In “Under the Monkey Bars,” the first story in Lien Chao’s stunning collection of short fiction, The Chinese Knot and Other Stories, Wei Ming wonders “how to get inside” the “fenced enclosure” (1) of the children’s playground at Monarch Park. Once inside, she subjects her body to a painful yet therapeutic exercise regimen, stretching her muscles, tendons, and ligaments to “work through the pain” (3) of “what the Chinese call ‘fifty-year-old shoulder’” (2). Wei Ming’s story is the perfect introduction to a book about the multiple kinds of stretching Chinese immigrants living in Canada must perform daily; in her collection, Chao’s characters stretch physically, linguistically, culturally, and emotionally as they learn to navigate their new national milieu.

Chao describes her volume as an assemblage of “inner-city snapshots [. . .] based on real-life models” (vii) she encountered in the heterogeneous cultural landscape of Toronto, Ontario. Each of the eight stories focuses on a single female character as she creates for herself a life in an in-between zone of rooting and uprooting, belonging and non-belonging. For all of these women, this zone is at once one of loss and acquisition. In both “Water and Soil” and “The Cactus,” regenerative possibilities of cultural uprooting emerge, paradoxically, in instances of botanical death. Judy, the protagonist of the latter story, learns to appreciate her friend in a new light at the same time that his fifty-year-old cactus “dries up and dies” (102). Shirley, the protagonist of the former piece, feels, for the first time in her life, “completely at one with the ground under her feet” (77), even as she learns that a tree planted at the grave of her beloved former English teacher has not survived its own uprooting. Such moments underscore, certainly, the traumas of migration; yet they also remind us that what is lost in acts of cultural translation cannot be separated from what is simultaneously gained.

Characters in Chao’s Toronto gain new relationships as old ones break down, acquire new experiences as previous ones fade into the past, and form new habits of being while memory fights against a tide of forgetting. This dynamic exchange between multiple vectors of influence means that identities are never fixed, but are instead malleable and open to infinite permutations. After witnessing first-hand her friend’s surprising culinary aptitude, Qing tells Rose, the title character of Chao’s second story, “I thought we would make some exotic Italian food today to amuse you. And now I am showing off in front of an Italian chef!” (20). Even national identities are up for grabs as individuals adopt the cultural traditions of others as their own. Chao is careful, however, not to exaggerate the ease with which such adoptions take place; throughout her stories, characters encounter racism, struggle to adapt to an alien economy, and work to maintain linkages between their present selves and the lives they once lived. Of course, such battles are never fought without attendant rupturing. However, as Chao says in her introduction, such struggles define and contribute to “the tapestry of a better society, more intense in colour and complex in texture” (viii).

Chao’s great triumph in this collection is that her stories are at once simple and resistant to simplification, fragmentary yet never incomplete. Like the society she imagines, her collection benefits from all of its component parts, each of which enriches and enlivens the whole in unique and frequently startling ways. If The Chinese Knot and Other Stories is a book about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in Canada, it is equally a book about those of us welcoming them. In her celebration of cultural cross-pollination, Chao reminds us of the manifold potentials to living in Canada, and encourages us all to participate in its increasing multiplicity.

— Justin Pfefferle