Review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

T.C. Chai lives through and flees the Cultural Revolution, swimming from Canton to Hong Kong and eventually settling down in America, where he meets and marries Ding and becomes a successful banker and little Hetty's father.  When an old flame shows up stateside, Chai falls in love with what he remembers romance to have been.  Eventually, in a kinder, more loving version of The Age of Innocence, husband is returned to wife, and, this time, both are happier for it.  The plot of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream (John Derbyshire, St. Martin's Press, 1996) is nothing to the mad cyberspace thrillers, cozy, banal romances, and volumes of slick sadomasochistic hipness floating through our bookstores, and I would have liked it for that alone.

But I recommend it to everyone because a gifted hand swirls through brilliantly observed settings, from Chinese living rooms (here and at home) to the terrible swelling sea to Plymouth Notch, and a gifted ear takes in and makes real the voices of all the characters, so beautifully heard that, even in our ignorance, we come to understand the different Chinese accents, from Mandarin to (my favorite) Dinglish.   The people are real and flawed and lovable, and so are the ghosts -- most particularly Calvin Coolidge, Chai's new hero, "a true Confucian".  With the most exceptional mix of charm and anguish, Derbyshire paints Chai's vision of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, life in the suburbs, the pleasures and pains of Scrabble, the implausibility of Amy Tan's novels, and the struggle of the powerful, shimmering past with the unlikely, cherished present.  Derbyshire offers us everything peculiar to our country that Chai can see, and everything human that we can see in him.