Little Fires Everywhere
“Isn’t it fair to say that if May Ling stays with you and Mr. McCullough, she will effectively be divorced from her birth culture?”
This is the question that lawyer Ed Lim poses to Mrs. McCullough in Celeste Ng's 2017 novel, Little Fires Everywhere. May Ling is the Chinese daughter of waitress and single mother Bebe Chow, who abandoned her on the steps of a fire station in the depths of postpartum depression. Since then, Mr. and Mrs. McCullough have adopted May Ling, naming her Mirabelle. But after Bebe gets back on her feet, she finds out about the adoption, knocking on the McCulloughs' door until a policeman arrives to ask her to leave.
With no other recourse, Bebe files suit with the assistance of lawyer Ed Lim. The case is a flashpoint of divided opinion in the local community: should Bebe still be able to raise May Ling as her original mother, or would she be better off with the McCulloughs, who have the financial resources to support her?
Unlike May Ling, most Asian adoptees in the US have historically been born in Asia, and adopted directly from their country of birth. International adoption began in 1955 with the adoption of Korean "war orphans" by American families following the Korean War. In the following decades, as Western birth rates dropped, international adoptions increased, especially in 1992 when China began allowing international adoption of Chinese orphans, whose numbers had increased as a consequence of the "One Child" policy.
Adoption is already a difficult topic to consider, and Ng takes care to portray both sides of the court case in a fair light. The McCulloughs had spent years trying to conceive a child of their own without success, and so they adopted May Ling with the hope of raising her as Mirabelle. From her birth, they raise her through her first birthday, staying up until the early hours of the morning to rock her to sleep, and the love that they show in caring for Mirabelle for an entire year cannot be easily dismissed.
That being said, the transracial nature of the adoption cannot be ignored. May Ling is a Chinese child, whereas Mr. and Mrs. McCullough are a white couple. The town where they live is a real place: Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of the first planned communities in America. There, conformity is prized above almost everything else, from the color of window curtains facing the street to the location of electric meters. It is against this background that Ng paints the picture of a community that chose to approach racial integration in a similarly idealistic fashion.
As early as the 1950s, Shaker Heights began to take on the problem of racial diversity through careful planning. Ng herself spent her teenage years growing up in Shaker, after moving away from Big Straw's beloved hometown of Pittsburgh at the age of 10. It's during these years, the 1990s, that the book is set. "I took it for granted that race was a big topic of conversation," Ng said in an interview with the Guardian, describing racial sensitivity training and neighborhood associations to encourage integration. Yet even by then, some of the attitudes towards race expressed remained surprisingly surface-level. This is evident as expressed in the book itself:
“Thank god we live in Shaker,” Lexie said one day during a provocative episode entitled Stop Bringing White Girls Home to Dinner! “I mean, we’re lucky. No one sees race here.”
“Everyone sees race, Lex,” said Moody. “The only difference is who pretends not to.”
As Ng said, "What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn’t see race, that you were color-blind.” Yet this attitude towards race fails to account for the reality that people of different races experience the world differently.
Nowhere in the book is this more evident than when Ed Lim cross-examines Mrs. McCullough in the court case. "What have you done, in the time she's been with you, to connect her to her Chinese culture?" He asks about the language, the food, the kind of books that May Ling will grow up with. The most powerful question is when he asks, surprisingly, about dolls.
“Have you ever seen a Chinese Barbie?” he asks.
Mrs. McCullough flushed. “Well—I’ve never gone looking for one. Yet. But there must be one.”
“There isn’t one. Mattel doesn’t make one.”
Indeed, as Ed Lim shows us, the color-blind views of Shaker Heights residents also leaves them blind to the complexities of growing up as a racial minority in American society. As members of the Asian diaspora, representation in the culture we live in is more than just something "nice": being able to see ourselves reflected in popular culture is a crucial aspect to understanding our own identities.
Though the McCulloughs have the financial stability to provide Mirabelle with anything they could think to buy, the experience of growing up with a cultural identity is not something that can be bought. This is not to say that having Asian family members is necessary to develop an Asian cultural identity. Rather, in posing this dilemma, Ng asks us to consider what it means to have such an identity, and to consider how members of the Asian diaspora develop such an identity in a country where representation in popular culture remains limited.
As far as issues of representation go, Ng herself has had to consider her own role as a prominent Asian writer living in a Western country. Certainly, her writing has not gone unnoticed; in the first week after its publication, Little Fires Everywhere shot to 7th place on The New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list, and a television adaptation is underway. Yet in a society where work by Asian writers and artists is only beginning to gain recognition, Ng has struggled with the perception of having to represent an entire race through her work.
In an interview with Celeste Ng and Amy Tan, the acclaimed author of The Joy Luck Club, the two authors discuss the challenge of breaking out of the Asian-American mold, and moving past the idea that all Asian writers are all telling the same story. Ng jokes about writing an essay titled "Why I Don't Want to Be the Next Amy Tan," expressing her frustration at reviewers who might compare her to other Asian writers due to her race, rather than judging her writing on its own merit. The prominence of Tan's works has fortunately allowed them to gain wider recognition: "It was so great to see eventually… that my books were no longer Asian American literature, but they were simply American literature," she remarks. Ng replies: "It’s as if [reviewers] suddenly recognized that what you had to say might resonate with people who weren’t just Asian American, right?"
In that sense, this article does a disservice to Little Fires Everywhere by only examining the areas where the novel sheds light on the Asian-American experience, without even introducing the main characters—most of which are not Asian. But the book addresses so much more: what it means to be a good mother, or even a mother at all; the paradox of living in an open-minded community with rigid rules, and in a supposedly utopian community where class divide still remains evident; and the importance of viewing situations and people from different perspectives. I'll have to blame the limited focus on the fact that this is an Asian interest magazine. Overall, though, Little Fires Everywhere is an eloquently written piece of fiction that asks readers to think deeply about these topics, and I definitely enjoyed reading it. I can't wait to see what Ng will write next.