The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, by Xu Xi and Robin Hemley
Authors and writing retreat leaders Xu Xi and Robin Hemley in Snake Temple in Penang, Malaysia.
Since reading Xu Xi and Robin Hemley’s latest offering, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, I’ve been reconsidering everything I learned in my chi-chi American liberal arts college education, where Volume II of the Norton Anthology of English Literature loomed large. My loose accounting of the 2,400 page, all-encompassing volume of must-read English literature, shows not a single Black, Indian, or Asian writer, although the volume includes the twentieth century (Derek Walcott had Black ancestors).
The Art and Craft of Asian Stories is exactly the opposite of my college experience in so many different ways.
Let me take you all the way back to my first and only class in Asian-American literature.
I’m not sure what I expected, only that I saw Asian-American lit as something to be studied separate from the rest of American literature. I took that class too, on top of the Literature 101 offering and a class in women’s literature. I saw these things as being discrete offerings. I did not see that a class in English literature or American literature could also encompass works by Asian authors or by women, for instance.
Yes, yes, you’re saying to me, it was the nineties, that’s to be expected. But believe me when I tell you that this kind of thinking can damage a person’s view of so much literature, and with great longevity. One begins to think of women’s literature, of Asian literature, of Black literature, as “other” to what we’ve been taught is the canon.
The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, which pairs short stories with insightful commentary on how and why they work, and provides to-the-point exercises at the end of each chapter, exists entirely to upend that model.
“Our aim,” write the editors, “is to widen the field of models from any background of any country.” Well, let me tell you; this simple statement from the introduction took me some time to wrap my head around. Hemley and Xu are telling me that Asian stories are not just for Asian students or other Asian writers; they are further telling me that we can all learn from these works.
I know. I am a narrow-minded jerk for not internalizing this concept from the very beginning. For not willing it to be so, from the very time I began to read literature in English. How easily we are influenced by authority figures like gigantic volumes of text!
Once I got over that hiccup, though, the many advantages of this text became apparent.
Spoiler alert; I’m a fan, and on one more than one level. I’ll separate them out here.
The Editor’s Side of the Desk
For a number of years, I edited short stories for what folks called a solid tier-two literary magazine. In the wild west that is the American literary magazine world, this means that we were a well-respected literary magazine that paid, and that placing a story, essay, or poem in our pages was a desirable thing. As part of my job, my associate editors and I vetted between four hundred and six hundred stories every reading period. I provided personal feedback for roughly a third of those.
So believe me when I tell you that new ways to express what a story is doing right; where it might be going wrong; how it can be improved, are always useful, and this is the most obvious of the things that struck me as an editor about Asian Stories–the book is not broken out into the traditional elements of plot, character development, point of view, and so on. Rather, Hemley and Xu have chosen themes: Family Matters, Attraction, Taboo, Diasporas, and Histories, just to name a few. And each of these themes allows us to explore the elements of short stories in a more organic fashion. For instance, a chapter on Routines allows us to explore point of view neatly and concisely, using short stories from Korean writer Han Yujoo (“We That Summer”) and UAE writer Deepak Unnikrishnan (“Birds”).
The clarity with which Xu and Hemley break down the stories is remarkable, too–in a later chapter on writing ordinary lives, they attack the question of writing morality: “But how do we write about ‘Little Fish’ without falling into the trap of sounding preachy or pompous, or worse, presumptuous about such lives?...No one wants to be told how they feel…the more you know about your character, the less you want your manipulation of the reader’s emotions to be apparent.”
The book’s assessments of the machinations of these short stories reads a lot like a friendly, but sharp, editorial letter, and that gives me something to strive for in my own editorial letters.
The Writer’s Side of the Desk
I don’t love writing short stories as much as I enjoy reading them. Every once in a while I’ll get a wild hair and produce something for publication, but more often than not my loose scribblings make their ways into nonfiction work or novels and novel ideas. Still, as I’ve just told another writer, we must never make the mistake of believing that what we learn from one genre can’t also be applied to another, and Asian Stories is a great object correlative for me in that way.
I didn’t enjoy all of the stories. But I very much I valued Hemley and Xu’s commentary throughout, especially the way in which it was delivered: It’s written– in first-person plural, with lots of life lessons drawn from the editors’ own lives and writing experience (“When we first began writing, we tended to want to push towards an outcome or message, and explained in a heavy-handed way why things turned out as they did in our stories…”).
There is also plenty of entertaining, tongue-in-cheek commentary: “Some Modernist Western Writers…attempted in their fiction to mimic the disorderliness of our rush of thoughts through a technique known as stream of consciousness, a term that’s widely misused in creative writing classes to mean ‘I don’t understand what the writer is saying,’” goes one passage.
Further, Xu and Hemley provide context where it’s needed, rightfully assuming that a western reader may not have at hand all of the knowledge that’s needed to fully appreciate a story’s meaning: as preface to the story “An Errand” by Filipino writer Angelo Acuesta, the editors tell us that the eponymous errand can take a driver in a good car six, seven, or more hours. And they fill us in on some societal context where we may not already have it: We learn, for instance, that much of the labor in the United Arab Emirates is immigrant labor, but also where these workers may come from.
Far from feeling annoyed by the additional information, the writer is grateful, since we are getting as much as we can out of the story.
The exercises provided at the end of each chapter are another huge benefit. Even if I’m not always writing short stories, I could easily see putting these exercises to use for my own writing, using them to explore the same themes and amplify the same skills the editors hope we’ll exercise if we are dedicated short-story writers.
I know I’ll be putting some of them to use for my creative nonfiction students nearly right away.
The Reader
When you live a life of words, it’s easy to forget how to enjoy a thing for what it is–masterfully crafted meaning from a series of words. Even though I didn’t love every selection (it’s rare to find an anthology in which every story resonates, after all), I enjoyed every paragraph of the editors’ good advice.
I loved the deft way in which they reminded us about the deeper message of inclusivity that’s being posited here, from the book’s raison d’être to its gentle reminders about writing “the other” carefully and respectfully. The question of authenticity is tackled to great effect, but never ad nauseum, and this reader is grateful for the book’s continuous gentle, wry, tone.
Probably the one element of this book that made me hiccup every time I came across it is the editors’ leaning on certain writers to illustrate a point: James Thurber, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever are all mentioned, for instance. All white, all dead, all male. (Okay, Flannery O’Connor makes an appearance, as does Virginia Woolf.)
Masters? Yes. Part of what we understand to be the canon? Most certainly. And yet, as much as I bristled at their inclusion in this text, feeling as if they were intruding on this world of literature that Xu and Hemley had built for me, a world of new-to-me writers I never wanted to leave, perhaps my discomfort at seeing these names is exactly what the editors had in mind.
Perhaps my discontent at seeing these names, once so familiar to me, in this particular text, is the point, after all.
To learn more about Xu Xi and Robin Hemley’s writing instruction and international writer’s retreats, visit them at Authors at Large.
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