“Thank You, Mr. Nixon” Traces the Arcs of Interconnected Characters Over Decades
My kingdom for a writer as savvy, empathic, and hilarious as Gish Jen. Throughout her career, she has distilled the breadth and depth of the immigrant experience into five novels and a classic collection of short fiction, Who’s Irish? Twenty-three years after that publication, she’s back with a tender, inventive second collection, Thank You, Mr. Nixon, linked stories that enhance her reputation as a sui generis stylist. The book teems with her trademark satire—the title story is a letter written by a Chinese girl in heaven to the disgraced president in hell–but it also probe the collective compromises of Chinese-Americans, who too often find themselves stranded on the hyphen, caught in a riptide between two opposing cultures.
Arranged chronologically, Thank You, Mr. Nixon traces the arcs of interconnected characters over four decades, from the first stirrings of post-Mao capitalism to our current pandemic, spanning the globe: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vancouver, New York. Jen borrows from previous books—readers will remember the charming man-child Duncan Hsu from Who’s Irish?—while unearthing fresh insights. A literary trapeze artist, she leaps and twirls from first person to second to third, weaving in emails and letters with brio.
The protagonist of “Duncan in China” flails as a “foreign expert” in Mainland (Jen’s term for the People’s Republic); he’s a “dropout” compared to his polished younger brother, the entrepreneurial Arnie, who glides from piece to piece as the spirit of the model minority, a kind of collective superego. There’s Amaryllis, portrayed in “It’s the Great Wall!” as an irritable child of an “interracial” marriage and in “Amaryllis” as a middle-aged malcontent who calls herself “Paralysis” while engaging in a virtual affair. Her grandmother, Opal, travels back to China with a tour group after years in the United State, shrugging off the Beijing crowds who take to their bikes, pedaling furtively into the modern world: “The grace with which even the elderly swung up onto their seats, their legs clearing their back wheels with ease! And yet more impressive was a certain dancelike synchrony. There was no choreography, of course; nor was there a ballet master. Still, people biked as if there were—they flowed.… On the corner by their hotel there were three old men with birdcages. The bamboo cages hung up in a tree; the old men sat below them in undershirts, fanning themselves and chatting. Now, that she recognized, Opal said, pointing down at them with her own fan. That was China. This bicycling China was—what? A usurper. A fake.”
The tension between fakeness and authenticity, the quest for “true” selves, thread the collection. Tom and Tory, a white couple on the same tour (Tory is a former Miss Ohio), own a coffee house; they can’t help feeling competitive when, years later, Duncan and his wife open a tea house down the block. Arnie Hsu, “the success, brother of Duncan Hsu the failure,” and owner of a thriving import-export business, loses his Hong Kong–raised, much-younger girlfriend, Lulu Koo, when she rejects a vapid future of shopping and lunching with his mother. Arabella Li, a lawyer with a passion for immigrants’ rights, advises her husband, Rich Lee, a writer, when he acts as an art dealer for Lulu’s parents.
Each story, then, passes the baton forward; Thank You, Mr. Nixon cycles through China’s Awakening, the rise of pro-democracy reformists, and the first SARS epidemic in 2003 (which was contained). The book’s second half shifts focus to the affluent Koo family from Hong Kong and the disparate fates of Lulu’s sisters: the brilliant eldest, Bobby, who vanishes mysteriously from her posh Manhattan life; and the middle child, Betty, who chooses the comforts of upscale domesticity while mulling the social turmoil around her. Their father, Johnson, foots the bills for their expenses while their indomitable mother, Tina, asserts herself in their lives, even during Asia’s monsoon season: “She herself had gone to the United States for her MBA and come back sounding okay, not like some people who took words to the United States and brought them back sounding strange. Would she have tried so hard to prepare the kids for the future if she knew they would sound like this? … You needed an apartment in Shanghai to make money, and an apartment in Vancouver to get out, and you couldn’t have too many passports, they were like bracelets. Degrees, too, especially from those top schools, for example, Harvard.… Outside it rained in fine perfect hairs, as if the clouds just had to show they did not have to straighten their hair Korean style, they were already Korean style.”
Jen eventually brings us into the present, with crackdowns in Hong Kong, lawyers rallying to dissidents. The motif of the missing child, tucked delicately beneath the stories’ surfaces, now emerges in relief as Betty Koo grapples with her runaway teenaged son, Theo, and Bobby’s cold trail; these disappeared mirror the disappeared Chinese from the Mao regime. If the West is more “free” than a totalitarian state, Jen poses, then why are our outcomes, from politics to public health, so toxic? The knotty politics of the China–U.S. relationship emerge as Thank You, Mr. Nixon’s overarching theme.
So what’s a writer to make of our chaotic world, growing ever messier and more perilous? Jen offers a clue in “Rothko, Rothko,” which recounts Rich Lee’s negotiations with Ming, a painter who passes off her abstract forgeries as the real thing. Ming works with the materials at hand. “Her paint—a blue-green mixture in an old Revere Ware pot—was so astonishingly diluted, it looked like Easter egg dye,” Jen writes. “On the floor there were also several gallons of turpentine, a box of rags—some of which appeared to have begun life as spaceship-themed pajamas—a camo-printed thermos, and a jug of water. But in addition, there was a jug labeled PHENOL FORMALDEHYDE, two rolled-up Chinese scrolls, a bottle of vinegar, a crate of eggs in cartons, and a large variety of baggies, twist-tied shut.” The validity of Ming’s canvases may be at stake; but the moral authority of leading authors, such as Jen, is essential, leading us forward as we plunge deeper in a darkening century.
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