By Audrey Fong
When I first saw Meng Jin tweet about her debut short story collection, Self-Portrait with Ghost, I could not help but fangirl. Her 2020 debut novel, Little Gods, left me awed in its portrayal of a daughter returning to China and discovering who her mother was beyond just her mother. The novel felt distinctly Chinese in the way the narrator depicts China’s rapid modernization over the past decades and how the narrator’s identity as a Chinese American girl shaped her childhood. I’ll never forget the line about the narrator’s friends dressing her as Mulan for Halloween – her race being the costume. So, when it came to her short story collection, I expected more of Jin’s signature incisive portrayals of modern-day China and distinctly Chinese insights into coming of age. In that, Self-Portrait with Ghost certainly delivered.
Self-Portrait with Ghost features 10 short stories spanning genres from literary fiction to ghost story and mystery. Written during the Trump presidency, Jin shares that she “was trying to understand how to live – from day to day, hour to hour – when news of disaster is coming always from everywhere, from the past and from the future.” Until this presidency, Jin had felt “American exceptionalism was still a real dream.” But with that dream broken and realizing the artificiality of that exceptionalism, Jin launched into writing these stories.
The collection certainly feels distinctly Chinese and Chinese American at the same time. Even though not every story takes place in China, the characters are described in ways that clearly mark them as Chinese or Chinese American – snacking on tea eggs, using Mandarin endearments, and commuting between cosmopolitan cities and rural villages, speaking to the discrepancy between the urban and rural worlds of China today. The strong reminder that each character is either Chinese or Chinese American works in that Jin uses their perspectives to offer criticisms of both the U.S. and China. In “Three Women,” a character named Tian, who’s lived in both countries, notes:
‘No one questioned if your mother or I could work office jobs like our husbands.’ Then women were freed from being beasts of carriage; since the eighties, China had birth controls and abortions plenty, no questions asked, because of the one-child policy. It wasn’t like in American, where people threw pig’s blood on women who didn’t want a child, where desperate girls went into back alleys with rusty clothes hangers and bled out onto the concrete. Mao’s China was atheist, governed by science, unlike America, which was governed by Christian fanatics.
This observation is timely in light of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and how much of the noise against abortion is fueled by “Christian fanatics.” While many Americans condemn the one-child policy and most of us can agree that China did not enforce their one-child policy entirely humanely, what Jin’s character offers us is another perspective on the one-child policy and the abundance of birth control – a world in which women are freed from being child producers, one in which they could have equal career opportunities to men. When positioned that way, it’s hard to argue that the policy is objectively evil, the way it’s so often depicted in U.S. classrooms. And in Trump’s America, where so many of us questioned the efficacy of the COVID vaccine, Jin’s character reminds the reader of the benefits of a country run by science. Cross-cultural observations like this can spark new conversations and beg the reader to take a step back and look at their world from afar.
While the aforementioned paragraph makes the collection sound heavy, the collection isn’t entirely focused on serious topics like the one-child policy. There are definitely some sweet spots for Chinese American readers – tiny moments of stunning recognition of my own experiences. For me, this occurred in a two-page long scene in “First Love” in which the character’s lover appeases her with a gift of doujiang with sweet ice and pork and mustard buns – one of my ideal snacks, down to the pickled mustard greens. No one needs another reminder of the importance of representation in art, so I will just say that I appreciate inclusions like this that make the stories feel familiar.
While the stories drew me in and overall, I did enjoy them, there is one issue I could not ignore. The stories in this collection often pivot to unexpected and uneven places both plot wise and tonally. In “Philip is Dead,” the narrator details her tumultuous relationship with death-obsessed Philip and for most of the story, she seems to stay emotionally distant from the events and it feels more like a story of a character reflecting on an odd period in her life. But then the story ends abruptly on a snarky remark about how she’s outlived him. Then, in “Suffering,” we watch the protagonist Ling being tortured by an unknown foe. She suspects that the series of mishaps and general unluckiness may be caused by a woman who is jealous she’s dating Mr. Fu, but we never learn for sure. Instead of exploring what could be a great mystery story or how China’s gender imbalance affects dating, the story ends with the unnamed narrator stealing Ling’s consciousness and wearing it like a jacket. While these endings felt jarring, the endings at least were not entirely random (there are vague hints here and there). It definitely leaves the readers having to reread sections. Because the worlds Jin creates are so textured and believable, I would have enjoyed spending more time in each story and therefore, wish she had slowed down her stories and given more background instead of the rapid, surprise endings.
Self-Portrait with Ghost is a gripping, fast-paced collection of short stories that takes its reader deep into the world of modern China. The variety of genres and themes kept each individual story fresh, such that the reading experience never felt like a grueling marathon. Additionally, since each story is distinct in the topics it covers and many of the issues are pressing, I can easily see her stories being incorporated into Asian American studies and Chinese history courses. Besides the uneven endings, I appreciated the collection as a whole for its ability to keep me interested, the moments of recognition I felt, and the wide selection of stories that kept pulling me back in day after day.
Self-Portrait with Ghost is available from Alexander Book Company, Barnes & Noble, Blue Cypress Books, Kinokuniya, Laguna Beach Books, Loyalty Bookstore, and Powell’s City of Books.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.