Speak Mandarin, Not Dialect
by Elizabeth Haynes
Thistledown, 1999
Review by Patra Reiser
In stories with titles such as "All She Wants," "The
Great Unlonely Silences," "Krishna saw the Universe in his mother's,
father's mouth," and "Pido la Palabra," Alberta writer
Elizabeth Haynes gives us a cast of characters with broken ties, whether
to country, family, or lovers. If, as Salman Rushdie says, that beyond
physical alienation, all of us are exiles from our past, then the past
is catching up with the men and women in Speak Mandarin, Not Dialect.
Memories can be triggered by a Sarah Vaughan song in a gym, or a raging
fever in India. Her voices are convincing, if a little earnest at times,
delicately projecting the dreams and disappointments of each character:
"His hands feel lighter,
less substantial, young, hands that never grew up. 'Do you know where
you're going to?' drifts from the jukebox, their grad song. She looks
at the blackheads on his forehead. She is Barbara Clare Thomas, B.Sc.,
R.N., twenty-nine. Who had an escape plan. And where did it get her?
Right back where she started."
In this story, "Meeting of the Waters," the aforementioned
Barbara has left her home in Kamloops and made a success of herself yet
still feels discontent. She has nostalgically returned home, spending
an evening with an old boyfriend. Haynes capture a certain Gen-X kind
of feeling, a generational Zeitgeist perhaps, never being happy in the
moment, forever looking to the past or searching into the future. With
a great eye for detail, she situates us in the exotic locales of her stories,
whether evoking the smell of ponderosa pine and sage or pinpointing the
image of a pathetic beggar boy in Delhi.
Some of the reader experience is marred, however, by errors and clunky
writing. For example, in her first story, "African Sleeping Sickness:
Some Conversations with my Father," a world traveller's father is
about to leave this mortal coil:
"My father worries
about dying, though he doesn't tell me that. He has sent me a story
to edit, set in William's Lake, about Joe from the Sugar Cane Reserve
who won a million in the Irish Sweepstakes, wouldn't take his meds or
go for the surgery my father arranged in Vancouver, died."
I had to reread this sentence quite a few times, which frustratingly
interrupted the flow at the end of the story. Perhaps my biggest problem
with this collection was with Hayne's endings. She quite capably, and
at times, hauntingly, leads us through a story but then inexplicably hits
us over the head with a pregnant-with-meaning final line. She should have
more faith and confidence in her audience, assured that for the most part,
we are 'getting' what it is she's trying to tell us.
Patra
Reiser lives in Montreal.
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