Book of the month - The Beijing of Possibilities

Cliches are skilfully avoided in the insightful set of short stories

Jonathan Tel skilfully avoids cliché with this collection of short stories about Beijing, instead choosing to examine the side of the city most foreigners rarely interact with, including an aspirational newly-married couple; a provincial teenager working as an ayi to pay her father’s debts and a university graduate shooting up the corporate ranks due to his family’s guanxi.

Each vignette, regardless of tone, is imbued with a subtle, playful humour throughout, and also a sense of Chinese history and culture (Buddhist themes of fate can be found in a few stories).

In the satirical ‘The Unofficial History of the Embroidered Couch’,Tel fiddles with the space/time continuum to throw a thoroughly modern businessman into a relationship (conducted entirely via SMS) with a Ming dynasty maiden – arranged through a supernatural dating agency.

After the excitement of courtship fades, the two are confronted by the fact that they have nothing in common and descend into a slanging match of petty insults, which comes surprisingly naturally to the ‘innocent’ from the Ming dynasty.

Tel is similarly skillful when it comes to creating a sense of pathos. ‘The Three Lives of Little Yu’ is the story of an infertile couple who try to raise three different adopted girls over the course of 30 years.

Tragedy befalls the first two, but the couple face the circumstances stoically, providing Tel an opportunity to evoke some apt Chinese proverbs: ‘You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair’.

Eerily, each of the daughters is given the same name, Yu, and in an allusion to reincarnation, seems to retain many of the same qualities as their predecessors.

But Tel’s stories are at their best when dealing with the trivial and comedic (like the Gorillagram turned national hero in ‘Year of the Gorilla’).

It’s the seemingly mundane aspects of Beijing life, which he paints in a peculiar and flattering manner, that make this book such an enjoyable, insightful read. Simon Fowler  

Other Press 158RMB