At the Mercy of Movement: "Our Castle" by Christine H. Chen (GUEST BLOG written by Luke Nolby!)
“Lit!Commons subscribers who participated in Flash Summer did a lot of really insightful close reading of published flash. This happened both in the Live Sessions and in the Networker Community Space. When we started a series on "writing about writing," subscribers developed those ideas into craft essays about the flash. Writing about writing is an important component of literary citizenship, and key to the Networker path, which is all about community.” — Allison Wyss, Lit!Commons Craft Expert
Allison’s words capture the collaborative energy of our Lit!Commons community. With that in mind, we’re excited to share a guest essay by subscriber Luke Nolby. In his reflection on Christine H. Chen’s Our Castle, Luke explores the powerful role of movement and change within flash storytelling. Enjoy!
Writers are often taught that a story must have conflict. Others argue that conflict is too limiting: a story only requires change—or perhaps, only movement. It’s not that "Our Castle" doesn’t have conflict; it just has so much movement. And at multiple depths.
At its surface, "Our Castle" is a story of food and leftover boxes that catches us like a giant ocean swell, rising and lifting—then faster and faster. We flounder in a storm, clutching bits of flotsam, story images, facts, and subtle voice that keep our heads above water. Then, at its peak, the wave elongates, holding us in suspension. With the briefest descent, we feel the rough grit of sand firm beneath our feet. Dripping, shivering—but standing—we have been delivered to shore. We hold the flotsam that held us, watching the wave recede, wondering at the deeper immigrant experience we have touched.
Chen is careful never to lose us. She gathers us up gently in the opening: "Some time, before we noticed it, Ah Ma had started renovating our cramped one-bedroom apartment into rows of cardboard boxes." These boxes frame a space from which the reader expands and contracts with Ah Ma’s movement. Details of foods purchased stack up while the narrator’s opinions—"because Ah Ma never buys just one thing at a time; that’s cheap and lonely, and we’re neither" and, "because happy takes at least two people, even if Ah Ma never believed in Happiness"—are folded into the cracks.
Only commas offer our quick sips of breath. Because "Our Castle," at 599 words, has two sentences. The first takes 571.
At first, Chen’s choice of an endless sentence infuses energy into Ah Ma’s actions. She "buys [things] in double at least . . . and then preferably, she buys items in triple," or picks up leftovers "before her colleagues throw them away." Then, it feels like it is Ah Ma herself forcing the story into this structure. Tirelessly, she "drops the pennies in the Piggy slot machine" and "shouts orders . . . wiping tables and scolding students," while disbelieving in happiness and distrusting gods "because the rest, she’s always figured out."
Ah Ma is our irrepressible wave.
By the story’s end, the apartment is full of cardboard fixtures. We return to the cramped space with a focused description of a dresser: "cutting out the top and bottom flaps, sewing a button on the left flap and a string on the right one, and there, you’ve got a cabinet that you can open and close with buttons like a shirt." This slowing, its quieting, feels more direct in intimacy between Ah Ma and the narrator—who until this point has largely observed.
This shift is key. Because Ah Ma—caretaker, breadwinner, gambler; resourceful and creative and superstitious—is not the one who changes. There is a deeper current we realize we’ve been sensing, driven within Ah Ma’s ceaseless external actions: the narrator’s internal journey.
One way to measure how Chen builds and balances these two movements is through the frequency of character names and pronouns. Throughout the story, "Ah Ma" and the associated pronouns she and her appear almost forty times. We, us, and our occur a total of eleven, usually like this: "[She will] make a meal for the three of us." This consistent structure—Ah Ma as active subject, narrator as passive observer or recipient—furthers the surface/depth dichotomy.
Chen, importantly, keeps her narrator’s interiority subtle. Stories that cleanly conclude the meaning of the character’s experience have their place, of course. Yet this can also oversimplify, even seem reductive. The power of "Our Castle" is that the deeper thread remains deep.
Chen’s careful guidance ensures that leaving the exact nature of the journey unnamed does not mean it goes unfelt. She immediately makes our narrator passive: "Some time, before we noticed it." Then, she hints at the narrator’s interiority with "our cramped one-bedroom apartment" and "[happiness is] for rich Americans, not people like us who came with a suitcase of patched-up old clothes."
To me, this starts our narrator as embarrassed, even bitter towards their poverty. But there’s something else. After informing the reader that, "Ah Ma worships everything that sounds like 'alive' because she was lucky she got out of China alive after the Communists’ takeover, and Ah Ba got out alive after he survived the Sino-Japanese war," the narrator remarks, "and I was born alive."
This is the only place in the story in which I is used. Here, through employing a classic tool (two elements similar, the third breaking the pattern—in theme as well as length), Chen allows us to wonder: does the narrator, lacking a shared hardship survived, feel disconnected?
We soon get, "so Ah Ma can save every penny and send cash overseas to her [family] . . . who can eat and live better than we do." Though this can be read with the same narrator-bitterness, I think a shift has started. A growing awareness. It echoes in the sound of "Ah Ba smacking his lips, sucking and crunching on bones until nothing but a pile of white dust is spit out, everything eaten, digested"; it is felt in the texture of "Styrofoam containers rinsed with hot water."
And it stands stark between a handful of numbers: "People like us who came with . . . $40 in a pocket sewn shut" and, "if she’s lucky enough to win $20 at the slot machine, she buys packs of pig hogs . . . just $1.99 a pound." Before this line, Ah Ma, at her cafeteria job, "spends the rest of her day wiping tables and scolding students for forgetting their sweater or their keys or their $1,000 smartphones."
Though it flows past so quickly, it begs us to ask: how many pounds upon pounds of pig hogs could Ah Ma buy if, instead of counting herself lucky with $20 at slots, she claimed a $1,000 smartphone? How far could her resourcefulness stretch that kind of money?
And is the narrator asking this, too?
The author could have simply written "smartphones," or highlighted how Ah Ma did not take them; instead, Chen tacks the detail at the end of a list, all squished under Ah Ma’s scolding. The only space allowed for temptation is in the narrator’s awareness of the values. Which, subsequently, triggers awareness of different values: those by which Ah Ma lives.
When the wave crests and slows with the description of the dresser, has the narrator’s bitterness faded? Is there gentle wonder, respect for Ah Ma’s creativity, her resourcefulness? The poverty is not gone; it holds an edge still, with all the cardboard fixtures "lining the walls, tightly, securely, trapping our cravings inside a cardboard home." But I wonder if the narrator, through Ah Ma’s example, is claiming ownership of this life.
It’s worth noting the pronouns once more. Our appears four times. Once, it opens the story: "our cramped one-bedroom." Then, it closes that first chaotic sentence ("our cravings") and appears twice more in the second, and final line: "When rain seeps into the walls, storm and wind batter our crumbling castle, we’ll pick up pieces of our shattered pride and tape them back into a fortress."
This is the power of movement in "Our Castle": it leaves me decentered and—even if I can’t say exactly what—feeling.