The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Below the Line by Sara ChinSusann Cokal
Sara Chin. Below the Line. City Lights, 1997. 149 pp. Paper: $9.95.
The Chinese-American characters in Sara Chin’s collection of short stories and vignettes are trying to fit themselves in: into families, freeways, grocery stores, Chinatowns, or occasionally China itself. But, like the old man who gets lost on Washington, D.C.’s Beltway, most have the sensation of going around and around, unsure of which direction will take them where they want to go. What they have to guide them—exit signs, family legends, translated recipes—is frequently confusing: How can you tell where you’re going and what you’ve passed already?
In “Red Wall” a team of independent filmmakers goes to China to make a documentary about the post-Mao years. The narrator, who is in charge of sound, signs on in order to look “for the heart, the trashy heart of my history.” She confronts a jumble of contradictory images and people: ancient peasants marked by torture; an opera singer with a flush toilet; an old family friend and government official who wants to know all about Hollywood. In this as in other stories the characters’ journeys through China and America are a constant debunking of the stories they have always believed, and in the end they show the stories to be unimportant. What matters is the human element, the human connection, in spite of individual facts. As the soundwoman finally realizes, “I didn’t have to worry about facts or truth. I could ponder other things. Things closer to my heart.”
Not all of the pieces are successful—“Fevers,” about an elderly woman who enters the world of her favorite television show, has the air of trying too hard. But Chin has an excellent ear; her prose is as rhythmic and condensed as poetry. And like her &Mac222;lmmaker, she has made herself the guardian of memory, so that what is close to the heart of this book is truth, of a transcendent nature. [Susann Cokal]