Recalling Literally Every Little Thing
“Every Little Thing” is a short story that focuses upon a protagonist with the rare medical syndrome known as hyperthymesia which is essentially like having a photographic memory that serves as a catalogue for nearly every moment of your life. People with this type of memory can recall to the most minute detail all aspects of even the most ordinary event which occurred decades before. See how boring that description of this condition was? Thankfully, Ng engages imagery right off the bat to reveal through her character’s first-person narration what such a memory recall is like:
“I see a barrette in someone’s hair and suddenly I’m six years old, at the Gimbels perfume counter. Eight greasy fingerprints on the plate glass front. Eleven atomizers on a tray, piano music tinkling through the store stereo. A poppy seed stuck in the saleslady’s front teeth. She turns her head towards Leather Goods and two wisps fly loose from her tortoise-shell clip and my mother slips a bottle of Chanel No. 5 into her pocket and a snail of sweat creeps down my back and she pulls me away by the hand…and when I come back to the present the teller is shouting Miss? Miss? through the hole in the plexiglass, cars are honking, a quart of ice cream is melting to soup in my hands. On my back the same wet snail-trail. In my nostrils, Chanel No. 5.”
What’s the Matter with Grace?
The narrator of “Girls, at Play” is part of a tightly-knit clique of fellow eight-grade girls who have outgrown Barbie dolls except as a way of messing with them through a benign, but no less politically active vandalism in the store aisle. Grace moves to town and she is instantly sized up using the kind of imagery that has gone through the heads of millions of middle-school girls in thousands of schools for who really knows how long?
“From all the way across the blacktop we can see that everything about her is wrong. Her shirt is too big: she’s tiny and it’s huge and hangs down past her butt. The cuffs of her pants stop at her ankle and a band of black cotton sock shows between hem and sneaker-top. Her shoes are too new, too stiff, too blindingly white in the lunchtime sun. Even the way she stands is wrong, hands clasped behind her back, index fingers linked, like she’s been told not to touch.”
NOT the Peking Garden…the Real One
The second-person narrative voice of “How to be Chinese” is telling a personal story happening to her by universalizing it to fit within a segment of an entire cultural experience. Part of the narrative involves a date which involves going to one of the two Chinese restaurants in town. The Peking Garden is the one she knows while the Happy Buddha is the one she does not. Apparently, one qualifies as not-quite-authentic:
“Look around to see what it’s like in a real Chinese restaurant. The tablecloths are pink and the napkins maroon. The teacups don’t have handles. Honeycomb balls of red paper and gold plastic bats dangle from joins in the ceiling tile. Worry that your people have bad taste. A woman croons in Chinese over the speaker system. Sit in a corner booth and imagine you’re in China.”
Pica
This section on imagery in the short stories of Celeste Ng takes us back to where we started. In a way. The section began with an excerpt of imagery bringing to life one of rarest of still-unexplained neurological syndromes; one that perhaps a great many people would think of as only a terrific advantage in life. The protagonist of the story “B & B” also suffers from a rare condition, but one not so immediately confused with being altogether a good thing. The main character suffers from pica, a disorder which compels people to eat certain substances which are not food: chalk, paint chips, and paper, for instance. Once again, the masterful balancing of imagery in the hands of Ng’s more than capable talent makes the whole strange business spring vividly to life:
“a business card fallen to the floor...thick and almost coarse, a pale creamy gold and crisp at the corners. At the top are the logo and address of a company, and beneath, his name and a phone number in glossy black lettering. She pivots the card between her fingers, watching his name flick in and out of view like an old movie: Jack D. Bauder. Jack D. Bauder. She rips off a corner, leaving the lettering intact, and places it into her mouth. The paper is tender, almost melting on her tongue, tasting of the dry heat of summer and the sour of lemonade. Fantasies hover like spiderwebs in the morning light."
