A young woman in a village marries two brothers, tending their shared house and sleeping with them on alternate nights. When characters find it, it is fleeting, or, in its own way, perverse. The book itself smells a little at times, so powerfully does Woo evoke the sensory memories of filth.Įscape is rare, and happiness is even rarer. And bathrooms smell pervasively of urine. Restaurants are pungent with smoke from the diners’ cigarettes. The walls of a mud hut in which a prospective bride lives in a village are slowing flaking away, covering her face with mud as she sleeps. These stories play out in a world that is appropriately shabby, and rendered with an attention to the material details of decay that is one of the book’s strengths: everywhere characters turn, there is dirt and grime. She recoils in fear and refuses, and he punches her in the face, beating her for rejecting him in the middle of the baying crowd. The art student arranges a public proposal that involves his male friends surrounding the English teacher, trapping her in the middle of a mob and chanting at her to marry him. He posts the pictures online, she is expelled from the school, and he waves to her as she leaves the campus in defeat and humiliation, her life and her reputation ruined. The student who schemes to seduce her English teacher into marriage succeeds in getting herself invited back to his apartment where it is quickly revealed that she is the gullible one: he charges her for a private lesson, and then convinces her to let him photograph her naked before having sex with her and sending her on her way. Regardless of whether these innocents are sinister or well intentioned, their naivete always works to reveal a world that is both brutal and brutalizing. But, most of the time, the protagonists are hapless, as innocent as someone who believes in an online deal that’s’ too good to be true, and prey to the more savvy characters who surround them. In “The Blonde Teacher,” an art student is completely unaware that his infatuation with a white English teacher is becoming dangerous and his behaviour is escalating to stalking. Time and again, characters appear clueless, unaware of the impacts of their actions, of the events that are unfolding around them, or of how those events will impacts them. Regardless of the characters’ backgrounds, levels of education or worldliness (and these vary substantially), they are almost uniformly defined by a deep naivete: a female student thinks that she can seduce her much older English teacher into marriage a teacher never expects his colleague to resent him for being promoted to principle. It is as if the let down of an online purchase that turns out to be anything other what it appeared to be, that arrives as a shoddy facsimile of what you put in your shopping cart, that is a second-rate knockoff instead of the real thing, has been woven into the fabric of the characters’ lives, and, indeed, into the world of the book itself. Even when characters get what they want, it doesn’t come with any satisfaction. These are not stories that end well or easily. Regardless of the protagonist or the setting, the stories share a common affect: deflation, disappointment, at times ennui, at other times a painfully immediate sense of loss and failure. The settings are equally diverse, including large urban centers, smaller, sleepy cities which are remarkable only because of their marginalization in comparison to larger cities like Shanghai, and isolated villages. The stories are set in China, and feature a wide cast of characters, ranging from brides to students, a delivery man, an English teacher, and several iterations of the author himself. Woo’s debut collection of stories, is by turns fanciful, tender, gritty, and discomforting.
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