"G" by Ling Ma in One Sentence
How to concoct a perfectly seductive drug
This week, we’re looking at how you as a storyteller can design and use potent drugs — in your narratives, of course.
Why? To enhance reality and lift us into a realm of possibilities beyond the everyday. To illustrate in strange and vivid ways your characters’ deepest desires, and what they are willing to sacrifice to achieve them.
Our mentor text is a story simply titled “G,” from the excellent collection Bliss Montage by Ling Ma, which won the Story Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction for 2022.
If you haven’t read it yet, you can still follow along with the craft lesson below. Then, if you are motivated to pick it up, you will simply feel like you are reading this story for the second time and with a keen eye for its boldest craft moves.
What, in exactly one sentence, is “G” about?
The Emotional Superstructure of “G”
Addicted to a drug that makes her invisible, a Chinese-American immigrant daughter must break up with her most enabling friend or disappear permanently into her care.
How to Concoct a Perfectly Seductive Drug
In order for a drug to productively seduce your main character, it must deliver an effect they desire very deeply, and deliver it better than anything else within the story world possibly could.
Beatrice, the twenty-something Chinese-American protagonist of “G,” wants very much to disappear.
On the evening the story takes place, she is about to do exactly that, in one sense. She is flying out of New York City the next day to join a film studies PhD program in California. In an extraordinarily deft move, Ma characterizes even this life choice as its own form of disappearance by having Beatrice run into a former neighbor: “He’d once derided grad school as the vanishing point of the aimless, a now-accurate diagnosis of my situation.” (LOL.)
Without drugs, this is the most enticing path the story world has offered to Beatrice.
She spends her last night in New York pulling a different kind of disappearing act. Her plan is to disappear on her former best friend Bonnie, a fellow Chinese-American immigrant who still lives in the Upper West Side apartment they once shared as undergrads.
Though it has been a year since Bea has last shown herself, Bonnie has clearly anticipated her arrival and procured G — a drug that makes users literally invisible for a few hours — for both of them. (In case you’re wondering, G is most likely short for “ghost.”)
“Personally, it’s my favorite drug,” Bea explains. “I have done so much G that my adult sense of self formed in the complete absence of my reflection. For a person like me, that’s a certain kind of freedom.”
Earlier, as she describes all the physical sensations of turning invisible on G, she concludes: “It’s not the same as being bodiless, but I imagine it comes close.”
And why might Chinese-American immigrant daughters desire near-bodilessness?
Ma embeds an answer in the creepy hug Bonnie insists on giving Bea as she crosses the threshold into the apartment.
She dragged me into her embrace, feeling my size and shape as a competitive sport. Nothing had changed. “You look thin.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Our Chinese mothers had gauged our bodies like this, and she had become their torchbearer. Those excelling at the game are its most devout rule-enforcers.
Around the middle of the story, we learn a bit about Bea’s actual mother, who is very beautiful but disinterested in her children, until Bea reaches high school age and she can start instructing her in how to dress, use makeup, and eat — styling Bea into her own skinny image.
“The only way to separate yourself from a person like my mother is to embody her fears and insecurities about herself, to become as far removed from her idealized self-image as possible,” Bea tells us. “Put on twenty pounds and wear a tight dress. Now you’re free.”
But this is all backstory. The main story is about Bea and Bonnie. Bonnie might be the body-policing torchbearer of their Chinese mothers, but Bonnie is also next gen.
“It’s supposed to be more extreme,” Bonnie says, while explaining to Bea that the G they are doing on this night is stronger than what she was used to in her undergrad days. “Like, you know, THC levels in weed, how they’re more potent? This is next-gen G.”
So while Bea might be practically invisible to her own mother already, Bonnie is very interested in her. The girls grew up in the same community and have been friends since middle school. Their mothers were friends first and strongly encouraged them to be. Bonnie is a bit FOB-bier than Bea, having emigrated from China when she was 9 as opposed to 6, but that makes space for Bea to like how she looks through Bonnie’s eyes.
As a teenager, she used to tell Bonnie all the worst things about herself, and Bonnie was voracious for this information.
“It doesn’t take much to come into your own,” Bea muses, “all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.”
On this night, however, Bea is determined to break up with Bonnie for good. She wants to share as little of her future plans as possible for fear that Bonnie knowing even the tiniest details will somehow mar her new life.
Yet she agrees to do G one last time with Bonnie, as soon as Bonnie presents her with the option. “There were no options, really,” Bea acknowledges. “She knew what I was going to do.”
The two young women drop their G and head out, invisible, to knock around the Upper West Side for a few hours.
There are so many more levels of resonance, within the above superstructure, that Ma explores during their journey that I had noted down to possibly write about. But in the interest of keeping these posts short and to the point, I’ll simply encourage you to obtain the collection and allow her to unfurl them for you herself. There are an abundance of delightful story vibes and carefully chosen details remaining for you to discover.
For the purposes of this lesson, suffice it to say that Bonnie has thought through their journey and her plans will ultimately force Beatrice to choose which flavors of disappearance she craves the most.
Key takeaway for story creators: to create a perfectly seductive drug for your main character …
Identify their deepest desire,
Present the best “drug-free” way they can achieve this, within the world of the story,
Present whatever ultimate dreamy, bizarre version of this desire the drug can plunge them into instead, and
Make them choose.
As a bonus for paying subscribers, below the paywall I will reveal what the drug G looks like, and how this detail vibes so delightfully with the story’s overall emotional superstructure.
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