ChangingLily HoangFairy Tale Review Press |
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Reviewed by John Madera
Besides being a powerful novella with an emotional heft that weighs you down with sadness, with the burden of a woman’s history, a woman calling herself “little girl,” Lily Hoang’s Changing is also a puzzle, a game, a manual, and, through some kind of magic, an oracle. Actually, that last part isn’t true because the fluff of hocus pocus is not the stuff of great fiction. In fact, Changing doesn’t provide definitive answers so much as it asks more questions, creates doubts and uncertainty; it provokes, prods, and befuddles the reader. As the narrator explains in “Viewing,” she’s sick of giving “answers so easy & I / want you to look at this I mean / really look at this & from these / stories find your own future.”
Reading Changing you might consider starting at the end, with the novella’s appendices, where you’ll find a “Letter of Introduction & Instruction” and “Handouts.” Or you could, like me, begin at the beginning and try to figure out for yourself exactly what is going on. If you see yourself opting for the latter, you might wish to stop reading this review and immediately pick up a copy of the book from Fairy Tale Review Press.
The novella uses the form of the I Ching’s hexagrams as a structural device. Divided into the 64 hexagrams, the text itself mimics the symbol’s form, as it’s broken up into “Yang” sections that run margin to margin and “Yin” sections that are divided in half. This experimental structuring, however, is not simply a fancy frame, but an energetic way of allowing the text to virtually continually change. Borrowing an idea developed by Alice Fulton in her essay “Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions,” Changing is “fractal.” Here every section is as complex as the larger piece from which it’s derived, is full of infinite nesting patterns where digression, disruption, and disintegration counteract conventional notions of continuity.
The I Ching translates as the “Book of Changes” and Hoang’s use of the active verb derivation of change for her title suggests in an even stronger way movement, and lack of fixity, lack of permanence. Like fractal forms, her prose fragments exist in a paradoxical space of movement and stasis. Another interesting device (one that I usually find annoyingly self-conscious and twee) in Changing is the universal use of ampersands. Here its curvilinear aspect acts as a kind of connective tissue to the text fragment’s angularity. Very smart that.
Without giving too much away (one of the pleasures of reading this book is piecing together its threads), Changing is a meditation on what gets lost in translation. Throughout the refractive narrative, the “storyteller” points to the inadequacies of various translators’ translations, mistranslations really, and their concomitant interpretations of the hexagrams. She writes of the “[t]ranslator translating & I not / liking it,” and in the hexagram “Innocence,” she shares the burden of her responsibility:
Translators translating for this one telling me how the innocent often befall misfortune & even though I don’t understand I don’t get it I try to translate au- thenticaly [sic] to authenticate texts of straight & broken lines to give fate.
Hoang’s novella is a collection of tiny time capsules. At times it reads as a kind of textual family photo album, each fragment a snapshot from the narrator’s life. Most of the memories are anguished, but some are joyous, even whimsical. Here is one of my favorite passages from the book:
Memory of bathtub filled & me pretending I’m a mermaid & me pretending to sing the Siren’s song even though I’m only four & I don’t really know what the song is I make it up & me pretending I’m the little mermaid only with out such red hair & me splashing up side of tub as if it’s a rock & me seeing water rise higher & higher & me not wanting to make a mess in the bath but still wanting to be a mermaid until a chin cracking open on porcelain & water being ruby red
Passages like this (and there are many others like it in Changing) beautifully navigate through childhood fantasy while allowing submerged pain to unexpectedly rise to the surface. In Changing, we find reflections on how one is shaped by circumstances, by memories. Here images collapse together, are obscured by contradictory feelings. Here time moves “differently than / straight & so leader leading to- / day will be gone & even perse- / verance can’t change it & even / being great won’t change it…”
There’s so much that my review hasn’t even touched on: the novella’s wonderful repetitions, the bouncing back and forth between “flatland” and the “city of heat,” its numerous interpolations of the Jack and Jill tale, its passages that tumble breathtakingly along. This is a book meant to be reread until the various fragmented memories and stories in Changing finally intertwine, then mesh, then cohere into a captivating story of love, illness, regret, sadness, betrayal, yearning, doubt, and fear. That said, it’s also a book meant (after picking a number out of a cup) to be read at random with each individual story offering direction, illumination for the reader’s—the seeker’s—path. Read this book. It will stretch you.