Review of It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away
“Even if he takes a little while to get there, the payoff at the end is greater for the time it took. The China Noyes builds is rife with details that roar off the page and revisiting the same interactions and slathering them in tense, conflicted emotions ultimately works out to Noyes' benefit because, to paraphrase Jeff, it's the little things that make up Beijing.”
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“Imagine Romeo and Juliet in mainland China with upset families, divergent cultures, public disapproval and a suspicious government — a complicated mess for two ardent lovers...What makes this novel special is that it goes past the Romeo and Juliet theme to all the daunting complications bicultural couples face. Jeff and Bian Fu's situation is so daunting that many readers won't know which outcome they're cheering for. ”
Read the full review at The Winnipeg Free Press website.
“A bittersweet song to Beijing, to the Chinese language, to the Chinese, It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away is foremost a lovers' tune, tender and sad. Steve Noyes knows China and knows the human heart, and entwines them beautifully. A lovely, truthful novel, sung without a false note. ”
“I arrived in Canada from China in 1955 as a five-year-old. Fifty years later when I returned to China for the first time, it was as someone with no memory of her homeland; it was as someone raised in the West. However, because I am Chinese and lived with Chinese parents, I had some innate understanding of Chinese culture—nothing that I am able to explain in concrete terms, but rather something that had been bred in the bone, learned through a process of osmosis. If not adept, I was at least familiar with the indirect way in which Chinese people will often communicate. My husband frequently refers to the Chinese “no” that really means “yes.” And heaven help the poor person who takes the Chinese “no” at face value. And yet even I who had grown up with some sense of this oblique style of interaction experienced an East–West divide when I landed in China as an adult and found myself dealing with relatives there. At times it was hard to interpret what was really expected; other times the questioning was so direct that by western standards it would have been considered intrusive. In China, people whom I had just met would ask me how much money I made, how many bathrooms were in my house … Needless to say, this line of questioning raised my hackles and it took me a while to realize that such interrogation was considered routine and just a display of general interest on the part of your new acquaintance. On the other hand, ask someone at the dinner table if he or she wants another bowl of rice and get ready for the Chinese no that might mean yes. If you do not read the situation right, you just might end up offending someone. These are just a couple of minor examples of the social quagmire that awaits anyone who becomes more than superficially involved with Chinese culture.
So you can imagine what it must have been like for Jeff Mott, the protagonist in It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away. Jeff, let’s face it, is a lost soul. It is 1997 and he is fast approaching 40, divorced, with a young daughter, aimless and broke. When a friend offers him a place to stay at his apartment in Beijing, Jeff, with his life in Canada going nowhere, decides to accept. After several weeks in China he finds a job teaching English to Chinese adults at a school in the small town of San Tiao, just north of Beijing.
Jeff is fascinated by China: the crowds, traffic, food, smells, noise, the Beijing neighbourhoods and, most of all, the women. At the same time he seems to operate in a fog, struggling with a new language, befuddled by unspoken rules of social conduct. The first meeting he has with his Chinese teaching colleagues ends in an awkward silence, leaving him totally perplexed. There is not a single name exchanged. Did he say something wrong? The poor man. I could not help smiling as I read—if only I had been there to explain. In Chinese society, unless two people are on intimate terms, names are rarely exchanged. It is your position in the family, the workplace, the social gathering that counts. You are older uncle on mother’s side, doctor Fong, teacher Lee, lawyer Chan, mother of … Whenever I visited with my relatives in China, I was never called by my name. It was either younger aunt on father’s side or younger aunt on mother’s side, and, in some cases, ancient aunt on mother’s side.
In addition to never completely understanding the often cryptic codes of behaviour, Jeff finds himself in a country where there are strict rules for everything and there are people on guard to make sure the rules are observed. Jeff discovers that something as routine as inviting a friend to visit his apartment is fraught with tension. The presence of his guest suddenly gives the security guard the right to ask personal questions and check identity cards. This can be nerve-racking, even more so if the person, unbeknownst to Jeff, is living illegally in Beijing.
A few weeks into his teaching assignment, while Jeff is riding the bus to Beijing, he meets a young woman dressed in a halter top and a yellow mini skirt, reading an English text. Bian Fu is irresistible, with her beautiful face, slim waist and pouting lips. Jeff strikes up a conversation and, before she gets off, he scribbles his phone number on a piece of paper and hands it to her. To his surprise, she phones the following day. And so begins a courtship between a vulnerable guy from the West and a needy, yet complex, girl from China.
It is obvious from the beginning that Jeff is deeply attracted to Bian Fu and would like to have a serious relationship. He would like her to be his girlfriend and, if things work out, get married. But it is not that simple. As Jeff gradually realizes, nothing in China is that simple. For one thing, after they have been dating for a while, she reveals to him that she is living with her boyfriend and his mother; she tells Jeff that she is unhappy and about to end the relationship. With Bian Fu convincing him that she will leave her boyfriend and marry him, Jeff promises to return when he departs for Canada at the finish of his teaching contract.
A few months later, Jeff does indeed return, this time on a teaching assignment in Beijing. Bian Fu is now living with her mother. Her parents live apart and when she takes him to her mother’s home, he feels out of place, at best tolerated. The only person who seems to genuinely like him is Bian Fu’s two-and-a-half year-old niece, who likes to play with knives. And because of his lack of fluency in Chinese, he wonders what they are saying about him. He would like to meet Bian Fu’s father in order to request the letter of permission that Jeff as a foreigner requires to marry his daughter. But she remains evasive. Jeff becomes more and more suspicious; his relationship with her begins to feel treacherous. Then he discovers something more about Bian Fu, and the extent of her deception is revealed. Nevertheless, she insists on her love for him and affirms her desire to marry him. When he leaves for Canada at the close of his second teaching contract, the future he has hoped for with her remains in limbo.
Once in Canada, Jeff continues to correspond with Bian Fu and encourages her to seek a resolution to their problems. But her letters remain elliptical and he wonders if he can ever truly trust the woman he loves, or indeed if he truly loves her.
Steve Noyes paints an affectionate portrait of China that is honest, intimate and layered. Through Jeff Mott, the reader moves beyond the tourist highlights into the schools, streets, parks and into the home of a particular family, experiencing the joys, frustrations and disappointments that come with exploring a country beyond its surface. But even more, this first novel shines a light on the complexities of love between a foreign man and a Chinese woman in China during the late 1990s and the vast cultural divide that separates them. It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away is a journey into the labyrinth of the human heart where logic has no place. But if you are like Jeff Mott and stay there long enough, you just might learn something about yourself.”
“The book moves quickly beyond stereotypes to describe a complex intercultural relationship, illustrating the difficulty of connecting across cultures and continents, while painting a vibrant pciture of a foreigner's life in China....
Noyes is a poet, and some of the lines perfectly evoke the lively, dirty, crowded chaos of Beijing and its village-like hutong communities. Sometimes these add up to wonderfully descriptive paragraphs which give the reader a 360-degree view of the streets, the people, the city.”
“It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away is a love story with a difference, for it is one in which cultural differences play a huge part. The story begins in 1997, not long before Hong Kong was handed over to China. The main character is Jeff Mott, a 37-year-old from Victoria, BC. Divorced, and father of eight-year-old Melissa, Jeff is at loose ends and jobless again. Invited by his friend Mark to stay with him for a while, Jeff arrives in Beijing and finds it “like stepping onto another planet” (11). Mark has worked there for four years but speaks no Chinese and associates only with other expatriates. Jeff is determined to live differently; he wants to learn to speak Chinese and to meet and get to know Chinese people, to get below the surface of tourist attractions to the real China.
He stays with Mark for two weeks, does a little travelling, and then accepts a position teaching English at the San Tiao College, north of Beijing. Before long he meets Wang Bian Fu and the two become friends, and eventually lovers. But Chinese tradition and Jeff’s limited language skills become barriers to a happy relationship. Jeff is upset by the way the couple is looked down upon when they go out together because he is a foreigner, and by the way his every move is governed by what is acceptable to the Chinese government and Chinese society. For example, he is criticized by officials for not meeting the standards set for foreigners by wearing his hair too long and not tucking in his shirt.
Security guards at the hotel where he lives constantly take down information of who he is with, presumably to pass it on to the police, and when he speaks in public people are occasionally planted in the audience to ask him controversial questions about Tibet. When he questions Bian Fu about her family or her past, she accuses him of being rude. He also finds it hard to accept the way her every move is apparently governed by her parents. “You don’t understand,” she frequently tells him. “I am a daughter . . . I listen and obey” (48). Eventually he asks her to marry him, and she accepts, but after some time he learns that she has been deceiving him. He has to decide whether to forgive her for lying and remain in China or to return to Canada to resume more responsibility for his daughter.
I enjoyed the story, especially the descriptive details of the Chinese cities: the jam-packed buses; the crowded back alleys where two bicycles can barely pass; Tian An Men Square where Jeff sees “red rice paper balloons floating above the temple with its upswept eaves, the McDonald’s on the far corner” (53); and the small courtyards where laundry is drying and old men play chess, with over all the “strong smells of fried meat, garlic, rotting garbage” (27). I found that the middle of the story dragged somewhat. The uncertainty and indecision of the couple almost becomes irritating. It seems that Jeff must commit to Bian Fu totally before she will commit to him. They are at an impasse, but at some point I just wanted them to make up their minds. I liked the book’s title, which is taken from a quotation by Master Kung (Confucius) near the end of the book – “It is not that I do not love you, it is just that your house is so far away” (280). This seems to refer to either Jeff or Bian Fu and their difficulties in crossing the cultural divide. “You love me, not understand me” (214) Bian Fu says to Jeff, and that holds true for her, too.
Like his main character, author Steve Noyes lives in Victoria, but he is originally from Winnipeg. He is best known for his six books of poetry and short fiction. It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away is his first novel. He has worked at a wide variety of occupations and has travelled widely in China, giving his novel a feeling of authenticity. Indeed, some of Jeff’s experiences read as if the author may have experienced these himself as a foreigner reaching across a cultural divide.”
“Steve Noyes has written a wonderful book, but it’s the kind of wonderful book you want to throw out the window as soon as you’re finished. Or maybe just before, when you can see where it’s headed.
So this novel with the incredibly awkward title—It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away—is both wonderful and frustrating, putting the reader in the uncomfortable position of trying to decide whether the frustration ruins and cancels out the wonder, or if the wonder is strong enough to smother the frustration.
First to the wonderful part, which endures for at least the first two-thirds of the book. Here we meet Jeff Mott, our somewhat feckless hero, a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian who confronts the approach of middle age and the remnants of his failed marriage by removing himself to China to teach English.
In contrast with his friend Mark, who has been teaching in China for four years and can’t speak a word of Mandarin, Jeff sets about learning the language immediately and with some enthusiasm. And again in contrast with Mark, who is married to a Canadian woman, lives in a posh apartment, and has insulated himself from any meaningful contact with the Chinese, Jeff is determined to meet the people on their own terms, embracing their food, music, literature, and, inevitably and most tragically, one of their women.
Jeff may be emotionally tentative in many ways, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t sensitive, and Noyes does a superb job of using him to impress upon the reader the strangeness of China and its people to Western eyes.
Through Jeff’s ramblings around Beijing and two small provincial towns, we see the grubby outdoor markets with tables bearing piles of skinned rabbits, hear the sing-song chants of toothless old women vending their wares, and feel the panic associated with getting lost in one of the hutongs, the narrow streets winding through the old quarters of the city, ripe with “strong smells of fried meat, garlic, rotting garbage.”
Through Jeff we also experience the constant humiliations involved with learning a foreign language as well as the rare triumphal moments of genuine communication. We feel his frustration when every attempt at humour ends in giving offense rather than pleasure, when every effort at penetrating the glass wall between him and the Chinese people is deliberately frustrated by his students and superiors at the university where he teaches.
But most of all, we sense the omnipresent and very palpable sexual tension that exists between the Western men and Chinese women in the book, a tension defined by mutual distrust. The men are afraid of being financially exploited, and the women of being seduced and abandoned. In a sense, the whole novel revolves around this tension and the way it plays out between Jeff and the young Chinese woman he falls in love with, Bian Fu.
She is undoubtedly the most fully realized character in the book. Noyes brings her to life not just through physical description and the drama of her actions, but by the words she speaks in her many conversations with Jeff. The author has a gift for dialogue, an ear for the way two people with different native languages struggle to communicate. In Bian Fu’s halting but serviceable English, through her pet phrases and exclamations, we actually see her take shape and begin to breathe and feel and react to her own growing love for Jeff. Her portrait is a marvelous act of creativity, and her character, in its complexity and strength, is unforgettable.
It’s only because of Bian Fu that Jeff finally breaks through that glass wall of reserve and propriety and begins — however haltingly and resentfully on both sides — to find himself accepted into a Chinese family, to be made a part of their daily routines and rituals. Within the walled complex of Bian Fu’s mother’s house, with its all-purpose courtyard and shifting population of relatives and boarders, Jeff seems more fully alive than anywhere else in the book. We sense that his discovery of the Chinese is really a process of self-discovery propelled by his love for Bian Fu; it advances not in spite but because of all the difficulties involved.
The reader’s interest never really has a chance to flag throughout this part of the book. The author is always introducing some new complexity in the lovers’ relationship, some new clash of worldviews that keeps the narrative moving and the characters developing. Unfortunately, all this comes to an abrupt halt when Jeff’s contract expires, and he returns to Vancouver Island without Bian Fu. Of course he swears to come back and marry her, swears that they will set up house together either in her country or in his, the place not being as important as the fact of their togetherness.
And of course, once he is back in Victoria, the slacker capital of Canada, inertia sets in and does something to Jeff’s heart. He reconnects with his young daughter, has a fling with a redhead he picks up in the grocery store, smokes a lot of dope with one of his slacker friends. That awkward title—It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away — is its own hint of the decision Jeff will make in regard to Bian Fu, a decision based more on an excuse than a reason. “I’m not going to take the chance,” he tells his friend, sealing his own indictment. Not taking a chance on love is really a form of emotional suicide, and once he’s made his decision, the novel ends if only because Jeff himself ceases to exist.
The truth is that with novels the ultimate destination, which is death, is always the same and so to some degree beside the point. It’s the journey there — the emotional rush of getting lost in a hutong, the precise way your lover composes her face to prepare for bad news — that’s the important thing. For this reader at least, the joy of the journey in this particular novel more than made up for the disappointment at the end.”
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