'Fiona and Jane': Short stories
In Jean Chen Ho's debut collection, two young women move in and out of each other's lives through thick and thin.
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OK, I’ll admit it: I wanted to read “Fiona and Jane,” Jean Chen Ho’s debut story collection, primarily because I’d heard it was about two young Taiwanese American women and their decades-long friendship. I wanted to see a version of myself in a book but with a specific kind of friend I lacked growing up, unless you counted my female cousins, two of whom are actually Canadian.
Not really fair, to lay such expectations on a book. But “Fiona and Jane” fulfilled them and went beyond.
Take the opening story, “The Night Market.” Ho uses one of Taiwan’s top tourist destinations, Shilin Night Market in the capital of Taipei, as the setting for a story about a pivotal father-daughter moment. Jane, clutching a newly hatched secret to her heart while visiting her long-distant father in his homeland, learns that she and her mother have been less central to his life than she thought — more tourists than residents. Back at home in Los Angeles, devastated, she rejects a gift from her piano teacher, Ping.
Adults were all the same. Even Ping. They were always feeding you some line, expecting you to eat it up without any questions. I’d thought she was different, like a friend’s cool older sister, someone who listened.
… The trip to Taiwan had taken everything away.
This isn’t just about Ping’s gift anymore, is it?
Ho tracks Fiona and Jane from childhood through early adulthood as they navigate their coming-of-age in an America they claim fully as theirs even when it doesn’t claim them back. Through shared nights out, through affairs and marriages (the latter all Fiona’s), through the pushes and pulls of a changing society, their bond tightens and loosens but remains. In the titular story, Jane and Fiona, now in their late 30s, openly discuss this bond at last as Jane brings up a traumatic event from 15 years prior.
“I needed you,” I said quietly. “I needed you when it happened. When he—”
Fiona was silent.
“You left.”
“I had to leave,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. “Because of Jasper?”
“I’m sorry,” Fiona said. “I just had to.”
Fiona then asks why Jane didn’t leave Los Angeles as well.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was waiting for you to come back.”
My childhood was punctuated by my mother’s visits with her closest friends from college. They had all immigrated to the United States and settled within a few hours’ drive of one another, spending time together whenever they could. One summer, all four of them managed to coordinate family schedules for a group reunion.
I was carousing with the other kids when an odd sound caught my attention. I recognized it immediately as coming from my mother. She was crying as she sat in her friend’s kitchen amid the other women, who were consoling her with gentle murmurs. One of them saw me staring. She quickly assured me my mother would be fine, that their conversation had merely dredged up a painful memory. One that my mother had never shared with me, but one that her friends seemed to know all about.
My mother didn’t turn her face my way. Instead, she looked at the other women with a expression of trust and vulnerability I’d never seen before. They’d known her long before I came on the scene. They had been there for her back then, and they were there for her now. I knew then that I was looking at something special, something we should all be so lucky to have.