For Today I Am a Boy in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Dec 23, 2020 Jessica rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

Confession: I had somehow been under the impression that this book about the childhood of a Chinese-Canadian trans woman was written by a Chinese-Canadian trans woman, and I didn't actually fact-check that before I started reading. Partway through the book I started having questions and learned that the author is Chinese-Canadian, but that the trans woman aspects of the book are not based on the author's lived experience. I think that might explain why most of the early parts of the book dealing Confession: I had somehow been under the impression that this book about the childhood of a Chinese-Canadian trans woman was written by a Chinese-Canadian trans woman, and I didn't actually fact-check that before I started reading. Partway through the book I started having questions and learned that the author is Chinese-Canadian, but that the trans woman aspects of the book are not based on the author's lived experience. I think that might explain why most of the early parts of the book dealing with family dynamics worked so well for me and why the book started losing me later on.

The book is about Audrey, a woman assigned male at birth, who grows up dominated by a Chinese father who wants above all else for his family to assimilate and be just like every other family in their mostly-white town of Fort Michel, Ontario. He forbids speaking Cantonese and eating Chinese food, and he strongly enforces gender roles, leaving his wife feeling voiceless and repressed, and leaving Audrey to bear the burden of all his expectations of having a manly-man son.

As a child, Audrey wants desperately to be a girl, but growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a conservative household in a conservative town, she doesn't have the vocabulary or role models to understand this could be a possibility for her. She has so much internalized transphobia, which doesn't necessarily make the book feel inauthentic, but does make it hard to read. This is also the sort of book that focuses near-exclusively on the bad things that happen to people who want to live their authentic lives; there is so little joy in the book. Honestly there's not a lot of emotion at all - it's adult Audrey passively narrating the things that happened to her, without ever giving us any sense of what adult Audrey thinks of these scenes, and without giving us much of a sense of what she felt in the moment, either.

I liked this book for the scenes of growing up smothered under a domineering father but wanted a lot more from the later parts after Audrey moved out. I also wanted to see more than just the tiny glimpse we get of adult Audrey. The book implies that she may have finally found happiness, but giving us one tiny glimpse of her in a bar isn't enough to tell us she's okay now. In the end, For Today I Am a Boy gives us a lot of misery without much joy or hope. ...more

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