The Trip by Weike Wang, 2019
The magic trick:
Establishing passive characters, lost in their own quiet malaise, but then twisting the plot with surprise action
I find so many New Yorker stories from the last five years find conflict in their characters’ inability to address the conflicts in their lives. Things aren’t good; they’re not making consistently healthy choices. And the characters know this. But they don’t feel capable of taking action to fix the situations. Or they don’t trust that the systems in place would even allow for any corrective anyway.
It makes for kind of lifeless, depressing stories – which, to be fair, sure feels like an accurate depiction of the times.
Anyhow, I took “The Trip” to be of this same genre. Young professionals aren’t entirely comfortable in their own skin. There is cultural disconnect. Identity crisis. Fractured family relationships. But the characters aren’t doing anything to solve any of the problems.
So it comes as a surprise halfway into the story when one of the main characters takes action. Bold action, in fact.
I would say it shocks her husband too. He was going along in the same kind of daze that I was as a reader, seeming to accept the malaise or at least assume that there was nothing ever to be done to fix the situation. Crisis at a simmer.
I’m not sure it was a conscious bucking of the literary ennui trend (mostly because there probably isn’t a literary ennui trend anywhere but my own brain). But even if it’s merely an accidental bucking, I enjoyed the plot twist very much.
And that’s quite a trick on Wang’s part.
The selection:
In Beijing, his mother e-mailed, but he didn’t reply.
In Xi’an, his mother texted, and he said yes, they had landed.
In Chengdu, his mother called. She wanted to know if he remembered So-and-So. His mother worked at UPS, and So-and-So’s Gam-gam had come in to mail a package. Gam-gam said that So-and-So had finally found a job in D.C. She asked his mother to relay a message from So-and-So about their time in high school when they worked at Chick-fil-A and that fun summer selling Aflac insurance. So-and-So used to be his best friend. They had once dated the same girl, who was now So-and-So’s wife and obese after three kids. So-and-So used to play football, defense—that field, green year-round, was the most expensive part of their school. Because So-and-So’s job was government, background checks were extensive—did he have a record, did he travel, who were his family and friends. When his mother paused, he said he had to go. But wait, his mother said, you haven’t told me anything about China. I want to know what you’re doing and eating. What did you do and eat today? What are you going to eat and do tomorrow? Sorry, Mom, he said, I really have to go.
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