“Javi”
by Han Ong
from the June 10 & 17, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
It’s always great to welcome in the summer with the annual New Yorker fiction issue. This year’s issue features three pieces, including Han Ong’s “Javi.”
Han Ong started publishing nearly three decades ago, though most of his work is as a playwright. Between 1990 and 1997, when he was in his twenties, he published fourteen plays (though none that I can see since). He then published two novels in the early 2000s, Fixer Chao and The Disinherited, but none since. I suppose I can feel a little bit okay, then, that I’ve never heard of him.
Here we have “Javi,” which begins with a four-, err, sixteen-year-old boy finding an 82-year-old painter in order to help out:
Are you sixteen or fourteen?
Sixteen. I look younger than I am.
Because if you’re fourteen I can’t hire you.
I can cut firewood. I understand you got a horse? I can feed it. Look after it. I ride, I’ve rode. I see your pickup there. I can drive stick. Bring back some stuff you need from the grocery store, mail your letters at the post office. I can carry your paintings for you. I can carry your paint for you. Buy some more when you need it.
That’s not, perhaps, the most compelling quote I’m pulling there, and the next chunk of the story is a playwright’s back-and-forth between the two, evaluating the need for help as well as the quality of the help being offered. Hopefully this story really packs in some great moments in this relationship.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
Admire this more than anything I have seen here in a while. It looks at so many different issues and threads in a detached yet totally understanding, knowlegable and caring way.
There is a mesmerizing quality to this story: it lingers, and Javi’s voice is hauntingly understated, yet painfully distant.
Javi has decided to live on ‘this side’ of the border wall, and he celebrates his decision and his adopted Americanness with a cheeseburger and fries. It’s a story of contrasts, the collision of separated worlds. Mass-produced impersonal cheeseburgers share space with lovingly hand-crafted, homemade Tamales. It’s a story of renunciation and adoption. The elevated world of art gives way to the real world of immigrants and fake ids. A story of two independent personal journeys: Javi the undocumented immigrant journeying into a new life, and the 82 year old Painter distancing away from her fame and her past.
The writing style feels metallic to me, deliberately so, as if the writing itself like the narrator of the story, aspires to a deliberate distancing from the lucidity normally expected of New Yorker prose.
Javi is 14. Too cornered to be a juvenile delinquent, too young to not be in school. Pre-adolescent, innocent Javi is like a seed, eager to grow and flourish but in need of nourishment and opportunity. The Painter, quite the contrast, is at a point in her life where she is poised for the full surrender of desires and aspirations. She provides empty space. Javi fills that space.
The Painter reminds me of people I know, people who have done the surrendering, and rejoined the real world, and filled their empty spaces with new discoveries; and in her case it’s a 14 year old whose innocence and labor and aspiration fill the new void in her heart and in her mind. It’s a love story: Art and Real life like two lovers, colliding and then coalescing.
The story haunts me. I keep listening to it.
Deb, I appreciate your comments. I struggled with this story. At first, it did not really engage me very much but it wasn’t bad. Then as the relationship between the painter and Javi started to develop it got better. Here were two very people from different worlds brought together by mutual need. But as the story went on I had trouble really finding how the stories of each of these characters might be connected more than that. I thought there might be or should be a more clear parallel of their situations, but I strained to find it, which made it feel more like two stores than one story with two aspects to it. Your comments give me something more to consider in trying to see the greater unity in the story, but I’m not sure I see it. Yet.
Thank you David! I’m entirely new in literary appreciation/criticism and so my comments (tentative, conjectural) are a (daring) departure from my usual posture.
This site has been a huge blessing, and I’m much happier in life because of it; kid you not. Have learnt an incredible amount from its regular contributors: Betsy. Trevor. David. Sean. Larry. Ken. Aaron. Arlene. William. Paul. Numerous others. Most grateful to you all.
Usually I actually read a New Yorker story (or listen to it) only AFTER you guys have reviewed it on this site and then only if the discussion intrigues me. Your site is an essential part of my “filtering process” for my reading life. Much appreciated!!
I think Deb makes good connections between the two characters, but I also found their situations to have enough parallels for coherence. Both are somewhat outside mainstream society (although she is more secure as a U.S. citizen and more financially stable) and they also form a sort of symbiotic relationship which has an unstated non-sexual intimacy that was moving in a subtle way. The story also has a good, stark, clearness sort of like desert light or like the lines of the painter’s work. I was becoming a bit disenchanted with this issue as I really disliked the Andrea Lee story and thought the Coates, although much better, really didn’t work as an excerpt but did make the novel itself seem promising. It felt like the theme of the issue was determining the pieces selected but this worked both thematically and as a short story.
Deb:
Thanks for your excellent commentary on “Javi”. You pinpoint the strengths of this story very precisely which gives anyone unsure of how the reading will be to give it a go. They can read for what the author would like the reader to see. Some may feel what occurs in the story is highly unlikely. Yet sometimes fiction is the art of making the unlikely seem inevitable if reality or real things are skillfully used. And its not to say that unlikely things can’t still happen along one’s way in life. Even simple stuff.
No matter how overburdened one can become by the inevitable arrival of harsh reality, there always seems to be a slight chance of a little grace, bit of redemption or as in this story, “Re-new-al”.
The thing that impresses me most about this story is the sheer quantity of life force that pours out in small sentences and how one can’t quite categorize it very easily. It is this intense yearning for something more after one is too old or almost anything at all when one is too young. So much effort to live, just to stay alive is exerted by Javier’s mother and the other women.
Contrasts of all sorts are skillfully used in this story. Little details are used to establish the reality of a fictional relationship. I liked the formal remote quality of Javier’s communication with the “artist” they respected each other’s journey so as not to get into arguments over each other’s choices.
Human worth counts for more than ephemeral fame. Fame is like a birth certificate or artistic VIP citizenship attained that validates a person’s existence yet once attained, it sort of invalidates most of the person’s huge amount of struggle and effort to get there.
A few more thoughts:
Towards the end of the short story “Javi,” the miserable plight of Javi’s mother and the other women and of Javi himself details a cumulatively horrendous situation that urgently needs to be alleviated.
Han Ong focuses on the fundamental decency of these people and even though they are fiction, they still represent real people.
As a writer, Ong draws out a feeling of the necessity that something needs to be done. This seems the simple takeaway from this story. And he very carefully remains almost totally nonpolitical about it.
Political considerations of opposed viewpoints or even small or large differences in perception complicate getting anything done or the remote possibility of any positive result achieved.
To me the simple clarity everyone (including all politicians) should have on this is in an honest way is: “Something can and should be done.” In “Javi” Ong emphasizes this necessity which repeatedly resonates in one’s head long after a one has finished reading this story
Others might find this naive. But logically it is where we could start. Providing for this to possibly occur is a traditional purpose of some of our best writers.
I agree with the above comments on the good writing in this story and on the interest generated by the development of the connection between Javi and the Painter. When Javi’s mother and her friends came in it was still all right, though it tended to move the story away from what I thought was its center.
When Javi drove the women to Los Angeles, I got confused. What happened to the plot with Javi and the painter? Was that just a setup? It seemed to be written too strong for that. I have the sense of two stories, neither satisfying. It is as though the author was working on the Javi-and-Painter plot, then couldn’t figure out where to go with it, so he threw in this gratuitous topical immigrant angle. Which to me seemed like a dud. Much like the T.C. Boyle story about the Mexican man with MDR-TB. Political , not artistic.
I’m not saying that immigration and politics generally are not important. I watched all of both Democratic debates. But I think a story has to stand on its artistic merits, not its emotional appeal in the social sphere, and this one doesn’t, for me.
Larry, your last 2 grafs, especially the last sentence, “Providing for this to possibly occur is a traditional purpose of some of our best writers.”, forcefully brought to my mind “Grapes of Wrath”. A “topical” story but also a great human tale.
William:
I agree that “Javi” may have fragmented into two stories but as you wrote, the first one was kind of dropped, so the second part kind of showed up out of nowhere. Making two stories cohere well enough within one another is probably technically one of the most difficult feats a writer can attempt to accomplish (especially in a short story). But from the precise creative thought given to the first three quarters of the story, it seems to me that he could have done it but then it may have had to have been a longer story. The structure of the first part might have had to change.
“Grapes of Wrath” is an excellent example of a humanitarian social novel. The “immigrants” were immigrating to California from drought ravaged Oklahoma if I have that right? Many moved to the port city of Long Beach (near where I grew up) and are thought to be partly responsible for its early growth and success in the early 1940s and 1950s.
The positive influence of a certain type of short story or novel on a social situation is only vaguely or indirectly seen in the apparent timing. About a month (or so) after “Javi” ran in The New Yorker, Nancy Pelosi said she would support the Senate’s immigration bill rather than the House version because there was a better chance it would be passed and immigrant children or older teenagers like Javi would get help in the form of food and shelter (and whatever other help the bill may provide) sooner rather than later. Did she see Han Ong’s story or did someone mention it to her? Who knows?
But books like “Grapes of Wrath” or stories like “Javi” reach out to readers with an urgency and immediacy that probably gets communicated to others and contributes to bringing about some sort of corrective action. There may be no direct connection. But against all odds the nation’s spiritual energy gets shifted into a more positive direction. I never liked Nancy Pelosi much. But God Bless her for having the guts to come out for the kids and young adults, Javi’s age and turning away from all the political games. She didn’t cave in. She stepped up big time.
Larry —
The connections between fiction and social, political life is a tenuous one. One hopes that good literature furthers a strong social conscience. Hard to prove.
As for Ong making two stories out of one, I am not pleased with the way that came out. I can’t imagine why he did that. I thought about how he might have continued the first theme, Javi and the Painter. It could have been done as a true “human interaction” tale. E.g., Javi’s mother and her friends come to live at the Painter’s compound. Javi’s mother stirs him up about how they have nothing and the Painter is well off, or at least comfortable. Javi reluctantly takes things– goods or money — from the Painter but feels bad about betraying her. Trapped between mother and employer/benefactor. Later the painter moves to her retirement home and obliquely lets Javi know that she had been aware that he was cheating her. How does Javi feel? What has he learned? That would have been a story worth telling, I think. Though not as topical or sentimental as what Ong wrote.
William,
Agree that the connections between social/political life and fiction are tenuous. And that the first part of the story is more random and individual and actually not so topical unless a reader has or brings that perspective.
Your excellent suggested restructuring of the story seems quite workable and would reconcile the two different paths it was taking even if muting the topical theme. The outsider aspect of the story reverberates most.
We don’t know what Han was thinking and ultimately, it is his story. But it is good that it is well worked out and written in a way that readers can think with it and take away whatever unique perspectives they might glean out of it. Thus it is worthwhile reading “Javi.”
Definitely worthwhile. Anything that engages us and gets us thinking about lit. And society.