A Review of Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vanessa Hua shares 13 stories that revolve around Asian and Mexican immigrant families in Deceit and Other Possibilities. Hua, the author of A River of Stars and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has received praise and recognition for her writing, some of which are through the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature among many others. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, and in this reissued collection of stories first published in 2016 now featuring new stories, Hua once again gives a voice to immigrant families as they find a way to make America their new home all the while trying to hold on to their culture and familial values. The majority of the families are possessed to lie or keep secrets from one another in order to protect their family but sometimes only with their own best interest at heart, which leads them to acts of deceit. You’ll find yourself asking how far the characters are willing to go to protect the truth.

Hua does an extraordinary job at pointing to issues immigrant families face in America, many in which the younger generations who sometimes live in two worlds face all on their own. Identity becomes an issue that is mostly grappled with in the younger generations, those who were born American but raised with different cultural values. The collection of stories touches on both the older and younger generations to show the whole picture of a family and the ways they are able to survive together and as individuals. As kids it becomes our nature to want our parents’ approval, and disappointment has a major role throughout the book. Take for example the story of “The Older the Ginger” that show other realities of returning to a birthplace where you have been gone for too long that it doesn’t feel like home anymore and where people look at you differently. The main character is an older man who never married and comes back home to fulfill his mothers wishes of taking a wife. Then, we have the prospect of marrying someone that comes from America even if they are from the same birthplace, they have become a new version of who they were solely because they’ve lived in America. We see how they’re taken advantage of by family and friends. On the other hand, the character of Little Treasure also shows the extremes people willingly put themselves through to exceed in life, almost as if it’s for survival. Little Treasure and people alike represent that story but also how they view American life, and most times that’s in a fantasy land. America is an illusion to the rest of the world but that misrepresentation is only broken once you can see it for yourself. Yet, the possibility as the title of the collection reads comes head on through the intentions of the characters in this story and many others. Readers that have seen or heard of this in their own close circle will see this as part of their story, one way of honoring their truth and also showing others who don’t understand the struggles immigrant families face whether here or in their birthplace, the realities that live within them. Family is all you have and that becomes specially true when that’s all you have in a new place and sometimes that might feel enforced as if you have no option but to follow the example. 

It is difficult to cover all the realities Deceit and other Possibilities touches on and “What We Have Is What We Need” is one of the many true but sad realities that immigrant families face. The story is about a Mexican immigrant family where the father is the first to come to America, the mother follows at one point and then the oldest son, Lalo. There are two younger brothers that are left back in Mexico with family, an inevitable result of immigration where families are separated for one reason or another. The story is told in Lalo’s point of view where we see him first say goodbye to his mother and a few years later watch him make the journey on his own at age eleven. We see him relish in feeling like an only child when he reunites with his parents. “In America, I was an only child, and I liked having all the attention.” The separation of what was and what is, is a result of a new place to call home. This quickly changes when he starts to witness how that is also changing his family dynamic in America. As the mother starts school while working and taking care of her family, tension rises as the father starts to feel that he and Lalo are being neglected by other duties. Later they find that she had been lying about working late, instead spending time with an American born man who shows her a different future, one that her husband and family can’t provide. Lalo reflects on this when he’s older, “She had an alternate existence, happier than what she was born to, bound to. The perfect life that she hid from us, the one where she did not cry for her lost sons or get on her knees to clean toilets or argue with her husband. The life she deserved.” These revelations are brought forth and the family fights to stay together even if its not entirely what each of them wants. This is a recurring theme, the mother struggles between picking what could be the American illusion becoming a reality and the actual reality. Lalo and many other children are witnesses to the life choices our parents make for the sake of staying a family. It introduces a cycle, Lalo’s parents stayed together and he followed their dreams for him, “I got the desk job my parents wanted for me. It is my gift to them. My burden.” The character learns a lot, grows up in a unimaginable truth by being left behind, leaving his family behind, crossing the border, marital struggles his parents faced, learned street smarts, avoided gangs, and how you live your life for the ones that gave up so much for you. In the end he followed the American illusion his parents set up, and for him although became a reality, it wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself.

The collection of stories is captivating for its realness, a kind of story that although at times sad or hard to grasp feels close to your heart and one that can show Americans how sometimes even if dreams can happen, they don’t always come true for immigrant families. Lalo kept the picture of his mother that once belonged to the American man, which is how he and his father found out about the lies his mother had been keeping, unknowingly helping the man that was trying to win her over. “I keep the picture as a reminder of how that smile can disappear, if you take for granted what you can never possess. You must make her yearn only for the life she already has. To want nothing more.” The collection of stories offer an appreciation for truth, a way into the lives of those you see on TV screens or passing by on streets. Within each story we see how deceit can tear a family apart as well as keep them together. The character of Lalo, a young boy shows wisdom as he figures out how to adapt to life in America, a place that has given his parents and himself opportunities but also given his family many struggles along the way. He says, “you can never see all angles at once” and this quote provides an insight to the book as a whole. Hua casts a light on deceit where it is provoked by circumstance and consequences in Deceit and other Possibilities that surround the lives of immigrant families but does well to remind the reader that such things are true within any race within any country, birthplace or not, we are all same, human. In the end, irony rules as truth is centered around the stories told in the collection but it is also deception that is equally as important. 

In and Around The Land of Pain: On Stacey Richter's "The Land of Pain"

When I was about four years old, my father decided to quit his job as a systems analyst and move our family to a tiny town — a hamlet, really — in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he would become a utility man. He took a huge reduction in pay and prestige, and went from writing computer programs to dumping garbage and cutting grass so he could spend more time with his kids. He wanted to be able to come home for lunch and see us as we ran around town with our friends — a privilege we never would have had in Southern California.

My father was a very healthy man. He was a runner and, when he lived near the ocean, a surfer. And yet, one day, while lifting a garbage can, he ruptured a disc in his spine. The doctors seemed unsure how to treat his condition, so they experimented. They used him as a surgical guinea pig: fused his spine, broke it, put screws in without his permission, removed them, carved his back with scars, inserted a hockey-puck-sized morphine pump just under the skin of his abdomen, and then misplaced a decimal point while recalibrating it, nearly killing him. Over the course of ten years he had about ten surgeries. Pain became part of his daily life, one it seems they will never be able to fully relieve.

I don’t talk about this much, because people don’t seem to understand it. My father looks pretty normal. He gets scowled at when he parks in the handicapped spot, though he has a valid placard; you can’t see his pain most of the time, and when you can it presents itself with a limp and a scowl. He was once yelled at by an old woman who bought the seat behind him at an amphitheater (he’s 6’4” and long-bodied, so his torso might be that of someone four inches taller) who refused to believe he needed the thin cushion he sat on, or that he couldn’t slouch on account of his fused vertebrae. Because he isn’t in a wheelchair or visibly maimed (I sometimes wish he would lift his t-shirt for these doubters and show them the eight-inch scar down his spine) people aren’t sympathetic.

I’d resigned myself to this fact until I read “The Land of Pain” by Stacey Richter, the ninth story in her second collection, Twin Study. I had never thought to look for fiction about chronic pain until I stumbled across a story about it in my stack of prospective thesis books. It felt fated, especially when I discovered the story had originally appeared in the journal, Willow Springs, where I interned, edited by my thesis advisor, and was written in the second person: my favorite point of view to play with. What amazed me most was that the story handles the subject subject glibly, yet it’s so apt:

“You go for a walk and during the walk something happens: you trip, you fall, you dive off a cliff; you crash, you twist, you type for hours, you age. When you get home, you notice that your house looks slightly different than when you left — mushier, if that’s possible, with misaligned corners. You open the door and are surprised to find a foil banner hanging over the mantle.

“It says: Welcome to the Land of Pain.”

Reading this without understanding what chronic pain can do to a person, this might seem light. It might seem silly. And that’s the thing about this story — and nearly all the stories in Twin Study — Stacey Richter chuckles her way through some of the most intimate subjects, adding flash with fast-paced prose and quirky characters. She sends Barbie-loving cavemen through a time tunnel, douses a rock-star mother in champagne and makes her sing, switches the lives of twins, and puts a princess in the emergency room. She grows a mindless clone, teaches her ballet and yoga, and watches her twirl in her favorite tutu, but then her face straightens, and she stops to ask, “How can you say goodbye to your unbroken version, the good version, the one that dances?”

I sent “The Land of Pain” to my mother once, and told her she and dad might find it interesting. She read it, then wrote back: It was so sad. A simple review, and one you might not expect from a second-person piece of pseudo-science-fiction. I tend to forget, between readings, how much Richter toys with my emotions. I flip through the stories and decide to read “The Cavemen in the Hedges,” mostly remembering the cavemen and their penchant for glitter, but by the time I finish reading, I’m devastated. I’ve sat through the drum circle by the Burger King, wallowed in loss. I have to read the next story to get over the last one, and on and on, until I’ve finished the book and want to start over again.

And Oppose Them We Must, For It's Our Land And Water And Air: A Review of Wendell Berry's What Matters?

In the heady days following President Obama’s election, my friend who edits the monthly newsletter for the village where I lived asked me to write a brief book review. She had some space to fill. And I was so excited to have a president whom I could imagine reading a book that I chose to frame the review as a book recommendation for our new, literate leader. The book I chose was Home Economics, a book of fourteen essays by the farmer/poet Wendell Berry. It had been part of the curriculum from a favorite course I’d taken as an undergrad, Ecology & Literature, and I had dragged the book along with me through multiple moves, after it had been stored for some time in my mother’s basement, because it is one of those books I knew I’d go back to over and over, the writing succinct and sharp, measured and real, and the thoughtfulness and deep observation behind it reflecting the kind of company I like to keep. And I wanted our new president (and anyone reading the village’s newsletter) to read it because already I could sense that our food system was failing, and that some straight talk from a proper farmer was just what the man with the power to steer things and oppose Monsanto (as well as the consumers fed by that system) needed to hear.

So imagine my delight, two years later, when my husband showed me, while shopping at Home Green Home, that Mr. Berry had a new book of essays out, What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2010). Turns out some of the old essays are included, but they’re as relevant as ever, and the situation is more dire than ever, as our monopolistic, monocultural, industrial farming methods have only “advanced” in the past twenty years while his wisdom has gone unheeded.

And it’s not like his is a lone voice in the wilderness. He is heir to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, developed in A Sand County Almanac (and featured in the highly recommended film Green Fire), colleague to Bill McKibben (Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) as activist/author imploring our government to see the rationality of preserving the living systems that sustain us, peer to poets like Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers, reiterating in myriad forms the fleeting expression of being a human not quite at home in nature.

He is a man capable of a poem like this:

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

Like Jeffers he sees the big picture, “watches the track of this age of time at its peak of flight / Waver like a spent rocket, wavering toward new discoveries, / Mortal examinations of darkness, soundings of depth;” so when he expounds, in the midst of the demise of the global economy, on what exactly has gone wrong and how we might fix it, I figure we should listen.

And so, too, does Herman E. Daly, economist and author, who writes the excellent forward, in which he bemoans the fact that, because Berry is a farmer and a poet rather than an economist, those who most need to read the book, the economists and statespeople, probably won’t. (But if enough of us common folk do, and figure out that we, by starving these gigantic corporations of their profits and building our own local economies, as Shannon Hayes details in Radical Homemaking: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, those statespeople and economists will become superfluous.)

Though the land he relates with is located in Kentucky, the manner of that relationship is universal: it translates. Not only the joy to be had in observing and working with the particulars of habitat, but the immanent danger of the extractive economy. In Kentucky it’s strip-mining for coal; in upstate New York, the fossil-fuel industry wants to risk our water and air, the vineyards and organic dairy farms surrounding our town of Ithaca, with a process called hydrofracking, though we do our best to oppose them. And oppose them we must, for it’s our land and water and air, these things that make up the commons and which no person, not even a “person” as powerful as Halliburton, has the right to spoil, or even risk spoiling, for profit; they are the very basis for the good life. As they’ve already left people around the world struggling to live within ruined habitats, these supranational corporations (a great term, that, worth the cost of the book all on its own) clearly don’t care that the landscape may be debased and well nigh uninhabitable by the time they’re done with it; they neglect to mention that the few jobs they create will be temporary and go primarily to workers from elsewhere. They care only about profit. As Mr. Berry perfectly puts it in the final essay, “The Total Economy”:

“The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as ‘a person.’ But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who ‘let their money work for them,’ expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super-government with the power to overrule nations.”

A warning: he makes no bones about his being a Christian, though he’s the sort of Christian who actually pays heed to the message of the gospels, the sort that would make those “Christians” on TV and inside the Beltway burn with shame, were they, in fact, capable. And though his religion colors his language, he’s aware that not all his readers share it, and one needn’t share it in order to grasp his meaning. In what I consider the keystone of these essays, “Two Economies,” he resorts to a biblical expression to denote all that is, “The Kingdom of God,” and notes that a person raised in the East would recognize what he’s talking about in the term “the Tao,” and finally settles on a culturally neutral term, “The Great Economy.” And what a loss to those who have been made allergic to any hint of religion by the aforementioned hatefreaks (the stupid and the mean who have hijacked our spiritual traditions and from whom I’m in the process of reclaiming mine), because if you can’t get through his biblical references you won’t get to read paragraphs like this:

“It is possible to make a little economy, such as our present one, that is so short-sighted and in which accounting is of so short a term as to give the impression that vices are necessary and practically justifiable. When we make our economy a little wheel turning in opposition to what we call ‘nature,’ then we set up competitiveness as the ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of economy; we make of it, willy-nilly, a virtue. But competitiveness, as a ruling principle and a virtue, imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to control. That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are shoddily made, why our ‘wastes’ are toxic, and why our ‘defensive’ weapons are suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between ‘free enterprise’ and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so frequently in court and robbery on the increase? Why should we be surprised to find that medicine has become an exploitive industry, profitable in direct proportion to its hurry and its mechanical indifference? People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that the robbers outright are not guilty of fraud.

Not only religion has been made suspect by its public practitioners, but discussions of morality itself seem questionable. Can anyone be blamed for hearing the term “moralist” as a pejorative after the likes of William J. Bennett? Wendell Berry is indeed a moralist, but the immorality against which he levels his eloquent opprobrium has nothing to do with who takes whom to whose bed, or what someone chooses to drink or smoke, but is the greed and competitiveness that have left our society one in which so many children go to bed hungry while a few enjoy cake dusted with gold. And which has left us with fouled air, water, and soil, and eliminated thousands of species eternally from existence.

So I say, moralize on, my man! And he does, in essay after essay, addressing issues of land use, human relations, education, consumerism, the value of diversity, and the colonization of the country by the city, always filtered through his deep relationship with the natural world and an honest striving, despite so much that could encourage the contrary, to love humanity, of which he understands himself fully a part. Relentlessly he calls out contemporary economics and politics on their bull, with lines like, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” And he calls the reader to live with the same approach, with affection for the land and our neighbors and responsibility to the future. He answers the question in his title with this: What matters is that which both supports life and makes it sweet, and it ain’t bigger and bigger piles of money.