Hattie Kong is born in Shandong province, China, her father a distant descendant of the Confucius family. Her mother is a Christian missionary. When she is 16, the cultural revolution begins and Hattie is sent away, to family in Iowa. But Iowa is a monoculture at this time, and a family in Massachusetts is found for her to live with as an exchange student. She hears nothing from her parents.
Gish Jen
Hattie grows up in the Hatch family, falling in love with Carter, the middle son, and investigating natural phenomena with him. It is Dr. Hatch who convinces Hattie to go into science. “You’re curious, interested in reality. Even the nature of our blindness interests you.” Dr. Hatch has a lab which Carter eventually runs. Hattie is hired, designing experiments to investigate Carter’s questions about the brain’s evolution. They have a brilliant partnership.
But science is competitive. Dr. Hatch thinks Hattie and Carter’s relationship is dangerous to the lab. Carter does not stand up for her. Hattie has to leave. She eventually finds her way to teaching, marrying Joe, a history teacher, and making a best friend of another teacher, Lee. Hattie and Joe have a son.
When World and Town [2021], the novel by Gish Jen which tells Hattie’s story, opens, Hattie is 68. Her husband and best friend have died and she has moved to Riverlake, a small town in Vermont where the Hatches used to summer. She lives alone with her dogs and spends her time painting. She also has a group of friends who walk together and do yoga. It doesn’t feel like enough. She is as lonely as she has ever been.
In addition, Hattie’s Chinese relatives keep insisting that her parents, buried in Iowa, must be moved to the Kong family cemetery in China. The relatives are having misfortunes which they feel are due to this disrespect to family members.
A Cambodian family moves into a double-wide trailer, on a property just below Hattie’s windows. She makes friends with them, especially the young girl, Sophy, who speaks English well. And Carter appears in the town, having retired. He is building boats. The town is resisting a cell phone tower, and a big box discount store. Carter comes up with the best defense against the discount store at a town meeting. “The world has come to town.”
Sophy becomes the unwitting accomplice in a complicated family feud, fueled by a woman’s attempts to secure her family farm against her husband. The inability of the members of Sophy’s own family to find places in the town result in a horrendous beating. Hattie watches, helpless but open. When Sophy confesses to her, Hattie listens, tries to resolve the situation without bringing in the police, of whom the family is afraid. She enlists the help of her walking group, and Carter.
In the midst of this conflict, Carter admits he came to Riverlake to look for Hattie. She finds it hard to forgive him. He gave his life to science, not to her. He has also lost his wife. She tells him she left the lab because she needed a home. She was good with kids, teaching was satisfying. But Carter insists, “You can argue for the dignity of an ordinary life, but the higher precincts of science do make a person feel his dignity.” Hattie agrees that science, finding hard, repeatable results of experiments and sharing them, was wonderful.
When Carter turns up at the Cambodian family’s trailer with an excavator, to help with the drainage ditch the family is trying to build, the father quits his suicidal stance. The whole town is on hand, giddy with relief. They adopt the family into the town’s celebrations. Hattie watches the young people going to school at last. The woman who instigated the problems leaves town.
Hattie goes out to Iowa with a Chinese “bone picker” to retrieve her parents' urns. She sends them to Hong Kong to her relatives. They report that they are feeling a “big peace” once the ashes are interred in the Kong family cemetery. Carter moves in with Hattie. “They are the ones who lived.”
I loved Hattie, with her honesty, inability to believe in superstition and her tenacity. She makes moderate inroads into problems and doesn’t let go when times get tough. Though Carter has been in her thoughts her whole life, she had no expectation of seeing him again. Her late coming together with him is very moving.
