Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 47

Two short stories by Charles Yu and Alyssa Wong

I recently read a couple of short stories by Asian American writers and thought I'd link them here. Every few years, I wonder about all the short stories, poems, and essays that get published in various literary magazines by Asian American writers. Does the corpus of this literature look different from what appears in book form? Would our conception of the major themes in Asian American literature change signficantly if we drew different frames around what we think of as published literature? What about if we incorporate other types of storytelling or narrative, via new or old technologies like podcasts, stand up comedy routines, and more?

The two stories I read were Charles Yu's "Fable" in the New Yorker and Alyssa Wong's "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" in Nightmare. Both stories are in the realm of speculative/fantasy fiction, and both function on an allegorical register for how we conceive of people's every day life. Yu's story centers on a man trying to make sense of his life's trajectory (choosing a career, finding a wife, having a child to build a family, etc.), and Wong's story considers how a daughter learned to live and relate to others via what her mothers taught and showed her through her actions.


Illustration by Tom Gauld.

There are also a couple of great extras for Yu's story at the New Yorker: a brief interview on therapy and storytelling and an audio recording of Yu's reading of the story. "Fable" is like some of Yu's other fiction in its metacommentary on its own genre and on the way the narrative perspective often breaks the fourth wall of telling a story.


Illustration by Plunderpuss.

I found out about Wong's story because it won this year's Nebula Award for short story. And I found out about the award through another article about how women swept the awards this year--something especially significant in light of some of the crazy stuff happening in the sci-fi/fantasy world with the other major prize, the Hugo Award. I'm really excited to have found out about Alyssa Wong and will eagerly look up her other writing. "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" does something really interesting with Asian American experiences like feeling different from other Americans because of what you eat and creates a fantastical story with monstrous characters that nevertheless plumb the complexities of familial and social relationships that are significant to Asian Americans.

Asian American Literature Fans: Small Press Spotlight X 3 (Four Way, Unnamed Press, and Akashic)

May 23, 2016          

Asian American Literature Fans: Small Press Spotlight X 3 (Four Way, Unnamed Press, and Akashic)

In this post, reviews of Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016) and C. Dale Young’s The Halo (2016); Avtar Singh’s Necropolis (Akashic 2016) and Ali Eteraz’s Native Believer (Akashic 2016); Janice Pariat’s Seahorse (Unnamed Press, 2016) and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press, 2016).

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. Counting this post, I will be up to 13 reviews (if I have completed my addition properly). We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership.

At last count, there were approximately 10 comments from unique users, and 2 reviews by Nadeen Kharputly, putting the community at 12!  At the time of this posting, I have completed my 31 review challenge. You still have about 19 comments to go and one week remaining! Go team!

For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

*****

In this post, I am focusing on three smaller, independent publishers, whose books I have absolutely adored and who deserve way more recognition by readers in general and most certainly from critics, instructors, and scholars.

*****

Spotlight on Four Way Books, with reviews of Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016) and C. Dale Young’s The Halo (2016).

I’ll start out with Four Way Books, which boasts one of the most extensive catalogues that include minority poets. Four Way has been near and dear to my heart, as so many of the collections are grounded in the confessional lyric that first drew me to poetry. Some previous books we’ve already reviewed at Asian American literature fans such as Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s collections: Shadow Mountain (2008) and her follow up Bear, Diamonds, and Crane (2011). Four Way has also published works by other Asian American authors; we’ll be certain to roll out reviews of other works in the future.

For more on Four Way Books and their catalog, go here:

http://fourwaybooks.com/site/

A Review of C. Dale Young’s The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016).

Well, it’s been an amazing experience just taking some time to dive back into ready poetry. I don’t really understand why I stay away. One of the highlights of this time has definitely been C. Dale Young’s The Halo, which is his fourth collection (after Day Underneath the Day, The Second Person, and Torn). Young’s The Halo is probably his most structurally cohesive collection, both on the level of theme and of form. In this work, he makes great use of a particular poetic structure involving the quintain. I’m not quite sure if this use of the quintain has a specific formal name, as I’m not all that well versed in such things, but the quintain organizes every single poem that appears whether or not there is six stanzas (which is generally the case in most of the poems, giving off a sestina-like geometric structure) or less. The thematic element obviously comes from the title. In this case, Young uses a motif related to a young man’s experience and shame over his status as a human who has somehow sprouted wings. The question that Young never answers, much to our delight, is how to understand this particular issue: is it simply a metaphor for social difference? Is it actually related to the fact that this lyric figure has extra appendages that should allow him to levitate? There’s probably an element of both somewhere in there. On the one hand, you have a poem like “Annunciation,” which seems to suggest a more literal reading of the wings:  “I learned to hide my wings almost immediately/ learned to tuck and bandage them down” (8). On the other, you have a poem like “After Crossing the Via Appia,” which gives us this gem: “Because my wings had already erupted from between my shoulder blades. Because I had coveted another man in that secret space in my own head, the lean shape of him, his water-drenched skin as he rose/ from the sea off Fort Lauderdale Beach” (30). Here, Young gives us the chance to connect the sprouting of angel wings and the monstrosity associated with it to queer desire, but this reading is later undercut when the lyric speaker does seem to have a chance to explore his feelings with another man, but discovers that this man does not have wings like he does, so to what then does this angelic form refer? Without answering this question, let us turn to the other issue at hand: the central lyric figure’s story becomes complicated when he is in a car accident and confined to a hospital bed, unsure of whether he is alive or dead. The narrative, or so it seems, is that he was run over by a drunk driver, and lucky to be alive at all. There is a surreal moment when he begins to think that the doctor he sees above him is actually himself sometime in the future, as is noted in the poem “Mind over Matter” when the speaker reveals: “The man standing over me was me” (18). The fissure between reality and fantasy, perception and objectivity is where this book really takes flight, if to pun only briefly: we want this lyric figure to spread his wings and to find a way embrace his winged self. A long-ish poem toward the end, “The Wolf,” involves the central lyric figure in a wrestling match with an actual angel, and so we’re taken back into strongly Biblical territory here. As this lyric Jacob discovers yet again that he is just a mere mortal, stuck with some corporeal abnormality that he wants to desperately to hide, we still want him to find his way in the world and out from the under the weight of his self-denigrations and his burdensome wingspan. What Young’s poetry reminds us is that though things might “get better,” the material effects of social oppression are inescapable and tragically destructive. Love, deep connections, passionate desires can all be all too temporary, so what do we hang onto but by (poetically) remaking our wounds and traumas into something we can live with, to keep us warm and cozy during those long stretches us darkness, to find a way to see what can’t be seen (but so often felt) in the intimate space between our shoulder blades.

Buy the Book Here:

http://fourwaybooks.com/site/halo/

A Review of Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way, 2016).

Well, gosh, I know I’ve been terribly behind on reading poetry and reviewing it as well. I always forget how much I’ve needed to read poetry, but it becomes apparent upon the first couple of pages of Rajiv Mohabir’s riveting, eclectic debut The Taxidermist’s Cut. Before I get started on reviewing, I wanted to first alert you to a great interview here:

http://www.connotationpress.com/hoppenthaler-s-congeries/july-2015/2600-rajiv-mohabir-poetry

At one point in this interview, Mohabir relates: “My dissertation will be a collection of poems that charts the historical journey of queer indentured laborers who traveled from India to Guyana as well as the personal: my own journey through cultural identities and surviving homophobias. I hope to put into conversation queer migration under Indian indenture (1838-1917), the whaling industry, and contemporary homophobic and racist violences.” This statement is an excellent way to consider the various forces at play in Mohabir’s collection, which draws on a complicated parental immigrant lineage on the one hand and the lyric speaker’s coming-to-terms with his queer/ racialized background on the other. There is a very interesting interlingual issue at work in this collection, and it made me wonder immediately about Mohabir’s background precisely because it reminded me so much of my own. Poetry comes into being for the child of immigrants often in association with a particular field of reference that is then placed alongside interlingual registers. As I was reading the Taxidermist’s Cut, I kept thinking about how his use of scientific language (especially in relation to plants and animals) and tropes connected to taxidermy in general fall in line with desire to categorize and classify every aspect of our lives down to our identities. What Mohabir so effectively deploys is a hybrid mixture of scientific language and discourses of identity that create a lyric amalgam that wonderfully renders the confusion arising in a queer racialized coming of age: the subject seeks power over his life through the process of naming, yet finds himself often stripped of any sense of security through the illicit nature of sexuality and the strangeness of his racial identity. Here are two of my favorite examples of this kind of “hybrid lyric”:

From “Carolina Wren”

On my mother’s porch, a mother
            wren nested amongst Rhododendron roots.
Her eggs hatched into naked skins. I read,
            Wrens reject their young if a boy should touch,

or be touched by, another boy but only after
            I wrapped it in my fingers. Beginning
To fledge, mother smelled only a child’s
            Foreign oils. She abandoned the baby chick (69).

These stanzas show us a really splendid example of lyric equivocation. Here, the lyric speaker is learning a lesson concerning the titular “Carolina wren,” but we’re unsure about how to deal with the italics that signal the “lesson.” On the one hand, the lyric speaker is learning about the problem of touching birds, as the “foreign oils” mark them for expulsion from the nest. On the other, this kind of lesson begins to accrue texture in relation to the development of his social difference: he is foreign in multiple senses of the word. These so-called “oils” of difference mark him perhaps as a figure who cannot be embraced by his family. But because of the ways that the italics are dropped into the poem, we wonder about what the “it” refers to: the indefinite antecedent might at first seem to suggest the boy’s handling of a bird, but given the racialized sexuality of the lyric speaker, the “it” takes on more metaphorical conceits concerning desire and yearning that track throughout the collection. Another wonderful example of the ways that these italics serve to complicate any reading practices appears in “Reference and Anatomy”:

There are many men’s fingertips up and down my own thighs. You ask me their names, so you can stuff them inside me. I smile, They’re all there,
frozen in thick sheets of lake ice, corpses
gossiping about exactly where and for how long
I’ve tongued each man—
You pluck nimbus feathers, to search for
the underlying structure as you position me—
You say anything I say to you is a fairytale” (83).

There’s an intriguing potpourri of mixed metaphors, as the lyric speaker seems to be engaging in an erotic encounter with another man, but the nature of this intercourse is complicated through the problem of naming (a thematic we saw in the previous poem). The “names” being referred to here seem connected to other men and their fingertips, which are somehow dead but animated enough to “gossip.” As with other poems in the collection, the lyric speaker is continually invoked in relation to his bird-like qualities—these “nimbus feathers”—but his social difference marks him as an oddity, something to be examined as spectacle perhaps rather than engaged as an object of beauty rather than a subject of desire. He is being plucked, then stuffed, then filled so as to be displayed, having been hunted perhaps and then transformed as a icon of successful predation: thus, the “fairytale” takes on a darker meaning here, as our lyric speaker finds himself remade into something perhaps both majestic and grotesque at the same time. The Taxidermist’s Cut is a collection that revels in making meaning out of poetic dissonances.

Buy the Book Here:

http://fourwaybooks.com/site/taxidermists-cut/


*****

Spotlight on Akashic Books with reviews of Avtar Singh’s Necropolis (Akashic 2016) and Ali Eteraz’s Native Believer (Akashic 2016)

Another wonderful indie/ smaller press is Akashic Books. They are perhaps most well known for their noir series, but they have also published a number of Asian American and Asian Anglophone author, including Nina Revoyr, Yongsoo Park, and Eric Gamalinda. For more on Akashic, go here:

http://www.akashicbooks.com/

A Review of Avtar Singh’s Necropolis (Akashic 2016).

Avtar Singh’s stateside debut is Necropolis, which is coming out of Akashic Books. This novel was definitely one of my anticipated reads for this year, partly because of the gruesome, but nonetheless intriguing plot description. We’ll let the official blurb over at Akashic briefly take it away from here: “Necropolis follows Sajan Dayal, a detective in pursuit of a serial (though nonlethal) collector of fingers. He encounters would-be vampires and werewolves, and a woman named Razia who may or may not be centuries old. Guided by Singh’s gorgeous and masterful writing, the novel peels back layers of a city in thrall to its past, hostage to its present, and bitterly divided as to its future. Delhi went from being an imperial capital to provincial backwater in a few centuries: the journey back to exploding commercial metropolis has been compressed into a few decades. Combining elements of crime, fantasy, and noir,Necropolis tackles the questions of origin, ownership, and class that such a revolution inevitably raises. The world of Delhi, the sweep of its history—its grandeur, grimness, and criminality—all of it comes alive in Necropolis.” The opening of the novel is superbly gothic, as it explores that aforementioned collector of fingers. Sajan Dayal is on the case, as well as some of his coworkers, including a younger investigator Smita and a faithful stalwart in a man named Kapoor. Dayal, also known as the DCP, discovers that the collector is somehow obsessed with a mysterious woman (the aforementioned Razia). Dayal and his coworkers employ Razia in order to locate the individual who is engaged in the finger severing. As we discover—and here is your spoiler warning—the serial finger collector is none other than some sort of otherworldly creature who is giving these body parts to Razia as a kind of tribute because Razia is apparently a vampire. The fact of Razia’s vampire-hood is something that the novel toys with constantly. Because Singh more or less creates a realist fictional world, the references to werewolves and vampires reconstruct New Delhi as a location that must be reconsidered from the vantage point of the supernatural. Thus, in this particular work, Singh pushes us to link the supernatural with global capitalism, creatures of the night with drug lords, life everlasting with the desire for the urban elite to retain control and power over the proletarian masses. The most compelling point for Singh is the character of New Delhi, a place that has become a strange amalgam of the ancient and the supermodern, a place that therefore is the perfect one to generate a speculative fiction and a noir-ish narrative. The pacing of the novel is unfortunately uneven because Singh uses Razia and the finger collector as more of a framing device. The middle chapters turn to individual cases that the DCP and his followers must investigate. The structure ends up mimicking the investigatory serial procedural—reminiscent indeed of shows you might watch such as Bones or Castle—in which there are individual mysteries, which are sometimes linked by a larger one. The opening is such a seductive one that when we’re forced to move away from Razia and her possible vampire background, these other plots can seem like diversions, even as they accrue an important texture for understanding the larger forces that Singh is grappling with concerning urban decay and decadence, poverty and exploitation, corruption and wealth accumulation. Despite these momentum bumps, the novel is a compelling one and certain to be a great addition to courses on detective fiction and noir, especially given its focus on a city that has not necessarily or traditionally been attached to mystery and mayhem. Singh is giving places like Los Angeles and San Francisco a run for their money in this re-envisioning of the urban noir.

For more on the book as well as a purchase link, go here:

http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/necropolis/

A Review of Ali Eteraz’s Native Believer (Akashic, 2016).

Before I get started on this review, I wanted to send a huge thanks to NKharput for her reviews of Ali Eteraz’s Native Believer and Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What!

Please go here for those reviews:

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/182538.html

Ali Eteraz’s Native Believer is his fiery debut novel, which reminds me a bit of the work of Ayad Akhtar and Mohsin Hamid in its provocative consideration of what it means to be Muslim in the United States. Eteraz is author of at least two other major publications, including the memoir Children of Dust (reviewed here in AALF awhile back) and then the short story collection Falsipedies and Fibsiennes (Guernica Editions, 2014). As I was reading up on Eteraz’s updated bio, the amazon site reveals this kernel: “Recently, Eteraz received the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize judged by Mohsin Hamid, and served as a consultant to the artist Jenny Holzer on a permanent art installation in Qatar.” I can’t say I’m surprised by the fact that Hamid and Eteraz have made their connection given the many obvious thematic and tonal parallels between their fictional works. Native Believer opens up with a party thrown by the narrator (known as M), who is a non-practicing South Asian Muslim and his wife (Marie-Anne), who is Caucasian. This party is important for the narrator based upon his work in a public relations firm; he needs to show the right amount of social graces to help cement his place in a company that would allow him room to advance. But it is also during this party that a senior colleague notices something stowed up high on a bookshelf: it’s the Koran, something that his mother placed there before she passed away. While the narrator believes this moment to be a relatively meaningless interaction, there is a question as to the import of this moment when he finds out he is fired from his job soon after. Did his senior colleague find his copy of the Koran to be evidence of some unpatriotic impulse? While he mulls over this question, he wallows in the wake of his unemployment. Meanwhile, his wife is struggling with her own career advancement in a sales company. She ends up trying to throw side projects the narrator’s way, as a means to keep him busy and perhaps to offer him entry into a new line of work. As the narrator continues to look into other job positions and freelance work, he meets up with a variety of salty and complicated characters, including a Muslim firebrand named Ali Ansari and a former co-worker named Candace, with whom the narrator embarks on an affair. Eteraz is going for quite a bit of shock value in this work, and part of the point is to undermine what it means to be both Muslim and American and to challenge any reductive positioning of Islamic fundamentalism and secularism. Readers should be forewarned that there are a lot of scenes involving sex both in graphic and comic ways. The title is thus ironically invoked: our narrator is a “native believer” insofar as he’s American and understands that his distant religious background will ultimately cause others to consider him as part of a “residual supremacist” group that will bring the nation to ruin. The concluding arc makes us wonder about the primacy of the romance plot to this kind of narrative, which seems to making larger claims about what constitutes the “brown body” in the post-9/11 moment. Those readers who have been following this larger body of work will necessarily position this novel as part of a masculinist ethos that can be seen in the writings of the aforementioned Hamid, and others such as H.M. Naqvi and Ayad Akhtar. I’ve been wondering about the gendered phenomena that tend to polarize the cultural productions, and it would be interesting to consider works such as Naqvi’s Home Boy, Akhtar’s American Dervish, and Eteraz’s Native Believer in contrast to fictions such as Nafisa Haji’s The Writing on my Forehead and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams. Certainly, an incendiary novel; one wonders how it will be received in Muslim majority countries.

For another useful review, please go to Kirkus Reviews:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ali-eteraz/native-believer/

Buy the book Here:

http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/native-believer/



*****

Spotlight on Unnamed Press with reviews of Janice Pariat’s Seahorse (Unnamed Press, 2016) and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press, 2016).

Finally, one of the newest presses that I have been introduced to is Unnamed Press, which has put out two of the most surprising and wonderful reads for me this year, but they are also the publisher of many other Asian American and Asian Anglophone authors, including Ranbir Sidhu and Kristine Ong Muslim (I hope to review these in the future.  For more on the offerings over at Unnamed Press, go here:


A Review of Janice Pariat’s Seahorse (Unnamed Press, 2016).

Wow, this novel was a real surprise for me. Janice Pariat’s debut novel Seahorse (she is also the author of a short story collection, which has not been published stateside and thus the subject of frustration for me as always) was the second book I read out of Unnamed Press. At this point, I’ll make the typical spoiler warning for those that do not want to hear more about the plot. To that end, we’ll let the official web page over at Unnamed Press do some plot work for us: “The seahorse is the only creature where the male is responsible for reproduction. Male seahorses bear their burdens, as does our protagonist Nem, a hero driven by his decades-long love for Nicholas, whom he met at a University in 1990s Delhi. Nem was not like his classmates, crowding around a TV set to watch music videos and talk about ‘doing it’; instead he opted for lonely walks around ruins. On one of these occasions he spied Nicholas, an enigmatic young professor from London, in the park with another male student. With surprising ease, Nem seduces the much sought-after professor. It is in the wake of this brief but steamy affair, when Nicholas returns to London and Nem tries to continue with his life, that the story truly begins. Nem graduates from university and becomes a successful art critic, but his memories of Nicholas dominate his existence. After an invitation to speak at a conference in London, Nem's obsession with Nicholas returns. Still single, Nem wonders if this will be the opportunity to reconnect with his old and influential lover. Instead, Nem is immediately swept up in London's cosmopolitan world, hobnobbing with the city's diverse artists and writers and enjoying the London club scene. Meanwhile, Nicholas artfully avoids any direct contact with Nem, instead orchestrating a series of clues that lead to Myra, a woman Nem had believed to be Nicholas's sister. Brought together by their love for Nicholas, Nem and Myra begin a friendship with surprising consequences.” So this summary provides a great deal of context for the story, but does leave out Pariat’s wonderfully poetic prose. She further employs first person narration to great effect, as she delves into Nem’s lovelorn melancholic subjectivity. The novel moves back and forth between two time periods. The diegetic present involves Nem’s time in London, trying to track down Nicholas. Instead of bumping into Nicholas, Nem bumps into Myra, who Nicholas discovers is not actually Nicholas’s sister, as she is first introduced to him in that capacity. In the diegetic past, Nem tell us about his quixotic involvement with Nicholas, which occurs mostly over a holiday period in India. Nem and Nicholas’s days revolve around lovemaking, wine and cheese consumption, and explorations on the topic of art, philosophy and the humanities. These sequences are some of the most poetic and elegant of the work and thus are pivotal in constituting why Nem would be driven to go to London in search of someone like Nicholas. In Myra, Nem ultimately finds a kindred spirit, someone torn asunder by love and affected by its incredible loss. The concluding sequence I found surprising, but Pariat is working within the confines of a complicated dynamic of desire that confounds any easy conceptions of gender and sexuality. The last two pages I especially found infuriating because of the way they are ambivalently staged and which possess a kind of non-sequitor-like quality that made me immediately want to grab someone who had already read the book to discuss what these pages meant. On the other hand, despite my gut reaction to the conclusion, it didn’t overturn my overall sentiment about this work, as it reminded me of many other novels that deal with obsession and love, even in the most complicated and thorniest of circumstances. Another recommended read.

For more information on the book, go here:


For a purchase link, go here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/seahorse-janice-pariat/1122089888

A Review of Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press, 2016).

So, I’ve been trying to do a better job of keeping track of small/ indie press offerings, and as part of that effort, I’m reviewing Esmé Weijun Wang’s intriguing and complex debut, The Border of Paradise. The official site over at Unnamed Press gives us this pithy description of the novel, but I am providing you with a spoiler warning here, so do not read further unless you want some major details revealed: “In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — the sharp-tongued, intelligent Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California’s Polk Valley. As David's health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter. It’s Daisy's solution for the future of her two children, inspired by the old Chinese tradition of raising girls as sisterly wives for adoptive brothers, that exposes Daisy’s traumatic life, and the terrible inheritance her children must receive. Framed by two suicide attempts, The Border of Paradise is told from multiple perspectives, culminating in heartrending fashion as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune confront their past and their isolation.” The element that I found perhaps most fascinating about this novel was the use of alternating first person perspectives across a wide historical swathe. The novel first begins David and Daisy’s perspectives, but later shifts to their children: William and Gillian. Wang continues to complicate the narratorial equation by later adding the perspectives of Marianne and Marianne’s brother. After I finished the novel, I didn’t think of the work as being framed by suicide attempts exactly, especially because the conclusion is far more murkier than the description conveys, but the novel is an impressive and complicated depiction of mental illness as it tracks across generations. There is a point where I got a vaguely Faulknerian impression of this novel, as William and Gillian must live in a home that becomes gothically rendered. What’s perhaps most terrifying about the novel, and a true testament of Wang’s talent, is that you don’t necessarily see right away how deep the problems these characters possess actually run because they are so good at rationalizing all of the dysfunctionality going on around them. Wang makes an interesting choice in the last chapter to narrate it from the third person perspective, and I wondered what encouraged her to go in that direction since she so effectively used the first person throughout the rest of the novel. I especially found Marianne and Marianne’s brother’s characters to be vital to the impact of the novel because they clarify what a dire situation that William and Gillian eventually find themselves in. I wasn’t too keen on the title, though the novel is definitely one meriting multiple reads and certain to be an excellent choice for classroom discussions.

For more on the book go here:


For a purchase link, go here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-border-of-paradise-esme-weijun-wang/1122615831

*****

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison and expert. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

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On Muslim American fiction, secularism, and the burden of responsibility

I've been thinking about the peculiar burden of representation faced by Muslim American writers and artists in our post-9/11 moment. Two texts that attempt to defy the expectations that these writers face are Ali Eteraz's Native Believer (2016) and Ayad Akhtar's The Who and the What (2014).

I am perpetually confounded by the state of the Muslim American literary canon: it seems near impossible to find a Muslim American character who is simply unextraordinary. The canon is replete with violent, misogynist, and crude caricatures. I had so much hope for Native Believer: it begins with a protagonist who seems wholly unassuming. His relationship with his wife is endearing: when she’s stuck in the bathroom at their own party in need of a tampon, the narrator states, "but her issues are my issues too” in response to a guest who asks him if she’s dealing with a “women’s issue.” He wants more than anything to have children but they are unable (for reasons that complicate and shock over the course of the narrative). The prose is humorous and delightful.

But larger issues dramatically shift the storyline: the narrator's relationship with Islam, which was almost nonexistent before this particular moment, takes over when his boss fires him for not only owning a copy of the Koran but also placing the book higher than Nietzsche on the bookshelf, which the boss takes as a symbolic displacement of Western culture by Islamic extremism. In search of what it means to be a Muslim American (even while rejecting that identity), the narrator, known only as M. (but implied to be Muhammad) falls in with a young crowd called the Gay Commie Muzzies who are recklessly debauched, which shifts the notion of what it means to be a radical Muslim. He conducts an affair with an African American woman who, unlike many in the mid-twentieth century, converts to Islam in order to reject the burden of her parents' racial pride. He encounters a number of Muslim American State Department employees — of the sort who travel abroad to prove that Muslims are assimilated in the US. His search for Muslim Americans who can give him a sense of identity yields nothing but a diverse range of characters who feel crudely drawn. The narrator himself devolves into a vengeful monster by the end of the story. Disappointed as I am with the parade of vasty unlikeable caricatures, the author does illustrate the various ways in which it is possible to be a secular Muslim. I just wish the characterizations weren’t so extreme.

The Who and the What is an older work but raises some of the same questions as Eteraz with regard to the burden of portraying Muslims (secular or not). It is Ayad Akhtar's second play since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced. Like Disgraced, The Who and the What revolves around a debate about religion: a book about the Prophet Muhammad that is thought to be incendiary. Akhtar's works offer a fascinating lens into what it means to be a Muslim in America in the post-9/11 age: that includes a discussion of what it means to be a secular Muslim, which has yet to be a widely accepted notion by Muslims and non Muslims alike.

Now, Akhtar is the foremost voice in Muslim American drama today: in addition to garnering the Pulitzer, Disgraced was the most produced play in the 2015-2016 season, according to American Theatre. What kind of responsibility -- and, conversely, freedom -- comes with this distinction? This question is very unfairly posed to Muslim American artists of this age. It is also at the heart of The Who and the What: Zarina's book on the prophet -- a book that illuminates how his "contradictions only make him more human" -- is published at the expense of familial harmony. Some critics have wondered whether Akhtar published Disgraced at the expense of the Muslim American community, since his representations of the community are far from flattering. Which goes to say: how is literary or artistic production regulated in the hands of the Muslim American artist, especially in the post-9/11 era?

The Who and the What features an all-Muslim cast: the headstrong yet obedient Zarina, her sister Mahwish, who desperately wants to wed her longterm boyfriend (yet cannot do so until Zarina, her elder, is married), their father, Afzal, whose overcontrolling tendencies stem from the loss of the family matriarch, and Eli, a white Muslim convert that Afzal sets up with Zarina. The diversity of the cast illuminates all the different ways one can be Muslim. Unfortunately, it also presents caricatures that recall unfortunate stereotypes about controlling, misogynist, violent men. The play -- and his other works -- makes you wonder what on earth Akhtar, now vastly prominent as a playwright, is trying to do with his representations of Muslim American characters. But that question is one that unfairly burdens artists of color who are taken to be representatives of their communities. So how do we look past these base questions when examining the works of Muslim American writers? Akhtar has given us the opportunity to begin, at the very least.

Asian American Literature Fans – Press Spotlight: Visual Cultural Productions – May 18, 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Press Spotlight: Visual Cultural Productions – May 18, 2016

In this post, reviews of: Tiger in my Soup by Kashmira Sheth (writer) and Jeffrey Ebbeler (illustrator) (2013, hardcover, Peachtree Publishers); Sona and the Wedding Game by Kashmira Sheth (writer) and Yoshiko Jaeggi (illustrator) (2015, hardcover, Peachtree Publishers); Yumi Sakugawa’s I Think I Am in Friend Love With You (Adams Media, (2013); Yumi Sakugawa’s Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe (Adams Media, 2015); Yumi Sakugawa’s There is No Right Way to Meditate: And Other Lessons (Adams Media, 2016); Kazu Kibuishi’s Firelight (Amulet #7) (Scholastic Press, 2016); Gene Yang (author) and Mike Holmes’s (illustrator) Secret Coders (First Second 2015).

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. Counting this post, I will be up to 13 reviews (if I have completed my addition properly). We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership.


For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

*****

This post is focused on visual cultural productions of numerous kinds, including children’s picture books, graphic novels, and illustrated guides. As with the previous post on young adult fiction, I tend to gravitate toward visual/ textual cultural productions when my mind needs a break from more traditional reading. I wanted to provide a mix of different kinds of visual cultural productions. I’ve definitely taken a break from reviewing children’s picture books, so I figured that I should include some here.

On to the reviews:

A Review of Tiger in my Soup by Kashmira Sheth (writer) and Jeffrey Ebbeler (illustrator) (2013, hardcover, Peachtree Publishers) and a review of Sona and the Wedding Game by Kashmira Sheth (writer) and Yoshiko Jaeggi (illustrator) (2015, hardcover, Peachtree Publishers)



So, I haven’t reviewed children’s picture books in awhile, and I wanted to catch up on a couple coming out of Peachtree Publishers. The first is Tiger in my Soup, which is penned by Kashmira Sheth and illustrated by Jeffrey Ebbeler. The back cover provides a useful and pithy plot summary: “Sometimes it’s impossible to get your big sister to read your favorite book to you. But if you’re really creative and use your imagination, you might just get what you want. Take care, though, not to go too far. Once you conjure up a tiger, there’s no telling where it might lead.”




The story relies upon the imaginative depictions offered by Jeffrey Ebbeler, which provides the right balance of menace and entertainment. What is interesting about this story for readers of AALF is the fact that the characters seem to be ethnically marked, but are not definitively determined to be so, either through dialogue or textual information. I wondered about the reasoning for this kind of depiction, and the rationale behind it. In any case, on the brief plotting level, the book does a wonderful job considering how a child’s imagination might run wild, to the point that tigers seem to come to life. For the target readers, such a whimsical world of fantasy run gleefully amok will certainly be amusing.

Buy the Book Here:

http://peachtree-online.com/index.php/book/tiger-in-my-soup.html


Whereas Tiger in my Soup was not so specific about ethnic or cultural contexts, Sona and the Wedding Game goes in the exact opposite direction. The inside cover of the hardcover edition provides us with some useful background information: “Sona has been given an important job for her big sister’s wedding: she has tot steal the groom’s shoes. She’s never attended a wedding before, so she’s unfamiliar with this Indian tradition – as well as many of the other magical experiences that will occur before and during the special event. But with the assistance of her know-it-all cousin Vishal, Sona finds a way to steal the shoes and get a very special reward.” Sheth has her work cut out for her because she needs to be able to render the story legible to young readers, while also maintaining ethnographic accuracy. Part of the success is reliant upon Jaeggi’s artistic style, which is far more realist in its approach than the more cartoon-ish drawings that Ebbeler appropriately provides for Tiger in my Soup. But Sheth also has to rely on more text and a detailed author’s note to give parents more information, which may be important to relay given questions that may come up during the reading experience. Again, it’s really amazing to see these kinds of picture books available these days; I can’t recall having access to such books when I was a young child.


Buy the Book Here:

http://peachtree-online.com/index.php/book/sona-and-the-wedding-game.html

A Review of Yumi Sakugawa’s I Think I Am in Friend Love With You (Adams Media, (2013); Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe (Adams Media, 2015); and There is No Right Way to Meditate: And Other Lessons (Adams Media, 2016).



I absolutely adored I Think I Am in Friend Love with You for the simply reason that the English language is so terrible about finding a way to move beyond the binaries of friend and lover, acquaintance and family member. I have often found my friendships to be as deep and as meaningful as any other connection I have made; love is certainly part of that equation, but not necessarily a romantic love. Thus, I really found Yumi Sakugawa’s I Think I Am in Friend Love With You to explore this strange liminal space of the “friend love.” As with Sakugawa’s other works, I am always reminded of Spirited Away, as Sakugawa typically uses anthropomorphic blob-like cartoons, which nevertheless seem appropriate because she’s always exploring feelings and emotions. I have to believe that many of us are in “friend love” or at least have strong platonic relationships that might be better categorized as something akin to family, but again, we have yet to develop the kind of language to mark precisely these connections. As a final note, I did end up reading selections of this piece to a person who I consider to be a “friend love,” and it was an entertaining experience.


Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe is another publication that offers more philosophical musings that are accompanied by visuals that tend to be cartoon-like. I found this particular work to be probably the most mystical in its orientation. It tends to suggest that there is some larger energy force at work that we can all tune into, if we only give ourselves enough attention to the world around us. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with this premise, but I have read some other works on mindfulness, especially as it relates to meditation, and I did find Sakugawa’s points to parallel these others. In this sense, her work attends to the necessity of slowing down and taking pleasure in finer moments when one can. Thus, this mindfulness enables to one to finding the path to becoming one with the universe. The various exercises that Sakugawa suggests that readers engage in seem a little far out for me, but I appreciated the unique perspective being offered here.



So, I was compelled to write up a short review of There is No Right Way to Medidate: And Other Lessons just because I do engage some meditation primarily through yoga. Though many are skeptical of yoga (especially at first) due to orientalist appropriations, which I can understand, I have found the practice of yoga to be beneficial for two primary reasons: the focus on the breath AND the time that I have to devote to stretching (and I am still extremely inflexible after 6 years of regular practice, going around 3 times a week, sometimes more). Yumi Sakugawa’s There is No Right Way to Meditate: And Other Lessons takes as its topic the focus of meditation but explores this issue through a visual form that is reminiscent of Lynda Barry’s work (especially the “demons” visual project that Barry engaged). So much of meditation is about moving beyond your thoughts, which tend to be negative. Sakugawa draws this “negative energy” as a kind of black cloud monster who comes and feeds off of what Sianne Ngai might call “ugly feelings.” Meditation in whatever form lets you get away from your thoughts, so you can just be one with the breath. It’s difficult; I can’t ever meditate for more than a handful of minutes at a given time, but when it’s working, I feel so much better and so much more centered. What Sakugawa’s work adds to this kind of practice is a visual schema to understand why it is you need to meditate and injects a little bit of humor into encouraging us all to be a little bit more mindful, so that we can go about our day with less emotional and psychic baggage. A fun and cute production from Adams Media.

Buy the Books Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/i-think-i-am-in-friend-love-with-you-yumi-sakugawa/1117074320?ean=9781440573026

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/your-illustrated-guide-to-becoming-one-with-the-universe-yumi-sakugawa/1119640547?ean=9781440582639

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/there-is-no-right-way-to-meditate-yumi-sakugawa/1122472599

A Review of Kazu Kibuishi’s Firelight (Amulet #7) (Scholastic Press, 2016).


Well, I absolutely adore Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series, but I am seriously beginning to wonder about whether or not we will ever see its ending. Perhaps, it shouldn’t have one, but the conclusion to Amulet #7 makes us realize that there could be many, many more installments to go before we see what happens to Emily and Navin, and their adventures in this fantastic world of mechanized droids, talking animals, dark elves, and stonekeepers. The very sparse overview over at B&N gives us this description: “Emily, Trellis, and Vigo visit Algos Island, where they can access and enter lost memories. They're hoping to uncover the events of Trellis's mysterious childhood -- knowledge they can use against the Elf King. What they discover is a dark secret that changes everything. Meanwhile, the Voice of Emily's Amulet is getting stronger, and threatens to overtake her completely.” I don’t really know if there is really a “dark secret that changes everything.” Pretty much everything we’ve been worrying about is taking effect and our central question remains the same: will Emily be able to control the power inherent in the stone or is she a pawn in some larger game. While B&N’s description focuses on Trellis’s childhood, in some ways, this particular installment is far more about Emily’s childhood and her melancholic attachment to her father. This connection is the one that we fear may turn Emily to the darkside. But the plot description completely fails to mention Navin’s subplot wherein he and his merry band of adventurers are working to reunite with the Resistance. An entertaining sequence involves Navin and his allies toiling in a skyship restaurant, but that’s merely dressing on the larger issue involving Navin and his quest to repel the forces of darkness alongside his mother and other faithful allies. As much as I am a fan of Kibuishi’s work, his tremendous output, and his regular installments, I do hope that the longer arc of this work will find a more original resolution. I’m already seeing it move toward that common “masterplot” I’ve seen in other comic books in which a good person becomes bad, who then must be defeated by someone the formerly good person loved (such as a brother in this case). The question in such plots is whether or not the formerly good person will end up living after the final cataclysmic battle, so I hope Kibuishi pulls the rug from out of under our readerly feet. He’s already staged a number of surprises, especially with the dark elves, so keep those twists and turns coming.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/firelight-kazu-kibuishi/1122377201

A Review of Gene Yang (author) and Mike Holmes’s (illustrator) Secret Coders (First Second 2015).

So, somehow I missed this publication when it originally came out, but Gene Yang is back, this time with Mike Holmes at the illustration helm with Secret Coders (First Second 2015). Our trusty summary over at B&N will get this review started: “Welcome to Stately Academy, a school which is just crawling with mysteries to be solved! The founder of the school left many clues and puzzles to challenge his enterprising students. Using their wits and their growing prowess with coding, Hopper and her friend Eni are going to solve the mystery of Stately Academy no matter what it takes! From graphic novel superstar (and high school computer programming teacher) Gene Luen Yang comes a wildly entertaining new series that combines logic puzzles and basic programming instruction with a page-turning mystery plot!” The biographical note that the summary provides is important in part because Yang’s point is to use this graphic novel as a method to teach readers about the basics of coding, especially in relation to binary code. Hopper arrives at Stately Academy as the proverbial new student who is looking to make friends. Though she has interests in basketball and seems to be relatively socially grounded, she finds it difficult to make new friends, which makes it all the more fortuitous when she strikes up a connection with Eni, the local basketball star. But, as they get to now each other, a central mystery emerges from the school’s supply closet/ tool shed (which is locked). After finding a way in, they come upon a programmable turtle, which is set to clean the grounds using a particular sequence of instructions, but these instructions can also cause strange birds (with multiple eyes) to attack. If this plot device seems bizarre, then you must be forewarned: there is something amiss at this school, as it is filled with electronic animals and robots as well as sallow looking people coming out of the principal’s office. Yang adds another interesting element into the plot by unveiling the fact that Hopper, who is drawn with racially ambiguous features, is the daughter of the Chinese language instructor, Mrs. Hu. To be sure, we are not given information about whether or not she is the biological offspring of Mrs. Hu, but Yang is clearly having some fun with the complicated issue of representing race in graphic form. Holmes’s illustrations pair well with Yang’s scribing efforts. For adult readers, Secret Coders might come off a bit frustrating, as the narrative is so short. This brevity is no doubt due to the fact that this work is being broken up into multiple installments, and this first portion naturally ends on a cliffhanger. Stay tuned, so shall we all.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/secret-coders-gene-luen-yang/1120506611



*****

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison and expert. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

LibraryThing:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/asianamlitfans

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Asian-American-Literature-Fans-147257025397976/

Asian American Literature Fans – Spotlight on the Second Books Club – May 15, 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Spotlight on the Second Books Club – May 15, 2016

In this post, reviews of: Zoë S. Roy’s Butterfly Tears (Inanna 2009); Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates (Viking 2016); Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Saga Press, 2016); Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island (Knopf, 2016); Alexander Chee’s Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2016); Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal: Stories (Curbstone Books, 2016).

Mary 14, 2016

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. Counting this post, I will be up to 13 reviews (if I have completed my addition properly). We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership.

At last count, excluding the comments made by Pylduck; five unique users have responded with comments. Latest APA Heritage Month Tally:

Me = 19 reviews; You = 5 comments! A much better stat! Keep it up! Let’s hope you guys can match the 31 posts/ comments =). I’m totally behind you!


For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

*****

This post focuses on an author’s second major full-length publication (at least according to my preliminary research). I apologize if any of these writers are mislabeled according to this category. I often use this category in general because I have been waiting a long time (impatiently HAHA) for a book to come out. Two writers on this list (Brian Ascalon Roley and Alexander Chee) are favorites of mine for their first books, so it is with only the highest pleasure that I review their subsequent publications. I’m still waiting on le thi diem thuy to publish the “second novel we are all looking for,” but that’s neither here nor there. If anyone does know the status of le’s future work, please do comment, because I’ve love to know what’s going on there. But, enough babble… on to the reviews!

A Review of Zoë S. Roy’s Butterfly Tears (Inanna 2009).



So, I’ve been reading through Zoë S. Roy’s Butterfly Tears, which is a short story collection. Roy is already the author of a third publication, but Butterfly Tears happens to be her second, so I am including it as part of this larger review post. I was immediately drawn to this work because of its focus on a general theme concerning Chinese women who are struggling with changing cultural values in light of modernization, especially in the period following the Cultural Revolution. The stories further show transnational verve, as characters travel from China to the United States or to Canada. The diasporic character of these migrations adds an extra level of instability to the lives of these female principles. Much of the stories involve star-crossed romances. In terms of literary taxonomies, Butterfly Tears is an intriguing example of a truly transnational and Asian North American work, as stories are set primarily in three countries: China, Canada, and/or the United States. The opening and title story, “Butterfly Tears” involves a protagonist (and Chinese migrant) named Sunni who realizes that her marriage to her husband may be on the rocks. Roy effectively uses analeptic intercuts to show us how moments in the past bring the diegetic present into better light: we see how young Sunni (growing up in China) reacts to the life story of Crazy Wen, a musician whose own romance was prematurely terminated. The fable of Crazy Wen allows Sunni to reconsider her adult life through a new perspective. Though Sunni is devastated when she discovers her husband’s infidelity, she understands that she cannot simply give up: she must keep herself together because other people rely on her and, for instance, she still needs to be a responsible parent. The third story, “Yearning,” is notable for the fact that it would become the basis of Roy’s next publication, Calls Across the Pacific. One of my favorite stories was “Balloons,” which offers Roy the opportunity to explore familial reunions amid the context of internet technologies. I especially was drawn to this piece because it was longer than many of the other stories and the characters have lengthier developmental arcs. The main character here, Suyun, eventually connects with a relative over the internet and realizes that her father’s brother may actually be alive. I found this story to be additionally intriguing because Roy employs a number of different discursive techniques to tell the tale, most notably the use of embedded letters and e-mails. “Twin Rivers” was also another standout for me, but also one of the most depressing stories, as the title character Jiang suffers from a disability that limits the use of one leg. As she adapts to life in Canada, she becomes the subject of a problematic romance with a man who is already married, leading her down a destructive path of obsessive behavior. Here, Roy works within the frame of the limited life options and paths for Chinese women even in the context of transnational migration. In “A Mandarin Duck,” Roy varies the theme of strained romantic relationships by exploring how a woman Huidi (with a son named Wade) attempts to make a new life in the shadow of an abusive relationship. And I’ll end with “Fortune-telling,” which seems to suggest the possibility of a same sex romance between its principle characters, but never fully explores this line of queer desire. If there is a critique to be made of some of the stories, it’s that I sometimes simply wanted to read further into a character’s life, but that’s the frustration of this form: you can’t always get much more than a brief, punctuated glimpse. The staccato cadences of Roy’s collection still finds a general adherence through the themes of Chinese female life paths and thus it might be better to regard Butterfly Tears as a loosely linked story cycle. Roy’s collection certainly can be taught alongside a number of others, and I especially see that this work would resonate alongside others with strong Chinese diasporic and transnational sentiments; these include Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and Xu Xi’s Access.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/butterfly-tears-zoe-roy/1014900328?ean=9780978223373



A Review of Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates (Viking 2016).


As a note, I always make a quick comment before any Penguin title to plug their CFIS program which gives qualified instructors 5 free exam copies per year. Because of this policy, I have been easily able to add new books to my courses routinely. The CFIS staff are wonderfully responsive and Penguin has the best exam copy hands down of any of the major presses. W.W. Norton is probably just behind.

For more on CFIS, go here:

http://www.penguin.com/services-academic/cfis/

While dealing with the flu this past winter, I read Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates, perhaps one of the perfect novels to have when you have a lot of time in bed. The plot is totally immersive and is certain to be picked up by book clubs, especially ones seeking female driven plots concerning motherhood. We’ll let B&N (as always) provide the basic scaffolding of the novel’s contents: “Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling, The Expatriates confirms Lee as an exceptional talent and one of our keenest observers of women’s inner lives.” The “expatriate” aspect of these three characters is that they have all moved to Hong Kong. Hilary Starr (not racially marked) and Margaret Reade (1/4 Korean) are wives of serious businessmen. Hilary and her husband David have been struggling to have a baby for eight years, and they are contemplating adopting a child who is of part Chinese part Indian (South Asian) background, but Hillary’s narrative is perhaps the least compelling and the least threaded of the three primary characters. Margaret Reade hires Mercy Cho to be the family’s babysitter. At that point, Mercy is pretty much moving from one job to another, so the possibility of stable finances draws her in to the orbit of the Reade’s. Mercy travels with the family to Seoul; Margaret immediately realizes that Mercy is not the best babysitter, but passes off her paranoia as being an overprotective parent. But (and spoilers forthcoming here) her intuition seems to be correct, as one day she, Mercy, and the three kids are in a market area and lose sight of the youngest (named G) for just a couple of seconds. G is gone, and much of the narrative is cast in the pall of his absence. Margaret (and her family) is trying to recover, while Mercy is trying to forget this past. Their lives begin to creep slowly back toward each other, but in the most subtest ways. Hillary’s husband David ends up having an affair, but engages this relationship with none other than Mercy. What Mercy does not know is that Hillary’s husband and Margaret’s husband work in similar business circles, which sets the stage for encounter in which all three characters will finally meet in the same physical space at Margaret’s husband’s fiftieth birthday party. Even with all the immense privilege that Margaret and Hillary do possess, Lee manages that rare feat of plumbing their psychic interiorities so deeply (through third person narration no less) that we still find them engaging and sympathetic characters, but the real coup is Lee’s portrayal of Mercy Cho: an incredibly flawed woman without a real understanding of American upward mobility and romantic courtship, who understands that she is without cultural capital even as she wields a rarefied educational pedigree. As Mercy creates one drama to the next, you begin to see that much of her circumstances appear not simply because of some character deficiency but the radically different class trajectories that the three main characters engage as the titular expatriates. It is in this sense that Lee’s novel provides its most crucial interventions concerning this particular character, who is in need of the most narrative attention in the end, and which Lee crucially provides as the most essential bridging apparatus to bring the narrative to its appropriate and somewhat uplifting conclusion. As with Lee’s previous effort (the epic war novel The Piano Teacher, and there is a fair amount of piano playing in this recent novel as well), there is a cinematic quality to the writing that makes one expect that this is the kind of work that may be optioned for motion picture adaptation. The question would really be about the issue of casting, as two lead roles would need to be awarded to Asian American actresses. I could see Mercy being played by someone like Jamie Chung or Arden Cho, but Margaret Reade would likely need to be mixed race and in her forties, so that role might be harder to cast, maybe someone like Julia Nickson.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-expatriates-janice-y-k-lee/1121772908

A Review of Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Saga Press, 2016).



I’ve been reading this phenomenal collection piecemeal. For everyone who has seen this book, you will know why: it’s over 400 pages with numerous stories collected. Nevertheless, I’ll focus mostly on a specific set of the stories. In my first foray, I rocked the first four or so of the stories, and the two that were absolutely fascinating to me were “The Perfect Match” and “Good Hunting.” “The Perfect Match” is a quirky love story in which characters believe their lives are tied to the endurance of a specific object. The protagonist, a young woman working a desultory office job, finds herself realizing that she’s crushing on a coworker. Her object is “ice,” and she lives in fear that an ice cube, which represents her life, will melt, unless she has a freezer always nearby. Even when she goes out to clubs or on social occasions, she needs to bring an ice cube with her and will go out of her way to find a place where it will be cared for in the proper freezing temperature. In her office, she stows the ice in a freezer near her desk. But when her coworker comes into her life, a man who everyone is attracted to, she nevertheless feels that she has a unique connection, one certainly cemented by their mutual love of literature and poetry. She eventually discovers that his object is salt: the very thing that makes it harder to freeze, but we understand that these objects are primarily metaphors. She needs to “warm up” her life, even at the cost of losing her “ice cube.” When the “ice cube” melts down after her moment with the coworker, she thinks she is going to die. The story then cuts to a letter penned by a close friend who tells her that she thought she, too, would die when her object ran out, which was in her case, a pack of cigarettes. When the pack ran out, she realized: she still had the box, and that she was not yet dead, and that she used the cigarettes as a false resource for living her life, that somehow these cigarettes would make her live her life to the fullest, when she could be doing that whenever she wanted. This letter is of course something that the protagonist now knows, too: that she must live, even if it means the possibility of being on the edge, losing something comfortable, living a life in security. Better to be devastated by life and love than to live in the hovel of a home without anyone else around you. When I read “Good Hunting,” (the fourth story or so), I knew I was in trouble: could any of the stories following this one be as good? LOL. In “Good Hunting,” which immediately made me think of Good Will Hunting (but I digress), our protagonists are respectively a demon hunter and a fox demon. They meet each other as youngsters, but the demon hunter and fox demon both discover that they are not really at odds with each other. The fox demon isn’t a being that needs to be vanquished and the demon hunter isn’t someone who is so intent on predation and killing. Instead, they strike up a unique friendship, but one that is coming under duress due to increasing modernization: railroads are being developed, automata are taking on the jobs of human workers, and people believe in magic and mischief a little bit less. The demon hunter doesn’t have demons to hunt anymore; the demons seem to be disappearing, but we discover that they may not be disappearing so much as they are being transformed. The fox demon, as we discover, is having a more and more difficult time turning into her true form as fox. Eventually, she is completely unable to change into her fox form; this fate is of course twinned by the fact that the fictional world is becoming ever more advanced in its technology and efficiency. But the fox demon’s human form does put her at some risk: she is particularly attractive and thus a target for men who might be up to no good. The conclusion sees the demon hunter take a new job, developing automata and technology for a corporation. The fox-demon, on the other hand, is severely assaulted by a man who subjects her to an incredibly twisted mode of body modification, as her appendages are changed into chrome machinery parts. Liu’s critique here is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, especially in the ways that humans become functionalized to the extent that we cannot distinguish where the human ends and the machine begins, so much so the hybridity of human and machine exists as the fulcrum of a dangerous sexual fetish. But, Liu has one more wonderful plot trick up his sleeve: the demon hunter uses his power of technological innovation to provide the fox demon with the ability to transform back into the fox form, but this time with the help of his technological know-how. The end sees her go off into the distance in this fox/ chrome hybrid form. “The Literomancer” follows the travail of a young girl named Lily, who must travel to Taiwan with her family (in the post KMT takeover period). Her father has a new job position out that way; Lily does not want to be there and suffers from bullying in school, but she establishes a friendship with an older man and his adoptive son. The older man possesses a talent based upon reading the fortunes through an analysis of Chinese calligraphy. Lily begins to see how this talent might also be used in terms of her understanding of English, but the story takes a very dark turn when Lily’s explanation of her friendship with this diviner is discovered by her father. Here, we again see the historical past effect considerable influence on a domestic plot. The “Simulacrum” reminded me of a number of different A.I. type stories. In this case, a man develops a kind of software that allows a person to re-experience particular events (reminiscent of that virtual reality moment in Minority Report when Tom Cruise’s character longs to remember his long departed son), but this software of course can be used in a variety of ways. When the daughter of the developer discovers him employing the technology as a way to access previous sexcapades (even though it is a source of marital tension), the daughter loses all faith in her father’s sense of morality. The story ends with the daughter’s mother dying but imploring her to give her father a chance: that her father’s actions in that one particular moment of using the simulacrum cannot be how she thinks of him forever. This story is one ultimately about forgiveness and the belief that people can change. After my concern about the status of other stories after reading “Good Hunting,” my fears especially abated after reading “The Regular,” which is an intriguing detective type plot involving an investigator and a serial killer. “The Regular” refers to the serial killer, who has been picking his targets based upon high-end escorts who have technology implanted in their eyes (here we have shades of Blade Runner for sure) that allows them to record any of their sexual encounters with customers. It’s a safety measure that sex workers can use so that customers know that their actions can be turned against them in case an encounter goes wrong. But, the titular regular and serial killer realizes he can use this technology as a mode by which to effect forms of political change, as he can blackmail high ranking officials and diplomats based upon what he finds in the ocular recording implants. Thus, he targets these escorts precisely because of the value of the information that might hold. The investigator is charged to find out about the death of a Chinese American call girl, one who reminds the investigator of her daughter Ruth who was killed at a moment in time when the investigator chose not to follow the instincts of a device called the Regulator, which provides all users with enhanced powers of perception. The Regulator is an intriguing form of technology that renders the user a kind of cyborg, and the investigator exploits its powers (even at her biological detriment) in her search for the killer. Though I didn’t necessarily think Liu needed to psychologize the investigator as someone compelled in this search because of its connection to her own daughter, the story was particularly enthralling. Another highlight. In the back half of the collection, the stories I enjoyed the most were “The Paper Menagerie,” “The Waves,” “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” and “The Man who Ended History: A Documentary.” I can understand why “The Paper Menagerie” was selected as the title story (and it won numerous awards): it follows a mixed-race child’s disintegrating relationship to his mother. The story begins with him having a very strong and loving relationship with her mother based upon a magical connection to origami: she is able to make origami animals that come to life and play with them. As they get older though, their connection starts to falter under the duress of racial melancholia. The young child begins to realize his mother is “foreign,” and that he, too, is being marked as “different.” He wants his mother to speak to him in English. We’re not surprised that soon the animals stop coming to life. Later, his mother will die from a disease at an early age, leaving behind a letter the son cannot read because, of course, he completely disregarded the need to learn Chinese. “The Waves” was one of my favorite stories, as it explored the evolution of humans to different forms, but how perhaps the cycle of life form changes that humans would undergo would be cyclical. “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” reminds me of something that might have been written as a kind of addenda to The Man in the High Castle, as the fictional world is set in a counterfactual timeline in which the Japanese Imperial power continued to rise in its power. The final story in the collection, “The Man who Ended History: A Documentary,” immediately brought to mind a story from Ted Chiang’s Story of your Life and Others (and later, this connection was affirmed as Liu did acknowledge the inspirational relationship) in terms of its form (and even the title). The content, though, was focused on the Nanjing massacre and thus uses Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking as the basis of a time travel storyline in which scientists discover the technology that will allow them to move observe and even to experience key historical events. This technology thus has the capacity to “end history” in the sense that one can be at any time and any place, but Liu seems way more interested in relaying the need to remember in whatever flawed guise that occurs, so that we do not become somehow disaffected to the atrocities occurring now, later, or those well into the past. Indeed, Liu seems well aware of the possibility of memory to be biased, but that such faults in our ability to retain the specifics of a given event do not make them somehow unreliable or untrue. Though I have spent most of my time recounting the stories in terms of their plot, I have to say that I find Liu’s command of the hard SF tropes to be compelling and do hope that he follows his current series with a work that might be set in space or in fictional world filled with robots or aliens. I would give yourself a lot of time to work through these wonderful stories; I definitely plan to adopt this book in future courses with the caveat that I know I’ll have to excerpt it. It will definitely pair quite well with Ted Chiang’s Story of your Life and Others.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-paper-menagerie-and-other-stories-ken-liu/1121191040

A Review of Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island (Knopf, 2016).



2016 is apparently turning out to be the year of second publications by Asian American fiction writers (others have included Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night, Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates, Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s The Golden Son, Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, among others). Shawna Yang Ryan’s follow up to Water Ghosts (which was originally published as a novel called Locke 1928 through a small press called El Leon Literary Arts) is titled Green Island. The title refers to the place where one of the main characters is imprisoned for approximately a decade, as he is interrogated due to his criticisms of the KMT. The novel is set primarily in Taiwan. The first hundred or so pages follows the tumultuous events that occurred in February and March of 1947 in which thousands were killed in the wake of the KMT’s brutal suppression of communist sentiment. The novel is narrated through the first person perspective, which at first seems strange, because this character opens the novel telling the story of her own birth, which not so coincidentally occurs during the violent period of national development. The main character’s father is taken prisoner, interrogated, tortured, but ultimately released, but of course the wounds of this period never quite go away. Indeed, readers begin to discover that this character is obviously suffering forms of PTSD and is described by others as “broken.” It also becomes clear that his release is due to the fact that he becomes an informant, having divulged the names of others who were seen as subversive due to perceived and assumed political leanings during that period. Thus, this man’s survival attaches to his family a kind of ignominy: he is understood in the community as a traitor and double agent. As the novel moves forward, the focus eventually shifts to the narrator herself, as she comes of age during a period that sees increased international mobility and transnational currents. The narrator is courted by a young Taiwanese American, who is pursuing his PhD at Berkeley. At the same time, she is beginning to discover that her father’s history is far more complicated than others have made it out to be. Initially, she and her siblings are ashamed of this broken man who returned home in silence, disgrace, and anger, but she realizes that there is more to his story. Thus, much of this novel is about the narrator’s motivation to recontextualize her father’s life in light of her own, which will tread an eerily similar path. Once the narrator ends up marrying the Taiwanese American (named Wei), they will settle in Berkeley. Wei is a professor of political science and continues to espouse anti-KMT views much to the chagrin of the protagonist. As the novel moves forward, they have two children (two daughters), and they choose to harbor a political exile. The political exile’s presence in the household creates considerable turbulence, especially in the wake of the protagonist’s ambivalence toward her husband’s continuing public rhetoric against the KMT. The narrator is at one point approached by a KMT operative and coerced into providing some intelligence for him. Thus, in some sense, her position is not unlike her father’s: she is forced to consider the safety of her own family even at the expense of her husband’s political ideals. A fateful decision, though, turns the narrative in a much darker direction, and the final act involves the narrator, her husband, and her two children returning to Taiwan. For those familiar with Taiwanese history, Ryan’s depiction of the 2-28 massacre will not necessarily present much new information, but most are generally unaware of this moment. In this sense, Green Island offers as much on the historical level as it does through its compelling fictionalization of one woman’s desire to balance personal freedoms against political ideals. Ryan packs in so much historical texture at times that the novel seems occasionally overburdened, but such is to be expected in this kind of ambitious work which necessarily reminds us that individual desire cannot be wrenched free from the structures of a violent national development. Strains of the understated elegance that marked the style of Ryan’s debut certainly come through in key moments, and these are the moments to read for.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/green-island-shawna-yang-ryan/1121998222

A Review of Alexander Chee’s Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2016).



Wow, wow, wow! What can I say. I have waited so long for this novel. Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh was one of the books that I can say made me look at the world anew. It made me see how a life like mine could be reflected in the fictional world in a commanding, textured way. In some ways, Chee’s Edinburgh is the kind of book that gives me hope about what can still be possible, what can still be achieved through fiction. I have taught Edinburgh so many times, I have lost count at this point. Students will back me up on this one; it’s hard to pass through coursework with me without having heard about this novel or having being assigned it (at the undergraduate and at the graduate level). So, reading Queen of the Night was an experience I knew I was going to relish. At approximately 500 pages, I took my time with it, forcing myself to put it down after about every hundred pages, refusing at any point to skim. It is a difficult, demanding, decadent but exquisite book, filled with sumptuous passages about late 19th century Paris. The novel is told in a frame narrative. The beginning opens with our narrator as a successful Paris opera singer, but there is some major intrigue as a novel has just been published purporting to lay out the life of some legendary woman, who ends up is really based upon the narrator. The narrator realizes that her identity may be revealed if someone is to make apparent the connection between the novel and her life, and she goes about investigating which person might have relayed the information to the writer. There are four main suspects: the narrator’s best friend when she was a teenager; a vicious man known as the tenor; a former elite known as the Comtesse, and then a pianist who had fallen in love with the narrator. The pianist is immediately ruled out because he had died, but the novel then goes about exploring the narrator’s quest to track down the three living individuals and basically to find out who might be the culprit. Interspersed with this frame narrative, the novel uses major analepses to provide the complicated backstory for this woman, who is Gatsby-like in her constant identity reinvention. As we discover, our heroine is born an American, who grows up in Minnesota with a gift: to be able to sing in a beautiful voice. Not long after her gift manifests, she begins to be targeted for it. Her own mother perceives that voice as a source of pride and forces her to wear a gag. Her family wonders if that gift is also a curse, and therein lies the ambivalence that will be coded into her life trajectory. Her entire family dies of some undisclosed fever when she is just about in her teens, so she travels to New York City, hoping to eventually make her way to Lucerne, Switzerland (from whence her mother’s family originates; she’s also part Scottish). By this point, her experiences have rendered her a kind of selective mute, even though she is still able to sing. Once in New York, as a young girl (and following the naturalist impulse of the novel), she is soon taken advantage of, but is able to make the most out of her options by joining what is essentially a traveling circus. She is hired as the pioneer girl, tasked with firing rifles and riding horses. Her special ability to sing one song is used at a climactic moment in her performance. That troupe eventually travels to Paris. Once there, our heroine realizes that she might be able to escape the troupe and get to Lucerne, but her plans go awry. For a time, though, she is able to make money by working for a different company; she befriends a courtesan, but that friendship is itself a complicated phenomenon. One night, while merrymaking with Euphrosyne (spelling?), she brandishes a knife to protect them and seriously injures a man. They escape from Paris, realizing that they are probably fugitives. When they return, they are detained and jailed by police. They are only released when their bail and fines are paid by Odile, who our narrator discovers is Euphrosyne’s mother. While working for Odile in her upscale brothel, one client, known only as the tenor, comes to discover her singing talent and demands to take her out to the opera. Eventually, this obsession with her leads him to buy her contract and associated fines, while training her to become an opera singer. She eventually auditions for a reputable school, but is turned down. This moment pushes the narrator to fake her own death, at which point she joins a convent and reinvents herself again, this time as a grisette, handling various seamstress-ing duties for royalty. In this period, she becomes a spy for a powerful elite known as the Comtesse, who is engaging in an affair with the Emperor. The Comtesse enlists her to find out everything about the Empress, most specifically what kinds of clothes she wears and when she goes out. Though the narrator enjoys her life as a grisette-informant, this espionage becomes complicated, especially when the tenor returns and demands that she come back with him, since he essentially owns her, but if I’m belaboring plot elements it’s only because the novel is an extremely intricate web of connections. As the novel moves forward, it becomes clear that Chee is working with themes of espionage and nation-state development on the one hand alongside a very, very thorny romance plot on the other. These dueling issues eventually come to a head, leading the heroine to her current situation, afraid that someone has found out her secret identity and plans ultimately to ruin her. The final 100 pages are paced in a breathless sort of way, paralleling the slow degradation of the falcon soprano’s voice (and here, Chee does gives us some typologies of opera singer vocal registers etc). Will the heroine retain her fame, her voice, and her love for only one man? The one challenge that this novel will present for me, at least in terms of how I will bring it back into my life again and again, is whether or not I can teach it in the quarter system. I sometimes toy with the idea of teaching a “long” Asian American novels course in which we would be assigned only the first 100 pages or so of each work, but then I realize some of the longest novels I’ve loved don’t really have all that much “Asian American” content. Toward the conclusion of Queen of the Night, Chee does include a reference to a Chinese American character, but other than that, there’s not too much that’s directly connected to what we might consider to be traditional Asian American themes or issues. But of course I’ve never really cared about content in this way, as I have argued elsewhere that Asian American literature is not so much about ethnoracial ancestry, as it is about how to understand authorial identity in tandem with the political texture of the cultural production. To be sure, Lilliet Berne—perhaps the most prominent alias taken by our narrator—is a figure who is highly eccentric: we understand that her rise in the Paris Opera world is exceedingly exceptional and her power, in the end, is still incredibly limited, because her rise is so much connected to others who are already born into positions of great privilege. Thus, the novel does very much connect to the issues of social inequality that have been central to so much work that comes out of cultural studies (and Asian American literature). In any case, Chee’s second novel is a luxurious epic, worthy of multiple reads. Most definitely worth the wait, but we’ll still hope that his next publication won’t take quite as long .

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-queen-of-the-night-alexander-chee/1115305215

A Review of Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal: Stories (Curbstone Books, 2016).



This collection was one of the most highly anticipated reads for this year! Brian Ascalon Roley published a novel about 15 years ago that I am still teaching (practically every year) called American Son. Fans of American Son can rest easy knowing that The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal continues Roley’s compelling storytelling track record. But before I get any further, let’s let the folks at Northwestern University Press (Curbstone Books is an imprint of this press) give us plot summary context: “The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal is a collection of stories that focuses on multigenerational tales of intertwined Filipino families. Set in the huge yet relatively overlooked and misunderstood Filipino diaspora in the United States, this book follows characters who live in the shadow of the histories of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. The impact of immigration and separation filters through the stories as a way of communing with or creating distance between individuals and family, country, or history. Roley’s work has been praised by everyone from New York Times literary critics to APIA author Helen Zia for his bare, poetic style and raw emotionalism. In the collection’s title story, a woman living with her daughter and her daughter’s American husband fears the loss of Filipino tradition, especially Catholicism, as she tries to secretly permeate her granddaughter’s existence with elements of her ancestry. In ‘New Relations,’ an American-born son introduces his mother to his Caucasian bride and her family, only to experience his first marital discord around issues of politesse, the perception of culture, and post-colonial legacies. Roley’s delicately nuanced collection often leaves the audience with the awkwardness that comes from things lost in translation or entangled in generational divides.” I always adore linked story collections, because they have a cohesion that’s a little bit more diffuse than a novel, but nevertheless are held together usually by characters that appear in multiple stories. Roley’s working with a very large extended family, so there is a very useful family tree that appears before the collection even begins. I was also really happy to see Roley experiment with different narrative discourses, as he moves deftly back and forth between first and third person. The standout stories for me are “Unacknowledged” and “New Relations,” which was already mentioned in NUP’s official book description. I found these stories so compelling because Roley sequences two first person narrators that hail from the same nuclear family. “Unacknowledged” follows the perspective of Twig, who suffers from a physical ailment that has stunted his growth and bodily strength. He observes his family, as they adjust to a new social dynamic when they hire a maid who was once the mistress of a relative. That mistress also happens to bring along her daughter Teresa, whose presence is the major force of disruption that the family must deal with. Twig’s big brother Matt ends up having romantic feelings for Teresa, which complicates family dynamics. The next story fast forwards to a period of time in which Matt is an adult and is in a marriage with someone from a Caucasian background. The premise of this particular story involves Matt’s mother coming to meet his wife’s family, as a sort of unification of both sides, but this unification necessarily involves extended family members. The wife’s relative, for instance, is married to a Filipina woman from Mindanao. The regional and class differences between Matt (and his mom) and the woman from Mindanao are the cause for much familial tension. These stories allow the reader to get a larger narrative arc to one specific family, so I naturally found them quite fascinating. Fans of American Son will be extremely happy to see that Roley does give Gabe and Tomas’s family some narrative room, as they are the subject of “Old Man.” Here, Roley chooses to give the first person perspective to Tomas, something he never did in American Son. It was wonderful to see how different Tomas viewed himself and it certainly complicates how we understand Gabe’s narration from American Son, though it seems as if the events that unfold in this story occur just before that the novel. In any case, fans of American Son (and of Asian American Literature) should reserve some reading time for Roley’s story collection and hope that he won’t make us wait as long for a third publication.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/last-mistress-jose-rizal



*****

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison and expert. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

LibraryThing:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/asianamlitfans

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Asian-American-Literature-Fans-147257025397976/

Asian American Literature Fans – Small Press Spotlight: Second Books Club – May 15, 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Small Press Spotlight: Second Books Club – May 15, 2016

In this post, reviews of: Zoë S. Roy’s Butterfly Tears (Inanna 2009); Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates (Viking 2016); Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Saga Press, 2016); Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island (Knopf, 2016); Alexander Chee’s Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2016); Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal: Stories (Curbstone Books, 2016).

Mary 14, 2016

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. Counting this post, I will be up to 13 reviews (if I have completed my addition properly). We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership.

At last count, excluding the comments made by Pylduck; five unique users have responded with comments. Latest APA Heritage Month Tally:

Me = 19 reviews; You = 5 comments! A much better stat! Keep it up! Let’s hope you guys can match the 31 posts/ comments =). I’m totally behind you!


For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

*****

This post focuses on an author’s second major full-length publication (at least according to my preliminary research). I apologize if any of these writers are mislabeled according to this category. I often use this category in general because I have been waiting a long time (impatiently HAHA) for a book to come out. Two writers on this list (Brian Ascalon Roley and Alexander Chee) are favorites of mine for their first books, so it is with only the highest pleasure that I review their subsequent publications. I’m still waiting on le thi diem thuy to publish the “second novel we are all looking for,” but that’s neither here nor there. If anyone does know the status of le’s future work, please do comment, because I’ve love to know what’s going on there. But, enough babble… on to the reviews!

A Review of Zoë S. Roy’s Butterfly Tears (Inanna 2009).



So, I’ve been reading through Zoë S. Roy’s Butterfly Tears, which is a short story collection. Roy is already the author of a third publication, but Butterfly Tears happens to be her second, so I am including it as part of this larger review post. I was immediately drawn to this work because of its focus on a general theme concerning Chinese women who are struggling with changing cultural values in light of modernization, especially in the period following the Cultural Revolution. The stories further show transnational verve, as characters travel from China to the United States or to Canada. The diasporic character of these migrations adds an extra level of instability to the lives of these female principles. Much of the stories involve star-crossed romances. In terms of literary taxonomies, Butterfly Tears is an intriguing example of a truly transnational and Asian North American work, as stories are set primarily in three countries: China, Canada, and/or the United States. The opening and title story, “Butterfly Tears” involves a protagonist (and Chinese migrant) named Sunni who realizes that her marriage to her husband may be on the rocks. Roy effectively uses analeptic intercuts to show us how moments in the past bring the diegetic present into better light: we see how young Sunni (growing up in China) reacts to the life story of Crazy Wen, a musician whose own romance was prematurely terminated. The fable of Crazy Wen allows Sunni to reconsider her adult life through a new perspective. Though Sunni is devastated when she discovers her husband’s infidelity, she understands that she cannot simply give up: she must keep herself together because other people rely on her and, for instance, she still needs to be a responsible parent. The third story, “Yearning,” is notable for the fact that it would become the basis of Roy’s next publication, Calls Across the Pacific. One of my favorite stories was “Balloons,” which offers Roy the opportunity to explore familial reunions amid the context of internet technologies. I especially was drawn to this piece because it was longer than many of the other stories and the characters have lengthier developmental arcs. The main character here, Suyun, eventually connects with a relative over the internet and realizes that her father’s brother may actually be alive. I found this story to be additionally intriguing because Roy employs a number of different discursive techniques to tell the tale, most notably the use of embedded letters and e-mails. “Twin Rivers” was also another standout for me, but also one of the most depressing stories, as the title character Jiang suffers from a disability that limits the use of one leg. As she adapts to life in Canada, she becomes the subject of a problematic romance with a man who is already married, leading her down a destructive path of obsessive behavior. Here, Roy works within the frame of the limited life options and paths for Chinese women even in the context of transnational migration. In “A Mandarin Duck,” Roy varies the theme of strained romantic relationships by exploring how a woman Huidi (with a son named Wade) attempts to make a new life in the shadow of an abusive relationship. And I’ll end with “Fortune-telling,” which seems to suggest the possibility of a same sex romance between its principle characters, but never fully explores this line of queer desire. If there is a critique to be made of some of the stories, it’s that I sometimes simply wanted to read further into a character’s life, but that’s the frustration of this form: you can’t always get much more than a brief, punctuated glimpse. The staccato cadences of Roy’s collection still finds a general adherence through the themes of Chinese female life paths and thus it might be better to regard Butterfly Tears as a loosely linked story cycle. Roy’s collection certainly can be taught alongside a number of others, and I especially see that this work would resonate alongside others with strong Chinese diasporic and transnational sentiments; these include Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and Xu Xi’s Access.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/butterfly-tears-zoe-roy/1014900328?ean=9780978223373



A Review of Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates (Viking 2016).


As a note, I always make a quick comment before any Penguin title to plug their CFIS program which gives qualified instructors 5 free exam copies per year. Because of this policy, I have been easily able to add new books to my courses routinely. The CFIS staff are wonderfully responsive and Penguin has the best exam copy hands down of any of the major presses. W.W. Norton is probably just behind.

For more on CFIS, go here:

http://www.penguin.com/services-academic/cfis/

While dealing with the flu this past winter, I read Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates, perhaps one of the perfect novels to have when you have a lot of time in bed. The plot is totally immersive and is certain to be picked up by book clubs, especially ones seeking female driven plots concerning motherhood. We’ll let B&N (as always) provide the basic scaffolding of the novel’s contents: “Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling, The Expatriates confirms Lee as an exceptional talent and one of our keenest observers of women’s inner lives.” The “expatriate” aspect of these three characters is that they have all moved to Hong Kong. Hilary Starr (not racially marked) and Margaret Reade (1/4 Korean) are wives of serious businessmen. Hilary and her husband David have been struggling to have a baby for eight years, and they are contemplating adopting a child who is of part Chinese part Indian (South Asian) background, but Hillary’s narrative is perhaps the least compelling and the least threaded of the three primary characters. Margaret Reade hires Mercy Cho to be the family’s babysitter. At that point, Mercy is pretty much moving from one job to another, so the possibility of stable finances draws her in to the orbit of the Reade’s. Mercy travels with the family to Seoul; Margaret immediately realizes that Mercy is not the best babysitter, but passes off her paranoia as being an overprotective parent. But (and spoilers forthcoming here) her intuition seems to be correct, as one day she, Mercy, and the three kids are in a market area and lose sight of the youngest (named G) for just a couple of seconds. G is gone, and much of the narrative is cast in the pall of his absence. Margaret (and her family) is trying to recover, while Mercy is trying to forget this past. Their lives begin to creep slowly back toward each other, but in the most subtest ways. Hillary’s husband David ends up having an affair, but engages this relationship with none other than Mercy. What Mercy does not know is that Hillary’s husband and Margaret’s husband work in similar business circles, which sets the stage for encounter in which all three characters will finally meet in the same physical space at Margaret’s husband’s fiftieth birthday party. Even with all the immense privilege that Margaret and Hillary do possess, Lee manages that rare feat of plumbing their psychic interiorities so deeply (through third person narration no less) that we still find them engaging and sympathetic characters, but the real coup is Lee’s portrayal of Mercy Cho: an incredibly flawed woman without a real understanding of American upward mobility and romantic courtship, who understands that she is without cultural capital even as she wields a rarefied educational pedigree. As Mercy creates one drama to the next, you begin to see that much of her circumstances appear not simply because of some character deficiency but the radically different class trajectories that the three main characters engage as the titular expatriates. It is in this sense that Lee’s novel provides its most crucial interventions concerning this particular character, who is in need of the most narrative attention in the end, and which Lee crucially provides as the most essential bridging apparatus to bring the narrative to its appropriate and somewhat uplifting conclusion. As with Lee’s previous effort (the epic war novel The Piano Teacher, and there is a fair amount of piano playing in this recent novel as well), there is a cinematic quality to the writing that makes one expect that this is the kind of work that may be optioned for motion picture adaptation. The question would really be about the issue of casting, as two lead roles would need to be awarded to Asian American actresses. I could see Mercy being played by someone like Jamie Chung or Arden Cho, but Margaret Reade would likely need to be mixed race and in her forties, so that role might be harder to cast, maybe someone like Julia Nickson.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-expatriates-janice-y-k-lee/1121772908

A Review of Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Saga Press, 2016).



I’ve been reading this phenomenal collection piecemeal. For everyone who has seen this book, you will know why: it’s over 400 pages with numerous stories collected. Nevertheless, I’ll focus mostly on a specific set of the stories. In my first foray, I rocked the first four or so of the stories, and the two that were absolutely fascinating to me were “The Perfect Match” and “Good Hunting.” “The Perfect Match” is a quirky love story in which characters believe their lives are tied to the endurance of a specific object. The protagonist, a young woman working a desultory office job, finds herself realizing that she’s crushing on a coworker. Her object is “ice,” and she lives in fear that an ice cube, which represents her life, will melt, unless she has a freezer always nearby. Even when she goes out to clubs or on social occasions, she needs to bring an ice cube with her and will go out of her way to find a place where it will be cared for in the proper freezing temperature. In her office, she stows the ice in a freezer near her desk. But when her coworker comes into her life, a man who everyone is attracted to, she nevertheless feels that she has a unique connection, one certainly cemented by their mutual love of literature and poetry. She eventually discovers that his object is salt: the very thing that makes it harder to freeze, but we understand that these objects are primarily metaphors. She needs to “warm up” her life, even at the cost of losing her “ice cube.” When the “ice cube” melts down after her moment with the coworker, she thinks she is going to die. The story then cuts to a letter penned by a close friend who tells her that she thought she, too, would die when her object ran out, which was in her case, a pack of cigarettes. When the pack ran out, she realized: she still had the box, and that she was not yet dead, and that she used the cigarettes as a false resource for living her life, that somehow these cigarettes would make her live her life to the fullest, when she could be doing that whenever she wanted. This letter is of course something that the protagonist now knows, too: that she must live, even if it means the possibility of being on the edge, losing something comfortable, living a life in security. Better to be devastated by life and love than to live in the hovel of a home without anyone else around you. When I read “Good Hunting,” (the fourth story or so), I knew I was in trouble: could any of the stories following this one be as good? LOL. In “Good Hunting,” which immediately made me think of Good Will Hunting (but I digress), our protagonists are respectively a demon hunter and a fox demon. They meet each other as youngsters, but the demon hunter and fox demon both discover that they are not really at odds with each other. The fox demon isn’t a being that needs to be vanquished and the demon hunter isn’t someone who is so intent on predation and killing. Instead, they strike up a unique friendship, but one that is coming under duress due to increasing modernization: railroads are being developed, automata are taking on the jobs of human workers, and people believe in magic and mischief a little bit less. The demon hunter doesn’t have demons to hunt anymore; the demons seem to be disappearing, but we discover that they may not be disappearing so much as they are being transformed. The fox demon, as we discover, is having a more and more difficult time turning into her true form as fox. Eventually, she is completely unable to change into her fox form; this fate is of course twinned by the fact that the fictional world is becoming ever more advanced in its technology and efficiency. But the fox demon’s human form does put her at some risk: she is particularly attractive and thus a target for men who might be up to no good. The conclusion sees the demon hunter take a new job, developing automata and technology for a corporation. The fox-demon, on the other hand, is severely assaulted by a man who subjects her to an incredibly twisted mode of body modification, as her appendages are changed into chrome machinery parts. Liu’s critique here is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, especially in the ways that humans become functionalized to the extent that we cannot distinguish where the human ends and the machine begins, so much so the hybridity of human and machine exists as the fulcrum of a dangerous sexual fetish. But, Liu has one more wonderful plot trick up his sleeve: the demon hunter uses his power of technological innovation to provide the fox demon with the ability to transform back into the fox form, but this time with the help of his technological know-how. The end sees her go off into the distance in this fox/ chrome hybrid form. “The Literomancer” follows the travail of a young girl named Lily, who must travel to Taiwan with her family (in the post KMT takeover period). Her father has a new job position out that way; Lily does not want to be there and suffers from bullying in school, but she establishes a friendship with an older man and his adoptive son. The older man possesses a talent based upon reading the fortunes through an analysis of Chinese calligraphy. Lily begins to see how this talent might also be used in terms of her understanding of English, but the story takes a very dark turn when Lily’s explanation of her friendship with this diviner is discovered by her father. Here, we again see the historical past effect considerable influence on a domestic plot. The “Simulacrum” reminded me of a number of different A.I. type stories. In this case, a man develops a kind of software that allows a person to re-experience particular events (reminiscent of that virtual reality moment in Minority Report when Tom Cruise’s character longs to remember his long departed son), but this software of course can be used in a variety of ways. When the daughter of the developer discovers him employing the technology as a way to access previous sexcapades (even though it is a source of marital tension), the daughter loses all faith in her father’s sense of morality. The story ends with the daughter’s mother dying but imploring her to give her father a chance: that her father’s actions in that one particular moment of using the simulacrum cannot be how she thinks of him forever. This story is one ultimately about forgiveness and the belief that people can change. After my concern about the status of other stories after reading “Good Hunting,” my fears especially abated after reading “The Regular,” which is an intriguing detective type plot involving an investigator and a serial killer. “The Regular” refers to the serial killer, who has been picking his targets based upon high-end escorts who have technology implanted in their eyes (here we have shades of Blade Runner for sure) that allows them to record any of their sexual encounters with customers. It’s a safety measure that sex workers can use so that customers know that their actions can be turned against them in case an encounter goes wrong. But, the titular regular and serial killer realizes he can use this technology as a mode by which to effect forms of political change, as he can blackmail high ranking officials and diplomats based upon what he finds in the ocular recording implants. Thus, he targets these escorts precisely because of the value of the information that might hold. The investigator is charged to find out about the death of a Chinese American call girl, one who reminds the investigator of her daughter Ruth who was killed at a moment in time when the investigator chose not to follow the instincts of a device called the Regulator, which provides all users with enhanced powers of perception. The Regulator is an intriguing form of technology that renders the user a kind of cyborg, and the investigator exploits its powers (even at her biological detriment) in her search for the killer. Though I didn’t necessarily think Liu needed to psychologize the investigator as someone compelled in this search because of its connection to her own daughter, the story was particularly enthralling. Another highlight. In the back half of the collection, the stories I enjoyed the most were “The Paper Menagerie,” “The Waves,” “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” and “The Man who Ended History: A Documentary.” I can understand why “The Paper Menagerie” was selected as the title story (and it won numerous awards): it follows a mixed-race child’s disintegrating relationship to his mother. The story begins with him having a very strong and loving relationship with her mother based upon a magical connection to origami: she is able to make origami animals that come to life and play with them. As they get older though, their connection starts to falter under the duress of racial melancholia. The young child begins to realize his mother is “foreign,” and that he, too, is being marked as “different.” He wants his mother to speak to him in English. We’re not surprised that soon the animals stop coming to life. Later, his mother will die from a disease at an early age, leaving behind a letter the son cannot read because, of course, he completely disregarded the need to learn Chinese. “The Waves” was one of my favorite stories, as it explored the evolution of humans to different forms, but how perhaps the cycle of life form changes that humans would undergo would be cyclical. “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” reminds me of something that might have been written as a kind of addenda to The Man in the High Castle, as the fictional world is set in a counterfactual timeline in which the Japanese Imperial power continued to rise in its power. The final story in the collection, “The Man who Ended History: A Documentary,” immediately brought to mind a story from Ted Chiang’s Story of your Life and Others (and later, this connection was affirmed as Liu did acknowledge the inspirational relationship) in terms of its form (and even the title). The content, though, was focused on the Nanjing massacre and thus uses Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking as the basis of a time travel storyline in which scientists discover the technology that will allow them to move observe and even to experience key historical events. This technology thus has the capacity to “end history” in the sense that one can be at any time and any place, but Liu seems way more interested in relaying the need to remember in whatever flawed guise that occurs, so that we do not become somehow disaffected to the atrocities occurring now, later, or those well into the past. Indeed, Liu seems well aware of the possibility of memory to be biased, but that such faults in our ability to retain the specifics of a given event do not make them somehow unreliable or untrue. Though I have spent most of my time recounting the stories in terms of their plot, I have to say that I find Liu’s command of the hard SF tropes to be compelling and do hope that he follows his current series with a work that might be set in space or in fictional world filled with robots or aliens. I would give yourself a lot of time to work through these wonderful stories; I definitely plan to adopt this book in future courses with the caveat that I know I’ll have to excerpt it. It will definitely pair quite well with Ted Chiang’s Story of your Life and Others.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-paper-menagerie-and-other-stories-ken-liu/1121191040

A Review of Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island (Knopf, 2016).



2016 is apparently turning out to be the year of second publications by Asian American fiction writers (others have included Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night, Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates, Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s The Golden Son, Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, among others). Shawna Yang Ryan’s follow up to Water Ghosts (which was originally published as a novel called Locke 1928 through a small press called El Leon Literary Arts) is titled Green Island. The title refers to the place where one of the main characters is imprisoned for approximately a decade, as he is interrogated due to his criticisms of the KMT. The novel is set primarily in Taiwan. The first hundred or so pages follows the tumultuous events that occurred in February and March of 1947 in which thousands were killed in the wake of the KMT’s brutal suppression of communist sentiment. The novel is narrated through the first person perspective, which at first seems strange, because this character opens the novel telling the story of her own birth, which not so coincidentally occurs during the violent period of national development. The main character’s father is taken prisoner, interrogated, tortured, but ultimately released, but of course the wounds of this period never quite go away. Indeed, readers begin to discover that this character is obviously suffering forms of PTSD and is described by others as “broken.” It also becomes clear that his release is due to the fact that he becomes an informant, having divulged the names of others who were seen as subversive due to perceived and assumed political leanings during that period. Thus, this man’s survival attaches to his family a kind of ignominy: he is understood in the community as a traitor and double agent. As the novel moves forward, the focus eventually shifts to the narrator herself, as she comes of age during a period that sees increased international mobility and transnational currents. The narrator is courted by a young Taiwanese American, who is pursuing his PhD at Berkeley. At the same time, she is beginning to discover that her father’s history is far more complicated than others have made it out to be. Initially, she and her siblings are ashamed of this broken man who returned home in silence, disgrace, and anger, but she realizes that there is more to his story. Thus, much of this novel is about the narrator’s motivation to recontextualize her father’s life in light of her own, which will tread an eerily similar path. Once the narrator ends up marrying the Taiwanese American (named Wei), they will settle in Berkeley. Wei is a professor of political science and continues to espouse anti-KMT views much to the chagrin of the protagonist. As the novel moves forward, they have two children (two daughters), and they choose to harbor a political exile. The political exile’s presence in the household creates considerable turbulence, especially in the wake of the protagonist’s ambivalence toward her husband’s continuing public rhetoric against the KMT. The narrator is at one point approached by a KMT operative and coerced into providing some intelligence for him. Thus, in some sense, her position is not unlike her father’s: she is forced to consider the safety of her own family even at the expense of her husband’s political ideals. A fateful decision, though, turns the narrative in a much darker direction, and the final act involves the narrator, her husband, and her two children returning to Taiwan. For those familiar with Taiwanese history, Ryan’s depiction of the 2-28 massacre will not necessarily present much new information, but most are generally unaware of this moment. In this sense, Green Island offers as much on the historical level as it does through its compelling fictionalization of one woman’s desire to balance personal freedoms against political ideals. Ryan packs in so much historical texture at times that the novel seems occasionally overburdened, but such is to be expected in this kind of ambitious work which necessarily reminds us that individual desire cannot be wrenched free from the structures of a violent national development. Strains of the understated elegance that marked the style of Ryan’s debut certainly come through in key moments, and these are the moments to read for.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/green-island-shawna-yang-ryan/1121998222

A Review of Alexander Chee’s Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2016).



Wow, wow, wow! What can I say. I have waited so long for this novel. Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh was one of the books that I can say made me look at the world anew. It made me see how a life like mine could be reflected in the fictional world in a commanding, textured way. In some ways, Chee’s Edinburgh is the kind of book that gives me hope about what can still be possible, what can still be achieved through fiction. I have taught Edinburgh so many times, I have lost count at this point. Students will back me up on this one; it’s hard to pass through coursework with me without having heard about this novel or having being assigned it (at the undergraduate and at the graduate level). So, reading Queen of the Night was an experience I knew I was going to relish. At approximately 500 pages, I took my time with it, forcing myself to put it down after about every hundred pages, refusing at any point to skim. It is a difficult, demanding, decadent but exquisite book, filled with sumptuous passages about late 19th century Paris. The novel is told in a frame narrative. The beginning opens with our narrator as a successful Paris opera singer, but there is some major intrigue as a novel has just been published purporting to lay out the life of some legendary woman, who ends up is really based upon the narrator. The narrator realizes that her identity may be revealed if someone is to make apparent the connection between the novel and her life, and she goes about investigating which person might have relayed the information to the writer. There are four main suspects: the narrator’s best friend when she was a teenager; a vicious man known as the tenor; a former elite known as the Comtesse, and then a pianist who had fallen in love with the narrator. The pianist is immediately ruled out because he had died, but the novel then goes about exploring the narrator’s quest to track down the three living individuals and basically to find out who might be the culprit. Interspersed with this frame narrative, the novel uses major analepses to provide the complicated backstory for this woman, who is Gatsby-like in her constant identity reinvention. As we discover, our heroine is born an American, who grows up in Minnesota with a gift: to be able to sing in a beautiful voice. Not long after her gift manifests, she begins to be targeted for it. Her own mother perceives that voice as a source of pride and forces her to wear a gag. Her family wonders if that gift is also a curse, and therein lies the ambivalence that will be coded into her life trajectory. Her entire family dies of some undisclosed fever when she is just about in her teens, so she travels to New York City, hoping to eventually make her way to Lucerne, Switzerland (from whence her mother’s family originates; she’s also part Scottish). By this point, her experiences have rendered her a kind of selective mute, even though she is still able to sing. Once in New York, as a young girl (and following the naturalist impulse of the novel), she is soon taken advantage of, but is able to make the most out of her options by joining what is essentially a traveling circus. She is hired as the pioneer girl, tasked with firing rifles and riding horses. Her special ability to sing one song is used at a climactic moment in her performance. That troupe eventually travels to Paris. Once there, our heroine realizes that she might be able to escape the troupe and get to Lucerne, but her plans go awry. For a time, though, she is able to make money by working for a different company; she befriends a courtesan, but that friendship is itself a complicated phenomenon. One night, while merrymaking with Euphrosyne (spelling?), she brandishes a knife to protect them and seriously injures a man. They escape from Paris, realizing that they are probably fugitives. When they return, they are detained and jailed by police. They are only released when their bail and fines are paid by Odile, who our narrator discovers is Euphrosyne’s mother. While working for Odile in her upscale brothel, one client, known only as the tenor, comes to discover her singing talent and demands to take her out to the opera. Eventually, this obsession with her leads him to buy her contract and associated fines, while training her to become an opera singer. She eventually auditions for a reputable school, but is turned down. This moment pushes the narrator to fake her own death, at which point she joins a convent and reinvents herself again, this time as a grisette, handling various seamstress-ing duties for royalty. In this period, she becomes a spy for a powerful elite known as the Comtesse, who is engaging in an affair with the Emperor. The Comtesse enlists her to find out everything about the Empress, most specifically what kinds of clothes she wears and when she goes out. Though the narrator enjoys her life as a grisette-informant, this espionage becomes complicated, especially when the tenor returns and demands that she come back with him, since he essentially owns her, but if I’m belaboring plot elements it’s only because the novel is an extremely intricate web of connections. As the novel moves forward, it becomes clear that Chee is working with themes of espionage and nation-state development on the one hand alongside a very, very thorny romance plot on the other. These dueling issues eventually come to a head, leading the heroine to her current situation, afraid that someone has found out her secret identity and plans ultimately to ruin her. The final 100 pages are paced in a breathless sort of way, paralleling the slow degradation of the falcon soprano’s voice (and here, Chee does gives us some typologies of opera singer vocal registers etc). Will the heroine retain her fame, her voice, and her love for only one man? The one challenge that this novel will present for me, at least in terms of how I will bring it back into my life again and again, is whether or not I can teach it in the quarter system. I sometimes toy with the idea of teaching a “long” Asian American novels course in which we would be assigned only the first 100 pages or so of each work, but then I realize some of the longest novels I’ve loved don’t really have all that much “Asian American” content. Toward the conclusion of Queen of the Night, Chee does include a reference to a Chinese American character, but other than that, there’s not too much that’s directly connected to what we might consider to be traditional Asian American themes or issues. But of course I’ve never really cared about content in this way, as I have argued elsewhere that Asian American literature is not so much about ethnoracial ancestry, as it is about how to understand authorial identity in tandem with the political texture of the cultural production. To be sure, Lilliet Berne—perhaps the most prominent alias taken by our narrator—is a figure who is highly eccentric: we understand that her rise in the Paris Opera world is exceedingly exceptional and her power, in the end, is still incredibly limited, because her rise is so much connected to others who are already born into positions of great privilege. Thus, the novel does very much connect to the issues of social inequality that have been central to so much work that comes out of cultural studies (and Asian American literature). In any case, Chee’s second novel is a luxurious epic, worthy of multiple reads. Most definitely worth the wait, but we’ll still hope that his next publication won’t take quite as long .

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-queen-of-the-night-alexander-chee/1115305215

A Review of Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal: Stories (Curbstone Books, 2016).



This collection was one of the most highly anticipated reads for this year! Brian Ascalon Roley published a novel about 15 years ago that I am still teaching (practically every year) called American Son. Fans of American Son can rest easy knowing that The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal continues Roley’s compelling storytelling track record. But before I get any further, let’s let the folks at Northwestern University Press (Curbstone Books is an imprint of this press) give us plot summary context: “The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal is a collection of stories that focuses on multigenerational tales of intertwined Filipino families. Set in the huge yet relatively overlooked and misunderstood Filipino diaspora in the United States, this book follows characters who live in the shadow of the histories of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. The impact of immigration and separation filters through the stories as a way of communing with or creating distance between individuals and family, country, or history. Roley’s work has been praised by everyone from New York Times literary critics to APIA author Helen Zia for his bare, poetic style and raw emotionalism. In the collection’s title story, a woman living with her daughter and her daughter’s American husband fears the loss of Filipino tradition, especially Catholicism, as she tries to secretly permeate her granddaughter’s existence with elements of her ancestry. In ‘New Relations,’ an American-born son introduces his mother to his Caucasian bride and her family, only to experience his first marital discord around issues of politesse, the perception of culture, and post-colonial legacies. Roley’s delicately nuanced collection often leaves the audience with the awkwardness that comes from things lost in translation or entangled in generational divides.” I always adore linked story collections, because they have a cohesion that’s a little bit more diffuse than a novel, but nevertheless are held together usually by characters that appear in multiple stories. Roley’s working with a very large extended family, so there is a very useful family tree that appears before the collection even begins. I was also really happy to see Roley experiment with different narrative discourses, as he moves deftly back and forth between first and third person. The standout stories for me are “Unacknowledged” and “New Relations,” which was already mentioned in NUP’s official book description. I found these stories so compelling because Roley sequences two first person narrators that hail from the same nuclear family. “Unacknowledged” follows the perspective of Twig, who suffers from a physical ailment that has stunted his growth and bodily strength. He observes his family, as they adjust to a new social dynamic when they hire a maid who was once the mistress of a relative. That mistress also happens to bring along her daughter Teresa, whose presence is the major force of disruption that the family must deal with. Twig’s big brother Matt ends up having romantic feelings for Teresa, which complicates family dynamics. The next story fast forwards to a period of time in which Matt is an adult and is in a marriage with someone from a Caucasian background. The premise of this particular story involves Matt’s mother coming to meet his wife’s family, as a sort of unification of both sides, but this unification necessarily involves extended family members. The wife’s relative, for instance, is married to a Filipina woman from Mindanao. The regional and class differences between Matt (and his mom) and the woman from Mindanao are the cause for much familial tension. These stories allow the reader to get a larger narrative arc to one specific family, so I naturally found them quite fascinating. Fans of American Son will be extremely happy to see that Roley does give Gabe and Tomas’s family some narrative room, as they are the subject of “Old Man.” Here, Roley chooses to give the first person perspective to Tomas, something he never did in American Son. It was wonderful to see how different Tomas viewed himself and it certainly complicates how we understand Gabe’s narration from American Son, though it seems as if the events that unfold in this story occur just before that the novel. In any case, fans of American Son (and of Asian American Literature) should reserve some reading time for Roley’s story collection and hope that he won’t make us wait as long for a third publication.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/last-mistress-jose-rizal



*****

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison and expert. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

LibraryThing:

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Asian American Literature Fans – Young Adult Fiction Spotlight – May 10, 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Young Adult Fiction Spotlight – May 10, 2016

May 10, 2016

This spotlight contains reviews of: Cindy Pon’s Serpentine (Month9Books, 2015); Linda Sue Park’s Forest of Wonders (HarperCollins, 2016); Linda Sue Park’s Forest of Wonders (HarperCollins, 2016); Erin Entrada Kelly’s Land of Forgotten Girls (Greenwillow Books, 2016); Heidi Heilig’s The Girl From Everywhere (Greenwillow Books 2016); Julie Kagawa’s Rogue (Harlequin Teen, 2015); Julia Kagawa’s The Iron Warrior (Harlequin Teen, 2015);
Mariko Tamaki’s Saving Montgomery Sole (Roaring Book Press, 2016); Rebecca Lim’s Afterlight (Text Publishing Company, 2016).



May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. Counting this post, I will be up to 13 reviews (if I have completed my addition properly). We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership.

As an update, I have received my FIRST comment from a reader. Big shout out from Ming over at Goodreads for taking the time to let us know that we’re not calling out into the darkness.

Me = 13 posts, Reading Community = 1 comment. This stat is not as compelling to me. LOL

For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

*****

This post focuses on young adult fictions penned by Asian North American/ Asian Anglophone writers. Many of you have noticed how many young adult fictions I end up reviewing. This interest isn’t part of some article or book project; I find young adult fictions to be a form of “comfort food” reading, so I naturally gravitate to them when I simply want to decompress a little bit.

A Review of Cindy Pon’s Serpentine (Month9Books, 2015)



Cindy Pon’s follow-up to the Phoenix series is Serpentine (Month9Books, 2015), which is apparently set in the same fictionalized word. But before I get to the review, I wanted to provide you with a link to this press:

http://www.month9books.com/

As per usual, we’ll let B&N handle some of our plot summarizing for us: “Inspired by the rich history of Chinese mythology, this sweeping fantasy is set in the ancient Kingdom of Xia and tells the coming of age story of Skybright, a young girl who worries about her growing otherness. As she turns 16, Skybright notices troubling changes. By day, she is a companion and handmaid to the youngest daughter of a very wealthy family. But nighttime brings with it a darkness that not even daybreak can quell. When her plight can no longer be denied, Skybright learns that despite a dark destiny, she must struggle to retain her sense of self – even as she falls in love for the first time.” So, it’s sort of hard to review this novel without revealing a major plot point concerning the title: Skybright was orphaned as a young child and brought to the house of a wealthy family to become the handmaiden of the daughter named Zhen Nhi. What Skybright doesn’t realize is that she’s part demon serpent. When she happens to come of age (in this case, we’re referring to her menstrual cycle), this moment coincides with accidental transformations into her serpent form. At first she’s obviously confused by what’s going on, but a chance meeting with a mysterious man named Stone reveals that her mother was a demon serpent named Opal who used her powers of transformation to seduce and kill men. Naturally, Skybright is frightened, especially after she develops strong feelings for a monk-in-training named Kai Sen, who has been tasked with helping seal the rift between the mortal world and the underworld. Kai Sen also happens to be someone who has to vanquish demons, so their romance already becomes coded as star-crossed. Another major problem appears with Zhen Nhi. Zhen Nhi eventually develops feelings for another young teenage girl named Lan; when Zhen Nhi’s mother discovers this same sex romance, she banishes Lan from Zhen Nhi’s life. Zhen Nhi is naturally devastated, but ultimately decides to run away in order to make sure she can see Lan again. Thus, Pon is invested in twining together two narratives of what are essentially “queer” forms of romance. Intriguingly, though Zhen Nhi and Skybright are very close friends, Skybright cannot bring herself to tell Zhen Nhi about her transformations and how they might be impacting her love for Kai Sen. The latter half of the book brings all the major characters together, as Zhen Nhi goes missing during her quest to find Lan. The crucial concluding arc suggests that Skybright cannot find a way to handle both her mortal and demon identities, thus suggesting the impossibility of this kind of hybridity, but I’m sure Pon has more in store for us, as there is already a sequel in the works. I found this novel compelling for a lot of reasons, the primary of which is the twinned queer-ish romance plots, and how squarely Pon engages the challenge of the “coming out” narrative. In this particular fictional world, the cross-species love affair between a half human/ demon and a monk comes off as perhaps more deviant than the same sex love affair between two female teenagers. Certainly, a work that can be used in a teaching capacity, Serpentine is the kind of young adult paranormal romance Y/A that would pair well with others such as Malinda Lo’s Ash and Huntress. The one minor quibble I had with this book was based upon production issues; sometimes the words on the page were justified too closely together, and I also found the margin area to be too small. I’m always thinking about note-taking and other such things when I read books and hope that Month9 considers these elements in the sequel!  Otherwise, a must read for fans of the paranormal romance/ young adult genre.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/serpentine-cindy-pon/1121684149

A Review of Linda Sue Park’s Forest of Wonders (HarperCollins, 2016).



It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything by Linda Sue Park, so I figured it would be a good time to catch up with her latest offering, which is the young adult novel Forest of Wonders. Forest of Wonders is the first in what will likely be a trilogy, the second of which is tentatively titled Cavern of Secrets. As per routine, we’ll let B&N give us the editorial description: “Raffa Santana has always loved the mysterious Forest of Wonders. For a gifted young apothecary like him, every leaf could unleash a kind of magic. When an injured bat crashes into his life, Raffa invents a cure from a rare crimson vine that he finds deep in the Forest. His remedy saves the animal but also transforms it into something much more than an ordinary bat, with far-reaching consequences. Raffa’s experiments lead him away from home to the forbidding city of Gilden, where troubling discoveries make him question whether exciting botanical inventions—including his own—might actually threaten the very creatures of the Forest he wants to protect.” The plot summary is light on the details of the other characters. Raffa has a relative named Garith, who is sort of a rival apothecary. Both are young and want to prove themselves in the field. Their parental guardians are careful to steer them in a particular direction. Raffa’s parents don’t want their work as apothecaries diverted toward Gilden. Garith’s family, on the other hand, wants to move to Gilden, a large city that will be opening up a major research center that will be employed to help generate more potions and magical elixirs that will no doubt be important for the cosmopolitan center. Early on the in the novel, Raffa and Garith experiment with a magical vine, which proves to save a dying bat, but with consequences. The bat revives, but is suddenly able to speak in a human language. Raffa’s parents realize both the power and the danger of such a magical vine, and they suggest he keep the news of this vine to himself. The second part of the novel turns to another adventure: Raffa eventually finds his way to Gilden, wanting to find out more about the city and what it may offer. Along the way, he teams up with Trixin and Kuma; through hook and crook, they manage to get into the city and all the way up into its royal center. The New York Times Book Review makes an interesting case for reading the novel as an inverted Aesop’s fable: “It is a fantasy novel, yes, but it is also a provocative moral tale about the relationship between humans and animals. An Aesop's fable turned inside out…In the end, the ambiguity of the message is one of the novel's strengths. In a genre that often paints good and evil in black and white, Park has written a book with a lot of gray. And green. There's a forest, after all. I look forward to further exploring the Forest of Wonders, and to meeting more talking animals.” I certainly agree with this perspective, but the moral tale moves beyond the relationship between humans and animals. Park’s work seems to be a microcosmic rendering of capitalism and the ways that human beings harness anyone to create more profit under the guise of efficiency and technological progress. Certainly, the novel is about biopower and the need to figure out the proper ethical framework when humans are tasked with handling items that can be deployed in a variety of dynamic and potentially deleterious ways. What’s interesting is of course how to read the ethnic and racial registers of this particular work: Park employs stylized language and dialogue to suggest we’re in some sort of dialect, but I can’t figure out quite what to do with these kinds of linguistic peculiarities. Indeed, dialogue functions in entertaining but nonstandard syntaxes, which imply that Park wants to move this work not only into fantasy registers, but also a location and place in which social difference functions as well.


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/forest-of-wonders-linda-sue-park/1122087958?ean=9780062327383


A Review of Erin Entrada Kelly’s Land of Forgotten Girls (Greenwillow Books, 2016).



Well, Erin Entrada Kelly’s Land of Forgotten Girls continues to signal to me that we’ve got another amazing middle grade writer of Asian American fiction. Kelly’s work reminds me so much of Kadohata, especially in her most outstanding works such as Kira-Kira, Weedflower, and Outside Beauty. Land of Forgotten Girls is told from the first person perspective of Soledad, a young Filipino girl, who comes of age in the shadow of the death of her younger sister. The plot summary from Library Journal will do us some work here: “Soledad and Ming, two sisters from the Philippines, live in Louisiana with their evil stepmother, Vea. All Sol and Ming have is each other and their stories. Both girls inherited a lively imagination from their mother, Mei-Mei. When she was alive, Mei-Mei wove enthralling tales about her magical sister, Jove, who traveled around the world. The girls cling to tales of Auntie Jove as a hope of escape while living in a dreary apartment with miserable Vea. Sol worries for her younger sister as Ming begins to believe Auntie Jove is a reality, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Can Sol save her sister from the depression caused by her own stories, or have they done irreparable damage? Is there a way for Sol, Ming, and Vea to understand one another and be happy in their own reality?” Soledad and Ming’s father left them in the care of Vea, and because Vea is not happy living in the United States while her husband father remains in the Philippines (presumably to work), the two sisters must rely on each other in order to find friends and comfort each other during difficult times. Ming, in particular, is convinced that Auntie Jove is going to come to take her away from Vea, but Sol knows that this wish is just a fantasy. Sol attempts to wrest Ming away from these idealizations by trying to do something for her; with her neighborhood friends who together go on trips to the local garbage dump, she begins to hatch a plan that will lift Ming’s spirits. The middle grade novel is often quietly heartbreaking precisely because Kelly is able to balance sentimentality with realism. We know that the sisters are in a serious predicament, and Kelly doesn’t offer them any easy solutions, which makes any triumph that comes their way seem especially poignant. One of the highlights is the alternative kinship that the sisters create with their almost mute neighbor Ms. Yeung. And Kelly’s ace in the hole is certainly the rag tag group of neighborhood kids that come together to provide a community, however ephemeral, that Sol and Ming can call a kind of home away from home.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062238641/the-land-of-forgotten-girls


A Review of Heidi Heilig’s The Girl From Everywhere (Greenwillow Books 2016).


So, this book is one of the first publications in 2016 I had the chance to read, and it is certainly one of the more ambitious YA paranormal fictions that I’ve encountered. We’ll let Goodreads take over the summarizing duties this time around: “Sixteen-year-old Nix Song is a time-traveller. She, her father and their crew of time refugees travel the world aboard The Temptation, a glorious pirate ship stuffed with treasures both typical and mythical. Old maps allow Nix and her father to navigate not just to distant lands, but distant times - although a map will only take you somewhere once. And Nix's father is only interested in one time, and one place: Honolulu 1868. A time before Nix was born, and her mother was alive. Something that puts Nix's existence rather dangerously in question...Nix has grown used to her father's obsession, but only because she's convinced it can't work. But then a map falls into her father's lap that changes everything. And when Nix refuses to help, her father threatens to maroon Kashmir, her only friend (and perhaps, only love) in a time where Nix will never be able to find him. And if Nix has learned one thing, it's that losing the person you love is a torment that no one can withstand. Nix must work out what she wants, who she is, and where she really belongs before time runs out on her forever.” What the description doesn’t tell you is that maps aren’t always accurate, and it matters when the map was produced and what the mapmaker was actually trying to map. So, maps can actually fail if they’re not authentic. For some reason, I thought that the time that Nix’s father Captain Slate was actually interested in was 1866, which would have been a time before Nix was born, and therefore her mother would still be alive, but who knows, I have been known to get simple plot details wrong. In any case, Nix’s father is able to get a map that gets him back to Honolulu at what he thinks will be the proper time, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s sort of a ploy to get him to a time in which individuals will sell him yet another map that will then bring him to the time he would actually like to return to. Nix is obviously skeptical, and the ransom they expect for that map is excessively costly because it will require Captain Slate and his crew to raid a heavily guarded Hawaiian treasury. Nix feels as though her life and her shipmates’ lives are secondary to Captain Slate’s melancholia. Thus, she feels as though she has to follow through on his plan, but of course, she has other ideas that would eventually free her from this endless quest. For instance, she certainly dreams of navigating time-traveling ships of her own, using maps that would take her to faraway places without the Captain. Heilig throws in a lot of other elements to complicate the plot. The requisite romance conundrum emerges when Nix develops a flirtation with a young artist and budding cartographer. But Heilig’s real spade in this novel is the question of the individual quest over a larger social problem: why is Slate so interested in saving his paramour’s life when a whole kingdom’s future is in question? Indeed, Slate is invested in changing the timeline for himself, while completely forgetting about the fact that imperial designs on Hawaii will ultimately lead to the kingdom’s downfall, so there is a larger question about the ethics around time travel that makes Heilig’s work far more textured than you might have expected from a young adult fiction. The novel is apparently part of a larger series, so we’ll see where the series will move from here, but given the Nix’s ability to work with maps, we know that Heilig has a lot of options and will very much continue to embody her moniker as the “girl from everywhere.”

Buy the Book:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-girl-from-everywhere-heidi-heilig/1121996229

A Review of Julie Kagawa’s Rogue (Harlequin Teen, 2015).



I needed to take my mind off some of the more challenging professional elements in my life, and my solution is often to read young adult fiction (with that paranormal romance element). I’d been “saving” Julie Kagawa’s Rogue for some time, letting it sit on my shelf until I wanted something on the frothier side. Rogue is the second installment in Kagawa’s dragon series (so I’ll let you know that there will be spoilers forthcoming), which focuses on a group of rotating narrators. Ember Hill, a female hatchling who is in training to become a deadly Viper—this term is used for a dragon tasked with killing other dragons who have attempted to escape the organization known as Talon—is our ostensible protagonist and readerly emotional center. There’s Riley, also known as Cobalt, who is the seasoned “rogue” dragon, who has been attempting to free young hatchlings from Talon. He’s been working as a subversice for about twelve years, a fact made apparent in Kagawa’s choice to engage anachronic narrative practices to provide us with some exposition concerning Riley’s movement into his status as a rogue. There’s Garret, the human soldier who works for the Order of St. George, the super secret organization looking to wipe out dragons from the face of the earth. At the conclusion of the first book—and here is another spoiler warning—Garret failed to kill Ember, letting her go. At a different point, Ember also has a chance to kill Garret but does not do so. They go their separate ways. The problem is of course Garret had a chance to kill Ember, meaning that he failed in his duty, a fact that evidences his inability to believe in the Order’s central mission. Thus Garret is to be executed. Ember, realizing that time is running out, manages to convince Riley and Riley’s human partner-in-crime and technology expert, Wes, that they have to break Garret out. This mission looks to be dangerous, but they go about doing it anyway, with the force of Ember’s will making itself known. Of course, Riley is carrying a torch for Ember, so we know that he’ll do what she says to keep her happy. Once Garret is out, Riley, Wes, Ember, and Garret need to go into hiding. Where else to go but Las Vegas? So, they head to Las Vegas, hole up in a hotel, while Riley goes about following up on a lead that there may be two hatchlings in the area that are in trouble. Over at Talon, trouble is also brewing in a different form. Ember’s twin brother Dante is looking to secure his position within the organization: the only way to assure his loyalty is to find Ember and bring her back to Talon. Thus, he is enlisted by those in the highest reaches of power to retrieve Ember; he is given support in the form of other hatchling recruits and aims to find a way to ensnare his twin sister. These storylines eventually converge, and the rest of the novel is a mad dash of chases and fight scenes. Though there’s certainly enough action and mayhem, there’s something less compelling about this narrative than Kagawa’s previous works. Nevertheless, I very much appreciated Kagawa’s choice to expand her stylistic wings by engaging multiple narrators. The problem here is that these internal monologues often sound similar to each other, thus creating the sense that these psychic consciousnessness are really one and the same. Perhaps, this shortcoming is the one I sensed while reading the work. I still will of course read the next installment, which will likely conclude the series, and which is provisionally entitled Soldier. In the meantime, the Iron Fey series continues with The Traitor Son that came out in October.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Talon-Saga-Julie-Kagawa/dp/037321216X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462852883&sr=8-1&keywords=julie+kagawa+rogue

A Review of Julia Kagawa’s The Iron Warrior (Harlequin Teen, 2015).



For those of you who have been invested in the Iron Fey series since it started seven installments ago, it seems as though The Iron Warrior definitively concludes this epic narrative. The Iron Warrior is long awaited; its release seems to have been delayed at various points, as Kagawa has been juggling three different storyworlds at the same time: the Blood of Eden series (Vampires), the Talon series (Dragons), and the aforementioned Iron Fey series (Fairies). In any case, we can’t help but wonder where Kagawa will go after The Talon series ends in the final book (which should be coming out sometime this year or early next). But back to the Fairies: Kagawa more or less makes her intentions known to close the book on the Chase family and their adventures in fairyland in her author’s note. As many of you are aware of, the last installment left us in a terrible cliffhanger. Ethan Chase seems to have died, and Keirran, the mixed blood elf and offspring of the Iron Queen (Meghan Chase) and her prince consort Ash, fulfills his prophecy, which would allow the Forgotten to come back to life, the First Queen to reign again, while simultaneously destroying the current power dynamics in the fairy realm (effectively disintegrating the domains of Summer and Winter Fey). Keirran no doubt has lost his soul, an effect mostly likely due to an amulet he had created in order to extend the life of his love Annwyl, who like the other Forgotten is suffering from the Fade. The cliffhanger is resolved in perhaps a kind of narrative cheat: Ethan does die, but his death is only temporary, and his resurrection means we can have the final installment. Narrated from Ethan’s first person perspective, this novel is all about his quest to find a way to save the Fey from almost virtual destruction at the hands of Keirran and the First Queen, who together command a terrible army of the Forgotten. For this quest to succeed, Ethan needs a lot of help and his band of adventurers reminds me most of a game you might have played in Dungeons & Dragons, as you move along a particular storyline and add allies who will join you in your various struggles. Ethan manages to acquire a number of these supporters, including: Kenzie, his romantic love; Kenzie’s fairy companion, Razor; Grimalkin, the cat evoking Neverland; the Thin Man, a Forgotten; even Wolf, who helps this band find a witch deep in a forest. They are able to find Annwyl there and realize that the only hope they have in defeating Keirran and the First Queen is to confront Keirran himself. Meanwhile, the fairy realms are battling each other for how to deal with Keirran without having to war with each other first. There’s quite a lot for Kagawa to deal with in terms of the power struggles here, but she is able to streamline much of the palace intrigue so to speak by focusing on Ethan’s particular plot. I have to say that given the cliffhanger of the 7th book, there was nothing that probably could have been done to satisfy my reading demands for this final book, and the narrative resolution, while certainly logical and fitting, thus becomes a little bit disappointing. Part of the challenge I think is the narrative perspective: Ethan Chase is an outsider with a heart of gold, but we never ever question his faith in good and in what might be possible, but his determination strikes sometimes as a bit too heroic, especially in light of other flawed, but no less striking narrators of these works such as the one found in Marie Lu’s The Young Elites. But, despite my personal quibbles with expectation, any faithful reader of this series will have to engage it if only to find out how the epic will end.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-iron-warrior-julie-kagawa/1121193298


A Review of Mariko Tamaki’s Saving Montgomery Sole (Roaring Book Press, 2016).



There’s a lot to admire about Mariko Tamaki’s Saving Montgomery Sole, which is narrated from the first person perspective of the titular Montgomery Sole. The young adult novel is part of that tradition of exploring the vast boundaries of new social formations in the genre. Here, the protagonist is raised by same sex partners, while her best friends are a mixed race Japanese Native American teen named Naoki and a queer teen named Thomas. There’s queerness, mixed race, and social difference pretty much everywhere in this text. But let’s backtrack for a second: to be honest, when I first picked up the book, I thought it might be about saving a species of fish because I think there is a fish called a sole. I guess I was entirely off the mark on that one. As per usual, we’ll let B&N provide us with some context: “Montgomery Sole is a square peg in a small town, forced to go to a school full of jocks and girls who don't even know what irony is. It would all be impossible if it weren't for her best friends, Thomas and Naoki. The three are also the only members of Jefferson High's Mystery Club, dedicated to exploring the weird and unexplained, from ESP and astrology to super powers and mysterious objects. Then there's the Eye of Know, the possibly powerful crystal amulet Monty bought online. Will it help her predict the future or fight back against the ignorant jerks who make fun of Thomas for being gay or Monty for having lesbian moms? Maybe the Eye is here just in time, because the newest resident of their small town is scarier than mothmen, poltergeists, or, you know, gym. Thoughtful, funny, and painfully honest, Montgomery Sole is someone you'll want to laugh and cry with over a big cup of frozen yogurt with extra toppings.” This summary does a good job of elucidating Monty’s interest in the paranormal; the Eye of Know provides her with a dose of power she suspects enables her to target bullies and others that she perceives are just sources of negative energy. But that desire to strike back and achieve revenge also begins to alter her character and to disturb her connections to her closest friends; this plot engagement is where the weight of the novel resides. Even though Monty is experiencing considerable trauma through various forms of social oppression at school and otherwise, she somehow must maintain a level of equanimity, while avoiding a path that resorts to violence and brutality. While this pacifistic mentality might placate some readers, I didn’t necessarily have a problem with the ways that Monty acted out: it made sense. She was being harassed, people she loved were being harassed, and she wanted to protect herself and the people she cared about. At the same time, Tamaki does throw a wrench into this kind of ethic because Monty presupposes the identities of those willing to harass her and it blinds her to the possibility that everyone may not be as mean-spirited as she thinks. This kind of nuancing is of course important, but this perspective-driven approach to the world didn’t necessarily solve the larger issue at hand concerning Monty’s constant negotiation with social forces that deem her and her family to be strange, queer, and just to out there to be part of anything mainstream, popular, or cool. In the world of high school, you can understand Monty’s pain at having to be so different. On the whole, Tamaki’s novel doesn’t necessarily stray far from the typical high school narrative, but I appreciated that she didn’t telegraph a major romance plot. Instead, she attempted to create a sense that there is a time and place for the non-normative family, even if it is under a constant barrage of normalizing impulses.

Buy the Book Here:


http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/saving-montgomery-sole-mariko-tamaki/1121270516#productInfoTabs

A Review of Rebecca Lim’s Afterlight (Text Publishing Company, 2016).

Well, I’ve been following Rebecca Lim’s publications after starting her Mercy series, which unfortunately never was completed on the United States side. For some reason, the publisher decided to halt the final installments. This experience is reminiscent of what happened with Leila Rasheed’s At Somerton series, which never had the final book come out in print form; it is only available in an electronic form. For those of you like me that appreciate the material page and the tangible product, this experience is certainly crazy-making. In any case, Rebecca Lim is widely published in her native Australia. As an Asian Australian writer, she comes from a different Anglophone literary heritage that still has yet to see much theorization at least from a stateside perspective. Lim’s Afterlight continues her tradition of creating fictional worlds that involve spirituality. In this particular work, our narrator and youthful teen narrator is Sophie Teague. The novel opens with both of her parents having been killed; she comes from a solid working class background and ends up moving in with her grandmother, who runs a bar. Her parents were part of a biker culture. Early on in the novel, Sophie realizes that she “can see dead people.” Though this kind of literary trope is hardly new, it never fails to interest me as a reader. In this case, Sophie is haunted by some sort of ghostly woman she calls Eve, who she discovers is a stripper that had gone missing. Eve seems intent on making her crazy, until Sophie starts to listen to what Eve seems to want her to do. Sophie ends up saving the life of one person after another, but these heroics end up attracting all sorts of attention, and she is eventually the subject of media publicity. Not surprisingly, this attention has both positive and negative effects. At school, people begin to wonder if Sophie is perhaps a bit different, and some regard her as a kind of witch-like figure. But Sophie’s ability to see the dead also allows her to meet the high school heartthrob named Jordan Haig, who as readers discover, is also able to see Eve. Thus,  Lim ingeniously weaves in the requisite romance plot into the paranormal young adult fiction through this kind of connection. The teenager outsider makes a key connection to a high school insider through their collective powers related to the occult. From there, Sophie begins to learn more about their powers and what they may signify, and the concluding arc sees the two team up in order to figure out what exactly their investments are in helping or ignoring those who have died. Lim’s novel also perfectly sets up readers for a sequel, and there’s enough unique worldbuilding in this book to make us thirsty for that second installment. We wonder if Sophie will be able to train in some way, so that she can master her powers with respect to the dead, but Lim’s introduction of a key character toward the conclusion (and which frame the narrative up front) make us realize that Sophie may be in for far more than she bargained for. A definite must read for fans of paranormal/ YA fictions.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/afterlight-rebecca-lim/1121565352

*****

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison and expert. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

LibraryThing:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/asianamlitfans

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Asian-American-Literature-Fans-147257025397976/

Asian American Literature Fans – Small Press Spotlight: Restless Books (May 5, 2016)

Asian American Literature Fans – Small Press Spotlight: Restless Books

May 5, 2016

This spotlight contains reviews of: Tash Aw’s Strangers on a Pier (Restless Books, 2016) and A Time Code (Restless Books, Print Edition, 2016).

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership. Better yet, join the active and current reviewers list, which you can see at the conclusion to this post! Feel free to e-mail me at ssohnucr@gmail.com to find out more about how you can get involved.

For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

*****

This post is a small press spotlight focusing on Restless Books, which first came to my attention because it was the press that offered the first stateside publication of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s fictions. In this post, I focus on the innovative “Face” series that has involved Chris Abani, Ruth Ozeki, and Tash Aw. Not surprisingly, I’ll be focusing on Ozeki and Aw, though I would venture to say that you pick up all three given how compelling the two I read already are. To browse the offerings over at Restless Books, go here:

http://www.restlessbooks.com/

Now on to some reviews!

A Review of Tash Aw’s Strangers on a Pier (Restless Books, 2016).


So, I’ve been meaning to review some titles coming out of a very cool press called Restless Books, and I finally get a chance to with the “The Face” series, which is a set of short, pocket sized titles (on high quality trade paperback type stock which is obviously really important to me hehe) that provides established writers a chance to meditate on their faces and how it impacts their understanding of the world and their writings. It’s a creative nonfiction conceit at its best, and the first I read in this series (with a second I’ll be reviewing at a later point by Ruth Ozeki) is Tash Aw’s Strangers on a Pier. The title is meant to invoke the complications of migration and how that process inevitably estranges, but also provides the opportunity for new contacts and new relationships to emerge. What seems most compelling to Aw is the process of forgetting and editing that can occur in diasporic movements. On the one hand, forgetting allows one to forge a new identity, while on the on the other, editing allows one the ability to tailor that identity in such a way as to create a kind of rhetoric behind one’s place in a new homeland. Aw is additionally invested in rooting out what is forgotten, what one wants to erase and to figure out why certain bonds become slack or covered over. In this sense, Aw makes clear that his creative inspirations as a writer and editor appear in seeing how relationships are determined only to be later made unstable by a contextual force or power. For instance, toward the concluding arc of his piece for “The Face” series, he makes apparent the ways in which capitalism and upward mobility inevitably fracture students who have been growing up together in a specific school system. Some students eventually achieve incredible success, while other struggle to find their footing as adults. Ultimately, their lives as adults seem a far cry from the communal identity that they once felicitously shared. Aw does link the everyman quality of his face to the fact of his ascension: the chameleonic nature of his countenance alongside his upper middle class upbringing provide him with a measure of mobility that many of his former students cannot claim. Even then, he makes apparent that fluidity has its limits. The writing in this piece makes me wish Aw would publish a creative nonfictional work, since he has thus far focused on fiction. I especially adored Aw’s Map of the Invisible World and hope he has much more in store for us soon.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/the-face-aw

A Review of Ruth Ozeki’s A Time Code (Restless Books, Print Edition, 2016)



I’ve been enjoying “The Face” series that has been put out by Restless Books. The second book I read in this series is Ruth Ozeki’s A Time Code. As most already know, Ozeki is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels (such as My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, and A Tale for the Time Being). She dives into the creative nonfictional genre with this particular work. I previously completed Tash Aw’s version Stranger on a Pier, which explored the complications of the diasporic subject hailing from Southeast Asia. His approach to the work was more or less a narratively driven memoir with a kind of philosophical flair. Ozeki’s version of “The Face” has a generalized structure based upon a Zen Buddhist koan that involves staring at one’s own face for three straight hours and detailing what thoughts come up. As A Time Code moves forward, she notes these various musings around the hour and minute they appear. In between these temporal markings—the titular time codes—Ozeki occasionally provides us with memoir-ish anecdotes involving her life and her face. One of the most compelling through-lines is not surprisingly the problematics of a mixed race upbringing, which necessarily revolve around the question of phenotype and the issues that arise when one’s face does not necessarily evoke a single or definitive ancestry. It was also fascinating to hear about her life growing up as the child of an ivy league professor and how she negotiated her upbringing as the daughter of parents who had married late. The other big reveal that I hadn’t known (and perhaps I should be faulted for this lack of knowledge) was that Ozeki is a pen name taken in part because she was honoring a request made by her late father concerning some issues related to publishing and family privacy. Finally, Ozeki squarely considers the thorny politics around aging and questions of beauty. Here, Ozeki ponders the kinds of decisions that go into things like plastic surgery and an author’s publicity photo. As always, Ozeki injects humor into her prose, a characteristic of all of her earlier publications, making this reading experience undoubtedly captivating.

To end, I wanted to note that “The Face” series has a third installment penned by Chris Abani. Given the succinct and provocative versions offered by both Tash Aw and Ruth Ozeki, you might as well pick up the final one and hope for many more.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/the-face-ozeki


Other titles of interest (and perhaps to be reviewed here at a later time):

Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Between Clay and Dust



http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/between-clay-and-dust

Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Story of a Widow (currently only available in an e-edition)



http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/the-story-of-a-widow

Githa Hariharan’s Almost Home



http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/almost-home

Santha Rama Rau’s Gifts of Passage (currently only available in an e-edition)



http://www.restlessbooks.com/bookstore/gifts-of-passage


*****

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

AALF is maintained by a number of professional academics and scholars, including Paul Lai (pylduck@gmail.com), who is the social media liaison and expert. Current, active as well previous reviewers have included (but are not necessarily limited to):

Sue J. Kim, Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Jennifer Ann Ho, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Betsy Huang, Associate Professor, Clark University
Nadeen Kharputly, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego
Annabeth Leow, Coterminal MA Student, Stanford University

Asian American Literature Fans can also be found on other social networking sites such as:

Goodreads (with a bad heading because it is not Stephen Hong Sohn’s blog):

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1612536.Stephen_Hong_Sohn/blog

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/asianamlitfans?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

LibraryThing:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/asianamlitfans

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Asian-American-Literature-Fans-147257025397976/

Asian American Literature Fans – Small Press Spotlight: Chin Music Press

Asian American Literature Fans – Small Press Spotlight: Chin Music Press

This spotlight contains reviews of: Leslie Helm’s Yokohama Yankee, Todd and LJC Shimoda’s Why Ghosts Appear, and Todd and LJC Shimoda’s Subduction.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. As part of my acknowledgement of this month, I am attempting to amass 31 reviews, so my rate would come out on average to a review a day in the month of May. We’ll see if I’m able to complete this challenge, but as part of this initiative, I’m hoping that my efforts might be matched in some way by you: so if you’re a reader and lurker of AALF, I am encouraging you to make your own post or respond to one of the reviews. Would it be too much to ask for 31 comments and/or posts by readers and others? Probably, but the gauntlet has been thrown. LJ is open access, so you can create your own profile or you can post anonymously. I kindly encourage you to comment just to acknowledge your participation in AALF’s readership.

For more on APA Heritage Month, go here:

http://asianpacificheritage.gov/

To start things off, I’m going to be conducting something I used to call a Small Press Spotlight. I aim to review a couple of offerings at an independent and/or small press in the hopes that we all consider the importance of occasionally expanding our readings beyond the big publishing houses (Random House, Penguin, Simon & Schuster etc.).  I begin with Chin Music Press!

The catalogue for Chin Music Press and website can be found here:



http://chinmusicpress.com/

For the uninitiated, Chin Music Press is probably best known for publishing the novels of Todd Shimoda and L.J.C. Shimoda. In our small press spotlight, we will cover two of Shimodas’ novels and Leslie Helm’s memoir Yokohama Yankee. The press itself would be of interest for readers of AALF because many of their publications have a focus on Asian cultural contexts, especially Japan. Consider supporting innovative small presses through course adoptions and individual book purchases.

Without further ado, some reviews:

A Review of Todd Shimoda’s Why Ghosts Appear (Chin Music Press, 2015)



So, I’ve been a little bit behind on Chin Music Press’s wonderful offerings, so I figured I’d do some catching up. I started off with Todd Shimoda’s latest novel Why Ghosts Appear (I still have to catch up on his earlier work Subduction). As with Oh!, Why Ghosts Appear is a mystery; our protagonist and narrator is an investigator. He is looking into the request made by a fortuneteller (Mizuno Rie) about her missing son (Mizuno Ren). But from here the plot thickens precipitously as Shimoda gleefully piles on strange coincidences and mysteries throughout the narrative. First off, there is a camera store owner (Obushi) that may or may not have a connection to Mizuno Ren, who is an artist. Obushi later disappears under enigmatic and perhaps deadly circumstances. A seductive woman (with a penchant for drinking beer) named Teruyo also happens to be hanging out over at Mizuno Ren’s place for no apparent reason other than to watch over Ren’s residence, even though it seems that she may have ulterior motives (here Shimoda is obviously working in the femme fatale trope). Then, there’s the strange Kuchi Clan, a group of fortunetellers that Mizuno Rie was connected to, but has since broken off from. Finally, there is an art director whose company had hired Mizuno Ren to complete some drawings for them. Somehow, the president of that company seems to be connected to all the strange goings-on. Along the way, the narrator enlists the help of a fraud clerk, who becomes a sort of sidekick. It becomes evident that Obushi and Mizuno Ren were connected in their work, but the narrator often becomes sidetracked because of another mystery that emerges. 20 years ago, the investigator was involved in a case in which a woman’s husband disappeared. The investigator was never able to solve that case, and it is intimated that the investigator was involved in some sort of affair with that woman. Flash forward 20 years later (to the present of this story) and the investigator discovers that the woman has been in an accident, a hit and run, and she’s in a coma. The investigator can’t help but want to figure out what happened and tries to look into the circumstances involving the accident. The title, Why Ghosts Appear, comes from a book that appears in the novel, which is a sort of typology of spirits, the most important being the obake and the yurei. As the investigator continues his search for clues and leads, it becomes evident that there is a spirit force at work. The novel gets increasingly murky, as the investigator wonders who is a spirit and who is not (this kind of plotting reminded me very much of Alvin Lu’s woefully understudied The Hell Screens). There are times that I felt the novel suffered from some momentum issues, as Shimoda grapples with an investigator whose perception of the world around him is constantly in question and thus, we too are seriously confused, but the conclusion becomes far more forceful, as the novel moves from Japan all the way to Mexico. This transnational current is necessitated by the fact of Obushi and Mizuno Ren’s connection, as the investigator is able to pin down that the two worked together on a catalog of sorts documenting the butterflies in the area. While in Mexico, the two had taken on side projects, some of which involved the growing sex industry in the area; their representations of the dispossessed women forced into prostitution serves as the first real thread that the investigator can follow. Shimoda’s plot sometimes leaves too much to coincidence but the final arc proves to be a compelling and fitting one for a novel so comfortable with straddling the boundary between the spiritual and physical worlds. Further still, Shimoda makes intriguing parallels by twining together the national cultural festivities that revolve around death and dying: in this case, Dia de Los Muertos becomes the vehicle to resituate the obake and the yurei. Perhaps, the most crucial quality to punctuate is the high aesthetic production values of this book, which follow the Shimodas’ previous collaborative efforts. The novel includes high quality color images (designed, drawn etc by LJC Shimoda) that are supposed to be excerpts perhaps from Mizuno Ren’s sketchbook; these add an element of intrigue and visual texture to the plot. Certainly, this book stands alongside Oh! in terms of its genre impulses, and I do hope that this work sees adoption in many courses, such as our standard Asian American literature classes as well as mystery / detective/ noir novels. In terms of the “coffee table” quality of this book, there is something to be said about a course that might explore these types of multigenre books, thus perhaps putting together something like Dao Strom’s We Were Meant to be a Gentle People, Janice Lee’s Daughter, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Anime Wong, and Shimodas’ Why Ghosts Appear (or any of the Shimoda collaborations).

For more in the Chin Music Press catalogue:

http://chinmusicpress.com/

Buy the Book Here:

http://store.chinmusicpress.com/product/why-ghosts-appear

A Review of Todd Shimoda’s Subduction (Chin Music Press, 2012).



So, I read Why Ghosts Appear before I finished Subduction, so I went backwards in terms of the publication chronology. We’ll let Publishers Weekly handle the summary duties this time around (this excerpt was snagged from B&N): “In Shimoda's eerie thriller (after Oh! A Mystery of Mono No Aware), a young Japanese doctor, Endo, is banished to Marui-jima, ‘a dust mote of an island,’ after he takes the blame for a patient's death. Although the government ordered the island's evacuation after a decade-long ‘earthquake swarm,’ its elderly inhabitants refuse to leave their home. On Marui-jima, Endo meets Aki, a seismologist who left his family in Tokyo to study the island's earthquakes and subduction zones, and Mari, a beautiful documentary filmmaker ‘dealing with demons.’ From Mari and Aki, Endo uncovers Marui-jima's past: a history of resentment between the local fishermen and the wealthy Furuta who bought them out to form his powerful fleet, an illicit ‘exchange’ between Furuta and a fisherman's wife, and two deaths that remain unexplained 40 years later. As Endo and Mari grow closer, she shares with him the islanders' stories—as well as Aki's and her own. Shimoda skillfully weaves these tales into the narrative, revealing how past events ‘continue to affect the island, like aftershocks.’ Earthquakes are an apt metaphor for the social disruptions on the island, and Shimoda links modern earthquake science, ancient Japanese myths on the origin of earthquakes, and an unforgettable cast of characters to create a suspenseful, richly illustrated novel.” This synopsis is pretty damn great: the main event is really the love triangle that emerges between Jun Endo, the disgraced doctor, Aki, the seismologist, and Mari, the documentarian. As is the case with Shimoda’s novel, he twines his interest in philosophy with genre fiction. Here, subduction and earthquake production really do act as the “apt metaphor” for the rumblings of the Marui-jima community, so we know that we’re eventually in for a rough tumbler. In terms of plotting, even Endo is targeted, as he is pushed off a pier and forced to swim back to land. The unexplained death of Aki late into the novel—and I suppose I should have provided an earlier spoiler warning—kicks the novel into high gear for its concluding arc. Endo must figure out how Aki died, and then begins to piece together Aki’s data in order to figure out what was going on. The illustrations by L.J.C Shimoda are exquisite as they always are, but have less to do with the narrative this time around than in the other two novels that came out from Chin Music Press. Nevertheless, they are always welcome additions and consistently make the reading experience that much more pleasurable and fun. This novel also happens to be the most ethnographic of Shimoda’s work (that I’ve read) because he uses the documentarian as a way to detail the lives of the Marui-jima islanders. Shimoda’s choice to shift narrative styles using font color variation was questionable though, as the lighter printing ends up being a little bit tough on the eyes. I wondered whether or not it would have been more compelling to leave those sections in what might be called the “diegetic” present and narrated through direct dialogue (offered by Mari). The analeptic sequences are always quite rich, especially as we get to know all the characters from stories in their murky pasts. Of course, Shimoda leaves the best flashbacks for the end, and we suddenly know why the cast of characters have been assembled in such a remote island which is destined to crumble into the turbulent Pacific Waters.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/subduction-todd-shimoda/1106249546#productInfoTabs

A Review of Leslie Helm’s Yokohama Yankee (Chin Music Press, 2013).


So I currently am in touch with a graduate student who is working on multiracial literatures, and I was immediately in that zone when I started reading Leslie Helm’s wonderful memoir Yokohama Yankee. We’ll let the official description over at Chin Music Press do some of the basic work for us: “Leslie Helm’s decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family’s 140 years in Japan, beginning with his German great grandfather, who worked as a military adviser in 1870 and defied custom to marry his Japanese mistress. The family’s poignant experiences of love and war help Helm learn to embrace his Japanese and American heritage. Yokohama Yankee is the first book to look at Japan across five generations with perspective that is both from the inside and through foreign eyes. Helm draws on his great grandfather’s unpublished memoir and a wealth of primary source material to bring his family history to life. Leslie Helm was born and raised in Yokohama, Japan, where his family has lived since 1869. Leslie graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in Asian studies. He attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on a U.S. Japan Friendship Commission fellowship. He has worked as Tokyo correspondent for Business Week and the Los Angeles Times. Helm is currently editor of Seattle Business magazine.” The memoir opens with a basic sense of Helm’s ambivalence to his biracial identity, especially in light of his status as someone who is always pegged to be a gaijin. Though he’s fluent in the language, his mixed ancestry does not always register with the other Japanese individuals he meets. As a journalist who has lived in Japan for many years, Helm finds this outsider-ness to be a key feature of a kind of insularity which has remained part of the culture for centuries (even with the infamous Commodore Perry event). As the memoir moves on, Helm takes the time to explain the form of this work: he’s researching into his family’s past, starting with his great grandfather and then moving to the lives of other key descendants. Obviously painstakingly researched, Helm’s memoir can’t cover everything. It’s always interesting to read Helm’s conditional word usage: “perhaps” a particular figure “thought” something or “maybe” this family member was feeling this “thing.” In other words, part of Helm’s memoir must in some sense be speculative, and this kind of acknowledgment makes Yokohama Yankee all the more compelling precisely because it reveals both the productivity and the limits of ancestral excavations. But, overpowering this quest for the past is Helm’s very complicated present: the construction of his own mixed family is absolutely riveting and is interspersed with these familial forays into the past. I felt sometimes impatient to find out how Helm and his wife was dealing with raising adopted children. The substance of these challenges only become most clear in the final pages, revealing the possibility that Helm may yet have to write at least one more memoir. Helm is painfully aware of his limits as an adoptive father: a claim made explicit when he divulges the insecurity apparent within him when his daughter Mari admits that she wants to find her birth mother. Helm’s response is certainly insensitive, and he tells us as much in the messy aftermath. But, Helm’s attraction to adoption as a route of creating another kinship is perhaps not surprising given the many challenges his own family has faced over a century because of its hybrid constitution. Perhaps, then, Helm’s move to adopt two children was a natural extension of the kind of belonging he has always understood: to embrace parts of himself and others that seem different, and in doing so come to a greater understanding of what home, community, and identity can mean. The production values of this memoir are naturally first rate. Again, I have to applaud Chin Music Press for its attention to these kinds of elements; it makes the reading experience so rich. Maps, color photographs and drawings are plastered throughout the pages giving the memoir an occasional scrapbook-ish feel. An epic, introspective memoir, certainly another to be considered for critical consideration and course adoptions, and reminiscent of the kind of arc of Dao Strom’s recently reviewed We Were Meant to be a Gentle People.


Buy the Book Here:

http://store.chinmusicpress.com/product/new-orleans-bicycles

Other books of interest from Chin Music Press for blog readers:
Todd Shimoda’s Oh!



For more on Shimodas’ collaborative efforts:

http://www.shimodaworks.com/

Jay Rubin’s The Sun Gods



http://store.chinmusicpress.com/product/the-sun-gods

***

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for April 7, 2016

Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for April 7, 2016 (with a focus on South Asian American/ Anglophone Writers and Publications)

AALF uses “maximal ideological inclusiveness” to define Asian American literature. Thus, we review any writers working in the English language of Asian descent. We also review titles related to Asian American contexts without regard to authorial descent. We also consider titles in translation pending their relationship to America, broadly defined. Our point is precisely to cast the widest net possible.

With apologies as always for any typographical, grammatical, or factual errors. My intent in these reviews is to illuminate the wide-ranging and expansive terrain of Asian American and Asian Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.


In this post, reviews of N.H. Senzai’s Ticket to India (Simon & Schuster / Paula Wiseman, 2016); Vaseem Khan’s The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (Redhook 2015); Nayomi Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us (St. Martin’s Press, 2016); Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s The Golden Son (William Morrow, 2016); Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Language of Secrets (St. Martin’s Minotaur 2016); Rajan Khanna’s Rising Tide (Pyr, 2015); Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss, and What We Ate (HarperCollins, 2016); and Shobha Rao’s An Unrestored Woman (Flatiron Books, 2016).

A Review of N.H. Senzai’s Ticket to India (Simon & Schuster / Paula Wiseman, 2016).



N.H. Senzai’s Ticket to India is her third novelistic outing (after Saving Kabul Corner and Shooting Kabul) and explores a young girl’s adventures as she attempts to complete a quest bequeathed to her by her maternal grandmother. As per usual, we’ll let B&N provide us with the plot summary: “A trip to India turns into a grand adventure in this contemporary novel about the Great Partition, from the award-winning author of Saving Kabul Corner and Shooting Kabul. A map, two train tickets, and a mission. These are things twelve-year-old Maya and her big sister Zara have when they set off on their own from Delhi to their grandmother’s childhood home of Aminpur, a small town in Northern India. Their goal is to find a chest of family treasures that their grandmother’s family left behind when they fled from India to Pakistan during the Great Partition. But soon the sisters become separated, and Maya is alone. Determined to find her grandmother’s lost chest, she continues her trip, on the way enlisting help from an orphan by named Jai. Maya’s grand adventure through India is as thrilling as it is warm: a journey through her family’s history becomes a real coming-of-age quest.” What the plot summary doesn’t tell us though is the tragic beginning of the novel that requires Maya’s family to travel to Karachi: Maya’s grandfather has died. During this period, Maya discovers that Naniamma (her grandmother) has a secret. Naniamma is going to travel to India even though Maya’s mother and aunts have told Naniamma there is no time to do so. Naniamma had originally planned to travel to India with her now late husband in order to complete a quest involving lost family treasures. Maya and her older sister Zara eventually force Naniamma to allow them to accompany her to India unbeknownst to the rest of the family. During this period Naniamma tells them the story of her tragic upbringing, which involved her being one of three survivors of a train massacre during the Partition of India in 1947. Naniamma is able to make her way to Pakistan but obviously at great cost. Though her entire family is killed, she recalls that she and her family buried a chest of family heirlooms before they left their home. Using a memory map, Naniamma believes she can retrieve this chest, find a special set of rings that she was meant to share with her husband, and provide her granddaughters with a sense of lineage they never knew. Senzai tackles quite a lot of history and plot exposition in this novel, which makes this novel a tremendous addition to the middle grade canon, but also opens up thorny questions which may prove to be difficult to engage in an instructional setting. For instance, a large part of the plot involves Maya navigating the underworld of India, particularly its slum cultures, and even working with an orphan in order to complete the quest. Though Maya is able to make good on a promise to help this orphan find his sister and advocate for the lives of some of the other urban dispossessed, the story points to the limits of fiction to enact large scale social change especially in light of a domestic-centered quest plot. Thus, the resolution of the plot, focused so much on Naniamma’s quest, ends up being subverted by larger social issues that cannot be solved by Maya’s tenacious spirit. The lessons that the novel teaches us seem far grander and perhaps far more ambivalent than what is depicted on the page. To be sure, Maya and her sister encounter the complicated historical tapestry of India and Pakistan and even come to see that their own lineages cannot be divorced from colonial violence, but their journeys keep us wondering about sustainable interventions for the social inequalities that remain. Another solid outing by Senzai, who already has another publication in the works!

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ticket-to-india-n-h-senzai/1121737850

A Review of Vaseem Khan’s The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (Redhook 2015).


I’ve been behind on my detective fiction reading for one reason or another, and I forgot how much I absolutely love this genre until I dived into Vaseem Khan’s The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (part of the Baby Ganesha Agency Investigation Series, with the second title due out this year). As per usual, I let B&N take over plot summary duties here: “On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought. And he soon learns that when the going gets tough, a determined elephant may be exactly what an honest man needs.” The drowned boy is none other than a young adult named Santosh, who hails from a lower middle class background. As Chopra begins investigating on his own (and against the wishes of his former superior), he discovers that Santosh might have been mixed up in some sort of issue involving business magnates, bribery, and of course, underworld thugs. Chopra’s unexpected inheritance is the titular the baby elephant, which comes from an uncle. Chopra must consider where to house the baby elephant until it can be claimed by a reputable animal sanctuary. In the meantime, he looks into why the elephant seems so depressed: it refuses to eat and barely musters up the energy to move around. The other major plot is related to Chopra’s wife Poppy, who still pines after a child, though she and Chopra had discovered that she would be unable to conceive due to some biological conditions. Fast forward to the present: Poppy finds out that her cousin’s teenage daughter is pregnant, and that the father has conveniently left town. Poppy devises a scheme in which she would take the child, feigning her own pregnancy, while simultaneously then saving her cousin’s family from almost certain social disgrace. Her plan of course entirely leaves Inspector Chopra in the dark. Khan’s got an especially winning formula in this first outing for Inspector Chopra: a scheming wife, a depressed baby elephant, and a mystery that only ever gets more complicated the deeper the investigation goes. There are a couple of moments toward the conclusion (sudden appearances out of nowhere, random coincidences that lead to breaks in the case) that do stretch the limits of credulity, but you can tell Khan is having some fun by making this narrative a little bit more comic and madcap than it would at first seem. Sign me up for the sequel!


Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-unexpected-inheritance-of-inspector-chopra-vaseem-khan/1121140668


A Review of Nayomi Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us (St. Martin’s Press, 2016).



This novel was on my highly anticipated reads for 2016 because the writer’s first publication, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, was one that broke into my trauma theory course in relation to Asian American Fiction (a hard thing to do at this point because I’ve pretty much been happy with the configuration and selection of books I’ve included). In Nayomi Munaweera’s What Lies Between Us, our protagonist and narrator is a Sinhalese immigrant woman. The novel starts out in a sort of frame narrative—as a note, I’ve been seeing this technique A LOT this year in consecutive readings—in which we discover that the narrator is in jail for a seemingly lurid crime, the details of which are not at first revealed. We know it’s pretty bad though because the prologue tells us a short anecdote of an animal that is willing to kill her own child and then kill herself so that they could avoid the fates of being kept alive and repeatedly abused as laboratory specimens. Uh oh! In any case, once the frame narrative is set, the novel moves back into the past; the narrator provides the details of her upbringing in Sri Lanka, how it comes to an inauspicious close, as her father dies in a suspicious drowning. There is also a murky subplot involving one of the servants, a boy just a handful of years older than the narrator, and who may have ended up sexually assaulting her over the course of many years. It is unclear to me (and perhaps someone else can chime on this detail) whether or not Samson may have somehow been involved in the father’s death. The narrator is brought up in a fragile family: her father, who was a part of the landed gentry, ended up marrying a woman who was beneath him; it was a love marriage and that kind of controversy colors everything else. Once the father dies, the mother and child have few options. The mother’s sister already resides in America, and she convinces the narrator and her mother to travel to the United States for a fresh start. Once in the United States, we get a more traditional immigrant narrative, an aspect that Munaweera covered to some degree in the first half of Island of a Thousand Mirrors (and that novel is referenced in this one at one point!). The narrator is growing up and wants to be anything other than Sri Lankan; this section is white melancholia at its best. Once the novel moves into the latter half, the questions surrounding the narrator’s upbringing begin to complicate her life, especially as she engages a lengthy romantic relationship with a talented painter (who also happens to be white). Their courtship period is quite idyllic, and they eventually get married, but once the narrator becomes pregnant, the rocky road to the novel’s conclusion begins. At first, the painter isn’t so keen on the idea of being a father, but later relents. Then, the narrator begins to notice that she’s not so into being a mother and that she can be a little bit absentminded when it comes to their daughter Bodhi. This development creates more strain in the marital union, and the narrator’s husband leaves and takes Bodhi with him. The final portion seems to suggest the possibility of a reconciliation, but the trauma of the narrator’s childhood emerges in full force, hurtling us toward the novel’s catastrophic denoument. While I do not find this novel as emotionally impactful as Munaweera’s debut, What Lies Between Us does provide another layer to the author’s larger project of considering the place of women in the Sri Lankan diaspora. The narrator and her mother are products of a patriarchal culture in which their agency bears down on their choices is limited. Though not necessarily as strong as her debut (at least in my humble opinion), Munaweera is able to tap into the poetic elegance of the narrator’s keen eyes for observation, and there are certainly many rich, rich passages that make this reading experience a multitextured one.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-lies-between-us-nayomi-munaweera/1121862014

A Review of Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s The Golden Son (William Morrow, 2016).



Shilpi Somaya Gowda moves out of the first novelist’s club with The Golden Son (which follows the bestselling work Secret Daughter, which was earlier reviewed on Asian American Literature Fans). Secret Daughter was “utterly readable,” a phrase I use to praise the writer who knows how to use hook after hook to keep her audience moving on from one page to the next. Gowda uses some similar techniques in this novel to generate narrative momentum. In particular, she shifts perspective between two characters: Anil Patel, the titular golden son, and Leena, who hails from a more lower middle class background. Anil and Leena seem to have had a fledgling romance blooming in their teens, but this brief courtship never comes to fruition, as their paths soon diverge. Anil comes from a landowning farming family. Though Anil is obviously upper middle class due to property ownership, he does lack some cultural capital, at least with respect to cosmopolitan sensibilities, so when he begins his ascendancy from farmer to medical doctor, you can expect some turbulence. Eventually Anil transcends his country “bumpkin” background and receives a prestigious medical residency in the United States. He is slated to work in Parkview, a hospital in an impoverished community in Dallas. The shift to the United States is clearly jarring for Anil, as he grapples with cultural assimilation, workplace politics, interracial romance, and homesickness (especially exacerbated after his father dies). Eventually, the pull of his family requires him to come back at various points, especially because, as the eldest son of this landowning family, Anil is expected to arbitrate over the sharecroppers and tenant farmers who till the family’s land. Leena’s story is far more tragic: she eventually is married off to a boorish man (Girish) who sexually assaults her whenever he wants. Girish’s family is similarly domineering. As the youngest wife in the household, Leena is subjected to physical and emotional abuse, while also being isolated from her birth family. Unbeknownst to Leena, Girish’s family is shaking down her mother and father for more money and more family heirlooms, blackmailing them in a cultural sense for their feeling that Leena is a terrible wife. Leena eventually flees that family due to a harrowing sequence in which Girish attempts to set her on fire. Leena obviously cannot return to Girish, but this situation still leaves her own parents in disgrace (due to cultural expectations that she should be in some sense owned by that family, even despite the peril to her life). Leena’s father succumbs to the depression brought about by these circumstances, but Leena and her mother attempt to forge some sort of life without a man at the head of the household. Leena’s spirit of survival leads her to the pottery wheel, and she uses her artistic talents to produce various commodities and items that can be sold at the market. Thus, she provides her mother and herself a way to earn a stable wage. Gowda patiently plots out of her novel, so that we eventually see how the two seemingly disparate narrative strands will meet. On one of Anil’s journeys back home, he calls in on Leena, after hearing about her many tragedies. Eventually, he encourages Leena to help him out with a sort of makeshift medical clinic, which employs some of her throwaway pottery items to hold some of the necessary equipment. Readers will obviously see the romance plot being telegraphed, but the individual stories are compelling enough on their own that the eventual unity in the plots does not necessarily seem forced and certainly all the more rewarding given the challenges each character faces. At the same time, the social texture of this particular story leads us to see the particularly fragile place of Indian women, especially in rural contexts, in which traditional cultural values leave her body and life to be especially endangered by male patriarchy. While Gowda’s narrative provides Leena with a measure of agency through the development of her artistic talents (which fortunately can be re-routed through the production of commodities), the romance plot is itself then expected to bear the burden of the Indian woman’s upwardly mobile path, a particularly conservative concluding arc that has darker resonances given the earlier issues portrayed in the novel. Gowda does leave some late stage shifts in the romance plot to complicate matters, but the rapidity of pace here throws off an otherwise elegantly choreographed developmental arc. Gowda’s story is, like the one at the center of her first publication, immensely readable, and it took great effort to force myself to finish The Golden Son off another time, because the hour was late. I have no doubts that this work, much like Janice Y.K. Lee’s recently read The Expatriates, will find fervent embrace by a broad readership.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.harpercollins.com/9780062391452/the-golden-son

A Review of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Language of Secrets (St. Martin’s Minotaur 2016).



So, Ausma Zehanat Khan’s first novel The Unquiet Dead set my expectations very high for the sequel. This detective series follows the investigations of Esa Khattak and his partner, Rachel Getty. We’ll let the folks over at B&N do some of the plot summary for us: “Detective Esa Khattak heads up Canada's Community Policing Section, which handles minority-sensitive cases across all levels of law enforcement. Khattak is still under scrutiny for his last case, so he's surprised when INSET, Canada's national security team, calls him in on another politically sensitive issue. For months, INSET has been investigating a local terrorist cell which is planning an attack on New Year's Day. INSET had an informant, Mohsin Dar, undercover inside the cell. But now, just weeks before the attack, Mohsin has been murdered at the group's training camp deep in the woods. INSET wants Khattak to give the appearance of investigating Mohsin's death, and then to bury the lead. They can't risk exposing their operation, or Mohsin's role in it. But Khattak used to know Mohsin, and he knows he can't just let this murder slide. So Khattak sends his partner, Detective Rachel Getty, undercover into the unsuspecting mosque which houses the terrorist cell. As Rachel tentatively reaches out into the unfamiliar world of Islam, and begins developing relationships with the people of the mosque and the terrorist cell within it, the potential reasons for Mohsin's murder only seem to multiply, from the political and ideological to the intensely personal.” The plot was one of the toughest aspects of this work, as Khan wants us to come into a fictional world in which the investigator’s investigation is not meant to investigate fully the central mystery. That duty is left to another governmental organization. Of course, Khan understands that we still need a plot, so we’re excited when Khattak goes a little bit rogue and wants to get at the bottom of Mohsin Dar’s murder. That process is of course extremely intricate because he cannot ask certain types of questions to the individuals who may or may not have been involved. Khan adds another wrinkle into the detective fiction equation when it becomes apparent that the main suspect is none other than the fiancé of his younger sister Ruksh. This information gets Esa’s hackles up, as he wonders whether or not there is a larger set up occurring in which his family and his own reputation will all be muddied by their connection to the terrorist cell and its charismatic leader Hassan Ashkouri. Getty’s own subplot is probably the most thrilling of the novel, as her undercover work generates much of the tension and anxiety that you would want when reading a detective fiction. We never know how successful her charade is, and there are people aware of her masquerade that can expose her. Further still, it becomes apparent as the investigation goes on that both Khattak and Getty have far less information than they should, and that paucity of knowledge is endangering their lives. The conclusion is certainly the high point of Khan’s work, as the bloody denoument makes for a very interesting set-up between Getty and Khattak for what I hope will be a third installment that we will soon see. Khan’s second novel is certainly a strong follow-up, and she no doubt avoids the sophomore slump, but the impact and the scope of this work may be said to pale in comparison to the debut. Part of this difference I think is attributable to the historical texture of the prior work, as Khan employed multiple third person perspectives to generate more interiority to characters who would later go on to be pivotal to solving the central mystery. For the most part, in the second novel, we’re limited to Khattak and Getty’s mindsets, and the central villains seem less rounded out than the ones that predominated in the first. Nevertheless, detective fiction plans will have much to sink their teeth into, especially with the dynamic interplay between the principle characters.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-language-of-secrets-ausma-zehanat-khan/1121780596


A Review of Rajan Khanna’s Rising Tide (Pyr, 2015).


Well, for some reason, I wasn’t sure that Rajan Khanna’s Falling Skies would end up having a sequel, but here it is! The first installment didn’t come off as a YA novel, so I immediately just figured that it would be a stand-alone rather than the requisite trilogy that has become the lingua franca of the genre, even though the ending left so many things open-ended. In any case, in this follow-up, and here is my spoiler warning, our (anti)hero Ben returns, but he’s obviously a little bit more battered and bruised. The opening sees Ben essentially a prisoner on a ship that’s taking on too much water, his romantic foil Miranda nowhere to be found. The ship is commanded by one of Ben’s old allies Mal. Mal has become embittered because on a foraging missions many years ago, Ben left Mal behind for dead. Thus, the novel’s opening sees Ben in a very bad situation: he’s trapped on a sinking ship, and Miranda is likely also being held hostage somewhere else on the ship. So, Ben basically strikes a deal with Mal to find him some water pumps, so that the ship won’t sink; this quest would then potentially allow Ben to leave the ship with Miranda. As loyal readers will recall, Miranda is the intrepid scientist from the first book, who is still seeking a cure for the plague that has wiped out most of the human population and turned them into Ferals. The vocabulary that grounded the first novel is still obviously in play here: the two primary eras are the Clean, the time before the plague, and the Sick, the time after the plague. Those who are infected through blood contact eventually Fade, and then turn into a Feral. Khanna adds some texture to this novel by interspersing the primary first person narrative perspective from Ben’s point of view with Miranda’s journal excerpts. Khanna’s strength is in the pacing: there’s always some sort of issue to resolve, some challenge to overcome, so we’re moving on briskly. The asides concerning the romance plot can seem sometimes a little bit too forced, but I suppose that’s part of the challenge in this genre, which sometimes must balance action with courtship. Where’s the time for a little bit of love when bloodthirsty zombie-like creatures are everywhere and the humans that are left seem just as craven? Apparently, there’s always enough time. A similar issue came up in Susan Ee’s World After series, but I suppose we should applaud those who are making time to find romance in a world gone basically to the zombies. Maybe, I’m just a super jaded reader! HAHA! But I digress: the last half of the book kicks things into high gear, as Miranda and Ben are able to escape from Mal’s ship; they eventually discover that Miranda’s former science friends are still alive, so they go back to an old encampment (with a name I can’t spell to save my life right now) to get some supplies, some help, and the airships that will be required to make the rescue mission go as smoothly as possible. This mission goes surprisingly well, and they are able to rescue some of Miranda’s old comrades, while adding some new potential allies to the mix, but Khanna has some plotting tricks up his sleeve that make the last 50 or so pages excruciatingly depressing. It was so depressing in fact that I’m not sure how well I will recover in case there’s another installment or two to be added. The zombie plague genre can get pretty stale quickly, so Khanna’s full commitment to engaging this form is well worth the price of reading admission: there’s enough to mischief and mayhem to please the devoted speculative fiction reader. It’s also of course interesting to discuss elements such as race, ethnicity, and social difference in speculative fiction because those elements still remain in play in some ways; much revolves around access to resources, which creates a new class structures and forms of social oppression that determine how we align ourselves as readers amongst this new playing field of heroes and villains.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rising-tide-rajan-khanna/1121228440

A Review of Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss, and What We Ate (HarperCollins, 2016)


Ah, the burn out factor! The good news is when you can’t work on an article, can’t get enough inspiration for writing a grant proposal, you can always read something a little bit more lighthearted and uplifting. I chose Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss, and What We Ate, which was absolutely the right choice. For a description, we’ll let B&N take it away: “Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India. Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external. Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.” So, the editorial description here makes the memoir something perhaps a little bit more far-reaching and “extraordinary” than I would call it, but those interested in literary things will be intrigued for the simple fact that Lakshmi was once married to Salman Rushdie. The chapters devoted to that marriage are mostly taken up in the first arc of the book, and there’s not much of a tell-all aspect, but the random tidbits were certainly of note. For instance, Lakshmi would routinely hold dinner parties that would have people attending such as Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and Susan Sontag. Otherwise, the memoir has some definite strength: there’s a really wonderful exploration of physical beauty, especially from the perspective of someone darker skinned in the modeling industry and someone who had to face the prospect of climbing that career ladder with a scar that she at first considered a physical deformity. Indeed, Lakshmi would be in a serious car accident at a young age that would leave a large scar on her arm. The latter half of the book details much of Lakshmi’s complicated high-risk pregnancy due to her late diagnosis of endometriosis. Further still, the paternity of the child is put into question, as Lakshmi is dating two men around the time. Of course, billed as a food memoir, there are recipes appropriately peppered throughout the book, and it’s clear that Lakshmi’s relationship with food is one of her more intimate and important ones, but where this memoir soars most is Lakshmi’s self-conscious understanding of her romances. She’s especially keen on figuring out why she is drawn to certain men, and what she finds so compelling about even the most unexpected attractions. Certainly, this book is required reading for the fan of the genre of the food memoir.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-loss-and-what-we-ate-padma-lakshmi/1122135615



A Review of Shobha Rao’s An Unrestored Woman (Flatirons Books, 2016).



Well, this collection took me entirely by welcome surprise. First of all, I thought this work was a novel, simply because there was no word “stories” attached to the title. I suppose it would be more apt to be called a “story cycle,” because the work is influenced by the historical event of partition and its reverberations across time, especially in its effects upon the lives of women. As is so often the case, we let B&N complete some of the book description for us: “1947: the Indian subcontinent is partitioned into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. And with one decree, countless lives are changed forever. An Unrestored Woman explores the fault lines in this mass displacement of humanity: a new mother is trapped on the wrong side of the border; a soldier finds the love of his life but is powerless to act on it; an ambitious servant seduces both master and mistress; a young prostitute quietly, inexorably plots revenge on the madam who holds her hostage. Caught in a world of shifting borders, Rao’s characters have reached their tipping points. In paired stories that hail from India and Pakistan to the United States, Italy, and England, we witness the ramifications of the violent uprooting of families, the price they pay over generations, and the uncanny relevance these stories have in our world today.” The best stories I found to appear up in the front of the collection, so I’ll concentrate on those, especially in the ingenious ways that Rao make full use of the story cycle form. In the title story, a woman finds out her husband has died during Partition and is forced to go to a camp for the “unrestored,” a term used to describe women who need to be repatriated to another country in the wake of Partition due to their religious backgrounds which place them in a geographical location hostile to their faith. While in that camp, this woman engages in a homoerotic relationship with another widow, but this connection is terminated when the woman discovers that her husband is actually alive. The second story, “The Merchant’s Mistress” follows the adventures of Renu, who was the other widow in the first story, and her new life as a maidservant of a rich couple. She becomes the mistress of both the husband and the wife, and later, deciding that she must continue to have at least one of these lovers, takes on the identity of a man in order to become a shipmate for a crew on its way to Africa, the location where the merchant husband will be for many months. The cohesion of the story cycle thus requires some readerly attention, which is part of the fun: we’re looking to see which character might yet again reappear in another story. In the third, “The Imperial Police,” we’re taken to a fictional world in which a British military officer, Jenkins, finds himself infatuated with an Indian man, who later is killed during the violence that occurs in relation to Partition. Jenkins, we discover, has queer leanings, and Rao deftly explores the difficulties of Jenkins’ queerness especially in a transnational postcolonial context: what place can there be for this kind of same sex desire, this story seems to suggest, especially when the Indian man dies. In “Unleashed,” two sisters must navigate a complex web of sexual triangulation that continually ties them together. Jenkins, who appeared as the central character in “The Imperial Police” now takes on a supporting role, as a doorman and elevator operator for the building in which the protagonist lives. Jenkins comes to be a source of comfort when the protagonist discovers that her sister is engaging in an affair with her husband, an indiscretion that reminds her of a problematic moment in their high school years involving the exploration of their sexualities while at a party. Other stories work in a similar fashion, and the entire collection was a pleasure to read through. Rao’s debut is most definitely assured; the range of narrative perspectives and associated social contexts make the reading experience expansive and often unexpectedly provocative. Again, one of the pleasant surprises of this reading year; this book will probably make a future appearance in one of my classes.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/an-unrestored-woman-shobha-rao/1121725360