Ahhhhh... the perennial conflict between Asian parents and their grown children. This is 'Peking Duck' by Ling Ma published in The New Yorker on July 4, 2022. It's a short story that is slated to be published in her first collection of stories titled 'Bliss Montage: Stories' in September 2022.
The author moved to the US at seven years old to join her parents who had been hard at work building a new life in a new country. It touches on the ambitions of the then-child author, and what she eventually chooses as a profession, versus her parents' ideas.
It's not an unfamiliar family tale, especially to children of immigrants, then and now. This story talks about how the author learnt English and mastered it, and using her mother's broken English as a yardstick. As an adult, she's no longer fluent in Mandarin.
Ice cream is my favorite food. I write these words in the journal my mother gives me to record my first days in the U.S. English is just a play language to me, the words tethered to their meanings by the loosest, most tenuous connections. So it’s easy to lie. I tell the truth in Chinese, I make up stories in English. I don’t take it that seriously. When I’m finally enrolled in first grade, I tell classmates that I live in a house with an elevator, with deer in the back yard. It is the language in which I have nothing to lose, even if they don’t believe a thing I say.
And the story talks about Peking Duck that one eats in Beijing. In an interview, she explained why she used the anecdote of Peking Duck to begin her story.
I noticed the connection between the Peking-duck anecdote in the memoir and the Lydia Davis short story “Happiest Moment” years later. I began thinking about the retelling of stories within the immigrant framework. It’s typically the second generation, fluent in English and more assimilated, who retell the stories of their parents and those of the older generations, to a Western audience. They’re translating these stories—not just linguistically, but making them more culturally palatable to the audience. I was thinking about whether the experiences of first-gen immigrants can be faithfully rendered by their children.
I blinked when the story skipped to the adult author enrolled in an M.F.A program for creative writing, and a discussion at a workshop. We return to a reference Mark Salzman's student's story of eating Peking Duck in his autobiographical 'Iron & Silk' (1986). We also then hear the author's story of an immigrant who became a nanny; one day, she met a salesman who came knocking at her employer's house, and she spoke with him, which culminated in her being fired from her job. Cue stereotypes, and also strength and dedication within. So one reads what one will into such stories.
The story meandered along to another scene. I was rather confused by the ending. It simply dives into the story of the nanny, the same one critiqued in the author's writing workshop. So we read about the story of the nanny, and we could decide if the classmate's criticism of it is warranted or if the instructor's more constructive comments work. I find it super stereotypical though, and real. It's the harsh reality many people face. Ah well. The author asked us readers to consider, "Is it the mother’s account of her experience? Is it her daughter’s imagined rendering of the experience? Is it the story that she once submitted to workshop? How are we supposed to situate this text, especially in relation to the other sections? If all these uncertainties disquiet the reader, I think that’s a good thing."
The author's mother didn't like her stories, understandably so. She thinks that the mothers in these stories the author had written, are all long-suffering, and miserable. She doesn't need stark reminders of her life or anyone else's struggles on paper. The author took her mother to a fancy Chinese restaurant famous for its Peking duck. And the irony, neither of them likes Peking duck.
I take a sip of water. We’ve been over this before. There’s no point in setting the record straight for the millionth time about my childhood, the school bullying. The worst part was how my mother used to encourage me to lie to her, to pretend how great things were. She would phrase her questions like “You’re popular at school, right?” or “You have a lot of friends, right?,” priming me to answer the way she wanted. She couldn’t not have known that I was lying, but she wanted to bathe in the lies. She needed to believe that I was thriving in the U.S., that my happiness came at the cost of hers, rather than acknowledge the fact that we were both miserable in this country together.
Instead of arguing this time, I simply say, “My therapist says that it is always better to acknowledge reality.”
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