The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Fixer Chao by Han OngPaul Maliszewski
Han Ong. Fixer Chao. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 377 pp. $25.00.
Playwright Han Ong’s first novel tells the story of two twenty-first-century confidence men: Shem C., a frustrated writer bent on scaling Manhattan society or, failing that, bringing the rarefied bunch, cocktail-party chatterers crashing down to his level, and William Narciso Paulinha, a Filipino street hustler who makes ends meet doing data entry and giving blow jobs in bathroom stalls. Shem devises a plan: Paulinha studies some Feng Shui books, assumes the name Master Chao, and pretends expertise in the ancient Chinese art of placing furniture in ways to guarantee a healthy life and obscene wealth. The two work the uptown crowd, taking full advantage of everyone’s eagerness to be mystified by anything Asian. They charge a hefty sum for twenty-minute consultations, all the while exploiting their clients’ anxieties over their spiritually bereft lives and the latest trend passing them by. Ong’s novel is broadly satiric and filled with occasionally cutting observations on the upper class, high culture, and the hypocrisies of both. Sometimes the novel is too broad. At a bustling mixer, the characters are such standard types that it’s hard to imagine even the most sensitive and easily bruised member of Manhattan society finding much difficulty laughing at their behavior. The novel becomes more complex when Master Chao decides that rather than take his clients’ money and give them fake, casually invented advice on the placement of their beds, he’ll take their money but endeavor to give them real advice. He’ll try to help them; most of them anyway. Is he still a charlatan? When clients’ lives improve, can he still be said to be cheating them? Ong’s novel sufficiently muddies the distinctions between scammer and scammed, imposter and expert. His book becomes a brisk, glitter-studded catalog of the ways people deceive and are deceived, over and again. [Paul Maliszewski]