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A Review of Ann Mah’s The Lost Vintage (William Morrow, 2018)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Ann Mah’s The Lost Vintage (William Morrow, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I’ve been reading a lot of dark material concerning the Korean War lately, so I’ve been turning to books that I think will be a little bit lighter. On first glance, it seemed as though Ann Mah’s The Lost Vintage could be the ticket. B&N provides us this description:

“Sweetbitter meets The Nightingale in this page-turning novel about a woman who returns to her family’s ancestral vineyard in Burgundy and unexpectedly uncovers a lost diary, an unknown relative, and a secret her family has been keeping since World War II. To become one of only a few hundred certified wine experts in the world, Kate must pass the notoriously difficult Master of Wine examination. She’s failed twice before; her third attempt will be her last chance. Suddenly finding herself without a job and with the test a few months away, she travels to Burgundy to spend the fall at the vineyard estate that has belonged to her family for generations. There she can bolster her shaky knowledge of Burgundian vintages and reconnect with her cousin Nico and his wife, Heather, who now oversee day-to-day management of the grapes. The one person Kate hopes to avoid is Jean-Luc, a talented young winemaker and her first love. At the vineyard house, Kate is eager to help her cousin clean out the enormous basement that is filled with generations of discarded and forgotten belongings. Deep inside the cellar, behind a large armoire, she discovers a hidden room containing a cot, some Resistance pamphlets, and an enormous cache of valuable wine. Piqued by the secret space, Kate begins to dig into her family’s history—a search that takes her back to the dark days of World War II and introduces her to a relative she never knew existed, a great–half aunt who was a teenager during the Nazi occupation. As she learns more about her family, the line between resistance and collaboration blurs, driving Kate to find the answers to two crucial questions: Who, exactly, did her family aid during the difficult years of the war? And what happened to six valuable bottles of wine that seem to be missing from the cellar’s collection?”

I’m a big fan of wine, a love cultivated in part by my sister. We once took a wonderful trip to Sonoma, a bike tour of the area, and it was one of the most enjoyable times I have ever had in my life. I figured that this novel would open a portal back into that kind of world, with picturesque vineyards and yummy varietals. The B&N description does a really thorough job of setting up our main characters: Kate is the narrator and an indispensable gateway into the world of wine tasting and wine quality, but I was wholly unprepared for the political stakes of this work, which does achieve a rich texture through the World War II storyline. Kate’s great-half aunt, named Hélène, is provided her own storyline through journal entries. We’re not even sure where these journal entries are coming from until very late into the novel, but they’re interspersed between the main characters and the primary diegetic level that involves Kate and her quest to figure out about this secret wine cellar and why it exists. Hélène’s perspective is pivotal in portraying the complicated position of French citizens during World War II, especially as families had to make difficult choices in relation to the Germans that they encountered. Hélène’s entire existence shrouds the family history, but Kate as well as her bestie Heather are determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. Along the way, readers are treated to the lush landscape of France’s wine country, which is a necessary respite from the increasingly bleak circumstances that Hélène and her family face. I was certainly surprised by the deft ability that Mah shows in mobilizing and complicating what could have been a superficially entertaining narrative and making it something far more weighty. There was obvious research put into the novel, a fact made clear by the acknowledgments that follow the novel’s conclusion. This novel also would have made an excellent candidate for something I discuss in my first book Racial Asymmetries, as the author (who is Chinese American) does not include any significant Asian American characters or contexts, but yet accrues obvious relevance for scholars in this field precisely because of Mah’s attention to forms of disempowerment and social inequality that radiated out of World War II and reverberates across generations to affect this particular family and many others.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

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A Review of Shaila Patel’s Soulmated (Month9Books, 2017)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Shaila Patel’s Soulmated (Month9Books, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn




So, the set-up for this YA paranormal romance is super intriguing because it focuses on a supernatural ability I haven’t seen very often: the empath. Growing up, I remember there was a supervillain called Empath, who was part of the rival team for The New Mutants in the Marval Universe. Empath naturally had the ability to manipulate people’s emotions. Shaila Patel takes up some similar ideas in Soulmated, the first of a two-part series. The second part apparently has been published, but not by the same company. B&N gives us this description of the novel:

“Two souls. One Fate. Eighteen-year-old Liam Whelan, an Irish royal empath, has been searching for his elusive soulmate. The rare union will cement his family's standing in empath politics and afford the couple legendary powers, while also making them targets of those seeking to oust them. Laxshmi Kapadia, an Indian-American high school student from a traditional family, faces her mother's ultimatum: graduate early and go to medical school, or commit to an arranged marriage. When Liam moves next door to Laxshmi, he’s immediately and inexplicably drawn to her. In Liam, Laxshmi envisions a future with the freedom to follow her heart. Liam's father isn't convinced Laxshmi is "The One" and Laxshmi's mother won't even let her talk to their handsome new neighbor. Will Liam and Laxshmi defy expectations and embrace a shared destiny? Or is the risk of choosing one's own fate too great a price for the soulmated?”

The narrative is bifurcated into two first-person perspectives, one obviously given to Liam and the other to Laxshmi. For the most part, each character has very divergent goals and motivations. Laxshmi lives within what might be considered the restrictions of the model minority construct. Her mother expects her to marry within caste and class, while also focusing on a sensible career (such as being a medical doctor). Naturally, Laxshmi finds her interests going elsewhere, like exploring her talents in dance and finding a better balance to her social life. Liam’s perspective is very different, because he holds so much more information about the “world-building” rules of the fictional world. He’s super obsessed to find the one, not only because it will be an important step for his family, but also because his emotions are so wrapped up in the process. As readers discover, Liam’s been on this quest for quite some time and come up on some dead ends. The problem with this quest is that Liam must break the hearts of the young ladies he realizes aren’t the one, while he himself must wrestle with the development of the topsy-turvy emotions that come with these various courtship stratagems. Though Patel is all in with the conceit—that is, Liam’s goal to find the “one”—the narrative spends so much time with the courtship between Liam and Laxshmi that the pacing and the upward arc become muddled. Part of the issue is that Patel may be saving much of the revelations for the second book, but I found my attention meandering even with the unique world-building elements offered. In my opinion, Patel did have more opportunities to expand upon the promise of this book: the political intrigue of the “warring” empath families is little explored. Nevertheless, it’s hard to make a final judgment on the book only insofar as there is still one more installment to go.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu


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A Review of Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes (Touchstone, 2018).

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes (Touchstone, 2018).
by Stephen Hong Sohn

One of the standout Asian North American literary debuts ever! Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes (Touchstone, 2018) is a speculative fiction that is told primarily from the perspective of Polly Nader, a young 20-something. It is 1981. We’ll let B&N take it from here:

“America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded laborer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years. But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured. An Ocean of Minutes is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story about the endurance and complexity of human relationships and the cost of holding onto the past—and the price of letting it go.”

Going to the future is about dealing with the crisis of the flu. In exchange for Polly’s time jump and a contract of labor that she will finish off in that future timeline, Frank will receive medical care in his non-obstructed timeline. The catch is that Polly and Frank will have to plan on how they will rendezvous with each other in that future. What Polly and Frank don’t know is that the future temporality comes with new nation-state boundaries. The United States is basically split in half, with the southern half being called America. Polly arrives to a future in which she’s forced to work in the American section in a contract labor situation that only gets worse and worse. This section of the novel I found difficult to get through because so many of the characters that Polly meets are despicable. I began wondering if I had the fortitude to finish the narrative because characters that even at first seemed to be more genuine ended up having ulterior motives. Eventually Polly’s status—she came on something called an O-1 visa, which is of a higher time traveling designation—is downgraded to an H-1. She is accused of a kind of theft, which extends her contract labor and causes her to do more menial tasks. At the same time, she discovers that Frank has not been able to meet her at the designated rendezvous point, likely in part due to the nation-state boundary restrictions generated within the last 17 years. All hope seems to be lost; Polly slowly begins to create a new life in America, but another chance circumstance allows her to reduce her contract labor time, while potentially finding a way to get more information about what happened to Frank. The novel has to use temporal intercuts in order to generate more pathos concerning Polly and Frank’s relationship. As I was thinking back on Lim’s choice, I realized that she had to include these sections, otherwise we wouldn’t quite understand why Polly was so invested in Frank and what it meant to her to be reunited with him. The purity of that young love is what constitutes her drive, her desire to survive her circumstances, and her persistence in believing that there might be a chance for a reunion. The back third of the novel, I thought, was the strongest. Finally, we get a sense of what Lim is doing with the romance plot, and the payoff is ultimately one of the most unsentimental, yet affecting endings I’ve read in quite a long time. The interesting thing about this novel is that the world building suggests such a complicated political quagmire, but only the surface is really engaged. This issue is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially because the limitations of the romance plot, with its explicit focus on two lives, does not necessarily allow for a more expansive perspective that perhaps would have been more fitting for the scale suggested by the speculative elements. The other dilemma that Lim brings up is the mechanics and functionalities of time travel; quite a bit is simply left unexplained, which didn’t bother me so much, only insofar as the novel moves in a different direction, leaving behind time travel for the most part. Yet, I still wondered more about how the time travel was invented and to what ends it has been used. There are glimmers that scientists had been using time travel to deal with the flu epidemic, but these attempts were unsuccessful. In any case, still, the ending is absolutely worth the depressing sludge that is the first 2/3 of the novel.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

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A Review of Sylv Chiang (author) and Connie Choi’s (illustrator) Tournament Trouble (Annick Press, 2

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Sylv Chiang (author) and Connie Choi’s (illustrator) Tournament Trouble (Annick Press, 2017).

by Stephen Hong Sohn

The writer and illustrator duo, Sylv Chiang and Connie Choi, bring us a fun debut with Tournament Trouble (Annick Press, 2018), which is the first in the Cross Ups series. Let’s let B&N do some setting up for us:

“All twelve-year-old Jaden wants to do is be the best at Cross Ups, the video game he and his friends can’t stop playing. He knows he could be—if only he didn’t have to hide his gaming from his mom, who’s convinced it will make him violent. After an epic match leads to an invitation to play in a top tournament, Jaden and his friends Devesh and Hugh hatch a plan to get him there. But Jaden’s strict parents and annoying siblings, not to mention a couple of bullies and his confusing feelings for his next-door neighbor Cali, keep getting in the way! Tournament Trouble marks the first book in a planned series by Sylv Chiang, a captivating new voice in middle reader fiction. With sharp dialogue and relatable characters, it chronicles the ups and downs of middle school with a relevant, contemporary twist. Accompanied by Connie Choi’s lively illustrations, Tournament Trouble invites readers into Jaden’s world, and will leave them eagerly awaiting his next adventure.”

So, there generally aren’t as many middle grade offerings, which makes Tournament Trouble a particularly welcome addition to the Asian American fictional archive. What I loved the most about the novel is that the general premise revolves around a fighting game. Growing up (and how old I feel now writing this statement), I recall many days that I spent playing games like Streetfighter and Mortal Kombat, which are just like Cross Ups. You basically pick a character who has particular combos that can activate special powers or moves, and your ultimate goal is to run down the hitpoint bar of your opponent. Typically, these games were played in real time in co-op mode, where you were either in an arcade or using controllers. These days, such games can also be played online, which allows a level of anonymity in terms of your opponents, which is part of the novel’s opening gambit. When Jaden is invited to participate in the local tournament, his registration is covered by a mysterious player of Cross Ups that Jaden has beaten. You can’t help but wonder who this person actually is, and the reveal was definitely a surprise for me. But Jaden’s mother does not want Jaden playing Cross Ups at all, so he has to find a way to get into the tournament without her knowing about it. Jaden’s mother is a character that also undergoes some development, as readers eventually discover why it is that she is so opposed to Jaden playing this particular game. The other complicated element of this novel relates to Cali’s subplot; her mother suffers from a degenerative condition, which makes it difficult for her to care for Cali, especially when she lands in the hospital. Jaden’s deep friendship with Cali spurs him to find a way to make it so that Cali can remain living where she is; this connection is undoubtedly heartwarming. Choi’s manga-like drawings were the proper aesthetic accompaniment to this plot, and readers of all ages should be delighted to know that Cross Ups part 2 is already coming out this Fall!

Buy the Book Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu.

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A Review of Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium 2018)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium 2018)
by Stephen Hong Sohn



There’s much to praise concerning Bina Shah’s second novel Before She Sleeps (Delphinium 2018), which sets us up in a dystopian world in which the gender ratio between men and women has become highly unbalanced due to a virus that is more destructive to women than men. Let’s let B&N give us some more context:

“In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment. This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.”

This description does a great job of providing us some basics, but doesn’t elucidate Shah’s complicated use of narrative discourse, as there are a mixture of different narrative perspectives and approaches to storytelling (including notes from a character’s journal/ diary). Our ostensible hero is a woman by the name of Sabine, who is part of the Panah, the secret society of women who provide “intimacy without sex.” Sabine isn’t really all that interested in the work, but the Panah is the closest thing she has to a home. Lin, the den mother of the women, provides them with the rules and the policies they must abide by in order to survive, but all is not perfectly well in the Panah. There is some dissension among the ranks; some like Rupa actually want to have more intimate relationships with their male customers, such as the prospect of falling in love with a man. But these sorts of violations are dangerous, as the women of the Panah cannot ever live a life in Green City nor can they take a man into their secret society. The plot moves into high gear once Sabine does not return from one of her routine visits with a client. Using her contacts, Lin is able to send one of her clients (a stern and calculating man by the name of Faro) to go after Sabine and to find out what has happened to her. However, Faro can only do so much, as he must still abide by the rules of Green City, while he attempts to help Sabine. But once Sabine appears on the radar of Green City occupants, including a doctor named Julien Asfour and a colleague named Bouthain, the situation becomes far more complicated. Can Sabine even be returned to the Panah? This question is the one that drives the plot toward its complicated conclusion. While Shah’s work is certainly a riff off of novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, she’s obviously working with different cultural contexts, involving South Asia and the Middle East. Given the rise of global feminisms, this novel comes at perhaps the perfect time to bring up larger questions about women’s agency. What was questionable to me was the compulsory heterosexuality at play in the novel, something that only comes under question once when it is suggested that Bouthain might actually have sexual desires for Julien. Indeed, I wondered more largely about any queer attachments in this future, which is so reliant upon the reproductive capacities of women. Do queer relationships exist at all? How would they be regulated? In any case, these questions aside: the novel’s world-building was certainly immersive and fans of speculative fiction will have quite a lot to mull over; this novel would also make an excellent addition to a postcolonial literature course, perhaps a novel to be taught in conjunction with something like Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu.

 

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A Review of Crystal Hana Kim’s If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018)

Posted by: xiomara

A Review of Crystal Hana Kim’s If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018)
by Stephen Hong Sohn



Crystal Hana Kim holding a copy of her book.
Author website: Click image or here!


I was really stoked about this debut, as I’ve been thinking a lot more about the Korean War; I haven’t had many opportunities to read works by Korean American writers about that period. Of course, there’s Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred, Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered, but since those texts, I haven’t had a chance to read many that delved so specifically into the war period and the following decades. We’ll let B&N provide us with some contextual scaffolding:

“An emotionally riveting debut novel about war, family, and forbidden love—the unforgettable saga of two ill-fated lovers in Korea and the heartbreaking choices they’re forced to make in the years surrounding the civil war that still haunts us today. When the communist-backed army from the north invades her home, sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, along with her widowed mother and ailing brother, is forced to flee to a refugee camp along the coast. For a few hours each night, she escapes her family’s makeshift home and tragic circumstances with her childhood friend, Kyunghwan. Focused on finishing school, Kyunghwan doesn’t realize his older and wealthier cousin, Jisoo, has his sights set on the beautiful and spirited Haemi—and is determined to marry her before joining the fight. But as Haemi becomes a wife, then a mother, her decision to forsake the boy she always loved for the security of her family sets off a dramatic saga that will have profound effects for generations to come. Richly told and deeply moving, If You Leave Me is a stunning portrait of war and refugee life, a passionate and timeless romance, and a heartrending exploration of one woman’s longing for autonomy in a rapidly changing world.”

In some ways, this novel did remind me of Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s Everything Belongs to Us, because the narrative immediately sets up a kind of naturalistic dilemma set up around a love triangle. Haemi is in a sort of bind because the marriage match with Jisoo is theoretically the better one: he comes from a well-established family, but Haemi obviously is more emotionally connected to Kyunghwan. Once Jisoo is able to procure medicine to help Haemi’s younger brother deal with a respiratory illness, her decision seems set: she must wed Jisoo, this man who has come to the rescue of her family, even if it means relinquishing her love for Kyunghwan. The years following the war only complicate matters further: Jisoo returns from his service a different man, having lost some use of his arm, while Kyunghwan keeps himself away from Haemi, realizing that he must try to carve out a life beyond her shadow. At the same time, Jisoo and Haemi find themselves drifting apart from each other. Jisoo’s masculinity has been in question ever since he returned, and he finds solace working at a local Korean orphanage (who happens to be staffed in part by a woman who once was a nurse and tended to his wounds during the war period). Haemi is frustrated by her experience with motherhood; her energy and strength are sapped by successive pregnancies. She also fears that her daughters will fail to get the proper resource support because they are girls (in a patriarchal society). Kyunghwan eventually returns to generate more relational fireworks, so you know that the ending sequence can only be dark. Kim has an obvious talent for the intricacies of character development; there are sequences that absolutely spark with their nuanced and often devastating insights. At the same time, the novel can sometimes meander a bit. Late stage narrative perspective additions muddy the waters slightly, and I was unprepared for additional viewpoints from Hyunki (Haemi’s little brother) and Sollee, Haemi’s eldest child. I wasn’t entirely convinced, given the plot dynamics, that we needed these additional narrative voices, but overall, the novel is an intriguing representational consideration of love and relationships as they must tarry with the development of war.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

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A Review of Anuk Arudpragasam’s Story of a Brief Marriage (Flatiron Books, 2016)

Posted by: sorayaz



Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel, Story of a Brief Marriage, reminds me why bring thrown off balance as a reader and academic is of immeasurable value. I’ve read a few books now that directly depict the Sri Lankan civil war or have stories taking place with the war in the background. My training as an academic focused on Sri Lankan Anglophone literature means that I look for a certain set of questions formed within specific theoretical foundations. But as much as I can, I try to let the literature I read guide my thoughts around issues of memory, war, trauma, gender, and colonialism. Story of a Brief Marriage uses the body as an index to intersect with all these aspects, and in doing so reminds us how much more careful (re)thinking there needs to be done around a long-standing event as devastating and complex as the Sri Lankan civil war.

Here is a short plot summary from Goodreads: “Two and a half decades into a devastating civil war, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority is pushed inexorably towards the coast by the advancing army. Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.”

The novel opens during a temporary reprieve from heavy shelling. The protagonist, Dinesh, is carrying an injured six-year old boy over to a makeshift hospital/clinic, where the boy will have his arm amputated. There are details of the precise injuries suffered by the child, and soon Dinesh becomes fascinated with what the stump of the child's already amputated thigh, lost to a landmine months previously, might feel like. I was worried at this point about this depiction of violence, of maiming, wondering if it was indulgent, or reveling in our need to visualize such injury from a safe distance. This academic paranoia I am trying to unlearn, and the novel certainly helped me do that.

The doctor starts sawing off the boy’s flesh while he is awake, because there is no anesthetic. At this point, Dinesh begins to wonder: is it better for the boy to lose his right arm or his left; is it easier for a person to balance if they lose their limbs all on one side of their body, or whether it is better to lose a left leg and a right arm, or vice versa. In the wake of the traumatic scene before him, in which he must participate by holding the boy down, Dinesh deliberates in the only way he can about the life of the child. He considers not only the boy’s past injury due to a landmine (his stump), but also what he sees as the boy’s present circumstance (the boy’s arm being sawed off), as well as what this result means for the boy’s future (will he be off-balance?; which is his dominant side?). These deliberations connect past, present, and future to both the immediacy and long-standing impact of war’s injuries on both the body and the psyche. It is this list of deliberations, simultaneously ringing in as ridiculous and practical, that changed my mind about what this book was doing with its opening pages, and indeed throughout.

The novel stretches the notion of what is ‘normal’ in times of war and violence, and one way it does this is by slowing down time. The entire novel takes place over a day and a night, but it feels much, much longer than that because of the careful way Arudpragasam renders Dinesh’s response to the violence around him. When the chaos and destruction of the shelling stops, Dinesh starts noticing the movements and workings of his own body as one that is still whole and functioning. He thinks about his feet moving, one in front of the other, as he walks. He notes what it feels like to feed himself a mouthful of rice and dhal, how the food feels as his tongue and teeth and molars crush it down, what the ball of food feels like as it moves down his throat and into his stomach. While the ground beneath him and his connections to others is vulnerable, Dinesh secures himself in his awareness of his own body and its wondrous work of keeping him alive. In noticing his body, Dinesh’s thoughts stretch out time.

Arudpragasam’s background in philosophy comes through clearly as Dinesh contemplates his body and wrestles with the notion that he may soon leave it behind. This struggle is only amplified when he agrees to marry Ganga. Set against the slowing down of time, the marriage proposal should seem out of time, but Arudpragasam writes it in such a way that it seems perfectly suited to take place among the carnage, loss, and chaos occurring around Dinesh and Ganga. And after all, why should it not, when we consider that in the midst of shelling, there is so little that is under one’s control? Ganga’s father attempts his fatherly duty of ensuring his daughter is married. Ganga seems reluctant to the marriage at first; we don’t hear the words she speaks to her father, although we do know that she thinks marriage isn’t the smartest move for her in case Dinesh dies and leaves her a widow. I’m still mulling over Ganga’s position here since questions of agency are complicated many-fold in this postcolonial social context that is further complicated by the intrusions of war. Silence in this novel has to do not just with agency and voice but also with the fact that the possibility of death hangs over Dinesh and Ganga, who do not quite know what to do with themselves. They're at a loss for words because their pasts so removed from them that they don’t know how to talk about who they are, and the future is not available to them either because they know they could die at any moment.

And yet, despite this knowledge, Dinesh acts on the present as he muses desperately over what it means to have a companion, what it means to truly know someone else. He and Ganga share his makeshift bed. He washes the grime that has accumulated on his body because he is aware of Ganga’s presence. He hopes, despite the nearness of death, for something as simple as having his new wife consider him clean and acceptable. Both in the quick images that filter through Dinesh’s days in the camp (a woman eating sand, an amputee shopping for a limb among the ones scattered around, the girl who wraps a square of sari around her brother’s amputated hand and fingers) and in the events we consider ‘major’ (marriage, death) there seems to be a recognition that actions must be based on the knowledge that the violence surrounding the characters will not end.

What can be done in the spaces of immediate violence and trauma? One answer seems to be to make room for what is necessary to move from one moment to the next. This method for dealing with trauma seems to be what allows Dinesh to function, and is similar to what I’ve read in other novels – characters moving from one thing, to the next, to the next. What is refreshing and heartening about Arudpragasam’s novel is that there is also room for whatever might give one peace of mind. For Ganga’s father, it was ensuring that his daughter was married. I wonder if, for Ganga, it was giving her father this peace of mind that allowed her to carry on. For Dinesh, once married, it was washing himself up. At least then, there is this peace and union, but these are imperfect and complicated, and in no way make up for the destruction and loss that these characters are dealing with.

This novel is at once about the specifics of the Sri Lankan civil war, the lived experiences of the people who suffered through it, and the minutiae of things that makes up human life - eating, walking, sleeping, shitting, washing. I think the book manages these nodes beautifully by simultaneously contracting and expanding time through the eyes of Dinesh. I did not know quite how to deal with the end of the novel, and spent a good few days processing it and coming back from the intellectual abyss that is reading literature about the Sri Lankan civil war.  This book is so very important. It left me with fascinating questions about what we think we know about how we form connections with others and to our own selves, and about the hope and futility of connection despite the closeness of death. A highly recommended book that deserves all its accolades!

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Brief-Ma...




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A Review of Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Vintage Contemporaries, 2017)

Posted by: sorayaz

A Review of Weike Wang’s Chemistry (Vintage Contemporaries, 2017)

The narrator of Weike Wang’s Chemistry goes unnamed, but, after two back-to-back readings of this novel, I feel as if I know her. She might be someone I met in grad school, in fact.

The narrator is working on her Chemistry Ph.D. and her boyfriend, Eric, has proposed to her. The novel begins by referencing this moment and then weaves it way through the narrator’s intellectual/emotional crisis via a series of short, journal-style vignettes. These stream-of-consciousness vignettes signal immediately to me the psyche of a graduate student, where the separation between who you are in life and what you do in life become muddier and muddier. For the narrator, then, both the mundane and special moments of everyday life (a marriage proposal, for instance), are inflected with field-specific knowledge (that diamond is no longer the hardest mineral known to man, for instance). This type of slippage occurs throughout the novel, and the matter-of-fact demeanor in which it occurs I think reflects one of the truest experiences of life as a graduate student.

The narrator’s impending moment of crisis (for lack of a better term) is indicated by a haircut which is quickly followed by her breaking five beakers in lab. After a one-month hiatus, she is put on medical leave and asked to see a therapist. One of the things I appreciate most is how Wang renders her narrator’s reactions as normal in response to an academic institution’s markers of failure (the lack of perfectly reproduceable results, the lack of multiple published papers, and so on). Walking the dog seven times a day, or redoing the just-done laundry – these come to be understandable tasks when we realize the narrator is confronting the larger-than-life loss of working towards a Ph.D. degree and being unable to tell her parents, Chinese immigrants who struggled far worse, and achieved much more than her, that she might not continue. And even as the narrator’s journey through the novel is rendered somewhat normal in this way, she still relates the stories of other graduate students, the ones that didn’t make it past the moments of uncertainty they faced within the unhealthy, sometimes violent spaces that exist within academic institutions.

As such, despite the brevity of the vignettes and the hilarity of the situations the narrator finds herself in, the novel confronts some immense, difficult questions. I sat down to read this book as an international first-generation college student from Sri Lanka. I just completed my first two years of a Ph.D. program in English. I have been in the U.S. for eight years now, seeing little of my loved ones back home. Back in Sri Lanka for the summer holidays, I am currently around family and friends who didn’t get much of an education past high school, sometimes less than that. Every time I return back to the community I come from, I ask the same question of myself that the narrator of Chemistry asks a mere five pages into the novel: “What use is this work in the long run?” I knew then that I had found a friend in this book.

Through the rest of the novel, the narrator grapples with more questions and situations familiar to those of us whose communities have sacrificed so that we may achieve: How does one measure the proofs of science or theory against the wisdom of cultural beliefs and proverbs related by one’s parents? What does it mean to occupy, strive for, achieve, and rebel against the model minority stereotype? How do you face failure when your parents sacrificed so that you could succeed? What part of our parents’ sacrifices are not redeemable by our success?

One of the many things that touched me is that the narrator’s most intense feelings of inadequacy arise not from her comparisons against lab partner or boyfriend or best friend, all of whom progress smoothly in their academics and careers. Instead, it is the achievements of the narrator’s father that make her feel like she will never achieve adequately: “But such progress he’s made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon” (22). I like this so much because, graduate school often assumes that our successes are measured against our peers, rather than looking outside the institution, perhaps towards our upbringings or our experiences, to think about how we might measure success. That impostor syndrome should reach our narrator then, through her own, imperfect father, is important and truer to life than I think any of us want to admit.

At the therapist’s insistence, the narrator spends time recalling both her father and her mother. We learn about their histories and sacrifices, and that the trauma of migration impacts their persons and marriage in unhealthy ways. The exercises in recall lead the narrator to understand her parents better, with all their imperfections. The vignettes about her parents are some of the most devastating aspects of this book, but they are delivered the same as any other insignificant, hilarious detail about the dog or the best friend’s baby. We are left to struggle with the struggles of the narrator’s parents. Eventually, these recollections provide insight into the narrator’s relationship with Eric, to whom the narrator writes a letter at the close of the novel. Part of it reads: “Pure crystals are those that have perfectly repeating units. You told me this after I asked you what you found beautiful about chemistry. But what of the repeating units in life? Most often imperfect” (211). Even as these lines read as a final word to Eric, I think it also brings home the fact that this book as a whole could be a love letter to the narrator’s parents, the “most often imperfect repeating units in [her] life.” (In this way, the novel also reminds me of Shailja Patel's work, Migritude, part of which Patel says is actually a love letter to her parents, and deals with similar questions of home, migration, and sacrifice, albeit with a much less humorous but equally touching voice.)

An adage that the narrator’s lab mate tells her early in the novel, “You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally” (9) is fitting for a book that is in many ways about the chemistry of academic institutions, of social institutions, of family, of love, and of migration. It is also about the struggle to love the things that are imperfect, including oneself. And still, alongside the big questions that make up part of this novel, there is the wonderful smallness of every day life. Outside the noise of those five beakers breaking, there are other things. There is an imperfect relationship with a perfect boyfriend, a lovable dog, a best friend with a troubled marriage who welcomes her first baby into the world. And always, there are her parents. These are the people who exist outside of what the narrator does, and they bring her back to who she is, partly by reminding her that there is, in fact, a ‘who’ outside of the ‘what’ she has been doing. If there’s anything a graduate students needs to hear more than that, I’m not sure what it is.

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-nove...

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A Review of Death Notice

Posted by: jamieliu


Death Notice by Zhou Haohui, Beijing: Beijing Times Chinese Press, 2014
Translated by Zac Haluza, New York: Doubleday, 2018

Death Notice is translated from the first book of a trilogy written by Zhou Haohui—one of the top suspense writers in China. Zac Haluza did a decent job translating the fiction, cutting out redundant depictions of the characters’ thoughts unrelated to the plot development and the various repetitions, correcting small contradictions, and smoothing out obviously illogical places. With the help of the translation, Death Notice is, overall, a page-turner that you would want to read in one setting.

A police officer was killed in his apartment. Its investigation leads to solved and unresolved cases 18 years ago. At the same time, the killer Eumenides—named after the Greek deity of vengeance and the self-imposed fair judge and ruthless executioner who works beyond the corrupted legal system—stirs the police force and the whole city by sending out death notices indicating next targets, their crimes, and dates of executions. To find out and impedes Eumenides and to confront the bold defiance, the 4/18 Task Force is formed, consisting of top police officers from local police offices and a psychologist from the local police academy. With their involvement in the investigation, their personal pasts are haunting, revealing, and complicating…Thanks to the translator, the psychologist—one of a few women in the fiction—fits her role as a smart and independent psychologist and lecturer from the local police academy instead of being a pretty young lady, who is unprofessional and concerns more about how men around her feel rather than her investigation in the original text. 

The novel is centered on questions of should justice be upheld by individuals that investigate crimes and execute criminals circumventing the law? Should polices protect those who have received death notices as any other innocent victims or use them as baits to capture Eumenides? The questions are great. The plot is intriguing. Yet the original motive of the birth of Eumenides and some of the convictions being made are unconvincing. Moreover, in the process of revenge, Eumenides is unhesitating to hurt his friend and kill acquaintance and innocent people, which undermines the originally serious questions that the author poses when readers could possibly read Eumenides as an insane character.

The original Chinese novel is set in “A city.” In its translation, Haluza sets it in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, China. “A city” sends out the message that the crimes, the corruption, the social and justice problems could actually happen in any big cities even around the world, transcending cultural differences. Whereas setting it in Chengdu gives the fiction a special Chinese flavor which may attract Western readers who are curious about Chinese culture and society. However, since there is few portrayal of “A city” in the original text, the sporadic places depicting Chengdu and Sichuan food are created solely by the translator and are restrained.

An interesting change in the translation is the name of the protagonist—one of the main police officers. His name is “Luo Fei” in the original text. He is an extraordinary detective and the main character in many of Zhou Haohui’s works. However, in the English translation, his name changes to “Pei Tao,” which comes out of nowhere. Not sure whether it is because he is also the main guy in Zhou’s first English translation novel The Valley of Terror, which “did not take off” according to a New York Times article.

The other minor problem is Chinese names. They might be so confusing to the Western audience as it confused even the translator. For a couple of places, Haluza confused “Meng” with “Mu.” Other names in this volume that might be confusing and interrupt reading include “Zeng” and “Zheng,” “Zhou” and “Zou,” and “Peng” and “Pei.” 

www.amazon.com/Death-Notice-Novel-Zhou-Haohui/dp/0385543328/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0


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Musing around Akuma-Shin (惡魔神), a play at FootLights Theater Community in LA

Posted by: kaihangcheang

 

In his contribution to the recent anthology Flashpoints For Asian American Studies (2017), the critic Timothy Yu poses a provocative question: “has Asian American Studies failed?” On first glance, the answer to this provocation might seem to be simply and obviously “no,” or at least, “not yet,” but Yu argues that the recent upsurge in overt xenophobia in the US—and especially the open discussion of using internment as a strategy to contain and monitor Muslim refugees—suggests that Asian American critics are failing to build or sustain a social consensus against the sort of enforced racial incarceration that so traumatized the Asian American community. To take one prominent example of xenophobia, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, David A Bowers (2015) is on record expressing sympathy with President Roosevelt’s decision to incarcerate 110,000 Japanese Americans, and feels the need to do the same to Syrians in the US out of fear of ISIS. Reading claims like this, it’s difficult not to wonder if Americans have already forgotten the flawed logic that underwrote the internment of Japanese Americans: specifically, the conflation of Japanese American citizens and residents of the US with Japanese whose identified primarily with Japan. Or have most Americans simply never learned about the repercussions of internment? It’s difficult to know the precise roots of American ignorance or indifference on this subject, but Yu suggests that if the traumas of internment are to be avoided in the future, Asian American studies must become more relevant to the public. The histories and stories of oppressed Asian immigrants and their descendants have so much to tell us about the prospects for and dangers to marginalized immigrant groups today.

Asian American scholarship can provide a bridge between the lessons of the past and pressing questions of the present, but so can Asian American art. Kenley Smith’s Akuma-Shin is one such project. The play features rising Asian American actors including Reuben Uy (from the show Bosch), and Victor S. Chi (from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D), and had a month-long run at LA’s Sacred Fools Theater Community, where I viewed it in April. Evoking Godzilla without directly calling “the monster” in the room by its commonly-known name, Akuma-Shin brings back memories of Cold-War-era xenophobia, materializing the affect in every characters’ terror of the monster, as the plot wanders through multiple temporal, geographical, and subjunctive dimensions from (post)WWII Japan, to the US in the Sixties, to 9-11 America.

Because of its expansive landscape, the play at times feel choppy; but the director and writer seem to have sought to make that choppiness a part of the play’s thematic presentation. The set included “side-stages” elevated on the left and right wings of the main stage, outfitted with colorful lighting and suspensive shadows to augment the drama. Overloaded by these stimuli, I left the theater still unpacking the dense symbolism at work in the play. What does the monster represent? What do the victims and the survivors in the play tell us about international fear by recounting the monster-induced apocalypse via the theatrical mediation of the talk show and the classroom?

The answers to these questions are, I think, directly related to the pedagogical values of Asian American history and culture. By concretizing fear in the popular figure of a Godzilla-like monster, a monster that brings out the personal demons, traumas, and failings in each of the characters of the play (Japanese and Americans included), Akuma-Shinuses popular culture to show how the fear of the Other can overwhelm the social imagination, leading to destructive vengeance and wide-spread collateral damage.

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