Transparency

by Frances Hwang

  “An odd woman,” the man from the justice court remarked. Mr. Chen thought at first that the man was referring to his wife. But then the elevator doors opened, and Marnie Wilson appeared, a faint smile on her lips. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tiny bun, and she wore the same blue suit that she had worn on the day that Mr. Chen had first shown her the apartment. He wondered what she had placed inside the small black suitcase that she clutched at her side. She stepped off the elevator, followed by two policemen. The doorman immediately approached her. “Miss Wilson,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry, but you can’t leave your furniture and boxes here.”

  The Christian lady’s face tightened, red splotches appearing on her skin. “Please,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Wilson, I truly am, but our manager has informed me that you can’t leave your things in the lobby.”

  The movers were already beginning to carry her boxes and furniture outside to the street. Mr. Chen watched as the Christian lady dragged her suitcase across the lobby through the revolving doors. She stood nervously on the sidewalk beside her possessions, and people stared at her and at her things as they walked by. The movers continued to dump boxes and furniture on the ground, her possessions growing and spreading into an island around her feet. Everything was in a pile, jumbled together. Her chairs, her table, her bookcase, her rug, her mattress. The movers departed, and she was left standing alone amid the heap. She picked up her suitcase, walked a few steps, then set it back down again.

  Mr. Chen tapped her on the shoulder, and she flew around to look at him. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said. She stared at him with dazed eyes, and Mr. Chen looked away, pretending to study her possessions. “What are you going to do? You have so many things.” He regretted his words as soon as they were spoken. The Christian lady owned very little actually. It had taken the movers only a half hour to clear out the apartment.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, shaking his head. “I hoped you already moved.”

  The Christian lady’s mouth trembled as she smiled. “I was so happy to live here,” she said. She fumbled in her pocket and pressed something cold and silver into his palm. Mr. Chen saw that he was holding the key to the apartment.

  In the lobby, there was no sign of his wife. The elevator was open, as if waiting for him, and Mr. Chen rode up twelve floors in silence. In the dim hallway, he hesitated for a moment, trying to remember which way to turn. On the door, the Christian lady had taped a note in neat handwriting. Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven, it read.

  He found his wife inside the empty apartment. She stood in front of a window, her arms folded across her chest as she looked down at the city. The room was perfectly bare, just as he had imagined, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to forget that the Christian lady had lived here.

  “Do you remember when we first saw this apartment?” his wife said. “We thought everything was going to be better then.”

  “Mingli,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to him. It did not sound like his own. He wanted to say something, to ask her pardon, but he could only touch her sleeve as she continued to stare out the window.

  “I feel ...” she said, and she covered her eyes with one hand. “I feel it would be easy to live in an apartment like this. I could live here for the rest of my life.”

  Mr. Chen laid his hand on the back of her head. He could feel her scalp’s warmth through the dry threads of her hair. Outside, there was winter, gray buildings against a white sky. From where he stood, he saw tiny cars inching along the highway through a world that had fallen into silence.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their generous support during the writing of this book, I would like to thank the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University, the MacDowell Colony, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation.

  So many people have helped me with these stories. There are others, too, whose friendship and conversation were invaluable to me as I wrote this book. I wish to thank them all for their contribution to this work.

  I am grateful as well to my teachers Kevin Canty, Debra Earling, Deirdre McNamer, and Joy Williams and to my fellow graduate students at the University of Montana. Special heartfelt thanks to Helen Atsma, Esi Edugyan, Wendy Erman, Matt Freidson, Tamara Guirado, Nancy Hwang, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Linda Mao, Sheila McGuinness, Michael Mezzo, Shimon Tanaka, and Amy Williams.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Frances Hwang is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Montana. She has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University. A past recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, she lives in Berkeley, California.

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  Reading Group Guide

  Transparency

  Stories by

  FRANCES HWANG

  A conversation with Frances Hwang

  You have studied writing at Brown University and the University of Montana. Before attending Brown, did you know you wanted to be a writer? How has formally studying the craft of writing been beneficial to you?

  I was in the eleventh grade when I thought that maybe I could be a writer. Until then, it seemed outside the scope of possibility, even though writing was something I was always interested in. What changed for me was simply having a close friend who also wrote and who was even more impractical and idealistic than I was. Somehow it no longer seemed like such a crazy thing to want to devote my life to writing. If the world thought I was foolish, it was comforting to know there was someone else who shared my delusions.

  Finding a community of writers might be one of the best reasons to go to graduate school to study creative writing. As a writer, you face rejection at every turn, and what’s worse, people often regard you as naïve, lazy, and unfortunate. So one of the things that makes this a little more bearable is finding others, like you, who are struggling to put words down on the page and who don’t question the validity of what you’re doing. It certainly can turn the solitary endeavor of writing into a more hopeful, less lonely one.

  Before going to the University of Montana, I must say, I was drifting as a writer. I had no sense of audience (that is, when I wrote, I didn’t have any consideration for my reader), I wasn’t reading contemporary fiction, and I didn’t have friends who were serious, practicing writers. In short, I was writing in a vacuum, and the result was incredibly stilted, pretentious stuff. I had a grandiose desire to write brilliantly, to write sentences of genius, but this ended up paralyzing me. Going to school for creative writing was a nice dose of reality and allowed me to come down from the ether. I had to start from the very beginning, with no pretensions and no ego, just a desire to communicate as truthfully as I could.

  Some of the stories in Transparency involve people who have limited interaction with society. Your character Marnie Wilson, for instance, stays in her apartment and seems unwilling or afraid to go out. Why do you think you’re interested in writing about this subject?

  It definitely wasn’t a conscious obsession, but I do notice that it’s a recurring theme in my work. Maybe it has to do with my profession, how I have to shut myself up in a room and not socialize if I want to focus and write. It also seems to me that modern life can be very isolating. The world is smaller and in a sense more connected through the power of the media, but we ourselves seem to be diminished, made numb, by the constant barrage of information and entertainment we view when we turn on our televisions and computers. We might not know our neighbors, but we do know the latest celebrity gossip. So when I write about shut-ins, I’m trying to touch upon this feeling of disconnection and unreality that pervades our lives amid all the confusion and chatter.

  Several years ago, when I was living in Philadelphia, an acquaintance of mine was talking about some artist or thinker who believed that as humans we’re fated to live apart from one another, trapped inside our own separate rooms. There are win
dows we can look out of, and this is how we communicate, but ultimately we’re separated by glass. This person I knew said that he might have to find a key or break a window, but whatever it took, he would do all that he could to get out of that room. I was struck by what he said. All of us have a hope for connection, a deep longing to get out of our separate selves.

  In “Blue Hour,” Iris likes the idea that people are always remarking on her resemblance to Laura, mistaking the two friends for sisters. But Laura tells Iris that they don’t look alike at all and that “people are always confusing one Asian for another.” No other mention is made of the ethnicity of these two characters. Was this a conscious choice of yours?

  As I wrote that story, Iris and Laura’s ethnicity wasn’t a crucial detail for me. They could have been any ethnicity, and the point of “Blue Hour” would still be the same. Iris is worried about her fading friendship with Laura and her imperfect, rather tenuous relationship with Paul, but she isn’t obsessing about her Asian identity. And yet I deliberately included Laura’s observation because I’ve found that unless a character is specifically labeled as such or given an ethnic-sounding name, readers will probably assume the character is white. I wanted to make it clear to the reader that Iris and Laura are Asian, maybe for the perverse reason that the story has little or nothing to do with being Asian. I think some readers tend to assume that an Asian character’s experience is primarily shaped by and concerned with being Asian. But you can’t reduce a person’s experience to his or her ethnicity. Similarly, there’s often an assumption that a minority writer’s subject matter is going to be dealing heavily with race and culture. I’m afraid it’s a way of pigeonholing and even dismissing that writer’s work. There’s no doubt that my ethnicity informs my identity and my writing, but it’s not the only subject I want to write about.

  How has your reading life informed your writing life? Which writers have most influenced your work?

  I have strong, vivid memories of the books I read as a child and the joy I felt while reading them. There was nothing as wonderful as leaving behind dull reality and falling into another world—and all I had to do was open up a book. More than anything, it was this love of reading that made me want to write.

  The writers I feel most strongly about are the Russians. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov are my holy triumvirate. They seem to go the furthest in terms of everything—the heart, the mind, the spirit. Everything. Other writers who have left an indelible impression on me are Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Proust, just to name a few. Probably the writers whose influence I was most conscious of as I wrote this collection were Chekhov and Alice Munro. What I admire about Chekhov is how clearly he sees his characters, revealing their limitations in precise, devastating ways, yet never losing compassion for them. And Munro is doing something so delightful and unexpected with the short story. I’ve found that I can’t ever predict where her stories will go and how they will end. She manages to surprise me every time, yet I never feel tricked by her because somehow her surprises are those that life affords us.

  What I love about fiction is how it encourages us to step outside the boundaries of our lives and to empathize with people whom we’d never otherwise meet. This ability to identify with others, to understand their situations and be moved by their experiences, is probably the most important thing fiction does for us. In this way, I believe reading literature humanizes us.

  Questions and topics for discussion

  Agnes loathes her father’s new wife, Lily, in the story “The Old Gentleman.” Did you feel any sympathy for Lily? Why or why not?

  In “A Visit to the Suns,” June is asked to encourage her cousin Helen to leave the oppressive religious group that Helen recently joined. In the end, though, June doesn’t push Helen to change her ways. Should she have?

  The characters in “The Modern Age” sit around a table telling one another “persecuted ancestor stories.” Are there any similar stories in your family’s history? If not, what other types of family stories have been passed down to you?

  In “Intruders,” Susan discovers a note from Andrea written in her diary and tears the page out because she says she doesn’t want Andrea’s thoughts to be mistaken for her own. Do you think Susan resembles Andrea in any way? How are they different from each other?

  In “Garden City,” Mr. Chen ultimately evicts his tenant, Marnie Wilson, from her apartment. Should he have acted differently? How would you have responded in his situation?

  Do you see any parallels in plot or character in “Transparency” and “Garden City”? What cultural and familial misunderstandings arise in both stories?

  The protagonist in “The Modern Age” says at the end of the story, “As for my boyfriend and me, we had been together for over a year, yet not once had the word love been spoken between us. Our hearts seemed too small for such a word to pass between our lips.” What was your reaction to this statement? Do the relationships described in Hwang’s collection seem familiar to you? Why?

  “Sonata for the Left Hand” is composed of three sections, each part taking place in a different city and among different characters in the narrator’s life. What did Hwang accomplish by writing this story in the way she did? Did the three parts of the story come together for you by the end?

  What do the stories in Transparency say about solitude? Is it a cross to bear, a choice that encourages personal strength and freedom, or a bit of both? Is solitude something you seek in your own life, or do you try to avoid it?

  “A devastating exploration of alienated modern lives. Hwang’s stories are lean, beautiful, and unflinching. Compulsively readable. Uncommonly wise”—Liza Ward, author of Outside Valentine

  FROM A PRIZEWINNING YOUNG LITERARY TALENT come these ten gripping tales about the intimate, often bittersweet experiences of immigrants and their American-born children as they negotiate the divide between Eastern and Western cultures: struggles to honor one’s personal history or to break free of the weight of the past, to find permanence amid the flux of modern life; and to form lasting ties even while holding on to secrets kept in plain sight.

  In the stunning title story, Henry Liu, convinced that he is dying, receives a second lease on life. In “Garden City,” a weary Chinese couple, struggling to evict their deadbeat tenant, find themselves forced to confront the aftermath of their teenage son’s death. And in “The Old Gentleman,” a woman becomes alienated from her father when he finds love—or what he thinks could be love—in his old age.

  This powerful debut collection—reminiscent of acclaimed works by Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Lara Vapnyar—showcases Frances Hwang’s myriad gifts as a storyteller as it announces the arrival of an exciting new voice in American fiction.

  FRANCES HWANG has been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and had held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Province town, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University. Two of the stories in Transparency were selected by Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose to appear in Best New American Voices.