Introducing Jie Liu

Introducing Jie Liu Diane Roberts Jie Liu is up to something. Her prose is sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often moving, with sharp, polished phrases. She's sly, too. Crafty. A story might seem to be about a school exam, a walk by a lake, a hard rain—officially ordinary. By the time you get a few paragraphs in, though, you realize you're in a world where expectations aren't merely thwarted, they're apt to be overturned, like a rickety cart full of glassware. At some point, a wheel comes off and the thing falls over with a crash, broken shards scattered, shining, prisms throwing off unsettling colors. She makes canny (or is it uncanny?) moves in "The Phoenix Man": you think it's going to be about a blind date with a man who manufactures biodegradable bags, a mother desperate to see her graduate student daughter land a man, and the debilitating conventions of femininity: the high heels, the hair, the make-up. The mother makes her daughter eat before she goes out with Manager Xu, a man with "a villa on the beach and two apartments downtown." Hunger is unladylike. But in the fancy restaurant where the waiters dress like Qing Dynasty palace servants, the menu becomes a battleground: what started off as a comic anti-romance—"as everyone knows, there are three types of people in this world: men, women, and female PhDs"—becomes a darkly funny power struggle punctuated with quotations from classical Chinese poets and fueled by crucian carp, chicken feet, snake soup, and globefish, which, if not prepared very carefully, is so poisonous it can kill. It's tempting, if facile, to place Liu in the tradition of such lionesses of Chinese American literature as Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, and Amy Tan. Like them, she's an elegant stylist, and like them, her literary obsessions include the ways Chinese culture has oppressed and suppressed women. But Liu doesn't really fit: she's the author of three novels and a story collection in Chinese who now writes in English. Her critique of Chinese gender issues doesn't come at one remove but from lived experience. Liu's from Wuhan, a city of ten million celebrated for its more than eighty colleges and universities, its poets, its opera, the 2,500-year-old bronze bells unearthed from the tomb of an ancient aristocrat, and its two lakes where hundreds of species of migratory birds blow in yearly from Siberia. Wuhan is said to be one of China's "four ovens:" a city notorious for its sultry summers, during which temperatures often edge toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity loiters in the 90th percentile, not unlike the Deep South of the United States where Liu now lives. Perhaps Tallahassee's sticky summers (which now last six months) make her feel right at home. Certainly, she has begun to write about the fauna (human and non) in her adopted home, going out on July days to circumnavigate Lake Ella (less a lake than an urban pond) to feed the Muscovy ducks, the mallards and the Canada geese and note their folkways—if that is the right word. Fish, fowl, pigs, pandas: animals as food, animals as social beings, as companions, as metaphors for the unknowability of the world, animals in various iterations, show up in much of Liu's work. As she goes on in her career, I expect her to discover still more fabulous beasts and to write about them with deadpan humor and deep wonder. [End Page 142] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

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