The Price Of Tea In China. - Review - book reviews

THE PRICE OF TEA IN CHINA by E. Shaskan Bumas. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. 205 pages. $22.95.

In "Flag of Fire"--the last of the eight stories in this collection, which received the 1993 Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction--Larry, an American teaching English in China, "often feared that English class existed in a parallel universe, and things said there had absolutely nothing to do with anything outside the class." Some of E. Shaskan Bumas's stories are like that too: hermetic worlds ingeniously imagined but filled with characters, motivations, events, and even language that fail to resonate with any external reality. They amuse during the reading but lack a lasting impact.

Bumas shapes each story around a unique situation and relates it in a different narrative tone and voice, from third- to first-person, male, female, and even androgynous. Often he seems to be deliberately undermining the short story's expectations for plot, character, and development, frustrating the reader's assumptions of how a story will resolve through consequential action. Several of the works are episodic accumulations in which anything can happen next. The characters appear to be "on," self-consciously performing, assuming identifies like costumes, deliberately acting out instead of revealing themselves. Such role-playing entertains but finally disappoints because those stories never move beyond their eccentric surfaces to engage the reader as more than a spectator.

"Cupid's Carriers" is the cleverest of these experiments, told as the journal of a college freshman, Cindy, that focuses on her relationship with her roommate, Sheila, who insists on being called "Sheena" and affects a punk sensibility and an English accent as well as carrying on with a fifteen-year-old boy named Speed. Cindy's narrative entries are interspersed with Sheena's fragmented commentary. When Cindy writes, "We had fermented cereals for breakfast," Sheena notes, "Didn't we drink lager!" The story conveys a cartoon version of the initiation to college life, familiar at the core but a tour de force in Bumas's rendering. Still, it's an MTV world, staged outrageousness.

The two most successful stories in the collection are the most conventional. In "Flag of Fire" Larry's lessons do take on significance for student protests that reflect the democracy movement of Tiananmen Square. The English words he teaches his class--such as "mass" as the root of "massacre"--once part of a game, now speak directly to the lives of the young Chinese who become his responsibility. "The Attraction to Gravity" satisfies the familiar standards for a well-made story. In it Seth, the narrator, feels that he is competing with his lover's soon to be ex-husband for her daughter's affection. At the end, just before the child drives off with her father, she turns and runs to Seth: "To everyone else it looked as though she jumped into my arms and landed against my chest. But they couldn't see the other part that passed through my skin and ribs and lodged in my heart."

Bumas can deliver an emotional impact. When he can integrate this ability with his inventiveness, he will fulfill his talent.

WALTER CUMMINS Fairleigh Dickinson University

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