The Art and Craft of Asian Stories

A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Robin Hemley, Xu Xi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350076563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An all-in-one craft guide and anthology, this is the first creative writing book to find inspiration and guidance in the diverse literary traditions of Asia. Including exemplary stories by leading writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore and beyond as well as those from Asian diasporas in Europe and America, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories offers an exciting take on the traditional how-to writing guide by drawing from a rich new trove of short stories beyond the western canon which readers may never have encountered before. Whilst still taking stock of the traditional elements of story such as character, viewpoint and setting, Xu and Hemley let these compelling stories speak for themselves to offer readers new ideas and approaches which could enrich their own creative work. Structured around the themes encountered in the stories, such as race and identity, history and power, family and aspirations, this text is a vital companion for writers at all levels keen to develop and find new perspectives on key elements of their craft. Written by two internationally successful writers and teachers, each chapter contains complete short stories and writing exercises for practice and inspiration.

Chapter 1

Family Matters

You hardly need to look further than your family to find some of your best possibilities for writing stories. In some ways, a family is a collection of stories handed down (or sometimes suppressed) by the generations. But there’s a big difference between the stories that a family tells about itself, the story it wants told (We’re all perfect and nothing ever goes wrong!), and the real story that the writer in the family knows and understands (We’re a bit of a train wreck, aren’t we?). Of course, we’re exaggerating. Most families have success stories and failure stories and failure stories that are really success stories and success stories that are really failures, and stories that fit neither of these judgmental terms, but are open for interpretation. Ambiguous stories. But one thing indisputable about families is that they have conflicts, and conflict is often considered the backbone of storytelling.

Does it make you uncomfortable thinking about your own family stories, the ones that your parents probably don’t want you to reveal to the world outside the family? If so, good. Stories don’t only create tension in the reader, but they also can create tension in the writer. What might come as a surprise is that stories rarely resolve the tension they create in the reader. Novels quite often have endings that resolve all the loose ends, but stories tend to leave the tension unresolved. There might be movement toward a resolution, but not in any grand or final way. Stories that end neatly in ways that release the tension rarely feel satisfying, but feel quite the opposite. Take, for example, the classic, trick ending. She woke up—it had all been a dream. While there are certainly famous narratives that resolve in just such a fashion (“Oh, Auntie Em, it’s you!”), short stories tend to leave the reader feeling pretty disappointed if the author makes too much of an effort to resolve the tension. That’s likely because the reader will see such an effort as inauthentic. We know that most moments of tension are not fully resolved, but are deferred, sublimated, partially forgiven but not forgotten, overcome for the most part but still haunting, reduced to a nagging voice, and so on.

Let’s go ahead then and take a look at conflict and the building of tension in one of our model stories for this chapter. Go ahead and read “The Brothers” by Lysley Tenorio first, before continuing:

“The Brothers”

by Lysley Tenorio (USA)

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune and the story collection Monstress, which was named Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle. Born in the Philippines, he lives in San Francisco, and is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

My brother went on Ricki Lake to prove he was a woman. The episode had a title that kept flashing at the bottom of the television screen: is she a he? is he a she? you decide! The show went like this: a guest would come out onstage, and the audience would vote on whether or not she was the real thing.

They came out one at a time, these big-haired and bright-lipped women, most of them taller than the average man. They worked the stage like strippers, bumping and grinding to the techno beat of the background music. The audience was on its feet, whistling and hooting, cheering them on.

Then came Eric.

My brother was different from the others. He was shorter, the only Filipino among them. He wore a denim skirt and a T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens. His hair, a few strands streaked blond, fell to his bony shoulders. He was slow across the stage, wooing the audience with a shy girl’s face, flirtatious, sweet. But he wasn’t woman enough for them: they booed my brother, gave him the thumbs-down. So Eric fought back. He stood at the edge of the stage, fists on his hips and feet shoulder-width apart, like he was ready to take on anyone who crossed him. “Dare me?” he said, and I saw his hands move slowly to the bottom of his T-shirt. “You dare me?”

They did, and up it went. The crowd screamed with approval, gave him the thumbs-up. Someone threw a bra onstage and Eric picked it up, twirled it over his head like a lasso, then flung it back into the audience.

I looked over at Ma. It was like someone had hit her in the face.

He put his shirt down, lifted his arms in triumph, blew kisses to the audience, then took a seat with the others. He told the audience that his name was Erica.

He’d left a message the night before it aired, telling me to watch Channel 4 at seven o’clock that night. He said it would be important, that Ma should see it too. When I told Ma she looked hopeful. “Maybe he’s singing,” she said, “playing the piano?” She was thinking of Eric from long before, when he took music lessons and sang in the high school choir.

I reached for the remote, thinking, That bastard set us up.

I turned off the TV.

That was the last time I saw Eric. Now he’s lying on a table, a sheet pulled to his shoulders. The coroner doesn’t rush me, but I answer him quickly. “Yes,” I say. “That’s my brother.”

Eric’s life was no secret though we often wished it was: we knew about the boyfriends, the makeup and dresses. He told me about his job at the HoozHoo, a bar in downtown San Francisco where the waitresses were drag queens and transsexual women. But a year and a half ago, on Thanksgiving night, when Eric announced that he was going to proceed with a surgery (“Starting here” he said, patting his chest with his right hand), Ma left the table and told Eric that he was dead to her.

It’s 6:22 p.m. He’s been dead for six hours.

“We need to call people,” I tell Ma. But she just sits there at the kitchen table, still in her waitress’s uniform, whispering things to herself, rubbing her thumb along the curve of Eric’s baby spoon. Next week she turns sixty-one. For the first time, she looks older than she is. “We have to tell people what’s happened.”

She puts down the spoon, finally looks at me. “What will I say? How can I tell it?”

“Tell them what the coroner told me. That’s all.” He had an asthma attack, rare and fatal. He was sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park when his airways swelled so quickly, so completely, no air could get in or out. As a kid, Eric’s asthma was a problem; I can still hear the squeal of his panic. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, he’d say, and I’d rub h is back and chest like I was giving him life. But as an adult, the attacks became less frequent, easier to manage, and he deemed his inhaler a thing of the past. “The severity of this attack was unusual,” the coroner explained. “No way he could have prepared for it.” He was dead by the time a pair of ten-year-olds on Rollerblades found him.

The look on her face makes me feel like I’m a liar. “He couldn’t breathe,” I say. “It’s the truth.” I go through cupboards, open drawers, not sure what I’m looking for, so I settle for a mug and fill it with water and though I’m not thirsty I drink it anyway. “He couldn’t breathe. And then he died. When people ask, that’s what you say.”

Ma picks up the spoon again, and now I understand: “Ang bunso ko,” she’s been saying. My baby boy, over and over. Like Eric died as a child and she realized it only now.

The morning after the show, my brother called me at work. When I picked up, he said, “Well . . . ?” like we were in mid-conversation, though we hadn’t spoken in six months.

“You grew your hair out,” I said. “It’s blond now.”

“Extensions,” he said.

“They look real.

“They’re not.” He took a deep breath. “But the rest of me is.”

It was a little after seven. I was the only one in the office. Not even the tech guys were in yet. I turned and looked out my window, down at the street, which was empty too.

“Goddamnit, Edmond,” my brother said. “Say something.”

I didn’t, so he did. He said he was sorry if it hurt Ma and me, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “I showed the world what I’m made of.” He said this slowly, like it was a line he’d been rehearsing for months. “What do you think of that?”

“I saw nothing,” I said. “What?”

“I saw nothing.” It was the truth. When Eric lifted his shirt, they didn’t simply cover his breasts with a black rectangle. They didn’t cut to commercial or pan the camera to a shocked face in the audience. Instead, they blurred him out, head to toe. It looked like he was disintegrating, molecule by molecule. “They blurred you out,” I said.

I could hear him pace his apartment. I’d never visited, but I knew he was living in the Tenderloin in downtown San Francisco. The few times he called, there were always things happening on his end—cars honking, sirens, people shouting and laughing. But that morning, there was just the sound of us breathing, one, then the other, like we were taking turns. I imagined a pair of divers at the bottom of the ocean, sharing the same supply of air.

“You there?” I finally said. “Eric, are you there?”

“No,” he said, then hung up.

And that’s how it ended, for Eric and me.

I go to my apartment to get clothes, but stay the night at Ma’s. My old bed is still in my old room upstairs, but I take the living room couch. I don’t sleep, not for a minute. Before light comes, I call Delia in Chicago, but her fiancé picks up. I ask for my wife, which irritates him. But technically, I’m right: the divorce isn’t final, not yet. I’m still her husband, and I won’t let that go, not until I have to.

“No message,” I tell him, then hang up.

Somehow, I’m wide awake all morning. Driving to the funeral home in North Oakland, I don’t even yawn.

Loomis, the man who handled Dad’s funeral eleven years ago, waits for us in a small square of shade outside the main office. He’s heavier now, his hair thinner, all white. Back then he walked with a limp; today he walks with a cane.

“Do you remember me?” It’s the first thing Ma says to him. “And my husband?” She pulls a picture from her wallet, an old black-and-white of Dad back in his Navy days. He’s wearing fatigues, looking cocky. His arms hang at his sides, but his fists are clenched, like he’s ready for a fight. “Dominguez. First name Teodoro.” Loomis takes the photo, holds it eye level, squints. “I do remember him,” he says, though he saw my father only as a corpse. “And I remember you too.” He looks at me, shakes my hand. “The boy who never left his mother’s side that whole time.”

That was Eric. Ma knows it too. We don’t correct him. The funeral doesn’t take long to plan: Ma makes it similar to Dad’s, ordering the same floral arrangements, the same prayer cards, the same music. Only the casket is different: Dad’s was bronze, which best preserves the body. Eric’s will be mahogany, a more economical choice. “It’s all we can afford,” Ma says.

Later, Loomis drives us through the cemetery to find a plot for Eric. We head to the north end, pull up at the bottom of a small hill where Dad is buried. But his grave is already surrounded, crowded with the more recent dead. “There,” Ma says, walking uphill toward a small eucalyptus. She puts her hand on a low, thin branch, rubs a budding leaf between her fingers. “It’s growing.” She gives a quick survey of the area, decides this is the place.

“But your knee.” I point out the steepness of the hill, warn her that years from now, when she’s older, getting to Eric will be difficult.

“Then you help me,” Ma says, starting toward the car. “You help me get to him.”

Back home, Ma calls the people we couldn’t reach last night, and each conversation is the same: she greets them warmly, pauses, but can’t catch herself before she gives in to tears. Meanwhile, I get the house ready, vacuuming upstairs and down, wiping dirty window screens with wet rags, re-arranging furniture to accommodate the foot traffic of all the guests who will pray for my brother’s soul. This will be the first of nine nights like this.

“I hate the way Filipinos die,” Eric once said. It was the week of Dad’s funeral. “Nine nights of praying on our knees, lousy Chinese food, and hundred-year-old women keep asking me where my girlfriend is.” The businessmen were worse. On the last night of Dad’s novena, one guy—he said he was related to us but couldn’t exp...