Looking back
Ambitious, formally complex debut marred by dialogue that’s sometimes too obvious
Little Gods Meng Jin Custom House
Meng Jin’s ambitious, formally complex debut opens in Beijing at the climax of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, as a woman gives birth in a hospital ward that will soon be filled with the wounded.
The maternity nurse who tends to Su Lan and her new baby is skeptical of the idealistic pro-democracy protesters: “Little gods, she thinks. Desperate to turn their own growing bodies, their own aches and despairs, into material that might reset the axes of worlds.” This desperation is also what drives Su Lan, we see in the three linked monologues that circle back to tell her story after her death 17 1/2 years later.the first narrator is Zhu Wen, an elderly neighbour who cared for Su Lan’s infant daughter, Liya, after Su Lan returned to Shanghai without her husband, apparently lost in the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The second is Yongzong, who along with a classmate named Zhang Bo competed for Su
Lan’s affections when they were university students. The third is Liya, two years old when Su Lan embarked with her for America to complete a PH.D. (and leave an unhappy history behind); she abandons college in the wake of her mother’s death to return to China in search of her unknown father.
Jin skilfully, if at times schematically, uses their varied voices and perspectives to elucidate what drove Su Lan and resolve the mystery of Liya’s father. She explores an intriguing array of themes: class distinctions in a supposedly classless society; language as a marker of identity and (paradoxically) a barrier to communication; the desire to eradicate the past, vividly embodied in the half-demolished building where Su Lan once lived in an ancient neighbourhood being pulled down to make way for modern skyscrapers.
Jin sometimes flags her themes with undue insistence. “Do you believe in time?” new mother Su Lan improbably asks the maternity nurse. A few pages later, Zhu Wen tells Liya that her mother was a physicist and “her subject was time ... Su Lan related to time as a prisoner.” It’s an odd insight to offer a recently bereaved teenager, and there are other moments in the novel when a character seems to speak more as the author’s mouthpiece than from credible personal motives. Nonetheless, Little Gods gains plausibility and texture as it progresses, slowly unpacking the emotional forces underpinning Su Lan’s intellectual quest to imagine the arrow of time running backward, so she could “remember the future and forget the past.”
Yongzong’s tortuous courtship of Su Lan makes palpable her conflicted feelings. She’s ashamed of her peasant roots and ashamed of her shame.
Kind, unconflicted Bo, who knows and loves her true self, is “too good for me,” she tells Yongzong. “Maybe I’m the kind of woman who deserves to be with dirt like you.”
We meet the woman she became in America in Liya’s recollections of an emotionally disengaged mother who uprooted them over and over, always seeking a new beginning. Discontinuous but complementary, the three monologues accumulate to paint a powerful, poignant portrait of a woman crippled by her fear of looking back.