At the heart of May-Lee Chai’s Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories (2022) is a globalized Chinese identity. Across the various short stories, they are born in various parts of the globe, and they cross borders with only a little unease. One work even has characters living on Mars colonies, but their Chinese identity and how they think and live still has China as a center of gravity and reference.
The title short story, “Tomorrow in Shanghai,” opens with a villager Zhang Xiaobing. He is on death row, is defended by a court-appointed defense attorney, and is a casualty of the mainland Chinese judicial system. While many remember him as a kind presence or as Assistant Village Head Zhang, none have any power to sway the system. As an untrained xue tou (“blood head”) or blood collector for the hospital system, he has caused damage to others and the social fabric. He has been an illegal entrepreneurial blood collector with blood “bought from the poor, illiterate peasants throughout the province, thus causing the deaths of more than thirty-seven persons (thus far) and the infection of more than a thousand (and counting) of others in the myriad remote villages nestled in the mountains and plains just south of the Yellow River in the province that was once the cradle of Chinese civilization.”
His parents have disappeared into the country’s large cities, which host to many internally migrated (and displaced) citizens. Arrested three months prior, Zhang Xiaobing is out of luck and chances. Chai writes:
Thus, Zhang Xiaobing was shot in the back of the head at 11:07 a.m. on the twenty-seventh of April, and within sixty seconds—for the timing was of the utmost importance—his still-warm corpse was dragged into the ambulance waiting at the side of the execution grounds, and a trained doctor began to extract his organs.
Out with the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. The eyes would have been harvested, too, except for the damaged organs from how he was dispatched. The young doctor who has harvested the organs has his own interests. He has done due diligence by reviewing the files of the criminal. And he needs the money for his upcoming nuptials.
Every stakeholder in this interaction has their own interests. The system itself is a brutal one, and those who hope to survive have to know what’s what, and they have to
know what the sociocultural illusions and fakeries are. They have to play along. It is
gauche and dangerous to protest.
“Life on Mars” follows Guo Yu, who has been sent by his mother to stay with an “uncle” in Colorado and to acquire an education, marry an American, and help acquire citizenship for his nuclear family (and perhaps extended family). Quite a bit of money has been paid to enable this setup. Guo starts in menial labor and then starts tutoring in math, even though his mathematical understanding is rudimentary. As he lets down roots, he is discovering his own desires, which must be hidden from his parents. There are truths about life “on Mars” (in the U.S. abroad) that would disappoint. The archaic respect for scholars in Chinese culture do not apply to Guo Yu. He becomes just another striving immigrant, who shares comforting fictions to his kin.
“The Monkey King of Sichuan” focuses on Esther, an academic in the Bay Area, in California, and her friend, Grace, who wants to meet with her. Grace has flown in from the East Coast and wants to meet up. With a premonition, Esther is already leery about meeting because a prior friend had told her of a traumatic assault in a prior face-to-face chat. There is a burden in hearing another’s story of troubles. Both were former graduate students at Stanford University, and they choose to meet there. They share stories of Stanford’s troubling history and ignominious origins, which belie its global reputation today. Their worldview is one of a subculture (elite, privileged, isolated, and of a racial minority).
What follows in their chat is a recollection of Grace’s relationship with a renowned Sinologist, with a belittling, sexist, classist, and racist approach to the world. Grace’s recollections ring true to Esther, but Esther is also savvy enough to realize that those complaints show something of her rejection by the system, which has its failings and longstanding social inequities. By the end of the story, Esther is calculating whether the relationship with Grace will be worth pursuing or not.
“Hong’s Mother” begins with the narrator having moved to France to study a few months ago. Her mother calls and invites herself to visit her daughter since she was able to parlay the winning of two plane tickets to Las Vegas to a round-trip to Paris. She is especially interested in visiting Lourdes, France. Hong’s mother is Caucasian, and her father is Chinese. The family had lived in various parts of the U.S. as part of her father’s academic profession. They encounter aggressive racism in the Midwest:
They hadn’t expected all the stares. When they walked down the main street of the small town, cars slowed, the drivers craning their necks to look. Then the obscene letters in the mail, addressed to ‘The Chinaman’ or ‘The Floozy.” The kids in school with their ching chong jokes, with their fingers to their eyes pulling them slanted. The church ladies with their adoption stories. Henry’s fights in school. It didn’t matter that it was the other boys, the white boys, who started it. He was the one who was blamed.
The mother joins a church group and starts internalizing the racist ideas, with the
mother referring to Hong as her assistant instead of her daughter. She would rather
belong socially than stand up for her own child: “She began to speak in a high-pitched
breathy voice. She laughed along when her friends made racist jokes after church, in
the bingo hall over donuts and black coffee.”
Hong’s mother arrives, and the two make a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, to acquire some holy water.
She’d been expecting an actual pool of water that she could dip the bottles into, something mystical, like a secret pond in a shaded alcove. But instead there were rows of rather ordinary faucets, like something anyone could screw a hose onto to water a lawn.
The story takes a surprising O. Henry turn, though, where the shared mother-daughter experience brings insight and stronger mutual understandings in the relationship.
In another story, the iconic “White Rabbits” candy plays a role as an important throughline in the experiences of Ning-Ning. The story opens with a little girl who bonds with her paternal grandfather, Ye-Ye, as her mother is focused on Nathan, the narrator’s baby brother. Ning-Ning is on a walk with her grandfather when they become lost, and the experience takes on ugly social overtones from racist neighbors and a public spanking for Ning-Ning.
The candy recurs when Ning-Ning is grown up and studying in Nanjing. Where the candy has emotional resonance for her, it is just another flavor for others. The innocuous chewy milky candy, wrapped in rice paper, stands in for this Chinese American’s thin ties to the homeland. There is a sweet flavor but little truly substantive.
“Jia” opens with Lu-lu, whose mother has packed hurriedly and is determined to drive back to California after yet another domestic crisis, after a fight with Lu-lu’s father. The family is beset by racist and xenophobic neighbors, who see the mixed-race family as threats. The outside pressures translate into parental fights in the home. The family in this story and others read as isolated, without much in the way of outside help.
“Slow Train to Beijing” has a Chinese American woman studying in Nanjing University. The country is under martial law. At a party, she meets Alex, who is a Chinese American based out of Beijing. The two start a relationship that evokes contemporary mores but also of intense social competition for romantic partners.
The last story of this collection is “The Nanny.” This one is set on human colonies on Mars. Wu Anping is applying to be a nanny for Heaven’s Blessing Auntie Service in the New Shanghai Colony. For all the change in location, the high technologies, people are still people, and they socially reproduce what they are familiar with. Of particular focus is how privileged men harness the technologies to meet their own psychological and physical needs. In this work, though, even the help are not without power or schemes.
May-Lee Chai’s collection Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories explores
fundamental human nature and Chinese-ness. The stories evoke prose. Chai is a
professor at San Francisco State University. She has published in both prose writing
and fiction writing. She is the American Book Award winner for Useful Phrases for
Immigrants. She has written over ten books.
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.
