Lost in the Long March by Michael X. Wang (Overlook Press, 2022)

Further News of Defeat, by Michael X. Wang (Autumn House Press, 2020)

By Brian Bouldrey

I teach creative writing and literature at Northwestern University, long considered a fancy rich-kid school (I also attended the university back in the 1980s and somebody commented in my yearbook, “Northwestern is a real melting pot! Rich whites, rich blacks, rich Asians, rich Latinos, all from all the rich parts of the world!”), has made great efforts in the past five years to bring into the student body a quarter of the acceptances based entirely on merit—that is, almost twenty-five percent of undergrads are accepted for their academic accomplishment and given monetary aid capping student loan costs at a remarkably manageable level.

In just half a decade, the students in my classrooms have changed dramatically, wonderfully. This came to my attention one day in a fiction writing workshop when a student’s story, about a Filipino-American daughter who is clashing with her Filipino émigré mother, contained a scene in which the mother, in the heat of an argument, switches over from English into Tagalog, which comes easier to her. In workshop, I said to the class, “Oh, it’s like when my mother ‘middle-named’ me.” The students were collectively mystified. “You know,” I clarified, “when I was a boy and misbehaving, my mother would shake a finger at me and shout, ‘Brian Douglas Bouldrey, you are in trouble!’” Ongoing silence, and then I realized what was happening. I then said, to my class of 17, “How many of you grew up in a house where more than one language was spoken?” Fifteen of the 17 hands shot up.

Those 15 might be identified as “first-gen”, the slangy, imprecise term covering so many people in the world whose parents are from one culture or nation while their child is born into another. Barak Obama, for example. Imagine your life, born naturally into a culture, with languages, manners, and habits the parents struggle to learn. The Polish parents who make a new home in Chicago need to call a plumber—but it is the child, fluent in both Polish and English, who understand the true value of a dollar, negotiates the scope and rate of the work on the sink. This, for the first-gen child, does not seem like an arduous task—it is simply doing what feels like a natural role in the family.

These students are my favorites, though I ought not tell you so. For one thing, they have stories to tell. They have families they love, and love to write histories of family members who have even better stories to tell. They are weirdly not allergic to anything. They get their work done on time. They never crave praise or validation. And they are calm, centered, never ruffled by anxieties like registration, midterms, finals, and me. Rachel and Michael and Mahalia and Yama and Abeje and Duran and Duncan and Meena and Srivan and the rest of you—this appreciation is, overall, for all of you—and especially you, Michael X. Wang.

Michael Wang was my fiction-major student for two or three years in the early oughts. This may or may not have been the year that the 15-person fiction cohort had nine students named Chris (apropos of nearly nothing, it’s nothing but a batch of Zachs and Olivias in academic year 2022-23). Michael, it turns out, never told me or the class the story of his coming to the United States from China in 1989, when he was just six years old, but it informs nearly every story in his 2020 story collection, Further News of Defeat, which first won the Autumn House Fiction Prize, and then—among several prize nominations in 2021, rose above the other four finalists to win the PEN/Bingham Prize for best book of short stories that year.

He was first-gen, capable, confident, hard-working, and ready to be an apprentice, a thing most undergraduates hate to be—after all, we were all geniuses in college, how dare you call that time apprenticeship. Also, Michael laughed broadly at my jokes in class, so we were solid.

What is it like to watch a writer evolve from a newly-minted adult just picking out the first phrases of their early fiction to a major representative of our literary landscape? My former students who have, marvelously, overtaken me, include Veronica Roth (Divergent), Mary South (You Will Never Be Forgotten), Jeannie Vanasco (Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl), YZ Chin (Edge Case), Patrick Ryan Frank (The Opposite of People), Lyz Lenz (Belabored), Eric Dean Wilson (After Cooling), Will Butler of the Arcade Fire, Rita Chang (quick! Get her new, glorious novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea) and Karen Russell (Swamplandia, Orange World). I will never forget the day Karen Russell rushed breathlessly into my office during office hours, concerned about a novella she was working on in my advanced class; she was so worried. “I’ve just made a chicken talk. Is it okay if I make a chicken talk?” She had already proved to be a person for whom I could only throw down epigrams and mysterious stories about good writing. I said to her, in a sort of confused moment of my own clarity reserved for the marvelous students who need only one thing—permission—“If you can make the chicken talk, for pete’s sake, make the chicken talk.” I do have what I think is a rigorous curriculum of reading and thought about writing, and like anything (especially bowling), there are students who linger in my memory as best single story, best first season, most improved average, most enthusiastic participation, team spirit, and my personal cryptic category, “I Dare You to be Better”. I have students who were brilliant, but bastards in the classroom, and I have asked them to meet me in private so as not to disrupt us with their annoying brilliance. There are the talented, there are the hard-working, there are the mad, and there are those who could have been great but were unwilling to sacrifice themselves to madness. I have had thousands of students over 30 years. I am just one teacher and I can’t bring out the artist in all of them, but I would never have told any single one of my students to look away from writing and consider dance or retail or politics. Well, except that one guy.

But we are appreciating Michael X. Wang here. What I know of his past is that his parents came, as emigrants, perhaps as refugees, to the United States around about the time of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He went on to study at Indiana and Purdue for his MFA, and received a PhD in literature at Florida State University. He now teaches the stuff himself at Arkansas Tech University, and if you are listening, Arkansas Tech—you are lucky to have him.

The stories! I know we all love the wallow of a good novel, but can you and your better angels embrace the possibility that the short story is a noble form of fiction that is perhaps harder to write and has rarer examples of success? Short story writers consider the possibility of financial success and pass it by. Publishers use story collections for hostage negotiations—sure, sure, we’ll publish your collection of stories. But if you want to live, writerwise, you are indentured to us until you hand over two future novels.

The stories! The first in Further News, so shockingly memorable, called “A Minor Revolution”, may or may not be based on true events: it’s 1989, and a little boy, Weiwei (the name means “Slight”), aged 6, the son of a Beijing University professor and his small-town illiterate wife, watches as the protests build in Tiananmen Square. Weiwei is perceptive, aware, but still has potty-training issues—he has embarrassed his parents on several occasions by inconveniently pooping his pants in public. His father, loving, politically impassioned, and already under suspicion, tells his wife and child that they must take the next possible bus out of Beijing and flee to safety, by any means. As things escalate in Tiananmen Square, Weiwei’s mother, seeing the military interrogate every person who gets onto the bus heading out of town, whispers into her son’s ear, “Go in your pants, Weiwei… Make it as dirty as you can.” By the time they reach the front of the line to get onto the bus to safety, everybody notices the smell—and to avoid further embarrassment, officers let them pass, and they escape doom.

Many, if not most of the stories in Further News of Defeat focus on children and teenagers, old before their time, living at the mercy of poverty, cruelty, and the sausage factory of rapid modernization; in “With Consideration and Care”, the geriatric foster parent of teenaged Lin, petitions the small-town corrupt family-planning commissioner with three oranges so that he might marry his ward. Lin knows enough of the western pop culture world that she loves but can only imagine: her Mariah Carey tapes, CC-TV broadcasts of western sitcoms. But she is seduced by a dance club poster: “There was a picture of a white man dancing, his hair the color of hay. Beneath him, the caption read: ‘A taste of the other side! We guarantee one dancing American every night!”

Wang went on to complete an MFA in writing at Purdue and then a Ph.D in literature from Florida State University. He is now an assistant professor at Arkansas Tech University. Reading Wang’s new fiction for the first time since I critiqued his early stories fifteen years ago, I was enthusiastic and compelled by marvelous story collection, though they are full of poop and protest and creepy old men and much, much violence, mostly cast through the eyes of children who know no world different from this. Children who are molested. Children who find entire village populations at the bottoms of wells. Children who find themselves living organ donors. Reviewers of Wang’s fiction continue to use the word “unflinching”. When you see that word in a jacket description, expect, as a reader, to flinch.

All of these stories are accomplished, and neither prologue nor some practice for the novel Michael Wang has been working on for years, his dark and troubling and loving and brutal and glorious historical work, Lost in the Long March. The main characters, Ping and Yong, are hardly adults themselves as they are introduced at the early end of the Chinese Revolution in 1934. Mao himself is a youthful guy hanging out with his armies. Ping, a young man who has lived in tiny villages deep in rural China doing crimes with his opportunistic friend Luo, learns how to make firearms and becomes indispensable to the cause. The narrative is structured into four books in this novel, each with a close third or first person point of view, and the first is told through Ping. With him, we see our first camera, and our first plane. With him, we are soothed by simple marching songs and unrequited love –there is no time for love, revolutionary comrade!—for the ferocious and mighty, wiry markswoman, Yong. Beware of Yong, for Yong is a true believer. It makes her, and therefore Mao himself, irresistible. Yong does not have time for your romantic bullshit. If only her previous suitor, the kung fu hero Haiwu knew this, perhaps he might not have sacrificed a perfectly good kicking leg for her safety.

I’ll tell you more of this marvelous plot in a moment, but there’s only this moment to point out that Haiwu means “Not Yet”, and it’s important to note that the people in this story are named before—or as—they are being born; you are born with the burden of family history.

Ping, third in line for Yong’s affections, is steady and patient, and this, dear reader, is a great historical and social novel. Think E.M. Forster begging us to “only connect!” but the characters must connect in a perpetual war. Think of Isaac Babel and his devastating revelations of true human behavior, and his stunted rewards of shriveled plums for surviving such devastations, buried as a clause in some sentence, in a time of terrible violence. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro who can use unreliable narrators to make horror look ordinary. Think of Yiyun Li, who never forgets the relationships between her characters, even in the midst of mistrust, haircuts, and madness. And think of the dream of the Soviet socialist realists, who wanted a fiction for the revolution and the people, and failed because they cared more about the revolution and not enough for the people. You guys: this book is not just something I like because it was written by my former student; this book is what you want.

It is, again, a story about children twisted and tied by the only culture know—because let’s face it, we are all twisted and tied by the only culture we know. Michael Wang, he knows more than one twisty-tie. And from that place in the margins of both our cultures, he has created a new kind of historical novel, and a new aesthetic.

The aesthetic is built on two of his great mentors, my former colleagues, who know how to write and rethink history, Anna Keesey (Little Century) and John Keene (Counternarratives). Both find ways to use imagination and emotion to recover impossible-to-recover parts of history. Both, I believe, inspired Michael to answer their great novels and stories with his own genius.

Not a spoiler: deep in the midst of the fights with nationalists, Yong becomes pregnant. The revolution is not sexist, but children can really slow down a revolution. Mao Zedong himself abandons his children to strangers. And so do Ping and Yong: as they mount the most devastating, strategic campaign known as The Long March and historically considered an evasive retreat that helped consolidate the communist forces and turn them into The People’s Liberation Army, they leave Little Turnip, their baby, with strangers who do not even speak their language. His name is changed to Little Mushroom. The entire village they leave him in ceases to exist. And for the rest of their long lives, Ping and Yong search for the child, one of thousands, they lost in the Long March.

Who can help them retrieve their lost son? What can be made of the few clues in an immense nation with few written records, few people who could read the records if they existed, countless uncounted citizens, and the endless chaos of war? These are the same few threadbare clues Michael Wang has when he goes to imagine and recreate this moment in history, a history far away from him in time and space, and yet a history of that place that was truly home, even if he left it at the age of six.

Of course, there are “pundits” in the fabric of Lost in the Long March, maybe they can help Ping, Yong, and Wang, Ping’s know-it-all sidekick Luo. Mao and his little red book. And then there’s a miserable hermit who spouts fortune cookie sayings before fortune cookies were invented by westerners. Haiwu the one-legged kung fu champion considers himself a historian even into his old age, and swears he remembers things that the reader knows is not true—things get misremembered, things are forgotten, and things get lied about. There is confusing wisdom when he repeats parables we’d love to hear, and, troublingly, uses an old Chinese folk tale about a perfect cabbage carved out of jade that only brings misfortune to the artist who carved it.

No, traditional ideas of beauty will not be enough for Wang’s novel. Cherry blossoms fall over Mao’s army, and its guns. Haiwu’s wife, Cho—“a child herself”—and her twin sister are described as “Two kids walking through a field made for a pretty watercolor, but a stiff wind blowing past would rip it in half faster than a scythe through wheat.” Like an Italian village in one of Forster’s social novels, Wang observes beauty and chooses to pass it by. Wang plays on our love (and Ping’s and Yong’s) of the beautiful impossible unity a novel provides.

After all, tales are meant to be fables, and when tales are subject to radical revolutions, all the morals are rendered moot, faddish. But never forget—Wang’s fictive world is always about the gulf between being human and the artifice of aesthetics and literacy—he holds us undamaged by old ideas of truth and beauty so that we can understand the damage of loss and exile and the cruelty that unhoming and history do, especially to children, so that we readers might understand that damage, if not shoulder it.

There is so much more to say about the successes and fascinations of Wang’s debut novel. If you are an afficionado of historical fiction, you may have encountered those works that are larded with historical facts that me be facts, but are not useful to the fiction that is epistemologically truer than mere facts: the moment one says of the author, “well, the author certainly did their homework,” their novel becomes only homework, mere facts, just stones in your shoe. Michael Wang understands this, I think, and his is a fully imagined novel—though we never say, “well, the author certainly has an imagination.” We marvel at a place and time that only this long-lost citizen can recover for us, a history and home that only an exile could find the heart and head with which to love it.

Brian Bouldrey is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, and several anthologies. He teaches writing and literature at Northwestern University, and his novels The Genius of Desire, Love, the Magician, and The Boom Economy are all available in new editions from ReQueered Tales. His collection of essays, Good in Bed: A Life in Queer Sex, Politics, and Religion will be published in November.