Noble dreams, pretty places can be prisons of our own making
D ’ Arcy Island, the setting for the enchanting title story of Yasuko Thanh’s Floating Like the Dead, is a bite- sized plot of Pacific Northwest: arbutus with fir and a rocky shore. Not far from Victoria ( where Thanh resides), what’s now national park land reserved for hikers and kayakers contains traces of a radically different past: the concrete foundations of an internment colony that closed in 1923 after three decades of housing Chinese lepers.
Floating Like the Dead, which won 2009’ s Journey Prize, is based on a documented visit by the capital city’s medical officer and a journalist in 1895. A subtle exploration of racial power dynamics, alienation and camaraderie-in- solitude, Thanh’s story also serves to introduce a theme woven through the collection’s remaining eight stories: noble dreams and pretty places can become prisons that are sometimes, though not always, of our own making.
At one pole, then, there’s the transporting promise of love, an exotic destination and self- reinvention; at the other, death by Valium or disease, double suicide and incarceration imply that all gardens come with serpents. Across all the stories of her debut, Thanh exhibits a fascination for often rootless or displaced characters — as well as smart women who are fools for love — whose hungering for transformative experience and surrender to wanderlust rarely produce the expected results.
Hunting in Spanish highlights the clear success of Thanh’s vantage point. Eager for a fresh start and to do good deeds, an idealistic woman leaves Vancouver for Mexico, aiming to volunteer at an orphanage. Six months later she’s selling opium at tourist trap bars after being dazzled by an “Aztec god” whose indifferent love nevertheless holds her captive.
The woman’s spiritual sister, in Hustler, is a former secretary from France who has relocated to Honduras. Stuck running a budget motel in Cayo Bonaire, Tiphaine’s tropical locale offers the mirage of easy love, but bountiful cocaine and a sporadic moral compass ultimately result in jail time. Though Tiphaine’s still capable of an epiphany (“A person will grab anything to stop himself from falling — even the edge of a knife,” she realizes), Thanh leaves us uncertain if thought will lead to decisive action; a refrain about the lost woman’s romantic entanglement — “And so they continue on in the way they always have” — suggests otherwise.
Elsewhere, notions that could appear in Celine Dion songs run into real life. The mythic bond imagined by the young Texan in Lulu May’s Love Stories convinces her to go on the run when Clovis Peach, her clueless rebel of a boyfriend, robs a bank. Yet Lulu May’s heart does not go on and on. Her jealousy ( there’s another woman, a hostage) and Clovis’s demise in Mexico are inextricable.
While likewise once lost in love, the narrator of The Peach Trees of Nhat Tan possesses the “gift of waiting.” With its seductive tinges of Poe, the Saigonset story of her revenge against a philandering husband cannot help but recall the old English playwright’s warning about the fury of a woman scorned.
His Lover’s Ghost and Her Vietnamese Boyfriend, set in Vancouver in 1998 and rural Germany in the late 1960s, respectively, explore the seemingly infinite complications of love in relatively ordinary circumstances. Thanh ably illustrates that regardless of intimacy, the unknowability of another person is a virtual guarantee.
Even perfectly contented love hits a snag in the form of mortality. Helen and Frank tells of a happy couple married for six decades who keep a double suicide pact circa 1958 hidden from their unsuspecting children. In contrast, Thanh’s single misstep, Springblade Knife, regrettably placed first in the collection, is narrated by a former gang member on the day before his execution. Flirting with triteness and melodrama, the story feels threadbare and its 1950s signifiers oddly artificial ( as though researched via repeated viewings of West Side Story and The Wild One).
A prizewinner well before the publication of her first book, Yasuko Thanh impresses above all with the thematic complexity of her approach. Coupling a globetrotter’s perspective and historical curiosity to that, her stories conjure vignettes of troubling existence, where change is possible but outcomes deviate far from plans.