The Complexity of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience: A Review of Nancy Au's Spider Love Song and Other Stories
““After a long frigid winter, she’d been craving jasmine blossoms, which is the scent of dragons in love.””
Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Nancy Au’s remarkable debut collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, explores the Asian American diaspora. Simultaneously modern and ancient, quirky and compelling, the seventeen short stories, flash and fables reveal the complexity of the immigrant and refugee experience. How that experience changes and morphs with each successive generation and yet carries the ancestral DNA, threads of culture and tradition, legend and mythology. Dynasties insisting to be sewn into the fabric of the now.
In this collection, Au humanizes the newcomer. In so doing, she invites us to sumptuous feasts and day-long meal preparations. Oven baked frog thighs, “pearlescent moon slivers with pungent garlic, tiny onions” served on a bed of arugula. Appreciated with loud croaking burps. Plates of “gingery fish and scallops, pickled duck web and salted squid, and a bowl of steaming rice.” Slurping of fish-ball soup. Serving the duck head to the honored guest.
Au reveals their struggles, from finding friends and community to finding employment consistent with education and background. Making do, making ends meet. The hard work, the physical and emotional toiling of non-white America. Where families labor in an orchard hand dusting blossoms with pollen sticks in “Lincoln Chan: Pear King” and a former veterinarian is reduced to dispensing meds at a nursing home in “Odonata at Rest.”
The stories are told mostly from a youthful point of view. Ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds, young enough to believe in dragons and damselflies, young enough to believe the stories their elders tell. But this is an age of constant observation. Because the world is still a wonder, they take it all in. They are at the dawn of understanding. They puzzle together white lies and omissions. They see, for the first time, their parents’ deficiencies. They feel acutely their displacement, their otherness.
In “The Richmond,” a daughter wins a lottery to attend a private school. The new school, the mean girls, the other side of town complicates her relationship with parents’ history and her new divergent path. She tries to understand the pain of fleeing Communist China– the cruelty and sacrifice it took to survive, but she can no longer tolerate the neighborhood in which they live. A place that’s not Chinatown. A place that’s not white suburbia. She tells her parents that she is not like them. She is not an immigrant. Why are they punishing her?
“I wanted to say that I understood Baba’s crude jokes with the Wans, about how they escaped genocide by pointing to their neighbors then playing dead. But at eleven, I couldn’t interpret their birdsong and thought it a sweet uselessness. I couldn’t grasp my parents’ twisted refugee humor or that their laughter was a sparrow song of sorrow, of disloyalty, of survival—a savage happiness. I couldn’t picture Mama’s childhood friend on her knees, hands tied behind her back, hair spilling over her shoulders, tears pouring from her eyes as a soldier towered over her. I could not picture the explosion of a bullet fired from the rifle, the pierced skin, the shattering skull, or Mama’s grief.”
Throughout the collection, Au underscores the tradition of Chinese storytelling. Au finds stories everywhere: in math and science, in trashy romance novels, in death. Where people can “stand next to each other on the slippery wet edge of their story, holding up each other’s glossy dime-store dreams.”
In “Wearing My Skin,” a single mother Cynthia earns a living as a phone sex worker, spinning erotic tales while she shuffles around her apartment in airplane slippers.
In “How to Become Your Own Odyssey or the Land of Indigestion,” a father recounts nighttime travels after he is found sleeping on top of the family’s old station wagon or sprawled on the kitchen floor amongst the remains of his sleepwalk-gorging: tofu blocks, raw cabbages, sesame oil. He tells glamorous sleepwalking stories where his dreams take him to grand forests with golden-winged creatures resembling seahorses and prisons, churches and schools “built out of bright vermillion pomegranate skins.”
There is a hopefulness embedded in this collection. Throughout, spiders and spider webs, pear trees, peaches and peach pits, the color red, and ducks, symbols of good omens, prosperity, abundance and luck, signal an optimism for the future, long and happy marriages and cures to relationship problems.
In the laugh out loud, riotous “Louise,” a married couple, wife and wife, May Zhou and Lai, both accountants, are having their traditional Friday picnic lunch when a mangled, one-eyed, one-toed, bald-headed duck wanders over. Lai scoops up the duck in delight, names it Louise and insists on adopting it. She tucks Louise into their lunch cooler, using a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich as a duck mattress. She’s already picturing the domestic scene, Louise greeting them at the front door after work, nipping at their pant legs, wiggling her feathery tail until they pet her bald spot. They’d be a family. “You don’t know love ’til you have a duck.” They are arguing over the practicalities of having a duck (it can’t bury its own poop, duck-proofing the house) when a ranger enters the scene commanding Lai to hand over the bird. A melee ensues. Lai believes the duck will bring magic into their lives, she refuses to give up hope.
Despite the psychological hold of the past, Au challenges stereotypes and traditions. Women marry women. Daughters are adored. A mother refuses to honor the birth spirits that would have diminished her daughter. “Math is an asshole.” An eighty-year-old woman, “in her own true myth,” is not “a corny grandmother.” “She is useful poison.” Women are the breadwinners, holding their families together with their wages while husbands/fathers are left behind, lose jobs, or disappear.
And with a slight of hand, Au uses an ancient tale, a retelling of Chinese mythology to comment on the future. Her lush poetic prose illuminates the truth of climate change and the truth of building a new life in an inhospitable land. In “Anatomy of a Cloud,” a story of love, ingenuity and grief, Fei tends to last dragon god of rain.
“Fei uses the chicken claw to comb YingLong’s coarse beard, and recites stories of the afterworld, a place not deadened by drought, with oil slicks for oceans, black and mystery deep. Fei shakes the sand dollar to hear inside. She puts it to her ear and listens to grains slide over themselves, washing over rocks and sea ledges the way water once washed over the long dead sharks and penguins, seaweed and jellyfish. The sand dollar lets her see underneath the beach. And there she finds millennia before the Anthropocene dried up the planet. She finds buried treasure, gold booty and purple gemstones, lost eyepatches of pirates. She finds the footsteps of every creature that has ever walked the beach, every bird, every warrior. She finds every seal and every whale and dragon skeleton. She finds broken kite strings, lost tennis balls. She finds the ocean that was once glacier and once in Africa and on the cap of the earth.”
It is difficult to sum up the experience of reading this collection, a journey through time, a dance with people you may have seen from a distance but never bothered to get to know or understand. In a place as vivid and inviting as your own backyard. These stories linger long after the last word is read. Like an ornamental shawl embroidered with the finest silk thread.
