The pandemic years were some of the most difficult in recent memory. People lived under threat of SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 infection and a range of outcomes, including death. The borders of nation-states closed down. Tourism came to a halt. Economies wobbled. Some governments spent large amounts of money to shore up economies and to protect jobs. Many had to get into car lines for food. In the U.S., the Trump era meant that many felt under attack for their race or other reasons.
The above was the context for the writing of Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost, a collection of short stories written in the years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic.
The opening story of the collection, “Phillip is Dead,” is narrated by a woman who had had a relationship with the aforementioned Phillip when both were young and aspiring artists. He had been forgotten until his death brought him back to mind. With the benefit of hindsight, with the protagonist in a satisfying love relationship, she is satiated, not hungry, not angry, not as hurt, as her former self.
I waited for my lover to come. I was in love, oh yes. Not the rapturous kind that turns and thins your sleep, but a satisfying, contented love. I woke in the mornings well-rested and warm, like a loaf of risen bread.
Her professional ambitions seem to have receded, too, with the satisfaction of her romantic relationship.
In her old life, with her former social networks, the ultimate was artmaking and being true to their artistic selves and what they could create. Her relationship with Phillip was not one of give-and-take but competition and one-upping. Both were untamed and perhaps short-sighted: “I’d liked that Phillip’s father was dead; it made him more interesting.” They obsessed about themselves and each other and Art. They were perhaps certain of their own self-greatness.
The two take shared trips. They go to an unnamed island.
…we’d wandered into an old cemetery at the outskirts of the city whose iron gates had once been locked by a chain that now lay in pieces in the grass. The grounds were overgrown. Dried weeds, sprouting from the cracks of grand crumbling tombstones, crunched beneath our feet. We walked into a circle of crypts guarded by faceless seraphs and saints, garish displays of wealth and piety, the false idols of the previous social order.
They live in the moment, and their sense of the past is limited. The dynamic between the narrator and the subject is violent and abusive. Phillip shuts down her creativity by diminishing her sense of self, her photography. His is a game of dominance. They have the idea of dying for so-called “great art.” In one recounted interchange, she admits to Phillip:
Yes. I’m too interested in my own survival. And I have no good reason for wanting to survive…except that I like being alive.
That statement is a refutation of the artiste ethos, perhaps a rejection of bohemian values with a nihilistic twist.
“Suffering” follows the life of Ling, whose husband has passed on (but who has left her with a young son) and whose Little Sister works as a banker in the U.S. Her sister visits China every so often with gifts of used clothing and expensive face creams (worth a year’s wages) for Ling. Ling has an interest in looking good since she has met Mr. Fu through a dating app: “Her beauty is an investment in Mr. Fu, and Mr. Fu is an investment in her future, in Hai’s.” She is practically focused on her financial well-being, and emotions are a frivolity. Ling has a rash on her face that may be from stress, or some disease, or the face cream that her sister has gifted to her.
Ling has a critical view of the world. She has the sense that her brother married the wrong woman: “The women in that family are known to go after men belonging to other women, chasing fortune, dispensing illness and tragedy to whoever stands in their way. Brother’s Wife is no different. She will do anything for Little Sister’s money.”
She is hyper aware of her social positioning. She is sensitive about who her friends are and who her friends are not. She is superstitious about the world, too. She plots out her life with paranoia. When her son Hai comes down with fever and vomiting, she instantly suspects poisoning. Hers is a worldview that may or may not be informed by reality. It is a world in which “kindness is never free,” and everyone has ulterior motives. People are in the business of ruining each other’s lives while hiding their spiteful hand.
Ling is falling apart mentally. She is withdrawing from the world. She sets up decoys in her home for whatever malicious force is plaguing her:
On the bottom shelf, I see: bottles of cooking oil, soy sauce, vinegar, salt, the lids and caps wrapped in film; above, the vacuum-sealed packs of clothes…I look closer and see: the shadows inside the unused room have been rearranged. The dresser and bed are pulled into positions of use, the bed made and a blanket spread over two lumps shaped to mimic the human form.
She has a camera set up to monitor the space. Her worldview evokes some of the topsy-turviness and hallucinatory nature of Can Xue’s avantgarde reality-shifting fiction.
The conclusion reads powerfully, with multiple acceptable interpretations. Ling may be an untrustworthy narrator, but it may also be that she has a persecutor close in to her life.
“Self-Portrait with Ghost” opens with the narrator seeing Gugu, a friend who had passed away 16 years ago. Then, she was depressed and suicidal.
She had been dead for sixteen years. Even when she was alive, she had never crossed the ocean to see me, though not out of malice or disregard. I know she’d meant more to me than I had to her. She’d meant more to me because for so long, she had pursued death with a near religious fervor. She was the first person of that type I’d known.
In this story, the title work, the narrator is challenged about her writing has turned out. Gugu suggests that the author does not care enough about differentiating between reality and unreality. Gugu is standing in as the voice of the author’s inner critic. Jin writes:
Each character tells their version of reality and the various realities add up to something that looks more like unknowing than a solution. And what about that story with the ambiguous “I,” or the one about paranoid grief, or the one set in a city that is kind of like this one but not? In all of them reality shifts somehow to question the very nature of what we privilege as real.
Perhaps the “ghost” in the story stands in for tradition, a reluctance to go post-modern.
“Three Women” follows the fates of three girls as they get older and grow into women. Where one was “evil,” one pretty, and one clever, they grow into their fuller selves over time in unpredictable ways.
“First Love” opens with a young woman’s obsession with X. Back in the day, the narrator was best friends with Dong Yun in primary school; it is her child whom she nannies in a lackadaisical manner. The narrator is self-obsessed and in love with the idea of love. If life is a competition, her friend Dong has hit the jackpot: she has married well and is wealthy and is perhaps an inattentive mother. The narrator observes: “She and her husband made so much money sitting in offices, they could pay other people to do all their work for them: the cooking, the cleaning, the mothering.”
The little girl is a year-old and nicknamed Guagua (melonmelon). The narrator thinks:
I adored her—I really did. She was not mine, but she was so small, and charming in her smallness and fatness, and tough she was useless she declared her needs clearly, without suggestion or subtext. I wanted to despise her; sometimes, when she exhausted or disgusted me, I wanted to despise her very much.
The subject of her obsession is X, a boy two grades higher, who has aspirations to work in a factory. The narrator has only attended primary school. The narrator wants to live a life of “pure feeling” instead of necessarily settling down to marriage and motherhood and a house in the village. She runs into X, and he is with a woman who was set up to be his arranged wife. She has a set of choices from which to make the next chapter of her life, and she makes her play in shocking ways.
What happens to human compassion in different circumstances? “With Feeling Heart” opens with the scene of a woman named Xiaoyi who is packing food into a plastic bag, which she tosses down to a man in the same building out on his balcony. He is hungry, and she has the goal of giving at all times as her raison d’etre. She wants to stack debts twofold by refusing repayment for her kindnesses. She thinks that her virtue is being counted and she is collecting a spiritual or other reward someday. (Is this a Buddhist belief?) Twenty years later, the narrator is stateside. It is the pandemic, and she recognizes the need of the homeless around her. She is stateside. Perhaps it is difficult enough for her just to survive. She finds her compassion for others has long disappeared. She thinks:
I have half a mind to leave my backpack of groceries at his feet. Instead I hurry past. I turn a corner and for shame I run. Through streets pitched with tents, past broken needles and shattered glass, past shifting shapes beneath shelters of tarp. I run, past Porches parked behind Teslas, past dried scabs of excrement, I run.
Who she is has changed, and she is slowly recognizing that change.
“Selena and Ruthie” opens with a choral director in middle school observing two friends. Selena is working class. Her father is a pizza delivery driver. As a singer, she sets a clear tune and pitch for those around her. Her friend is Ruthie, who sings with a “raw, expressive light,” perhaps fit for solo work. The story evokes middle school life among friends, with their thin and temporal relationships, their high emotions, their experimentation with sexuality, their flirting with self-harm, and their melodrama around romantic relationships. Over time, families move, and the social landscape changes. Selena has married and she and her husband attend a musical performance, which is revelatory about talent and the hard work of harnessing wildness and raw talent into something worthy of the bright lights of others’ attention.
“In the Event” is narrated by Chenchen, whose friend Tony introduces her to Jen, a “local local” who also has an interest in music. Chenchen and Tony are both transplants to the Bay Area, with families from an area south of Shanghai. They obsess over the threat of earthquakes and agree to meet at “Chinaman’s Vista” in case of a quake. Chenchen has something of a doomscrolling focus on disasters and catastrophizes in terms of her media consumption—such as an audio book and other content. While the Chinese-ness and Asianness is something fleeting in many of these stories, often something of a footnote, that identity does inform a sense of physically feeling sick at seeing the newly elected president’s face onscreen. His signaling has been racist and antithetical to the values of a pluralistic democracy. The story ends with the realization of the need for psychological safety in a time of risk.
“The Garden” captures a snippet of lived life in a time of lockdown. The narrator is sharing a web conferencing session with her grandmother, whose is eating loquats on screen, with a caretaker wiping the juice from her face. Time is slipping away even as the world has slowed and gone to ground:
On the other side of the world a small hole had opened in her grandmother’s mind and memories were dripping out one by one. Meanwhile the airports were shut, and they were told to also shut their doors…News came by images on screens, as did diversion and entertainment, the pulse of the greater world.
In such a time of crisis, simple pleasures, normalcy and its continuance, human connection are of special value.
“The Odd Women” reads as a sci-fi work, in which first, a woman jogger is seen running headlong into a moving train by multiple witnesses. Investigators enter a home only to step on human bones. They discover 13 corpses of the same woman.
The genetic code from every separate corpse—thirteen total, it was finally determined—was not just similar but identical, down to the last nucleobase pair, a biological impossibility never before seen, even in cases of laboratory-engineered monozygotic twins. The perfect identity of genetic and epigenetic code, the perfect identity even of biological traces and residues of time and experience, was such that even the wild speculation of cloning had to be dismissed. Nonsensical as it was, the only accurate way to describe what had been found was this: thirteen separate corpses of one person, born into the same body, living the same life, and dying the same death—by gunshot to the head.
With those discoveries and spectacle, the story reverts to explanation, with the core dynamics surrounding a mother, Octavia, and her daughter, Mina. This work is one of the more elusive ones.
Meng Jin attended Harvard University and Hunter College. Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and lives in S.F.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
