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A Review of Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As part of the memoir kick I have been on, I finally finished Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021). I started this memoir probably over two years ago, but I crashed out of it. I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten older, I’ll be in the middle of reading like four or five books at the same time. I don’t know when this bad habit started, but it causes me to leave books unfinished for very long periods. In any case, let’s let the marketing description get us started: “In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to ‘beautiful country.’ Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly ‘shopping days,’ when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.”

 

I think the most important part of the description occurs at the end, when it states that the author is grounded in “her childhood perspective.” I didn’t realize that about 99% of this memoir would be told in this way. That is, Wang really attempts to resituate herself at the time of her childhood, even though the memoir is clearly being told in past tense. There are only a handful of times where it becomes apparent that the memoir is really being told in retrospect, so I did find this technique a bit jarring. The level of detail that Wang evokes throughout is really incredible, and I did wonder (and was hoping that we might find out) how Wang was able to cobble together the earlier sections. Did she have to outline? Did she have journals that she had kept? Whatever the case, the memoir essentially covers her time from elementary school up until about junior high and early high school. It then fast forwards over one chapter from college all the way to Wang’s contemporary moment, when she becomes a lawyer. The main throughline of this memoir is the unceasing fear that the undocumented migrant feels while being in the United States: they must do everything they can to avoid detection, even to the point of potentially harming themselves. This issue becomes most pressing when Wang’s mother becomes very sick, and there is no option but for her to be taken to the emergency room. Wang’s mother is diagnosed with a mass, and her convalescence is long, but the fact remains that no one is deported. This moment figures prominently in this memoir precisely because it becomes one point in time when the family begins to realize that their categorical self-surveillance may be a little bit too oppressive. The pressures of this kind of life also begin to take a considerable toll on Wang’s parents, who become increasingly distant from each other. A tense encounter involving physical abuse becomes the propelling factor for Wang’s mother to get Wang and herself out of the house and into Canada, there they can be full-fledged citizens, out from the under the weight of their fears. Wang’s father eventually joins them, but what Wang’s memoir ultimately reveals are the painstaking sacrifices that undocumented migrants make in order to find their way to the United States. Of course, it’s never what they hope it will become, and the brutalities of everyday life are made apparent in Wang’s assured narrative voice, however childlike it may be. Through her vision, we understand the godsend that a free meal might be, how much a $50 gift certificate she wins to the bookstore means, and the glory of a radiator’s heat when insulation is faulty. These minor miracles are the ones that move Wang forward through the desperation that clouds over so much of her childhood. Wang’s steadfastness is only paralleled by her forward-thinking mother, who becomes the focal point for a future that is more than just survival.

 

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A Review of Sorayya Khan’s We Take Our Cities With Us (Mad Creek Books, 2022).

Posted by: uttararangarajan


Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Well, Sorayya Khan’s We Take Our Cities With Us (Mad Creek Books, 2022) is a memoir I let slip by me by accident, but since I’ve been on a tear with the Mad Creek Books imprint over at Ohio State University Press, I knew it was the right time to give Khan’s beautifully wrought work some coverage. The marketing description gives us some key background information: “ Even when we leave them, our cities never leave us.  After her Dutch mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where Khan finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan beautifully illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love.”

I was fascinated by Khan’s structural and spatial approach to this memoir, which is really so much about different cities that become important to families and which also fracture families apart across continents, cultures, and social formations. While the description tends to center Khan’s Dutch mother a little bit more, it really is about both parents, their eventual deaths, as well as how the children end up dealing with the aftermath. Khan is not just a family chronicler, she’s also a well-known novelist, so her foray into the creative nonfictional form is a boon for those interested in life writing. The memoir really hits us hard when Khan details the decline of her parents. Khan’s father dies first (with what seems to be complications from a surgery), which encourages her mother to pack up what was once their home in Islamabad. Instead of moving back to Amsterdam, Khan’s mother actually chooses to move to Vienna, which Khan attributes to the fact that Khan’s mother could establish a new home without any specific cultural attachments from either side of the family. Yet Khan’s mother will deal with health troubles of her own, with leukemia eventually claiming her life. Khan’s narrative does not end here. Indeed, the death of Khan’s mother occasions the possibility of archival recovery, which is exactly what she does. She follows various leads found in letters as well as in family stories to uncover personal histories that are complexified by other perspectives. What remains evident in Khan’s incredible labor of familial archiving is exactly what the earlier description mentions: the love that is clearly rooted in the desire to document her parents and their lives as well as the lives of her larger family. Yet another masterful entry in Asian American/ Asian diasporic life writings and at a compact 141 pages, you can certainly finish it quickly. 

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A Review of Aysegül Savas’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024).

Posted by: uttararangarajan


Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’m lucky to be part of a little reading group with some brilliant folx, and this year’s selection is none other than Aysegül Savas’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). Occasionally, at AALF, we look a little bit further eastward and such is the case with Savas, who is a Turkish anglophone writer who lives in Paris! In any case, her novel is an interesting one because it functions partly through general abstracts, which is certainly one of Savas’s aims: “Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. ‘Forget about daily life,’ chides her grandmother on the phone. ‘We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.’ Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?  Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas' distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.”

 

This official marketing description is super useful because of the quotation provided by the grandmother! Part of the whole point of this novel is to document the ordinary and the quotidian, even in the abstract. There’s something that Saval is wrestling with here about evacuating the text with particularity and even historical and cultural specificity. Readers are never given an exact sense of where the story is set (which city is it in?) or the ethnicity of specific characters (though we know, for instance, that Manu and Asya are foreigners, as are many of their friends). Don’t expect food references to help you, as Savas also declines specifying too many of the foods. The only area where I thought we might get a glimpse of where we actually are is when a character mentions needing a residential permit and that this document might limit their movements in and out of the city, but my knowledge of urban centers is extremely limited. In any case, this book meanders and is reflective and seems more philosophical. It is not driven by plot, though there are three main strands. The first involves the repeated sections titled “future selves,” which focuses on Asya and Manu, as their tour properties to find a more permanent place to level. The second involves the documentary that Asya is making which is contained more or less to the sections called “in the park.” Asya is clearly focusing on the ways that community is forged in the unnamed park location. These sections are again pretty pedestrian, but that, I think, is part of the point: to find some semblance of what is important about the ordinary and the everyday.  The final repeated sections, “Principles of Kinship,” were probably my favorite because it details the complications of developing alternative community formations beyond heteronuclear structures. In this novel’s case, Asya and Manu have one clear close friend named Ravi, but around that major friend, a number of others orbit, including Lena; Tereza, an elderly neighbor; and a handful of others. The heft of the novel, at least for me, appears here, and I will provide the spoiler warning. Have you looked away? Well, if not, then it means you either already know or don’t care: the ending leaves us in a situation where Manu and Asya do find their new place, while Ravi moves away with one of their other friends, leaving behind the fledgling kinship that they hoped would endure. The documentary doesn’t seem to be a major element to the conclusion, so the novel really leaves us with the connections that people make as they grow older. The novel makes you wonder about the endurance of these non-heteronuclear family formations we attempt to make, especially in the guise of migrant communities. Overall, Savas’s work seems almost to be less of a novel than a series of vignettes, which the intent to show the complications of the immigrant everyday. An intriguing and spare narrative.

 
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A Review of Chenxing Han’s one long listening (North Atlantic Books, 2023)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I read Chenxing Han’s one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care

 (North Atlantic Books, 2023) right on the heels of Melody S. Gee’s We Carry Smoke & Paper. Both really explore the creative nonfictional form through a hybrid mode; they both seamlessly link spirituality with autobiographical elements. North Atlantic Books is “an independent nonprofit publisher committed to a bold exploration of the relationships between mind, body, spirit, culture, and nature.” Based in California, this press fills an intriguing intersectional niche, and I am so glad that there are all of these different venues for authors and publications. I wonder, for instance, if Han’s work would have found a mainstream publisher otherwise. Gee’s text likewise came out of a smaller university press. But let’s now move to the marketing description: “How do we grieve our losses? How can we care for our spirits? one long listening offers enduring companionship to all who ask these searing, timeless questions. Immigrant daughter, novice chaplain, bereaved friend: author Chenxing Han (Be the Refuge) takes us on a pilgrimage through the wilds of grief and laughter, pain and impermanence, reconnecting us to both the heartache and inexplicable brightness of being human. Eddying around three autumns of Han’s life, one long listening journeys from a mountaintop monastery in Taiwan to West Coast oncology wards, from oceanside Ireland to riverfront Phnom Penh. Through letters to a dying friend, bedside chaplaincy visits, and memories of a migratory childhood, Han’s startling, searching memoir cuts a singular portrait of a spiritual caregiver in training. Just as we touch the depths, bracing for resolution, Han’s swift, multilingual prose sweeps us back to unknowingness: 不知最親切. Not knowing is most intimate. Chinese mothers, hillside graves. A dreamed olive tree, a lost Siberian crane. The music of scripts and silence. These shards–bright, broken, giddy, aching–are mirrors to our own lives in joy and sorrow. A testament to enduring connection by a fresh and urgent new literary voice, one long listening asks fearlessly into the stories we inhabit, the hopes we relinquish, and what it means simply to be, to and for the ones we love.”

 

So, I had trouble diving into this memoir at first. I found the initial half of this text to be a little bit more fragmented that I would have preferred. Han sequences vignettes alongside a structuring epistolary that is directed toward a friend, who has already died of a rare cancer. The vignettes toggle between an early period when Han is training to be a chaplain in California and then a period when she is attending a Buddhist college. The brevity of the vignettes gives the memoir a poetic quality, which was my initial struggle with it, as I wasn’t prepared for working my mind in that direction. Eventually I settled in, but the memoir takes an interesting turn, as the epistolary portions take on increasing significance and readers receive more information about Han’s dear friend. One of the most extraordinary sequences in this latter half of the book is when Han travels to Ireland on a trip that is in part dedicated to the memory of her deceased friend. Han happens to meet a stranger, who she somehow seems to think is important to this journey. She eventually realizes that he is a reiki healer, and it is he who helps Han to process some of her grief and her feelings of loss. Han’s memoir does end with a turn toward the COVID pandemic as well as the acknowledgment of much global turbulence. Ultimately though, Han refuses a kind of social pessimism, the likes of which can be easy to succumb to, especially now. Han instead places her faith in the possibilities of joy and hope and the acknowledgment that loss, though (incredibly) hard, is still a gift. The other thing I’ll end with is the incredibly challenging yet crucial work that a chaplain must do, as they help shepherd families through incredibly difficult times. Excuse my repetitious language but reading these vignettes about her chaplaincy were mind-boggling, and I have only the deepest respect for these extraordinary individuals who devote their lives not only to spiritual care but robust emotional support for the bereaved. A powerful and formally inventive memoir.

 

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A Review of Laura Lee’s A History of Scars (Atria, 2021)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve been on a bit of a creative nonfictional kick lately, and I think it’s because I’m trying to balance all of my high fantasy reading with something that’s a little bit more grounded in explicit social contexts. This time around I’m reviewing Laura Lee’s A History of Scars (Atria, 2021), which is a debut memoir that concerns mental health, caretaking, and the balance one needs to survive in a complicated home environment. The text brings to mind what separates a memoir from a book of essays. After having read a good number of each, I am beginning to see that books marketed as essays are a little bit more wide-ranging, staying away from the central life or recollections of the author. Other than that, the differentiation is really a matter of degree and intensity. But I digress, so let’s get to that marketing description: “In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In ‘History of Scars’ and ‘Aluminum’s Erosions,’ Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World,” Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea. Through the vivid imagery of mountain climbing, cooking, studying writing, and growing up Korean American, Lee explores the legacy of trauma on a young queer child of immigrants as she reconciles the disparate pieces of existence that make her whole. By tapping into her own personal, emotional, and psychological struggles in these powerful and relatable essays, Lee encourages all of us to not be afraid to face our own hardships and inner truths.”

 

This memoir was at times pretty gut-wrenching, and I am beginning to see that such stories are perhaps the foundation of many creative nonfictions. There is perhaps a writing “cure” or at least therapy at work here, with Lee exploring the vulnerable childhood she had under the hands of a physically and emotionally abusive father. These dynamics are soon complicated by the fact that Lee is beginning to take care of her mother, who is eventually diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. For many years though, Lee has no idea, and because Lee’s father is expelled from the home at some point, Lee, as the only one who is still around, is eventually expected to take care of her mother, whether or not she wants to. Lee has two older siblings, but the home dynamics make it clear that they need to get out of there as soon as possible. Lee’s relationship with her middle sister is complicated because that sister ends up emulating some of the propulsive anger modeled by their father. Lee struggles to keep herself afloat in this world. It is climbing that she turns to for a form of escape, where the presence of mind required to move up a sheer rock face is the kind that becomes meditative and constitutive. The memoir also explores how Lee is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, which she astutely notes cannot be solely understood as a biologically-activated mental disorder. Lee considers how impactful her difficult upbringing would have been and how it likely was involved in the development of schizophrenia. What also anchors this text is Lee’s enduring relationship with a Pakistani woman. In this respect, Lee’s memoir is one of the few that considers the queer Asian American experience from the women’s perspective. Though the memoir ends with Lee’s struggle with the day-to-day experiences of a woman afflicted by mental health issues, it is more than apparent that Lee turns to writing as a way to help document her complicated life journey and to find some level of empowerment, however provisional, that exists on the page. Readers will also be incredibly buoyed by Lee’s glorious prose.

 

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A Review of Youngmi Mayer’s I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying (Little, Brown and Company, 2024)

Posted by: uttararangarajan


Written by Stephen Hong Sohn 

Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As a continuation of my speculative fiction palate cleansing reading (LOL), I pick up Youngmi Mayer’s I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), which is a real departure from the other books I’ve read in terms of tone. I have to say: balancing the comedic with the dramatic is incredibly difficult, but Mayer manages to do it in a way that reminds me so much of the Korean American bestie who wants to keep it real with me. In any case, here is the marketing description: “It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before her: it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering. In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to her: The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.”

Mayer grows up in a really challenging milieu. She clearly loves and respects her parents, but they do make things difficult, and there is no question that Mayer’s departure on her own from Korea as a very young adult is partly based upon the instability of her home growing up. To become independent would mean to find the means to support herself without any of the complicated strings that might come with family. Indeed, it’s unclear to me if she has been in touch with any family members since coming to the United States. The early chapters of the memoir detail her itinerant life. Mayer, though born in the United States, is soon whisked off to many locations, including Korea and Saipan. She makes her way back to the United States, lands in Palo Alto at first, then heads up to San Francisco. These early sequences in America have a dark humor to them: she finds a good deal in a sublet in Treasure Island. She can’t believe her luck, until we all find out that she’s actually in a place filled with methamphetamine addicted residents. She eventually moves out (thankfully) and also eventually finds a measure of financial stability, all the while embarking on a life-changing relationship with Danny Bowien, who himself will find major success as a chef. There were points in this memoir where I wasn’t sure if I should be shocked or amused, but that’s part of the point of the title: that there’s a thin line often between what we find traumatic and what we find funny. Mayer makes the most of making those lines blur, emphasizing that the comedic is a palliative to the strange and often challenging obstacles that life throws our way. Mayer will end the memoir realizing that she has always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and she ultimately lets go of all these things holding her back. She finds her most fulfillment at this stage in life, admitting that everything before seems primarily as an in-between, limbo space, where she has been sort of living life without a fully realized purpose. The concluding arc also has some pretty frank ruminations on new motherhood, including the revelatory moment that the body has these incredible capacities to help support the life of a developing living entity. Before reading this memoir, I hadn’t known much about Mayer’s stand-up career. There is something about this particular moment, where there are different levels of fame and social visibility, as we are atomized across media platforms. I’ll definitely be looking out for Mayer in the future.
 

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A Review of Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

There’s a couple of new presses that have come out with the name Z at the beginning. There’s Zando and then there is Zibby! Zibby has already impressed with its initial slate of books, and Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024) is a testament to the incredible acquisitional and editorial work that their team is doing. What a GUT PUNCH this memoir is. You’ll see why after you read the marketing description: “Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds' move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy's family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive. Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment. What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held ‘truths’ about what the grieving process looks like. Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis' death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.”

 

As I continue the memoir kick I’m on and as I toggle back and forth between fiction and creative nonfiction (maybe it’s finally time to add in some more poetry? Drama?), I have seen Lin’s work get more and more publicity. It follows in the tradition of works like Zauner’s Crying in H Mart in the way that it so totally embraces the profound complications of bereavement. What I especially loved is the use of white space throughout this text. Chapters are really snippets that read like prose poetry, and the white space that surrounds each block begins to accrue a kind of emotional intensity that perhaps helps to mirror that sense of loss — one that most of us can’t even begin to imagine — that has befallen the author. The medical crisis that Lin must navigate on her own are a very dangerous series of clots that require a stent to be put into her body. Without that stent, she may end up having a life-threatening or life-ending stroke. As you might expect, Lin is ambivalent about getting the stent: after all, what is there to live for now that Kurtis is gone? Despite such ideations, Lin also knows that she must find a way to navigate the after: she goes to therapy regularly and also signs up for a new grief counselor. She also consistently meets with a fellow widow, which sometimes helps her process her unique positionality. Days stretch out, like the white blocks that surround each page, as she struggles to find the energy to do anything. Outwardly, friends and family start to assume she is doing better, but Lin knows that she is not. She eventually adopts a puppy, despite more ambivalence about whether or not she can actually care for this other living thing, which may die at any moment. What I appreciate most about Lin’s memoir is that she takes the time to dispel a lot of myths about the grieving process. There are no developmental stages of grieving, nor do projects about how bad grief will be map onto any common template. If anything, we are reminded that the cost of profound love will be catastrophic grief, but Lin also reminds us that one method to dealing with grief is in a communal process. That is, you use the tools you have in order to address grief. For Lin, to address grief is to write about it. The logical step that she may not have at first anticipated is that this writing would be the basis for a creative publication. But it all makes sense. It is Kurtis, after all, who tells Lin that she is a writer, even before Lin has published her first short story, about embracing that identity. It comes full circle with Lin’s coruscating meditation on bereavement, so we see that one way that Lin comes to honor and to grieve Kurtis is in the process of narrative reconstructions. There may be no end to grief, as Lin’s memoir reveals, but it can and should be shared.

 

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A Review of Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass (Tor.com, 2024)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Tor.com is always at the forefront of shorter novels and novellas. Such is the case with Nghi Vo’s latest publication The City in Glass (Tor.com, 2024). I’m a huge fan of Vo. The Chosen and The Beautiful, her brilliant re-writing of The Great Gatsby tickled my global modernist sensibilities. It reminded me of the similarly brilliant work by Monique Truong in her supplementary narrative to Stein’s Toklas in The Book of Salt. I am still awaiting other great modernist re-writes by Asian American authors! In any case, let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned. She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever. Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again. The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.”

 

I didn’t read much paratextual material going into this one, so I was pretty surprised at how the narrative develops. This one reminds me a bit of Wang’s rental house, because the plot is frankly minimal. Instead, much like Wang’s work (despite the radical difference in genre), the focus is really on relationships. In this case, the anchor of this text is Vitrine’s antagonistic connection to a fallen Angel. Vitrine naturally hates the Angel, but over the course of the text, we see their relationship evolve. At first enemies, the Angel comes to understand Vitrine’s love for humans, with all of their flaws, over the course of narrative. He comes to exist in a position similar to Vitrine in the sense that he watches over the humans and begins to have investments in their survival, success, and overall well-being. At first, the Angel is judgmental, dismissive, and imperious, but his tethering to Azril changes and humbles him. The one element of this text that I wanted more was related to world-building elements involving the angels and demons. Vo gives us just enough to understand that demons have an ability to transform into other beings; they also can seem to carve and to alter material elements before them. They can compose themselves of different things, and they can reformulate their bodies even if they are seemingly disintegrated. Angels seem to be generally impervious as well, but they cannot engage in questionable activities. They cannot lie or steal, so the Angel’s ability to intervene in the lives of mortals is decidedly limited. In other words, the Angel sometimes needs Vitrine’s explicit help once he becomes enmeshed in the lives of mortals. The ending—and here, I will provide my requisite spoilers, so look away at this point lest you want to discover what occurs between the two—was perhaps not what I wanted for these two characters. I appreciated their antagonists and even their mutual respect, which has accrued essentially over centuries, but I didn’t see them as a romantic pairing at all. While a minor quibble, I did absolutely adore Vitrine’s attachments to the mortals. She archives them through a book she holds inside of herself, and throughout the text, we get a sense of the history of Azril and all that were lost when the Angels destroyed the city. In this way, the text ultimately becomes a kind of grief archive, one that exists in the elastic bounds of the speculative fictional world.

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A Review of Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you know, we occasionally set our sights to other allied communities and writers of varying BIPOC backgrounds. One of our favorite writers is none other than the prolific Louise Erdrich, who graces us with another brilliant novel: The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024)! This robust marketing description gives us quite a bit of information: “In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.  Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.  Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.   Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own. Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day. The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.”

 

As is common for Erdrich, there are always a ton of characters, but Erdrich is an obvious pro and knows exactly how to cultivate the depth of these figures, even down to the most minor of these individuals in terms of their import to the plots. I will admit: the first 1/3 of the novel or so I found taxing: the central love triangle between Kismet, Gary, and Hugo just sort of drove me crazy, but I suppose I don’t give enough room for the messiness that is young love. In any case, I eventually settled into these dynamics, especially because we discover the reason behind much of these complicated and dysfunctional connections. The other main elements involve the older residents of the town, the thirty, forty and fiftysomethings or so that are the older generation above Kismet, Gary, and Hugo. There’s a book club that links most of the major female characters. Hugo’s mom, Bev owns a bookstore Bev’s Bookery, that brings these women together. Kismet’s mom Crystal is in a strained marital relationship with a man named Martin. Then there’s the fact that there’s been a major tragedy that befell the town some months back that has impacted all of the youth there. This latter issue is the one that was the most surprising to me, as it emerges in the back end of the text. The community generally talks around what has happened but when we finally get to see what it is that is keeping some of the characters so guarded, the novel really gains momentum as some actual healing and reconnection can begin. What I loved best about this book though is something that I haven’t seen in Erdrich before: I feel as though Erdrich always pushes herself stylistically and, in this novel, she uses more clipped sentences than I’ve seen in the past. It is also paired with a sly humorous undertone that I think is more prominent than other novels that I’ve read. There’s also the way that Erdrich will just come up and surprise you with a narrative sleight of hand. There’s always a little bit of magic and mischief in Erdrich’s fictional world: a ghost will pop up in this novel’s case and then there’s the fact that a short chapter is taken from the perspective of a river and how it handles the various beings that fall in it. If there is a minor quibble it’s that twenty years pass by in the blink of a couple pages at the conclusion, which suggests that there might have been hundreds of pages of material for a different novel. After all, Erdrich is the one who has been compared to Faulkner for quite some time, and we can see how maybe there might have been more threads to pull together for another story. Whatever the case, Erdrich is clearly at her heights of creative genius, and we are all the more fortunate for how productive she has been as a writer and as an artist.

 

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A Review of Amy Lee Scott’s When The World Explodes: Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2025)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Mad Creek Books is an imprint of Ohio State University Press, and it has been killing it with the creative nonfictional titles I’ve read thus far. My reviews from this imprint begin with Amy Lee Scott’s When The World Explodes: Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2025). Again, I’ve mentioned in other reviews that I sometimes find the essay collection to be a strangely defined form. Certainly, it seems to be the most flexible of creative nonfictional genres, as the essay collection is not necessarily united by a specific topic, and individual pieces typically do not proceed in linear fashion. The plasticity of the essay collection can be seen in Scott’s wide-ranging and poignant work. The official marketing description helps us understand this form’s pliability: “By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed. Witnessing a Cabbage Patch Kid ‘born’ at BabyLand General Hospital inspires a meditation on the history of Korean adoption and her own origins. Recalling her miscarriage as the streets of her Detroit neighborhood flooded, she asks what it means to mourn what would have been. And she remembers her mother’s illness and death amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In this haunting debut, Scott gets to the heart of what it means to wrestle with the grief, rage, and anxiety seething in this tender world. Ferocious and true, When the World Explodes probes the space between personal and global calamities—from Krakatoa to the emotional perils of motherhood—to unearth the sharp ridge of hope that hides beneath the rubble.”

What is most impressive about this collection is Scott’s fearless use of juxtaposition. Perhaps, the clearest indication of Scott’s ability to place things side by side in productive fashion is the aforementioned section concerning the BabyLand General Hospital. When I read essay, I had to stop to look up this BabyLand General Hospital, because when I was perusing what Scott had written, the whole set up sounded really strange. After all, adults had gone to see a cabbage patch kid being born: I kept wondering if this sequence was satire. Apparently, not only does this place exist, but it seems to function as a kind of make-believe world fashioned for these cabbage patch kids. What Scott does with this place is to link it to intercountry Korean adoption. The link is of course something to be considered very loosely but Scott’s point is that you can’t fully disarticulate the rise in Cabbage Patch popularity for the rising transnational adoption rates occurring around the same time. The simultaneity that Scott reads into this essay is at play in other sections as well. For instance, Scott links the apocalyptic nature of the Los Angeles riots to the death of her mother when she is just 8. The point is not to trivialize the riots, but really to relate, however metaphorically, her sense of disaster in her own life to the one unfolding socially. “Theories of Cosmogony” is probably my favorite essay, as it explores various celestial phenomena that have occurred over centuries, while simultaneously considering her relationship with Korea. Scott’s enterprising ability to put so many historical events and occurrences into conversation with what she has experienced personally allows this work to unfold with scalar incandescence and certainly combines scholarly acumen with the accessibility of the autobiographical voice. Another creative nonfictional standout, and I can’t wait for the Asian Americanist cultural critic who decides to take on the essay as a cultural and racial form. We are waiting =).

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