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paperback $16.95
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More reviews by Isaac Stone Fish
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The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flas Fiction from Contemporary China by Shouhua Qi (ed.)
Ever since the rise of the Internet and the fall of the attention span the genre of flash fiction has boomed in China. Known in Chinese as "Minute Story", "Pocket-Size Story", "Palm-Size Story", or "Smoke-Long Story", flash fiction is an extremely short short story, often no more than a few hundred words. Shouhua Qi, Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University and author of the short-story collection Red Guard Fantasies, edited and translated a collection of flash fiction, which he says represent the achievements of the genre in contemporary China.
The Pearl Jacket is divided into seven sections, including "Relationships", "Society", and "The Strange and the Extraordinary". In the introduction, Shuohua writes that each of the 130 stories by 130 different authors has "something profound to say about the human condition, which transcends the bounds of time and place." Each story "showcases a distinctive style, whether simple, minimalist, folksy, erudite, ornate, or elegant." This is true, even for the boring ones. The Communist social realism stories that parade the accomplishments of the peasant class lack energy and after reading a few of them the details tend to blur. The book includes stories written from the 1920s to the present. Because of the lack of English language materials in this genre, it would have been instructive for the author to include some of the early examples of Chinese flash fiction that he mentions in his introduction like the "remarkably `grand' creation myths of Nuwa (ca. 350 BC), Fuxi and Pangu."
The most remarkable stories twist or kick at the end. In "Blowfish", written in 1936, a father cooks a poisonous blowfish for his starving family in an attempt to end their sufferings. He wanders around the village that entire day, mourning. When he returns home, however, he finds his family alive because they had waited for him, and when they eventually eat the blowfish it is no longer poisonous. The story ends with him crying, "Why is it so hard even to ask for death?" Another story, titled "Merchant of Wills", tells of a merchant who purchases wills for the large sum of ten silver coins, because "the last words of a dying man are the most precious treasure he leaves behind to humanity." The reader never learns why the merchant desires the wills; the taut story ends with the villagers wondering "why they felt so uneasy in their hearts."
The collection ends with the dystopian "Parrot," about a poet whose parrot spews prophecies: "Now, including yourself, there are only 13 people left in this town. That's reality, you understand?" The poet examines the town and finds the parrot's words to be true. Returning home, the parrot's mouth (its body has disappeared) exclaims that the other townspeople have died. The poet concludes all that's left for him is to become a parrot. Possibly symbolizing the death of individuality, this story, like the best of the genre, leaves the reader desiring something longer.
Isaac Stone Fish
03/04/2009
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Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media. |
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