Peking Duck by Ling Ma, 2022
The magic trick:
A multilayered magical experience of reference and meta commentary
I really loved Ling Ma’s story “Office Hours.” I thought it might be the best story of the century.
Then I read “Peking Duck,” and I realized “Office Hours,” though amazing, probably isn’t even the best story in Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage collection.
It’s even better!
I love the way both stories use meta elements to fold in on themselves over and over. “Peking Duck” reminds me a little bit of Lore Segal’s “The Reverse Bug,” but it also recalls the best of Nabokov and Borges. The latter would certainly appreciate the labyrinthian nature of this plot.
To be more specific, “Peking Duck” references Lydia Davis’s short story, “Happiest Moment.” In fact, it includes the complete (very brief) text of the story. It’s the first nod to a story by someone else about someone else sharing their story. Or something like that. There are many layers. It’s brilliant stuff, it really is.
It’s a story that comments on itself, criticizes its own limitations, and criticizes the people who criticizes stories for not being something else. All while being itself and that something else at the same time.
And that’s quite a trick on Ma’s part.
The selection:
The winter that I touch snow for the first time, I also taste ice cream. In the kitchen, we review the fridge and pantry foods in English. My mother names every item, foods I’ve never heard of: Minute Maid orange-juice concentrate, Yoplait strawberry-banana yogurt, Farley’s Dinosaurs Fruit Snacks, Lay’s potato chips, Surfer Cooler Capri Sun, Lunchables. I repeat each word after her. They hover in a vacuum, with no Chinese correlation. And we’re not allowed to eat anything, so I can’t associate word with taste.
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