by Corrine Watson
July 5, 2022
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC. She is a contributing reader and Reviews Editor at The West Trade Review, and her fiction has been published in Wretched Creations. Corrine can be found on Twitter @CorrineWatson6.
Self-Portrait With Ghost: Short Stories by Meng Jin; Mariner Books; 224 pages; $27.99
Often defying the bounds of genre, Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait With Ghost breathes life into the quiet chaos of life through the lens of women looking for their place in the world. In these ten stories, Jin explores the interiority of the self, illustrating the solitude of self-discovery.
The collection opens with the complexity of grief. While “Philip is Dead” depicts the emotional awkwardness of processing the death of your first love, the following story, “Suffering” stands out in comparison as Jin shows the ways grief manifests in isolation and the need to maintain a strong front. Following her husband’s suicide, Ling is convinced that someone is contaminating items she and her son use around the house causing them to fall ill.
This narrative is told second hand through a person who might be a therapist or a friend. While the relationship was unclear, the limited perspective gives the reader a sense of doubt into Ling’s perspective. The narrator can see the rashes on Ling’s skin and her son’s illnesses are real, but as Ling retreats into paranoia and isolation with no proof as to who her tormentors are, the lack of evidence suggests that perhaps this conspiracy is just a manifesting psychosis brought on by grief. The narrator believes that Ling views help as a weakness and prefers to handle her problems alone. The narrator relates that, “for Ling, suffering is a tool wielded by the human and the divine. The abstract manifests as concrete, the intangible is felt. Suffering can be hard like a slap or it can fester, like grit beneath the nail.” As Ling’s suffering persists, it becomes clear that her endurance and strength is a test of her own character as she resents her husband for not fighting harder to live. In this, Jin aptly captures the ways anger and denial manifest themselves in grief and how loved ones often struggle to understand the all too real mental anguish of those who commit suicide.
The theme shifts comfortably in the midsection of the book as Jin explores identity through characters looking back on their past friendships and selves. “Three Women” reflects on the narrator’s childhood friendships and the ways their lives drifted apart in less character-driven ways as the girls were described less as people and more as character types. “Selena and Ruthie” accomplishes similar themes in a more holistic way. This story explores a similar struggle with identity as well as how socioeconomic status and race play into Selena’s perception of herself. In spite of her determination to make friends, Selena often misses the mark in regard to intimacy. When Ruthie tries to share her traumatic experience, “Selena could not focus, gripped by the feeling that she was in the wrong room, always, stuck in the room where nothing important was happening.” Rather than internalizing the complexity of her friend's situation, she brushes it off with naivete or disinterest when she feels like she’s missing out on a group experience. Jin's characterization of Selena's flaws gives this story a sense of loneliness as Selena loses herself trying to fit in the shape of everyone's identity but her own. In contrast to the earlier stories in the collection, “Selena and Ruthie” feels the most well-rounded as it takes its time to illustrate not just Selena’s coming of age, but her reflection, shame, and grief for the failures of her childhood self.
The last stories deal with the effects of isolation in the pandemic as well as other disasters of the not-so-distant past. “In the Event” felt distinctly relatable as it portrays the different ways a couple responds to disaster. As she watches her partner respond to a devastating election, earthquake, wildfire, and injustice he sees on social media with strong emotion in the moment, the narrator struggles to make the same connection. It is clear that the narrator is incapable of taking in the minutiae of everyday catastrophes. She wonders, “WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME? Why didn’t I want to be a witness to history, to any kind of time passing?” At best she is apathetic to these moments. While her partner’s reaction is immediate in the moment, it is fleeting and prone to minimization as time passes. But as she retreats into her solitary spaces, the narrator develops her own anxieties and paranoia for an impending doomsday. And preparing for the worst gives her a sense of peace. In this story, Jin illustrates the multifaceted forms of anxiety and paranoia and the underwhelming numbness that follows when the world doesn’t crumble, which felt resonant to our own year of unprecedented catastrophes.
Continuing with the pandemic setting, specifically quarantine, “Odd Women” uses magical realism to depict the solitary shapes a person’s identity can take. The story follows three women who have developed unique superpowers. Vandana masters the art of fading, making herself as intangible as a ghost drifting through the walls while Ursula's ability manifests in fracturing her personalities into perfect clones of herself to reflect the ever-changing needs of the world around her. But her friend Octavia had no tangible grasp on her identity and took "shape and form as a mirror did, perfectly reflecting the person you needed her to be.” When she was alone, "the little particles of Octavia drifted off without the glue of identity, floating loosely in a human shape.” Each of these women are in search of community and purpose and felt the strain of this deficiency for as long as they could remember, but the isolation of quarantine pushed these detriments to a breaking point. Through the setting of quarantine, Jin masterfully illustrates the emotional impacts of isolation and the ways it exacerbated existing mental health issues.
There is intentionality behind the structure of these thematically linked stories. While these stories often echo each other, it’s often the second or third iteration of the theme that paints the fullest picture while the meaning of others leave the reader on the verge of understanding without hitting the mark. The ghosts in this collection are often a reflection of the self and the intricate ways in which we drift from one self to the next whether through personal growth or the forms we inhabit for those around us. Even in the intangible moments, there is a resonant loneliness in Meng Jin's Self-Portrait With Ghost that creates a unique intimacy with the reader as we look in on the solitary spaces of the characters’ lives.
©2022 West Trade Review
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Alone With Yourself: An Exploration of Identity Through Self-Reflection and Resilience in Meng Jin’s Self-Portrait with Ghost
FICTION REVIEW
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