How a town without pity shaped a writer
When she was 12, May-lee Chai’s family moved to South Dakota. After a rough period in New York City, Chai’s father thought a small-town experience would provide solace. The family was instead met with violence.
Chai’s parents — a Chinese father and a white mother — had committed the sin, in the eyes of some locals, of a mixedrace marriage. Chai was deemed to be the spawn of the devil, and her brother was physically attacked at school. Their house was shot at. Five of their dogs were shot and killed.
It’s the kind of hellish and frighteningly real experience — which Chai chronicled in her memoir, “Hapa Girl” — that would conjure up certain expectations about what strain of fiction comes with Chai’s new book of short stories, “Useful Phrases for Immigrants,” especially in the Trump era.
“That was my ’80s,” says Chai, who lives in San Francisco and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University. “And this is of course was the time when the media was very anti-Japanese. It was all: ‘Japanese trade war. Oh the Japanese are attacking us — economic Pearl Harbor.’ And I thought that we were past that. But now with Trump, I hear the same level of ugly, racist rhetoric.”
Yet Chai’s book never veers into the territory of spectacular experience — the kind that she lived and that she worried would be newly inflamed through the 2016 election season’s discourse. To be sure, Chai did put the book together as a sort of “active resistance” to what she heard from Donald Trump during the presidential primaries. But the eight stories in “Useful Phrases for Immigrants,” each centered on either characters in China or the Chinese American immigrant experience, largely revolve around more quotidian occurrence.
Characters grapple with complicated but not unusual relationships with parents, such as in “Canada,” about a young girl struggling against the tide of her coming of age, and “The Lucky Day,” which follows a daughter visiting her sick mother. In “The Body,” a polyphonic story explores varied daily lives in relationship to the discovery of a dead body, providing a window into a modernized China predicated in part on the exploitation of bodies.
With Chai’s deeply assured writing, the more ordinary struggles of Chinese lives make the stories feel quietly revolutionary. The book was her way of humanizing those who are perhaps only seen as wealthy “economic predators.”
“One of the many things that disturbed me about the rhetoric in 2016 during the presidential election was this false notion that only white Americans suffer from globalization’s disruptions and that only white Americans are suffering from economic anxieties,” says Chai.
The assumptions of wealth or lack of hardship on the part of Chinese immigrants or Asian Americans at large stem from certain stereotypes, but Chai recalls the perception changing over time from a drastically different narrative.
“I remember back in the ’70s when my father was at City College, the model-minority stereotype had not taken root yet,” she says. “The media had just started pushing this forth, but no one believed it yet. And so it was really hard for Chinese students to get admitted to colleges. People didn’t think Chinese were good students. They thought of them as working class and not intellectual.”
In her stories, Chai reflects the reality — the Chinese experience, back then and now, is, like any other, full of strife big and small.
“It’s been very heartening and heartwarming for me to hear back from a number of Chinese American readers, now that it’s been out for a few weeks, who have read it and said that it resonated with them — that the stories ... had meaning for them and for the families,” she said.
Chai will read and discuss her work alongside National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley at Green Apple Books on the Park.