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I never took my mother’s writing seriously. Even when she called me from Chengdu one afternoon this February, announcing: “I’m gonna write fiction!”
Her voice was breathy and barely audible, full of secrecy that made me itchy. She talked too close to the phone whenever there was news too delicious to be eavesdropped by a third party.
“Again?” I yawned and swirled on the squeaky computer chair in my rented apartment in Shanghai to face a window view blocked by hanging clothes and unkempt shrubs.
“It’s different this time! I’m all serious!” she promised, “I’ve just started a short story, great stuff, The Candidates.”
“All right,” I shrugged, “but why?”
A sudden bashfulness sweetened her voice: “I’d love to see some of my stuff in print, too. You know, I almost published a story in college….”
“Yeah, you told me about it like a hundred times, Ma.”
Apparently, she was in a good mood. Her laughter, though retaining that bright timbre, which made her a passionate amateur singer, had already turned husky out of years of teaching and bouts of hours-long tantrums.

In March, my internship in Shanghai was over, and I returned home, an industrial town on the outskirts of Chengdu. Its 60-year-old steel factory had just announced bankruptcy. Younger people trickled out, but my parents continued to perch on the fifth floor of a gray building almost engulfed by the cool green shades of three Chinese banyans.
“So, how was your story?” I spread my limbs on the sofa and asked Mom. “Have you finished it?”
“Not yet, I’ve still got two-thirds to go.”
“2 thirds? But it’s been weeks! How many words do you write a day?”
“Two…hundred, maybe three hundred.” she smiled sheepishly.
And these two, three hundred words were laboriously chiseled at a 26-year-old wooden table against a corner of the living room lit up only by pale daylight sifting through the balcony windows. Mom sat upright on a stool wrapped up in a shirt, a ribbed sweater, a knit vest, and a brownish orange cardigan, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose due to presbyopia.
The room was shrouded in a quiet snugness broken only by her faint snuffles and the crisp clicks of Dad’s mouse. When forty minutes passed, her stiffened back could no longer endure such posture, she heaved a long, satisfied sigh and flipped through her little thread-bound notebook made from bad prints. It clattered in a mellifluous way.
The Candidates told a story of office politics. With the death of the vice-manager of a bridge construction factory, the wives of two candidates for the vacant position, Wan-er and Lili, vied to send gifts and offer condolences to the widowed wife on their visits. While Lili was more than adept at sweet talks, Wan-er visibly agonized with her social awkwardness:

For the first time in her life, she felt embarrassment cutting into her bones like a knife. People’s gazes shot through her like arrows. She stepped forward and drew back, not knowing where to look….‘How, how pathetic you are!’ She scolded herself with hot bitterness. Time seemed to be mocking her, too, locking her body in this painful moment.

“You are Wan-er, right?” I tossed the draft on the sofa, “and you are writing about that night when you and Dad went to the factory manager’s apartment trying to bribe him with a roasted duck?”
Mom nodded with a smile, and her joking voice came back to me: “We were too nervous to knock. How young we were, how naïve! That woman—his wife—never bothered to say a thank-you.”
Usually, in her spirited retellings, a waving hand would be combined to show a good-humored reconciliation with the past.
But on other occasions, when she was consumed by fury, all the delightful details would be deleted, even denied, and the story would dive into an attack at Dad’s failure to secure a promotion and provide a better life for the family. Good-for-nothing and Crap would be two very mild descriptions among all the other words filled with naked hatred.
She provided another reading of the story that I’d known by heart, and from this dark twist, I learned bitterness, hot fear, and confusion that made my mind sore. Once I scribbled down her ranting in my bedroom; another time I even ventured to record it and planned to play it to her afterward. But I never listened to the recording. Too drained out after the seemingly endless litany and eager for any possible reconciliation, I neither deleted it nor played it, simply let its existence sliding into the shadow.
Who would think of a third version of the story? But the moment felt strange. Never had the emotion been thus torn apart, dissected and elaborated: the piercing humiliation, the “hot bitterness.” My blind spot amazed me: how could have I never done this? But then again, to understand Mom always implied the risk of knowing too much, so much that she became a stranger to me again.
And the guilt that had been stirring in me for some time now almost verged onto the surface.

....

The Force of Life

Set in the rural regions and small towns in Ireland, Kevin Barry’s debut collection of short stories There Are Little Kingdoms buzzes like an X-ray machine, revealing, with relentless accuracy, the unfortunates’ desires, frustrations, and confusions.

It is the devilish energy of the characters that sends the stories spinning. We rarely see inactive, hesitant, and self-conscious scholar-types; the inhabitants of Kevin Barry’s world stride and stumble and fight and fall with disturbing decisiveness and shameless innocence. Two fast girls try to play pranks with a blind shop owner; a hiker relishes in a love-triangle with two middle-aged women; a farm owner plays wife-swapping game with his neighbors until he finds himself deep in trouble....

Forcefulness is a default quality of these characters. Atlantic City portrays a young man who dominates the pinball machine like a king, and plays billiards with admirable expertise:

A lesser player would be inclined to ram in the easier pots with showy force and venom, but always James played the game quietly, he would roll his reds gently home rather than slam them, he would apply no more force than was needed, and for this reason it was exquisite to watch him play, and the arcade was hushed in the presence of his talent.

Who would guess, after 11 pages of detailed description of this flamboyant cowboy, that he would die, “on a low September evening,” of drowning? Kevin Barry certainly holds a fatalistic view of life, for he concludes that “laments and regrets were no use—these were just the quotas and insistences of Broad Street.”

Kevin Barry shows an uncanny knowledge of how people mess up their lives: in The Wintersongs, on a train to Dublin, an old woman forces conversations on a young girl, and vents her past miseries. The monolog, vividly presenting a life in decline, only ends when the train arrives at its destination, and the old woman vanishes among the carriage-building sheds and becomes “light, air, dust.”

Sometimes the writer’s attitude softens, and in my favorite story, Burn The Bad Lamp, he shows his sympathy by summoning a genie out of a lamp, granting three wishes to a middle-aged divorcé named Ralph. It is a real delight to hear the genie grumbling about traffic, the decline of work ethics and stupid people making dumb wishes. He is one of those old school genies who insist on appearing from a lamp instead of, say, a toaster or an air bag.

And he is eager to instruct:

“You give people a chance!” he says, balling a fist and slapping it into his palm. “You give them a chance to transform their lives! You give them every fucking opportunity. And what do they do? They look at you like you’re crazy. Don’t disappoint me, Ralph.”

Instead of material wealth or worldly conveniences, Ralph asks for a singing voice, a time trip back to when he and his wife were still in love, and an outstanding day. Like almost every other character in the book, all he needs is to feel “fluffy and lovely again.”

The Irish forcefulness shares many qualities of its strong liquor: refreshing, warming and emboldening. It fuels the dialogue and prods the story forward. Even the language feels intoxicated. Sentences become heavy-weighted as the peaceful giant in Last Days Of The Buffalo “spreads his arms like he’s nailed to a cross and … looks to the sky in great noble suffering and …bellows from deep: ‘Hold on, boys!’”

The narration in Breakfast Wine, too, is dense and evocative when the conversation in a forlorn bar is interrupted, and a mysterious woman walks in as if she is the incarnation of glamor:

Glamour carried itself with great elegance and ease. It was jewelled at the fingers and jewelled at the throat. It wore fine woolens and high leather boots and a green velvet cape, the texture such an excitement against machine-tanned skin.

These “little masterpieces” are so strong in characterization that sometimes they seem like thirteen sketches. Party At Helen’s, for instance, reads like there is a camera shifting focus from one guest to another as if the writer is experimenting on a spatial narrative. It is true that these tantalizing characters can easily charm the readers without getting involved in any drama or real conflicts, but sometimes the story ends so abruptly that I would leaf through the book, checking for missing pages. Reading Kevin Barry is like riding a coal-burning train that dashes ahead nonstop, but at some point, I would love to get off at a station and linger for a while.

·There Are Little Kingdoms is published by Stinging Fly Press.