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A review by emergencily
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

4.5

A collection of short stories from the same author as Severance, which I read earlier in the year and was eerily prophetic of COVID lol.

I felt unsure about it at first because I didn't find the first two stories very interesting, but it really hit its stride afterwards. I loved the surrealism & magical realism present in a lot of the stories and the way the author plays around with perception, reality, and identity. She examines the experiences of Asian American women and how  they are perceived / how they self-perceive. Thankfully it largely avoids becoming trite & reductive like some AsAm diaspora lit can become.

One of my favourite stories was "G," about two AsAm best friends drifting apart after college who decide to have one last big blow out using their favoured recreational drug from their college days. The fictional drug "G" has the side effect of turning you invisible / into a ghost. The story has so much to unpack about women's friendships and the ways we re-enact cycles of patriarchal violence on each other. A lot in there about disordered eating and self-image (e.g. body checking each other as friends, as mother/daughter). Loved how the story interrogated the erasure of boundaries and separation of self/identity between these two friends as they melted into and consumed each other. Literally they were playing out that meme from Nana about 2 girl best friends with unspoken homoerotic & romantic tension until they have an inexplicably emotional and heartbreaking friendship breakup and never speak to each other again but are forever changed by the love and how they were once girls together.

Favourite passages from "G":
“It doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.”

"Do you think," she asked one night, "that if they combined the two of us, we would make the perfect woman?"
"Am I lacking in some way?" I asked. "Are you?" She wouldn't stop, I thought, until she had totally consumed me. I'd end up in her digestive tract, as she metabolized my best qualities and discarded the rest.
"I don't know," she said, a little sadly.

My other fave story was "Peking Duck." The protagonist is writing a story for her class about a racist incident her mother experienced while working as a nanny when she was still a child, and the tensions btwn her and mother regarding the telling of that story and their differing perceptions of the same experience. Her mother disagrees with her daughter's story and how it retells what happened to her, feeling that the mother character in her story feels like a miserable trope of victimization. On the other hand, her daughter feels that her mother is downplaying the incident, invalidating her daughter's feelings of witnessing the event, and brushing off her own feelings. Super interesting story because it raises so many questions about the authorship and ownership of stories. What does it mean when we retell someone else's story through our own lens? We may be our parent's children, but are we entitled to use their experiences as fodder for our own narratives? What does it mean when we retell their stories through our own lens -- does it distort? Whose story is real?

I'd love to give this 5 stars because the highs it hits with G and Peking Duck are so, so, so, good. But damn are some of the weaker stories boring as hell