“Elsewhere” by Yan Ge (Faber and Faber, 2023)

Stories from The Stinging Fly, Brick, etc. Back cover blurbs by Sarah Hall, Danielle McLaughlin, and Lucy Caldwell - 3 of my favourites.

• The little house - The 1st person female narrator, Pigeon, who's been sleeping alone in a tent, is led by a friend through a square of tents to a house of poets etc to stay. It's 2008. There's been an earthquake and another is threatened. There's a post-apocalyse mood. She sleeps with "Six Times" in a tent. They visit a friend with a big tent, a widowed author of 3 books. She's a vegetarian but gives in when there's a banquet of ostrich, quail, sea bass, golden chang etc. But the soup of human heads makes her puke. Overnight there's a storm, the rain going through the dead bodies contaminating the water, so they plan to drink only beer. In the final paragraph, she's as content as she's been for years. She expects to dream she's Zhuangzian's butterfly.
• Shooting an elephant - Shanshan, the close 3rd-person narrator, has recently moved to Dublin with husband Declan. He's a court reporter currently working on an IRA trial. "Shanshan didn't reveal to Declan that the reason she loved going to IKEA was because it reminded her of China". She points out to a cashier who asks that their tattoo meant "grave", not "home" because of a misprint. Declan had forgotten that her name means "the colour coral, or moving very slowly". She's recovering from something. She doesn't tell him she's on the pill. When he suggests an Xmas break she suggests going to Burma to finish their honeymoon. Then we learn about their honeymoon - how she (not he) had been nervous about going, because of war; how Orwell, his hero, had been a policeman in Mawlamyine. She had a miscarriage there. He's not keen on returning. There's a party when the trial ends. Not liking it, she leaves early. He makes up by booking flights but as they do, he's phoned to be told that his mother has fallen badly and needs an op. They visit her, postponing holiday ideas. She becomes pregnant and they abandon the Burma idea altogether. She recalls how, when she was recovering on their honeymoon, he read her Orwell's "Shooting an elephant" and she wept about her mother.
• When travelling in the summer - It's winter 1095. Huang, an official from the capital, visits old friend Shen Kuo and wife Woman Zhang. Shen Kuo retired to write a series of books that he'd completed 2 years before and is about to be published. He's working on another, to fill the gaps of the first. The 2 statesman show off about number of concubines, etc. We're told, omnisciently, that Shen Kuo will die in 5 months. In coded discourse, Huang tells Shen Kuo that the emperor has sent Huang to kill Shen Kuo. Huang asks how long he needs to finish the book. In mid-March, Lady Zhang asks his servant Yi, 24, to sleep with her. She realises that her husband will be killed, and his family too. Her plan to save the rest of them is for her husband to die of “natural causes” first. She plans to involve his latest concubine Ping too. Shen Kuo tells Ping that she and Yi should escape together before it’s too late. In May, Huang sees Yi and Ping kissing and takes them to Shen Kuo. He lets them off. In the night a fire rages, an unidentifiable charred body is found, and Ping and Yi have gone. But it’s Ping and Shen Kuo who are starting a new life at the end, the corpse being Yi.
• Stockholm - The narrator, still breastfeeding, attends a conference run by old friend H (whose girlfriend is Olivia). They discuss freedom and society. H tells her he's always preferred her talking about writing to her actual writing. He offers her a man, Jacob, for the night. She lets Jacob walk her to her hotel, discovers they have several international friends in common, says goodnight, then regrets it. She breast-pumps, phones her husband. She has low body self-esteem. Next day a gay tells her that when he was in her home town in China on an exchange visit, a man whose wife was pregnant died while having sex with him in a hotel. In her hotel room she and Olivia talk. She breastpumps, tells Olivia about her sewn labia. Olivia offers to check and the narrator says yes.
• Free wandering - The narrator Xiao Peng, (male, 28) arrives in "the city" to visit cousin Linda who he's not seen for 15 years. He's not been in a new city before, let alone a continent. It's unclear whether he's a labourer on the Empire Estate, or an architect. He's met by a Simon, a friend of Linda. He cares for the dying. Peng passes out. Simon takes him to his flat. Waking, he sees calligraphy which reminds him of a quote from "Free Wandering", about a giant fish, Kun. Later, alone in the entrance hall, the widowed chairwoman (who reminds Peng of his grandmother) apprehends him because he says he's "living in" (rather than "staying in") Simon's flat. Simon saves him. He and Simon discuss Tao Te Ching, Life/Death ("we are given names, and henceforth confined in the set idea of self, ego, and desire"). He vists the Statue of Liberty. In a Chinese theme park he's seen it years before with his cousin. She'd said "Promise me when you grow up, you'll come to the other shore, and we will meet again". He decides to call himself "Little Roc". In "Free Wandering", the fish changes into a bird called Peng. Simon says to him "You've made your decision, Roc. Now it's time to go". He jumps out of the window, turns into a bird.
• No time to write - It begins with "I decide to write a story to explain why I literally have no time to write". There's some philosophising about time as an illusion. Then we learn that the narrator was born in 1982 in Singapore to Irish parents. She attended Trinity College Dublin, taught at language school, dated girls there, backpacked round Cambodia then lived in Ireland with her parents. "I'm naturally sceptical of binaries: man-slash-woman, straight-slash-gay, single-slash-taken, occidental-slash-oriental, and more fundamentally, past-slash-present". She'd one gone to see a friend, Gemma, in Paris. Gemma had been bulimic. With the narrator she relapses. The narrator hopes to sleep with Gemma but Gemma's engaged loyally to a man. The narrator's mother makes the narrator go to a therapist on discovering the narrator is bulimic. He encourages her to write about the meeting. Her mother might divorce her father at any moment.
• How I fell in love with the well-documented life of Alex Whelan - After meeting Alex once (at a club where they watch Foreign Movies No Subtitles - FMNS), and friending him, the narrator finds that he died hours after the meeting. She first thinks it a joke. She cyberstalks. Then she discovers it was a suicide. We learn that she was raised in China by a widowed mother who moved to Ireland to live with a divorcee she found online. The narrator usually calls herself Claire but with Alex she'd explained her real name. She imagines what a date with the dead Alex would be like. She'd ask why he killed himself. She plays songs his little band recorded. Her mother tells her that she's not attractive and shouldn't wait for Prince Charming. She goes to another FMNS meeting and imagines Alex is beside her, crying, while a Japanese widower and his unmarried daughter speak onscreen.
• Mother tongue - 40 pages. Meeting an old friend (unnamed, but finally revealed to be Patient) in London, Pigeon, the first-person narrator, learns that 7 years ago her old friends Vertical (poet) and Chilly had married in China, bringing up their child in English.
  We go back in time. A friend tells her she should sleep with Patient. Paul is the barman where her friends drink. Vertical and Chilly puts on entertainment at weddings. Pigeon’s mother is dying. Pigeon feels guilty that she feels nothing. Her mother dies. At the wake the couple entertain. That night he loses her virginity . The performers grow in fame, but fall out.
  Back in the present she tells her husband - Paul - that she’s going to baking lessons. Actually she’s on a poetry course. At the sessions she introduces herself as Vertical. The story ends with a quote from a dream. ’He chu shi gui cheng,’ I said to my mother. ‘Chang ting geng duan ting.’
• Hai - A novella about 95 pages long. Zixia (a senior disciple of Confucius, and a poetry collector), late for the symposium in Qufu, has a jar. Back to when he was 11, watching a play glorifying Confucius, he dreamed of following Confucius. He studied and tracked the confucian disciples, joining them. He's been on a mission with fellow master Zilu, who was captured and sentenced to death by the Hai method (minced). The jar has his remains. They discuss whether Zilu had advised appropriately during the mission. Confucius agrees with Zixia. There's rivalry amongst disciples. Who will be promoted to replace Zilu? Why was such a brutal form of death chosen?
  Zixia's wife moans about their poverty. He puts principles above money, hiding presents that might be construed as bribes. Yanyan invites him to go away with him and start their own academy. He wants rich and poor to have equal chances. He goes with Yanyan to watch a play written by Ranyong about the Zilu incident. He makes a very public speech about the corruption of Confucius and the organisation, citing the Analects and offering favours to the public. Confucius interprets the Analects differently, and thanks to subterfuge (the wife helping?) condemns him to death by Hai.

When I make notes about stories I record details and incidents that on a first reading sound significant. With several of these stories, the details I noted didn't seem to matter in the end. The notes here are quite long because there are many details (and correspondences between details) which don't always accumulate into layers to give depth. The centre cannot hold. What about the disaster in "The little house"? How did the narrator live before? In "Stockholm" what are we to deduce about the narrator's marriage? Standard plots are destabilized - there's order and disorder, plot and chance, fable and realism. Mothers figure frequently - dead, unfaithful, etc. Words aren't to be trusted either.

Other reviews

• Chelsea Leu (These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut – the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life. The collection is populated with writers stymied by their inability to get out of their own heads and accept their bodies or feelings ... At its best, Yan’s writing has an appealing quickness and wit (her drunken poets are especially irresistible). Several stories, however, feel too crammed with ideas; they drop hints and significant details that never quite cohere, and all this signifying gives the prose a stilted abruptness.)
• goodreads
• Sarah Gilmartin (the stunning second story, Shooting an Elephant ... quietly momentous realisations about the human condition that are often underlined or undercut with dry humour ... While the period detail, philosophical insights and depiction of power mongering among the supposedly noble Confucian brothers are all well done, there is a marked lack of momentum, a tediousness creeps in as the story continues)