In Chinese folktales, there is an intriguing concept, Cosmos in a Calabash. Imagine a magical calabash that the immortals wear on their belt. It looks as small as a flask. But if you enter into the calabash, you’ll experience a whole cosmos within – a cosmos no less real, complex or diverse than the world outside.
For me, a good book is often such a calabash.
My debut novel, Nothing to My Name, explores the theme of political turmoil in Chinese modern history through the day-to-day lives of three women: a grandma, a mother and a daughter. This choice of grounding something large and collective in the smallest moments of personal life felt intuitive for me. I have always been intrigued by books that are large enough to tackle social-political themes in a sweeping manner, but at the same time feel intimate and personal. Here are seven literary fictions that inspired me as a writer, because they explore the eternal themes of gender, race, injustice and belonging through character-driven, intimate storytelling.
This Pulitzer winning masterpiece explores the psychological trauma of slavery, the nature of motherhood and black womanhood through the haunting of a former slave, Sethe, by the ghost of her infant daughter, Beloved. What really haunts is the brutality of a whitewashed history – a haunting that feels at once surreal and too close to home. Like a true masterpiece, Beloved jolts the readers out of their comfort zones. With unbridled imagination and sensory scenes, Toni Morrison captures what lurks in the collective subconscious of a culture, and touches a nation’s nerve.
This sweeping historical fiction follows a Korean family that immigrated to Japan in the early 1900. Opening with the line: “History has failed us, but no matter,” Min Jin Lee details the racism, discrimination and stereotyping that four generations of the Korean Japanese family have encountered in their life journey. But at the same time, the book is an epic documentary of their dignity and perseverance. Pachinko is a historical drama that foregrounds ordinary people and their day-to-day struggles, a people’s history at its core.
This multi-generational saga traces the descendants of two half-sisters in eighteenth century Ghana, Effia and Esi. One marries a British slaver. The other is sold into slavery in America. The story unfolds at the Gold Coast, and takes us for a wild journey across the ocean, from the Mississippi plantations to Harlem and beyond. The book tackles slavery and its generational trauma, as well as colonialism and racism across Ghana and United States, but at the same time, Gyasi’s storytelling is driven by compelling characters and always filled with lush, vivid scenes. I was amazed to have followed eight generations of characters in the story and never once felt lost, a true testament to the brilliant prose and structure of Homegoing.
What does it feel like to not only survive trauma, but to deal with its aftermath in a broken system, day after day? What does it mean to speak up, and what are the costs? What if your loved one is the monster, what do you do then? T Kira Madden’s literary thriller, Whidbey, paints the lives of three women who are connected through (and hurt by) one man. I am deeply touched by the immense empathy with which Madden portrays each and every one of the women – how she embraces the fullness of their humanity, how she refuses to oversimplify or tokenize at every turn. Whidbey is a brilliant subversion to the tropes of true crime narrative.
This literary horror is based on real events in the medical historical: in the 1940s, doctors prescribed DES, a synthetic estrogen, to pregnant women hoping that it would prevent miscarriages. You can look up on the internet how that went, but I suggest you read The Garden instead. The book reimagines this historical event into a mesmerizing Gothic story, and renders it truer, somehow, psychologically. Asides from the vivid scenes and compelling characters, I was really impressed by Beams’ ability to portray the devastation and anxiety of women battling with pregnant loss to a T. The Garden delves deep into motherhood, patriarchy, the mystery of female body and the way it has always been controlled and corralled, as well as patient and physician power dynamics in modern medicine. A keen, daring story deliciously told.
Kim Fu, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts
Another one of my favorite literary horror stories. After her mother’s death, our protagonist Eleanor, a young therapist, impulsively buys a model home nestled in the deep woods on a secluded mountain. Rain season comes and never goes away. The constant rain brings haunting from her past, and her new home is about to fall apart. This book reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but it feels even more ambitious. In this uncanny blend of surreal and mundane, Kim Fu’s Valley explores mother-and-daughter relationship, Asian women’s experience, the loneliness and absurdity of modern life, affordability, environmentalism and so much more.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
This is a collection of eight short stories. And although each story unfolds around a different protagonist, they all circle back to the same themes: the dual cultural identity of Indian American immigrants, loneliness and belonging, womanhood, family dynamics, love and loss. As an immigrant woman myself, I am always drawn to literatures that explore the depth of a particular kind of loneliness: the tug and pull of assimilation versus acculturation, the unmoored feeling of drifting between two cultures, not fully belonging to either. Lahiri is a writer who possesses the magic of embodying this deep unaccustomedness in all the small, mundane moments of her character’s daily life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kangkang Li Kovacs grew up in Nanchang, China, and came to the United States for her graduate studies. After earning a PhD in nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and teaching math and physics at UC Santa Barbara, Kangkang decided to pursue her passion for writing. Kangkang received her MFA at the College of Charleston. Her writing has been published in Jellyfish Review and swamp pink literary magazine, among other outlets. Nothing to My Name is her first novel.