Moon Cakes by Andrea Louie

First published: 1995

The Work

Moon Cakes, Andrea Louie’s first novel, builds upon the question: “What becomes of an eleven-year-old child whose father suddenly dies?” Suffering the pangs of increasing anger, alienation, and isolation, Maggie tries to restore balance and give meaning to her life as she searches for answers to this question. The transience, fragmentation, and truncation that dominate her narrative become a conceit for the emotional and social disruption characterizing her life since her father’s death. The opening dream sequence, for example, introduces a little girl, wearing a “pint-size knapsack with an appliquéd penguin made of black and white felt” and pulling behind her a wagon. She is on an impossible quest to find what none have seen or heard of before, something called “moon cakes.” This dream-quest impinges upon Maggie’s life in the form of her journey into personal discovery and self-worth.

Born in a small town in the middle of Ohio, a place where “the land is very flat and well kept,” Maggie has grown up with the stereotype of the all-American family, the embodiment of fantasy-like perfection, down to the last detail. Her father was a successful and altruistic physician. Her mother miraculously balances careers as a brilliant biochemist and university administrator. Her older sister juggles cheerleading and rigorous medical residencies, matriculation at an Ivy League university, and marriage as “a Chinese Martha Stewart.” The second daughter of such a “model minority” family, Maggie, or “Xiao Li,” as her father affectionately calls her, is from birth nurtured behind the veneer of assimilation. Her family heaps upon her the bountiful rewards of their American Dream. Innocent to the spiritual costs of their blind acquiescence and easy balance, she, too, embraces this world of mixed signals.

Her father’s death removes this veil of innocence. The veneer that had stood between her and the world peeling away, Maggie finds a stuttering uncertainty, a void within herself. Those memories of her father—the cacophony of Cantonese opera as he calmly pressed his shirts, his childlike passion for ice cream and his stoicism when eating moon cakes once a year, for example—no longer seem “inner-resting,” as her Ohio-bred neighbors once pronounced, but are inscribed with contradiction, opposition, and discord. The stability of his presence afforded no more than an illusion; she turns to the “seamlessly normal” world of sacrificing mothers with their outlandishly blond coiffures and blue-eyed lettermen sons to provide the yardstick by which she can measure herself. Such a yardstick seems ill-suited as she recognizes the depth of her differences. “I am,” she laments, “a Chinese daughter born in the unlikely American landscape of farmers’ sons.” Whatever ties remained to this world are severed completely when these mothers and sons turn against her and spit curses from the sides of their mouths. In their expletives—Oriental, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean—she loses any sense of who she is.

In the face of loss comes denial, as the narrator adopts a new name: “Maya, after some great ancient people I had read about in an encyclopedia,” and begins whispering such words as mi amor, la cucaracha, and quesadilla for would-be lovers to hear. She meanders through a state university, bedecked head to toe in an all-purpose black wardrobe. Her destination invariably becomes “an empty study carrel in the deserted reaches of the Spanish literature section.”

Maya next escapes to New York, resigned to lead her life as a Chinese bagel that “refuses to rise.” Venturing away from the security of her sister’s apartment, she wanders into the city and finds work with an upstart publishing house, all the while seeking a sense of the familiar in her surroundings: three abandoned cats, the savorlessness of instant noodles, and a plethora of empty boxes. Then, overwhelmed by the enormity and the unabashed ostentation of her sister’s wedding plans, she suddenly books a ticket with a tour group bound for China. Unable to explain her impetuous behavior, even to herself, she knows only that she must search. As she boards the plane, there are only questions, no answers, only uncertainties, no absolutes.

In the tradition of the Chinese talk-story, given popular exposure by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, Louie’s narrative begins, “I want to tell you a love story,” one that “has no beginning, no end,” that “simply must start somewhere in the middle, which is now.” The work eschews the comfort of this form in favor of uncertainty; following the death of the narrator’s father, her encounters become increasingly brief, briskly alternating, nimbly evanescent. Life’s capriciousness is reflected in the narrative, which ranges from her childhood schoolmate Beverly, born into an abusive family and victimized her whole life, who appears one day and who as suddenly disappears, to college soulmate Lance, who struts into Maya’s life, who introduces her to one madcap platonic adventure after another, who grows silent, moves to California, and succumbs to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, to Alex, a student from Hong Kong who shares her love of food, Chinese mountains, and their futon, to their child, conceived in a moment of passion and miscarried in abandonment and despair. The people she meets and allows herself to care for appear at random out of nowhere and, without the slightest of transitions, pull away, quickly disappearing without a trace, the same way her father had done when she was eleven.

As a metaphor for the process by which Maya comes to terms with who and where she is in the world, the narrative pushes outward in all directions rather than flowing unidirectionally. Maya’s search for a personal identity moves away from passive questioning and the rejection of her past toward an active redefinition. Those with whom she has formed any lasting bonds are ones who similarly have taken responsibility for their own self-definitions, their own self-worth. Candy, a gum-chewing bass player with no rhythm, lives a life with a cadence all its own. Renee, a bleached-blond pre-op transvestite whose elbows give him away, promises himself an operation. The child, Marcus, Korean by bloodline and vintage American in outlook and temperament, is precocious and self-assured, easily bored and increasingly weary for a place he knows to be home. Prior to leaving the Chinese mainland, Maya realizes, perhaps for the first time, that the pain and uncertainty characterizing her past, like the two stones she has collected somewhere along the way, bear upon her present but only as raw materials from which she must fashion her own future. The wholly personal nature of her voice becomes an expression of her emerging sense of power and authority and a celebration of her difference.

Bibliography

Awkward, Michael. Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Personality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Brewer, María Minich. “A Loosening of Tongues: From Narrative Economy to Women Writing.” Comparative Literature 99, no. 5 (1984): 1141-1161.

Cafarelli, Annette Wheeler. “Gender, Truncation and Ideology: Women and Autobiography.” In Literary History, Narrative, and Culture, edited by Wimsal Dissanayake et al. Honolulu: The East-West Center, 1989.

Langbaum, Robert. The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.