Tag: Sons

  • Short Story Review: “I Am Pizza Rat” by Han Ong

    (The short story “I Am Pizza Rat” by Han Ong appeared in the October 23rd, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    (There are SPOILERS!)

    Photograph by Melissa Schriek for The New Yorker

    As a kid who grew up in the 90’s, I am a sucker for slacker lit. You know, meandering stories, aloof narrators, whacky characters, and a general revelry for nothing happening… you know, whatever… Perhaps Kerouac created this genre of fiction with On the Road and Dharma Bums. And it’s a tough genre to execute. The form appears antithetical to the general format of short fiction and novels, as slacker lit just wants to stay mellow and float on down the road, but to work effectively, it still needs a climax. And it pains me to say this about “I Am Pizza Rat” by Han Ong, which is a charming and enjoyable short story, but lacks an effective climax, and leaves the end of the piece feeling flat.

    And I liked this story and the writing. The narrator is a fifty-one year old struggling writer who lives in New York City, but is out in San Mateo, California taking care of his seventy-six father who recently had a fall and is recovering. The writing has just the right tone of sadness and depression in it, but also a touch of irony and humor which never lets the story go too far in the dark corners. We meet the instructor of a FALLING NATURALLY class, and his pot selling brother, Bun (pronounced “Boon”) the African nurse, members of a Gilbert and Sullivan Group, and the idiosyncratic routine of an elderly father. And there are animal videos. But at its core is a father and son story, and slowly the life of the father is revealed, and the trauma he experienced, and how he made imperfect efforts not to pass that along to his son. And the son is aware that his father tried, and mostly succeed, at ending this cycle of trauma.

    This is all great stuff, which makes the climax all the more disappointing. I read the story twice, and decided that the climax is the last paragraph of the second to last section. See, the father asks the son where he goes when the nurse comes to the house, and the son replies that he goes to the university library and has started writing again, thus gaining his confidence back. Then the narrator goes on to say in the same paragraph, “In stories, books, I’m a sucker for the moment when the dormant character awakens.” As if this ironic “wink and a nudge” of a line is to suffice as the “realization moment” in the “Hero Cycle” where the hero has changed from the events of the story, thus leading to the resolution. Unfortunately, this lands hollow as the action is told to us, and not shown. This choice feels lazy in an otherwise active slacker story.

    Look, endings are hard, and I don’t believe this ending “ruins” the story. It’s just more like a record scratch in an otherwise very good song. There are moments and observations in here that Han Ong shows a deft hand with. Especially with the father/son relationship, which is the core reason I would recommend reading this story.

  • Short Story Review: “Heart” by Shuang Xuetao (Translated from the Chinese, by Jeremy Tiang.)

    (The short story “Heart” by Shuang Xuetao appeared in the October 9th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Sally Deng

    If you write a story about a parent/child relationship, and then throw in a dying parent, you pretty much are half way to claiming a small place in my heart. My logically analytical side gets thrown out the window, and I am running on emotions. And let’s be honest, if you’re creating art, you want people to have an emotional reaction – it’s like the whole point. I say this because I can be completely biased when it comes to certain subject matters, which can complicate things when I try to review short stories from an objective place.

    Which is why it’s strange for me to say that I didn’t feel an emotional connection to “Heart” by Shuang Xuetao. This is a fine story, well written, engaging, and just odd enough to keep me intrigued with what was happening. And as I was reading this piece, I kept expecting it to “click” into place and tap that raw parent/child emotion in me, but it never came. But I don’t begrudge the story for this, nor am I left feeling that the story “misfired” in its execution. Oddly, I feel this might have been exactly the reaction the story was attempting to create in the reader.

    The story mainly takes places on a medical bus that is driving late at night to Beijing. The passengers are an older man dying of heart disease, his son, a driver, and ER doctor who agreed to accompany the father and son. We learn from the narrator, who is the son, that the heart disease that is killing his father skips every other generation, meaning the son is immune from the fate of his father.

    The tone of the story is straightforward, logical, and there are no literary flourishes. But the events in this story slightly graze the edge of surrealism – just slightly. It’s enough touches to make the story feel that it’s not completely in reality. But still I had to wonder why these touches were there. What did the father’s daily boxing routine really symbolize? Why was the driver sleeping as he drove the vehicle? Also, what about the doctor’s sleeping? Was this all a dream? And the need for the son to have to use the bathroom? Was there a meaning to the son’s self-described laziness and his recent decision to stop working, while the father worked every day; even when he retired, he went and found a new job to keep working? All of these questions left me feeling uncertain, unsettled, and wondering what I was supposed to make of this?

    And then there is a moment in the story where the son wonders what he is supposed to do when his father does pass away. He thinks of all the work that will come with making the arrangements for a funeral; contacting family and people his father worked with, raising money to pay for it all, and cars for the procession. Then the son thinks that once his father is gone, that he will truly be alone and by himself. To that the narrator says, “I guess that’s what freedom looks like nowadays,…” A sobering, and heartbreaking realization, that can also feel overwhelming to the point where one can be left numb, and disconnected.

    There isn’t one way to mourn, and that’s what “Heart” reminded me of. I don’t know what all of these pieces in this story amounted to, but I don’t think Shuang Xuetao is wrong for presenting that either, if that was the intention. Maybe not having a feeling right away is still a sort of feeling. Maybe.