New Yorker Fiction Review #285: "Hammer Attack" by Han Ong
Review of the short story from the Jan. 16, 2023 issue of The New Yorker...
Philippine-American writer Han Ong is going at a steady rate of about one short story per year in The New Yorker since 2020, but this is the first I've managed to catch. Not the easiest read -- I actually took the time to re-read it (just like with last week's story (perhaps it's not that these authors write inaccessible fiction, but rather that Instagram is destroying my attention span. I really don't know anymore)) -- and I guess I'm glad I did. I think this story rewards a close reading, mostly because it's a very "interior" narrative. In other words, it all takes place deep inside the head of the main character. In Fiction 101 (sorry, I never graduated to 102) we might call this "close first-person" narration.
The real "action" of this story took place weeks before, when a Korean-American man named Allen was attacked and severely beaten on a subway platform in New York, a victim of the rash of hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent which started in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Allen lies comatose in a hospital bed, his sisters, his parents, and his friends from his book club -- of which the narrator is one -- take turns visiting him, reading to him, and (adding some levity to the whole scene) massaging his toes. The narrator, for his part, reflects upon the things he and Allen share (they are both gay, and they are both early-life immigrants who have tried to leave behind them cultures and families they found repressive), as well as their differences (the narrator, by his own assessment, is conventionally attractive; Allen is not), as he provides a brief history of their friendship and membership in the book club.
Along the way we get some really juicy intertextuality, as the author name-drops at least a half-dozen Asian or Asian-American authors and giving me at least one book for my "to read" list. Among the books and authors Han Ong manages to drop in this short story, like crumbs for the reader to follow (or perhaps just because they fit in the story; it does, after all, feature a book club):
Kawabata
Amy Tan
Thersa Hak Kyung Cha
Osamu Dazai
Mishima
Han Ong is clearly attempting to take a crack at a contemporary social issue of our time, an admirable if not necessarily always vital thing to do as an artist. There's enough happening inside a human being during the course of any one 24 hour period to make a novel in and of itself, without bringing in current events. But I think it's important for artists, writers, creators to do so, otherwise we'd be pretty lost as a society.
The question in my mind is does Han Ong succeed in this story with what he was "trying to do." Well, that begs the question: "What is he trying to do?" Here is where a close reading of Han Ong's interview in "This Week in Fiction" would come in handy, but honestly I try not to read those before I've written a review. I'm less concerned with the author's own views on what they wanted to do, and more concerned with mine.
It seems to me that Han Ong was trying to take a look at the ongoing problem of violent hate-crimes against Asians and people of Asian descent, through a humanizing, even one might say "lighter-hearted" lens. Who are the victims of these crimes? How does this violence impact their communities & families who must pick up the pieces and move on? And is there a positive that can be taken away from any of this? We're all more than a race or a color or a gender. We have histories, friends, pasts, families, baggage. To me, on one level, this is Han Ong slicing through the factual nature of news headlines and sound bytes, down to a ground-level view of life as an Asian American in pandemic America.
At the end of the day, a fiction writer has characters, setting, plot, and dialogue, and has to make some choices on what to do with those. Did Han Ong write the definitive short story to end all short stories on Asian hate crimes? No. Not by any means. Even that were possible. But he did write a pretty heavily layered, context-laden story calling attention to an issue that affects him and his community personally (really, all of us personally) and perhaps makes us stop and consider the different layers of groups and affiliations we all have -- to a nationality, a religion, a family, a city, a gender, a sexuality -- and how a shock to one of us pulls on all the strings that attach us to others.
Illustration by David de las Heras.
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