There is a disquieting and sometimes delightful sense of paranormal connection in these stories: Echoes, recurrences, and bizarre coincidences animate the drama of this collection. Through Bliss Montage’s dream logic, Ma destabilizes easy expectations-around speculative literature, Asian American literature, immigrant literature, trauma literature, and fiction itself-to gratifying effect. Discontented with the familiar grooves of the immigrant narrative or the survivor narrative or even the successful-American-writer-with-certain-expectations-placed-upon-her narrative, Ma finds her way out of stereotypes by way of the surreal, the nightmarish, and the psychological. A convalescent state, a business conference in a midsized city.” Dream logic prevails as a film professor immortalizes himself in a Magritte-like landscape, through a trapdoor a street drug brings on temporary invisibility a wealthy woman’s mansion is filled with a hundred ex-boyfriends a pregnant woman’s fetus slips its developing arm out of her vagina a ceremony in a foreign land involves burying oneself alive for one night. “Radisson like the hotel chain,” Ma writes.
To get a former boyfriend to stop calling her, a character lies that she has a new partner, pulling his name from thin air: Mark Radisson.
In more than one story, characters dream the most banal of dreams: dreams of their exes. In “Tomorrow,” a woman dozes off, again at an airport, awaiting her flight home. In “Returning,” a woman wakes after an overseas flight to discover that her husband has already deboarded and left the airport, taking with him her passport and luggage. In “Office Hours,” a student enjoys naps-not a euphemism-on her professor’s sofa, while he works at his desk. The feeling of entering and exiting a dream recurs in each of Bliss Montage’s stories.
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