34 pages • 1 hour read
Gish JenWho's Irish?
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 2 Summary: “Birthmates”
In the opening of “Birthmates,” Art Woo has been locked out of his hotel during the insurance conference he is attending for work. The hotel he booked is the cheapest he could find, and he later calls it the “welfare hotel.” Art removes the handset from the phone once he gets into his hotel room, “for protection,” and as he is carrying it into the lobby, a group of kids knock him out with it and steal it. Art comes to in the hotel room of a Black woman who gives him Tylenol and tells him that “you folk” are better off than she and her family.
During this sequence of events, Art recalls several racist comments his boss has made toward him; his wife, among others, thought he should quit his job in response. We learn that Art’s wife left him sometime after their last failed pregnancy. In grief counseling, Art’s wife, Lisa, calls the fetus her baby, but Art refuses to call it a baby and then stops going to grief counseling completely. Art spends the present-day action of the story talking about Billy Shore, his “birthmate” of the story, his counterpart at another firm and “competitor in the insurance market” (23). Art is concerned with making sure Billy doesn’t know he is at the “welfare hotel.” Art rehearses his interaction with Billy only to realize that Billy isn’t at the conference at all, having taken a job at a start-up.
When Art makes it back to the conference, another insurance agent approaches him and tells Art that he has time to get out of this dying business because he has no wife and no children. Art agrees, and when a headhunter approaches him, he gives him the number at his hotel. Art goes back to his hotel to wait for the call from the headhunter only to realize that the headset of his phone is gone. Art then imagines calling his ex-wife. He imagines telling her that what they lost was a baby, their baby.
Story 2 Analysis
In “Birthmates,” Art Woo spends much of his day imagining running into Billy, his competitor in the insurance industry. While Art never does end up running into Billy, Billy’s presence in Art’s consciousness is so strong that he functions as a foil for Art even though he has no physical presence in the story. Billy, before leaving his job, was able to offer customers a personal computer option, which Art could not. Most of all, Art notes Billy’s relationship with language—how he “never called things by their plain names” (23). Where Art is precise, Billy is sloppy and “spoke the thoughts of thousands” (23). Billy can behave like a “primate,” Art’s wife says, but Asian men never do this, “if they’re brought up properly” (24). Billy is not only what Art is not, but what Art can never be.
Art is precise with his language and his living because he has to be, as we learn in the beginning of the story, he overlooks his boss’s anti-Asian racism at work to make sure he can get a raise. Billy leaves insurance for work at a start-up, getting out before it’s too late and taking a risk because he can.
At the end of the story, Art misses the phone call from the headhunter because he removed the headset from his phone as a means of protection. The phone becomes symbolic of what one can use as protection, as well as what one can miss if one is concerned with protecting oneself over all else. This theme of warding off life comes up throughout this collection, and in this story, we see a man realize he has put so much energy into protecting himself that it is too late to take any chances: It is too late to leave the welfare hotel, it is too late to get out of the dying industry, it is too late to make things right with Lisa. In the final scene, when Art imagines telling Lisa that their baby was a “baby,” he is able to be precise about something that causes him pain. He is no longer warding it off: He is welcoming it with language.
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By Gish Jen
