Being someone’s child is a difficult job, a position one has no right to quit.
This quote pops up in the first paragraph of “Death is Not a Bad Joke, If Told the Right Way” and it is as essential to understanding the story as the title itself. Which is to say, perhaps not much. Here’s the thing: this is a fabulous line; so fabulous that it should have been reserved by the author as an opening line. Only not the opening line of this story. In fact, this line verges very close to seeming to be out of place in this story. The title itself is problematic because it seems to befit a story about something entirely different. All three together—the line quoted above, the title, and the content of the story—seem almost ferociously at odds with each other as if none of them belongs with the either of the other two. It is a strange quality for a short story to possess, but perhaps the strangest is that this example is far from the only one in the collection.
Han, thirty-three years old, single, software engineer and recently naturalized American citizen, arrives at Beijing International Airport, with a brand-new American passport and an old Chinese worry.
Unlike the previous quote which would make an incredible opening line to a story distinctly—and solely—about the difficulty of being someone’s child, this actually is a terrific opening line that fits perfectly with the story that it tells. In fact, in that single opening line is much that can help shear away the necessity for backstory. So much information is conveyed in this opening line that will be prove useful to the reader in trekking through the subsequent narrative that it endows a sense of confidence. It is like the difference between watching a sport one has never seen before having had the rules explained or going in completely unprepared. It is basically a two-character drama and as a drama is it more of a sketch than fully fleshed-out story. The best news of all is that the writer can recognize a great opening line from the pen that wrote the rest of the story even if the ball seems to have been tragically dropped in the above example.
Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.
The closing line of this story is proof enough that the writer can fulfill the often-difficult proposition of concluding on a strong note. The story preceding the closing line is one of the strongest in the collection—arguably the strongest—and it is not entirely clear where things are going to wind up. That ambiguity is not put to a rest with this image of hope for a possible change of mind within the young pregnant women who begins with the intent that is the opposite of what this closing line suggests. But it is has been a long haul from conception to decision and, goodness knows, the backstory is anything but a fairy tale. And yet, there is a perverse sort of fairy-tale quality to the story which is made somewhat explicit with its reference to the absurd storyline of the Julia Roberts rom-com Pretty Woman, and the young pregnant woman’s almost Yakov Smirnov-like recurring insistence that in America, everything is possible.
