“You and me, we’re the same,” the husband says, but the narrator isn’t convinced. Questions of foreignness and otherness are central to two of the strongest and most memorable stories in the collection, “Returning” and “Peking Duck.” In the uncanny and powerful “Returning,” two immigrant writers bond over their shared experiences, despite their wildly different upbringings.
When the cameras monitoring social and gender norms stop rolling, they see the truth. On the other side the strangeness of living in a body is exposed, the absurdity of carrying race and gender on one’s face, all against the backdrop of an America in ruin. “On the other side is where the story begins,” the professor in “Office Hours” says as she opens her closet door and wanders into a parallel universe where it is always night. An office worker sits across the table from her abuser’s current girlfriend. A soon-to-be film studies PhD student is pushed to the limit by a drug that makes her invisible. A pregnant government official finds her baby’s arm poking her between the legs. A film and media studies professor finds a magic portal in her office closet. Instead, much like in Ma’s celebrated debut novel Severance, life happens to them, and surreal events force them to face who they really are. In Ling Ma’s story collection Bliss Montage, Chinese American women hope for a similar Happy Interlude, if not a happy ending. The real story is what happens before and after the sequence, where women’s lives tear through the artifice. There’s no story to the Bliss Montage, no life, only rehearsed poses. Film historian Jeanine Basinger coined the term “Bliss Montage” in her book A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 to describe the “Happy Interlude” that often interrupts old movies, where “the leading lady can be seen laughing her head off, dressed in fabulous clothes, racing across the water in a speedboat, her yachtsman lover at her side.” This kind of joy - the kind that “almost never appears anywhere except in a woman’s film” - quickly passes her by.
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