by Meng Jin
The sky is clear. People rush past the sudden desert. At the bottom, a bulldozer crawls. Liya’s palm opens, releasing her last belonging, the key to the door that no longer exists. But she doesn’t see it falling. She is lifted, lifted as if by a hand outside of time, outside of the time she knows, entering instead the kind of time described by her mother, which spreads out before her as in an open field. In this field now is an expanded present and events occur neither in past nor future but simply elsewhere. She floats here, beholding the city—the winding streets and alleys, the grids and curves—and is struck with the image of someone else searching, running, circling this maze as she. Someone is frantic, longing, trying, to find—her.
No, it is not someone, not someone exactly. It is not a person but the imprint of a person, the inverse of a shadow, a shadow but made of light. It takes the figure of a woman, for a leaping instant she believes it her mother, but in fact it resembles herself. At any moment, she feels, it will turn a corner and discover her, charge into her and fill her.
Liya looks from an airplane window at the curving boundary of ocean and sky below. Impossibly, she is sitting on her mother’s lap; they are going to America. Her mother says, Once we believed the earth was flat. We did not think that two people, flying like birds from the same point in opposite directions, would one day find themselves face-to-face. In a similar way we still misconceive of time. Time is not separate from space, they are in fact two aspects of the same thing. Imagine a sphere like the earth, but drawn in four dimensions instead of three. The fourth dimension, the one we have trouble seeing, is time. Imagine two people starting at the same point in space-time, flying around this new sphere, in opposite directions: one travels in the direction of the future, the other in the direction of the past. Just like the people who circle the earth, these travelers will eventually collide.
And so she feels the collision coming, Liya running toward her at full speed. She is dressed nicely, wearing her invented history, as her mother once hoped to wear her new American life. Look how the costume suits her, as Su Lan’s never had.
She goes. At the next street she will meet herself, bearing strange consolation, around the next corner she will.
Acknowledgments
Endless thanks to Jin Auh for infallible instincts and trusting that the best version of this book was within my reach, to Kate Nintzel for bringing it to fruition and into the world with intelligence and care, and to the formidable teams at the Wylie Agency and Custom House.
Thanks to the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the David T. K. Wong Fellowship, M on the Bund Shanghai, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook for generous gifts of time, space, and means, without which the writing of this book would have been near impossible.
Thanks to dear friends for insights on one or many drafts of this book—Shruti Swamy, Jianan Qian, Simon Han, Sunisa Manning, Christopher Fox—I hope our conversations never end. To Tang Siu Wa, Zang Di, and Yang Xiaobin for character names, and Kate Greene for physics smarts. To my wonderful cohort at Hunter and the brilliant teachers there for nurturing this book when it was barely a seed, with special thanks to Claire Messud for illuminating the possible path forward. To Andrew Cowan at UEA for shrewd and generous reading.
Love and gratitude to everyone at The Ruby and Kundiman. To Emily, Shanshan, Kacie, and many others, for friendship and sanity. To Neel for all of the above. Finally, to my parents and my family, for everything.
About the Author
MENG JIN was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard University and Hunter College. Little Gods is her first novel.
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Copyright
Excerpt from Ways of Seeing by John Berger, copyright © 1972 by Penguin Books Ltd. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
little gods. Copyright © 2020 by Ge Jin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs © d3images/iStock/Getty Images (art); © miakievy/Getty Images (pattern); © janniwet/Shutterstock (gold texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JANUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293597-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293595-3
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