Ling Ma: It was Spring 2020 and I was jogging around this track that was near my apartment, like a runner’s track.
Joe Skinner: That’s Ling Ma, a Chicago writer who recently won the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize, the Story Prize, and the Windham Campbell Prize, for the short story collection she was working on that day at the track.
Ling Ma: And I just kept thinking about the story as I was jogging. And I had the first four sections, and those four sections just fell into place: her relationship to English, the mother’s, job as a nanny and what they do inside the MFA workshop. They were putting up wire fencing around the track because it was during the pandemic, maybe it was to discourage people from congregating. I think they were trying to do some renovations, actually, to the track as well. But I think the thing you want to do is keep doing the thing you were doing when inspiration struck. And so I thought, no, I don’t wanna get kicked out of this track!
I jogged a few more laps, to see if I could figure out how to complete the story. I didn’t, I only had the first four sections and so I laid out a partial outline of the fragmented sections, and I think I worked on the story on and off over the course of a year, and I still couldn’t figure out what the last section would be. The whole process of putting this together was like trying to complete a thought.
Joe Skinner: Ling Ma’s fragmented thoughts would go on to become a short story called “Peking Duck,” a piece from her newest collection of eight short stories, together called “Bliss Montage.”
Ling Ma: I never worked on short stories in quite that way before, that process of pushing a story as far as you can go, getting stumped, then focusing your attention on another story. And I would just do that with like, four stories in a row. Just kind of go through it sort of in a circle. It was like crop dusting. That was a very interesting way of working on a story collection.
Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner and this is “American Masters: Creative Spark.” In each episode we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. Today, author Ling Ma talks about the process and thinking behind her short story, “Peking Duck.”
Ling Ma: I think how it initially started was, I had read this memoir by Mark Salzman, “Iron & Silk,” and it was about his travels in China in the eighties. And he was an English teacher in China and it was a memoir about his experiences there. And as a kid when I read that, I just thought this must have been like what it was like for my parents to have lived in China during that time. And I read it multiple times. I mean, I still really like reading it.
Joe Skinner: Ling was drawn to a specific story from Salzman’s memoir, an anecdote, about Peking duck.
Ling Ma: The anecdote in question from Salzman is about he’s teaching to a class of students. And they all have to read their essay about their happiest moment. And a student tells him, oh, my happiest moment was when I went to Beijing and I had Peking duck. And then later he tells Salzman, well, actually I have to confess, that’s what happened to my wife. My wife went to Beijing and she ate this big banquet meal with Peking Duck. And you know, even though it’s her moment, I also feel like it’s my happiest moment.
But it’s notable that maybe for each of the storytellers, none of them have on first hand eaten any Peking duck, and including the narrator. And I was just thinking about Peking duck as like a cultural artifact. It was the food that was served to Nixon and Kissinger on their state visit to China. And so it has this sort of strange relevance.
Richard Nixon: I wish to thank you for the incomparable hospitality, for which the Chinese people are justly famous throughout the world. And I particularly want to pay tribute not only to those who have prepared the magnificent dinner, but also to those who have provided the splendid music.
Joe Skinner: President Nixon has been quoted as saying his favorite dish from his 1972 visit to China was Peking Duck. By this time, the dish had become something of a national symbol for China as it opened up to the West. Ling Ma discovered that the odd anecdote about Mark Salzman’s students and their pseudo-experiences with Peking duck, showed up almost word for word, in another work, this time by short story writer Lydia Davis.
Ling Ma: when I was in grad school, I read the Lydia Davis story, “Happiest Moment.” And I realized it was a reframing. It had metabolized an anecdote from Mark Salzman’s “Iron & Silk.” And I just, you know, it was just one of those, trivia facts, obscure trivia facts. And it was just something I’d remembered for a long time. I thought, well, could I write an essay about it? But what would the essay be about other than, hey, I noticed this obscure random thing. Does it matter?
But there was something about this coincidence that really stuck with me, and it became a way for me to talk about appropriation. It became a way for me to talk about metabolizing our parents’ stories, and maybe using our parents’ stories for cultural capital in some sense. And so I think I had always had that first section, with this narrator talking about how she learned English when she first arrived to the states, when she first immigrated from China to the U.S. And it was about reading Mark Salzman’s, “Iron & Silk.”
Joe Skinner: Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Ling Ma’s story, “Peking Duck.”
Ling Ma (Excerpt from “Peking Duck”): In my first years in the U.S., my parents take me to the library to encourage my learning of English. With my mother’s guidance, I check out ten, fifteen books every weekend. Though I gravitate toward picture books, my mother pushes me to start reading more advanced chapter books. “Just the words themselves should be enough,” she says. “If you can’t think up the image on your own, then that’s a failure of imagination.”
This is how I come across “Iron & Silk,” recommended by a librarian as an adult book that’s easy to read. It’s a memoir by Mark Salzman, a wushu enthusiast who was among the first wave of Americans accepted into China in the early nineteen-eighties. He traveled to Changsha and taught English at the Hunan Medical College.
Salzman recounts how, during one lesson, he asked the students to read aloud their essays on the topic of “My Happiest Moment.” The class consisted of middle-aged teachers brushing up on English. The last to read was Teacher Zhu, who wrote about attending a banquet dinner in Beijing years before. “First we ate cold dishes,” he read, “such as marinated pig stomach and sea slugs. Then we had steamed fish, then at last the duck arrived! The skin was brown and crisp and shiny, in my mouth it was like clouds disappearing.” He recounted other courses of the Peking-duck dinner: the duck skin in pancakes with sauce and scallions, the meat with vegetables, the duck-bone soup and fruits.
At the end of his reading, Teacher Zhu set down his essay and confessed to Salzman that he had never experienced this. It’s someone else’s memory, he said. “My wife went to Beijing and had this duck. But she often tells me about it again and again, and I think, even though I was not there, it is my happiest moment.”
I’ve never had Peking duck, but it was once a near-iconographic image. In a past life in Fuzhou, it represented some reality other than the one of daily congee and pickled turnips, cabbage and boiled-rib soup. On TV in the evenings, I saw it in soap operas set among the wealthy, in commercials filmed in Hong Kong. After I moved to the U.S., however, I forgot about it. Flipping through picture books, sometimes I conflate Peking duck with similar-looking things: a turkey in a story about the origins of Thanksgiving, the roast chicken that’s part of a hallucinatory dinner that appears to the little match girl, foods she’s fantasized about but never tasted.
Joe Skinner: The story of the Peking duck starts to feel like a set of Russian nesting dolls that provoke questions around what it means to tell someone else’s story.
Ling Ma: There is an immigrant story encapsulated in, I guess in this piece. Maybe as an Asian American writer, I’ve always been very self-conscious about writing immigrant stories and stories that wrestle with identity because it feels like such a predictable thing to do at this point. And the immigrant story is its own genre, right?
Joe Skinner: The narrator in “Peking Duck” spends much of the story describing her mother’s life as a first generation immigrant and nanny in Utah.
Ling Ma: I grew up during a time when maybe Amy Tan was the only Asian American author that was really well known, and if you were an Asian American author, you were supposed to grapple with topics about being Asian American and with identity and with immigration. “Peking Duck” was my way of complicating the experience for any reader who comes to this type of story with ease and who’s able to read it at face value. I was trying to recreate the experience of this sort of dissociative feeling that I get when I encounter that type of story. Often when I read a certain type of immigrant story, I just don’t know how to situate the text. Like, when the story takes the first person point of view of a non-English speaker, but the prose is rendered in fluent English, I don’t know how, as a reader, to approach the text. Often, the author might be a second generation immigrant and perhaps it’s a rendering of their parents’ experiences.
Joe Skinner: “Peking Duck” brings the reader into this discourse by spending a lot of time in the story in the classroom of the narrator’s MFA program, where the narrator has brought into the workshop a story she wrote about a day in the life of a Chinese immigrant nanny, about one particular Friday when she brings her young daughter to the mansion where she is employed. The piece is written from the nanny’s perspective.
Ling Ma: in this MFA workshop they discuss the ethics of depicting an immigrant through the first person point of view, but a non-English speaker, but rendering the prose in perfect English and sort of the complications around that.
Joe Skinner: This part of the story invites us into the conversation Ling Ma is trying to have with herself around these issues. And it’s here that, through the point of view of our narrator, the story really veers into metafiction.
Ling Ma: One of her classmates, Matthew, the only other Asian American person in the class, challenges the protagonist on representations of Asian American characters, female characters, and is the mother character in the story too submissive? And those are definitely all thoughts that have run through my head. And I think that’s specific to the burden of representation, where, I don’t think a white writer has to, consider, in the same way, many of us, I guess underrepresented or minority authors have to constantly calibrate, what is this saying about an entire group? Can it just stand as its own story and as its own specific thing without having to represent an entire group?
I think a lot of the difficulties of writing as an Asian American person and writing Asian American experiences, many of the questions and doubts that I struggled with made it into this story. These are things I’ve been thinking about and wondering about and arguing with myself over for a long period of time. So it’s not, to be honest, it wasn’t my favorite story to write, but it was definitely the story that felt the most inevitable.
Joe Skinner: “Peking Duck” is one story out of eight in Ling Ma’s “Bliss Montage.” The collection is described as “eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions.” The term bliss montage itself, comes from Hollywood.
Ling Ma: “Bliss Montage” refers to this edited sequence that shows the main character engaging in a joy spree – this sort of burst of pleasure. And I guess one popular example of it is in the film “Home Alone,” when Kevin McAlister realizes his entire family has left the house and now he can do whatever he wants. There’s this montage showing him doing things that he would otherwise not be allowed to do. He orders things on his parents’ credit cards. He kind of runs amuck in the house. And that’s called, I guess, the bliss montage. According to film scholar Jeanine Basinger, this sort of edited sequence was once a trademark of this outdated genre film called The Woman’s Film. And it would show the heroine engaging in pleasure in about maybe a two minute sequence or something. Usually in The Woman’s Film, the bliss montage would occur right before the protagonist’s downfall. They were kind of like public morality tales. And, I just, I really like that term. I like the way it sounds and it just felt suitable for this story collection, which features all female protagonists.
Joe Skinner: And do you see this short story, “Peking Duck,” fitting in under that umbrella concept?
Ling Ma: It has more to do with my creative process. I guess something that, springboards me into writing a story. It’s really just, I love to kind of dwell in, I guess, the bliss montage at first. And that’s usually my entry. It may not be how the story initially begins, but very often it’s the part that I begin writing first.
Joe Skinner: Was there a bliss montage entry point for you into writing “Peking Duck”?
Ling Ma: Well, I really like the sections when she’s talking about learning English. And her mother is employed as a nanny, so she’s at this mansion in Utah, where her mother works and she’s learning English from these workbooks, but they also go through the kitchen and there’s this listing of various brands and products and she’s learning those words as well. I think another part that I liked was writing about winter in Utah and just some of those initial details that made the story much more enlivening, I suppose, to me.
Joe Skinner: Here’s one more selection from “Peking Duck.”
Ling Ma: It’s December, possibly, off the top of my memory, when I arrive. There are sensations that exist for me only in English, many associated with winter, that I experience for the first time when I move to Utah. There is the sensation of walking underneath pine trees, of wearing a too big puffy coat, of destroying the clean surface of snow after first snowfall, of buying discounted items in a white-tiled Osco Drug redolent of harsh detergents, the scent of which I will always associate with being poor; overcompensatory cleanliness. The sensation of my mother dragging a wet towel across my face to wipe off dried congee, and the sensation of wet skin drying in the stiff, cold air outside. We live in a one-bedroom apartment that is very tidy, but sometimes ants come in through the bathroom. I sleep in the living room, where, at night, I still hear my grandma’s phantom snores.
In someone else’s home, a two-story mansion nestled in the mountains outside Salt Lake, a VHS cassette of “Bambi” plays on the TV while actual deer come through the back yard, pulling at the garden foliage with their teeth, and we are separated from them only by a sliding glass door.
My mother points outside. Deer. Tree. Teeth. Eats.
I repeat the words, then put them in sentence order: Deer eats tree with teeth.
The English lessons take place inside the mansion, where my mother is employed as a nanny to a toddler named Brandon. The home, which has a lobby-like foyer and an elevator, is imposing enough that not even Mormon missionaries bother us. Either that, or it’s too isolated from anywhere else to be worth the trek.
Joe Skinner: “Peking Duck” might feel a little autobiographical to the reader, once you learn that Ling Ma also grew up in Utah and went through an MFA program, at Cornell.
Ling Ma: The protagonist and I share some similar traits, just being 1.5-generation immigrants and I have lived in Utah, and my mother was a nanny at some point, so I guess those are some of the superficial qualities. Although don’t think it’s all that useful or illuminating to kind of parse out specific facts. But I have had readers come up to me and they expect every single part of it to be to be lived experience. Particularly the last section, which describes this encounter with this door-to-door salesman and the mother. Readers expect every single part to be true, and, um, it’s not (laughs).
Joe Skinner: The sixth and final section of “Peking Duck” is formally a departure from the first five sections of the story. Whereas before, the story is pretty openly exploring almost essayistic ideas around authorship, identity and representation, in this final section we are thrust into a vivid, scary, even, first-person telling of an encounter with an aggressive door-to-door salesman confronting the mother character.
Ling Ma: For most of this story, it’s written in the first person. It’s from this girl’s perspective. And in the last section, written from the point of view of her mother, you are not entirely sure if she wrote it or if this, narrated section stands as a direct representation of her mother’s experience.
Joe Skinner: So how did you eventually figure out that that would be your ending?
Ling Ma: I mean, can’t totally remember. A lot of good things come to me in dreams (laughs). And sometimes when you think hard and long about something and you can’t figure it out, the best thing to do is do something else. Focus on something else. And I did that multiple times. And I probably did that enough times where finally I got an answer.
It was important to me that the last section reads like a story in its own right, and it has to be immersive and compelling in its own right, not just as a formulated solution to everything that comes before. And it has to maybe seduce the reader in some way in becoming immersed by it, even as all of the other sections before destabilize how you frame the story in the last section. I think there’s the tension right there: who’s the actual author of this piece? And yet you have to be a little bit seduced and be immersed by that story at the end.
Joe Skinner: Do you think writing should be risky?
Ling Ma: I think writing should be risky to the writer. I think you should feel maybe, well, I’m not sure. Maybe this is just something I tell myself, but I think when you publish something, you should feel that it’s a risk, because it means that it’s worth something to you, that you tried something, and maybe succeeded or maybe failed.
Joe Skinner: I guess because when I read “Peking Duck,” it kind of felt like that was being explored in a way.
Ling Ma: For me, maybe part of what felt risky was, I’m so avoidant of talking about the immigrant narrative. I’m so in deep grappling with it. I’m so avoidant in talking about Asian American identity, and the story really begins with, you know, this immigrant learning English coming to the US and it actually has many of the familiar beats. It feels that the story initially vamps as any other immigrant story: coming to the states, learning English. If you only read like the opening of it, maybe the reader would think, “I can predict what the beats are already. There’s gonna be some general, some generational differences from like between the parents and the child, that has to do with cultural assimilation. On the other hand, it’ll probably be heartwarming because they’re going to learn how to overcome this,” or I don’t know, I’m not exactly sure.
Maybe I was trying to write that type of story, but implode it from the inside. So I have to create it, and it has to resemble it, but then we’re going to try to implode it from the inside out and I don’t know, see what that does. So, yeah. I’m not a confrontational person and I’m not here to have fights. A lot of these arguments and fights that the story posits, you know, I’m having with myself most of the time.
Joe Skinner: A huge thank you to Ling Ma for talking with us about her work. “Peking Duck” can not only be found in her collection, “Bliss Montage,” but you can also read it right now on the New Yorker’s website, where it was published this past year. We’ll put the link in the episode description.
