In this month’s From the Archives, Assistant Editor Brandon Williams dives into Kwan Ann Tan’s panoramic flash fiction “Pearl (c. 1250–1400),” published in The Masters Review in May 2021.
In “The Pearl (c. 1250-1400),” by Kwan Ann Tan, a Masters Review New Voices publication in May 2021, we follow the titular pearl as it’s passed from hand to hand. The pearl is beautiful and large, and all who see it instantly recognize its value: the fisherman who first finds it immediately sells it to a jeweler “in exchange for a sum of money that could feed his entire family for a month”; the jeweler sleeps with it pressed against his chest, it’s so valuable; the craftsman willingly destroys a friendship in order to grab the pearl, then keeps it close for much of the rest of his life, finally bestowing it to the Emperor as “the greatest gift that their city will ever send”; and so on. But the chain of ownership is also consistently visited by disaster after ownership of the pearl, as that original fisherman takes his life-changing money “and then promptly loses it at gambling,” people are murdered, friendships destroyed, and more people murdered wherever the pearl shows up.
The point of view of this piece is a distant storytelling third person until it resolves into a simple second person, the you-as-main-character second person. Setting and character both are occasional strategies rather than full-fledged narrative elements, and much of the piece relies on simply relaying information, although we’re never in a full objective point of view: Even in the opening sentence, “the pearl stares back” suggests a light presence of character-awareness from the pearl, and the narrator uses plenty of language that is just biased enough in its presentation and phrasing to clearly lead the reader in the story’s intended direction.
On a strategy level, this is written almost as a fable, skipping significant moments of time to focus on the most essential hours of the pearl’s existence and the changes wrought by those moments. We are given at all times both the weight and the counterweight of the actions taken around the pearl, the pearl itself serving as the catalyst for the human interaction that pushes us through the piece. That fable-like structure is particularly important when we come to this ending, where our narrator, who has arrived out of the mist to resolve into the main character and lead voice of the story, takes the pearl—not exactly stealing it since she has the right to possess it, as Empress Dowager, but hiding her actions nonetheless—and returns it to the water. Now, the power of storytelling suggests that this choice is related to the death and danger that we’ve seen build up around the pearl, and the Empress who owned it certainly is miserable and does arrange a murder while wearing it, but the second-person narrator who grabs the peal is presented as simply growing curious about it and so taking it for her own reasons to which we are not privy. There is a fascinating narratorial question left at the heart of that, leaving us to question how much she knows, how much she told us, and what led her to this action.
Point of View
This story is presented in a fable-esque voice, moving quickly through each setup of moment to hit most heavily on the idea of the story and reiterating that theme again and again. That theme, if I haven’t spoken it explicitly enough, circles around greed and its deleterious effects, hence the constant attaining of the pearl and the destruction that attainment (and even the selling-off, interestingly enough) wreaks. Particularly interesting within this is the fact that not everyone is hit with the curse of their actions—indeed, the craftsman who holds it longest seems to live a decently fulfilling life and dies naturally—though enough are that the pearl has the feel of morality tale regardless.
For much of the story, the point of view is played as a third-person POV that almost-but-not-fully sits as objective. Once we get to the final moments, to our final character, our “you” shows up in a sentence that, at least for me, took a second or third read to parse, as second-person POV often can: “When you become the Empress Dowager, you inherit the past Empress’s treasures, including the pearl hairpin.” On a first read, that could be a general you, as in every Empress or Empress Dowager does this thing, and it’s easy to read it that way since we haven’t had that tightening of POV. Putting us behind the eight-ball just slightly as readers means that we’re straining for answers even as our sudden narrator refuses to give them to us, which is a super-interesting technique in a story that had previously felt like it was using its moralistic take to provide clear answers. As a result, the story folds over on itself into something where we as readers are now active participants, choosing our thought process for the intentions of the piece in a way that was hidden from us right until it became necessary.
Time and Awareness
Flash fiction must always be aware of page space, but this story is particularly brutal on that front, as we only have two paragraphs with which to work, and not even 700 words. I’m particularly interested by the paragraph break: In a story with multiple characters we meet for only a sentence, this paragraph transition is not used to slide from one character to another, nor to jump times or timelines, but instead to transition narratorial style: We jump into a slightly deeper examination of our characters, and the closest that we get to scene-work, with this second paragraph. Everything before it is relegated, by its speed and brevity and by the sudden willingness to stay with characters, to the before-times, to a prelude, to an introduction.
And yet the extra time this second paragraph bestows also complicates the legacy of the pearl. If we had moved as quickly as the opening paragraph, it would have been quick work to make the craftsman’s acquisition of the pearl yet another moralistic failing; however the destruction of their friendship that comes from his taking ownership of the pearl is the large tragedy here, and both men are free to then live their lives and die somewhat naturally: the tradesman of plague on the road, the craftsman of old age. For a while, I struggled with this section, but I keep coming back to one tiny detail that makes this moment of time absolutely inescapable. The craftsman hides the pearl away with the intention to ultimately give it to the Emperor as a great gift, “the greatest gift that their city will ever send.” As his hands no longer work, the disciple must do it, and asks, Will they be able to tell? The disciple is clearly asking if they’ll be able to tell that it was their work rather than that of the master craftsman, but the craftsman’s response is fascinating to me: Even if they could, it’s a precious enough treasure that it wouldn’t matter. The story never mentions the workmanship again, but also never mentions the craftsman again, his role both necessary and also negligible to that of the pearl as it moves through time and space.
As much as I keep saying this story is written like a fable, we have multiple points that complicate that reading and allow it to be something slightly more and therefore slightly more interesting. That line about the disciple doubles as a commentary upon the pearl itself. While it’s beautiful and the largest pearl anyone has ever seen, it also possesses a dark history and immediately creates greed and desire in all who see it. And yet, the darkness is often tied to things that would have happened regardless of the pearl’s existence, allowing it to serve early on as the excuse for murders or fallings out that would have happened anyway and later as simply an accessory during large moments. Did it matter? Did it ever? Was it the cause of absolutely anything?
This uncertainty is compounded by that earlier point of view choice, where a story that has clearly claimed the ability to answer any question refuses to give us the reasoning behind our second-person main character’s choice. I want to argue that we can read the history of the empire in those descriptions of the pearl—the Emperor dies, the Empress is married off to his younger brother and led to despondency that is compounded by the death of her son that then leaves the empire bereft of an age-appropriate Emperor-in-waiting, presumably leaving her to die in misery once her task is completed, which then leaves the Emperor to marry this woman who is our narrator, is how I’m scanning it at least—but we cannot be sure how much of the previous history she knows, nor how much responsibility or blame she puts upon the pearl. It’s just as easy to assume that the previous Empress wore it often, and so it’s a mark of a woman that this new Empress Dowager wants forgotten. This is the beauty of second-person POV; that character doesn’t have to know anything that the narrator previous told us, but certainly could. Again, that previous simplicity disappears, quite intentionally, within a few very quick decisions.
In Conclusion
In this compact piece, we see a large array of techniques, and also we see an example of how storytelling can avoid some of its usually necessary components. We often talk as an editorial team about the way that flash is most effective when it is deeply focused upon its individual elements, and this is a story that in my opinion does that incredibly well: The mysteries that are laid out, the character and their challenges introduced, are there, but they never dominate the story. The piece does not ignore them; it lets them sit there naturally as they arise, but remains focused upon itself and its primary instrument, the pearl.
by Brandon Williams