Family and the World

Yang Huang’s My Old Faithful is a collection of linked, polyphonic stories told, over a thirty-year period, from the point of view of each member of a close-knit Chinese family of five, living in both China and the United States. Each family member—mother, father, son, and two daughters—negotiates his or her way through various cultural and socio-economic upheavals while still maintaining a deep connection with one another and his or her past. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; This is the celebrated first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878). My Old Faithful is hyperaware of just how families are alike and unalike, when happy or unhappy. Happiness—as the matriarch of the family and follower of Guanyin, a figure of compassion in Chinese folk religion, knows all too well—is fleeting. At the same time, sadness is also fleeting, so a connection deeper and more stable than inconstant emotion is called for. And in this wonderful collection of ten interconnected stories, family provides the bedrock and soil for the roots of such a connection to take hold and flourish.

But the family is also the garden of primeval violence. The father, a professor of child psychology, is not above beating his eight-year-old son out of a desire to prevent him from going down a “lawless” path. And, in turn, the son is not above taking advantage of his younger sister’s desire to be loved by her older brother. Nothing, however, is terminal, especially not definitions of what it means to be born into a family at a time of great political change.

In “The Birthday Girls,” Lian, the youngest daughter, born “before 1982, when the one-child policy was enforced with financial penalty,” wants a pair of Nikes for her twelfth birthday; her mother, however, knows she will wear out and outgrow the expensive, imported running shoes within six months, so she would rather buy her a jade amulet of Guanyin, a figure in whom Lian calls her mother “superstitious” for believing. The mother responds, “Hail to Guan Shi Yin Bodhisattva…. Don’t be a simpleton.” Lian rebukes her mother: “School taught us there aren’t fairies or spirits, ghosts or gods. Guanyin, the so-called goddess of mercy and giver of offspring, is folk, not fact.” And so goes the struggle between mothers and daughters, believers and non-believers.

Huang offers multiple perspectives on the same events. In “If You Were My Legend,” for example, Lian’s brother Wei, while still a young boy, takes sexual advantage of his little sister. In the following story, “The Match,” narrated by a now young adult Lian, makes explicit reference to this traumatic event, which she has never told her parents, “what was the point in getting him beaten for a thing past? But it never passed for me.” Lian will never forget what happened, nor the lesson she has learned from this unwanted, formative experience, namely, “what a dirty trick a boy could play on a girl.”

The patriarch is a stern chain-smoker, who, we learn in “Chimney,” acquired the dangerous habit when he was a “lowly university student and sent to the countryside to be re-educated by peasants.” As the father narrates, “I had hoed in the field every day for two years to atone for having bickered against the Cultural Revolution. It was then I took up smoking, the only thing that let me forget about life and its broken promises.” Yet, despite his devotion to cigarette smoking, he is willing to give it up, if only his wayward son would change and start behaving in a more suitable manner. People and their entrenched habits turn out to be as mutable as political systems in My Old Faithful, especially when they are conditioned by love.

Family prejudices are challenged again and again in this collection, and more often than not, individual family members are willing to change with the times...