GINGKO SEASON, by Naomi Xu Elegant
In pre-20th-century China, the widespread practice of binding young girls’ feet — breaking and disfiguring them with the goal of restricting their permanent size to the three-inch “golden lotus” ideal — was said to serve an aesthetic purpose, making young women more attractive to potential husbands. The physical reality of this excruciating, yearslong process, often performed by the child’s own mother, told a different story: of forced subservience, of entrapment inside the home, of mass suffering.
Putting together an exhibition of handmade, delicately embroidered Qing dynasty footwear at a Philadelphia museum, the narrator of “Gingko Season,” a 25-year-old archivist named Penelope Lin, tries and fails to persuade her boss to allow visitors to touch the impossibly small artifacts on display, and to project images of actual women wearing them onto the walls. Only then, she argues, can the viewer grasp the shoes’ actual function: “to mask man-made deformity with prettiness.”
Naomi Xu Elegant’s superb debut novel opens in September 2018, as Penelope is reeling from a breakup that has locked the emotional doors she shut long ago, when her bipolar mother abandoned her at 13. (Penelope’s drug-tripping, narcissistic artist father has abandoned her emotionally ever since.) Raised in Beijing until she attended university in America, she’s repressed these memories to the point that “I felt pity for the child who experienced them, but I no longer felt that child was me.” She prefers instead to “intellectualize” her feelings in theoretical debates about the uncomfortable overlap between aesthetic pleasure and historical pain, between beauty and deformity, love and abjection.
This she does not only at work, but also with her two best friends, Apple and Inno, both opinionated, self-torturing corporate types who don’t get along (when the 2016 election results came in, “Apple started to cry at almost the exact moment that Inno burst out laughing,” and that was that). Penelope shares a cramped apartment in Chinatown with a white finance bro and an older couple: “Xinwei was from Guangdong, and I spoke with her in Mandarin; Raymond was from Philly, half-Vietnamese and half-Chinese, and I spoke with him in English; to one another they spoke in Cantonese.”
“Gingko Season” is as much a love story as it is a subtle experiment in the ways language can be manipulated either to reveal or conceal its speaker. Over the ensuing fall, winter and spring, Elegant quietly disrupts Penelope’s safe, boring “equilibrium of habit, solitude and friendship” with the arrival of Hoang, a tall and handsome research lab tech who, upon encountering Penelope in a random waiting room, immediately divulges a secret: He’s been releasing the lab mice he was supposed to euthanize. Why is he telling her this? “I’m a trusting person,” he says.
From there the two embark on a drawn-out, will-they-or-won’t-they courtship that consists mostly of handwritten letters scrawled on postcards and pages torn from books (Hoang is the kind of guy not to have a phone), and of Penelope’s overthinking. After the all-consuming “black hole” of her last relationship with the arrogant and inaccessible Paul, she thinks, “This time around, I had to enforce my passivity.” But when Hoang forms a worker’s union at the hotel where he bartends, Apple pushes Penelope to volunteer in the effort, claiming, “this is the closest you’ve gotten to having sex in like five thousand years.”
Some novels announce themselves with virtuosic plotting or language, headline-worthy conceits, Big Ideas. This is not one of them, and it’s better for it. Most of the book consists of fickle, comically punctuated conversations between educated but directionless 20-somethings about sex and dating and effective altruism and classical Chinese poetry and Napoleon and the ways in which their world is bad and they’d like to make it better. In a Sally Rooney novel, such conversations usually further the protagonists’ relationships; in “Gingko Season” they are often a means of distancing Penelope and her friends from their feelings, of deflecting.
The exception, of course, is Hoang, whose resilient openheartedness in the face of his own personal tragedy offers Penelope an alternative model to her withdrawal. The delayed gratification of their epistolary romance and the relief of Hoang’s unguarded candor recast language and beauty as expressions of, not distractions from, honest feeling. “Thought of you this morning when I jumped into a freezing lake,” he writes to Penelope, merging physical sensation and emotional intimacy into a single, pure experience. “The water was like fire, I never felt so alive.”
GINGKO SEASON | By Naomi Xu Elegant | Norton | 250 pp. | Paperback, $19.99
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