Harmonizing All the Elements: Henry Lien's "Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird"

A friendly reminder to subscribers new and old that my plan this year is to alternate craft essays on the first and third weeks of each month with reviews or interviews and longform essays. This is the second book review of the year — for more about my plan for 2025, see my year-end post for 2024. Most of my content is free; only the longform essay at the end of each month is reserved for full members.

I’m also incorporating giving this year. 5% of Q1 earnings will go to Out of the Cold Centre County; Q2 is reserved for Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four). Thank you to everyone who supports my writing on a monthly or annual plan!

Harmonizing All the Elements: Henry Lien's "Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird"

Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird (Norton, 2025) is a fresh reminder of how profoundly our cultural settings impact our literary taste. If we carry the linear expectations of Western storytelling within us, looking for the point at which a book pushes its inciting incident over the peak of Freytag’s pyramid, we will judge stories that perfect that model as exemplary and those that deviate from it as flawed.

This is not to say that the design of a story is all there is, that a story has no power to reach beyond its scaffolding to enthrall us in image or tone or character, merely that it’s helpful to remember that our aesthetic judgments, particularly about writing that we do not enjoy, might be borne of ignorance as much as of discernment. What seems flat or sour or tedious to us might, with a little more insight, be understood as nuanced and sophisticated.

Sometimes good writing is an acquired taste. And sometimes what makes us pucker the first time around is actually as bad as it seems. It pays to reflect on the instincts we’ve internalized and come to trust as our sensibility.

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird begins with a simple thesis: “Diversity encompasses artistic forms, not just faces and names.” That is, just because Disney has reworked casting and produced a soundtrack that sounds ethnic, that doesn’t mean the underlying form of the story isn’t Western.

Lien doesn’t name Moana here, but there’s no mistaking his reference in this example of cultural appropriation:

It’s the animated musical with a main character (usually female) from some non-Western culture in a non-Western setting nonetheless talking and acting exactly like an American teenager, defying their parents, running into the ocean, singing an “I Want” song, and launching into a three-act story to “find themselves” and “own their power.” That’s not diversity. That’s a Western story in non-Western drag.

To illustrate the contrast, Lien tells a little story featuring two characters he calls Chelsea and Marilyn. Chelsea is a bird and Marilyn is a T-rex. Chelsea is aware of Marilyn, but Marilyn has no idea that Chelsea exists. They’re both living their lives more or less peacefully, or as peacefully as a T-rex can live. The point of view suddenly shifts to the first person, and we understand that an asteroid millions of miles overhead has taken over narrating the story (possibly was narrating it all along). The asteroid tells us how it will strike the Gulf of Mexico “with the force of ten billion Hiroshima bombs,” creating a massive dust cloud that kills all plant life, then herbivores, then the large carnivores, like Marilyn. Chelsea and her kind survive, but eventually Chelsea, too, dies. Millions of years later, the “risen mammals” dig up fossilized bones for museums and use the other remains of Marilyn’s kind to fuel vehicles and create plastic replicas of dinosaurs.

Lien’s story is an adaptation of the Chicxulub asteroid that is believed to have triggered the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, but he intends to show how an East Asian story follows a four-act structure that fundamentally differs from the three-part Western arc.

The typical Western tale, he claims, follows three stages: Act One is Setup, Act Two is Confrontation, and Act Three is Resolution. By contrast, the East Asian form known as kishōtenketsu moves through four stages: Act One introduces the main elements, Act Two develops the main elements, Act Three adds a twist or new element, and Act Four harmonizes all of the elements.

Lien acknowledges exceptions to these rules but emphasizes the apparent randomness of Act Three in kishōtenketsu and an attempt at restoring symmetry in Act Four as crucial differences between the Western and Eastern forms. This seems a useful distinction, given how widely accepted rules like Chekhov’s gun have become (if there’s a loaded gun on stage in the opening act, it had better be used later on). In fact, most courses in fiction writing would explicitly discourage introducing new characters or major plot elements after a book’s halfway mark.

I’m not familiar with all of Lien’s examples from international film (Parasite, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Your Name), but his analysis of the Mario and Zelda Nintendo games helps me understand the kishōtenketsu form.

Act One in Super Mario Brothers introduces Mario as the main character swimming through pools that lead to walls where zippers open up like doors. Act Two delves deeper into the virtual world, opening new levels and landscapes while sticking with the opening premise: you are Mario, you move by swimming through pools, and the way you transition between scenes or levels is through these zipper doors. Act Three adds more than one new element: pools give way to platforms, you can “die” by following into a bottomless pit, you can use zippers to create bridges over these drop-offs, and you now have to contend with several hostile characters that must be avoided or conquered. Finally, Act Four harmonizes all of these elements, combining the platforms, enemies, and zippers into a coherent end: possession of a magic key.

There’s nothing new about seeing storytelling in video games, but the idea that American teenagers are learning kishōtenketsu without knowing it, just by playing Nintendo, is rather remarkable. I’ve never been a huge gamer, so I don’t understand these nuances as well as others might, but it seems obvious now that many games thrive on sudden surprises (this is part of the appeal of unlocking new levels in a fantasy game) while relying on an underlying logic or harmony for the whole.

Just how tossing a reader a random twist like the asteroid in Lien’s opening story might improve a literary memoir is another question, but the idea that a story can absorb extraneous examples and even introduce new elements late in the narrative, so long as those new elements are harmonized with what came before, opens me up to new possibilities in nonfiction.

I’ll not reprise Lien’s thorough discussion of The Legend of Zelda, but his insight into the end of the game, where the monster Yuga must be conquered by the Bow of Light, also got me thinking:

You must use not just the Bow of Light to defeat Yuga, but the very shape of the small, locked room. The answer was lying in plain view literally all around you, and the thing that you considered an obstacle is actually your greatest weapon. The way the game gently nudges you to figure this out yourself makes you feel like a genius…

Full disclosure: I’ve never played Zelda, so I’m just as much in the dark about who Yuga is and just what the particulars of this final battle are, but Lien gives us enough detail to imagine how these principles might work in story form.

If you’ve followed my fatherhood project closely, you’ll know that it’s experienced fits and starts that I’ve largely attributed to upheaval in my life or the absence of what Sarah Orne Jewett calls the “quiet center” from which an artist must write. But I recently wondered out loud, while talking with a friend, whether the premise for my book might be something more like, “I thought I was certain, but it turns out I was wrong.” This premise might work very well with the kishōtenketsu form, because a certain mindset or worldview could be the default for Acts One and Two, that way of thinking could be blown apart by an epiphany or transformative experience in Act Three, and Act Four might seek to harmonize those two seemingly opposed layers of the story.

This raises a question, which I’ll have to ponder longer, about whether a single life can contain the “main elements” and “new elements” that then become harmonized at the end of the kishōtenketsu form. Or would this be a narcissistic adaptation of a story form that arises from communal, rather than individualistic, values? Is it even possible to write a memoir following kishōtenketsu, or are the two forms essentially contradictory?

Lien’s discussion of circular story structures raises a similar concern. While circular stories aren’t unique to Eastern traditions, they are more common in non-Western literature. The essentials of a circular story, according to Lien, are:

• Multiple, standalone sections

• Revisits the same characters

• Revisits the same location

• Revisits the same theme

• Braids together different periods in time

The effect of a circular story is to magnify universal truths and diminish the significance of any individual character. Memoir, almost by definition, flips these priorities. Even so, the individual story only matters if it serves others more than the author. This might be one explanation for why Kao Kalia Yang subtitled her first book, The Latehomecomer, as a family memoir, and why her most recent memoir, Where Rivers Part, is actually her mother’s story, narrated in the first person, not the author’s memoir at all.

Lien, to his credit, makes plain that he’s not arguing for the superiority of one cultural model over another. His goal in Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird seems more to make readers aware of other storytelling models beyond the Western defaults, and to argue against cultural appropriation, particularly when it presents false forms of diversity. It’s always useful to examine our default settings, to trace our taste to its cultural origins, to reflect on ways our apprenticeship to craft might expand.

If you are weary of the usual Freytag diagrams and are looking for more creative ways to structure a book, an essay, or a story, I’d recommend Lien’s book. He’s given me a lot to think about, including a question that has been haunting me for some time — whether there is an implicit contradiction built into the parenting memoir subgenre, which tries to tell a story about family that is nevertheless centered on the individual. Maybe the most important story to tell about fathers is not about any one father, but about fathers as a cohort, fathers as they have existed over time, fatherhood as different cultures understand the role.

More Reviews and Interviews ⬇️

Telling the Truth Slantwise: Tobias Wolff's "In Pharaoh's Army"

The Things Not Named — With Kern Carter

Behind the Scenes with Kao Kalia Yang