asianamlitfans | A Review of Meng Jin’s Little Gods (Custom House, 2020).

A Review of Meng Jin’s Little Gods (Custom House, 2020).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Meng Jin’s debut novel, Little Gods (Custom House, 2020), is an exquisitely crafted novel about loss and family genealogy. Let’s let the HarperCollins official site give us some more information on it: “Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.”

I was listening to a podcast episode with Meng Jin, which was really useful. Jin was quite purposeful in the many gaps that would emerge in her story. There’s a point at the ending—and I should provide my spoiler warning here to look away lest you be spoiled—where I simply did not know what happened. The wording is ambiguous enough to make me wonder if the entirety one of the character’s narrative sequences is something that might have been made up. In any case, the way that the novel ends makes me want to grab someone who has read it and ask: did Liya actually almost meet her father and then leave him behind? Did she actually travel to see her grandmother, or was that sequence in her mind? Who knows? I was confused, but it was nice to know that it was part of Jin’s point.

The other element that was a real revelation was Jin’s discussion of narrative perspectives: she did not include any sections from Su Lan’s perspective, so Su Lan becomes this kind of empty center around which all the characters revolve. Jin herself called Su Lan a kind of “black hole,” which I agree with. Precisely because she gives so little of herself sometimes to others, they attempt to figure her out, try to understand her motivations or, in the worst cases, they simply ignore her and impress upon her their own aspirations and dreams. The most challenging relationship in the text for me was the one between Sun Lan and her husband Yongzong. It seemed like there were so many red flags between them even before they were married that I was skeptical that they’d even go through with it. Then, there was the strange issue of Yongzong disappearing from Su Lan’s life just after the Tiananmen Square massacre. The narrative, if I read it properly, seems to suggest that Yongzong abdicates from his responsibilities as a husband and father simply because he cannot deal with the life he has made.

It is perhaps this kind of detail that makes the novel so hard to read, as you see the self-delusion that characters retain in order to render their lives more meaningful. If I had to hazard a critique of the novel, it was in the positionality of Zhu Wen. I found her a fascinating figure, a kind of watchwoman for Su Lan, but who sort of disappears from the narrative by the conclusion. I wish Jin had found a way to bring her back in, because even as the novel is moving toward increasing entropy (as is necessary given the thematic of physics), there is a sense that the narrative perspectives are Jin’s way of reversing this chaotic process, giving readers more to hold on to.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu