By Gish Jen. New York: Knopf, 2010. 386 pp.
Hattie Kong has moved to Riverlake, a small town in New England, following the deaths of her husband and best friend. Daughter of an American missionary and a Chinese father, Hattie escaped the Communist revolution in China for Iowa, staying with her mother’s family. She is later taken in by the Hatch family, becomes a scientist, marries, has a child. In Riverlake she is haunted by all of her pasts, including the family burial ground at Qufu, which Hattie “grew up dutifully sweeping. . .every spring,” the deaths of Joe and Lee, and the affair that reframed both her personal and professional lives.
In Riverlake, too, are Sophy and her family, Cambodian immigrants trying to make a new home away from their life in the city, with its gangs, criminal records and allegations of abuse. Hattie and Sophy’s lives become intertwined, then complicated by the personal and political entanglements of small-town life.
The pacing of this novel is utterly different from Jen’s early, and wonderful, Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land, but it is filled with engaging voices and an assured, perhaps more mature style. “Time’s marched Hattie hard,” (31) and her experiences, as well as her intelligence, give this novel a wise, elegiac tone. Jen’s trademark sense of humor is here, too, as when Hattie and her son Joe are discussing identity and his (Chinese) future parents-in-law, “Lola says aren’t you lucky to have the skin—it’s such a savings. She says she only spends half as much as everyone else on her face” (244).
In the end, Hattie stands up to her ghosts, asking, “And what if one person’s development comes at the expense of someone else’s?” (368). It’s a question that frames several of the conflicts in the novel, and though it’s never neatly resolved, Hattie seems to find her own satisfying, though complicated, answers.
