asianamlitfans | A Review of Hiromi Goto’s A Chorus of Mushrooms (Reply)

For useful links, please see:

A biographical site:

http://www.athabascau.ca/writers/goto/goto.html

An interview:

http://www.indiebound.org/author-interviews/gotohiromi

If Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone was called the anti-Joy Luck Club, then Hiromi Goto’s A Chorus of Mushrooms (NeWest Press, 1994), winner of the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, might be considered the Canadian response to Tan’s foundational novel. Certainly, a kind of mother-daughter novel, Goto’s debut is extremely complicated in terms of its form, employing playscript, newspaper clippings, myth and fables, along with traditional narrative arcs, to trouble any clear sense of perspective. A Chorus of Mushrooms is thus a rich text to consider from postmodern and poststructural vantage points as characters repeatedly admit how stories can change and how truth is a malleable element. Most fittingly, the back cover contains a blurb written by Fred Wah, a figure who would seem to be a natural writerly inspiration for Goto and indeed, this work was in part catalyzed by a creative writing course that Goto took that happened to be instructed by Wah. The story revolves around three generations of Japanese Canadian women. The grandmother figure, Naoe, is discontented with her living in Canada as the arid weather and the fact that her daughter, Kay (from Keiko) has assimilated so readily have caused her to feel quite Othered: “There is nothing as silly as dusting when you live in a desert. But [Keiko] ignores me. Keiko. My daughter who has forsaken her identity. Forsaken! So biblical, but it suits her, my little convert. Converted from rice and daikon to wieners and beans. Endless evenings of tedious roast chicken and honey smoked ham and overdone rump roast” (13). Kay, of course, embraces her life in Canada to the extent that her mother seems to exist as a problematic relic of a static Asian heritage. Kay’s daughter, Muriel (called Murasaki by her grandmother and an obvious riff off of Lady Murasaki), navigates the extremes seen in both her mother and her grandmother and acts as a kind of bridge figure.

The title of the novel comes in part from the mushroom farm that the father runs (this detail seems to be inspired from Goto’s own life as she had worked on a mushroom farm and maintained a close relationship to her grandmother); at one point, Muriel is recruited to help with the labor on the farm, which is also enabled by the presence of many Vietnamese immigrant laborers. Over the course of the novel, time is wielded with much plasticity as Naoe recalls her past in Japan, especially central being the firebombing that almost kills Naoe and Keiko as a young girl. For Muriel, Obachan (Naoe) presents a kind of touchstone not only to the past, but also to art and storytelling: “I turned my head slowly in Obachan’s lap, the fabric scratch and stiff. Inhaled dust and poetry. She stroked my forehead with her palm, and her words, they flowed fluid. I snuggled close and curled my legs and stopped pretending to understand. Only listened. And listened. And then my mouth opened on its own accord and words fell from my tongue like treasure” (52). The conflict at the center of the novel stems from the disintegration of the relationship between Naoe and Kay and how Muriel yet still seeks to draw from her grandmother’s articulatory powers as a woman gifted with language. Indeed, Muriel continually attempts to fashion stories and to derive agency from them in the face of challenges. After her grandmother’s disappearance, Muriel/Murasaki gives varying accounts for the reason her grandmother has “left.” Between Naoe’s disappearance and Kay’s mental breakdown, the readers gradually discover the challenges that the family has faced growing up in an area with very few ethnic Asians. Indeed, as Muriel tells it there were very few other Asian Canadians, excepting the occasional handful, so the possibility for a larger racially specific community became difficult to sustain, if not simply untenable. An abortive relationship with a Chinese American boy named Shane is emblematic of Muriel’s isolation from other Asian Canadians.

Toward the conclusion of A Chorus of Mushrooms, Muriel opines, “There are people who say that eating is only a superficial means of understanding a different culture. That eating at exotic restaurants and oohing and aahing over the food is not even worth the bill paid. You haven’t heard anything at all. I say that’s a life. What can be more basic than food itself? Food to begin to grow. Without it, you’d starve to death, even academics. But don’t stop there, my friend, don’t stop there, because food is the point of departure. A place where growth begins. You eat, you drink and you laugh out loud. You wipe the sweat off your forehead and take a sip of water. You tell a story, maybe two, with words of pain and desire. Your companion listens and listens, then offers a different telling. The waiter comes back with the main course and stays to tell his version” (201). Once again the instability of narration and storytelling is offered here, but in the specific realm of the conclusion, Muriel attempts to forge new ways of seeing the world around her, new ways of connecting to her lost grandmother and what she must have felt and faced as an immigrant to a wildly strange country. What is of course interesting is that this passage also references the much-cited notion of “food pornography,” the ways in which ethnic foods can be employed as a marker to accentuate a writer’s authenticity. This sequence does seem to challenge the so-called superficiality of food tourism, suggesting that it is a place of productivity precisely because it is the site of a germination. And it is the conclusion of A Chorus of Mushrooms that calls for hope without being overtly sentimental about it, in this creation of story.

A Chorus of Mushrooms, like Miki’s Saving Face, is a work deserving of much more critical attention than it has currently received (a quick survey of the MLA international database yields approximately four critical articles, three of which have appeared just within the last three years). With the increasing emphasis that Asian Americanists (and more broadly Asian North Americanists if we are to constellate ourselves in such a way) take on aesthetic elements that undergird narrative production, Goto’s novel offers a rich terrain to consider how politics and form might be considered together and mutually constitutive. In its experimental leanings, A Chorus of Mushrooms has as much in common with Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters as it might with its Asian Canadian literary counterparts, where aesthetic impulses create a unique bridge for dynamic conversations to emerge.