Meng Jin

From the acclaimed author of Little Gods, whose “gift merges science, politics and art: the kind of audacity our world needs now” (Gina Apostol), comes an immersive and electrifying story collection that explores self-construction, female resilience, and migrations both literal and transformative.

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.

Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

Short Stories

Self-Portrait with Ghost

Lindsay

What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I want to be a witness to history, to any kind of time passing?

The future had been an open field then, opaque and blinding white; in the blindness a million paths waited to clarify into color and shape. She had not known enough to imagine what any one path might look like, or to understand that to take one might preclude your journey on another.

In these times I’ve grown tired of my heart, how much feeling it has required, and would much prefer to laugh. But there it is, thumping.

Could a body belong to anyone, including oneself?

“Her suffering begins to appear”— Ling would not put it this way. For Ling, suffering is a tool, wielded by the human and the divine. The abstract manifests as concrete, the intangible as felt. Suffering can be hard like a slap or it can fester, like grit beneath the nail. Feeling hardens into form, allegory into event. Ling doesn’t need pigmentation to describe her grief. Her suffering has always been material.

Phillip had been as good as dead to me, for no pernicious reason. Just— irrelevance. Now he’d been resurrected and killed, in one swift blow.

Ivy X

3.5 - the first half was better than the second half imo 

Quotes: 
- I waited for my lover to come. I was in love, oh yes. Not the rapturous kind that turns and thins your sleep, but a satisfying, contented love. I woke in the mornings well-rested and warm, like a loaf of risen bread. 

-I had come to the photograph with the simple but sincere desire to preserve my sight of beautiful fleeting things. 

-Oh, I was uncomfortable all the time. In a foreign land, buried in first love, I heard constantly the whisper of "you must preserve this," which was really the cry of "you are afraid." 

-...everyone in this country was bored to death so had plenty of time to read and ruminate and appreciate life's higher pleasures. 

-"Be natural, change your face, move your body, whatever you like. Painting is dynamic, not like photography, freezing a moment in time" -- he winked at me -- "but a medium to capture the subject moving through time, caught in its locomotion." 

-How this lover had changed me. Once, I had found honor in naked honesty: if there was a wound, I pressed it. I'd taken pride in dredging up buried pain; pain was how I recognized another. With previous lovers, I'd eaten up stories of other women hungrily, hurting myself with jealousy until it felt like love. 

-For Ling, suffering is a tool, wielded by the human and the divine. The abstract manifests as concrete, the intangible as felt. Suffering can be hard like a slap or it can fester, like grit beneath the nail. Feeling hardens into form, allegory into event. 

-Kindness is never free; he owes a great debt. 

-What a wealth of meaning life contains, just waiting to be read. 

-"Death," Ling wants to tell me, "is the one certainty of life. The one thing every person can be sure to accomplish, regardless of circumstances of birth." 

-There were three women I remember - three girls. Though they appeared like women to me, like they were-complete.

-Perhaps I didn't like her because she was just like me.

-It was so much work, determining if a boy was to be wanted, to be loved. Whereas it was clear as day with girls. I could look at a girl and instantly say if she was ugly or pretty, beautiful or gorgeous, if she was plain but sweet, if I wanted to look like her or not. If I envied her, if I could dream myself into her body. I couldn't see my own body unless I was looking at it beside another girl's. A quick study, I quickly discovered an easy way to tell about a boy: if his girlfriend was pretty or not. 

-I wanted something to be better than I remembered.

-I was thoroughly in love, so much so that all I could think about day in and day out was what love meant, why it existed, what it was good for. 

-In love, I acted totally against my nature and against my best sense. I knew it but I couldn't help it. When I wasn't with X, every part of me wanted only to be with him, and when I was with him, even when we weren't having a fabulous time, I forgot that there might exist any other purpose in life.

-...I didn't just feel it on my lips but all the way down through my lungs and stomach, in some organ that was just now waking into existence. 

-She was not mine, but she was so small, and charming in her smallness and fatness, and though she was useless she declared her needs clearly, without suggestion or subtext. I wanted to despise her; sometimes when she exhausted or disgusted me, I wanted to despise her very much. But it was impossible. 

-What was wrong with me? Why didn't I want to be a witness to history, to any kind of time passing?

Favorites:

- "Phillip Is Dead"

- "In the Event"

Self-Portrait with Ghost Short Stories

Reviews

Highlights