The Overstory

It is 1948 in Shanghai, China, and Ma Sih Hsuin, an electrical engineering student, is preparing to leave for America. He sits with his father Ma Shouying, a wealthy businessman and scholar, discussing their family. They speak English—Shouying’s English is aristocratic and British, while Sih Hsuin’s is poor and awkward—and Shouying notes how far they have come. Their family is Muslim and originally from Persia, but now they run a business empire in Shanghai. Shouying then explains that Sih Hsuin must go to America because the Communists will soon arrive and destroy their family and its wealth. Sih Hsuin protests that the Americans will help them, but Shouying tells him he is being naïve.

Shouying then takes Sih Hsuin to another room where he unlocks a secret safe hidden behind a filing cabinet. Inside are many treasures. First, Shouying removes three jade rings, each intricately carved to show three different trees. “Look the color!” Sih Hsuin exclaims when he sees them. He examines their incredible artistry as Shouying speaks. “You live between three trees,” he says. Behind is the tree of the past: the Lote tree, a sacred tree in the Quran and a sign of their family’s Persian history. In front is the tree of the future: Fusang, a mulberry tree in a magical land to the East. “You’re off to Fusang now,” Shouying tells his son.

Shouying hands Sih Hsuin the third ring, explaining that the third tree is the tree of “Now,” the tree that is all around and will follow him always. Sih Hsuin asks what kind of tree this is, and in response, Shouying opens a beautiful wooden box. Inside is an ancient painted scroll depicting several old men in robes, one sitting beneath a pine tree. Shouying says the tree of Now is this kind: the pine. The script on the scroll is too old for Sih Hsuin to translate, but his father tells him that it says the men are “Luóhàn. Arhats. Adepts who have passed through the four stages of Enlightenment and now live in pure, knowing joy.”

Sih Hsuin is overwhelmed to see these treasures, and he realizes that his family is much wealthier than he ever imagined. Shouying tells him that he must take these objects with him to America, because otherwise the Communists will destroy them. Sih Hsuin reluctantly accepts, but he promises to bring the heirlooms back when China is safe again.

Later Sih Hsuin begins his journey east. He takes a train to Hong Kong, where he boards a ship. The Asian passengers are crammed together belowdecks, while the Europeans live luxuriously above. After 21 days at sea, they arrive in San Francisco, and Sih Hsuin feels happy and optimistic. To fit American norms, he reverses his name, so that he is now Sih Hsuin Ma instead of Ma Sih Hsuin.

A customs official questions Sih Hsuin and looks through his luggage. She doesn’t find the jade rings, which have been baked into moon cakes, but the scroll is out in plain sight. The official asks about it, and Sih Hsuin tries to stay calm. He explains that the men in the paintings have discovered “the True Thing,” which is that “human beings, so small. And life, so very big.” The official laughs scornfully at this and waves Sih Hsuin through.

Years pass, and Sih Hsuin becomes “Winston Ma.” He attends school in Pittsburgh, marries a Southern white woman named Charlotte, and moves to Wheaton, Illinois. In the backyard of their new house Winston plants a mulberry tree, the tree of Fusang, to honor his father and the silkworms, the source of their family’s success. As they stand looking at the tree, Charlotte relates a supposed Chinese saying that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the next best time is now.

“Countless nows pass,” and Winston’s three young daughters sit eating beneath the mulberry tree while their parents are shut up in their bedroom, blasting classical music. The girls argue about who Mao is, their “Chinese grandpa” who is in a work camp, what their father’s job is—Winston works at a lab inventing a travel phone—and what they think their parents are doing in their room. Nine-year-old Mimi, the oldest girl, starts to climb the mulberry to look into their window.

Mimi thinks about her father, who was entirely a mystery to her until just the day before. Winston is beloved by all as a “small, cute, smiling, warm, Muslim Chinese guy who loves math,” but he never speaks Chinese and rarely talks about his past. The day before, however, Mimi had come home crying because of a classmate’s racist bullying. Winston then finally told his daughter about his life in China and about Mao and the Communists.

Winston then took Mimi into his study and showed her the three jade rings and the arhat scroll. About the arhats, Winston said, “They solve life. They pass the final exam. […] Chinese superhero!” At that moment, Mimi felt as if older versions of herself were rising up within her current nine-year-old self, as time became “a column of concentric circles,” with her eternal self at the center and “the present floating outward along the outermost rim.”

Back in the present, Mimi keeps climbing the mulberry tree. Her youngest sister, Amelia, yells at her that she’s not allowed to climb the tree, and then calls to their father that “Mimi’s in the silk farm!” Mimi hushes her and promises to show her and Carmen, the middle sister, something special. Then they sneak into Winston’s office, and Mimi shows her sisters the rings and the scroll.

Winston Ma loves America’s national parks, and every June he takes the family on a trip to visit them. He spends months planning and preparing, and then they all squeeze into their car and take a road trip. This summer they go to Yosemite, and Winston takes meticulous notes about every campsite where they stay. The girls practice their instruments in the car but mostly fight with each other. Charlotte doesn’t try to stop them, and the narrator notes that she is already beginning to slip into dementia, though no one knows it yet.

At one campsite, Winston fly fishes in a lake, and Mimi accompanies him. Winston loves fly fishing and feels free out on the water, measuring everything and trying to “think like a fish.” Watching him, Mimi thinks that he is like the next arhat, a descendant of the men on the scrolls. Later, as the family is picnicking, a bear suddenly wanders into their camp. Charlotte grabs Amelia and runs into the lake, and Mimi and Carmen quickly climb a tree. Winston remains seated.

The bear wanders around the camp as Winston stays perfectly still, taking photos of it. When the bear approaches him, Winston stands up and starts talking to the bear in Chinese, while slowly edging toward the car. The bear seems distracted, and Winston is then able to toss it some food and the whole family runs to the car. Later that night Mimi, in awe of her father, asks Winston if he was afraid. He says that he wasn’t, and that it is “Not my time yet. Not my story.” This idea frightens Mimi—that he could know when his “story” will end. Winston says that when he was talking to the bear, he apologized to it for humanity’s stupidity. He said, “Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon.”

Mimi ends up going to Mount Holyoke College, where she starts to date women. She studies poetry at first, but after reading Edwin Abbott’s book Flatland, she realizes that she wants to be an engineer like Winston. She transfers to Berkeley and starts studying ceramic engineering. She thrives there, and after graduation takes a job as a casting process supervisor in Portland. The job requires a lot of travel, and she goes to Korea often. Meanwhile Carmen and Amelia also grow up, go to college, and get jobs.

In Wheaton, the mulberry tree is attacked by bugs and bacteria. Winston tries everything, but the tree is slowly dying. One day, he calls Mimi and tells her that his invention has finally been completed and sold to other companies. Winston seems dispirited by this, however, and he lingers on the dying mulberry tree. Mimi tries to cheer him up, as she has never heard him sound so depressed. Charlotte picks up the phone and starts speaking in Latin. Then Winston returns, asking Mimi, “What I do now?” When they hang up, Mimi intends to call her sisters and tell them about the call, but soon other responsibilities and distractions drive it from her mind.

That fall, Winston dies by suicide. One day, while Charlotte is in the basement studying Latin, Winston sits under the dying mulberry and shoots himself in the head. There is no suicide note except for a poem by Wang Wei left open in his study. Mimi is at the airport when she gets the call. Before she even answers, she feels that she knows what has happened and is even remembering it already.

Mimi returns home, where Charlotte is slipping into dementia and won’t accept that Winston is dead. The body and gun have been removed, but nothing else, so Mimi has to clean up the bits of her father’s brain scattered across the yard and mulberry tree. When she’s done, she sits under the dying tree and weeps.

Carmen and Amelia arrive, and the three sisters sit together, remembering their father and trying to understand his suicide. They avoid the mulberry tree. Mimi tells them about the phone call, and in response, Amelia comforts her while Carmen blames her. Meanwhile, Charlotte keeps speaking about Winston in the present tense, claiming that she’ll see him again.

The three daughters have to deal with all the paperwork that comes with a sudden death. Mimi tells the others that they need to divide Winston’s belongings, and that Charlotte can’t take care of herself anymore. She and Carmen argue, while Amelia tries to keep the peace. Later, the daughters decide to each take one of the three jade rings. They reach in blindly to pick at random, and Mimi receives the ring representing the tree of the future: the pine. Mimi suggests selling the arhat scroll or donating it to a museum, but Carmen wants it to stay in the family. She leaves it to Mimi to get its value appraised.

The police return the gun that Winston used, but no one in the family has a permit for it. Mimi puts it in the carrier of her old bicycle and rides to the gun shop where Winston bought it, hoping to sell it back. On the way, she is stopped by a police officer. She is terrified that he will find the gun, but he sends her on her way. Later Mimi waits at the airport for her flight back to Portland, twisting the jade ring around her finger nervously. She has the arhat scroll in her carry-on bag. Mimi feels that she only wants peace, but she must now live “in the shadow of the bent mulberry.”