“Victory”, which can be found in the August 26th issue of the New Yorker, opens like a venerable folk tale. There’s a sequence of discoveries, of discoveries within discoveries until a secret is revealed: In Hong Kong, Li Hanlin is cheating on his wife, Lin Hong.
Often in stories it’s the smallest details that matter the most. I loved the quotidian ordinariness of the opening scene. LIn Hong is straightening up at her apartment. She is fixing up her husband’s drawers, presumably in their bureau or his desk. You’re always taking your life in your hands when you decide to sort through someone’s else’s stuff. This is one of the risks that can make marriage so dangerous.
LIn Hong discovers a small key. Yu Hua takes us through the whole domestic reasoning process, step by step. There’s no reason to rush the storytelling here. Life at home is generally not rushed. It’s more like an ant crawling from one side of the pavement to the other. perhaps mindless or perhaps terrified at the prospect of being crushed along the way.
I’ve discovered a small key. What can it be for? There’s a stimulating reflex of thought that occurs as Lin Hong tries to find a lock that the key will fit. The more fruitlessly she searches for the right lock, the more convinced you are that some secret is protected by that lock.
The discovery that you’ve been cursed. That your secure life is not what you’ve thought it was. The roof is going to collapse under the next heavy snow, ruining you and your possessions.
Lin Hong has been betrayed by her husband. What’s your choice: Flight or Fight? Lin Hong decides to engage her husband in marital warfare. And it’s here that she makes a fascinating discovery about her marriage. It has left her bereft of allies.
Yu Hua sets this up wonderfully. Lin Hong, calls their mutual acquaintances, trying to locate him. (He’s away on a business trip.) This is another, retro domestic ritual. The husband had left on a trip, so his spouse in reflex was sorting out his stuff. It’s simple and prosaic but it helps underpin how Lin Hong has discovered the key in the first place.
As Lin Hong calls their friends, in her trauma blurting out the ugly truth, we share her shock at the unsympathetic reception. Their family friends don’t back her, they back up her husband, either reacting with apathy, almost acting bored with the whole idea, or in outright denial. It hasn’t happened.
She realizes that “their” friends are really “his” friends. All their married life, she’s pretended that they were family friends, an illusion. With the crisis, she realizes she’s isolated herself socially, accepting the illusion of friendship with her husbands associates.
I’m going to leave Lin Hong here at her moment of maximum trauma and confusion. In the wonderfully modulated story that follows, you’ll encounter the reappearance of an old friend and an appearance of the other woman in which actions speak louder than words. There’s a soap opera quality to this old-fashioned story. But I happen to love the idea of soap operas, even if I don’t have the patience to watch any. In “Victory” the essence of “telenovelas”, in the best sense, is distilled.
