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Review | Meng Jin’s debut novel Little Gods is not your typical Chinese immigrant story

The Shanghai-born, San Francisco-based author’s audacious book feels deeply personal

Readers are confronted with an audacious narrative that incorporates the Tiananmen Square crackdown

Reading Time:5 minutes

The personal and the political collide in Meng Jin’s impressive debut, Little Gods. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 8:00pm, 15 Feb 2020Updated: 5:13pm, 21 Oct 2020

Little Gods
by Meng Jin
Custom House
4/5 stars

Little Gods is the impressive first novel by Meng Jin, born in Shanghai, now resident in San Francisco. Like many impressive debuts, it feels deeply personal and relentlessly ambitious.

The most obviously personal aspects are personified by Liya, whose story broadly resembles that of her creator. Born in Shanghai (or so she thinks) on June 4, 1989, Liya relocates to America as a child with her mother, Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who has won a place to pursue a PhD.

Their life as perpetual outsiders is evoked with acute sensitivity. This is partly inevitable: the result of American xenophobia, their inability to speak English (at least to begin with) and broader cultural dislocation. In one memorable passage, an infant Liya wakes up at home to find her mother missing. Running into the street, she eventually finds two police officers, who are by turns sympathetic and menacing as they reprimand Su Lan for maternal neglect: “I remember one of the policemen, a tall blond man, saying in America followed by other words as my mother struggled to explain herself.”

Then there’s the Halloween party Liya attends dressed as Maxwell’s demon (a high-minded physics joke) to the mystification of all. Suddenly ashamed, Liya explains tearfully she is meant to be Mulan. Jin describes the host’s kindly but clumsy decision to wrap Liya in a Japanese shawl as a “staged humiliation and triumph”.

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} The Shanghai-born, San Francisco-based author’s audacious book feels deeply personal Readers are confronted with an audacious narrative that incorporates the Tiananmen Square crackdown

The Shanghai-born, San Francisco-based author’s audacious book feels deeply personal

Readers are confronted with an audacious narrative that incorporates the Tiananmen Square crackdown