A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Author Pingmei Lan

On August 20, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019, the third edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Danielle Evans, Alice Sola Kim, and Carmen Maria Machado. Submissions for the 2020 awards are open now.

Pingmei Lan grew up in Beijing, China. She received her MFA in creative writing from Pacific University in 2018. Her work appears in Epiphany, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. She lives in San Diego.

*

“Cicadas and the Dead Chairman” was originally published in Epiphany.

*

That summer when Chairman Mao died I saw a funeral for the first time, a national one. It had gone on for weeks. Everywhere I turned, people were wearing black armbands and making white paper flowers. The usual sea of blue Mao suits seemed to be foaming, churning, shaping into dark and light swells. Thousands of mourning wreaths blanketed Tiananmen Square, eventually spilling down to the sidewalks of Chang’an Avenue. For days, then weeks, it looked like snow in summer.

Then an old farmer came to Beijing riding a donkey cart. He cried over Mao’s body while waving his copy of the Little Red Book. The Chairman looked down at this loyal subject from an old photo hung above the Tiananmen Fort. A half smile flashed permanently between his smooth pink cheeks and bright black beauty mark. The farmer made the news after crying for days and passing out, his fingers brittle and curled over the good book.

I didn’t understand that kind of devotion and grief, having just turned seven that spring. And the only thing I knew about death was from the old maid who lived across the hutong.

“My lover died and came back to life,” she said one day.

I walked away without answering. I didn’t know if she was crazy. I didn’t know if she was talking to me.

*

Where did you find the idea for this story?


It started with a voice—the young narrator telling me about her name. She was a chatterbox, and couldn’t stop talking so her parents named her shut up. She was kind of funny so I sat down and wrote some of it down, then the story took on a life of its own.

A few aspects of the old maid came from my experience working with the homeless. One of the women is in her thirties. She likes to roam some of the suburban malls where she occasionally gets harassed by security guards. She wears simple but well-maintained clothes, has long blond hair and a beautiful face. You wouldn’t think she’s homeless at a first glance. She carries three large backpacks with her everywhere. Whenever the guards are not around she’d unpack one of the bags, wash her clothes at the fountain and dry them on outdoor fireplaces.

How long did it take you to write this story?

This one took a few months.

The story title “Cicadas and the Dead Chairman” is immediately striking. How did you come up with it?

There was a scene where the narrator visited the dead chairman’s mausoleum. Instead of the chairman’s embalmed body she saw thousands of cicadas swarming in his crystal casket. The scene didn’t make the final cut but the name stuck.

The story begins with a monumental event, the funeral of Chairman Mao, that is ostensibly unrelated to the events that follow. Can you talk a little about the significance of beginning with this scene and how it interacts with the rest of the story?

I wanted to start with a broader setting and a defining mood in that scene, and to establish the fact that although the chairman is dead, his influence lingers. For example, before the Cultural Revolution, people treated each other with more courtesy and respect but so much of that old-world civility was lost in the hands of the Red Guards. This point is not the focus of the story because I think much has been written about it, and most people are somewhat aware of the troubles during that time. Instead I wanted to set up the reader to follow the eyes of someone born after the time of the chairman and see some of the inexplicable meanness still present in everyday lives.

As part of the opening scene, the narrator also reflects on the fact that she “didn’t understand that kind of devotion and grief." Which I suppose is something I don’t often hear outside of China—that much of the country held this childlike devotion toward the ruler and experienced this insurmountable grief for his passing. So the narrator spends some time in the rest of the story coming closer, perhaps, to this notion as she notes examples of devotion (or lack thereof) play out in the lives of her parents, her neighbors, and, naturally, the old maid.

The old maid and the young narrator are both never called by their “real” names, though for different reasons. No one knows the old maid’s name, whereas the narrator seems to be told to “shut up” so often that her teacher had to tell her “shut up was not [her] real name.” Can you talk about the significance of names and the ways characters are addressed in the story?

Yes, this gives a sense of that community-based culture where names are rarely used around the neighborhood. Instead, children are often given silly nicknames such as Little Rock or Kid Sister or Why. Adults are often addressed as So-and-So’s Ma, or the Popsicle Lady, or simply Third Sister, etc. This convention could either lead to a sense of closeness or a sense of distance. In the case of “shut up,” she doesn’t feel particularly close to her parents and her perception of her own name is an aspect of that. (I came across Anna Burns amazing book, Milkman, recently and was delighted to discover she used this notion throughout her book for her characters.)

The way the old maid is described is, in the editor Tracy O’Neill’s words, “creaturely, mythological.” In one instance, she is a “white snake” and another, a woman with a “creepy head of white hair” who “never ate salt.” These descriptions call to mind several other Chinese stories—for example, the famous legend of the White Snake who takes on human form and couples with a man; and more markedly, the folktale of “The White-Haired Girl,” in which the local white-haired goddess turns out to be a young peasant woman living in hiding from an abusive landlord, her hair turned white from lack of salt. The story is later taken up as a revolutionary opera in which the girl is finally rescued by her Communist fiancé. Can you talk a little about how other stories and influences shape the character of the old maid and the tragic way her narrative plays out?

The women in these stories are depicted as magical and powerful but almost always as transfigured spirits, enchanted animals or skeleton ghosts. So they are both dismissed as unrealistic role models, and perceived as a thing that needs to be destroyed. For this story, I wanted a character that is perceived as such but essentially more human and sympathetic, even though the community’s reaction to her is still more mixed and unpredictable.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

I loved writing this story but I wondered if anyone would want to read it. So the prize gave me much-needed encouragement and a boost to move forward. It also gave me the kind of visibility I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting otherwise.

• 0