asianamlitfans | Feb. 5th, 2009

A Review of Lily Hoang’s Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008).

Admittedly, I occasionally look to the back cover of a publication to give me pointers on how others might have read the book that I am reading. This often happens when I am not completely sure about how I “should” be reading. Take for instance, Lily Hoang’s experimental “fairy tale,” Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008), which is described in this way: “At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang’s CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family’s story. Changing is Little Girl’s fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.” While the description seems clear enough, one knows that there will be a challenge levied upon the reader when the phrase “mysterious and lucid” is used to describe the text. Indeed, the “fairytale” does not operate in a realist fashion, proceeding along a relatively linear trajectory. Instead, the text jumps from one narrative configuration to the next, but there still seems to be a rough geometry, as each page possesses textual blocks. Having read Lily Hoang’s Parabola prior to this point, I was well aware of the mathematical way in which her work tends to be structured. In Parabola, the title already clues the reader into the way that the novel will appear as a kind of boomerang. With Changing, Hoang structures it in relation to the I Ching, which employed 64 hexagrams in its arrangement. As such, the updated “fairy tale” does possess 64 sections that each seem to mimic the ideographic nature of the I Ching. It is difficult to describe exactly what this looks like, but suffice it to say that on some pages there are six separately blocked sections in two columns with three “text boxes” each, where it is confusing to think about whether to read “downward” or “across.” Because each “text box” is already so fragmented, it almost doesn’t matter what direction you read. Not all pages have six different text boxes, some have three, others have five, but all are in blocked form and each seems to exist independently of the others. When taken together though, strands do begin to emerge.

While one of the immediate impulses is also to re-envision the “fairy tale,” Hoang seems content with the metaphorical nature of what the fairy tale provides. While the description at the back does make mention of Hoang’s Vietnamese heritage, there is very little reference to that except in the form of indirect and oblique references. For instance, “Mother & father coming here from the country of heat from the country that was their home coming here to a land without their language a cold land & Mother & Father bowing heads complicity dreaming” (6). “The country of heat” might refer to Vietnam given its tropical climate. Their migration to “a cold land” already suggests the challenges they might face. Another block explains, “That my mother & father don’t speak the language fluently that they take insults from strangers with regularity like pills like medicine swallowing without water like humility like theirs doesn’t need lubricant” (31). The updated fairy tale is very invested though in the question of translation and if we are to take the possibility that the “narrator” of Changing is indeed someone facing the challenges of assimilation, the fairy tale structure serves as an entire metaphor for such acculturative obstacles, that language is itself a process of Othering and we see this element all throughout the fragmented narrative: “Translator translating this Prevading & me with my humility & embarrassment not knowing what this word Prevading could mean & me searching dictionaries & maybe it’s misspelled or simply the wrong word” (23). If we understand the “narrator’s” parents as suffering due to their lack of English fluency it would seem vital for the “narrator” to establish a link with English that would allow to use it in such a way as to overcome its power to Other not only her, but her parents as well. Family is a larger motivation as it recurs over and over again; brothers and sister appear repeatedly throughout, and the mother “character” seems to endure a cancer illness that leaves the “narrator” struggling to find her bearings. Other portions of the text seem to invoke a more experimental aesthetic; one block reads: “Return: point a to point a to point a…” (49) and another reads “When I grow up, I want to be a _______ or a _______ or a _______ or a _______ or a ______ but never in my life had I wanted to be a ________ or a ________ & yet that is what I am” (88). Fred Wah and Myung Mi Kim has used similar techniques in their poetry to leave the reader to “fill in the blacks” themselves. The other major “fairy tale element” is the repetitive motif of “Jack and Jill” which become a riffing device for Hoang; one characteristic riff is this one: “Jill holding the pail & water sloshing & Jill asking Jack to help & Jack saying I thought you’re Ms Independent & Jill saying Of course I am Jack but this is really heavy & I think I might & Jack stepping in front of Jill & Jill falling down & the pail no longer containing & Jill with her head hit & Jack running off & Jill dreaming dreams of seven men no taller than her knees & Jill dreaming dreams of a man with hair yellow & fine & dreaming dreams of a life without Jack” (101). What is of course interesting here is that the Jack & Jill fable is retold from the perspective of a ruptured relationship and placed in a feminist context. It also has a somewhat serious undertone in that it disrupts the playfulness of the rhyme for a scene of domestic violence in some sense.

The I Ching was supposedly an oracular text, a way to find order out of seemingly random events, and one wonders what sort of predictions that Changing provides the reader. Hoang does not make it clear for us and that I believe is part of the fun. Towards the conclusion of the novella, Hoang intrudes in the form of the translator, “If you are still confused, dear readers, here are more guidelines, but they are unimportant. This can be read any way you want, but I dream of you friend standing & thinking your questions needing resolve & I dream of you extending your arm into the cup & removing a sheath of paper & this is what you read & this is all you read until your next question” (133). Clearly, Hoang understands the importance of the reader in making meaning out of text, but those meanings can be derived independently of writerly intent. To a certain extent, this makes Changing an absolutely interactive and liberating text. I think taking a very flexible mindset when reading this novella is the only way to make “sense of it” as the translator doesn’t ask us to read it in any one way. There is no handholding, no specific signposts. If I were to invoke my own fairy tale in this review it is to liken this text to a positivistic reading of Hansel and Gretel, where there is no need to follow the bread crumbs, because you can make the bread crumbs out of the hexagrams that appear in the novella. You will find your own way out of the forest, eventually that is. In this respect, I agree with the blurb on the back cover (to be circular if only momentarily), that the text is both mysterious and lucid. I especially appreciate the use of the word “glassine” to describe, as glassine is a type of translucent paper that can be made opaque in the presence of dyes, both transparent then and possibly not. On this seemingly paradoxical terrain, Changing is its own chameleonic force.