By Melody S. Gee
Dear Chrysanthemums, Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s inventive and powerful debut novel-in-stories, offers a mosaic of lives affected by devastating events in 20th century Chinese history. In these stories, some as brief as a single page, and all impressively diverse in form, setting, and emotional terrain, we meet women struggling to live with their experiences in the Chinese Civil War, the Cultural Revolution, or the massacre at Tiananmen Square. A poet, translator, and musician, Sze-Lorrain’s language is lush and lyrical, from descriptions of a forearm scar as “a deformed horizon that had somehow landed” on a body, to reflections of a craftsman who “never saw in a table an object without a life. Round or oblong, he used to say, a table embodied a world: we sit at a table to find company.” With each story, Sze carefully unfolds how characters are traumatized and haunted, and how they are connected to people in other stories. For readers, it is a slow and breathtaking realization of the scope of damage—assault, isolation, torture, mass murder, forgetting—that has spread across the diaspora and the decades.
The opening story, “A Death at Wukang Mansion,” plunges us into the political retaliations of the Cultural Revolution. A dancer is brought to a room in a vast and crumbling complex of apartments to await her fate. Each day, she watches an empty coffin carried into another room, and later removed by the Red Guard with a body inside. When it is finally the dancer’s turn, the building’s old caretaker and his wife come to collect her body, wondering what ordinary people like them can do about anything. Their conversation is terrifying in its rationalization. “I wish we’d done something,” the old man says. “No point in having regrets,” his wife replies. “What can ordinary people like us do? Better to play safe than to pay the price—.” The coffin, like so many objects throughout the novel—a white piano, a carved table, a harp, a scar—is as animated as a character, bearer of ghosts and former desires.
From there, we meet a cast of women connected by blood and circumstance, subject to cultural forces or personal decisions that ripple out for generations. “Back to Beijing” is a particularly haunting series of unanswered letters from a woman to her sister, each dated on the 6th, 16th, or 26th day of the latter half of 2016. (Every year in the novel ends in the number six, an ironically divine number in Chinese that signifies “a smooth life.”) The narrator, who had survived the massacre at Tiananmen Square, sounds confused and alone, uncertain about her confinement in Hôspital Sainte-Anne, about her own memories, or what the doctors and her husband are telling her. Reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s unreliability ultimately assures us that what is happening around her is surely not about care or healing.
That massacre is also a specter in the novel’s most poetically charged story, “An Invisible Window,” where we meet three old college friends, Ying, Lou, and Tong, in a cathedral in Paris. At first, they talk of St. Augustine, meditation, and yoga. They seem like reflective tourists. But then, one friend says, “You know our grief will never leave us. Here is the term for our condition: post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.” The three are survivors and witnesses of “the June fourth carnage” at Tiananmen Square. Most of the story unfolds in their conversation, whose minimal dialogue tags cause the reader to lose track of who is speaking as the events they recall spill out with mounting urgency, and as one collectively formed remembrance. The lines of dialogue often read like poetry.
“Be calm, yes, be angry—”
“We can never step foot on the square anymore…”
“All the exits were blocked.”
“Because we lost.”
“We died that night.”
“We must live on—”
“Yes, because we are alive…because…”
Together, the friends remember singing and chanting, trying to meditate, screams, sirens, fires, and the smell of burnt flesh, all while grappling with survivor’s guilt. “This reunion is no more than a symbolic act for lost souls who have no cemetery to go to, no place to honor their dead. It is our candlelight vigil for the massacre. I come because of my guilty conscience. Why are we alive instead of our comrades?” Their painful liturgy is an act of catharsis, survival, and ongoing resistance.
Every story in this stunning novel captures how our histories live with us, on us, and through us, and how we are defined by and defiant of our pasts. One character, a cook for Madame Chiang Kai Shek, muses, “Every storyteller knows when to omit the backstory, how to mend the foggy in-betweens,” as she reckons with the truth and how, or whether, to tell it. Dear Chrysanthemums is a record of truth none of us can afford to let disappear, illuminating the backstory that is the story, and mending the “foggy in-betweens” of displacement, loss, and fragmentation with painful and exquisite human wholeness.
Dear Chrysanthemums is available from Astoria Bookshop, Bookshop, Garden District Bookshop, Green Bean Books, Laguna Beach Books, and Waucoma Bookstore.
Melody S. Gee is the author of the poetry collections The Convert’s Heart Is Good to Eat (2022), The Dead in Daylight (2016), and Each Crumbling House (2010). Her first book of essays is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in 2024. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.