“Ming”
by Han Ong
from the January 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker
Over the past few years, more and more of Han Ong’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. “Ming” is his seventh to appear in the magazine since her first showed up in the summer fiction issue in 2019. I think it’s time I paid more attention, as I’m not sure I’ve read any of the previously published ones, but I would like to get to know such a prolific New Yorker fiction writer.
Here is how “Ming” begins:
Thadeus had never offered to take Johnny Mac out for a meal before. This is new, Johnny Mac says, grinning. For twenty-five years, Johnny Mac worked as a tenant-rights lawyer. He is a fount of varied and surprising knowledge.
Thadeus orders a burger, fries, and a Coke, just like Johnny Mac.
Remember around 2015, 2016, when I was poet-in-residence at N.Y.U. Langone? Thadeus asks. The cancer ward. A section of the cancer ward.
Johnny Mac smiles. Not firsthand, but I’ve heard from the others. This is Thad with the hundred and one stories about cancer!
What others? Who’ve you been talking to?
Ed? Johnny Mac says. Lidell?
Ed is dead now—has been dead for three years. Lidell, who knows where he is. He disappeared from the meetings around 2018. Rumor has it that he took classes in coding and is now working for Google out in California.
What could they have said? I never told them much.
I look forward to your thoughts below!
I quite liked this and was surprised to see no comments. What most impacted MY reading was the suspense of what the character was going to do with this valuable inheritance, antique Chinese porcelain, which could single-handedly vault him into the realms of the quite rich if sold. He also is frightened of reverting to drinking if he becomes wealthy and also has qualms about why someone he didn’t even know well would give him such an item. I also kept worrying the item would break.
I didn’t even think much of form or style but would add that the poems, presumably by Han Ong, are themselves very nice.
The strength in this story is the tension between two traps that are renown for either bringing happiness or helping one to endure the pain of unhappiness; the hugely valuable expensive cup and overly consumed alcohol which the protagonist feels he needs to be avoid.
And the somewhat mitigating third thing is writing poetry. All three are prescriptions for finding or achieving happiness in life. But it’s difficult to read this story without feeling a huge sense of frustration.
Great symbols, the cup and the little plastic figures juxtaposed against one another. The plastic figures are way underpriced whereas the expensive cup is way overpriced.
It’s optimistic for Thadeus to play with the figures and the cup like a child undeterred and unswayed by the unspoken implied difficulty for an adult to achieve happiness of which a child is almost totally unaware.
Happiness through acquisition of money or a life role or profession that will offer fulfillment, or any satisfaction or whatever that can be wrangled out of fleeting engagement with others or another.
Becoming happy as an adult seems so impossible. Yet Thadeus’ poetry soothes his soul to some degree. The best part of this story is the empathy for the entrapped who craft the best solutions for impossible situations.
This story is so bleak. But it does get one thinking. And thinking is good rather than always ignoring what’s difficult to think about.