Gonna be, gonna be golden (arrow): "Arrow" by Gina Chung (2025 O.Henry Awards)

One of the good things about blogging on American contemporary short stories for a while now is that hopefully, I've gotten better at it. One of the downsides is that there are some topics that come up again and again, and after a while, it feels hard to say something you haven't already said before. So it is with "Arrow" by Gina Chung, the most noteworthy characteristic of which might be the second-person narrator. This is hardly a novelty in American literature anymore, but it's still less used than first person or third-person limited, so when it shows up, it does still stand out. 

I used to not like it, because it felt, not gimmicky, but overly writerly. It wasn't until I wrote a story using second person myself that I realized that far from being a stodgy and difficult form to maintain, it is actually very natural, almost as natural as "I" is. When I learned Tigrinya--which now seems so long ago I can't believe it was actually part of this lifetime--I was surprised to learn that as different as the language is from English in so many ways, it shared the use of the indefinite "you" in speech. Much as we might say, "To get to Cleveland from Canton, you have to go up 77," even if we don't mean that the actual person we are addressing has to do this, Tigrinya often does the same thing. This means to me that using it is probably part of humanity's inherited grammatical deep structure. It's a very natural way to speak, so much that English teachers for generations have been struggling to get kids to write "One does not simply walk into Mordor" rather than "You don't just walk into Mordor." "You" just feels right to us when we're talking about a generic person other than us. It's colloquially very common, so when it gets transferred over to a story, it gives it a lot of the natural feel that a spoken word story has over a highly literary one. 

Second person "you" narratives feel to me like they more easily maintain momentum. "Arrow" by Gina Chung was certainly no exception. 

Symbolism!!

Other than the narrative choice, the next thing that stands out the most reading "Arrow" is the symbol of the arrow itself. We're already well into the story of the main character "you" getting pregnant at 35, not knowing who the father is, and not being sure what you should do as you're such a mess you can barely take care of yourself, when the arrow shows up. It gets referenced when we read about your hookup with a tattoo artist, the third of your three trysts that give you one-in-three odds of knowing who the father is. You met the tattoo guy at a cheesy bar, where the two of you played darts. (More arrows! See, I pay attention when I read! 

"You" tell the tattoo artist about the only tat you ever wanted, which is a "slim arrow pointing down the length of (her) forearm." You don't explain what it really means to him, but it has to do with how you wanted to escape your mother and Southern California. It means two things to "you." You recall learning about how sharks die if they don't keep moving, so you also kept moving, working hard to get good grades and earn money for scholarships so you could leave. So in that sense, the arrow just represents something moving. But then "you" also associate the arrow with fear: "You thought of your fear as a golden arrow that pointed outward from the dark surrounding your mother's house, a beam that led you away...toward a future where you were no one's daughter, where the only dreams and desires you had to follow were your own." 

Fear of what? Presumably, of not escaping your mother and Southern California. Your golden arrow is both a symbol of the need to keep moving and also of fear. Turns out you have pretty good reasons to fear your mother. She's pretty tough. She hits. She belittles. She manipulates. She's like a lot of Korean mothers I've seen on Korean television shows or read about in books, and also like a few that I've known in person. There's some cultural reasons why Umma (pronounced Uh-mah, not Oo-mma like Uma Thurman) acted the way she did to you, but it was still a traumatic childhood for you. Even when you talk to your mother today, you end up on drinking binges. 

Even more symbolism!!

Once it arrives in the story, the arrow takes over as the gravitational force of the narrative. The narrator has two ideas of what the arrow means to "you," but more emerge, unasked for. When "your are alarmed by and resentful of the passage of time," this calls to mind Eddington's "arrow of time," which tells us that time only flows in one direction. This is the closing image of the story, when the gold arrow has been replaced by the golden shafts of lights coming into your apartment: "And as the sun climbs over the lip of the sky, and the two of you watch its ascent, gold filling the corners of your apartment, you begin to understand that there is only this moment, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and that the only thing to do is to keep on living." 

It's typical for a character's narrative arc to be completed in a way that the character wasn't expecting. The Wizard of Oz is one of the clearest examples of this, as all of the main characters find that the thing they set out to have was there all along. There's no place like home. In "Arrow," the unexpected arc is expressed through the shifting appearance of the central image. "You" thought the arrow was telling you to keep moving, to run like hell from home. But the golden arrow turns to golden shafts of light, reminiscent of the "warm, healing ball of divine light and energy" you try to imagine God as, that instead tell you to keep on living. 

If you wanted to go a little bit further, you could also extend the arrow's meaning to how, once we are all shot into the world, we are at the mercy of fortune, which is why "you" feel your connection to your mother is as much of an accident as anything else. The arrow is just uncertainty in general, then, which is natural for "you," given your upbringing. 

Foreshadowing!!

I'm just going to point out that "you" foreshadowed your own golden arrow tattoo on your forearm by cutting yourself with paper clips so you could feel something. That's it. I have no greater point than that. 

Look, this is a good story...

I have nothing really negative to say about this story. The symbol of the arrow comes in at just the right time and exerts just the right amount of influence over events. "You" are a believable and sympathetic character in your weakness. It's not too much weakness, and the explanations for your foibles don't sound like weak attempts to excuse bad behavior. When "you" lose the baby, I felt loss, even though I kind of thought that's where it was going. 

I'm often tough on Korean stories, because I think I know enough to be critical, but this one put in all the Korean touches in just the right places. I love juk, by the way. South Korea has a chain of restaurants that just serve juk (translated as porridge, although that never felt quite right to me). I think I went five times a week one autumn. 

...But I can't help reading it in the context of this cultural moment

Because absolutely nothing in America anymore can just be a thing in itself without it being a thing either claimed by right or left, conservatives are really into fitness. In a recent New York Times discussion of this phenomenon, Jessica Grose quipped that compared to conservatives, who are all about going to the gym and eating well and cutting alcohol out of their lives, liberals come off as "TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a Ring light." Conservatives have latched onto wellness because, among other reasons (some of which are very good ones), they feel that a message of taking control of your own life and taking responsibility for your own health will play well politically to people who are tired of being shamed for ableism or being forced to watch the Oppression Olympics. 

Conservatives of this stripe would read this story and shake their heads, saying look, here's what fetishizing your traumas instead of working to overcome them, along with decades of feminism and free sex have gotten you: a woman totally unable to live her life responsibly or make good choices. I'm just glad that "you" didn't take anti-depressants in this story, or it would have been a perfect conservative strawman all queued up for them. 

I think the "you" of the story is sympathetic and not overly indulgent of herself and her traumas. I think your drinking and dropping out of law school and questionable sexual choices are all understandable, but in this particular moment, when conservatives are being especially hard on women in their thirties and forties who aren't married and don't have kids and are still struggling to get their lives in order, it's a little bit tougher to appreciate the story as "your" own private life story and not as part of a social drama that's going on. Which might be the whole point of conservative rhetoric: to deny the existence of personal stories by turning them all into public and political ones. It's a perverse application of Kant's categorical imperative by making every individual's life journey a question of what the world would be like if we all lived in that way. "Arrow" could be seen, then, as an answer to that kind of thinking, one that defiantly defends a woman's right to pick her own errant way through life. 

I'll just say that society sometimes fixes flaws by overcorrecting. If we've gone too far in one direction, being too indulgent of ourselves as a reaction to traumas such that we have infantilized ourselves, the movement among conservatives is likely soon to go too far in another. It will eventually spark its own backlash. If so, we may one day in the near future be looking back with nostalgia to when it was okay to write stories about deeply flawed female characters using their freedom to make bad choices. 

By that time, I assume I'll have forgotten all about what happened in the summer of 2025 that made me choose the title for this post that I did.