When Yang Huang was 16 years old and living in Jiangsu province, her mother took her to the local tailor so he could make her a stone yellow coat. Her mother usually sewed Huang’s clothes or Huang wore her mother’s altered clothes, but it was the New Year and her mother wanted to do something special. The tailor was a slender young man with a tall, voluptuous wife, who sized up Yang, and announced that Yang had a small bust, a tiny waist, and big hips. Cutting remarks for a young woman, bound to leave an impression. Years later, Huang visited another tailor who had a sick son. These two events comingled into an image that wouldn’t leave Huang alone: a tailor who puts on a long-form fitted dress and heels and has difficulty walking.
“It’s a strange image,” says Huang, “Does he pretend to be a woman or is he driven by something else?”
It’s not language, but an image that gives birth to her stories, as it did for her new novel, My Good Son. “I looked at the image in my head of the tailor and mapped it into language, using the simplest and most accurate words. I made sure the words were candid and without cliché. Slowly I began to understand my main character.”
My Good Son is the story of Mr. Cai, a tailor in post-Tiananmen China, and his wife and only son, Feng. Mr. Cai’s most fervent desire is for his son to succeed. He solicits the help of a gay American customer, Jude, to sponsor Feng’s studies in the United States. The opening sentence of the book establishes the poignant conflict between father and son, and Mr. Cai’s understandable but flawed view of parenting.
If he could have exchanged a limb for a wish, Mr. Cai would have traded his gladly in order to unleash Feng, his only son, into a life where he could live and prosper on his own.
Huang grew up during the denouement of the Cultural Revolution, and her parents endured all of it. Her father was exiled to Jiangsu province after being labeled a “Rightist.” At the time, quotas were used to banish the “Rightists” from every work unit and university. The pressure not to stand out, not to offend, to obey the rules—these things colored Huang’s childhood and became associated with her native tongue, Mandarin. Huang, who speaks standard Mandarin and learned three different dialects, also learned English during middle school.
“Because of the censorship throughout my upbringing, I can’t write stories in Chinese,” says Huang. “I don’t feel safe or free enough. I worry people will judge me, censor me, so I get ahead of them and censor myself, using metaphors, allegory, allusions or homophones, all these literary devices. But it’s easy to lose your story that way.”
Though Chinese is lyrical and supple, it lacks precision, says Huang. It’s moody and metaphysical, full of indirection and ambiguity. It veers toward proverbs, metaphors and hyperbole. “It wants to be all-encompassing,” she says. “I grew up hearing things like, ‘life is like that.’ And ‘history is a river, everything that happens to me happened to everyone else.’ That might be true, but it doesn’t capture an individual’s unique experience.”
So Huang writes her stories in English. Occasionally she conceives a story in English and then translates it into Chinese. This gives her prose a distinct candor and sharp edge.
“English is a very precise language,” she says. “In English, the traditional sentence of subject/verb is active and strong. You can see the characters, their actions and responses, and feel their emotions. It is visual and blunt. I like English’s plainspoken words, and I love the verbs.”
My Good Son is primarily told in unadorned, self-effacing short sentences. The style fits Mr. Cai, who is the point-of-view character and never went to college. He expresses an opinion by building on it, and uses metaphors and proverbs to bolster his view. “Mr. Cai, like everyone else in the story, has a blinkered view about what really goes on,” Huang says. “There is always some clue seen or missed, a lesson learned or ignored. Sentences try to reflect that highly personalized or fragmented view about the events.”
Feng wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. Mr. Cai rarely saw tears from his son. Feng had an inner strength that belied his fragile appearance. As a young boy, he had taught himself making rag dolls with scrap cloth.
This passage, with simple sentences and short complex sentences, is emblematic of many of the sections in the novel.
Feng got to his feet and left. Mr. Cai stole a glance at Jiao, who lowered her head and brushed a strand of loose hair behind her ear. Mr. Cai nodded at her and then walked away. He knew better than to ask Jiao any more embarrassing questions.
Here’s Mr. Cai, invoking one of his metaphors, trying to convince Jude’s father to accept his gay son.
“After the warp and weft are woven together, the cloth becomes durable. A shirt on your back can last you a decade before it goes out of style.” Mr. Cai wrapped the curtain around his shoulders like a shawl. “Imagine the resilience of human fabric, if it is well woven.”
The metaphor works well; Huang does not write over her characters, but allows the metaphor to emanate from Mr. Cai and his work as a tailor. There is musical alliteration of warp/weft (the two components of weaving that turn thread into fabric) and woven, which is echoed at the end with ‘well’ and ‘woven.’
“I could picture Mr. Cai saying this,” says Huang. “When he looks at fabric, he considers the symbolic meaning of the image, and the customer’s body as the canvas to display that image.” In the novel, when Mr. Cai sees fabric decorated with peonies, he sees beauty, nobility, prosperity, happiness and beauty. A light ginger-colored silk with turquoise butterflies, however, is only for “a teenage girl with a peachy complexion.”
Jude, the young, gay American who is living in China and speaks fluent Chinese, is much more plainspoken, with his dialogue stripped of metaphors. Here he is, looking at fabric, trying to choose which one to buy.
“It’s the only pattern I like.” Jude stood by the cascading silk. “Do you think it’ll look ugly on me?” His blue eyes darkened with something like hurt.
Huang still has the coat from when she was 16. It’s made out of wool, a coat that is thigh length with a detachable hood. It’s simple and elegant. Just like the sentences of her novel.