China, 1989: It was the close of the decade, and what a fantastic decade it had been! Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms meant music and material goods from Taiwan, Japan, America, Europe flowed freely in for the first time since the 1940s.

Love ballads by Teresa Teng (the English name of Taiwanese singing sensation Deng Lijun) occupied every radio station. The country’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken had opened in Beijing’s Qianmen, and young couples on first dates munched on crispy drumsticks. New economic exposure had spurred the tidal waves of political reform. The decade felt full of promise, a generation in bloom.

The Communist Party crushed that dream of democracy one summer evening, not only as a metaphor, but as citizens’ bodies smeared under military tanks.

Around two in the morning on June 4th, a 26-year-old anesthesiologist in Beijing was finishing her shift. Just as she was about to leave the hospital, a nurse ran in: every available medical professional was to go to the emergency room immediately.

The anesthesiologist followed her colleagues to the ER. The entrance to the ER was a wide corridor, usually a waiting area, but that night there were bodies everywhere—on the chairs and on the floor. The cold tiles were red with blood.

A nurse beckoned the anesthesiologist over to a stretcher for an examination. Carefully turning the man over, she realized that he was already dead. The Chinese army had used bullets that were designed to explode when they entered the body. A single bullet in the abdomen could riddle the intestines with thirteen holes. The young anesthesiologist and the rest of the overwhelmed hospital staff would not leave the hospital for another two days.

This anesthesiologist was my mom, and the night of the Tian’anmen massacres was the night she decided to abandon her country. And that’s the night Meng Jin’s Little Gods begins its story. Little Gods opens with a young woman in a Beijing hospital, giving birth to a girl who she would eventually take to the United States. The young mother in this book would bury the story of that night for years.

Reading is an act of vital pluralism: it forces you to inhabit other people’s bodies, follow their decisions, watch as they explain themselves. The last books I read consisted of a San Francisco stripper’s life imprisonment for murder, a Norwegian man’s fourth volume of his utterly ordinary life, a Black journalist’s reckoning with the violence of his existence in America, a Jewish woman’s ascent into the ranks of magazine royalty.

When you observe and settle into the details of a life you could never have lived, your identity is safe, removed, tidy. It’s an exercise in sympathy.

Your identity is more at risk when the book reads like a parallel universe from which your life could have plausibly split off, requiring only a few changes in the cosmic organization. This is an exercise in self-empathy. It is not “fun.”

The act of reading Meng Jin’s Little Gods forced me, exhausted and unwilling, to grapple with the paradox of intimacy: how close strangers’ or even fictional stories were to me, and how distant my own family history was.

Growing up in Texas, I didn’t want the bleak details of a life in a third world country. I wanted assimilation into the clean, sunny Wonderbread of American suburbia. Individualism! Freedom! Coca-Cola! The snippets I had were never normal or easy: a vaccination scar that no one else had, a secret birthdate I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about.

Like all kids, I saw parents as only parents, and not as people with backstories, youths, or traumas. I knew if I asked for the details of their past, I would have to find a way to nestle those stories into my own identity. But I knew those stories would be spiky, and my conception of self as a child was soft and undefined. I didn’t want to have to walk around carrying their stories and feeling them scrape against my insides.

By the time I was a college student, I knew it was time to know more about that third world country. But rather than face my family directly with my questions, I took an academic route. Learning about China through books, through classes, through the scholarly neutrality of a university felt easier than just asking my family questions. Studies gave me context, and context felt like armor for the day I would one day have to ask them.

Meng Jin too strives for a formal complexity in Little Gods. Jin reaches beyond details of setting and character to high-brow, academic themes like the physics of time and of thermodynamics, about the structures of the Chinese and English languages. The book’s intellectual themes coalesce into a manifesto about the fragility and unknowability of the present, future, and past.

A cast of characters remember their lives and their relationships with Su Lan, the young woman in labour at the beginning of the book. The newborn from the opening scene, Liya, returns to China seventeen years later to better understand her mother, a physicist more obsessed with reversing the “the arrow of time” than raising her young child:

In her thought experiment, under the reversal of the second law, the thermodynamic arrow of time would run backward, toward order instead of disorder. The mind’s arrow would run parallel to it, so instead of remembering what had already occurred, we would be able to predict what was about to occur. The cost of seeing into the future, however, was that we would lose our memory of the past, and with it, any explanation of how we arrived at our present state

The intellectual conceit is fragile. Jin flips back and forth between people’s memories and potential futures, causing the narrative to stretch so much that it threatens to snap like a rubber band and undermine its much more compelling emotional core.

But sometimes the intellectual distractions felt like a respite. They were a welcome break from dealing with Liya’s personal discovery, a narrative that constantly reminded me of the blind spots in my own personal history.

It’s questions about personal history that Su Lan’s sudden death forces Liya to confront and that catalyze her own personal journey of discovery. Liya leaves her college life and flies to Shanghai, the city of her mother’s last home. An elderly neighbor observes Liya after the young woman has rooted through her mother’s apartment-cum-mausoleum: “But you are not interested in the truth; you are interested in answers.”

Through her time in China, Liya, desperate to be “from somewhere,” eventually finds the answers to her early life in China, the identity of her father, and begins to understand her mother as a person and not as a parent. Su Lan was a headstrong but insecure woman who sees constant migration as a escape from poverty of her roots. In the end Liya comes to terms with the unheroic circumstances of her birth and with the imperfect love of her flighty, cold, intellectual mother.

Liya’s story is complicated by a national history of the June Fourth incident, but that national history alone, she finds, is too easy a story to tell. More brutally, Liya realizes, the story of June Fourth is specifically hers and her mother’s: not because it is a solid immigrant narrative, but because its narrative has been flipped inside out and backward by Su Lan’s purposeful concealment of unhappy facts. Immigrant stories are personal stories.

At the end of the novel, Liya sits in a train station with her mother’s ashes and imagines a cleaner, easier, more “authentic” story for an alternative Liya:

How attractive this person was to me, this person who, in her lifetime, filled in rootlessness with a story so deep in the mud of history it could be passed as identity—as self! She was the kind of person I’d always dreamed of becoming without a notion of how to do it, a person admired for possessing an authoritative moral center, who, when called to, can speak with assured gravity about past and present, personal and global moral failings….even as I knew she was me I envied her for carrying her history with the dignity of possession.

It would take my mom another six years to leave China after that gruesome, hopeless night. My parents moved to the United States in 1996; I joined them two years later. But I would not hear her recount this story, in full detail, until last month. And I probably would have waited even longer to ask, had this book not landed in my hands this year.

There's the story you read in a book, and then there's how a book can force you to consider your own story. Among all the calls for representation in the arts, the most prominent is the call to give more people with diverse histories the opportunity to tell their stories. But very few address about how published works of art can help us simply hold our stories, rather than cast them off, to give people back their history so they carry it “with the dignity of possession” — rather than buckling under the silent burden of its weight.