A Post-Modern Take on Gish Jen's story
Are we born human or do we learn our humanity by living? Art Woo looks for signs everywhere in Gish Jen’s short story, “Birthmates.” Art Woo has no solid instincts. He reads as much as he can into the glass of the world, hoping to identify himself in the reflection; but he misinterprets every clue, every significance. Jen delivers the details of the story through his warped senses, forcing the reader to suffer Art’s disjointed life; and the brilliance of the story reveals itself only at the end when the irony claims Art and the reader together–both entities shocked, accepting despair.
Details are everywhere, always. Art Woo, a 49 year-old traveling salesman, Chinese, finds himself in a worse situation than he expected–always. Prior to his arrival at the budget lodging, he determined that paying a low fare more than compensated for any discomfort or inconvenience. In order to determine truth, Art makes a guess based on an obscure instinct. When he encounters the result, as he does when he first spies a huge, injured black man stuffed into tight clothing running his hotel, Art invariably responds by second-guessing his instinct. His instinct tells him that his instincts are always wrong. Therefore, to fill the void left by his lack of self-identity, he compensates by believing the opposite of what he believes. His instinct to save money led him incorrectly, he now believes, to the hotel. The race of the hotel manager supports his belief swing, it seems, but as Art becomes aware of this new instinct, he now sees the man as good:
“For Art had come to few conclusions about life in his forty-nine years, but this was
one of them: that men turned surly when their clothes didn’t fit them. This man, though,
belied the rule.” ( Who's Irish? : Storiesp.18)
The irony of Art’s life is his continual search for identity and truth prevents him from finding such goals.
Without an identity, Art estimates and re-estimates his existence relative to signs. Jen bludgeons us with the theme throughout the story, beginning bluntly with a literal sign: “’FEWEST CUSTOMER INJURIES, 1972-73’” (WIS p.18). Art reads danger into the fact that the year is no longer 1972. As a direct result of this interpretation, Art absurdly decides to take a “handset” from his room phone in order to defend himself, which of course leads to the despairing irony of the story’s end. His makes his decision based on his relative size compared to the woman who apparently defended herself with a handset, and this handset’s relative weight compared to hers. At breakfast, he finds that nearly everyone else is black. He finds no one with whom he truly identifies, and always believes he is an outsider. When his white boss attacks him physically and verbally, he interprets his situation as an opportunity for advancement; later, when the “nurse”, Cindy, identifies him racially, he becomes confused. Is she his inferior? She seems to think so. In response, he feels a distant rush of eroticism enter his consciousness. And perhaps the central comparison Art makes in the story is to his rival, his “birthmate”, Billy Shore. The only thing they have in common is the same birthday, four years apart. But the alignment of stars seems to have bestowed everything upon Billy, that Art feels he lacks, specifically “mainstreamness”, or, perhaps, whiteness.
Gish Jen crafts this story in a way that the reader forgets to use his own logic, his own instinct. We find ourselves jumping from illusion to illusion, intimately accepting Art’s poor judgment and his dependency on signs. Every sentence brings the reader to an opposite conclusion; eventually, like Art, willingly jumping from one clue to the next non sequitar clue. How willing the reader is to accept the scene in Cindy’s room! “Mochaccino” Cindy the cokehead, the “nurse”: these are ways of describing her that the reader accepts without hesitating. Later, when she labels Art a ”nice boy”, and groups him with “you folk” something should click in the reader’s mind. Only Art’s distant echo of lust allows the reader to see what judgments lack of identity induces us to make. The reader experiences a brief epiphany, realizing for the first time where the story is leading. Art, too, feels the foreshadowing, noticing how quickly the world changes, decaying, if you do not change with it. The booths at the conference are cheap, disposable put-togethers, and the conference itself pales in comparison to Art’s memory of conferences in years past. Strangely, he finds himself identifying with his colleagues, and inside him grows the desire to confess what he sees as a transgression against healthy living: staying at the damned economy lodging. Nevertheless, he cannot, even as the desire grows; and more than anything Art fears that his confession will force itself from his soul in front of his nemesis, Billy Shore. Soon, however, he inadvertently discovers that Billy is his “birthmate”. Perhaps his identity is tied to Billy’s, and Art thinks to find his own identity in Billy’s social success. Now, in fact, a job opportunity he believed himself unworthy of actively pursues him, even as he learns that Billy himself has moved on to new work. At this point, the reader is so tied to Art’s hopes and beliefs, that the reader also feels that success is now inevitable. The reader, like Art, has whored his hidden identity for the possibility of stealing someone else’s. Therefore, when Art realizes that his bizarre, unique decision to take and subsequently lose the handset to the telephone will seal his fate to despair, the reader accepts this fate, too! Why doesn’t the reader jump up and down, yelling for Art to track down the employment talent hunter? Why doesn’t the reader scream for Art to jump down flights of stairs, demand a new phone, a new handset, whatever the charge? Because everyone, especially Art, accepts this fate. Thanks, Gish.
Worse, too, is this: we accept that Art is dead. Too late for me, Art thinks, and we agree. All of us deserve it. We judged and determined his life as much as Art did. Maybe we all feel this post-modern, post-structural view of our lives: no central meaning exists. We accept Coke advertisements. We agree with RJ Reynolds that Joe Camel is damn cool. Who doesn’t want to be like Mike? Who doesn’t believe that we are not like Mike? Mike is Mike. Joe Camel is Joe Camel. Billy Shore is Billy Shore. Meanwhile, we are just a flock of ghostly shadows searching for a reflection of someone else’s meaning.
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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