The American immigrant story is taking a new turn — away from focusing on assimilation and back toward examining the past.
At least that’s the observation of one author whose new novel takes that turn.
A previous wave of American novels told the stories of how immigrants wrestled with assimilating to their new culture, observed the author, Meng Jin.
“That story of assimilation can presume that the immigrant doesn’t exist until the immigrant arrives,” Jin said during an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
In fact, she said, people leave behind “full lives” — which a new wave of novels explores by “gaz[ing] toward the past, toward the first life.”
Jin’s new novel, Little Gods, does exactly that.
Harper Collins released the book Tuesday. It’s a first novel, and an intriguing read. It tells two stories at once, switching from different participants’ perspectives and skipping back and forth in time. The main story is about a woman named Su Lan who grows up in rural China, becomes a brilliant physicist, then sees her life and her dreams mysteriously fall apart after moving to the U.S. The other main story involves a search by her 17-year-old daughter Liya to discover the truth about her mother’s life after her mother’s death — and in the process must decide how much of her own origin story she wants to know.
Reading the novel, I was struck about how another recent novel I read, The Leavers by Lisa Ko, also featured a Chinese-American youth traveling abroad to learn more about his back story. And right after reading Little Gods, I happened to dive into Catherine Chung’s The Tenth Muse — in which a Chinese-American daughter (another brilliant student wrestling with, in her case, the big mathematical questions) … travels abroad for clues about her own family history. These are books that just happened to come our way at WNHH and look interesting. They seemed to be mining similar terrain.
Jin spent six years working on Little Gods. It’s a personal story, distinctive, her own. Is it also fair to place it amid a new wave of immigrant fiction?
Definitely, Jin said. “As the world becomes more globalized” and “more people are displaced,” she observed, more stores will emerge about people seeking “to make sense of who they are.” Those stories, like Little Gods, don’t always “have neat beginnings and endings,” in fiction or in real life.
Click on the video below to listen to the full interview with author Meng Jin on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”