Seven Days, February 7, 2007

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Book review: FireWife by Tinling Choong

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Lives of Girls and Women

T

he Oscar nominations bestowed on Babel suggest that the time is ripe for stories that remind us the world is getting smaller every day, and we’re all more connected than we think. Alejandro GonzĂĄlez Iùårritu’s solemn film wasn’t wildly popuSTORY MARGOT lar, but it seems to have struck a chord. HARRISON FireWife, the first novel from Yale grad student and Randolph resident Tinling FireWife: A Story Choong, plucks some resonant nearby of Fire and Water strings. It’s also the debut of a talented by Tinling Choong. writer who has a knack for alternating Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, 206 between floridly sensuous prose and plainspoken abruptness Ă la Jamaica Kincaid. pages, $21. FireWife is the story of eight women Tinling Choong who live scattered over the globe, from reads from and Taipei to Amsterdam to New York, all of signs FireWife on February 10 Asian ancestry. The nominal protagonist is at Cover to Cover, Nin, a young architect of Chinese heritage Randolph, who, much like the author, was raised in 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. Malaysia and now lives in the U.S. Info, 728-5509. Like many — perhaps too many — young female protagonists of fiction, Nin is on a journey of self-discovery. She’s sick of her job designing “E.D.I. Fridayâ€? chain restaurants for cities such as Bangkok and Singapore. So she obtains a six-month leave of absence to fly around the world shooting portraits of “nameless girls and womenâ€? for a photo essay she calls “FireWife.â€? Nin’s deeper agenda is to rediscover her own “fireâ€? self — a self free from guilt over the role she played in her sister’s accidental death decades earlier. In the novel’s carefully constructed symbolic scheme, based on a Chinese creation myth, “fireâ€? represents spontaneity, boldness and sexual freedom. “Waterâ€? represents stability, continuity and the maternal virtues most cultures expect women to embody. Nin has spent most of her 31 years being “good,â€? as daughter, wife and employee, but now she’s had it with her “Water Me.â€? “How does one leap off the solid cliff of memories and fly immensely?â€? she asks. “How does one become free as a fearless tiger with wings?â€? If this sounds like every “female selfempowermentâ€? narrative ever written, it is — in some ways. But Choong is a complex thinker, and she shows us the other

side: the dangerous heat of fire as well as the allure. The first voice to speak in the novel isn’t Nin. It’s the ghost of Lakshmi, a lowcaste Indian woman whose “fire tiger� spirit, “fierce but blind,� helped bring her to grief. In a lyrical, compressed narrative of horrors that’s like a darker version of the opening of The Color Purple, Lakshmi tells her niece Parvati, whose dreams she’s visiting, how she married for love and found herself in slavery. “Really, they respected cows and fish more than they did me,� she says of her husband’s family. “They didn’t kill cows.� By the end of her tale, Lakshmi has returned literally to her element — fire. But we’re told that her spirit follows Nin on her travels, as the photographer encounters a series of women who have their own stories to tell. They do so in their own words, in a series of short chapters that alternate with chapters narrated by Nin while she’s in transit. Like Lakshmi’s, most of these stories are rife with oppression and atrocities. In Thailand, we meet a 14-year-old prostitute; in Japan, a woman who sells her naked body for use as a sushi table. In the West, women don’t seem to be much better off: These narrators speak of childhood molestation, spousal abuse, bulimia. A welcome exception to the pattern is Zimi, a Taipei rock musician with a saucy voice who makes her own choices, whether she’s renting out her forehead as ad space or breaking her own hymen so the virginityobsessed doctors will let her donate eggs to an infertile friend. That sauciness — which crops up in almost every narrative, no matter how grim — is the saving grace of the book. FireWife has compelling lyrical passages, and its philosophical quandaries about balance and interconnection provoke real thought. Yet the mysticism sometimes feels stale, and Nin’s meditations can become dangerously reminiscent of a selfhelp book — she keeps telling us about liberation, not showing us. (“Do. Be,� she lectures herself. “Don’t analyze. Don’t think.�)

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