By Katherine Jin
The characters in Ling Ma’s short story collection Bliss Montage inhabit worlds that are just a little different from ours. The chasm is sometimes fantastical, like a world where college students do drugs that make them invisible, or professors travel to parallel universes where time doesn’t pass. Other times, the rift doesn’t feel that far-fetched, like a man in Los Angeles who only speaks in dollar signs, or a pregnant woman whose baby’s arm protrudes from her vulva due to the worsening environment in a declining empire. It’s within these twisted realities that Ma’s protagonists navigate entirely human challenges, laying bare the folly and fragility of life in today’s society. “Is this a local issue or a global issue?” a character in Bliss Montage asks. The implication is that while some problems can be solved, the rest must be accepted as facts of life.
Time is a palpable force in the lives of the characters in Bliss Montage. A couple stories feature uncomfortable reunions with people from the past. In “Oranges,” a woman follows her abusive ex-boyfriend around and compares notes about him with another woman he assaulted who’s pressing charges. “G” chronicles young adult Bea’s experience taking an invisibility drug with Bonnie, a childhood friend of circumstance Bea’s grown distant from. Although Bonnie betrays Bea on numerous occasions, Bea can’t seem to bring herself to cut her off as Bonnie is one of her few friends who is also Chinese. To make things more complicated, Bea feels actualized by Bonnie’s keen interest in her. “She asked so many questions, inquiring about what I liked, what I thought about someone, what I wanted in the future. It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze.” In Bliss Montage, the passage of time doesn’t just change the tenor of human relationships. It also shifts the physical space the characters inhabit—for example, the luxury-condo-ification of cities is a through line in several stories.
Stories within stories are used in Bliss Montage to establish a character’s perspective on key themes. Three characters in the standout story “Returning” are authors who publish books about homecoming, each revealing a glimpse of their anxieties and hopes on the subject. The narrator’s husband’s book is about a man who returns to his country and family of origin, only to find that literally nothing has changed and his parents haven’t aged at all during his exile. Yet, the author still returns to his home country Garboza to participate in its Morning Ritual, where hopefuls bury themselves alive and risk death for a chance to be cured of their ailments. This is a character who expects disappointment on one hand, while yearning for a miracle on the other. Another story within a story appears in “Peking Duck,” a story without any sci-fi or speculative elements. In it, a second-generation Chinese immigrant writes a story from her mother’s perspective and presents it at a fiction workshop, raising questions of authenticity and appropriation. The narrator’s story is critiqued by some peers in her workshop for sounding too proficient in English, and by the narrator’s own mother for overdramatizing what she considered an innocuous experience. Ma shows the character’s story in full and allows readers to come to their own conclusions, though I knew which side I was on the moment the narrator said “her imperfect, broken English serves as a scaffolding for my English.”
While Ma eagerly adds twists to the worlds she invents for her characters, her firm grip on realism can limit the intrigue of her stories. The yeti in “Yeti Lovemaking” is physically different from humans, but doesn’t meaningfully diverge from them in any other respect and even speaks perfect English. That the narrator sleeps with one is hardly remarkable. The last story in the collection, “Tomorrow,” suffers from a similar lack of intrigue. We’re told the story takes place in a world where the U.S. is no longer number one and migrants no longer rush its borders. But besides the narrator experiencing a pregnancy anomaly due to a worsening environment, nothing else suggests such a massive shift in the balance of global economic power. In this story, Ma could have leaned into the day to day differences such a world would entail and painted a richer and more convincing picture of what life in America would look stripped of its supremacy.
Ma tends towards ambiguous endings, a tactic she cheekily acknowledges could be considered a cop-out. Whether these types of endings are to your taste, every one of the eight delightfully imaginative stories in Bliss Montage will get you thinking or at least entertain you. This is a collection of stories chock full of intriguing situations from a writer I’m sure has a lot more up her sleeve.
Bliss Montage is available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Garden District Book Shop, Loyalty Bookstore, and Strand Books.
Katherine Jin is a short fiction writer currently based in New York. She was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story prize, and has work forthcoming in The Margins by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.