sin is proven.” The disciples, the common men, the rulers: all of them follow the teaching of Confucius, but who was Confucius? Zilu observes, “…Once, Confucius was someone who considered wealth and rank like passing clouds, feeding with delight on coarse rice and resting on no pillows but only his own elbow; he’d pay tribute at the commoners’ funerals and sing with strangers. But now we have a Master who hides in his golden chamber, misappropriating the institution’s funds for personal luxury. Meanwhile, as he grows progressively paranoid, he is abolishing the free discourse of the symposium, dictating every debate with his monotonous voice.” What should they do then? Should they “…put an end to the whole scam: announce the death of Confucius and dismantle this archaic and corrupted institution?” On the other hand, do the commoners actually want the same things deemed essential by these intellectual minds, or would they rather have “a great ruler, a strong government, a rich, powerful nation that begets a new peaceful era, so they can be at rest?” And again, let’s get back to solving the murder mystery: who really killed Zilu? So many people have a motive, for money, for pride. But perhaps, as Yanyan pointed out, “who killed Zilu is in fact irrelevant. The more crucial question is: Whom do we want to convict and remove from the stage?”

I wonder why “When Traveling in Summer” and “Hai” are included in this collection. Not only did the stories happen elsewhere, but they also happened at an entirely different time. But did they really? In “Hai”, according to Confucius, “the tones of a well-managed age are at rest and joyful; the tones of an age of turmoil are bitter and full of anger; the tones of a ruined state are filled with lament and brooding.” This sounds like something I just heard the other day from CCTV, not something said in 480 BCE. Perhaps some things never change. Perhaps “elsewhere” is right here.

A prolific bilingual writer, Yan has published numerous works in Chinese. In this English-language debut, most of her characters are writers, poets, or some other types of intellectuals, through whom she displays her clear penchant for language. She has done so much unpacking of Chinese words in this book, and I wonder if she felt the constraint of English when she wrote her first book in this non-logographic language. In “Hai,” Zilu tells Zixia to “…never listen to the words people say. Because phonetics are merely garments to conceal what’s beneath. Only the characters, carrying the wisdom of our ancestors, were created to reveal.” One cannot do so in English.

And why does Yan write in English? Fair or not, every diaspora writer with a different mother tongue must have faced this question at some point. It’s easy to tout the lure of the idea of “freedom”, but I caution against that. In “Stockholm”, Yan gives us this conversation between a non-Chinese male novelist and the Chinese woman writer now living in the UK:

“He then asked me why I had lived such a life, to be a writer for foreigners instead of for my own countrymen and now dwelling in England. Are you also in some kind of exile? What problems did you have in your country? Did you write censored books? Were you persecuted by your government?

I laughed. Not everything is political. I had some personal issues and made certain choices.”

How to cite: Collins, X. H. “The Places We Would Rather Be: Yan Ge’s Elsewhere.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 26 May 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/05/26/elsewhere-stories.

X. H. Collins was born in Hechuan, Sichuan Province, China, and grew up in Kangding on the East Tibet Plateau. She has a PhD in nutrition and is a retired biology professor. She is the author of the novel Flowing Water, Falling Flowers (MWC Press, 2020), and has published short stories and essays. She now lives in Iowa with her family. For more information, visit her website and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. [All contributions by X. H. Collins.]

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