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BASS 2023: Ling Ma, “Peking Duck” from The New Yorker/7/11-18/2023 | A Just Recompense

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As I’ve been reading this volume, I’ve been admiring many of the stories, some for their technique, some for their impact. But I’ve been waiting for the story I would love. And here it is. It’s a story in six parts. Five of those parts read like an essay or memoir; that just adds to the overall impact. It’s a story about writing: a story about framing a story, about who tells a story and why it matters, about the stories we tell, how we write our reality every day even if we never pick up a pen. And yes, it’s about appropriation. But it’s not just a technical discussion, it’s an example of how a story can reveal different sides of a person, can shift from one mood to another. We experience it, we don’t just read about it. I keep thinking of it as an Escher staircase of a story, a Matryoshka doll of a story, a recursive function of a story: a story that keeps reframing itself to demonstrate reframing, that keeps shifting, opening new views, keeps going inward and ending up outward. It’s

TNY Illustration (detail) by Vanilla Chi One day in spring 2020, I was jogging around a runner’s track near my apartment, and I started forming this fragmented narrative that begins with Iron & Silk , then loops around to the Lydia Davis story. This trail of thoughts seemed diaphanous and almost flimsy. It was almost as if I were trying to compose an essay, though I already knew it was a story. ….When I got home, I laid out a partial outline of fragmented sections that followed a loose narrative. Some sections seemed to represent sides of a long-running argument I’ve been having wi

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