A Chinese American Novel
Cheng, Bill. Southern Cross The Dog. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.
Bill Cheng’s first novel, constructed according to the best
standards of creative writing programs, may be symbolic of one trend in the
contemporary American novel: ethnic cross-examination. As an example of the trend, Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995) is sterling. Alexie skillfully absorbs the legend of
bluesman Robert Johnson into a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene narrative tradition and
renders an omni-American story.
Apparently that skill is not or cannot be taught in creative writing
programs, because Cheng fails to use Chinese American sensibility in the making
of a novel that is geographically accurate but spiritually pathetic. Cheng knows all the right place names in the
State of Mississippi, the major matrix for the blues, but he is rather
uninformed about African American spirituality and ceremonies of poise in an
absurd universe. He seems to think blues
is grounded in some weird, stereotypical version of hoo doo. Southern
Cross The Dog is at once historically accurate in describing the affects of
the Mississippi River flood of 1927 and hysterically gauche in narrating the
biocultural dimensions of blues production.
Cheng stumbles in the wilderness of modern American fiction, blind to what
most Southern writers know by instinct.
Wild women do not have the blues.
In seeking to write a deep study of the elements of the
blues, especially the psychological elements, Cheng presents us with a faux
Faulkner novel, one indebted more to the imaginations of Sherwood Anderson and
Gertrude Stein than to the grounded imaginations of Jean Toomer, Zora Neale
Hurston, and Sterling A. Brown. His
American literary ancestors have taught him how to invest in the exotic, the
grotesque and Gothic, the ultimately insulting.
He has quite abandoned a general Chinese piety in the face of poverty
and dehumanization.
In his tortured effort to become an “American” (a sentient
cipher), Cheng creates a monstrous distortion of music and racial history in
the South between 1927 and 1941. And
only God knows what led him to drag degenerate Cajuns into the story. His training in creative writing should have
taught him to deal with Cajuns as complex human beings not as beings devolving
into abject animality as they practice love/hate upon the African American
body. Perhaps the best that can be said
of Southern Cross The Dog is that
extremes of assimilation in fictive ethnic cross-examinations do not work. Despite the generous praise Cheng has
received from Edward P. Jones and William Ferris for his mastery of prose
----calling a repaired harmonium a “box full of souls” is a brilliant metaphor
for the Mississippi Delta, the novel does not justify Ravi Howard’s opinion
that “Cheng conjures history with precision and style.” What Cheng manages to conjure is a hushpuppy
for consumers bereft of discriminating tastes.
