All coming-of-age stories all the time: "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?" by Jenny Zhang

I knew when I was writing my last post that I was jumping the gun. While writing about how it had been hard for me to get past the fact that I was reading a fourth straight coming-of-age story in the O.Henry Anthology, I thought to myself, "Surely, they won't go for a fifth?" But they did. It's the year of the bildungsroman, I guess.

Like with the last one, it would be unfair of me to judge the story because it happened to have been anthologized with so many other coming-of-age stories, and I'm going to deal with it on its own merits. I can also see what the anthology editors were thinking. These might have been five stories that were alike in that they featured young protagonists passing through trials into adulthood, but the stories are also profoundly different from one another. We had a wealthy Connecticut family taking their teens on vacation to Italy, a German child growing up during post-WW-II reconstruction, a wonderful Afghan boy-goes-on-a-journey tale, a Russian child in the 90s (I think?) watching her mother and her mother's best friend try to find happiness, and now this story about a Chinese-American girl's relationship to her grandmother.

Zhang's story stands out as different for more reasons than just the ethnicity and location of the narrator, a now-grown woman thinking back over her childhood from age nine to age seventeen. It also stands out for being perhaps the only story in which the climax is not the main character changing, but failing to change. Or does she? The narrator essentially tells us this is a negative character arc, but it's possible that the act of writing the story is more meaningful and more indicative of a post-facto change in the narrator than the narrator realizes.

The story unfolds as four different visits from a Chinese grandmother to the home of Stacey, the narrator. When Stacey is young, she is won over by her old grandmother, who is hard of hearing, entirely too self-assured and unaware of herself, and who re-invents her past from moment to moment. She first says she lost her hearing when a horse ran into her, then later says it happened when she was running away from boys who were throwing bricks.

The grandmother is the one who supplies the question to this second version of the story, "Why were they throwing bricks?" She answers, "Who knows. There was a violence back then no one can understand now." It turns out that Grandma lived through Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution and lost her own parents in the process. This is why she has developed a habit of re-inventing her past; it's a survival mechanism for her. It's also why she is so devoted to her grandchildren. She sees loving them as a way to redeem herself for failing to save her own parents.

We often tend to talk about Mao's revolution now like it's all a joke, which is another way to disassociate from what we find hard to understand.

We don't realize all this until the end. Stacey, after loving her grandmother and missing her when she goes back to China when Stacey was younger, later grows to be mortified by her. The grandmother is a symbol of all the things Stacey wishes she wasn't, all the things that make her standout as weird in America. When the grandmother returns for her second visit, the narrator recalls that, "I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night--I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread."

Stacey begins to resent her grandmother, whose weird Chinese-ness and origins in a time that doesn't make sense anymore remind Stacey of all the things about herself she doesn't like. Stacey works to keep her younger brother from loving Grandma the same way Stacey used to love her, and eventually she succeeds.

We see hints that Stacey, as she is growing into a woman, is also developing the ability to see grandma's own struggles from a mature and sympathetic perspective. Stacey finds the grandmother out late one night after Grandma's senility is beginning to set in, bouncing on a neighbor's trampoline. Through Grandma's dialogue with the ghosts of her parents, Stacey understands more than she ever has about why Grandma chooses to re-invent her own story. And here's where the narrator self-diagnoses herself with a failed epiphany:

"I thought I would always remember this night and be profoundly altered by having seen her this way. But it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake--that if you remember this dream, it will unlock secrets to your life that will otherwise be permanently closed--but when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. And after trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don't change at all."

That's the narrator's diagnosis. Should we accept it? Or is it possible that Stacey has adopted some reverse syndrome from the grandmother's? While Grandma changed the past to make it more palatable, Stacey might have changed her story to make herself feel more guilty than she needs to. It's the story of many "hyphen people": Chinese-Americans feel damned if they are too Chinese and damned if they are too American,and so live with a permanent sense of guilt. 

There are two reasons to doubt Stacey's own self-diagnosis. First, even when she is telling herself she is happy to see the grandmother leave for the fourth and final time, she shows signs that she will miss her. She finds the grandmother's hearing aid on the ground. After first saying, "It's like you just won't go" and kicking the hearing aid away, she immediately runs, picks it up, and tenderly brushes the dirt off it. At her worst, she is torn about the grandmother.

Secondly, she hasn't forgotten the dream, the one that she thought might "unlock secrets to her life." She just told us the dream in minute detail. It's possible that the act of writing this story is the moment when the narrator finally internalizes the lessons learned from her long contact with her grandmother.

I remember in grad school my adviser specifically used the "grandma dying" story as an example of a story we shouldn't write. "Everyone feels bad when Grandma dies," she says. "And everyone thinks everyone else should feel bad about it, too, but the fact is that nobody else really cares about Grandma dying." Zhang picked an uphill battle for herself, but I think she was mostly up to it. I felt like the narrator herself may have been too absent from the story. We get insight into her only through her reactions to Grandma. We never see her interacting with peers or doing homework or hoping for something for herself. The passage above about the many ways she felt inadequate is one of the few bits of internal dialogue we see from her. Since the story is really about the narrator and the effect Grandma had on her, I thought the story was too focused only on the older generation and not enough on the new. It's easy to understand why--Grandma was a great character, and it was more pleasant to focus on her than on Stacey. In the end, I felt like the impact was slightly less than it might have been, but still worthy of its place in this block of five stories written form the points-of-view of five vastly different young people. (I read ahead the first few pages of the next story this time. I really think it's got adult protagonists.)