Title & author
Little Gods by Meng Jin
Synopsis
Lan, a brilliant, often underestimated physicist, has spent her life avoiding her past: a childhood of poverty, a husband that abandoned her and their newborn, and her own scholarly work. However, after Lan dies, her refusal to speak of her past leaves her daughter Liya to put the pieces of her mother’s puzzle together. She travels to China to trace what little she knows, interviewing two different individuals, all while Jin interweaves a poetic use of physics and language.
Who should read this book
Fans of Trust Exercise and The Incendiaries
What we’re thinking about
What it means to be content with our past and the uncertainty of our future
Trigger warning(s)
Racism
“Do you believe in time?” Little Gods (Custom House, 2020) character Su Lan asks a nurse shortly after the birth of her daughter, Liya (10, Jin). Su Lan’s question, one that causes the nurse (and likely the reader) confusion, becomes the propellant for the entire novel: Is time something we “believe” in? If so, does that mean we can restructure not just our concept of time, but how it actually works?
Su Lan, a brilliant, often underestimated physicist, has spent her life avoiding her past: a childhood of poverty, a husband that abandoned her and their newborn, and her own scholarly work. In an effort to take another step away, Su Lan relocates herself and Liya to America from their home in China. However, after Su Lan dies, her refusal to speak of her past leaves Liya to put the pieces of her mother’s puzzle together. She travels to China to trace what little she knows, including that of her mother’s studies.
“She began to speak then of human memory, calling it the mind’s arrow of time…” an old neighbor tells Liya (32). “Instead of remembering what had already occurred, we would be able to predict what was about to occur. The cost of seeing into the future, however, was that we would lose our memory of the past, and with it, any explanation of how we arrived at our present state” (32). Jin’s masterful interweaving of physics and fiction results in poetic imagery, standing apart from the usual stripped and clumsy syntax found in scientific writing. What could be difficult to tread through becomes flowery, beautiful, molded into a piece of literature.
And this theory she constructs shapes the novel in more ways than just her syntax. The book is split into three sections, “The End,” “2007,” and “The Beginning” (a clear marking of the reversal of time). The three characters that narrate the middle section—Liya, Zhu Wen, and YongZong—all see Su Lan differently, but through their vision of her and their understanding of time, Su Lan’s portrait is born.
In many ways, Liya lives the life her mother had dreamed: She knows nothing of their past in China, of her mother’s childhood, or of her father. Born on June 4, 1989 in Beijing, the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Liya also symbolizes future: the night of her birth, a “new” China is born. During the second section of the novel, we are introduced to Zhu Wen, a former neighbor, and YongZong, Liya’s father. These characters’ opposing (and gendered) ideas of Su Lan craft a complicated character: a portrait of a woman combatting gender and class roles in late twentieth century China.
However, while Zhu Wen and YongZong emerge as strong narrators, their own histories and desires revealed with distinct voices in their short sections, Liya’s persona is often overshadowed by her representation of her mother’s desires. Is this purposeful? Is Jin crafting her as a foil for her mother’s dream, down to the point where she cannot separate her own identity and personality? Or is this a flaw—that Liya simply exists as a mouthpiece for her mother’s journey? In many ways, a reader might believe it is the former, especially as we come to learn Liya craves history and roots where her mother doesn’t. But at the same time, we do not see Liya’s responses to Zhu Wen or YongZong’s stories, and we are not taken along the journey of who is and who is not Liya’s father (as the identity is narrowed down by the description on the jacket cover). One might wonder whether this lack of character build is an oversight—a character developed simply to move the plot along.
In the final section, “The Beginning,” Jin narrates the conclusion of Liya’s journey in the third person (a choice that furthers the reader even more from Liya’s voice). Liya “is struck with the image of someone else searching… she believes it her mother, but in fact it resembles herself… She is dressed nicely, wearing her invented history, as her mother once hoped to wear her new American life…At the next street she will meet herself, bearing strange consolation,” (279). Liya has attempted to find answers to her family history, yet in this moment, she finds comfort in invention; she accepts that she will not know her past, surrendering instead to creating her own, just as her mother had tried to do.
However, although neither Liya nor Su Lan are content with time’s impact, in this ending, Jin suggests a meeting that begs the question: Is this figure rushing towards Liya simply a metaphor for her acceptance of the past, or is it also a symbol for an understanding of her future? If she sees herself in this woman, in this new “Beginning,” as the final section is entitled, is it a revelation of what’s to come for her own story?
“At the very least, he wanted very much to know her, fully, to describe how she was, who she was, defining and redefining her in the way of a person who must get to the bottom of something, who would never tire of searching.”
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How does the use of physics shape the text? What does this allow us to see and understand that we otherwise might not?
What impact does the narration style — the three sections and three main narrators — have on our understanding of Liya and Su Lan’s story?
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