Fiction by Chris Drangle and Ha Jin, and an essay on DNA editing by Michael Specter

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Soleil was on her way to meet Warren for their first date when she ran out of gas.  The engine shuddered on its last fumes, and she looked down the highway at a long stretch of nothing.  She was alone on the road, save for one pair of headlights drawing closer in the rearview.  She put her hazards on, hoping to coast as long as possible, but the vehicle behind her, a black SUV, raced up to her bumper and stayed there.  High beams filled her mirrors.  She braked and pulled halfway onto the shoulder, and still it loomed close.  Teenage girl, no gas, highway at dusk--she felt her vulnerability like a chill in the air.  But as she rolled to a stop, the SUV swerved and accelerated, finally passing her with a snarl of engine rev.  She didn't want to look but did; two men in the cabin stared back, lit red by the instrument panel.  The driver had a dark beard.
--From "Optimistic People," a short story by Chris Drangle, One Story, Issue 224 (December 31, 2016).

When my roommate moved out, I was worried that Mrs. Chen might increase the rent.  I had been paying three hundred dollars a month for half a room.  If my landlady demanded more, I would have to look for another place.  I liked this colonial house.  In front of it stood an immense weeping cherry tree that attracted birds and gave a bucolic impression, though it was already early summer and the blossoming season had passed.  The house was close to downtown Flushing, and you could hear the buzz of traffic on Main Street.  It was also near where I worked, convenient for everything.  Mrs. Chen took up the first floor; my room was upstairs, where three young women also lived.  My former roommate, an apprentice to a carpenter, had left because the three female tenants were prostitutes and often received clients in the house.  To be honest, I didn't feel comfortable about that either, but I had grown used to the women, and especially liked Huong, a twiggy Vietnamese in her early twenties whose parents had migrated to Cholon from China three decades ago, when Saigon fell and the real estate market there became affordable.  Also, I had just arrived in New York and at times found it miserable to be alone.
--From "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry," a short story by Ha Jin, from his collection A Good Fall (Vintage International, 2009), pp. 195-219.  This story originally appeared in The New Yorker (April 7, 2008) and was later included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, edited by Laura Furman (Anchor Books, 2009).

Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island.  Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease.  He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed.  
--From "Rewriting the Code of Life," an essay about DNA editing by Michael Specter, The New Yorker (January 2, 2017), pp. 34-43.

Three poems by Lynne Knight, a novel by Samanta Schweblin, and a short story collection by Ha Jin

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We broke things.  Glasses, a lead crystal vase, 
the ceramic chicken painted à la portuguaise.  

It was the longest, hardest winter in a decade.
Snow against the windows, sealing us inside.
--From "Survival," a poem by Lynne Knight, published in Poetry Daily on November 10, 2016, from her collection The Persistence of Longing (Terrapin Books, 2016).  


I loved hearing the guy on the local station
in the small town where I lived for twenty years: 
Here in the foothills of the Adirondacks.
I was trying to become a poet, and I thought
everything I heard could become a poem
if I could figure out how to make use of it, 
the way frontierswomen made use of berries . . . 
--From "The Twenty-Year Workshop," a poem by Lynne Knight, Rattle, Number 50 (Winter 2015).  


I was thinking No.  No, oh no.  Not one more thing.
I was thinking my mother, who sat rigid
in the passenger seat crying, How terrible!
as if we had hit a child not your front bumper, 
would drive me mad, and then there would be 
two of us mad, mother and daughter . . . 
--From "To the Young Man Who Cried Out 'What Were You Thinking?' When I Backed Into His Car," a poem by Lynne Knight, Rattle, Number 32 (Winter 2009).  


It's dark and I can't see.  The sheets are rough, they bunch up under my body.  I can't move, but I'm talking.
          It's the worms.  You have to be patient and wait.  And while we wait, we have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being.
--From Fever Dream, a brief novel by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Riverhead Books, 2017).


The moment Hong Chen entered the narrow lane leading to Lilian's house, a bloody rooster landed before her, jumping about and scattering its feathers.  Four little boys ran over with knives and a hatchet in their hands.  "Kill, kill him!" one boy cried, but none of them dared approach the rooster, whose throat was cut half through.
--From "Taking a Husband," a short story by Ha Jin, from his often brutal collection Under the Red Flag (Zoland Books/Steerforth Press, 1999), pp. 132-153.

Ocean of Words: Stories by Ha Jin, a poem by Rachel Morgan, and stories by Anya Groner, Natalie Rogers, and Annie Hartnett

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But the two sisters didn't hesitate at all and started wheeling before us so naturally.  They enacted "The Korean People Love Great Leader Chairman Mao," a sort of Loyalty Dance.  Their long silk skirts waved around while their mother clapped her small hands, crying, "Chaota!  Chaota!"  That means "wonderful" in Korean.  The flame of the kerosene lamp was flickering with the women's movements.  Their shadows were flowing on the floor and the walls as if the whole house was revolving. 
          When they finished, they bowed to us, and we all applauded.  Shunji looked like a young bride in her loose, white dress.
          Guzhe and Guhua, Uncle Piao's grandsons, began to set off firecrackers outside.  I went out to join them.  They dared not light the big ones, so I helped them.  With a burning incense stick, I launched the double-bang crackers into the sky one by one.  It was snowing lightly.  The air smelled of gunpowder as clusters of explosions bloomed among the dim stars.  
--From Ocean of Words, a collection of short stories by Ha Jin (Vintage, 1998).  This segment is from "Uncle Piao's Birthday Dinners," pp. 28-29.

Amy Brown's mother was the bus driver, and so to get to her birthday party all the girls had to do was stay on the bus.  Amy Brown's mother yelled, Sit your asses down.  The girls leaned headfirst over the vinyl seats.  No one sat.  Amy sat.  The sun set.  The suburbs stopped.  Amy Brown's trailer was on the highway.  Amy Brown's mother parked the bus in the grass.
--From "Wood Swallows," a short story by Anya Groner, NANO Fiction (May 8, 2015).

In a child's vision marriage is a house.  Fine lines bisect each plane, clean bleak, like the edge of a farmhouse: flat land, flashes of power lines, old trucks lopsided in gravel, corn, soy, soy, corn.
--From "The Marriage Letters," a poem by Rachel Morgan, DIAGRAM, 14.1.

When I was a child, my mother worried that I would eventually abandon her for the company of friends. But when I still had not made a friend by the end of the second grade, she worried about my social ineptness. Mom blamed my diffidence on my genes. She believed that I felt self-conscious about being bun jan bun gwai, "half-human, half-ghost." Whatever the cause, she knew that I needed help.
          "Little girl," she said in Cantonese. "Is there anyone you'd like to be friends with?"
          She had just served Joe and me our dinner—fried spam over rice. I swallowed a juicy bite of spam and thought of Molly, who sat across from me in Mrs. Singer's class. I liked Molly because she was pretty, and because whenever she chatted with the other kids at our table, she also glanced at me. Her eyes always remembered that I was there.
          "There's one girl," I said. "But she already has a best friend."
          "Joe," Mom said. "Ask your sister what she's mumbling about."
          "I can't be best friends with Molly," I replied, "because she already has a best friend, Chloe."
          "Joe," Mom said. "Tell your sister that if she doesn't want to end up all alone, she better change her attitude."
--From "One-Legged Crow," a short story by Natalie Rogers, New Orleans Review (June 2015).

I called my grandma in Florida.  It was bound to happen, she sighed.  He just needs a hobby, she explained.  But he's wearing your reading glasses, I said, and he has perfect vision.  She suggested I get him a cat.  I hung up the phone when I heard my father clicking knitting needles in the living room.
--From "Dad Grandma," a short story by Annie Hartnett, NANO Fiction (May 10, 2015).

Two stories from Granta and a novel by Ha Jin

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I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn't have much else to do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I couldn't, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my routine, until one day I couldn't stand it any more and I bought myself a pair of black swimming trunks at a store in the centre of town and I went to the beach, wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not too far from the water and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide whether to go into the water or not . . .  
--From "Beach," a short story by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, Granta, Number 114 (July 18, 2011). 

Some time ago, when my husband went to stay at the American Academy in Rome in order to do research, I accompanied him because I had never seen the Roman Forum.  I had a book Harold had given me for my birthday that showed how the ruins looked in the present day, and each page also had its own transparent sheet with drawings that filled in what was missing, or completed the fragments that remained, so you could see what the scene had looked like in ancient times. . . .  At dinner, our first night there, we were introduced to other visitors, and here is where the story starts: they were the parents of a young man to whom our daughter, Angela, had briefly been engaged at the end of her senior year at Yale--so briefly that I had never met his parents, though Harold and Donald Stipley had a passing acquaintance.  
--From "Lavande," a short story by Ann Beattie, Granta, Number 94 (December 10, 2008).   

Finally Taotao got his passport and visa.  For weeks his parents had feared that China, even if not closing the door outright, would restrict the outflow of people.  After the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, all the American airlines except United had canceled their flights to Beijing and Shanghai.  At the good news, Pingping burst into tears.  She quickly rinsed the colander in which she had drained the shredded turnip for her jellyfish salad, took off her apron, and set out with her husband, Nan Wu, for the town center of Woodland, where the office of Travel International was located.
--From A Free Life, a novel by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books, 2007). 

A story by Austin Bunn, poem by Maxine Scates, and novel by Ha Jin

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. . . The papers arrived from the lawyer yesterday.  Soon I will be officially divorced from Scott.  I'm selling what I can. 
          "You have to come with me to the doctor," my mother says.
          But I have buyers coming.  I'm expecting to get money for my past life.  The pleasures of subtraction, of seeing things go. . . .  
--From "Everything, All at Once," a short story by Austin Bunn, first published in The Sun, Issue 390 (June 2008).  Reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXIV (2010), pp. 414-424.

. . .   The jets 
are screaming overhead and in the intervals 
after they pass the neighbors are arguing again
and it doesn't matter which house because they all do: 
Big John and his nameless wife, Julia and Ted, 
The Smiths, Rosie and Bob, or Lynne and Jack, 
the ex-Hell's Angels who have settled down 
with their four kids.  They all pretend they can't hear
what the next is yelling but I'm the one who hears
nothing.  My mother is sleeping and my father 
has left for good . . .   
--From "Not There," a poem by Maxine Scates, first published in The American Poetry Review, Volume 37, Issue 4 (July/August 2008), p. 44.  Reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXIV (2010), pp. 226-227.

Shao Bin felt sick of Dismount Fort, a commune town where he had lived for over six years.  His wife, Meilan, complained that she had to walk two miles to wash clothes on weekends.  She couldn't pedal, so Bin was supposed to take her on the carrier of his bicycle to the Blue Brook.  But this month he worked weekends in the Harvest Fertilizer Plant and couldn't help her.  If only they had lived in Workers' Park, the plant's apartment compound, which was just hundreds of paces away from the waterside. . . .  
--From In the Pond, a novel by Ha Jin (Vintage, 2000).

A novel by Ha Jin and short stories by Alice Munro, Ethan Canin, and Laura van den Berg

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The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt.  It was simple but audacious.  I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, "I think I ought to have an office. . . ."

--From "The Office," a short story by Alice Munro, first published in The Montrealer and reprinted in Dance of the Happy Shades (The Ryerson Press (Canada), 1968; McGraw-Hill Book Company (United States), 1973), pp. 59-74.

Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her.  It seemed the wisest thing to do.  She herself said, "If you don't remember me you don't remember much," but let the matter drop, just once adding, "I bet you never went to your Grandma's house last summer.  I bet you don't remember that either. . . ."  

 --From "Images," a short story by Alice Munro, published in Dance of the Happy Shades (The Ryerson Press (Canada), 1968; McGraw-Hill Book Company (United States), 1973), pp. 30-43. 

Everybody was surprised when Professor Yang suffered a stroke in the spring of 1989. . . .  His stroke unsettled me, because I was engaged to his daughter, Meimei, and under his guidance I had been studying for the Ph.D. entrance exams for the classical literature program at Beijing University.  I hoped to enroll there so that I could join my fiancée in the capital, where we planned to build our nest.  Mr. Yang's hospitalization disrupted my work, and for a whole week I hadn't sat down to my books, having to go see him every day. . . .   

--From The Crazed, a novel by Ha Jin (Pantheon/Random House, 2002). 

I tell this story not for my own honor, for there is little of that here, and not as a warning, for a man of my calling learns quickly that all warnings are in vain.  Nor do I tell it in apology for St. Benedict's School, for St. Benedict's School needs no apologies.  I tell it only to record certain foretellable incidents in the life of a well-known man, in the event that the brief candle of his days may sometime come under scrutiny of another student of history.  That is all.  This is a story without surprises. . . .  

--From "The Palace Thief," a short story by Ethan Canin, first published in The Paris Review, Number 128 (Fall 1993), and reprinted in The Palace Thief (Random House, 1994), pp. 155-205.

 

...It was my daughter's job to assemble the game board, my husband's to shuffle the cards, and mine to make drinks in the kitchen: Sprite in a highball glass for my daughter, whiskey with no ice for my husband and me.  Every other Friday night, my husband had been the Banker, handling the money, buildings, and title deed cards, but for this game, I had decided to change things up.  Before leaving the kitchen, I plucked an ice cube from the freezer with a little pair of silver tongs and dropped it into his drink. . . . 

--From "The Golden Dragon Express," a short story by Laura van den Berg, first published in Storyglossia, Issue 27 (March 2008), and reprinted in There Will Be No More Good Nights Without Good Nights (Origami Zoo Press, 2012), pp. 27-29.  

The Bridegroom by Ha Jin

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The Bridegroom, a collection of short stories by Ha Jin (Pantheon, 2000).

. . . Tong Guhan was a simple man, not very interested in power.  But recently he realized that if he were the vice director, he could have moved into a new apartment long ago and said to his son, "Prepare for the wedding!" and he could also have written to his daughter, "Forget veterinary medicine and come back home.  I'll get you a residence card and find you a good job here."  Obviously the solutions to both problems depended on whether his promotion would materialize in time.  These days he became anxious.  Every morning, when watering the violets, cannas, roses, and cyclamen in his tiny backyard, he'd pray in silence that today he'd be officially notified of the promotion. . . . 
--From "Alive," pp. 17-42, originally published in AGNI, Number 45 (1997). 

 

A letter was lying on Nimei's desk.  She was puzzled because the envelope did not give a return address.  The postmark showed the letter came from Harbin, but she knew nobody in that city. 

--From "Flame," pp. 126-141, originally published in The Missouri Review, Issue 20.3 (Fall 1997).  

Waiting by Ha Jin

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Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.  Together they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia Town many times, but she had always changed her mind at the last moment when the judge asked if she would accept a divorce.  Year after year, they went to Wujia Town and came back with the same marriage license issued to them by the county's registry office twenty years before.  
        This summer Lin Kong returned with a new letter of recommendation for the divorce, which had been provided for him by the army hospital in Muji City, where he served as a doctor.  Once more he planned to take his wife to the courthouse and end their marriage.  Before he left for home, he had promised Manna Wu, his girlfriend at the hospital, that this time he would try his best to make Shuyu stick to her word after she agreed to a divorce.  
        As an officer, he had a twelve-day leave each year. . . but by now a whole week had passed and he had not yet mentioned a word to his wife about the divorce.  Whenever the subject came to his tongue, he postponed it for another day. . . .   

--From Waiting, a novel by Ha Jin (Vintage, 1999).  The book was a National Book Award winner, a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, and the winner of the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award.