by RHIANNA WALTON Rhianna Walton
It was only when I started describing Little Gods to people that I realized how seamlessly debut novelist Meng Jin integrates the huge, complicated themes of revolution, rebirth, time, and language into an intimate story, without sacrificing their grandeur or significance. At its heart, Little Gods is the story of a scientist, Su Lan, whose brilliance both attracts and alienates the people who love her. While her husband, child, and friends circle around her like planets to a sun, she struggles to use her fire to light the way forward and incinerate the past. Set against the backdrop of the 1989 student uprisings in China, and later in the anonymity and dislocation of the American immigrant experience, Little Gods is a beautiful exploration of how the political is the personal, and of the invisible cords that tie us to our histories — both private and collective — despite our best efforts to only look forward. It was a pleasure to speak with Jin about her novel, and it is a delight to present Little Gods to you as Volume 84 of Indiespensable.
Rhianna Walton: The contrast between life and the death, and the inescapable violence of rebirth, is a central theme of Little Gods. To that end, the novel opens with an incredible third-person chapter that takes place in a maternity ward adjacent to Tiananmen Square on the night of the massacre. It’s an amazing opening — disorienting, upsetting, and cryptic — almost like a short story. How did you arrive at it?
Meng Jin: It took me a long time to get to this opening. I spent many years trying different ways of opening the novel. In previous drafts, I had started with Liya’s voice. But when I wrote the version that you see today, that was when the rest of the book opened up for me.
I think of the opening almost as a trick. It starts from this bird’s eye perspective and then it narrows and circles in. I thought a reader might pick it up and think, I’m going into this really grand story, with this grand, omniscient voice. Quite quickly, though, we land on an inconsequential character, and then the opening ends and we go into the perspectives of the other characters.
Once I figured out that the nurse was the character who would open the book, the rest of the writing fell into place.
Rhianna: The nurse is a wonderful character — I was sorry to see her go! I wondered if she’d end up being one of the central characters, or integral to the main narrative, because she’s so fully realized in just a few pages.
Jin: Thank you. It was very important to me that every human on the periphery be a fully realized human. Many of the characters in the center of my novel exist at the periphery of their societies as well.
As a writer, when I envision a picture, I try to look at the people who might be standing outside of it and remember that though they’re not the subject, they’re just as human and their interior lives are just as rich and mysterious as anyone else’s.
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