By Audrey Fong
Leaving music festivals, I always do the exact same thing without fail: I gesture to the beer and Liquid Death cans on the floor and say to whoever is next to me, “Wow, a Chinese person would have loved that.”
Growing up, I saved all of my family’s recyclables to get the five cent return. Even though we were middle class, I couldn’t help but think of all the wasted money that would get tossed if I didn’t intervene. And each time I turned in bags and bags of Diet Coke cans and Vitamin Water bottles, I would marvel at the dozens of dollars we’d get back. To this day, I find it unfathomable that someone would not save their recyclables to get the five cent refund.
I know I’m not the only one. Around Southern California, it’s not an uncommon sight to see Chinese people, usually elderly ones, poking through garbage cans and pulling out recyclables. To this day, I can still picture my friend’s grandfather biking along the boulevard in a white tank top and khaki shorts with bags and bags of recyclables hanging from his handlebars. He, among many others, are why I can’t see a festival field strewn with crushed cans and not think about how much a Chinese person would love to collect them. They’re also partly why I was drawn to Alexandra Chang’s 2023 short story collection, Tomb Sweeping. As a fan of Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, I pulled Tomb Sweeping off the library shelf upon recognizing her name and when I saw that there was a story, “Li Fan,” about an elderly Chinese woman who collects recyclables, I knew I had to check the book out.
Composed of 15 stories, Tomb Sweeping largely deals with scenarios not too far from reality. Like Days of Distraction, Tomb Sweeping is at its best when it makes sharp and oftentimes unpleasant observations of life and the realities we face as we grow up. In Tomb Sweeping, adult narrators grapple with their aging parents or come to turns with their own disappointing adulthoods, while child narrators reflect on their complicated, often tense, family dynamics.
At only three-pages long, “Li Fan” stands out due to its structurally unique format. Starting at the moment Li Fan dies in a gutter, the story progresses backwards, revealing whom she was before she became known as “the Asian recycling lady.” Unlike my collecting of recyclables, Li Fan needs “the bottles and cans that support her life.” The reader learns that she experienced homelessness before moving into a boardinghouse, reflecting the tough reality that senior Asian Americans experience poverty at higher levels than the nation’s average. After detailing Fan’s poverty, the story continues to recede into the past, detailing miscarriages, her husband’s death, and their shared hope that they experienced as students. The story ends the moment she enrolls at university, when she is “overwhelmed with the feeling that her life is finally beginning.” By working backwards, “Li Fan” culminates in a quiet sadness frontloaded by her hardship. Juxtaposing the Fan at the beginning of the story—an elderly woman who passed away collecting recyclables—and who she was before her descent into poverty—a hopeful university student—emphasizes the harshness of the discrepancy between one’s hopes and realities in addition to painting a portrait of who these Asian recycling ladies (and men) could be.
Chang’s subtle reveals and observations are where her short stories shine. “Cure for Life” and “Klara” are perfect examples of how Chang expertly sets up a story to seem ordinary at first, only to culminate in unpleasant realizations or creeping anxieties for the protagonist. In “Cure for Life,” college student Bobby Green works at an upscale supermarket and befriends a teenage coworker named Lillian, whom he views as a little sister. Due to a misunderstanding at a party, Bobby’s friendship is misconstrued as possibly romantic by coworkers, resulting in him chastising Lillian and her quitting her job. A decade later, he sees her again at the Whole Foods he now works at. His excitement dims immediately upon seeing her “pinched smile, the one customers make when they’re annoyed something is out of stock.” Seeing her as a successful adult in office wear, Bobby is forced to reckon with his unpleasant reality, in which he is “frightened at how much time has passed and how little has changed, and he feels deeply sorry and sad, most of all, he realizes, for himself.”
Similarly, the narrator of “Klara” revels in her own self pity upon realizing that her friend, the titular Klara, has outgrown her: “I realized that Klara was doing something important, and doing it just fine without me, exactly as she’d planned.” Before this realization though, Chang details Klara and the protagonist’s friendship from meeting at UC Berkeley to growing apart as Klara became more focused on her sorority, boyfriends, and graduate school, making the narrator feel like a nonpriority. The reader gets the sense that the narrator wishes to absorb residual coolness from Klara, whom she views as beautiful and popular, and to remain her closest companion. While the narrator provides evidence of Klara’s increasing detachment, the final moment where it becomes undeniably clear to the narrator that Klara has moved on still stings because of how the narrator appears to finally fully grasp her unimportance yet still hopes that Klara might reach out to her.
While changing friendships and disappointing adulthoods may not be unique, the way Chang handles them is. Both Bobby and the narrator of “Klara” feel familiar, resulting in their realizations and anxieties provoking similar fears in the reader: What if you’re the one who’s been left behind? What if you’re the friend experiencing arrested development?
Chang’s stories are by no means flashy, rather they are subtle and occasionally mundane, similar to Kate Chopin’s “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (one of my favorite short stories!). However, Chang’s implementation of mundanity is purposeful in the way it mimics real life and how many of our days are unremarkable yet when we look back at years or lives, suddenly, we are able to come to our own realizations. These stories do not beg for your attention; rather, they invite you to sit in solitude with your own reflections.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.