Stephen Hong Sohn's Blog, page 51
September 20, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 21, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 21, 2014
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of: Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great (Harper, 2014); Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn, 2011); Lily Yuriko Nagai Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp (University of Utah Press, 2014); Ed Lin’s Ghost Month (Soho Crime, 2014); Michael Cho’s Shoplifting (Pantheon, 2014).
A Review of Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great (Harper, 2014).
Bilal Tanweer’s ambitious and formally inventive debut The Scatter Here is Too Great follows a revolving cast of characters who are linked by one tragic event: a bomb blast in Karachi, Pakistan that leaves many injured and dead. The bomb blast is a red herring, though, and that fact is only made clear in the novel’s final sequence. Indeed, readers might be looking too much into the source of the blast, what caused it, and the motivations for its detonation, without realizing that we’re missing the point. Tanweer’s true protagonist in the city of Karachi, how it has been imagined and remade especially in light of terrorist discourse and the projection of Islamic Fundamentalism on countries in that region. Tanweer’s project, then, is to particularize experience and texturize how the city is interfaced and understood from a variety of different perspectives. Called a “novel in stories,” it follows a number of different characters, shifting narrative perspectives constantly (especially between first and second person). Each section of the novel seems to slightly advance the story, moving us closer and closer physically to the blast. One of the most important connections it seems is the place of the writer in this modernizing city. Indeed, one of the returning figures is a subeditor who is tasked with understanding how to interface with the many facets of Karachi and demystifying its representations. This character muses: “All these stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city as anything but a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That’s how we lose the city—that’s how our knowledge of what the world is and how it functions is taken away from us—when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what was and we are left strangers in a place we know, that we ought to have known. Suddenly, it struck me that that’s how my father experienced this city. How, when we walked this city, he was tracing paths from his memory to the present—from what this place had been to what it had become” (165). It would seem that the writer in all of his metafictional conceits is taking himself to task for this very same purpose, trying to create some sort of narrative that links time and place to the urban experience. The form of the novel itself is then part of the key to understanding Tanweer’s rhetoric: not everything will cohere, but the fragmentation is part of the complexity and the beauty of Karachi, a city that we understand is more than a bomb, more than Islamic fundamentalism, more than a site that has been determined to be a terrorist stronghold. I agree with other reviewers that the story can sometimes meander in ways that are distracting to readers, but Tanweer’s prose is so compelling, especially the philosophical renderings that appear in the opening and closing chapters that you’ll be lulled into Karachi’s representationally rich character configurations, including an ambulance driver undone by two figures who seem to represent the end of the world and two young lovers who seek to find a place to be alone in a city with too many eyes.
Buy the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Scatter-Here-Too-Great/dp/0062304410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=the+scatter+here+is+too+great
A Review of Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn, 2011).
The great thing about the archive of “literatures penned by writers of Asian descent in English” (otherwise known as Asian Anglophone) is that the depth of its reach seems unending. There’s always a new writer that I find that I feel like I should have already heard of but haven’t, which brings me to Farzana Doctor, a queer Asian Canadian writer, who has published two novels. I review Six Metres of Pavement here, which is told in the third person perspective and primarily follows two characters: Ismail Boxwala, a Muslim Indo Canadian who is divorced, something that occurs in the wake of a tragic accident. He had left his infant daughter in his car while at work and Zubeida (nicknamed Zubi) dies from sun exposure. His wife, Rehana, attempts to assuage to the situation by suggesting they have another child, but Ismail suffers erectile dysfunction, no doubt related to his anxiety that he cannot possibly father another child, fearing that he may again be negligent. Celia Sousa has just moved into the neighborhood with his daughter Lydia and her son-in-law. Celia is in mourning; her mother and her husband Jose have both passed away recently, and she struggles to find a way out of her daily melancholy. It’s been about eighteen years since Zubi died when the novel opens, and Ismail struggles with a drinking habit. He falls into meaningless sexual dalliances with women at the local bar; he also strikes up a friendship and sexual relationship with a local there named Daphne, who ends up proclaiming her queerness and then joining an AA group. It is Daphne who encourages Ismail to take a creative writing class, and it is there that Ismail makes a strong friendship with a fellow classmate Fatima, even after he questions whether or not to stay enrolled (Daphne quickly drops out of the class leaving Ismail abandoned). It’s quite clear from the get-go that Doctor is setting up a romance plot between Ismail and Celia, and it takes too long to get there, but fortunately Doctor also provides us with an interesting friendship plot that occurs between Fatima and Ismail. Both Fatima and Ismail hail from similar ethnic backgrounds (though Fatima is a generation younger) and when Fatima is thrown out of the house, with no support for her livelihood, education, and other such things, she has to increasingly rely on Ismail’s help just to survive. Fatima, as we soon discover, is a feminist, an anticolonialist, steeped in academic rhetoric concerning social inequality, and most importantly for our understanding: she’s a lesbian. gasp To a certain extent, Doctor’s structure strangely enough replicates a heteronormative family unit, as at one point, it seems possible that Ismail will marry Celia, and that Fatima has become a kind of surrogate daughter (a kind of imperfect replacement for Zubi). Though the novel takes too long to set up the connection between Celia and Ismail—indeed, Doctor is a talented writer and it’s perfectly clear that both characters are traumatized, so we could have used some editing in the first 100 pages—the sociopolitical import of the novel is obvious, and the novel especially provides the kind of ending not usually fit for so many characters who exist on society’s fringes. Somehow, Doctor manages to provide us with a convincing ending where outcasts and pariahs do not necessarily succumb to violent deaths and premature termination from the plotting.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Metres-Pavement-Farzana-Doctor/dp/1554887674/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408805340&sr=8-1&keywords=six+metres+of+pavement
A Review of Lily Yuriko Nagai Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp (University of Utah Press, 2014).
What an absolutely amazing book! There can be no other estimation for such an important document that is part of the long-standing recovery effort related to the Japanese American internment experience. Lily Yuriko Nagai Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp is a mixed-genre, creative nonfiction memoir that employs photographs, narrative, and watercolor paintings to represent and to give life to Havey’s experiences as a ten-year old who first must endure living at an assembly center and then in the harsh conditions of Colorado’s Amache internment camp. The narrative is straightforward enough and one that recalls other internment works (such as Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile, Mitsuye Yamada’s Desert Run, etc) in its depiction of the monotony, the psychic struggles, and the everyday desultory life of languishing in what is basically an inhospitable place. There are moments of pleasure and even happiness, which erupt in Havey’s narrative in unexpected places: the light of the sun when it hits a cold and barren landscape or the return of a father from long periods away (working outside of the internment camp in order to escape its confines and to provide for the family). In other moments, we constantly see how the internees make the most of meager circumstances, continuing to persevere despite their imprisonment. Again, it is the minor moments which surface as a brutal and stark reminder of indomitable spirits, such as the desire of Havey’s mother to continue polishing the pot-bellied stove, or the move to decorate the ramshackle interiors of the interment barracks. But, what makes Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp so dynamic and so indispensable is its visual catalog, one that includes photographs (indeed, as Havey notes, in the last year of the internment camp, a camera was able to be used by residents) and watercolor paintings that Havey created over time to represent her experiences. The watercolor paintings are notable in that they are far from directly representational: most have abstract and symbolic qualities that seem exactly appropriate as a kind of formal conceit that illuminates such a fragmenting and harrowing experience.
Here’s a link to one of the watercolor paintings:
http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/lily-havey-reads-gasa-gasa-girl-goes-to-camp/
Havey often uses pastels (an effect to a certain extent of the watercolor approach), which ends up also functioning within a light scheme that comes off as ghostly. As these watercolors accompany the direct narrative of the internment, a multifaceted portrayal emerges that reminds us of the continued work that needs to be done in order to reconsider how this experience impacted so many Americans (Japanese in ethnicity and otherwise). Finally, I would like to remark on the production quality of this book: the pages used are the kinds found in art and painting studies, with a glossy finish. Certain to stand the test of time, one must pick up this essential and new addition to the canon of internment literatures.
Internment literatures based upon place:
Topaz: Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile; Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine
Minidoka: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Writings
Manzanar: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar
Heart Mountain: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain
Poston: Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Gasa-Girl-Goes-Camp-Behind/dp/1607813432/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1410191557&sr=8-2&keywords=gasa+gasa+girl
A Review of Ed Lin’s Ghost Month (Soho Crime, 2014).
So when I picked up Ed Lin’s Ghost Month, I automatically assumed it was another book in Lin’s Robert Chow’s detective series (which includes This is a Bust, One Red Bastard, and Snakes Can’t Run). Instead, we have another book entirely, which revolves around Jing-nan (aka Johnny), a twenty-ish character languishing in a life he never wanted (inheriting the debts of his father and running a stall out of Taipei’s famed Night Market) living in a country he doesn’t want (Taiwan). The opening of the novel begins inauspiciously enough with Jing-nan discovering that the love of his life Julia Huang has been murdered. Jing-nan hadn’t kept in touch with Julia because of a promise he made that he would only marry her if he had established himself in a career and with full preparedness for life as a married couple. When he must leave UCLA without finishing his degree and returns to Taiwan, but not soon after, his mother dies in a tragic accident and his father dies just three weeks later due to health issues. Needless to say, Jing-nan’s life is turned upside down. He takes on the family business, while realizing that must pay back the debt his father had accrued over time. Thus, his romance with Julia is effectively dead, and he never hears about Julia until the news that a betel-nut stand worker has been found killed. This betel-nut stand worker is none other than Julia Huang. For about one hundred pages of the novel, Lin employs Jing-nan as the perfect narrator to welcome a reader with little understanding of Taipei. Jing-nan carefully and meticulously lays out the density of the city, its cultural particularities, and more importantly, its underground and unofficial economies. Toward the ending of this longer than usual preamble to the noir-plotting, he visits Julia’s family as a mode of honoring her memory. They beseech Jing-nan to find out more about the mysterious circumstances of Julia’s death and though reluctant, Jing-nan agrees. On the way out of the house, he is accosted by a stranger who warns him not to investigate. Later on, this stranger reappears and makes the same warning and punctuates his threat with ominous promises of physical harm and death. Thus begins the noir-plot that readers might have been waiting for, but Lin is really balancing more than one narrative here. On one level, the novel is really a character study of Jing-nan, who simultaneously comes to tell us about the complicated historical and social texture of Taiwan, which includes tensions with aboriginal tribes, the continuing standoff with mainland China, as well as the national drive to modernize and to displace older forms of commerce and culture. On the other, Lin introduces the noir plot as a way to get at some of these social issues and to some extent, then, this mystery doesn’t function as seamlessly as other texts that stick more closely to formula structures. My assessment is no means a critique of Lin’s work, which is multifaceted and benefits from the trademark humor that we’ve come to expect in his writings, but rather to elucidate the varied workings of this novel. Though Jing-nan’s fidelity to solving Julia Huang’s murder can stretch the bounds of credulity, the novel succeeds primarily due to Lin’s construction of a flawed but intriguing noir anti-hero, and we can see this novel as the start of another series.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Month-Ed-Lin/dp/1616953268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410801485&sr=8-1&keywords=ed+lin+ghost+month
A Review of Michael Cho’s Shoplifting (Pantheon, 2014).
In Shoplifting, Asian Canadian graphic novelist Michael Cho brings us a poignant, nuanced narrative of a young woman trying to figure out her path in life. Our protagonist is Corinna Park, who may or may not be Asian American (an issue I’ll come back to later). She works for an advertisement agency in New York City, but finds her job less than fulfilling. The narrative starts on a day when she’s in a boardroom meeting coming up with an advertising campaign for a perfume that will be marketed to 9 year old girls. She makes an off-color remark that gestures to the sense of ennui that she feels working in a company that is far from her passion. As an undergraduate, Corinna majored in English and thought that she’d one day write novels. Instead, she feels lonely, socially anxious, and generally finds her job desultory. This graphic novel is a coming-of-age that begins when Corinna is brought in by the head of the company and told to rethink why she is at the advertising agency. The title refers to an illicit habit that Corinna maintains whenever she is at the local grocery store. She manages to shoplift a magazine by inserting it in between the pages of a newspaper. She doesn’t provide a reason for why she does it; indeed, she doesn’t lack the money to buy the newspaper but it gives her a kind of thrill. The shoplifting is of course a larger metaphor for the fact that Corinna needs a jumpstart, some sort of obvious sign to move into a new occupation or life trajectory. Fortunately, the graphic novel provides a conflation of different events that lead Corinna to make a monumental decision. Cho’s art has a nice cartoon-style to it. The production design team also saw fit to use a four-toned color scheme system, where pink is mixed in with grays, blacks, and whites.
The use of pink to structure the color is an interesting one and gives the graphic narrative a kind of lighter feel to it than the content of the story would probably allow for on its own. Cho is particularly effective at rendering the alienation that can come with living in a metropolis: Corinna is often framed in scenes with a ton of other individuals, whether commuting by subway or at some sort of gathering. A particular favorite detail of mine was Cho’s focus on internet dating, a quagmire of hilariously bad profiles that Corinna must sift through when she gets home. But, perhaps, the most intriguing element is Cho’s choice to veil Corinna’s ethnic background. With a Korean surname, it would seem very possible that she’s Asian American, but there’s nothing contextually provided that would determine this with any sort of certitude. It brings to mind the question of how race gets represented in the visual register and how graphic novels present more avenues for cultural critics to attend to the complexities of racial formation. A wonderful work, the first I hope of many more by Cho. Certainly, a book I will adopt for future classroom courses on the graphic novel.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Shoplifter-Michael-Cho/dp/030791173X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409183592&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+cho
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of: Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great (Harper, 2014); Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn, 2011); Lily Yuriko Nagai Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp (University of Utah Press, 2014); Ed Lin’s Ghost Month (Soho Crime, 2014); Michael Cho’s Shoplifting (Pantheon, 2014).
A Review of Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great (Harper, 2014).
Bilal Tanweer’s ambitious and formally inventive debut The Scatter Here is Too Great follows a revolving cast of characters who are linked by one tragic event: a bomb blast in Karachi, Pakistan that leaves many injured and dead. The bomb blast is a red herring, though, and that fact is only made clear in the novel’s final sequence. Indeed, readers might be looking too much into the source of the blast, what caused it, and the motivations for its detonation, without realizing that we’re missing the point. Tanweer’s true protagonist in the city of Karachi, how it has been imagined and remade especially in light of terrorist discourse and the projection of Islamic Fundamentalism on countries in that region. Tanweer’s project, then, is to particularize experience and texturize how the city is interfaced and understood from a variety of different perspectives. Called a “novel in stories,” it follows a number of different characters, shifting narrative perspectives constantly (especially between first and second person). Each section of the novel seems to slightly advance the story, moving us closer and closer physically to the blast. One of the most important connections it seems is the place of the writer in this modernizing city. Indeed, one of the returning figures is a subeditor who is tasked with understanding how to interface with the many facets of Karachi and demystifying its representations. This character muses: “All these stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city as anything but a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That’s how we lose the city—that’s how our knowledge of what the world is and how it functions is taken away from us—when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what was and we are left strangers in a place we know, that we ought to have known. Suddenly, it struck me that that’s how my father experienced this city. How, when we walked this city, he was tracing paths from his memory to the present—from what this place had been to what it had become” (165). It would seem that the writer in all of his metafictional conceits is taking himself to task for this very same purpose, trying to create some sort of narrative that links time and place to the urban experience. The form of the novel itself is then part of the key to understanding Tanweer’s rhetoric: not everything will cohere, but the fragmentation is part of the complexity and the beauty of Karachi, a city that we understand is more than a bomb, more than Islamic fundamentalism, more than a site that has been determined to be a terrorist stronghold. I agree with other reviewers that the story can sometimes meander in ways that are distracting to readers, but Tanweer’s prose is so compelling, especially the philosophical renderings that appear in the opening and closing chapters that you’ll be lulled into Karachi’s representationally rich character configurations, including an ambulance driver undone by two figures who seem to represent the end of the world and two young lovers who seek to find a place to be alone in a city with too many eyes.
Buy the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Scatter-Here-Too-Great/dp/0062304410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=the+scatter+here+is+too+great
A Review of Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn, 2011).
The great thing about the archive of “literatures penned by writers of Asian descent in English” (otherwise known as Asian Anglophone) is that the depth of its reach seems unending. There’s always a new writer that I find that I feel like I should have already heard of but haven’t, which brings me to Farzana Doctor, a queer Asian Canadian writer, who has published two novels. I review Six Metres of Pavement here, which is told in the third person perspective and primarily follows two characters: Ismail Boxwala, a Muslim Indo Canadian who is divorced, something that occurs in the wake of a tragic accident. He had left his infant daughter in his car while at work and Zubeida (nicknamed Zubi) dies from sun exposure. His wife, Rehana, attempts to assuage to the situation by suggesting they have another child, but Ismail suffers erectile dysfunction, no doubt related to his anxiety that he cannot possibly father another child, fearing that he may again be negligent. Celia Sousa has just moved into the neighborhood with his daughter Lydia and her son-in-law. Celia is in mourning; her mother and her husband Jose have both passed away recently, and she struggles to find a way out of her daily melancholy. It’s been about eighteen years since Zubi died when the novel opens, and Ismail struggles with a drinking habit. He falls into meaningless sexual dalliances with women at the local bar; he also strikes up a friendship and sexual relationship with a local there named Daphne, who ends up proclaiming her queerness and then joining an AA group. It is Daphne who encourages Ismail to take a creative writing class, and it is there that Ismail makes a strong friendship with a fellow classmate Fatima, even after he questions whether or not to stay enrolled (Daphne quickly drops out of the class leaving Ismail abandoned). It’s quite clear from the get-go that Doctor is setting up a romance plot between Ismail and Celia, and it takes too long to get there, but fortunately Doctor also provides us with an interesting friendship plot that occurs between Fatima and Ismail. Both Fatima and Ismail hail from similar ethnic backgrounds (though Fatima is a generation younger) and when Fatima is thrown out of the house, with no support for her livelihood, education, and other such things, she has to increasingly rely on Ismail’s help just to survive. Fatima, as we soon discover, is a feminist, an anticolonialist, steeped in academic rhetoric concerning social inequality, and most importantly for our understanding: she’s a lesbian. gasp To a certain extent, Doctor’s structure strangely enough replicates a heteronormative family unit, as at one point, it seems possible that Ismail will marry Celia, and that Fatima has become a kind of surrogate daughter (a kind of imperfect replacement for Zubi). Though the novel takes too long to set up the connection between Celia and Ismail—indeed, Doctor is a talented writer and it’s perfectly clear that both characters are traumatized, so we could have used some editing in the first 100 pages—the sociopolitical import of the novel is obvious, and the novel especially provides the kind of ending not usually fit for so many characters who exist on society’s fringes. Somehow, Doctor manages to provide us with a convincing ending where outcasts and pariahs do not necessarily succumb to violent deaths and premature termination from the plotting.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Metres-Pavement-Farzana-Doctor/dp/1554887674/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408805340&sr=8-1&keywords=six+metres+of+pavement
A Review of Lily Yuriko Nagai Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp (University of Utah Press, 2014).
What an absolutely amazing book! There can be no other estimation for such an important document that is part of the long-standing recovery effort related to the Japanese American internment experience. Lily Yuriko Nagai Havey’s Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp is a mixed-genre, creative nonfiction memoir that employs photographs, narrative, and watercolor paintings to represent and to give life to Havey’s experiences as a ten-year old who first must endure living at an assembly center and then in the harsh conditions of Colorado’s Amache internment camp. The narrative is straightforward enough and one that recalls other internment works (such as Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile, Mitsuye Yamada’s Desert Run, etc) in its depiction of the monotony, the psychic struggles, and the everyday desultory life of languishing in what is basically an inhospitable place. There are moments of pleasure and even happiness, which erupt in Havey’s narrative in unexpected places: the light of the sun when it hits a cold and barren landscape or the return of a father from long periods away (working outside of the internment camp in order to escape its confines and to provide for the family). In other moments, we constantly see how the internees make the most of meager circumstances, continuing to persevere despite their imprisonment. Again, it is the minor moments which surface as a brutal and stark reminder of indomitable spirits, such as the desire of Havey’s mother to continue polishing the pot-bellied stove, or the move to decorate the ramshackle interiors of the interment barracks. But, what makes Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp so dynamic and so indispensable is its visual catalog, one that includes photographs (indeed, as Havey notes, in the last year of the internment camp, a camera was able to be used by residents) and watercolor paintings that Havey created over time to represent her experiences. The watercolor paintings are notable in that they are far from directly representational: most have abstract and symbolic qualities that seem exactly appropriate as a kind of formal conceit that illuminates such a fragmenting and harrowing experience.
Here’s a link to one of the watercolor paintings:
http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/lily-havey-reads-gasa-gasa-girl-goes-to-camp/
Havey often uses pastels (an effect to a certain extent of the watercolor approach), which ends up also functioning within a light scheme that comes off as ghostly. As these watercolors accompany the direct narrative of the internment, a multifaceted portrayal emerges that reminds us of the continued work that needs to be done in order to reconsider how this experience impacted so many Americans (Japanese in ethnicity and otherwise). Finally, I would like to remark on the production quality of this book: the pages used are the kinds found in art and painting studies, with a glossy finish. Certain to stand the test of time, one must pick up this essential and new addition to the canon of internment literatures.
Internment literatures based upon place:
Topaz: Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile; Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine
Minidoka: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Writings
Manzanar: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar
Heart Mountain: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Beyond Heart Mountain
Poston: Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Gasa-Girl-Goes-Camp-Behind/dp/1607813432/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1410191557&sr=8-2&keywords=gasa+gasa+girl
A Review of Ed Lin’s Ghost Month (Soho Crime, 2014).
So when I picked up Ed Lin’s Ghost Month, I automatically assumed it was another book in Lin’s Robert Chow’s detective series (which includes This is a Bust, One Red Bastard, and Snakes Can’t Run). Instead, we have another book entirely, which revolves around Jing-nan (aka Johnny), a twenty-ish character languishing in a life he never wanted (inheriting the debts of his father and running a stall out of Taipei’s famed Night Market) living in a country he doesn’t want (Taiwan). The opening of the novel begins inauspiciously enough with Jing-nan discovering that the love of his life Julia Huang has been murdered. Jing-nan hadn’t kept in touch with Julia because of a promise he made that he would only marry her if he had established himself in a career and with full preparedness for life as a married couple. When he must leave UCLA without finishing his degree and returns to Taiwan, but not soon after, his mother dies in a tragic accident and his father dies just three weeks later due to health issues. Needless to say, Jing-nan’s life is turned upside down. He takes on the family business, while realizing that must pay back the debt his father had accrued over time. Thus, his romance with Julia is effectively dead, and he never hears about Julia until the news that a betel-nut stand worker has been found killed. This betel-nut stand worker is none other than Julia Huang. For about one hundred pages of the novel, Lin employs Jing-nan as the perfect narrator to welcome a reader with little understanding of Taipei. Jing-nan carefully and meticulously lays out the density of the city, its cultural particularities, and more importantly, its underground and unofficial economies. Toward the ending of this longer than usual preamble to the noir-plotting, he visits Julia’s family as a mode of honoring her memory. They beseech Jing-nan to find out more about the mysterious circumstances of Julia’s death and though reluctant, Jing-nan agrees. On the way out of the house, he is accosted by a stranger who warns him not to investigate. Later on, this stranger reappears and makes the same warning and punctuates his threat with ominous promises of physical harm and death. Thus begins the noir-plot that readers might have been waiting for, but Lin is really balancing more than one narrative here. On one level, the novel is really a character study of Jing-nan, who simultaneously comes to tell us about the complicated historical and social texture of Taiwan, which includes tensions with aboriginal tribes, the continuing standoff with mainland China, as well as the national drive to modernize and to displace older forms of commerce and culture. On the other, Lin introduces the noir plot as a way to get at some of these social issues and to some extent, then, this mystery doesn’t function as seamlessly as other texts that stick more closely to formula structures. My assessment is no means a critique of Lin’s work, which is multifaceted and benefits from the trademark humor that we’ve come to expect in his writings, but rather to elucidate the varied workings of this novel. Though Jing-nan’s fidelity to solving Julia Huang’s murder can stretch the bounds of credulity, the novel succeeds primarily due to Lin’s construction of a flawed but intriguing noir anti-hero, and we can see this novel as the start of another series.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Month-Ed-Lin/dp/1616953268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410801485&sr=8-1&keywords=ed+lin+ghost+month
A Review of Michael Cho’s Shoplifting (Pantheon, 2014).
In Shoplifting, Asian Canadian graphic novelist Michael Cho brings us a poignant, nuanced narrative of a young woman trying to figure out her path in life. Our protagonist is Corinna Park, who may or may not be Asian American (an issue I’ll come back to later). She works for an advertisement agency in New York City, but finds her job less than fulfilling. The narrative starts on a day when she’s in a boardroom meeting coming up with an advertising campaign for a perfume that will be marketed to 9 year old girls. She makes an off-color remark that gestures to the sense of ennui that she feels working in a company that is far from her passion. As an undergraduate, Corinna majored in English and thought that she’d one day write novels. Instead, she feels lonely, socially anxious, and generally finds her job desultory. This graphic novel is a coming-of-age that begins when Corinna is brought in by the head of the company and told to rethink why she is at the advertising agency. The title refers to an illicit habit that Corinna maintains whenever she is at the local grocery store. She manages to shoplift a magazine by inserting it in between the pages of a newspaper. She doesn’t provide a reason for why she does it; indeed, she doesn’t lack the money to buy the newspaper but it gives her a kind of thrill. The shoplifting is of course a larger metaphor for the fact that Corinna needs a jumpstart, some sort of obvious sign to move into a new occupation or life trajectory. Fortunately, the graphic novel provides a conflation of different events that lead Corinna to make a monumental decision. Cho’s art has a nice cartoon-style to it. The production design team also saw fit to use a four-toned color scheme system, where pink is mixed in with grays, blacks, and whites.
The use of pink to structure the color is an interesting one and gives the graphic narrative a kind of lighter feel to it than the content of the story would probably allow for on its own. Cho is particularly effective at rendering the alienation that can come with living in a metropolis: Corinna is often framed in scenes with a ton of other individuals, whether commuting by subway or at some sort of gathering. A particular favorite detail of mine was Cho’s focus on internet dating, a quagmire of hilariously bad profiles that Corinna must sift through when she gets home. But, perhaps, the most intriguing element is Cho’s choice to veil Corinna’s ethnic background. With a Korean surname, it would seem very possible that she’s Asian American, but there’s nothing contextually provided that would determine this with any sort of certitude. It brings to mind the question of how race gets represented in the visual register and how graphic novels present more avenues for cultural critics to attend to the complexities of racial formation. A wonderful work, the first I hope of many more by Cho. Certainly, a book I will adopt for future classroom courses on the graphic novel.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Shoplifter-Michael-Cho/dp/030791173X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409183592&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+cho
September 16, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans - Megareview for September 16 2014 Amazon Imprints
Asian American Literature Fans - Megareview for September 16 2014 Amazon Imprints
A Review of Kirstin Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners (New Harvest, 2014).
I’ve slowly been working through Amazon’s publishing list, which brings me to Kirstin Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners, which is definitely on the lighter side of Asian American literature. It will be sure to fulfill the needs and desires of those who are especially interested in romance and courtship plots. In this case, we have a transnational Singaporean culinary twist as our protagonist, Gretchen Lin, travels back to her homeland in order to take a temporary job working in the family company. Her father and her uncle both run a soy sauce business that has been operating for almost three generations, but Gretchen’s arrival is not necessarily a felicitous time for everyone. Gretchen’s marriage is over, while her mother is suffering from health complications that require her to be on daily dialysis. Not helping matters is the fact that her mother continues to drink heavily. The soy sauce business is also in a state of transition. Gretchen’s cousin Cal has just been fired, after he attempted to shift the focus of the company to cheaper, mass-produced, trendier products, a move that ultimately backfired when it was discovered that these items were tainted and caused food poisoning. Thus, Gretchen’s father and uncle want to push the company back in the direction of its artisanal roots. Gretchen also happens to be working for the company at the same time as her best college friend, Frankie; she managed to get Frankie a business consulting position. With her best friend in tow—two single ladies as it were—we know that there are romance troubles certain to appear on the horizon. So the stage is set: will Gretchen (and Frankie) find love in Singapore? Will the business get back on track? Will Gretchen’s mother get sober? These are the issues at play in the novel. For those in Asian American Studies, what will be of further interest is the question of class privilege and modernization, especially in postcolonial context. Here, Gretchen never has to worry about where her next meal is coming from. Indeed, she is the daughter of a successful business magnate. In some sense, when she returns to Singapore, without a husband or a child and with no clear career path (she’s gotten an MA in musical education, but does not know she is going to do with this degree), she still has a tremendous safety net. The issue here is whether or not such a story ultimately provides a useful apparatus to explore the problems and tensions that have traditionally energized the field: elements such as social inequality and racial formation. Despite its more airy plotline, Chen obviously shows a gift for the construction of a lively protagonist, one which you can’t help root for, even if it already seems a given that she’ll find her way somehow. And the conclusion is, I think, one that moves beyond mere romance sentiment and moves this debut outside of some of the more stereotypical endings in which the protagonist’s success is so often levied on her successful pairing with a male partner (with money, good lucks, and a sense of humor to boot)! =)
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Soy-Sauce-Beginners-Kirstin-Chen/dp/0544114396/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid
A Review of Lori M. Lee’s Gates of Thread and Stone (Skyscape, 2014).
(does the cover have an Asian girl on it? does it matter? who knows?!)
Lori M. Lee’s debut novel Gates of Thread and Stone comes out of an amazon.com publishing imprint called Skyscape, which is focused on young adult cultural productions. Though I was wary about reviewing titles from this imprint, it’s quite clear that amazon is very serious about this venture, especially because the production value and editing in these works are of top-notch, big five publishing variety. With the recent spat between Hatchette Books and Amazon going on, let’s hope that there is a way for big and small presses to continue to thrive, to make some sort of reasonable profit, and for innovative work to continue to be produced. Lee’s debut is part of an intended series that will involve its first person protagonist, Kai, who is a teenager with the ability to bend time. Yes, she can manipulate time in such a way as to slow things down and then defend herself better in fights and escape dangerous situations. Kai lives in a city called Ninurta, a kind of throwback to the Medieval era and certainly inspired by fantasy fiction. Ninurta is segregated according to class. Those of the highest backgrounds eventually get to settle in the White Court, which is highly fortified and guarded by special humans who have their minds wiped and are called sentinels. When the novel opens, Kai subsists as a messenger, trying to make extra credits in order to survive. Her surrogate brother Reev works at a local bar. When Reev disappears, Kai decides that she is going to find him and teams up with Avan, a man who runs a local store. There are rumors of a malevolent figure called the Black Rider, who is kidnapping individuals in the city for unknown reasons, but as Kai and Reev find out, they will have to travel beyond Ninurta’s borders, through the harsh Outlands, across a forest, and into the void, to find out whether or not the Black Rider is involved in Reev’s disappearance. These places beyond Ninurta’s fortified walls all harbor deadly gargoyles. With the help of a traveling device called a gray, Avan and Kai are just able to make it to the Void and come upon a settlement in the desert in which the Black Rider can be found, but the Black Rider ends up being someone else entirely and shifts the novel into a new register in which myth, deities, and super-beings come to be unveiled. Lee takes some time to world build in this novel and fortunately, it’s so complex that readers have a lot to digest. At the same time, Lee sticks to the tried and true formula that fans of the genre will recognize: the not-so-normal heroine, who discovers that she possesses some unique power or ancestry, that will eventually get her into trouble and also move her into the path of a romantic foil. The late stage shift and plot reveals are a dicey gamble and it remains to be seen whether or not Lee can sustain the level of intrigue in the second book, especially given the fact that so much of the first novel was predicated on how little readers and Kai understood the social structure and power dynamics that undergird Ninurta. A solid debut!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Thread-Stone/dp/1477847200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407962511&sr=8-1&keywords=gates+of+thread+and+stone
A Review of Andrew Xia Fukuda’s Crossing (Skyscape, 2010).
Billed as a young adult novel, Andrew Xia Fukuda’s debut Crossing was one of the first books to come out of amazon.com as a publishing house. The editing and production values of the book are of the highest quality, as evidenced by this engrossing narrative, one that will certainly cause readers to either “love” or “hate” the climactic conclusion. The novel is told from the first person perspective of a high school student named Xing, who grows up in Ashland, New York, a semi-rural town. He is one of two students of Asian descent in the entire high school, the other being Naomi Lee, his very close friend. Perhaps, we’re not too surprised to discover that Xing experiences bullying from some of his classmates; he’s an outsider and knows it, but the novel also throws in another interesting element into the equation when students start disappearing. Their bodies are typically found later in frozen lakes or in bits and pieces, and it’s apparent there is a serial killer on the loose. While these events wreak havoc on the high school, Xing has other complications to deal with, including a less-than-stellar home life and the possibility that he is going to sing in a school musical production. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are other social outcasts at Slackenville High, including a new student named Jan Blair, who boasts the very same name of the antagonist from The Blair Witch Project. When Jan is introduced, students start name-calling right away (in this sense, the high school-ers seem far more petulant than I ever remembered from personal experience, but hey, I guess I dodged a bullet) and it does not help that Jan is unkempt, pale, with stringy hair and a funky fashion style. Jan has been relegated to the netherworld of high school, a place that Xing knows all too well. You can expect that Jan and Xing are thus on a collision course in the novel, with Jan hoping for a romantic affiliation with Xing, but Xing begins to develop romantic feelings for Naomi. These various entanglements come to a head by the novel’s conclusion, and Fukuda has an obvious sense of where the novel must go. Though the novel can come off as heavy-handed, Fukuda’s success is in revealing how a social monster might be created rather than just birthed. A definitely engrossing debut novel for Fukuda; let’s hope he returns to exploring these ethnic and racial themes in his follow-up To The Hunt trilogy.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Andrew-Xia-Fukuda/dp/1935597035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408518658&sr=8-1&keywords=andrew+xia+fukuda
A Review of Susan Ee’s Angelfall (Skyscape, 2012); World After (Skyscape, 2013).
It’s the apocalypse in a way you might have not expected in Susan Ee’s debut, Angelfall, which turns conceptions of angels on their heads. In this novel, our protagonist and storyteller is Penryn Young, the requisite teenager that appears in these paranormal young adult fictions. She has one younger sister, Paige, (about seven years old) who suffered an accident as an infant and is now wheelchair bound. She has been raised under the spotty care of her schizophrenic mother. When angels descend on earth to wreak havoc upon the human populace across the globe, anarchy rains. People have abandoned their homes and are looking to go to less populated places. Penryn and her family hail from Silicon Valley, so their best choice is to head into the local hills. Things go south quite quickly when Penryn and her family end up interrupting a fight among angels. For whatever reason, Penryn assists the one angel who seems to be getting sacrificed; indeed, his wings are cut off, but in the process of drawing attention to herself, another angel takes off with Paige, flying away. Though Penryn has a dislike of all angels, she decides she must help nurse the wounded angel back to health if she is to have any chance to find her sister. The angel is named Raffe, and soon, they are traveling northward, with Penryn having convinced Raffe to take her to a place called the aerie, which may have some answers about Paige’s whereabouts. Raffe’s goal is of course to get his wings surgically reattached, and he is convinced that someone may be able to help him at the aerie. Of course, traveling in a post-apocalyptic world is no bowl of cherries and Penryn and Raffe have to deal with cannibals, roving bands of thieves and gangsters, and militia type men intent on resisting the angels. For the first half of the novel, Penryn and Raffe’s connection is obviously tenuous, with each showing an apparent dislike of each other, but as things go on, they follow the credo of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and this approach allows them a fragile alliance that helps them to survive various obstacles. As the novel approaches its climax, the dynamic duo reaches the aerie, a place where angels and humans are congregating in San Francisco. Once there, it becomes clear the angels are set up in factions and that there is dissension among the ranks. It is also possible that Paige might be in one of these rooms, being held against her will. The conclusion is a thrilling, action-packed sequence that nicely sets up a sequel: is Paige alive? Will Raffe get his wings surgically reattached? And whatever happen to Penryn’s schizophrenic mother who disappears not long after Raffe and Penryn decide to travel northward together? All such questions can be answered when you read this book! As with other books in the paranormal young adult fiction genre, the question of race seems to be completely avoided. Most of this novel is set in Northern California, certainly a very diverse place, but there is—from what I can recall—never a mention of any racial or ethnic difference at any point in this text. Is Penryn white? Does it matter? These are questions I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially as Asian American writers have increasingly delved into popular genres in which race apparently doesn’t have to factor at all. Beyond these issues that I always think about, the novel is superbly entertaining with all of the requisite things you’d want in this genre, including the plucky, indefatigable heroine who somehow gets herself involved in some sort of supernatural storyline in which a guy, who may or may not be a possible romantic partner, plays a major part.
Apparently, according to GoodReads, the Penryn and the End of Days series is going to be at least five novels, which is sort of strange given the penchant for trilogies dominating the young adult market right now, but it gives us of course a lot to look forward to. In World After, the second installment, we see Penryn being separated from Raffe after the explosive events of the last novel. Penryn is also finally reunited with Paige, but—and there are spoilers forthcoming, so I would stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled—Paige is a little bit different at this point, having been subjected to some sort of experimentation that has altered her bite and her taste in food. Penryn also managed to get back in touch with her mother, so there is a sort of familial reunion. Not surprisingly and given the continued tensions occurring in the angelic realm, we know that this reunion will not last for long. Added into the mix is a woman named Clara, who Penryn had inadvertently saved in the last novel. Clara has prematurely aged, as her life force was being slowly sucked out of her by creatures who seem to be experiments gone terribly wrong: monstrosities with stinger tales and grasshopper like bodies who function to do the dirty work of fallen angels. These scorpion-like creatures can also fly, and the events from the conclusion of the last novel show us that they can be unleashed upon the world. When Penryn and her group of survivors are attacked by a band of these creatures, she is separated from Paige. Thus, Penryn, her mother, and Clara travel to Alcatraz in the hopes of finding her. By this point, the novel’s storyline concerning Paige grows a little thin, and readers might be wondering about Raffe and when he may or may not be reunited with Penryn. The repartee between Penryn and Raffe was certainly one of the highlights of the first book and the second takes too long for these figures to find their way back to each other. Surely, Ee does tantalize the possibility of their connection. For instance, Penryn is now owner to the sword that was once most faithful to Raffe, and Penryn is subjected to visions that allow her to understand that Raffe’s distant behavior was in fact a kind of cover to his true feelings. Ee does provide some intriguing future prospects for the series, especially given the genetic manipulation of species, something that moves this book more firmly into the area of biotechnology and issues related to assisted reproductive technologies. Here, it seems as though one of the rogue angels has a plan to reintroduce Armageddon on earth, and it definitely involves creating the perfect genetically modified specimens. It would seem that if we’re reading any political allegory into the novel, it appears with respect to this issue of genetics and who gets to play god when it comes to the future of Earth. Though it takes quite awhile before Raffe makes a substantive appearance in book 2, fans should be pleased that he’s still around and that there still seems to be an inkling of potential romance between the two characters, even if the relationship is supposedly forbidden. Indeed, Raffe has told Penryn that angels who fell in love with “daughters of Men” created offspring that were essentially demons. The conclusion to World After sees an interesting new shift in relation to power and destruction and we’ll look forward to seeing how the series continues to unfold.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Angelfall-Penryn-End-Days-Book/dp/0761463275/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408746317&sr=8-1&keywords=angelfall
http://www.amazon.com/World-After-Penryn-Days-Book/dp/147781728X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
A Review of Kirstin Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners (New Harvest, 2014).
I’ve slowly been working through Amazon’s publishing list, which brings me to Kirstin Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners, which is definitely on the lighter side of Asian American literature. It will be sure to fulfill the needs and desires of those who are especially interested in romance and courtship plots. In this case, we have a transnational Singaporean culinary twist as our protagonist, Gretchen Lin, travels back to her homeland in order to take a temporary job working in the family company. Her father and her uncle both run a soy sauce business that has been operating for almost three generations, but Gretchen’s arrival is not necessarily a felicitous time for everyone. Gretchen’s marriage is over, while her mother is suffering from health complications that require her to be on daily dialysis. Not helping matters is the fact that her mother continues to drink heavily. The soy sauce business is also in a state of transition. Gretchen’s cousin Cal has just been fired, after he attempted to shift the focus of the company to cheaper, mass-produced, trendier products, a move that ultimately backfired when it was discovered that these items were tainted and caused food poisoning. Thus, Gretchen’s father and uncle want to push the company back in the direction of its artisanal roots. Gretchen also happens to be working for the company at the same time as her best college friend, Frankie; she managed to get Frankie a business consulting position. With her best friend in tow—two single ladies as it were—we know that there are romance troubles certain to appear on the horizon. So the stage is set: will Gretchen (and Frankie) find love in Singapore? Will the business get back on track? Will Gretchen’s mother get sober? These are the issues at play in the novel. For those in Asian American Studies, what will be of further interest is the question of class privilege and modernization, especially in postcolonial context. Here, Gretchen never has to worry about where her next meal is coming from. Indeed, she is the daughter of a successful business magnate. In some sense, when she returns to Singapore, without a husband or a child and with no clear career path (she’s gotten an MA in musical education, but does not know she is going to do with this degree), she still has a tremendous safety net. The issue here is whether or not such a story ultimately provides a useful apparatus to explore the problems and tensions that have traditionally energized the field: elements such as social inequality and racial formation. Despite its more airy plotline, Chen obviously shows a gift for the construction of a lively protagonist, one which you can’t help root for, even if it already seems a given that she’ll find her way somehow. And the conclusion is, I think, one that moves beyond mere romance sentiment and moves this debut outside of some of the more stereotypical endings in which the protagonist’s success is so often levied on her successful pairing with a male partner (with money, good lucks, and a sense of humor to boot)! =)
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Soy-Sauce-Beginners-Kirstin-Chen/dp/0544114396/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid
A Review of Lori M. Lee’s Gates of Thread and Stone (Skyscape, 2014).
(does the cover have an Asian girl on it? does it matter? who knows?!)
Lori M. Lee’s debut novel Gates of Thread and Stone comes out of an amazon.com publishing imprint called Skyscape, which is focused on young adult cultural productions. Though I was wary about reviewing titles from this imprint, it’s quite clear that amazon is very serious about this venture, especially because the production value and editing in these works are of top-notch, big five publishing variety. With the recent spat between Hatchette Books and Amazon going on, let’s hope that there is a way for big and small presses to continue to thrive, to make some sort of reasonable profit, and for innovative work to continue to be produced. Lee’s debut is part of an intended series that will involve its first person protagonist, Kai, who is a teenager with the ability to bend time. Yes, she can manipulate time in such a way as to slow things down and then defend herself better in fights and escape dangerous situations. Kai lives in a city called Ninurta, a kind of throwback to the Medieval era and certainly inspired by fantasy fiction. Ninurta is segregated according to class. Those of the highest backgrounds eventually get to settle in the White Court, which is highly fortified and guarded by special humans who have their minds wiped and are called sentinels. When the novel opens, Kai subsists as a messenger, trying to make extra credits in order to survive. Her surrogate brother Reev works at a local bar. When Reev disappears, Kai decides that she is going to find him and teams up with Avan, a man who runs a local store. There are rumors of a malevolent figure called the Black Rider, who is kidnapping individuals in the city for unknown reasons, but as Kai and Reev find out, they will have to travel beyond Ninurta’s borders, through the harsh Outlands, across a forest, and into the void, to find out whether or not the Black Rider is involved in Reev’s disappearance. These places beyond Ninurta’s fortified walls all harbor deadly gargoyles. With the help of a traveling device called a gray, Avan and Kai are just able to make it to the Void and come upon a settlement in the desert in which the Black Rider can be found, but the Black Rider ends up being someone else entirely and shifts the novel into a new register in which myth, deities, and super-beings come to be unveiled. Lee takes some time to world build in this novel and fortunately, it’s so complex that readers have a lot to digest. At the same time, Lee sticks to the tried and true formula that fans of the genre will recognize: the not-so-normal heroine, who discovers that she possesses some unique power or ancestry, that will eventually get her into trouble and also move her into the path of a romantic foil. The late stage shift and plot reveals are a dicey gamble and it remains to be seen whether or not Lee can sustain the level of intrigue in the second book, especially given the fact that so much of the first novel was predicated on how little readers and Kai understood the social structure and power dynamics that undergird Ninurta. A solid debut!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Thread-Stone/dp/1477847200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407962511&sr=8-1&keywords=gates+of+thread+and+stone
A Review of Andrew Xia Fukuda’s Crossing (Skyscape, 2010).
Billed as a young adult novel, Andrew Xia Fukuda’s debut Crossing was one of the first books to come out of amazon.com as a publishing house. The editing and production values of the book are of the highest quality, as evidenced by this engrossing narrative, one that will certainly cause readers to either “love” or “hate” the climactic conclusion. The novel is told from the first person perspective of a high school student named Xing, who grows up in Ashland, New York, a semi-rural town. He is one of two students of Asian descent in the entire high school, the other being Naomi Lee, his very close friend. Perhaps, we’re not too surprised to discover that Xing experiences bullying from some of his classmates; he’s an outsider and knows it, but the novel also throws in another interesting element into the equation when students start disappearing. Their bodies are typically found later in frozen lakes or in bits and pieces, and it’s apparent there is a serial killer on the loose. While these events wreak havoc on the high school, Xing has other complications to deal with, including a less-than-stellar home life and the possibility that he is going to sing in a school musical production. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are other social outcasts at Slackenville High, including a new student named Jan Blair, who boasts the very same name of the antagonist from The Blair Witch Project. When Jan is introduced, students start name-calling right away (in this sense, the high school-ers seem far more petulant than I ever remembered from personal experience, but hey, I guess I dodged a bullet) and it does not help that Jan is unkempt, pale, with stringy hair and a funky fashion style. Jan has been relegated to the netherworld of high school, a place that Xing knows all too well. You can expect that Jan and Xing are thus on a collision course in the novel, with Jan hoping for a romantic affiliation with Xing, but Xing begins to develop romantic feelings for Naomi. These various entanglements come to a head by the novel’s conclusion, and Fukuda has an obvious sense of where the novel must go. Though the novel can come off as heavy-handed, Fukuda’s success is in revealing how a social monster might be created rather than just birthed. A definitely engrossing debut novel for Fukuda; let’s hope he returns to exploring these ethnic and racial themes in his follow-up To The Hunt trilogy.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Andrew-Xia-Fukuda/dp/1935597035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408518658&sr=8-1&keywords=andrew+xia+fukuda
A Review of Susan Ee’s Angelfall (Skyscape, 2012); World After (Skyscape, 2013).
It’s the apocalypse in a way you might have not expected in Susan Ee’s debut, Angelfall, which turns conceptions of angels on their heads. In this novel, our protagonist and storyteller is Penryn Young, the requisite teenager that appears in these paranormal young adult fictions. She has one younger sister, Paige, (about seven years old) who suffered an accident as an infant and is now wheelchair bound. She has been raised under the spotty care of her schizophrenic mother. When angels descend on earth to wreak havoc upon the human populace across the globe, anarchy rains. People have abandoned their homes and are looking to go to less populated places. Penryn and her family hail from Silicon Valley, so their best choice is to head into the local hills. Things go south quite quickly when Penryn and her family end up interrupting a fight among angels. For whatever reason, Penryn assists the one angel who seems to be getting sacrificed; indeed, his wings are cut off, but in the process of drawing attention to herself, another angel takes off with Paige, flying away. Though Penryn has a dislike of all angels, she decides she must help nurse the wounded angel back to health if she is to have any chance to find her sister. The angel is named Raffe, and soon, they are traveling northward, with Penryn having convinced Raffe to take her to a place called the aerie, which may have some answers about Paige’s whereabouts. Raffe’s goal is of course to get his wings surgically reattached, and he is convinced that someone may be able to help him at the aerie. Of course, traveling in a post-apocalyptic world is no bowl of cherries and Penryn and Raffe have to deal with cannibals, roving bands of thieves and gangsters, and militia type men intent on resisting the angels. For the first half of the novel, Penryn and Raffe’s connection is obviously tenuous, with each showing an apparent dislike of each other, but as things go on, they follow the credo of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and this approach allows them a fragile alliance that helps them to survive various obstacles. As the novel approaches its climax, the dynamic duo reaches the aerie, a place where angels and humans are congregating in San Francisco. Once there, it becomes clear the angels are set up in factions and that there is dissension among the ranks. It is also possible that Paige might be in one of these rooms, being held against her will. The conclusion is a thrilling, action-packed sequence that nicely sets up a sequel: is Paige alive? Will Raffe get his wings surgically reattached? And whatever happen to Penryn’s schizophrenic mother who disappears not long after Raffe and Penryn decide to travel northward together? All such questions can be answered when you read this book! As with other books in the paranormal young adult fiction genre, the question of race seems to be completely avoided. Most of this novel is set in Northern California, certainly a very diverse place, but there is—from what I can recall—never a mention of any racial or ethnic difference at any point in this text. Is Penryn white? Does it matter? These are questions I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially as Asian American writers have increasingly delved into popular genres in which race apparently doesn’t have to factor at all. Beyond these issues that I always think about, the novel is superbly entertaining with all of the requisite things you’d want in this genre, including the plucky, indefatigable heroine who somehow gets herself involved in some sort of supernatural storyline in which a guy, who may or may not be a possible romantic partner, plays a major part.
Apparently, according to GoodReads, the Penryn and the End of Days series is going to be at least five novels, which is sort of strange given the penchant for trilogies dominating the young adult market right now, but it gives us of course a lot to look forward to. In World After, the second installment, we see Penryn being separated from Raffe after the explosive events of the last novel. Penryn is also finally reunited with Paige, but—and there are spoilers forthcoming, so I would stop reading now if you don’t want to be spoiled—Paige is a little bit different at this point, having been subjected to some sort of experimentation that has altered her bite and her taste in food. Penryn also managed to get back in touch with her mother, so there is a sort of familial reunion. Not surprisingly and given the continued tensions occurring in the angelic realm, we know that this reunion will not last for long. Added into the mix is a woman named Clara, who Penryn had inadvertently saved in the last novel. Clara has prematurely aged, as her life force was being slowly sucked out of her by creatures who seem to be experiments gone terribly wrong: monstrosities with stinger tales and grasshopper like bodies who function to do the dirty work of fallen angels. These scorpion-like creatures can also fly, and the events from the conclusion of the last novel show us that they can be unleashed upon the world. When Penryn and her group of survivors are attacked by a band of these creatures, she is separated from Paige. Thus, Penryn, her mother, and Clara travel to Alcatraz in the hopes of finding her. By this point, the novel’s storyline concerning Paige grows a little thin, and readers might be wondering about Raffe and when he may or may not be reunited with Penryn. The repartee between Penryn and Raffe was certainly one of the highlights of the first book and the second takes too long for these figures to find their way back to each other. Surely, Ee does tantalize the possibility of their connection. For instance, Penryn is now owner to the sword that was once most faithful to Raffe, and Penryn is subjected to visions that allow her to understand that Raffe’s distant behavior was in fact a kind of cover to his true feelings. Ee does provide some intriguing future prospects for the series, especially given the genetic manipulation of species, something that moves this book more firmly into the area of biotechnology and issues related to assisted reproductive technologies. Here, it seems as though one of the rogue angels has a plan to reintroduce Armageddon on earth, and it definitely involves creating the perfect genetically modified specimens. It would seem that if we’re reading any political allegory into the novel, it appears with respect to this issue of genetics and who gets to play god when it comes to the future of Earth. Though it takes quite awhile before Raffe makes a substantive appearance in book 2, fans should be pleased that he’s still around and that there still seems to be an inkling of potential romance between the two characters, even if the relationship is supposedly forbidden. Indeed, Raffe has told Penryn that angels who fell in love with “daughters of Men” created offspring that were essentially demons. The conclusion to World After sees an interesting new shift in relation to power and destruction and we’ll look forward to seeing how the series continues to unfold.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Angelfall-Penryn-End-Days-Book/dp/0761463275/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408746317&sr=8-1&keywords=angelfall
http://www.amazon.com/World-After-Penryn-Days-Book/dp/147781728X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
September 12, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 12, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for September 12, 2014
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of Steph Cha’s Beware Beware (Minotaur Books, 2014); Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm (Viking Adult, 2014); Tania Malik’s Three Bargains (WW Norton, 2014); Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (Arsenal Pulp, 2014); A Cut-Like Wound (Bitter Lemon Press, 2014).
A Review of Steph Cha’s Beware Beware (Minotaur Books, 2014).
Again, I failed to hold off on reading a book that I was saving for a rainy day. This time it was Steph Cha’s Beware Beware, which is the follow-up to Follow Her Home. In Follow her Home (reviewed earlier here), Cha created a wonderful noir-ish heroine with Juniper Song, who falls into an unofficial investigation, which ends up getting increasingly complicated, so much so that the body count includes one of her closest friends. In Beware Beware, Song has gone more official; she’s an intern now working with an actual investigatory team, which includes her boss Chaz and another supervisor Arturo. Song is finally put on her own case, which involves her scoping out a woman’s boyfriend to see if he is cheating on her, and if he is into dealing drugs. The woman, Daphne Freamon, a semi-famous painter who is African American, simply wants more information about what her boyfriend, Jamie Landon, does with all of his time, especially when he seems to disappear for days. As Song discovers, Jamie doesn’t do much but hang out with an aging, but still well-known Hollywood movie star named Joe Tilley. But when Joe Tilley is discovered by Jamie with his wrists slashed after a night of hard partying and Song is the first person to come upon the crime scene after being alerted to the goings-on by Daphne, the novel shifts into high gear. Did Jamie kill Joe, perhaps in a drug-fueled haze? If not Jamie, who would have the motive? Could it be Joe’s son from an earlier marriage? Could it be an ex-wife? Song is up for the challenge to investigate and indeed is hired by Daphne to look into the possibility that Jamie may have been set up. Cha adds a very important subplot early on involving the daughter of one of the murderer’s from her debut. Indeed, Song has moved in with Lori, the young Korean American woman who Song had “followed” home in the first part of the series. Lori’s life has turned around and she even has a promising new Korean boyfriend named Isaac, but her connection with her uncle Taejin creates more complications. Indeed, after visiting him at his auto shop, she bumps into a Korean thug Winfred, and Taejin cautions her to treat this man very nicely. Of course, Winfred becomes more menacing. As Lori maintains a fragile line between flirtation and friendship, thing soon things escalate. As the central plot involving the murder resolves, both Song and her boss Chaz realize the improbability of the scenario that eventually plays out, but even as the mystery plot seems both complicated and hardly feasible (with so much premeditation that your head may be swimming), Cha’s handle on the core genre element of detection is top-notch. Indeed, you are effectively pulled into this labyrinthine narrative precisely because of the desire to know. The threads all do resolve in one way or another and the noir-ish ending shows us how murky the line between heroes and villains can be. Cha continues to draw upon the rich Los Angeles noir tradition. Last time I mentioned Walter Mosley and I couldn’t help but think about the femme fatale in that plot, Daphne Monet, who seems to have certain parallels to Daphne Freamon in Cha’s novel. I also really enjoyed Cha’s movement more firmly into the Hollywood film industry here, which allows Cha to delve into some different spaces than the last novel, which focused more Korean ethnic subcultures. Another winning installment in the Juniper Song series, and we’ll hope for many more.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Beware-Juniper-Song-Mystery-Mysteries/dp/1250049016/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408030966&sr=8-1&keywords=steph+cha
A Review of Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm (Viking Adult, 2014).
Lan Cao leaves the first novelist’s club (the ones remaining that I keep wondering about are Brian Ascalon Roley and le thi diem thuy, both writers that I hope have something still cooking) with The Lotus and the Storm, a war epic in line with the work of Tan Twan Eng and Roma Tearne, especially with respect to its sweep, scope, and pathos. Given the ever-growing body of literature devoted to representations of the Vietnam War, Cao continues to delve into the psychic aftermath for those who still continue to suffer in the wake of a country’s long history with foreign rulers, invasions, and occupations. The story is primarily told between two alternating narrators: there is Mai, who in 1963, is just a young girl, who is growing up in the very long shadow of war and foreign occupation; and then there is Minh, Mai’s father, who is a colonel in the South Vietnamese army. The French have left the country with their tails behind them, while the Americans are rolling in and increasing their presence. The president, Diem Bien Phu, has just been overthrown by a military coup, which has not been supported by Minh. Minh is able to escape from the fallout of his dissension with the support of a close friend, Phong, but the realization that his country is moving in a direction that portends its eventual downfall leaves Minh with a bitter sense of what the future will bring. Their lives are completely thrown into disarray when Mai’s sister Khanh is killed by a stray bullet. Mai goes mute, while Minh and his wife Quy eventually grow apart. The situation in the country continues to deteriorate, while Cao puts to effective use the tense period of the Tet Offensive to show how badly things are going for the South Vietnamese and the American military. The story of Mai and Minh during the war appears to alternate to the present moment in which Minh lives in Virginia and is being taking care of by Mrs. An, a woman who has come to be a part of Minh’s extended family. Mrs. An and Minh are part of a hui, a rotating money club, which has come to some disagreement over the ways that funds are being used and handled. Mrs. An in particular is having trouble with her monthly payments, which becomes a source of contention between Minh and Mai, who is a grown adult, but still suffering from what might be called psychotic breaks linked backed to the war. Perhaps, the most effective and original element of Cao’s novel is a kind of surprise narrative move (something that reminded me of Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth) about halfway through the novel that discursively shows us exactly what kind of state Mai is still in as an adult and how there are still so many things that these narrators are not telling us. The withholding by these narrators does create some momentum issues, especially because it takes quite a bit of time before we start to see what is going on underneath these characters and how unstable the psychic landscape has been for them both. Cao’s novel is impressive in its panoramic descriptive force, but the novel will ultimately require patience, especially in the first 100 pages. There are numerous late-stage revelations that make the reading experience quite an emotional rollercoaster and by the time you make it to page 300, you’ll be reading the final hundred or so pages at a lightning speed, trying to figure out how the novel will resolve its many loose ends. To be sure, Cao doesn’t wrap everything up too neatly, but a surprise appearance in the final forty pages is an interesting and perhaps debatable choice, especially with how that particular plot plays out. As the narrative accrues its many textures, the eventual result is a novel with an outstanding representational intervention in the links between the individual and the social, trauma and its aftermath, Vietnam and America. A must-read for fans of American and Asian American literature, war epics, and those interested in representations of psychic instability!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lotus-Storm-A-Novel/dp/0670016926/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408118982&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lotus+and+the+storm
A Review of Tania Malik’s Three Bargains (WW Norton, 2014).
Tania Malik’s debut Three Bargains was a novel that I had highly anticipated; it received a very early listing on amazon. As with many other works set in India, this novel deals with both class and caste and follows a character of humble origins as he must engage his perilous subjective and social positioning. Our ostensible protagonist (told in the third person) is Madan, a young boy, with one sister (Swati). His father, a sort of bodyguard and thug, and his mother, a maidservant are both employed by a man of great means and power, Aavtar Singh. Aavtar, for whatever reason, takes a very early liking to Madan, especially because in an early meeting between Aavtar and Madan’s father, Aavtar realizes that Madan can read some English (ah, the colonial influence at all social levels). Madan is to be enrolled in a local school, The Gorapur Academy, which will be funded by Aavtar himself. This turn of events is certainly fortuitous, as Madan’s mother seems to think, but from here, things begin to go downhill. Madan’s father increasingly becomes unreliable at work to the extent that Aavtar gives him an ultimatum to improve his performance or suffer serious consequences. Both Madan’s mother and Madan realize what a dire predicament they are in; if Madan’s father cannot be relied upon, then they all may be booted out into the street. When Madan’s father ends up selling off Swati in a sort of child marriage in order to cover some debts, Madan makes a desperate plea to Aavtar to do anything to get Swati back, even if it means an irreparable action against Madan’s father. Swati is found in a tragic condition, having been raped and sexually assaulted; and Madan’s father is assumed to have been killed off as part of what we might call one of the “bargains” of the title. From this point forward, it becomes evident that Madan is a kind of surrogate son figure. He comes to learn much about the finances of Aavtar’s estate and increasingly acts as in a footman’s capacity to the elites that populate the area. Madan soon becomes infatuated by a young woman named Neha, who is of the elite background; their affair is no doubt illicit given their class and caste differences, and when they are found out (with Neha being pregnant no less), Madan is forced to leave Gorapur behind him, with many assuming he has been killed off by Singh’s henchman. Instead, he’s subsisting in New Delhi, until he makes a fortuitous connection with an aspiring businessman. Together, they forge a great business empire, so huge that they have the ability to create modern megacities, one of which will be taking over the Gorapur area. Yes, Madan’s ultimate aim is to undermine the power that Aavtar Singh possesses over his own ancestral homeland, a kind of revenge we might say for Madan’s expulsion from Gorapur and the fact that he had to leave behind his family, a possible wife (Neha), and the child she bore, which was taken away by a Singh’s religious advisor. This section is the part that stretches the most credulity, only insofar as the time span is compressed, and we wonder how Madan and his business partner actually did manage to succeed in so many different business ventures (hotels, apparel, construction, etc). Nevertheless, the final sequence brings many threads together and reminds me very much of Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm, precisely because the novel requires some patience: the late stage revelations are poignant and the lessons (for Madan) hard-earned. There’s an interesting meta-discursive moment when Madan actually tells someone else the story of his own life, something that then contrasts against the third person narration that Malik has used up until that point, and we begin to see how a character might have seen his own trajectory, independent of this omniscient entity who follows him. Malik grants a very antagonistic character a much more contoured concluding depiction, but I predict some readers may balk at the rapprochement that is ultimately staged. Of course, the novel does dovetail with the serious issues still plaguing India in its move to modernization. Indeed, even as Madan ascends to an incredibly high social position given his successful business ventures, it is apparent that the incredible wealth disparities between the rich and the poor remain. One wonders about what good Madan could do with all of his affluence for those who might have started off in the same position as he did as a young child. Malik’s debut is poignant and multitextured.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Bargains-Novel-Tania-Malik/dp/0393063402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=T
A Review of Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (Arsenal Pulp, 2014)
Tom Cho’s debut, Look Who’s Morphing, is a loosely linked story/ vignette collection that is perhaps the most funky, weird, psychedelic read of 2014 (or perhaps of the new millennium, at least for me). The title is a gesture to the ways that characters in these stories are constantly taking on costumes (literal or metaphorical or allegorical) and assuming different identities and subjective positions. While in and of itself, this conceit might not seem so strange or different, Cho will occasionally drop in the random cultural reference or action that will not necessarily make all that much sense, but contributes to a sense of comedy in the narratives. For instance, in “The Exorcist,” the main character and his aunt are thrown together in a confrontation with evil when the aunt happens upon an apron to which fake breasts are attached. There’s something wrong with this apron—not only fashion-wise obviously—but because it causes the aunt to be demonically possessed. Yes, my friends, the aunt ultimately channels some Linda Blair, but fortunately, the main character has some help and is able to discern that the aunt needs to get the apron off in order to be “cured.” This story is just one of many in which a popular cultural reference becomes the grounds of a funky narrative, but of course, Cho is also working more metaphorically: the aunt’s desire to be someone else is, we might say, another way of exploring the obsessions that a given person might have to be someone else. If there is a culmination of weirdness, an acme of the truly queer, it occurs during the last two stories, which are fortunately longer than most of the others. Were you expecting the protagonist to morph into Godzilla, to ravage his hometown, to eat a vegetable garden, and then get a bad gastrointestinal experience? Well, probably not. Oh, and then, there’s the sequence where the protagonist becomes a sort of “rock cock god,” and makes a name for himself in Tokyo. As a giant-sized rock cock star, he has his set of female groupies. In an ingenious riffing off of Gulliver’s Travels, he is at one point tied down, only to be subjected to sexual acts by these diminutive groupies, who are of course insatiable. The one thing that Cho keeps coming back to in all of these stories seems to be one underlying theme: you are what you perform and that what you desire says as much about you as the way you actually look. While this message certainly contains gravitas as it is represented in this collection, the social contexts that ground so many of these stories are rooted in social difference, and we also understand the desire to be something else can be influenced by the desire to be nearer to something normative, to be closer to a center of power, and so we understand that desire is itself the issue: why is it that I desire to be that thing? My one critique of this collection is that many of the stories do not gain narrative force because they are simply too short and because the characters and events that do appear are so compelling, the readers simply want more. Look Who’s Morphing comes off as a prose poetry work because you’re spending time trying to figure out the metaphorical resonances of each plot twist or turn: why did the character morph into this particular figure? why must the story be set in Tokyo? Such questions encourage you to revisit the work again to try to make sense of what seems nonsensical, to have some fun with such a whimsical story collection. Biographies state that the Asian Australian writer Cho is working a novel (YAY!) and we can be sure to expect the unexpected.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Look-Whos-Morphing-Tom-Cho/dp/1551525380
A Review of Anita Nair’s A Cut-Like Wound (Bitter Lemon Press, 2014).
In a world of strange coincidences, I read Anita Nair’s A Cut-like Wound just after finishing a television series about a serial killer (the outstanding and incredibly dark True Detective). Nair’s newest publication is also about a serial killer, but in this case, it would seem to be a transgender woman named Bhuvana who finds unsuspecting men, hits them over the head with a blunt object, then strangles and slices their necks using a ligature. On the case is a washed up investigator named Gowda and his newly hired underling, Santosh. Though the two have a less than stellar connection, they realize that they must find some sort of synergy if they are to find out the identity of this killer. Nair uses a relatively interesting mode of ironic storytelling: the readers know immediately more information concerning the serial killer than Gowda and Santosh do, so we are propelled by our desire for Gowda and Santosh to come to the conclusions that have already been made apparent to us, but Nair also uses an effective doubling technique within the novel which makes it unclear as to the final and actual identity of Bhuvana. Indeed, because there are a number of genderqueer and queer individuals who occupy the novel and because we’re not sure who may be performing as one gender or another, our suspicions are also motivating us to race to the finish. Nair rounds out the story with the human interest and romance plot angles: Gowda, for instance, is a family man, trying somehow to be a good influence on his son, while also trying to navigate the re-emergence of a former flame, Urmila, who presents herself as available even though she, too, is married. The most intriguing discourse (at least from my perspective) that Nair conjures up in this fascinating novel is of course the question of queer representation, especially in Indian context. Bhuvana is made out to be something different than her hijra counterparts, but Nair is clearly attempting to navigate a complicated line: on the one hand, depicting a marginalized community with a full-fledged understanding of their complicated social positioning, but also, employing that same community as the location from which a serial killer originates. Given the long association of queers with social deviance, this relationship is particularly thorny and Nair’s backstory for our serial killer gestures to nature of social inequality as it appears through the paradigm of caste, class, and sexuality. Another interesting element in relation to the narrative is the use of the word “eunuchs” to demarcate the presence of hijras. Here, eunuchs take on a connotative significance in Indian context that is different from here in the West. Whereas there is tendency to think of the eunuch as someone who has been physically castrated, Nair clearly uses the term in reference to individuals who identify as “third sex” in India, men who are not necessarily castrated, but who are more likened to a positionality of genderqueerness. Additionally, the structure of the police system in India was a little bit difficult for me to wrap my head around, but Nair has obviously done her homework here, as we discover that there is a chain of command through which Gowda must operate, even if it means he must occasionally hold back on hunches and leads. Gowda is represented as a figure who is sort of in a mid-life crisis and the case of the serial killer provides him with a sense of purpose and calling that clarifies what is most important to him. Finally, as a genre based work, Nair is firmly in control of the detective plot, so fans of the murder mystery will be highly compelled to pick up this work.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/A-Cut-Like-Wound-Anita-Nair/dp/1908524367/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409792838&sr=8-1&keywords=anita+nair
For more on Bitter Lemon Press:
http://www.bitterlemonpress.com/
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of Steph Cha’s Beware Beware (Minotaur Books, 2014); Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm (Viking Adult, 2014); Tania Malik’s Three Bargains (WW Norton, 2014); Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (Arsenal Pulp, 2014); A Cut-Like Wound (Bitter Lemon Press, 2014).
A Review of Steph Cha’s Beware Beware (Minotaur Books, 2014).
Again, I failed to hold off on reading a book that I was saving for a rainy day. This time it was Steph Cha’s Beware Beware, which is the follow-up to Follow Her Home. In Follow her Home (reviewed earlier here), Cha created a wonderful noir-ish heroine with Juniper Song, who falls into an unofficial investigation, which ends up getting increasingly complicated, so much so that the body count includes one of her closest friends. In Beware Beware, Song has gone more official; she’s an intern now working with an actual investigatory team, which includes her boss Chaz and another supervisor Arturo. Song is finally put on her own case, which involves her scoping out a woman’s boyfriend to see if he is cheating on her, and if he is into dealing drugs. The woman, Daphne Freamon, a semi-famous painter who is African American, simply wants more information about what her boyfriend, Jamie Landon, does with all of his time, especially when he seems to disappear for days. As Song discovers, Jamie doesn’t do much but hang out with an aging, but still well-known Hollywood movie star named Joe Tilley. But when Joe Tilley is discovered by Jamie with his wrists slashed after a night of hard partying and Song is the first person to come upon the crime scene after being alerted to the goings-on by Daphne, the novel shifts into high gear. Did Jamie kill Joe, perhaps in a drug-fueled haze? If not Jamie, who would have the motive? Could it be Joe’s son from an earlier marriage? Could it be an ex-wife? Song is up for the challenge to investigate and indeed is hired by Daphne to look into the possibility that Jamie may have been set up. Cha adds a very important subplot early on involving the daughter of one of the murderer’s from her debut. Indeed, Song has moved in with Lori, the young Korean American woman who Song had “followed” home in the first part of the series. Lori’s life has turned around and she even has a promising new Korean boyfriend named Isaac, but her connection with her uncle Taejin creates more complications. Indeed, after visiting him at his auto shop, she bumps into a Korean thug Winfred, and Taejin cautions her to treat this man very nicely. Of course, Winfred becomes more menacing. As Lori maintains a fragile line between flirtation and friendship, thing soon things escalate. As the central plot involving the murder resolves, both Song and her boss Chaz realize the improbability of the scenario that eventually plays out, but even as the mystery plot seems both complicated and hardly feasible (with so much premeditation that your head may be swimming), Cha’s handle on the core genre element of detection is top-notch. Indeed, you are effectively pulled into this labyrinthine narrative precisely because of the desire to know. The threads all do resolve in one way or another and the noir-ish ending shows us how murky the line between heroes and villains can be. Cha continues to draw upon the rich Los Angeles noir tradition. Last time I mentioned Walter Mosley and I couldn’t help but think about the femme fatale in that plot, Daphne Monet, who seems to have certain parallels to Daphne Freamon in Cha’s novel. I also really enjoyed Cha’s movement more firmly into the Hollywood film industry here, which allows Cha to delve into some different spaces than the last novel, which focused more Korean ethnic subcultures. Another winning installment in the Juniper Song series, and we’ll hope for many more.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Beware-Juniper-Song-Mystery-Mysteries/dp/1250049016/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408030966&sr=8-1&keywords=steph+cha
A Review of Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm (Viking Adult, 2014).
Lan Cao leaves the first novelist’s club (the ones remaining that I keep wondering about are Brian Ascalon Roley and le thi diem thuy, both writers that I hope have something still cooking) with The Lotus and the Storm, a war epic in line with the work of Tan Twan Eng and Roma Tearne, especially with respect to its sweep, scope, and pathos. Given the ever-growing body of literature devoted to representations of the Vietnam War, Cao continues to delve into the psychic aftermath for those who still continue to suffer in the wake of a country’s long history with foreign rulers, invasions, and occupations. The story is primarily told between two alternating narrators: there is Mai, who in 1963, is just a young girl, who is growing up in the very long shadow of war and foreign occupation; and then there is Minh, Mai’s father, who is a colonel in the South Vietnamese army. The French have left the country with their tails behind them, while the Americans are rolling in and increasing their presence. The president, Diem Bien Phu, has just been overthrown by a military coup, which has not been supported by Minh. Minh is able to escape from the fallout of his dissension with the support of a close friend, Phong, but the realization that his country is moving in a direction that portends its eventual downfall leaves Minh with a bitter sense of what the future will bring. Their lives are completely thrown into disarray when Mai’s sister Khanh is killed by a stray bullet. Mai goes mute, while Minh and his wife Quy eventually grow apart. The situation in the country continues to deteriorate, while Cao puts to effective use the tense period of the Tet Offensive to show how badly things are going for the South Vietnamese and the American military. The story of Mai and Minh during the war appears to alternate to the present moment in which Minh lives in Virginia and is being taking care of by Mrs. An, a woman who has come to be a part of Minh’s extended family. Mrs. An and Minh are part of a hui, a rotating money club, which has come to some disagreement over the ways that funds are being used and handled. Mrs. An in particular is having trouble with her monthly payments, which becomes a source of contention between Minh and Mai, who is a grown adult, but still suffering from what might be called psychotic breaks linked backed to the war. Perhaps, the most effective and original element of Cao’s novel is a kind of surprise narrative move (something that reminded me of Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth) about halfway through the novel that discursively shows us exactly what kind of state Mai is still in as an adult and how there are still so many things that these narrators are not telling us. The withholding by these narrators does create some momentum issues, especially because it takes quite a bit of time before we start to see what is going on underneath these characters and how unstable the psychic landscape has been for them both. Cao’s novel is impressive in its panoramic descriptive force, but the novel will ultimately require patience, especially in the first 100 pages. There are numerous late-stage revelations that make the reading experience quite an emotional rollercoaster and by the time you make it to page 300, you’ll be reading the final hundred or so pages at a lightning speed, trying to figure out how the novel will resolve its many loose ends. To be sure, Cao doesn’t wrap everything up too neatly, but a surprise appearance in the final forty pages is an interesting and perhaps debatable choice, especially with how that particular plot plays out. As the narrative accrues its many textures, the eventual result is a novel with an outstanding representational intervention in the links between the individual and the social, trauma and its aftermath, Vietnam and America. A must-read for fans of American and Asian American literature, war epics, and those interested in representations of psychic instability!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lotus-Storm-A-Novel/dp/0670016926/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408118982&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lotus+and+the+storm
A Review of Tania Malik’s Three Bargains (WW Norton, 2014).
Tania Malik’s debut Three Bargains was a novel that I had highly anticipated; it received a very early listing on amazon. As with many other works set in India, this novel deals with both class and caste and follows a character of humble origins as he must engage his perilous subjective and social positioning. Our ostensible protagonist (told in the third person) is Madan, a young boy, with one sister (Swati). His father, a sort of bodyguard and thug, and his mother, a maidservant are both employed by a man of great means and power, Aavtar Singh. Aavtar, for whatever reason, takes a very early liking to Madan, especially because in an early meeting between Aavtar and Madan’s father, Aavtar realizes that Madan can read some English (ah, the colonial influence at all social levels). Madan is to be enrolled in a local school, The Gorapur Academy, which will be funded by Aavtar himself. This turn of events is certainly fortuitous, as Madan’s mother seems to think, but from here, things begin to go downhill. Madan’s father increasingly becomes unreliable at work to the extent that Aavtar gives him an ultimatum to improve his performance or suffer serious consequences. Both Madan’s mother and Madan realize what a dire predicament they are in; if Madan’s father cannot be relied upon, then they all may be booted out into the street. When Madan’s father ends up selling off Swati in a sort of child marriage in order to cover some debts, Madan makes a desperate plea to Aavtar to do anything to get Swati back, even if it means an irreparable action against Madan’s father. Swati is found in a tragic condition, having been raped and sexually assaulted; and Madan’s father is assumed to have been killed off as part of what we might call one of the “bargains” of the title. From this point forward, it becomes evident that Madan is a kind of surrogate son figure. He comes to learn much about the finances of Aavtar’s estate and increasingly acts as in a footman’s capacity to the elites that populate the area. Madan soon becomes infatuated by a young woman named Neha, who is of the elite background; their affair is no doubt illicit given their class and caste differences, and when they are found out (with Neha being pregnant no less), Madan is forced to leave Gorapur behind him, with many assuming he has been killed off by Singh’s henchman. Instead, he’s subsisting in New Delhi, until he makes a fortuitous connection with an aspiring businessman. Together, they forge a great business empire, so huge that they have the ability to create modern megacities, one of which will be taking over the Gorapur area. Yes, Madan’s ultimate aim is to undermine the power that Aavtar Singh possesses over his own ancestral homeland, a kind of revenge we might say for Madan’s expulsion from Gorapur and the fact that he had to leave behind his family, a possible wife (Neha), and the child she bore, which was taken away by a Singh’s religious advisor. This section is the part that stretches the most credulity, only insofar as the time span is compressed, and we wonder how Madan and his business partner actually did manage to succeed in so many different business ventures (hotels, apparel, construction, etc). Nevertheless, the final sequence brings many threads together and reminds me very much of Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm, precisely because the novel requires some patience: the late stage revelations are poignant and the lessons (for Madan) hard-earned. There’s an interesting meta-discursive moment when Madan actually tells someone else the story of his own life, something that then contrasts against the third person narration that Malik has used up until that point, and we begin to see how a character might have seen his own trajectory, independent of this omniscient entity who follows him. Malik grants a very antagonistic character a much more contoured concluding depiction, but I predict some readers may balk at the rapprochement that is ultimately staged. Of course, the novel does dovetail with the serious issues still plaguing India in its move to modernization. Indeed, even as Madan ascends to an incredibly high social position given his successful business ventures, it is apparent that the incredible wealth disparities between the rich and the poor remain. One wonders about what good Madan could do with all of his affluence for those who might have started off in the same position as he did as a young child. Malik’s debut is poignant and multitextured.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Bargains-Novel-Tania-Malik/dp/0393063402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=T
A Review of Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (Arsenal Pulp, 2014)
Tom Cho’s debut, Look Who’s Morphing, is a loosely linked story/ vignette collection that is perhaps the most funky, weird, psychedelic read of 2014 (or perhaps of the new millennium, at least for me). The title is a gesture to the ways that characters in these stories are constantly taking on costumes (literal or metaphorical or allegorical) and assuming different identities and subjective positions. While in and of itself, this conceit might not seem so strange or different, Cho will occasionally drop in the random cultural reference or action that will not necessarily make all that much sense, but contributes to a sense of comedy in the narratives. For instance, in “The Exorcist,” the main character and his aunt are thrown together in a confrontation with evil when the aunt happens upon an apron to which fake breasts are attached. There’s something wrong with this apron—not only fashion-wise obviously—but because it causes the aunt to be demonically possessed. Yes, my friends, the aunt ultimately channels some Linda Blair, but fortunately, the main character has some help and is able to discern that the aunt needs to get the apron off in order to be “cured.” This story is just one of many in which a popular cultural reference becomes the grounds of a funky narrative, but of course, Cho is also working more metaphorically: the aunt’s desire to be someone else is, we might say, another way of exploring the obsessions that a given person might have to be someone else. If there is a culmination of weirdness, an acme of the truly queer, it occurs during the last two stories, which are fortunately longer than most of the others. Were you expecting the protagonist to morph into Godzilla, to ravage his hometown, to eat a vegetable garden, and then get a bad gastrointestinal experience? Well, probably not. Oh, and then, there’s the sequence where the protagonist becomes a sort of “rock cock god,” and makes a name for himself in Tokyo. As a giant-sized rock cock star, he has his set of female groupies. In an ingenious riffing off of Gulliver’s Travels, he is at one point tied down, only to be subjected to sexual acts by these diminutive groupies, who are of course insatiable. The one thing that Cho keeps coming back to in all of these stories seems to be one underlying theme: you are what you perform and that what you desire says as much about you as the way you actually look. While this message certainly contains gravitas as it is represented in this collection, the social contexts that ground so many of these stories are rooted in social difference, and we also understand the desire to be something else can be influenced by the desire to be nearer to something normative, to be closer to a center of power, and so we understand that desire is itself the issue: why is it that I desire to be that thing? My one critique of this collection is that many of the stories do not gain narrative force because they are simply too short and because the characters and events that do appear are so compelling, the readers simply want more. Look Who’s Morphing comes off as a prose poetry work because you’re spending time trying to figure out the metaphorical resonances of each plot twist or turn: why did the character morph into this particular figure? why must the story be set in Tokyo? Such questions encourage you to revisit the work again to try to make sense of what seems nonsensical, to have some fun with such a whimsical story collection. Biographies state that the Asian Australian writer Cho is working a novel (YAY!) and we can be sure to expect the unexpected.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Look-Whos-Morphing-Tom-Cho/dp/1551525380
A Review of Anita Nair’s A Cut-Like Wound (Bitter Lemon Press, 2014).
In a world of strange coincidences, I read Anita Nair’s A Cut-like Wound just after finishing a television series about a serial killer (the outstanding and incredibly dark True Detective). Nair’s newest publication is also about a serial killer, but in this case, it would seem to be a transgender woman named Bhuvana who finds unsuspecting men, hits them over the head with a blunt object, then strangles and slices their necks using a ligature. On the case is a washed up investigator named Gowda and his newly hired underling, Santosh. Though the two have a less than stellar connection, they realize that they must find some sort of synergy if they are to find out the identity of this killer. Nair uses a relatively interesting mode of ironic storytelling: the readers know immediately more information concerning the serial killer than Gowda and Santosh do, so we are propelled by our desire for Gowda and Santosh to come to the conclusions that have already been made apparent to us, but Nair also uses an effective doubling technique within the novel which makes it unclear as to the final and actual identity of Bhuvana. Indeed, because there are a number of genderqueer and queer individuals who occupy the novel and because we’re not sure who may be performing as one gender or another, our suspicions are also motivating us to race to the finish. Nair rounds out the story with the human interest and romance plot angles: Gowda, for instance, is a family man, trying somehow to be a good influence on his son, while also trying to navigate the re-emergence of a former flame, Urmila, who presents herself as available even though she, too, is married. The most intriguing discourse (at least from my perspective) that Nair conjures up in this fascinating novel is of course the question of queer representation, especially in Indian context. Bhuvana is made out to be something different than her hijra counterparts, but Nair is clearly attempting to navigate a complicated line: on the one hand, depicting a marginalized community with a full-fledged understanding of their complicated social positioning, but also, employing that same community as the location from which a serial killer originates. Given the long association of queers with social deviance, this relationship is particularly thorny and Nair’s backstory for our serial killer gestures to nature of social inequality as it appears through the paradigm of caste, class, and sexuality. Another interesting element in relation to the narrative is the use of the word “eunuchs” to demarcate the presence of hijras. Here, eunuchs take on a connotative significance in Indian context that is different from here in the West. Whereas there is tendency to think of the eunuch as someone who has been physically castrated, Nair clearly uses the term in reference to individuals who identify as “third sex” in India, men who are not necessarily castrated, but who are more likened to a positionality of genderqueerness. Additionally, the structure of the police system in India was a little bit difficult for me to wrap my head around, but Nair has obviously done her homework here, as we discover that there is a chain of command through which Gowda must operate, even if it means he must occasionally hold back on hunches and leads. Gowda is represented as a figure who is sort of in a mid-life crisis and the case of the serial killer provides him with a sense of purpose and calling that clarifies what is most important to him. Finally, as a genre based work, Nair is firmly in control of the detective plot, so fans of the murder mystery will be highly compelled to pick up this work.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/A-Cut-Like-Wound-Anita-Nair/dp/1908524367/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409792838&sr=8-1&keywords=anita+nair
For more on Bitter Lemon Press:
http://www.bitterlemonpress.com/
September 7, 2014
Small/ Independent Press Spotlights: Transit Lounge (Australia) and Digital Fabulists (U.S.)
Small/ Independent Press Spotlights (September 7, 2014): Transit Lounge (Australia) and Digital Fabulists (United States)
I’ve been trying to focus my readings on some new publishers and this small press spotlights considers Transit Lounge (Australia) and Digital Fabulists (United States). Here are links to these two publishers so you can get a sense of their full catalogues:
http://www.transitlounge.com.au/
http://digitalfabulists.com/
Transit Lounge is particularly of interest to us because it focuses on publishing work that queries the interconnectedness between the East and West. Digital Fabulists, on the other hand, is part of the growing wave of publishing devoted to the electronic market. I still haven’t managed to warm up entirely to e-books, but I can understand especially their utility. Imagine having your entire library based in a kindle: easiest moving experience ever. Here, I should probably link a picture from my office before I had to move:
Finally, I am reviewing a suite of books from these publishers. What I especially appreciate about these independent publishers is their ability to put out bold and exciting works, ones without traditional plotlines, character constructions, or discursive formations. It is this kind of freedom that makes such publishers innovative, and we would hope that there would continue to be a nice balance between more commercial publishers and ones such as these.
Without further ado, some reviews!
In this post reviews of: Cyril Wong’s Let Me Tell You Something about That Night: Strange Tales (with illustrations by Jason Wing) (Transit Lounge, 2009); Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official (Transit Lounge, 2014); Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (Transit Lounge, 2013); Isaac Ho’s Hell is Full of Strippers (Digital Fabulists, 2012); Isaac Ho's The Repatriation of Henry Chin (Digital Fabulists, 2011).
A Review of Cyril Wong’s Let Me Tell You Something about That Night: Strange Tales (with illustrations by Jason Wing) (Transit Lounge, 2009).
(Singapore cover edition)
(low res, u.s. edition)
Let Me Tell You Something About that Night is one of the few publications by Cyril Wong that you can acquire stateside. Though Wong is quite well known in Singapore and has published a number of poetry collections, his work has not achieved much recognition in the United States quite yet. In Let Me Tell You Something about That Night, Wong dials up the weird factor and never lets up. The subtitle “strange tales” gestures to the fact that these are variations of whimsical fairy tales, certainly informed by Hans Christian Anderson or the Grimm Brothers rather than say Disney-ified princess narratives. In the first story, “The Lake Children,” a husband and wife lose their daughter in a tragic accident; she drowns after falling through the ice of a frozen lake. In the wake of her death, the couple find themselves growing apart. One day, the bereaved wife decides that she will go to the same lake where her daughter died and try to get to the very spot where she fell through. We’re of course a little bit afraid for her and apparently with good reason, because she, too, falls through the ice, but what happens next you would not expect: a set of strange children sporting fins, swim over to the wife, then proceed to consume her until she is disembodied, at which point she floats through the air. She looks upon her husband before sort of dissipating out of existence. Who were those strange children who ate her? Were they the result of some sort of near-death hallucination occurring as her body succumbed to the cold and to the water? There are no answers and Wong quickly takes us into the next strange story, “The Blind Girl & the Talking Moon,” which as you might expect involves a blind girl and a relationship to a talking moon. The blind girl is raised by two mothers, a fact that is secondary to the connection the blind girl develops with the moon, who is a sort of support system in difficult times. The queer motherhood depicted in “The Blind Girl & the Talking Moon,” as well as the rather strange children with fins who appear in the first story set up the rest of the collection quite well. There are lots of transformations that occur all throughout the collection: an elf into a human woman, a butterfly into a bunny who later becomes a bear who later becomes a human woman, two women in an elevator who seem to transform into goddesses with wings who then kiss each other. There are other supernatural things and beings littered across the collection: ogres and dragon princes, caves that cause one to go back to a single point in time and over and over again, a little boy who can see how a person will look like just before they die, and another strange boy who is apparently born with a flower growing out of his anus. Underlying all stories seems to be the issue of queerness in all of its potential metaphorical iterations and the questions: how do strange people and strange things in strange worlds find love and companionship, a sense of family or achieve a sense of resolution? Such questions are ultimately not so strange as Wong makes apparent. Indeed, all the fairy tales he has constructed are simply veiled considerations of illicit love affairs, unrequited romances, tales of suffering and torment, and other such relationship complications that are compounded when one is already considered to be sexually perverse or deviant. Thus, when the elf falls in love with the human knight, the one who is already wooing a fetching young woman, we’ll understand his anguish, but Wong doesn’t let clichés crop up in his approach. In a later story, we’ll discover that the elf, so utterly smitten with the knight, ends up torching the home of the young woman, killing her and her father. Then, he takes what’s left of her body—her head in this case—and approaches a witch in the hopes that she’ll transform him into a human. Then, he is able to go into the king’s palace as this woman and wake up the knight, who is actually a prince, because he has fallen into a deep slumber. The elf-as-human woman’s kiss wakes the prince and they live happily ever after, the fact of the murder of the woman never cropping up again. The prince gets to be sleeping beauty and well, the murderous elf, he gets to be the hero he always wanted to be. And we, the readers, smile elliptically at such queerly, heteromorphic stories.
Buy the book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Something-About-That-Night/dp/0980571715/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407532403&sr=8-1&keywords=cyril+wong
A Review of Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official (Transit Lounge, 2014).
Well, I’m not sure where to begin exactly with Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official. Perhaps, it’s best to start with the assumption that you’ll likely either love or hate this book, as it is certainly meant to provoke a strong reaction to readers. Diary of a Naked Official is what we might call a novel of ideas, with a narrative that really masks as a trenchant social critique of contemporary Chinese society, its movement toward a form of decadent capitalism, and the development of hypersexuality in an age of increasing alienation and apathy. The back cover provides some key information about the title as a “naked official” is apparently a term for an individual who “buys a permanent resident status for his wife and daughter in the West” while he stays behind in China. The “West” in this novel is figured as Australia and the naked official works as the “deputy director of a publishing company in a nameless city in China.” In this position, he is certainly corrupted in all ways: he embezzles, and he routinely rejects manuscripts he thinks are worthy on the literary level while favoring commercial ventures. His personal life is an endless morass of sexual encounters. In fact, it seems as if most of the novel depicts graphic encounters with the various random women, prostitutes, and other sex workers with whom the protagonist engages. This novel is not for the faint of heart: this protagonist comes off as particularly unsavory, so if you’re looking to sympathize with the main character, you should look to another book. But, if you’re interested in a more elliptical critique of contemporary Chinese society, you won’t find a more incisive example. Yu fully commits to the extremities of this character, who knows no limits to sexual hunger or to corruption and will continually succumb to his most basest instincts, because apparently, he lives in a society that supports such actions. Indeed, it is a society that seems to encourage it. The novel is not unlike Annie Wang’s The People’s Republic of Desire (reviewed earlier) in its focus on characters who cannot seem to find a moral center, even though they seem to desire it. If there is a critique to be made of this particular novel, it’s that the diary form lends itself to a kind of fragmentation and circularity that makes some of the sexual encounters seem monotonous. Certainly, that is Yu’s point per se, but this kind of representation tests the patience of the reader, even as it enacts and models the very foundations the excoriating critique being offered.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Naked-Official-Ouyang-Yu-ebook/dp/B00K24Q9IG (kindle edition)
A Review of Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (Transit Lounge, 2013)
I was immediately startled by Michele Lee’s Banana Girl, as it sort of posed a reversal in gendered perspective from Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official. In this case, the individual engaging a number of sexual escapades is the memoirist and creative nonfiction writer Michele Lee, whose work ends up reading as a kind of diary-esque log of personal experiences growing up and living in Australia, as the child of immigrants of Hmong background. Michele’s status as a self-proclaimed “banana girl,” is a nod to her belief that she is intimately Westernized and doesn’t necessarily identify as an immigrant or as an Asian. Yet, Michele’s title is much more ironic than it might seem or as it is portrayed in the narrative space precisely because she is more than willing to engage aspects of her ethnic and racial background as a way to understand her mutitextured identities. Michele is engaged in the theater arts and is a playwright. In between her dating travails, anonymous and “no strings attached” sexual encounters and ongoing sexual escapades, there is a longer narrative concerning an arts grant that will take her back to Laos, where she will do some fieldwork that will help inspire and inform her future creative endeavors. The memoir opens with about five weeks before she leaves and one of the most striking narrative threads that will appear throughout is the question of intimacy and desire that surfaces in the wake of sexual dalliances. A trip to Auckland to meet a named nicknamed only as Jackie Winchester ends up going badly, with Jackie deciding that the two should just be friends (of course, this designation occurs after they have had sex). Michele comes to realize that her expectations of men can shift, especially because she had desired so much more from this man, who had presented himself as much more than a random lay. Their connection from this point remains tentative, and Michele attempts to figure out why she is so tortured about this man. One of the most playful aspects of this memoir is Michele’s usage of nicknames for individuals, like her exes (one is called Husband) or her sexual partners (Cub; Mr. Mercedes). For all of Michele’s belief in her Westernization, it is often her dealings with Laos itself that come off as the most vivid, the desire to understand a past that cannot be experientially accessed it itself something that drives this memoir into a higher register in the sections that deal with this country and its tortured history and mobile inhabitants. Though the memoir suffers abrupt shifts in temporality and has a meandering quality, the author is so assuredly direct that you can’t help but keep reading. Indeed, there were moments where I was not expecting the author to go so squarely in a particular direction. One of the most humorous sequences for me occurs very close to the conclusion and it involves the memoirist and another person watching a set of youtube videos of individuals basically doing outrageous, ridiculous, or gross things. There is nothing necessarily groundbreaking about this part of the memoir, but I was not prepared for the author to delve into so much detail about what she was seeing, but that’s precisely the brilliance of this work. It takes you there and then goes further.
For another similarly themed book on sexuality and gender (but from the male perspective), please also see David Mura’s Where the Body Meets Memory; Alex Tizon’s Big Little Man.
For another book on Hmong ethnic contexts (from the American perspective), please see
Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer.
For More information about Banana Girl and where to buy go here:
http://www.transitlounge.com.au/
A Review of Isaac Ho’s Hell is Full of Strippers (Digital Fabulists, 2012); The Repatriation of Henry Chin (Digital Fabulists, 2011).
Isaac Ho definitely should win an award for Hell is Full of Strippers, a novella (maybe a novelette), simply based upon its hilarious title. This slim fictional work follows the adventures of an unnamed young man who gets himself into all sorts of trouble. The story begins with the main character realizing that his affection for a woman named Sharyn is not being returned. He seeks solace at a strip club called The Old Cameltoe (another outrageous name). Once there, he receives an unforgettable lap dance with a woman named Sable, a woman who bears a strong, but not exact resemblance to Sharyn. The main character finds his job as an IT employee rather unfulfilling and his life takes an even darker turn when he is served legal papers by Sharyn: she has filed a temporary restraining order on him, based on events that took place on the very night that he had that fateful lap dance with Sable. Thus the novel turns into a sort of quest plot, as the main character desperately tries to locate Sable, who would be able to prove that the narrator was somewhere else other than harassing Sharyn. Along the way, we know he’s going to get more lap dances and meet more strippers, drink more booze and get into more trouble. By the conclusion to the novel, it’s clear that Ho has been setting us up for awhile through the lens of an unreliable narrator. Certainly not in the vein of Ishiguro, but nonetheless, Hell is Full of Strippers offers the kind of unreliable perspective where everything is obviously distorted through the eyes of someone who could drink less and exercise more. The political conceit of the novel seems more difficult to pin down. Certainly, the women that the main character meets possess a kind of depth that escapes full characterization because everything is focalized through this male figure. If Hell is Full of Strippers is a veiled social satire, it seems to function from a kind of postmodern critique in which meaning and ethics are constantly shifting. The regular-ish main character, even in his rather ribald and unadorned depictions of sex acts, seems like a sad target for all that befalls him, but even his buffoonery does not grant him much readerly empathy. Finally, it’s clear that the man has an interest in marking the social differences in the women he meets, but he himself is not identified in any way (racially or ethnically). What becomes apparent is that we do not actually know too much about the main character’s personal life (at least in terms of his own history and beyond his relationship with Sharyn), which leaves us swimming on the surface of things, living on the superficial veneer that speaks to the “hell” of this character’s life. This book coincidentally dovetails very much with the above titles by transit lounge concerning sex and social critique.
As a last note, Isaac Ho’s work is being published by Digital Fabulists, part of a new incarnation of press’s that are particularly attuned to the e-market. I was able to get my hands on a physical copy and I just wanted to state that there is still a clear attention to the highest production qualities and editing that must come with the material book! For more information about Digital Fabulists, go here:
http://digitalfabulists.com/
Their entire list seems eclectic, with an obvious interest in speculative fictions!
But back to reviewing. In The Repatriation of Henry, Isaac Ho takes us into the land of speculative fiction and Asian American literature, one of my favorite intersectionalities. Reminiscent of the work of Perry Miyake in 21st Century Manzanar, Ho explores what might have happened if America freaked out over China’s global economic domination and decided to “repatriate” all citizens of Chinese ancestry into internment camps. Yes, this novel is a post-internment speculative fiction in which the title character, Henry Chin, along with his daughter, Elizabeth, are carted off to an assembly-type center and then are supposed to be shipped off to somewhere in the desert. Henry, though, has other plans in mind and seems to have been aware that just an event might happen, and is able to escape along with Elizabeth into the wilds. His plan is to have them trek for a long distance and cross over the border into Canada. Hot on their trail though is a governmental representative named Babcock, who is sure that Henry is more than just an average Chinese American. Indeed, researching into Henry’s background, Babcock discovers that Henry has an extensive military background and thus must be some sort of terrorist or spy. While Henry and Elizabeth adjust to their experiences in the wilderness, they happen to encounter a militia group that essentially takes them hostage. At this point, the novel turns a little bit into a comedy of errors, as the governmental agencies in pursuit of the two fugitives come upon hostile fire generated by the militia. Henry is able to make his escape at this time, especially with the help of a former military buddy named Clyde, but while Elizabeth had been held captive by the militia, she was raped. Thus, Henry, Clyde, and Elizabeth must go to a hospital to receive medical care, knowing that this detour will likely mean they will have to turn themselves in. The final sequence of the novel is perhaps the most satisfying because the characters move into an entirely new direction, portending the radical actions necessary to incite serious and sustainable social progression, especially given the glacial nature of the legislative process. A more lighthearted take on a dark topic.
For a related title on Asian American literature and speculative fiction, see Perry Miyake’s 21st Century Manzanar.
Buy the Books Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Full-Strippers-Isaac-Ho/dp/0615688837/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1406039893&sr=8-2&keywords=isaac+ho
http://www.amazon.com/Repatriation-Henry-Chin-Isaac-Ho/dp/0615548385/ref=la_B005KN8J3M_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408212409&sr=1-5
I’ve been trying to focus my readings on some new publishers and this small press spotlights considers Transit Lounge (Australia) and Digital Fabulists (United States). Here are links to these two publishers so you can get a sense of their full catalogues:
http://www.transitlounge.com.au/
http://digitalfabulists.com/
Transit Lounge is particularly of interest to us because it focuses on publishing work that queries the interconnectedness between the East and West. Digital Fabulists, on the other hand, is part of the growing wave of publishing devoted to the electronic market. I still haven’t managed to warm up entirely to e-books, but I can understand especially their utility. Imagine having your entire library based in a kindle: easiest moving experience ever. Here, I should probably link a picture from my office before I had to move:
Finally, I am reviewing a suite of books from these publishers. What I especially appreciate about these independent publishers is their ability to put out bold and exciting works, ones without traditional plotlines, character constructions, or discursive formations. It is this kind of freedom that makes such publishers innovative, and we would hope that there would continue to be a nice balance between more commercial publishers and ones such as these.
Without further ado, some reviews!
In this post reviews of: Cyril Wong’s Let Me Tell You Something about That Night: Strange Tales (with illustrations by Jason Wing) (Transit Lounge, 2009); Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official (Transit Lounge, 2014); Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (Transit Lounge, 2013); Isaac Ho’s Hell is Full of Strippers (Digital Fabulists, 2012); Isaac Ho's The Repatriation of Henry Chin (Digital Fabulists, 2011).
A Review of Cyril Wong’s Let Me Tell You Something about That Night: Strange Tales (with illustrations by Jason Wing) (Transit Lounge, 2009).
(Singapore cover edition) (low res, u.s. edition)Let Me Tell You Something About that Night is one of the few publications by Cyril Wong that you can acquire stateside. Though Wong is quite well known in Singapore and has published a number of poetry collections, his work has not achieved much recognition in the United States quite yet. In Let Me Tell You Something about That Night, Wong dials up the weird factor and never lets up. The subtitle “strange tales” gestures to the fact that these are variations of whimsical fairy tales, certainly informed by Hans Christian Anderson or the Grimm Brothers rather than say Disney-ified princess narratives. In the first story, “The Lake Children,” a husband and wife lose their daughter in a tragic accident; she drowns after falling through the ice of a frozen lake. In the wake of her death, the couple find themselves growing apart. One day, the bereaved wife decides that she will go to the same lake where her daughter died and try to get to the very spot where she fell through. We’re of course a little bit afraid for her and apparently with good reason, because she, too, falls through the ice, but what happens next you would not expect: a set of strange children sporting fins, swim over to the wife, then proceed to consume her until she is disembodied, at which point she floats through the air. She looks upon her husband before sort of dissipating out of existence. Who were those strange children who ate her? Were they the result of some sort of near-death hallucination occurring as her body succumbed to the cold and to the water? There are no answers and Wong quickly takes us into the next strange story, “The Blind Girl & the Talking Moon,” which as you might expect involves a blind girl and a relationship to a talking moon. The blind girl is raised by two mothers, a fact that is secondary to the connection the blind girl develops with the moon, who is a sort of support system in difficult times. The queer motherhood depicted in “The Blind Girl & the Talking Moon,” as well as the rather strange children with fins who appear in the first story set up the rest of the collection quite well. There are lots of transformations that occur all throughout the collection: an elf into a human woman, a butterfly into a bunny who later becomes a bear who later becomes a human woman, two women in an elevator who seem to transform into goddesses with wings who then kiss each other. There are other supernatural things and beings littered across the collection: ogres and dragon princes, caves that cause one to go back to a single point in time and over and over again, a little boy who can see how a person will look like just before they die, and another strange boy who is apparently born with a flower growing out of his anus. Underlying all stories seems to be the issue of queerness in all of its potential metaphorical iterations and the questions: how do strange people and strange things in strange worlds find love and companionship, a sense of family or achieve a sense of resolution? Such questions are ultimately not so strange as Wong makes apparent. Indeed, all the fairy tales he has constructed are simply veiled considerations of illicit love affairs, unrequited romances, tales of suffering and torment, and other such relationship complications that are compounded when one is already considered to be sexually perverse or deviant. Thus, when the elf falls in love with the human knight, the one who is already wooing a fetching young woman, we’ll understand his anguish, but Wong doesn’t let clichés crop up in his approach. In a later story, we’ll discover that the elf, so utterly smitten with the knight, ends up torching the home of the young woman, killing her and her father. Then, he takes what’s left of her body—her head in this case—and approaches a witch in the hopes that she’ll transform him into a human. Then, he is able to go into the king’s palace as this woman and wake up the knight, who is actually a prince, because he has fallen into a deep slumber. The elf-as-human woman’s kiss wakes the prince and they live happily ever after, the fact of the murder of the woman never cropping up again. The prince gets to be sleeping beauty and well, the murderous elf, he gets to be the hero he always wanted to be. And we, the readers, smile elliptically at such queerly, heteromorphic stories.
Buy the book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Something-About-That-Night/dp/0980571715/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407532403&sr=8-1&keywords=cyril+wong
A Review of Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official (Transit Lounge, 2014).
Well, I’m not sure where to begin exactly with Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official. Perhaps, it’s best to start with the assumption that you’ll likely either love or hate this book, as it is certainly meant to provoke a strong reaction to readers. Diary of a Naked Official is what we might call a novel of ideas, with a narrative that really masks as a trenchant social critique of contemporary Chinese society, its movement toward a form of decadent capitalism, and the development of hypersexuality in an age of increasing alienation and apathy. The back cover provides some key information about the title as a “naked official” is apparently a term for an individual who “buys a permanent resident status for his wife and daughter in the West” while he stays behind in China. The “West” in this novel is figured as Australia and the naked official works as the “deputy director of a publishing company in a nameless city in China.” In this position, he is certainly corrupted in all ways: he embezzles, and he routinely rejects manuscripts he thinks are worthy on the literary level while favoring commercial ventures. His personal life is an endless morass of sexual encounters. In fact, it seems as if most of the novel depicts graphic encounters with the various random women, prostitutes, and other sex workers with whom the protagonist engages. This novel is not for the faint of heart: this protagonist comes off as particularly unsavory, so if you’re looking to sympathize with the main character, you should look to another book. But, if you’re interested in a more elliptical critique of contemporary Chinese society, you won’t find a more incisive example. Yu fully commits to the extremities of this character, who knows no limits to sexual hunger or to corruption and will continually succumb to his most basest instincts, because apparently, he lives in a society that supports such actions. Indeed, it is a society that seems to encourage it. The novel is not unlike Annie Wang’s The People’s Republic of Desire (reviewed earlier) in its focus on characters who cannot seem to find a moral center, even though they seem to desire it. If there is a critique to be made of this particular novel, it’s that the diary form lends itself to a kind of fragmentation and circularity that makes some of the sexual encounters seem monotonous. Certainly, that is Yu’s point per se, but this kind of representation tests the patience of the reader, even as it enacts and models the very foundations the excoriating critique being offered.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Naked-Official-Ouyang-Yu-ebook/dp/B00K24Q9IG (kindle edition)
A Review of Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (Transit Lounge, 2013)
I was immediately startled by Michele Lee’s Banana Girl, as it sort of posed a reversal in gendered perspective from Ouyang Yu’s Diary of a Naked Official. In this case, the individual engaging a number of sexual escapades is the memoirist and creative nonfiction writer Michele Lee, whose work ends up reading as a kind of diary-esque log of personal experiences growing up and living in Australia, as the child of immigrants of Hmong background. Michele’s status as a self-proclaimed “banana girl,” is a nod to her belief that she is intimately Westernized and doesn’t necessarily identify as an immigrant or as an Asian. Yet, Michele’s title is much more ironic than it might seem or as it is portrayed in the narrative space precisely because she is more than willing to engage aspects of her ethnic and racial background as a way to understand her mutitextured identities. Michele is engaged in the theater arts and is a playwright. In between her dating travails, anonymous and “no strings attached” sexual encounters and ongoing sexual escapades, there is a longer narrative concerning an arts grant that will take her back to Laos, where she will do some fieldwork that will help inspire and inform her future creative endeavors. The memoir opens with about five weeks before she leaves and one of the most striking narrative threads that will appear throughout is the question of intimacy and desire that surfaces in the wake of sexual dalliances. A trip to Auckland to meet a named nicknamed only as Jackie Winchester ends up going badly, with Jackie deciding that the two should just be friends (of course, this designation occurs after they have had sex). Michele comes to realize that her expectations of men can shift, especially because she had desired so much more from this man, who had presented himself as much more than a random lay. Their connection from this point remains tentative, and Michele attempts to figure out why she is so tortured about this man. One of the most playful aspects of this memoir is Michele’s usage of nicknames for individuals, like her exes (one is called Husband) or her sexual partners (Cub; Mr. Mercedes). For all of Michele’s belief in her Westernization, it is often her dealings with Laos itself that come off as the most vivid, the desire to understand a past that cannot be experientially accessed it itself something that drives this memoir into a higher register in the sections that deal with this country and its tortured history and mobile inhabitants. Though the memoir suffers abrupt shifts in temporality and has a meandering quality, the author is so assuredly direct that you can’t help but keep reading. Indeed, there were moments where I was not expecting the author to go so squarely in a particular direction. One of the most humorous sequences for me occurs very close to the conclusion and it involves the memoirist and another person watching a set of youtube videos of individuals basically doing outrageous, ridiculous, or gross things. There is nothing necessarily groundbreaking about this part of the memoir, but I was not prepared for the author to delve into so much detail about what she was seeing, but that’s precisely the brilliance of this work. It takes you there and then goes further.
For another similarly themed book on sexuality and gender (but from the male perspective), please also see David Mura’s Where the Body Meets Memory; Alex Tizon’s Big Little Man.
For another book on Hmong ethnic contexts (from the American perspective), please see
Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer.
For More information about Banana Girl and where to buy go here:
http://www.transitlounge.com.au/
A Review of Isaac Ho’s Hell is Full of Strippers (Digital Fabulists, 2012); The Repatriation of Henry Chin (Digital Fabulists, 2011).
Isaac Ho definitely should win an award for Hell is Full of Strippers, a novella (maybe a novelette), simply based upon its hilarious title. This slim fictional work follows the adventures of an unnamed young man who gets himself into all sorts of trouble. The story begins with the main character realizing that his affection for a woman named Sharyn is not being returned. He seeks solace at a strip club called The Old Cameltoe (another outrageous name). Once there, he receives an unforgettable lap dance with a woman named Sable, a woman who bears a strong, but not exact resemblance to Sharyn. The main character finds his job as an IT employee rather unfulfilling and his life takes an even darker turn when he is served legal papers by Sharyn: she has filed a temporary restraining order on him, based on events that took place on the very night that he had that fateful lap dance with Sable. Thus the novel turns into a sort of quest plot, as the main character desperately tries to locate Sable, who would be able to prove that the narrator was somewhere else other than harassing Sharyn. Along the way, we know he’s going to get more lap dances and meet more strippers, drink more booze and get into more trouble. By the conclusion to the novel, it’s clear that Ho has been setting us up for awhile through the lens of an unreliable narrator. Certainly not in the vein of Ishiguro, but nonetheless, Hell is Full of Strippers offers the kind of unreliable perspective where everything is obviously distorted through the eyes of someone who could drink less and exercise more. The political conceit of the novel seems more difficult to pin down. Certainly, the women that the main character meets possess a kind of depth that escapes full characterization because everything is focalized through this male figure. If Hell is Full of Strippers is a veiled social satire, it seems to function from a kind of postmodern critique in which meaning and ethics are constantly shifting. The regular-ish main character, even in his rather ribald and unadorned depictions of sex acts, seems like a sad target for all that befalls him, but even his buffoonery does not grant him much readerly empathy. Finally, it’s clear that the man has an interest in marking the social differences in the women he meets, but he himself is not identified in any way (racially or ethnically). What becomes apparent is that we do not actually know too much about the main character’s personal life (at least in terms of his own history and beyond his relationship with Sharyn), which leaves us swimming on the surface of things, living on the superficial veneer that speaks to the “hell” of this character’s life. This book coincidentally dovetails very much with the above titles by transit lounge concerning sex and social critique.
As a last note, Isaac Ho’s work is being published by Digital Fabulists, part of a new incarnation of press’s that are particularly attuned to the e-market. I was able to get my hands on a physical copy and I just wanted to state that there is still a clear attention to the highest production qualities and editing that must come with the material book! For more information about Digital Fabulists, go here:
http://digitalfabulists.com/
Their entire list seems eclectic, with an obvious interest in speculative fictions!
But back to reviewing. In The Repatriation of Henry, Isaac Ho takes us into the land of speculative fiction and Asian American literature, one of my favorite intersectionalities. Reminiscent of the work of Perry Miyake in 21st Century Manzanar, Ho explores what might have happened if America freaked out over China’s global economic domination and decided to “repatriate” all citizens of Chinese ancestry into internment camps. Yes, this novel is a post-internment speculative fiction in which the title character, Henry Chin, along with his daughter, Elizabeth, are carted off to an assembly-type center and then are supposed to be shipped off to somewhere in the desert. Henry, though, has other plans in mind and seems to have been aware that just an event might happen, and is able to escape along with Elizabeth into the wilds. His plan is to have them trek for a long distance and cross over the border into Canada. Hot on their trail though is a governmental representative named Babcock, who is sure that Henry is more than just an average Chinese American. Indeed, researching into Henry’s background, Babcock discovers that Henry has an extensive military background and thus must be some sort of terrorist or spy. While Henry and Elizabeth adjust to their experiences in the wilderness, they happen to encounter a militia group that essentially takes them hostage. At this point, the novel turns a little bit into a comedy of errors, as the governmental agencies in pursuit of the two fugitives come upon hostile fire generated by the militia. Henry is able to make his escape at this time, especially with the help of a former military buddy named Clyde, but while Elizabeth had been held captive by the militia, she was raped. Thus, Henry, Clyde, and Elizabeth must go to a hospital to receive medical care, knowing that this detour will likely mean they will have to turn themselves in. The final sequence of the novel is perhaps the most satisfying because the characters move into an entirely new direction, portending the radical actions necessary to incite serious and sustainable social progression, especially given the glacial nature of the legislative process. A more lighthearted take on a dark topic.
For a related title on Asian American literature and speculative fiction, see Perry Miyake’s 21st Century Manzanar.
Buy the Books Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Full-Strippers-Isaac-Ho/dp/0615688837/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1406039893&sr=8-2&keywords=isaac+ho
http://www.amazon.com/Repatriation-Henry-Chin-Isaac-Ho/dp/0615548385/ref=la_B005KN8J3M_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408212409&sr=1-5
August 28, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans Megareview for August 28, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans Megareview for August 28, 2014
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused (Push Reprint Edition, 2014);
Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2014); Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well (Sourcebooks Fire, 2014); Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone (Atavist Books, 2014); Marty Chan’s The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2013); Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter (Quercus, 2014).
A Review of Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused (Push Reprint Edition, 2014).
I’ve been meaning to read Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused for a very long time, since it was originally published in 2002, but I haven’t had the proper motivation until I realized a sequel was coming out this year (called Bombay Blues). Push put out a paperback reprint this year, so it seemed like the right time to review it. Hidier’s Born Confused is narrated from the first person perspective of Dimple Lala, who turns seventeen early on in the novel and is experiencing many of the growing pains that come with being the child of South Asian immigrant parents. She understands herself to be an “ABCD,” which is short for “American Born Confused Desi.” The “confused” portion (and of course such an important part of the title) is the requisite ambivalence between being American and Asian. As Dimple tells us, when she’s in America, she doesn’t feel American enough, and when she’s in India, she doesn’t feel Indian enough. This confusion manifests especially in her social relationships. Her best friend, Gwyn, for instance, though a kind of misfit herself, is able to use her gregarious personality to attract the attention of her male peers. Dimple, on the other hand, isn’t so lucky and seems to find herself on the outside looking in, especially when Gwyn takes a liking to a young college boy named Karsh Kapoor. Though Karsh is the son of a family friend and an obvious potential romantic interest for Dimple especially given their shared ethnic background, it is Gwyn who immediately and aggressively pursues him. This central storyline is bolstered by a number of others, especially the one related to Dimple and her connection to her parents, however strained by the fact of cultural assimilation. Certainly, Hidier’s heroine is lively and believable, especially in her complete immersion in teen angst, but the general ethos behind the liminal position of the immigrants’ child is a well-trodden ground. Hidier’s novel doesn’t necessarily offer anything incredibly new in this regard, but nevertheless, allows her winning storyteller to come to a sense of her identity that many teens—and the novel’s target audience—can no doubt relate to. Perhaps, the most important political undercurrent of the novel appears through the regime of female friendships and how they are destabilized or reformulated in the shadow of looming heterosexual romances. Here, we can see the longer effect of the courtship plot on young adult novels, as any female who is single may become a competitor for the heroine, who is single herself and as is foundational in any courtship plot, seeks to find the proper and suitable match. The strength of Hidier’s novel is in the creation of this accessible protagonist, one who will be embraced by a wide audience, and whose quest to ameliorate her disorientation is energetically rendered.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Born-Confused-Tanuja-Desai-Hidier/dp/0439357624
A Review of Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2014).
Ah, Shaun Tan has returned with Rules of Summer, a board book, aimed at young readers. The target audience will no doubt delight in the incredible images and the ethos of the narrative, which at first seems to be about some of the things that a young child might encounter on adventures through long summer days without schooling (at least from a western perspective). Yet, the rules are often whimsical and unexpected. The pictures, too, don’t ever work from an obvious connection to the “rule” being laid out. For instance, one of the early rules about never leaving a sock hanging from a clothesline has what seems to be two children cowering against a wooden fence (see picture below).
The clothesline is in the foreground with the item of clothing hanging on it. Above the children and behind them seems to be a large rabbit-looking like figure partially obscured by the wooden fence, with an enormous eye looking over the scene. What is the deal with this red rabbit? Are we supposed to be thinking metaphorically here? All of the images in the book operate in this elliptical way, where what we see does not necessarily match up directly with the rule being explored. As one moves through the board book, it’s apparent that Tan’s signature stylistic flourishes remain: strange looking creatures often posed in semi-industrial environments. Looking back to Tan’s phenomenal The Arrival, we can say that issues of social difference and labor never disappear from his work, even when it is catered to such a young audience. As I have mentioned before, this factor is what makes his work so relevant to readers of all ages. Another must read from brilliant Tan, who can do no wrong!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Summer-Shaun-Tan/dp/0545639123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406041027&sr=8-1&keywords=shaun+tan+rules+of+summer
A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well (Sourcebooks Fire, 2014).
Where should one start in this review for Rin Chupeco’s debut novel, The Girl From the Well? Perhaps, with the fact that this novel is clearly influenced by Japanese folk myth, especially the one that was the basis for the American version of the film, The Ring. In that film, we know of a drowned girl who returns to kill people who have seen a video tape; they always die seven days time. The Ring is a remake of the Japanese film, Ringu, and there is little connection to the Japanese origin of this story. Alternatively, Chupeco her re-envisions the Japanese folktale from the perspective of the drowned figure herself, while transporting the tale, much like the American film, to another country. In this case, our narrator, Okiku, as she is called (and we only find out later on in the novel), takes revenge upon murderers, especially those who have committed unspeakable crimes against young children. As a spirit of vengeance, she is not unlike the serial killer Dexter: the killer with an apparent ethical vision in the killing of other killers. The story’s central tension is set up fairly immediately with the introduction of a young teenager, Tarquin, who Okiku immediately notices is a bit different. First of all, he sports strange tattoos on his arm. Second, he is able to see Okiku, even though she is undead. Third, there seems to be a malevolent spirit attached to him, a kind of counter-ghost figure, one who is bound to him and unable to enact any violence… yet! Finally, Tarquin’s cousin, Callie, a teaching assistant and Tarquin’s new high school, is aware of the strange goings-on with him and wants to find out the root of these events. Of course, her interest in Tarquin’s health and well-being soon entangle her in ta web of death, vengeance, and evil spirits. There is also the creepy issue with Tarquin’s mother, who is languishing in a mental institution. We discover late into the narrative that Tarquin is half-Japanese and that his mother, Yoko, seems to be exist in an altered state of reality. When Tarquin and his father visit Yoko, it becomes apparent that Yoko is probably not as mad as she seems. Chupeco clearly engages in some culturally-specific research, especially as the narrative later moves to Japan, and she is able to weave in elements of horror quite effectively. Perhaps, the most interesting stylistic choice Chupeco uses is the narrative perspective itself. Okiku exists in such a disembodied form for so much of the plotting that some full chapters seem told from the perspective of the third person. At other moments, it’s apparent that Okiku is split into multiple subjective positions, able to articulate her thoughts in the first person, but sometimes seeing herself in the third. This use of storytelling is quite apt for Okiku’s traumatized psyche, a state that has lasted for many centuries. Chupeco’s vision of the young adult world is refreshingly free of a romantic plot, and this kind of streamlining enables her to devote narrative space to other more germane concerns. Indeed, Chupeco never lets the gore fall completely out of sight and thus relishes in our narrator’s unique desire for deadly retributive justice. The interesting conclusion makes it difficult to know whether or not this book will be part of an intended longer series, but we’ll be eager to see what Chupeco has in store in her next publication. A promising and entertaining paranormal YA debut.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Girl-Well-Rin-Chupeco/dp/140229218X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407379249&sr=8-1&keywords=rin+chupeco
A Review of Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone (Atavist Books, 2014).
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Kamila Shamsie’s latest effort (after Burnt Shadows) is A God in Every Stone. Shamsie is the author of numerous novels, a number of which we haven’t yet had a chance to review here, but perhaps we’ll eventually get to them =). In A God in Every Stone, Shamsie takes on the historical and panoramic sweep that marked Burnt Shadows. In this case, the novel starts out just before the beginning of World War I. Our third person protagonist focalizes through the perspective of Vivian Spencer, a woman out of time if you will; she’s an anthropologist and is on site on a dig in Turkey with a full team. Her situation is of course unique: she’s a British woman and a proper lady is not supposed to be out in the wild, unmarried and doing such things as getting herself dirty in situ. There’s a circlet she’s after, something that hails all the way back to Alexander the Great. She’s falling in love with a man about twenty years her senior, Tahsin Bey, also at the dig site, while discovering how much she is driven by her desire for knowledge of the past. Her idyllic time spent on that dig is cut short when she discovers that World War I has broken out; she must return to England. Once there, there decides she must work as a war nurse, but anthropology and the past still call out to her. She knows she must take the next step that was planned in the process of their digs: to go to Peshawar (what is now a place found inside the borders of Pakistan, but at the time was part of British India). Shamsie fractures narrative perspective with a second character: Qayyum, who at the beginning of the novel finds himself fighting for the British, even though he is of part Pashtun background. He is eventually injured during a battle in France, loses an eye, and is to be sent home. On the way back, which includes a train ride, he and Vivian Spencer get to know each other a little bit, before they part ways: Vivian to get her anthropological fieldwork going, and Qayyum returns to his family in Peshawar. Vivian gets a little help concerning the local culture, life, and geography through a young boy named Najeeb. What Vivian doesn’t know at the time is that Najeeb is actually Qayyum’s younger brother. When a former military buddy who has gone awol arrives in Peshawar to attempt recruit Qayyum to fight in the war against the British, Qayyum finds himself with a troubling decision to make. The conclusion of book I occurs when Vivian Spencer receives a letter that alters the course of her life, pushing her to leave Peshawar and return to England. There is something called ellipsis that follows at this point, as a stretch of about 15 years passes without mention. Najeeb is an adult and has taken on the path that Vivian had paved for him, working for the local museum. Qayyum has moved into the Indian independence movement, swayed by the non-violent protest rhetoric espoused by Gandhi and a local charismatic leader. Vivian is encouraged to return to Peshawar by Najeeb, insisting that he has found something very important related to the original anthropological artifact that had altered the course of Vivian’s (and other characters’) life. Vivian is at first unconvinced, but later realizes that she must see her original quest through and travels to Peshawar, but as Qayyum’s storyline attests: there is much unrest in the area. The conclusion of the novel takes a drastically different turn, introducing another character that takes so much of the focus off of the original three major characters that you’ll wonder whether or not this other figure was deserving of her own novel. Shamsie takes a lot of risk with this introduction; this character is pivotal and enthralling and readers may balk at the movement of the plot away from the anthropological elements, but therein lies a part of the narrative’s critique. What is the value of finding history in artifacts when history is being created right in front of you. The balance between these two elements is never quite in sync and Shamsie is well aware of the fact that these characters serve as allegories. If we come to think of Vivian as a kind of stand-in for a gentle, more benevolent form of empire, we’re not disappointed that the artifact is never found. Instead, we’re already looking toward a future in which characters sacrifice their lives for the chance of something greater than themselves, greater than any one object, which at the end of the day can never tell the full story. An ambitious, if uneven work by Shamie, one that obviously shows a great deal of dedicated research and ethnographic detail.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/God-Every-Stone-Novel/dp/1937894304
A Review of Marty Chan’s The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2013).
What a curious, unexpected young adult fiction that Marty Chan has written with The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate (part of an intended series, as the sequel will be coming out in 2015). Chan who is a Chinese Canadian writer and playwright (author of numerous works) creates a counterfactual, steampunk-ish fictional world in which dimensional creatures come through the demon gate and wreak havoc on America. Chan is having some metaphorical fun with race and ethnicity, as the dimensionals are an obvious analogue to immigrants. The novel opens with the main character, the titular Ehrich Weisz falling through the demon gate and finding himself in another version of the United States, certain that his brother Dash has somehow died in the process of dimension-hopping. What is left behind is a medallion with a strange inscription: he vows to figure out the importance of the medallion, but he first must survive in the new world. Even though Ehrich himself is a dimensional, he looks like the dominant class in this other version of the United States, so he is able to pass, and he even becomes part of a patrolling crew to make sure any new dimensionals are first detained before they can enter the country. Recalling both Ellis and Angel Islands, the demon gate and its patrol are sort of this world’s variant of the INS. Ehrich develops a strong friendship with a scientist, Nikola Tesla (the same name of the famous scientist and inventor), who is charged with making sure that any strange objects that come through the demon gate cannot be used to harm citizens and to see if they might have any use value in terms of helping patrols control the influx of dimensionals. As Ehrich works for that patrol, he eventually crosses paths again with some dimensionals who he believes were originally involved in his brother’s disappearance and thus, the quest plot begins. Ehrich attempts to pursue a number of strange dimensionals with different colored-skins, strange shapes, and exterior appendages; these include characters named Amina, Ning Shu, and Dr. Serenity. Chan’s novel is heavy on the action-sequences and one can tell that he had fun in the reconstruction of a fictional world that is not too dissimilar from our own. Steampunk influences are prominent, which further contributes to the novel’s rich textures. Though the pace of the novel can seem jumpy at times, from the perspective of a race and ethnic studies scholar, the novel does much in terms of thinking about the fictive construct of phenotypic difference. Indeed, it becomes evident as the novel goes on that the dimensionals are not really so demonic (at least not all of them) and that some of the so-called humans are not nearly as ethical or heroic as they might have at first seemed. In this sense, Chan brings us back to the artificiality of racial difference as a mode of policing, but does so in an inventive way.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ehrich-Weisz-Chronicles-Demon/dp/1554553067/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405639499&sr=8-1&keywords=ehrich+weisz
A Review of Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter (Quercus, 2014).
According to amazon.com, Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter was a #1 bestseller in India. This distinction is particularly impressive given Parajuly’s chosen form, which is the short story collection. In The Gurkha’s Daughter, Parajuly explores the varied lives and life courses of characters who hail from Nepal and/or India, many of whom will attempt to move transnationally (primarily to the UK or the United States). The title word, Gurkha, refers to a soldier from Nepal. Parajuly is able to use an effective structural conceit for this collection: a map which occurs before each story, delineating some of the key cities or towns in which characters reside or to which characters travel. Most of the stories are written in third person perspective, though toward the conclusion Parajuly begins to deviate, offering two stories from the first person perspective: the title story and then the final story, “Immigrants.” I focus on some of the ones that had the most impact for me as the reader and especially consider what makes this group of stories a collection rather than a random assortment of short narratives. As Rocio Davis notes in her book Trancultural Reinventions, the first and last stories often tend to carry the most weight and it becomes apparent that for Parajuly, the conflicts that occur between classes and castes generate a variety of tensions that make for an excellent bridging thematic. In the opening story, “The Cleft,” a servant girl (Kaali) with a cleft palate is determined to escape from her life of servitude by going across the border and getting an operation. The story’s larger narrative surrounds Kaali’s employer, Parvati, a widow who is on her way (with a number of other family members, including her sister-in-law Sarita and others) to her mother-in-law’s funeral. Throughout the story, it is apparent that both Parvati and Sarita are preoccupied with their own lives, choosing to see Kaali as an apparent peripheral figure with no complexity of thought or life. However, Parajuly includes short key passages in italics from a mystery figure who tells Kaali that she can be beautiful, that she must use what money she has to go across the border to get a surgery. Kaali clearly has hopes and dreams of another life, perhaps one filled even with stardom. This story sets the tone for the many that follow: characters seek some measure of self-determination in fictional worlds that constrain them in some way, whether it is a Nepalese woman who seeks purpose in her life after her children have gone to study abroad or the young daughter of the Gurkha who desires the connection of an alternative kinship. In the last story, “The Immigrants,” Parajuly contrasts two figures from different classes: Amit, who makes six figures and lives in New York City (an Indian ethnic from Nepal) and Sabitri, a cleaning woman, who begins to work for Amit in exchange for English lessons. This story is narrated from the perspective of Amit, and we begin to see some of the issues that he faces as an immigrant in America. For instance, upon meeting an American who clearly knows a bit about Nepalise cuisine, Amit muses, “This was interesting. It’s not every day that you came across an American who knew about momos. When I told people I was of Nepalese origin, they instinctively asked me if I had climbed Mount Everest. When I answered no, I hadn’t climbed Everest and no, I did not know anyone who had, they were disappointed. When I mentioned I was from Darjeeling, most people asked me a tea question” (201). Here, Amit gets to the core of the one other issue that the collection sets out to complete: to demystify Nepal through the everyday lives of relatively run-of-the-mill characters. As Amit and Sabitri come to a new understanding of their employer-employee relationship, Parajuly shows us that those who hail from Nepal are far from touristic curios, to be observed upon with a superficial exoticism. Certainly, an intriguing and intricate short story collection, one no doubt influenced by the increasingly globalized world in which we live. Parajuly’s work joins an outstanding group of story collections with a strongly transnational focus and it’s certainly one I can adopt in the classroom.
For a similar title reviewed on Asian American literature fans, see Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In other Rooms, Other Wonders (reviewed by Pylduck):
http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/67132.html
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gurkhas-Daughter-Prajwal-Parajuly/dp/162365145X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407281499&sr=8-1&keywords=prajwal
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused (Push Reprint Edition, 2014);
Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2014); Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well (Sourcebooks Fire, 2014); Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone (Atavist Books, 2014); Marty Chan’s The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2013); Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter (Quercus, 2014).
A Review of Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused (Push Reprint Edition, 2014).
I’ve been meaning to read Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused for a very long time, since it was originally published in 2002, but I haven’t had the proper motivation until I realized a sequel was coming out this year (called Bombay Blues). Push put out a paperback reprint this year, so it seemed like the right time to review it. Hidier’s Born Confused is narrated from the first person perspective of Dimple Lala, who turns seventeen early on in the novel and is experiencing many of the growing pains that come with being the child of South Asian immigrant parents. She understands herself to be an “ABCD,” which is short for “American Born Confused Desi.” The “confused” portion (and of course such an important part of the title) is the requisite ambivalence between being American and Asian. As Dimple tells us, when she’s in America, she doesn’t feel American enough, and when she’s in India, she doesn’t feel Indian enough. This confusion manifests especially in her social relationships. Her best friend, Gwyn, for instance, though a kind of misfit herself, is able to use her gregarious personality to attract the attention of her male peers. Dimple, on the other hand, isn’t so lucky and seems to find herself on the outside looking in, especially when Gwyn takes a liking to a young college boy named Karsh Kapoor. Though Karsh is the son of a family friend and an obvious potential romantic interest for Dimple especially given their shared ethnic background, it is Gwyn who immediately and aggressively pursues him. This central storyline is bolstered by a number of others, especially the one related to Dimple and her connection to her parents, however strained by the fact of cultural assimilation. Certainly, Hidier’s heroine is lively and believable, especially in her complete immersion in teen angst, but the general ethos behind the liminal position of the immigrants’ child is a well-trodden ground. Hidier’s novel doesn’t necessarily offer anything incredibly new in this regard, but nevertheless, allows her winning storyteller to come to a sense of her identity that many teens—and the novel’s target audience—can no doubt relate to. Perhaps, the most important political undercurrent of the novel appears through the regime of female friendships and how they are destabilized or reformulated in the shadow of looming heterosexual romances. Here, we can see the longer effect of the courtship plot on young adult novels, as any female who is single may become a competitor for the heroine, who is single herself and as is foundational in any courtship plot, seeks to find the proper and suitable match. The strength of Hidier’s novel is in the creation of this accessible protagonist, one who will be embraced by a wide audience, and whose quest to ameliorate her disorientation is energetically rendered.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Born-Confused-Tanuja-Desai-Hidier/dp/0439357624
A Review of Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2014).
Ah, Shaun Tan has returned with Rules of Summer, a board book, aimed at young readers. The target audience will no doubt delight in the incredible images and the ethos of the narrative, which at first seems to be about some of the things that a young child might encounter on adventures through long summer days without schooling (at least from a western perspective). Yet, the rules are often whimsical and unexpected. The pictures, too, don’t ever work from an obvious connection to the “rule” being laid out. For instance, one of the early rules about never leaving a sock hanging from a clothesline has what seems to be two children cowering against a wooden fence (see picture below).
The clothesline is in the foreground with the item of clothing hanging on it. Above the children and behind them seems to be a large rabbit-looking like figure partially obscured by the wooden fence, with an enormous eye looking over the scene. What is the deal with this red rabbit? Are we supposed to be thinking metaphorically here? All of the images in the book operate in this elliptical way, where what we see does not necessarily match up directly with the rule being explored. As one moves through the board book, it’s apparent that Tan’s signature stylistic flourishes remain: strange looking creatures often posed in semi-industrial environments. Looking back to Tan’s phenomenal The Arrival, we can say that issues of social difference and labor never disappear from his work, even when it is catered to such a young audience. As I have mentioned before, this factor is what makes his work so relevant to readers of all ages. Another must read from brilliant Tan, who can do no wrong!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Summer-Shaun-Tan/dp/0545639123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406041027&sr=8-1&keywords=shaun+tan+rules+of+summer
A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well (Sourcebooks Fire, 2014).
Where should one start in this review for Rin Chupeco’s debut novel, The Girl From the Well? Perhaps, with the fact that this novel is clearly influenced by Japanese folk myth, especially the one that was the basis for the American version of the film, The Ring. In that film, we know of a drowned girl who returns to kill people who have seen a video tape; they always die seven days time. The Ring is a remake of the Japanese film, Ringu, and there is little connection to the Japanese origin of this story. Alternatively, Chupeco her re-envisions the Japanese folktale from the perspective of the drowned figure herself, while transporting the tale, much like the American film, to another country. In this case, our narrator, Okiku, as she is called (and we only find out later on in the novel), takes revenge upon murderers, especially those who have committed unspeakable crimes against young children. As a spirit of vengeance, she is not unlike the serial killer Dexter: the killer with an apparent ethical vision in the killing of other killers. The story’s central tension is set up fairly immediately with the introduction of a young teenager, Tarquin, who Okiku immediately notices is a bit different. First of all, he sports strange tattoos on his arm. Second, he is able to see Okiku, even though she is undead. Third, there seems to be a malevolent spirit attached to him, a kind of counter-ghost figure, one who is bound to him and unable to enact any violence… yet! Finally, Tarquin’s cousin, Callie, a teaching assistant and Tarquin’s new high school, is aware of the strange goings-on with him and wants to find out the root of these events. Of course, her interest in Tarquin’s health and well-being soon entangle her in ta web of death, vengeance, and evil spirits. There is also the creepy issue with Tarquin’s mother, who is languishing in a mental institution. We discover late into the narrative that Tarquin is half-Japanese and that his mother, Yoko, seems to be exist in an altered state of reality. When Tarquin and his father visit Yoko, it becomes apparent that Yoko is probably not as mad as she seems. Chupeco clearly engages in some culturally-specific research, especially as the narrative later moves to Japan, and she is able to weave in elements of horror quite effectively. Perhaps, the most interesting stylistic choice Chupeco uses is the narrative perspective itself. Okiku exists in such a disembodied form for so much of the plotting that some full chapters seem told from the perspective of the third person. At other moments, it’s apparent that Okiku is split into multiple subjective positions, able to articulate her thoughts in the first person, but sometimes seeing herself in the third. This use of storytelling is quite apt for Okiku’s traumatized psyche, a state that has lasted for many centuries. Chupeco’s vision of the young adult world is refreshingly free of a romantic plot, and this kind of streamlining enables her to devote narrative space to other more germane concerns. Indeed, Chupeco never lets the gore fall completely out of sight and thus relishes in our narrator’s unique desire for deadly retributive justice. The interesting conclusion makes it difficult to know whether or not this book will be part of an intended longer series, but we’ll be eager to see what Chupeco has in store in her next publication. A promising and entertaining paranormal YA debut.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Girl-Well-Rin-Chupeco/dp/140229218X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407379249&sr=8-1&keywords=rin+chupeco
A Review of Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone (Atavist Books, 2014).
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Kamila Shamsie’s latest effort (after Burnt Shadows) is A God in Every Stone. Shamsie is the author of numerous novels, a number of which we haven’t yet had a chance to review here, but perhaps we’ll eventually get to them =). In A God in Every Stone, Shamsie takes on the historical and panoramic sweep that marked Burnt Shadows. In this case, the novel starts out just before the beginning of World War I. Our third person protagonist focalizes through the perspective of Vivian Spencer, a woman out of time if you will; she’s an anthropologist and is on site on a dig in Turkey with a full team. Her situation is of course unique: she’s a British woman and a proper lady is not supposed to be out in the wild, unmarried and doing such things as getting herself dirty in situ. There’s a circlet she’s after, something that hails all the way back to Alexander the Great. She’s falling in love with a man about twenty years her senior, Tahsin Bey, also at the dig site, while discovering how much she is driven by her desire for knowledge of the past. Her idyllic time spent on that dig is cut short when she discovers that World War I has broken out; she must return to England. Once there, there decides she must work as a war nurse, but anthropology and the past still call out to her. She knows she must take the next step that was planned in the process of their digs: to go to Peshawar (what is now a place found inside the borders of Pakistan, but at the time was part of British India). Shamsie fractures narrative perspective with a second character: Qayyum, who at the beginning of the novel finds himself fighting for the British, even though he is of part Pashtun background. He is eventually injured during a battle in France, loses an eye, and is to be sent home. On the way back, which includes a train ride, he and Vivian Spencer get to know each other a little bit, before they part ways: Vivian to get her anthropological fieldwork going, and Qayyum returns to his family in Peshawar. Vivian gets a little help concerning the local culture, life, and geography through a young boy named Najeeb. What Vivian doesn’t know at the time is that Najeeb is actually Qayyum’s younger brother. When a former military buddy who has gone awol arrives in Peshawar to attempt recruit Qayyum to fight in the war against the British, Qayyum finds himself with a troubling decision to make. The conclusion of book I occurs when Vivian Spencer receives a letter that alters the course of her life, pushing her to leave Peshawar and return to England. There is something called ellipsis that follows at this point, as a stretch of about 15 years passes without mention. Najeeb is an adult and has taken on the path that Vivian had paved for him, working for the local museum. Qayyum has moved into the Indian independence movement, swayed by the non-violent protest rhetoric espoused by Gandhi and a local charismatic leader. Vivian is encouraged to return to Peshawar by Najeeb, insisting that he has found something very important related to the original anthropological artifact that had altered the course of Vivian’s (and other characters’) life. Vivian is at first unconvinced, but later realizes that she must see her original quest through and travels to Peshawar, but as Qayyum’s storyline attests: there is much unrest in the area. The conclusion of the novel takes a drastically different turn, introducing another character that takes so much of the focus off of the original three major characters that you’ll wonder whether or not this other figure was deserving of her own novel. Shamsie takes a lot of risk with this introduction; this character is pivotal and enthralling and readers may balk at the movement of the plot away from the anthropological elements, but therein lies a part of the narrative’s critique. What is the value of finding history in artifacts when history is being created right in front of you. The balance between these two elements is never quite in sync and Shamsie is well aware of the fact that these characters serve as allegories. If we come to think of Vivian as a kind of stand-in for a gentle, more benevolent form of empire, we’re not disappointed that the artifact is never found. Instead, we’re already looking toward a future in which characters sacrifice their lives for the chance of something greater than themselves, greater than any one object, which at the end of the day can never tell the full story. An ambitious, if uneven work by Shamie, one that obviously shows a great deal of dedicated research and ethnographic detail.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/God-Every-Stone-Novel/dp/1937894304
A Review of Marty Chan’s The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2013).
What a curious, unexpected young adult fiction that Marty Chan has written with The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles: Demon Gate (part of an intended series, as the sequel will be coming out in 2015). Chan who is a Chinese Canadian writer and playwright (author of numerous works) creates a counterfactual, steampunk-ish fictional world in which dimensional creatures come through the demon gate and wreak havoc on America. Chan is having some metaphorical fun with race and ethnicity, as the dimensionals are an obvious analogue to immigrants. The novel opens with the main character, the titular Ehrich Weisz falling through the demon gate and finding himself in another version of the United States, certain that his brother Dash has somehow died in the process of dimension-hopping. What is left behind is a medallion with a strange inscription: he vows to figure out the importance of the medallion, but he first must survive in the new world. Even though Ehrich himself is a dimensional, he looks like the dominant class in this other version of the United States, so he is able to pass, and he even becomes part of a patrolling crew to make sure any new dimensionals are first detained before they can enter the country. Recalling both Ellis and Angel Islands, the demon gate and its patrol are sort of this world’s variant of the INS. Ehrich develops a strong friendship with a scientist, Nikola Tesla (the same name of the famous scientist and inventor), who is charged with making sure that any strange objects that come through the demon gate cannot be used to harm citizens and to see if they might have any use value in terms of helping patrols control the influx of dimensionals. As Ehrich works for that patrol, he eventually crosses paths again with some dimensionals who he believes were originally involved in his brother’s disappearance and thus, the quest plot begins. Ehrich attempts to pursue a number of strange dimensionals with different colored-skins, strange shapes, and exterior appendages; these include characters named Amina, Ning Shu, and Dr. Serenity. Chan’s novel is heavy on the action-sequences and one can tell that he had fun in the reconstruction of a fictional world that is not too dissimilar from our own. Steampunk influences are prominent, which further contributes to the novel’s rich textures. Though the pace of the novel can seem jumpy at times, from the perspective of a race and ethnic studies scholar, the novel does much in terms of thinking about the fictive construct of phenotypic difference. Indeed, it becomes evident as the novel goes on that the dimensionals are not really so demonic (at least not all of them) and that some of the so-called humans are not nearly as ethical or heroic as they might have at first seemed. In this sense, Chan brings us back to the artificiality of racial difference as a mode of policing, but does so in an inventive way.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ehrich-Weisz-Chronicles-Demon/dp/1554553067/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405639499&sr=8-1&keywords=ehrich+weisz
A Review of Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter (Quercus, 2014).
According to amazon.com, Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter was a #1 bestseller in India. This distinction is particularly impressive given Parajuly’s chosen form, which is the short story collection. In The Gurkha’s Daughter, Parajuly explores the varied lives and life courses of characters who hail from Nepal and/or India, many of whom will attempt to move transnationally (primarily to the UK or the United States). The title word, Gurkha, refers to a soldier from Nepal. Parajuly is able to use an effective structural conceit for this collection: a map which occurs before each story, delineating some of the key cities or towns in which characters reside or to which characters travel. Most of the stories are written in third person perspective, though toward the conclusion Parajuly begins to deviate, offering two stories from the first person perspective: the title story and then the final story, “Immigrants.” I focus on some of the ones that had the most impact for me as the reader and especially consider what makes this group of stories a collection rather than a random assortment of short narratives. As Rocio Davis notes in her book Trancultural Reinventions, the first and last stories often tend to carry the most weight and it becomes apparent that for Parajuly, the conflicts that occur between classes and castes generate a variety of tensions that make for an excellent bridging thematic. In the opening story, “The Cleft,” a servant girl (Kaali) with a cleft palate is determined to escape from her life of servitude by going across the border and getting an operation. The story’s larger narrative surrounds Kaali’s employer, Parvati, a widow who is on her way (with a number of other family members, including her sister-in-law Sarita and others) to her mother-in-law’s funeral. Throughout the story, it is apparent that both Parvati and Sarita are preoccupied with their own lives, choosing to see Kaali as an apparent peripheral figure with no complexity of thought or life. However, Parajuly includes short key passages in italics from a mystery figure who tells Kaali that she can be beautiful, that she must use what money she has to go across the border to get a surgery. Kaali clearly has hopes and dreams of another life, perhaps one filled even with stardom. This story sets the tone for the many that follow: characters seek some measure of self-determination in fictional worlds that constrain them in some way, whether it is a Nepalese woman who seeks purpose in her life after her children have gone to study abroad or the young daughter of the Gurkha who desires the connection of an alternative kinship. In the last story, “The Immigrants,” Parajuly contrasts two figures from different classes: Amit, who makes six figures and lives in New York City (an Indian ethnic from Nepal) and Sabitri, a cleaning woman, who begins to work for Amit in exchange for English lessons. This story is narrated from the perspective of Amit, and we begin to see some of the issues that he faces as an immigrant in America. For instance, upon meeting an American who clearly knows a bit about Nepalise cuisine, Amit muses, “This was interesting. It’s not every day that you came across an American who knew about momos. When I told people I was of Nepalese origin, they instinctively asked me if I had climbed Mount Everest. When I answered no, I hadn’t climbed Everest and no, I did not know anyone who had, they were disappointed. When I mentioned I was from Darjeeling, most people asked me a tea question” (201). Here, Amit gets to the core of the one other issue that the collection sets out to complete: to demystify Nepal through the everyday lives of relatively run-of-the-mill characters. As Amit and Sabitri come to a new understanding of their employer-employee relationship, Parajuly shows us that those who hail from Nepal are far from touristic curios, to be observed upon with a superficial exoticism. Certainly, an intriguing and intricate short story collection, one no doubt influenced by the increasingly globalized world in which we live. Parajuly’s work joins an outstanding group of story collections with a strongly transnational focus and it’s certainly one I can adopt in the classroom.
For a similar title reviewed on Asian American literature fans, see Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In other Rooms, Other Wonders (reviewed by Pylduck):
http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/67132.html
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gurkhas-Daughter-Prajwal-Parajuly/dp/162365145X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407281499&sr=8-1&keywords=prajwal
August 27, 2014
Jaswinder Bolina's Phantom Camera
Jaswinder Bolina's second book of poems Phantom Camera (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013) won the Green Rose Prize in 2012, a prize previously won by another poet reviewed on this site, Jon Pineda (for The Translator's Diary).
I noticed two things about the poems in the first part of this book.... First, that the poems often seemed to be persona poems (written in the voice of someone who is not the poet himself) addressed to a you, often named, in the second person. Second, there are frequent mentions of Chicago as a place, which makes sense knowing that Bolina was born there. A few of his poems are available online in various places, including nearer poems not in Phantom Camera. Here are a few: Aviary; Sunday, Sunday; and Oops Canary.
Bolina's poems might be characterized as experimental; there is a philosophical bent and an interest in places where language makes meaning in weird ways. Thematically, Bolina's poems range from contemplating (romantic) relationships to addressing the geography of America (often the Midwest).
Poking around online, I came across this newer poem by Bolina, "Letter to a Drone Pilot", which is quite a bit more explicitly engaged with political questions than most of the poems in Phantom Camera.
I noticed two things about the poems in the first part of this book.... First, that the poems often seemed to be persona poems (written in the voice of someone who is not the poet himself) addressed to a you, often named, in the second person. Second, there are frequent mentions of Chicago as a place, which makes sense knowing that Bolina was born there. A few of his poems are available online in various places, including nearer poems not in Phantom Camera. Here are a few: Aviary; Sunday, Sunday; and Oops Canary.
Bolina's poems might be characterized as experimental; there is a philosophical bent and an interest in places where language makes meaning in weird ways. Thematically, Bolina's poems range from contemplating (romantic) relationships to addressing the geography of America (often the Midwest).
Poking around online, I came across this newer poem by Bolina, "Letter to a Drone Pilot", which is quite a bit more explicitly engaged with political questions than most of the poems in Phantom Camera.
August 25, 2014
Review: Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan (CB Editions, 2014)
Title: Things to Make and Break
Author: May-Lan Tan
Publisher: CB Editions
Publication Date: February 2014
[Disclaimer: I obtained a review e-copy of this book at no cost.]
May-Lan Tan’s debut collection of short stories comprises sordid, gut-wrenching narratives told in compellingly hypnotic prose. The description provided for the titular character in “Julia K.” is just as applicable to Tan’s writing itself: “Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of Christ.”
Tan’s transnational background also colours the tone of the book somewhat. The daughter of parents from Dutch-controlled Indonesia, Tan grew up in British Hong Kong, before moving to northern California and then London, where she now lives. The stories in this collection take place everywhere, with people from everywhere, like the protagonist of “Candy Glass,” a Hollywood star whose parents were East German refugees, or the prickly Bay Area Korean American narrator whose failed relationships with her boyfriend and her sister form the meat of “101.”
Destructive and abortive attempts at establishing human connections tie together the broken men and women of Tan’s eleven short stories. “Every one of his exes has a thing—they’ve been molested or are a cellist or something,” the obsessive narrator of the first story, “Legendary,” begins. “Holly shattered seventeen bones falling from a trapeze.” Sex and family, ideally sources of intimacy and comfort, are repackaged here as places of alienation and trauma.
While Tan’s stories are set in the ~real world~, their plots—like the ritualistic crucifixion of an exotic dancer—strain the reader’s understanding of mimesis. This, combined with Tan’s propensity for narration in the first person, can occasionally be frustrating. The unprepared reader may at times find the collection difficult to get into, with “Legendary” being about a woman methodically stalking her partner’s exes to satisfy a need for—empathy? understanding? Some strange, lonely fate for the host of strange, lonely dramatis personae that wend their way through Things to Make and Break.
“Date Night,” the second story in the collection, is my favourite because it crystallises the themes of movement, familial disaffection, and impotent desire that run through the book. It’s set in the Hong Kong of the author’s childhood, with the narrator a nine-year-old left alone at home with the new Indonesian maid, while her neurotic mother hops alcoholically about town with a suitor.
It may be the Southeast Asian in me, but this story struck very close to home, literally and figuratively. The other stories in this collection are a lot more cynical about the possibility of emotional fulfilment, even in supposedly happy endings. “Candy Glass” closes with the actress imagining a future for her stunt double, a stealth trans woman:
“I picture her living in a two-story duplex, sugar maples growing in a shared front yard heaped in gold light and red leaves,” Alexa says. “…She might be working as a bank teller. She’ll be dating by now. I imagine a slightly overweight divorcé with soft, fat fingers and pretty eyes, who teaches science at the high school. He has a young son and daughter who come to stay with him every other weekend, and he doesn’t want to have any more children. He washes his car every Sunday, and his favorite expression is What the hey.”
Compared with the bland bourgeoisie of American suburbia, the domestic worker Davy’s longing for reunion with her lover Farah imbued “Date Night” with a note of hope that felt absent from the hardened plots about childhood sexual abuse (“Laurens”) or the fraternal exploitation of the same amnesiac girl (“DD-MM-YY”). Trauma tugs down on the edges of Things to Make and Break, and like its world-weary characters, the reader has to snatch comfort where they can find it.
This review was originally published on my blog.
Get the book online: Amazon | CB Editions
Author: May-Lan Tan
Publisher: CB Editions
Publication Date: February 2014
[Disclaimer: I obtained a review e-copy of this book at no cost.]May-Lan Tan’s debut collection of short stories comprises sordid, gut-wrenching narratives told in compellingly hypnotic prose. The description provided for the titular character in “Julia K.” is just as applicable to Tan’s writing itself: “Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of Christ.”
Tan’s transnational background also colours the tone of the book somewhat. The daughter of parents from Dutch-controlled Indonesia, Tan grew up in British Hong Kong, before moving to northern California and then London, where she now lives. The stories in this collection take place everywhere, with people from everywhere, like the protagonist of “Candy Glass,” a Hollywood star whose parents were East German refugees, or the prickly Bay Area Korean American narrator whose failed relationships with her boyfriend and her sister form the meat of “101.”
Destructive and abortive attempts at establishing human connections tie together the broken men and women of Tan’s eleven short stories. “Every one of his exes has a thing—they’ve been molested or are a cellist or something,” the obsessive narrator of the first story, “Legendary,” begins. “Holly shattered seventeen bones falling from a trapeze.” Sex and family, ideally sources of intimacy and comfort, are repackaged here as places of alienation and trauma.
While Tan’s stories are set in the ~real world~, their plots—like the ritualistic crucifixion of an exotic dancer—strain the reader’s understanding of mimesis. This, combined with Tan’s propensity for narration in the first person, can occasionally be frustrating. The unprepared reader may at times find the collection difficult to get into, with “Legendary” being about a woman methodically stalking her partner’s exes to satisfy a need for—empathy? understanding? Some strange, lonely fate for the host of strange, lonely dramatis personae that wend their way through Things to Make and Break.
“Date Night,” the second story in the collection, is my favourite because it crystallises the themes of movement, familial disaffection, and impotent desire that run through the book. It’s set in the Hong Kong of the author’s childhood, with the narrator a nine-year-old left alone at home with the new Indonesian maid, while her neurotic mother hops alcoholically about town with a suitor.
It may be the Southeast Asian in me, but this story struck very close to home, literally and figuratively. The other stories in this collection are a lot more cynical about the possibility of emotional fulfilment, even in supposedly happy endings. “Candy Glass” closes with the actress imagining a future for her stunt double, a stealth trans woman:
“I picture her living in a two-story duplex, sugar maples growing in a shared front yard heaped in gold light and red leaves,” Alexa says. “…She might be working as a bank teller. She’ll be dating by now. I imagine a slightly overweight divorcé with soft, fat fingers and pretty eyes, who teaches science at the high school. He has a young son and daughter who come to stay with him every other weekend, and he doesn’t want to have any more children. He washes his car every Sunday, and his favorite expression is What the hey.”
Compared with the bland bourgeoisie of American suburbia, the domestic worker Davy’s longing for reunion with her lover Farah imbued “Date Night” with a note of hope that felt absent from the hardened plots about childhood sexual abuse (“Laurens”) or the fraternal exploitation of the same amnesiac girl (“DD-MM-YY”). Trauma tugs down on the edges of Things to Make and Break, and like its world-weary characters, the reader has to snatch comfort where they can find it.
This review was originally published on my blog.
Get the book online: Amazon | CB Editions
August 23, 2014
Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for August 23 2014.
Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for August 23 2014.
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of Eric Liu’s A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2014); Khanh Ha’s Flesh (Black Heron Press, 2012); R. Zamora Linmark’s Drive-By Vigils (Hanging Loose Press, 2011); Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental (Alice James Books, 2013); A.X. Ahmad’s The Last Taxi Ride (Minotaur Books, 2014).
A Review of Eric Liu’s A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2014)
Eric Liu’s A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream explores the challenges of upward mobility in a time of great change. The title is of course a nod to the aphorism concerning the impossibility of a certain outcome. Here, that aphorism is being directed at a kind of skepticism of the potential for upward mobility within an American context. Liu employs not only personal anecdotes but also statistics, cultural references, sociological studies, which all point to the concentration of wealth in a particular stratum of American society. Liu reminds us now that the greatest predictor of actual financial success is whether or not your parents are already wealthy (this finding also corroborates the scholarly work of a number of sociologists etc that I’ve researched independently). Liu’s point is that the dream of upward mobility might actually be shifting elsewhere; he explores, for instance, the fact that many of his Uncles eventually returned to Taiwan where they achieved great success in a land where a racial glass ceiling did not exist for them in the same way that it did in the United States. Indeed, Liu’s father is one of the few in his family to stay in the United States. But the larger message that Liu seems to be conveying is that there has been a monumental shift in the world order: China stands as a beacon for these mutable dynamics of power and perhaps a threat to the American ethos of meritocracy.
Liu has an incredibly engaging writing style, which is important because this family memoir is written in block segments. Narratively fragmented, there is an occasional loss of flow that is only overcome because Liu is quite calculating in his trajectory over the arc of the work. Though Liu is rather direct in addressing increasing disparities of wealth, he is still ultimately an optimist: he believes that America can be made and remade through the work of its diverse citizenry. For those who are cultural studies scholars, Liu does devote a considerable amount of time to notable Chinese Americans in the field of arts, sciences, sports, etc. He spends quite a bit of time dissecting the various approaches that Chinese American writers have had to their craft (referencing Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Gish Jen’s Tiger Writing, and Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog: all titles already reviewed on Asian American literature fans). Liu’s aim is to explode the specifics around what Chinese American success can look like, while still evading the model minority label. A politically engaged and thoughtful account of Chinese America and of Liu’s family.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinamans-Chance-Familys-Journey-American/dp/1610391942/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405007479&sr=8-1&keywords=a+chinaman%27s+chance
A Review of Khanh Ha’s Flesh (Black Heron Press, 2012).
At its core, Khanh Ha’s Flesh is about questions of family, how to honor one’s parents, and how to go about dealing with a perceived injury. The story begins ominously enough. Set in the French colonial period of Vietnam, a young boy (who is our narrator) must watch his own father executed; the executioner is none other than this young boy’s granduncle. To complicate matters, a smallpox epidemic soon sweeps through the village; the young boy’s younger brother dies, while the young boy himself is scarred by the disease. There is an interesting use of a narrative perspective shift early on, as Ha briefly moves the discursive viewpoint to a Catholic priest named Danto (and into the third person), who appears in the village in order to impart his religious viewpoints and offer his spiritual support in light of the plague. But the novel quickly shifts back to the young boy’s first person viewpoint and from this point onward, the boy is on a quest to make sure that his father and his brother get an honorable burial spot. Working for a boatman at one point, he realizes that he may be able to secure family plots through an association with a traveling geomancer. A series of exchanges occur between the geomancer, the narrator, and the narrator’s mother, and it becomes apparent that in order to for him to secure these spots he must work in the service of that geomancer. At this point, the narrator essentially becomes an indentured servant and is later transferred to work for one of the geomancer’s most prized customers. While in Hanoi, he also chances upon an elderly dying Chinese man, who charges him to find granddaughter, Xiaoli, who can be found working out of an opium den. The old man hopes that the narrator will be able to relay not only the fact of his death, but also Xiaoli’s mother. Though the narrator dismisses this request as one he cannot complete, he eventually does bump into the very same Xiaoli, but withholds the information about her mother and grandfather, fearing that the news would be too traumatic. This point is probably the one which pushes the narrative (at least for me) further out from the realm of credulity than I would have preferred, but Ha’s politically engaged writing is clear: he seeks to explore the limited lives of indentured servants who struggle under the weight of clearing their debts. Xiaoli, like the narrator, is ultimately an indentured servant, so when love begins to blossom between them, the narrator’s motivations become obscured, and he tries to balance his service to his employer (and his employer’s requests and rules) against his desire for Xiaoli. Ha’s work is an intriguing addition to the Vietnamese American literary canon, especially given its historical focus and its exploration of the interethnic relationships among diasporic Chinese and local Vietnamese populations (calling to mind Vincent Lam’s novel The Headmaster’s Wager, earlier reviewed here).
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Flesh-Khanh-Ha/dp/0930773888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406319801&sr=8-1&keywords=khanh+ha+flesh
A Review of R. Zamora Linmark’s Drive-By Vigils (Hanging Loose Press, 2011).
(unfortunately the most high res pic I could find)
I don’t think there is any other poet that can mix such incredible humor and poignancy in lyric, and R. Zamora Linmark is in fine form with his latest poetry collection, Drive-By Vigils (Hanging Loose Press, 2011). Somewhere along the way of writing my first book, I realized I had to cut down on what I felt was extraneous to the research process. Since I focused on fiction, a lot of what obviously got cut was the poetry. Reading Drive-By Vigils and reviewing it is part of my “catch up” period. Linmark’s brilliance is in his irreverence: his mixture of high and low, popular culture and canonical literatures. In this collection, you’ll get Hamlet rewritten in raucous form; a quotation from Ally Sheedy’s character from The Breakfast Club in a poem that is basically a kind of elegy to John Hughes; a woman warning a lyric speaker from stepping in dog shit; Lorca being reframed from the angle of pidgin English; Carson McCullers being called—yes, you heard it here—a “fag hag” (18). Still, there is a somber confessional quality to all these poems and we know we’re getting into the heart of the collection’s soft and gooey center with poems like “Chronicle of a Virginity Foretold,” which seems to take as a point of reference the use of a timeline as a formal impulse (something you might have seen in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life); there is a moment where it’s obvious that the lyric speaker is wrestling with the demons of his own queer sexuality and then Linmark’s brilliance will hit us with his reference to 1984 in which “Frotting and fear of dying increases” (40). Here, the lyric speaker clearly engages the years in which the AIDS epidemic emerged, but pairs it up with the growing interest in exploring his queer sexuality. Linmark’s poetic textures also emerge from the scope of the collection, which has a wide geographical sweep, where lyrics take us to Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Europe (particularly Spain), Latin America (Argentina) then also its impressive temporal span (we’re never far from any form of colonialism in this collection and its centuries-long bearing on the Philippines, for instance). Linmark’s title is partly a sly wink at the rapidly changing world in the age of the internet, plane travel, and other time-space compressing technologies, while also referencing the lyric speaker’s obvious devotion to Spanish writers (like Lorca and Borges). In keeping with chronology as a kind of formal impulse, the last poem subverts its own sequencing to remind us that we’re in Linmark’s poetic world: a dazzling jumble of politically engaged and aesthetically dynamic awesomeness.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-By-Vigils-R-Zamora-Linmark/dp/1934909238
A Review of Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental (Alice James Books, 2013)
Again, I’ve been trying to catch up on some poetry reading and that process includes going back to some presses that have been historically very supportive of Asian American poetry. Alice James is one such press; it is the established independent press that runs the Kundiman Poetry Prize. I don’t think Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental appears in conjunction with that competition, but comes out independently and is striking in its environmentally conscious lyrics, interesting use of punctuation (double colons), its devotion to questions of materiality, transformation, and loss, and finally and perhaps most importantly: this strange thing of water. There is a point in the reading of a collection where I am wandering around an element through which I can get a sense of coherence. In We Come Elemental, it is primarily this issue of water: what it is, how it is all around us, and inside of us. The cover not surprisingly shows what seems to be a beach or shallow body of water upon which stands the body of something that looks like a human covered in dirt and moss and stones; this figure is doubled by a figure in the far horizon, an echo of this humanoid creature standing atop water. This cover stands as a useful way of conceptualizing the problem of loss and transformation and our relationship to the environment. We live so close to bodies of water and see ourselves refracted over bodies of water (through representation, through how we settle into cities). Beyer takes us into very specific geographies, too: San Francisco, Oakland, Manhattan all take center stage in this poetry collection. But this question of colons is something that integrates the contextual issue of transformation and shifts it into a formal register. Though there can be many interpretations of the double colon, I find them particularly intriguing given their connections to analogy. Some of us may have a bad memory trip when thinking about double colons and analogies because it takes us all the way back to the SATs, where the double colon is a place marker for the word “as.” For Beyer, the double colons might function in a similar sense in that there are rough equivalences to be made that link individuals, elements, animals, bodies of water, and geographies in a relational way. This sequence is a good example of what I am getting at:
Matter transforms human
body to maggot nest the hiss
of dry ice against a metal sink.
Flesh shreds or just grows old
and turns to dirt to concrete to building
:: internal energy equals heat minus work.
Wood to smoke becomes
a manifestation of something else
:: smell that lingers a tenuous
cling to my jacket’s cotton lining.
If burning is not disappearing
then neither is drowning:: the body
shows up again on another shore
in the folds of a current
whisked through the Atlantic.
Translation is a form
of disappearance:: my name gone
all wrong in their mouths (40).
These lines all operate to consider the nature of “matter” as it takes different shapes and morphologies. I especially find the comparison between the wood burning to the “smell that lingers” as particularly effective rendering of matter in its transformations. What’s interesting is that there is the suggestion that matter itself does not ever transform (the law of conservation of energy after all) but finds itself remade anew, but when we get to conceptions of translation, there is a disappearance when the “name” is not uttered in the way that it should. Thus, for the lyric speaker, what seems to still disappear amongst all of this matter in transformation is the nature of speaking and the nature of communication, who is hailed and how this individual is hailed. As the poems move forward, it is clear that Beyer’s lyric speaker is invested in rooting out a form of communication that might urge a call to action, individuals transformed into currents moving in the same direction, perhaps even toward a more engaged and productive relationship to one of the most precious elements: water. In this year of such incredible drought, the clarion call of Beyer’s poetry collection cannot be loud enough.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/We-Come-Elemental-Tamiko-Beyer/dp/1938584007
A Review of A.X. Ahmad’s The Last Taxi Ride (Minotaur Books, 2014).
(again, the highest res pic I could find =( )
A.X. Ahmad’s The Last Taxi Ride takes on a more global approach to the noir-ish series started with The Caretaker. Ranjit Singh is back with a couple of key changes: he’s divorced; his ex-wife has moved back to India, and his daughter has moved with her. Fortunately, the daughter is soon to visit, which puts Ranjit in higher spirits. Ranjit is still struggling to make ends meet. He’s a cab drive in New York City, but he also happens to help out with a local businessman with potential mob connections named Jay Patel. As a cab driver, he ends up coincidentally taking on a famous customer: Shabana Shaw, a Bollywood actress whose star is fading. Ranjit’s connection to Shaw seems only one of a fan to a star, but a chance reconnection with an old buddy, Mohan, from Ranjit’s military days begins to collapse various worlds together. Mohan, who is the bellman for the building in which Shabana Shaw resides, is able to give them access to her swanky New York City apartment. One night when she is gone, they have dinner together. But, is it not soon after that meal that Ranjit is pegged for Shabana Shaw’s murder, and Mohan is nowhere to be found. With Ranjit’s prints all over Shabana’s apartment, he seems to be the obvious culprit, but readers know the truth to be otherwise. Shabana was killed in a brutal manner, with her head smashed. Fortunately for him and the readers, Ranjit is able to make bail, but it becomes clear that his work with Jay Patel marks his position as more precarious than he has realized. Ranjit is tasked by Jay Patel to find Mohan for a reason that he does not understand, and Ranjit begins to see that the key to finding out the identity of Shabana’s murderer will be to find his former military buddy. From this point forward, the novel becomes the classic detective quest for the most part. Ranjit, as our noir detective, must find Mohan, and unravel the various skeins that have been tangled together, even though he must deal with a broken arm, shady mob bosses, and individuals who have useful knowledge concerning the mob underworld but are not necessarily willing to share such information. Ahmad uses an effective intercutting structure (one that was also used in The Caretaker) that provides important background to Shabana’s life and her struggle to make it as a Bollywood film actress. Perhaps the most important element introduced at this point is Shabana’s contentious relationship with her sister Ruki and her reliance upon mob bosses for protection and support. Ahmad is also game to make apparent the complicated racialized existence that enfolds Ranjit, as a South Asian immigrant taxi driver. The diversity of New York City comes most prominently to the surface with Ahmad’s effective use of minor characters, who hail from a variety of backgrounds and classes. Ahmad never lets the plot get away from him. Though there are occasional momentum shifts, the central mystery always propels readers assuredly forward. An entertaining, politically textured noir fiction!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Taxi-Ride-Ranjit/dp/125001686X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407249696&sr=8-1&keywords=a.x.+ahmad
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 Anglophone literatures. Please e-mail ssohnucr@gmail.com with any concerns you may have.
In this post, reviews of Eric Liu’s A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2014); Khanh Ha’s Flesh (Black Heron Press, 2012); R. Zamora Linmark’s Drive-By Vigils (Hanging Loose Press, 2011); Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental (Alice James Books, 2013); A.X. Ahmad’s The Last Taxi Ride (Minotaur Books, 2014).
A Review of Eric Liu’s A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2014)
Eric Liu’s A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream explores the challenges of upward mobility in a time of great change. The title is of course a nod to the aphorism concerning the impossibility of a certain outcome. Here, that aphorism is being directed at a kind of skepticism of the potential for upward mobility within an American context. Liu employs not only personal anecdotes but also statistics, cultural references, sociological studies, which all point to the concentration of wealth in a particular stratum of American society. Liu reminds us now that the greatest predictor of actual financial success is whether or not your parents are already wealthy (this finding also corroborates the scholarly work of a number of sociologists etc that I’ve researched independently). Liu’s point is that the dream of upward mobility might actually be shifting elsewhere; he explores, for instance, the fact that many of his Uncles eventually returned to Taiwan where they achieved great success in a land where a racial glass ceiling did not exist for them in the same way that it did in the United States. Indeed, Liu’s father is one of the few in his family to stay in the United States. But the larger message that Liu seems to be conveying is that there has been a monumental shift in the world order: China stands as a beacon for these mutable dynamics of power and perhaps a threat to the American ethos of meritocracy.
Liu has an incredibly engaging writing style, which is important because this family memoir is written in block segments. Narratively fragmented, there is an occasional loss of flow that is only overcome because Liu is quite calculating in his trajectory over the arc of the work. Though Liu is rather direct in addressing increasing disparities of wealth, he is still ultimately an optimist: he believes that America can be made and remade through the work of its diverse citizenry. For those who are cultural studies scholars, Liu does devote a considerable amount of time to notable Chinese Americans in the field of arts, sciences, sports, etc. He spends quite a bit of time dissecting the various approaches that Chinese American writers have had to their craft (referencing Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Gish Jen’s Tiger Writing, and Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog: all titles already reviewed on Asian American literature fans). Liu’s aim is to explode the specifics around what Chinese American success can look like, while still evading the model minority label. A politically engaged and thoughtful account of Chinese America and of Liu’s family.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Chinamans-Chance-Familys-Journey-American/dp/1610391942/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405007479&sr=8-1&keywords=a+chinaman%27s+chance
A Review of Khanh Ha’s Flesh (Black Heron Press, 2012).
At its core, Khanh Ha’s Flesh is about questions of family, how to honor one’s parents, and how to go about dealing with a perceived injury. The story begins ominously enough. Set in the French colonial period of Vietnam, a young boy (who is our narrator) must watch his own father executed; the executioner is none other than this young boy’s granduncle. To complicate matters, a smallpox epidemic soon sweeps through the village; the young boy’s younger brother dies, while the young boy himself is scarred by the disease. There is an interesting use of a narrative perspective shift early on, as Ha briefly moves the discursive viewpoint to a Catholic priest named Danto (and into the third person), who appears in the village in order to impart his religious viewpoints and offer his spiritual support in light of the plague. But the novel quickly shifts back to the young boy’s first person viewpoint and from this point onward, the boy is on a quest to make sure that his father and his brother get an honorable burial spot. Working for a boatman at one point, he realizes that he may be able to secure family plots through an association with a traveling geomancer. A series of exchanges occur between the geomancer, the narrator, and the narrator’s mother, and it becomes apparent that in order to for him to secure these spots he must work in the service of that geomancer. At this point, the narrator essentially becomes an indentured servant and is later transferred to work for one of the geomancer’s most prized customers. While in Hanoi, he also chances upon an elderly dying Chinese man, who charges him to find granddaughter, Xiaoli, who can be found working out of an opium den. The old man hopes that the narrator will be able to relay not only the fact of his death, but also Xiaoli’s mother. Though the narrator dismisses this request as one he cannot complete, he eventually does bump into the very same Xiaoli, but withholds the information about her mother and grandfather, fearing that the news would be too traumatic. This point is probably the one which pushes the narrative (at least for me) further out from the realm of credulity than I would have preferred, but Ha’s politically engaged writing is clear: he seeks to explore the limited lives of indentured servants who struggle under the weight of clearing their debts. Xiaoli, like the narrator, is ultimately an indentured servant, so when love begins to blossom between them, the narrator’s motivations become obscured, and he tries to balance his service to his employer (and his employer’s requests and rules) against his desire for Xiaoli. Ha’s work is an intriguing addition to the Vietnamese American literary canon, especially given its historical focus and its exploration of the interethnic relationships among diasporic Chinese and local Vietnamese populations (calling to mind Vincent Lam’s novel The Headmaster’s Wager, earlier reviewed here).
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Flesh-Khanh-Ha/dp/0930773888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406319801&sr=8-1&keywords=khanh+ha+flesh
A Review of R. Zamora Linmark’s Drive-By Vigils (Hanging Loose Press, 2011).
(unfortunately the most high res pic I could find)
I don’t think there is any other poet that can mix such incredible humor and poignancy in lyric, and R. Zamora Linmark is in fine form with his latest poetry collection, Drive-By Vigils (Hanging Loose Press, 2011). Somewhere along the way of writing my first book, I realized I had to cut down on what I felt was extraneous to the research process. Since I focused on fiction, a lot of what obviously got cut was the poetry. Reading Drive-By Vigils and reviewing it is part of my “catch up” period. Linmark’s brilliance is in his irreverence: his mixture of high and low, popular culture and canonical literatures. In this collection, you’ll get Hamlet rewritten in raucous form; a quotation from Ally Sheedy’s character from The Breakfast Club in a poem that is basically a kind of elegy to John Hughes; a woman warning a lyric speaker from stepping in dog shit; Lorca being reframed from the angle of pidgin English; Carson McCullers being called—yes, you heard it here—a “fag hag” (18). Still, there is a somber confessional quality to all these poems and we know we’re getting into the heart of the collection’s soft and gooey center with poems like “Chronicle of a Virginity Foretold,” which seems to take as a point of reference the use of a timeline as a formal impulse (something you might have seen in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life); there is a moment where it’s obvious that the lyric speaker is wrestling with the demons of his own queer sexuality and then Linmark’s brilliance will hit us with his reference to 1984 in which “Frotting and fear of dying increases” (40). Here, the lyric speaker clearly engages the years in which the AIDS epidemic emerged, but pairs it up with the growing interest in exploring his queer sexuality. Linmark’s poetic textures also emerge from the scope of the collection, which has a wide geographical sweep, where lyrics take us to Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Europe (particularly Spain), Latin America (Argentina) then also its impressive temporal span (we’re never far from any form of colonialism in this collection and its centuries-long bearing on the Philippines, for instance). Linmark’s title is partly a sly wink at the rapidly changing world in the age of the internet, plane travel, and other time-space compressing technologies, while also referencing the lyric speaker’s obvious devotion to Spanish writers (like Lorca and Borges). In keeping with chronology as a kind of formal impulse, the last poem subverts its own sequencing to remind us that we’re in Linmark’s poetic world: a dazzling jumble of politically engaged and aesthetically dynamic awesomeness.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-By-Vigils-R-Zamora-Linmark/dp/1934909238
A Review of Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental (Alice James Books, 2013)
Again, I’ve been trying to catch up on some poetry reading and that process includes going back to some presses that have been historically very supportive of Asian American poetry. Alice James is one such press; it is the established independent press that runs the Kundiman Poetry Prize. I don’t think Tamiko Beyer’s We Come Elemental appears in conjunction with that competition, but comes out independently and is striking in its environmentally conscious lyrics, interesting use of punctuation (double colons), its devotion to questions of materiality, transformation, and loss, and finally and perhaps most importantly: this strange thing of water. There is a point in the reading of a collection where I am wandering around an element through which I can get a sense of coherence. In We Come Elemental, it is primarily this issue of water: what it is, how it is all around us, and inside of us. The cover not surprisingly shows what seems to be a beach or shallow body of water upon which stands the body of something that looks like a human covered in dirt and moss and stones; this figure is doubled by a figure in the far horizon, an echo of this humanoid creature standing atop water. This cover stands as a useful way of conceptualizing the problem of loss and transformation and our relationship to the environment. We live so close to bodies of water and see ourselves refracted over bodies of water (through representation, through how we settle into cities). Beyer takes us into very specific geographies, too: San Francisco, Oakland, Manhattan all take center stage in this poetry collection. But this question of colons is something that integrates the contextual issue of transformation and shifts it into a formal register. Though there can be many interpretations of the double colon, I find them particularly intriguing given their connections to analogy. Some of us may have a bad memory trip when thinking about double colons and analogies because it takes us all the way back to the SATs, where the double colon is a place marker for the word “as.” For Beyer, the double colons might function in a similar sense in that there are rough equivalences to be made that link individuals, elements, animals, bodies of water, and geographies in a relational way. This sequence is a good example of what I am getting at:
Matter transforms human
body to maggot nest the hiss
of dry ice against a metal sink.
Flesh shreds or just grows old
and turns to dirt to concrete to building
:: internal energy equals heat minus work.
Wood to smoke becomes
a manifestation of something else
:: smell that lingers a tenuous
cling to my jacket’s cotton lining.
If burning is not disappearing
then neither is drowning:: the body
shows up again on another shore
in the folds of a current
whisked through the Atlantic.
Translation is a form
of disappearance:: my name gone
all wrong in their mouths (40).
These lines all operate to consider the nature of “matter” as it takes different shapes and morphologies. I especially find the comparison between the wood burning to the “smell that lingers” as particularly effective rendering of matter in its transformations. What’s interesting is that there is the suggestion that matter itself does not ever transform (the law of conservation of energy after all) but finds itself remade anew, but when we get to conceptions of translation, there is a disappearance when the “name” is not uttered in the way that it should. Thus, for the lyric speaker, what seems to still disappear amongst all of this matter in transformation is the nature of speaking and the nature of communication, who is hailed and how this individual is hailed. As the poems move forward, it is clear that Beyer’s lyric speaker is invested in rooting out a form of communication that might urge a call to action, individuals transformed into currents moving in the same direction, perhaps even toward a more engaged and productive relationship to one of the most precious elements: water. In this year of such incredible drought, the clarion call of Beyer’s poetry collection cannot be loud enough.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/We-Come-Elemental-Tamiko-Beyer/dp/1938584007
A Review of A.X. Ahmad’s The Last Taxi Ride (Minotaur Books, 2014).
(again, the highest res pic I could find =( )
A.X. Ahmad’s The Last Taxi Ride takes on a more global approach to the noir-ish series started with The Caretaker. Ranjit Singh is back with a couple of key changes: he’s divorced; his ex-wife has moved back to India, and his daughter has moved with her. Fortunately, the daughter is soon to visit, which puts Ranjit in higher spirits. Ranjit is still struggling to make ends meet. He’s a cab drive in New York City, but he also happens to help out with a local businessman with potential mob connections named Jay Patel. As a cab driver, he ends up coincidentally taking on a famous customer: Shabana Shaw, a Bollywood actress whose star is fading. Ranjit’s connection to Shaw seems only one of a fan to a star, but a chance reconnection with an old buddy, Mohan, from Ranjit’s military days begins to collapse various worlds together. Mohan, who is the bellman for the building in which Shabana Shaw resides, is able to give them access to her swanky New York City apartment. One night when she is gone, they have dinner together. But, is it not soon after that meal that Ranjit is pegged for Shabana Shaw’s murder, and Mohan is nowhere to be found. With Ranjit’s prints all over Shabana’s apartment, he seems to be the obvious culprit, but readers know the truth to be otherwise. Shabana was killed in a brutal manner, with her head smashed. Fortunately for him and the readers, Ranjit is able to make bail, but it becomes clear that his work with Jay Patel marks his position as more precarious than he has realized. Ranjit is tasked by Jay Patel to find Mohan for a reason that he does not understand, and Ranjit begins to see that the key to finding out the identity of Shabana’s murderer will be to find his former military buddy. From this point forward, the novel becomes the classic detective quest for the most part. Ranjit, as our noir detective, must find Mohan, and unravel the various skeins that have been tangled together, even though he must deal with a broken arm, shady mob bosses, and individuals who have useful knowledge concerning the mob underworld but are not necessarily willing to share such information. Ahmad uses an effective intercutting structure (one that was also used in The Caretaker) that provides important background to Shabana’s life and her struggle to make it as a Bollywood film actress. Perhaps the most important element introduced at this point is Shabana’s contentious relationship with her sister Ruki and her reliance upon mob bosses for protection and support. Ahmad is also game to make apparent the complicated racialized existence that enfolds Ranjit, as a South Asian immigrant taxi driver. The diversity of New York City comes most prominently to the surface with Ahmad’s effective use of minor characters, who hail from a variety of backgrounds and classes. Ahmad never lets the plot get away from him. Though there are occasional momentum shifts, the central mystery always propels readers assuredly forward. An entertaining, politically textured noir fiction!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Taxi-Ride-Ranjit/dp/125001686X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407249696&sr=8-1&keywords=a.x.+ahmad
Paul Yoon's Snow Hunters
I've had a copy of Paul Yoon's Snow Hunters (Simon & Schuster, 2013) sitting in my must read soon pile for half a year because, like stephenhongsohn, I love Yoon's debut short story collection
Once the Shore
(and had a chance to teach it as well).
More than anything, the power of this language is in the contemplative sentences. Describing the plot would do little justice to it, even though the plot itself is full of potential for lots of interesting exploration into history, transnational movements, war, romance, and more. In brief, the story focuses on Yohan, a man from northern Korea who ended up conscripted into the North Korean military and eventually was captured by American allies to South Korea. He spent time in a prisoner of war camp where he learned to mend clothes, and after the end of the Korean civil war, he moved to Brazil to become an apprentice to Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor in a seaside village. The novel interweaves moments from throughout Yohan's life, often with flashbacks and thus disrupting a linear narrative structure. Throughout his life, Yohan encounters people with whom he forms friendships and other kinds of relationships. In addition to Kiyoshi, these people include Peng, who as a boy traveled with an entertainment troupe and later ended up in the POW camp with Yohan; Bia and Santi, an itinerant girl and boy in Brazil who pop in and out of Yohan's life; and Peixe, the groundskeeper at the church in the village.
To provide a sense of the language in this novel, here are a few paragraphs:
As this passage shows, Yoon's language is spare. Many of the sentences are concise descriptions of basic actions or objects. Yet, the choice of words often evokes something more emotional (sometimes verging on pathetic fallacy). The middle paragraph describes a tree, but the description suggests the impact of nature and the course of life on a living being's shape. This type of writing is highly metaphorical, and in some instances, it is a kind of metonymy where the tree comes to stand in for Yohan himself.
One thing I am curious about is the naming of this novel for people who appear briefly towards the end of the novel. The eponymous snow hunters are a group of people, possibly a nuclear family unit, scavenging in the winter. From a distance, it looks like they are gathering snow, and Peng describes them that way--as snow hunters (p. 152). This description is curious, and the deliberate misinterpretation of the family's actions, which is more accurately probably scavenging for food, clothing, and other necessary supplies for surviving a winter in a war zone, suggests both a violence and a beauty. I need to think more about snow hunters as the overarching image or idea for the novel, how they might encapsulate or capture all of the themes of the novel.
More than anything, the power of this language is in the contemplative sentences. Describing the plot would do little justice to it, even though the plot itself is full of potential for lots of interesting exploration into history, transnational movements, war, romance, and more. In brief, the story focuses on Yohan, a man from northern Korea who ended up conscripted into the North Korean military and eventually was captured by American allies to South Korea. He spent time in a prisoner of war camp where he learned to mend clothes, and after the end of the Korean civil war, he moved to Brazil to become an apprentice to Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor in a seaside village. The novel interweaves moments from throughout Yohan's life, often with flashbacks and thus disrupting a linear narrative structure. Throughout his life, Yohan encounters people with whom he forms friendships and other kinds of relationships. In addition to Kiyoshi, these people include Peng, who as a boy traveled with an entertainment troupe and later ended up in the POW camp with Yohan; Bia and Santi, an itinerant girl and boy in Brazil who pop in and out of Yohan's life; and Peixe, the groundskeeper at the church in the village.
To provide a sense of the language in this novel, here are a few paragraphs:
In the fall, Yohan climbed to the top of the hill town. He passed the church where the road ended and crossed a sloped meadow, heading toward the tree on the ridge.
The tree was tall and had been shaped by the wind. Its branches were long and thick, extending out in one direction. Some nearly touched the ground.
He rested there, on the peak of the hill, and looked out at the distant lighthouse and the old plantation house to the north. Breakers approached a cliff. The wind was steady, consuming the noises, and he watched the town go about its day. (p. 49)
As this passage shows, Yoon's language is spare. Many of the sentences are concise descriptions of basic actions or objects. Yet, the choice of words often evokes something more emotional (sometimes verging on pathetic fallacy). The middle paragraph describes a tree, but the description suggests the impact of nature and the course of life on a living being's shape. This type of writing is highly metaphorical, and in some instances, it is a kind of metonymy where the tree comes to stand in for Yohan himself.
One thing I am curious about is the naming of this novel for people who appear briefly towards the end of the novel. The eponymous snow hunters are a group of people, possibly a nuclear family unit, scavenging in the winter. From a distance, it looks like they are gathering snow, and Peng describes them that way--as snow hunters (p. 152). This description is curious, and the deliberate misinterpretation of the family's actions, which is more accurately probably scavenging for food, clothing, and other necessary supplies for surviving a winter in a war zone, suggests both a violence and a beauty. I need to think more about snow hunters as the overarching image or idea for the novel, how they might encapsulate or capture all of the themes of the novel.
August 15, 2014
Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl
This week, I listened to the audiobook recording of Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl (Viking, 2014; Dreamscape Media, 2014), narrated by Bernadette Dunne. Earlier this year, stephenhongsohn also reviewed the novel. I agree with
stephenhongsohn
's comment that this novel interestingly stakes a claim for Vietnamese American literature as part of a broader American literary history.
Pioneer Girl focuses on Lee Lien, a second-generation Vietnamese American woman who has just completed a PhD in American literature with a dissertation on Edith Wharton, whose novels explored early twentieth century New York high society. Throughout this story, Nguyen draws out tensions and resonances between canonical/traditional/white America and Vietnamese America but especially in inserting Lee's family into the history of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie as emblems of the myth of the American frontier. What is fascinating is that the Little House books were already always a nostalgic look back at frontier/settler life when they were published in the twentieth century, and they continue to serve as a touchstone for many Americans of an idealized frontier past, both through the books and the popular television series based on the books in the 1970s and early 1980s.
At the heart of this novel is a pin/brooch that her family owns. Its history is what potentially links her family to the Little House. I am curious how much this speculative history stuff is real (or at least how much of the archival documents the novel identifies are real, if not the interpretations). The story goes that Lee's grandfather owned a cafe in Vietnam during the war. An older white American woman by the name of Rose visited the cafe for an extended period of time, chatting with him often. When she left, she left behind the pin, which Lee's grandfather kept. The pin became a kind of heirloom, held by Lee's mother and eventually taken by Lee as part of her family history.
The novel takes on kind of a literary mystery quality, with Lee visiting various libraries and museums to find documentation of Rose's visit to Vietnam, perhaps mention of her grandfather and his cafe. As she searches out clues of her family's presence in the lives of the iconic Ingalls/Wilder/Lane family, she negotiates her own family's dramas. As in Short Girls, Nguyen provides plenty of exploration of sibling dynamics in an immigrant family, something that she does really well as an added layer to the usual considerations of intergenerational (parent-child) conflict in these types of stories. The novel is also on the lighter/more humorous side in some ways though it is not as funny as Short Girls. I do agree with some other online reviews of the novel, though, that I kept expecting more to happen in Lee's quest to find out about the pin, Rose Wilder Lane's connection to her family, and so on.
A couple of other reviews of the book:
BookDragon (interestingly, Terry Hong found the fake Asian accents problematic in this audiobook, but I didn't notice it that much in comparison to the bad accents in Mambo in Chinatown)
Hyphen Magazine
stephenhongsohn
's comment that this novel interestingly stakes a claim for Vietnamese American literature as part of a broader American literary history.Pioneer Girl focuses on Lee Lien, a second-generation Vietnamese American woman who has just completed a PhD in American literature with a dissertation on Edith Wharton, whose novels explored early twentieth century New York high society. Throughout this story, Nguyen draws out tensions and resonances between canonical/traditional/white America and Vietnamese America but especially in inserting Lee's family into the history of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie as emblems of the myth of the American frontier. What is fascinating is that the Little House books were already always a nostalgic look back at frontier/settler life when they were published in the twentieth century, and they continue to serve as a touchstone for many Americans of an idealized frontier past, both through the books and the popular television series based on the books in the 1970s and early 1980s.
At the heart of this novel is a pin/brooch that her family owns. Its history is what potentially links her family to the Little House. I am curious how much this speculative history stuff is real (or at least how much of the archival documents the novel identifies are real, if not the interpretations). The story goes that Lee's grandfather owned a cafe in Vietnam during the war. An older white American woman by the name of Rose visited the cafe for an extended period of time, chatting with him often. When she left, she left behind the pin, which Lee's grandfather kept. The pin became a kind of heirloom, held by Lee's mother and eventually taken by Lee as part of her family history.
The novel takes on kind of a literary mystery quality, with Lee visiting various libraries and museums to find documentation of Rose's visit to Vietnam, perhaps mention of her grandfather and his cafe. As she searches out clues of her family's presence in the lives of the iconic Ingalls/Wilder/Lane family, she negotiates her own family's dramas. As in Short Girls, Nguyen provides plenty of exploration of sibling dynamics in an immigrant family, something that she does really well as an added layer to the usual considerations of intergenerational (parent-child) conflict in these types of stories. The novel is also on the lighter/more humorous side in some ways though it is not as funny as Short Girls. I do agree with some other online reviews of the novel, though, that I kept expecting more to happen in Lee's quest to find out about the pin, Rose Wilder Lane's connection to her family, and so on.
A couple of other reviews of the book:
BookDragon (interestingly, Terry Hong found the fake Asian accents problematic in this audiobook, but I didn't notice it that much in comparison to the bad accents in Mambo in Chinatown)
Hyphen Magazine
