Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for April 9, 2014

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Asian American Literature Fans – Megareview for April 9, 2014

In honor of the new Penguin/ Random House merger, a post with Random House/ Penguin titles!

Do recall that Penguin still has the academic service:

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/services-academic/cfis.html

Through Penguin’s service, I have had the chance to consider many new course adoptions and it’s a wonderful, wonderful resource for educators of all levels. With the Random House merger, I’m not quite sure if the academic service will still be retained, but we can all hope! Now on to the reviews!

In this post, reviews of: Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl (Viking Adult, 2014); Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead Books, 2014); Michelle Sagara’s Touch (Daw Books, 2014); Lydia Kang’s Control (Dial Press, 2013); Yiyun Li’s Kinder than Solitude (Random House, 2013).

A Review of Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl (Viking Adult, 2014).



Bich Minh Nguyen’s second novel and third publication (after Short Girls and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner) explores the life of a newly minted PhD, who is not surprisingly unemployed. We are further not surprised to find out that her degree is in English. Fortunately, the protagonist, Lee, completed a thesis on Edith Wharton, so we know that she might have some marketability, having focused in an area that has widespread institutional legibility and on an writer who most would consider as part of a “broader field” (but I digress). Jobs are good. Job security is of course even better, but Lee isn’t so lucky. She moves back home to suburban Chicago, where she helps out at her mother’s restaurant, the Lotus Leaf Café, and creates tension with her desire to help change the menu design and other such minor details. Lee’s father died when she was just a child and her family life is essentially comprised of her connection to her mother and her grandfather, Ong Hai (who also works at the Café). Lee’s brother Sam is estranged from the family at the start of the novel and it is his arrival that catalyzes the plot: he comes home to demand money. Apparently, Lee and Sam’s mother had been receiving money from years from Hieu, a family friend and a man who had been somehow indirectly involved with their father’s accidental death. Sam does not find any of that money, which he believes is rightfully owed to him and Lee precisely because they were the ones to “lose” their father. Before Sam vacates the area, he leaves behind a pin, one that has a rather legendary story in the family. Indeed, there was a Caucasian woman who used to frequent the café that Ong Hai had owned back in Vietnam, in the days of the war. Through some creative deduction, Lee begins to think that that woman may have been Rose Wilder, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House Books. Since she is essentially not doing anything related to her research, she sets out to discover whether or not Rose Wilder was also the one who ended up in Vietnam and had frequented Ong Hai’s café. For Lee, this quest is particularly important precisely because she had wrapped up so much of her American identity around the Little House books.
Nguyen’s book is essentially a kind of detective plot, so it reads very quickly. Of course, we can read into Lee’s rather obsessive desire as one that is elliptically confronting her second generational, child-to-immigrants identity: to find a narrative in which her Otherness can be ultimately and directly tied to a perceived American-ness. Nguyen’s knowledge of all things Laura Ingalls Wilder is put to effective use here and fans of that series will no doubt find much to celebrate in this inventive re-envisioning of the afterlife of the Little House books from the Vietnamese American perspective. Finally: there is a strange discourse about the “marketability” of ethnic literature in this particular novel that appears in relation to Lee’s job prospects, which I find troubling insofar as the thing so many forget is that ultimately and importantly: Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl is as “American” as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and should be understood as a novel that is taxonomically configured from multiple literary genealogies: Asian American and otherwise.

Buy the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Girl-Bich-Minh-Nguyen/dp/0670025097/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1391190662&sr=8-2&keywords=Pioneer+Girl


A Review of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead Books, 2014).

spoilers forthcoming

First off: see pylduck’s review here:

http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/164179.html



It is late, I should be in bed, but instead I’m writing some quick thoughts on Chang-rae Lee’s fifth novel, On Such a Full Sea (after Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, The Surrendered, and Aloft). I’ve followed Lee’s work ever since Native Speaker and a new novel is always occasion for a celebration and carving out time to read the novel itself. This time around I had to wait a couple of weeks before I could sit down and finish the book; I read it in about five sittings, which isn’t typical for me as a novel reader in general. The novel is told from an interesting narrative perspective conceit: a kind of disembodied “we” voice, with a vaguely omniscient perspective. The “we” seems to be the common folk of B-Mor, a postapocalyptic town that takes place in what was once known as Baltimore. There were plagues and other such things and Baltimore becomes repopulated by Chinese settlers. It seems as though Lee is working from an alternative timeline that might be counterfactual rather than fully futuristic, as the story itself doesn’t pose super advanced or imaginary technologies that would tell us we’re centuries from the present moment. The “we” is focused on narrating the life of a character, Fan, who leaves B-Mor for the Open Counties, seeking to find her lover, Reg, who has been whisked away from B-Mor. She’s not aware of the reason Reg has been taken, though the “we” is convinced that Reg is part of the magical set of people who are “C” free. That is, he has some sort of genetic anomaly that allows him to avoid getting one of the diseases that still plagues the general population. Lee tiers three main “spaces” in the novel: the Charter “cities,” B-Mor (which seems to be a middle-class, working class suburbia), and then the Open Counties, which functions as the novel’s wide open, rural ghettos. The Open Counties are a kind of no-man’s land, with the absence of structured laws. In Lee’s novel the Open Counties are a place of polyamory, cannibalism, theft, and kidnapping. Fan somehow is able to survive there. In part, she is lucky, but she is also plucky and a tactical individual. She looks far younger than she actually is and uses her diminutive size to evade capture, to mask her pregnancy, and to perform in various roles that allow her to continue her quest to find Reg. Once in the Open Counties, she falls into a makeshift camp led by a man named Quig. Quig eventually sells Fan off to a husband and wife living in a Charter city; Fan is bartered for a drug treatment that will help with some of those living in Quig’s encampment. Of course, Lee makes this moment quite poignant precisely because Fan is sold only after she has saved Quig and Quig’s partner’s life from being eaten by cannibals (and here, I couldn’t help but think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road). Once Fan is in the home of the Charter couple, she realizes that she not only might be able to find Reg, but she also might be reunited with her brother, Bo Liwei, who as a young child was one of the very few selected from B-Mor to live in a Charter city due to his intellectual gifts. At this point, the novel takes a relatively strange turn. Fan soon discovers that the couple she has become connected with have some dark secrets. Mister Leo seems to have an inclination toward adopting young Asian American women, while Miss Cathy stands idly by as these surrogate daughters become part of Mister Leo’s sadistic harem. Once Mister Leo suffers from a major medical condition, Miss Cathy is able to—however problematically—save these women, as they become part of a living collection of dolls that she harbors in secret. Thus, Fan has been added to this precious grouping. Fan, with the help of the housekeeper Mala, is able to engineer her escape, while also keeping Miss Cathy and her surrogate daughters together. She ultimately realizes that Miss Cathy is not the true enemy. From there, Fan is taken in by Vik, one of the doctors who tended to Miss Cathy’s surrogate daughters. With Vik, Fan attends a party thrown by the wealthy Cheungs (Oliver and Betty) and Oliver ultimately reveals himself as none other than Fan’s brother Bo Liwei. The final arc sees Oliver and Betty welcome Fan into their family and offer to help her find Reg, but these promises ultimately become hollow as Betty sells out Fan and the fact that she is pregnant with Reg’s child to a pharmaceutical company (Asimil). Fan’s child is obviously critically important because the child possesses the genetic heritage of someone who has been C-Free. Vik ends up saving Fan by commandeering one of the vehicles that would have taken her to the pharmaceutical company. The conclusion of the novel sees Fan on the run and still in search of Reg.
I had dinner with an author friend of mine over at a sushi place not long after I finished the novel and the thing I kept coming back to was an element of spirituality. In Lee’s alternate universe, religion and spirituality seem absent. The reverence with which the “we” tell Fan’s story is as if she is a kind of Christ-figure, one who must remain a fugitive because she bears the hope to deliver a new era for those in B-More and beyond. Fan is unlike so many she meets; she’s openly empathetic, she helps people even to her detriment, she’s giving, she’s caring, she loves deeply. In other words, she is someone to emulate. Thus, she moves into a kind of mythic position, giving B-Mor inhabitants the hope that there might be a way to move beyond the rigid class paradigms that constrain them, that there still might be a shred of benevolence left in individuals despite such rigid strata. The “we” seems to be a “we” seeking to believe in someone, something greater than the sum of their biopower-harnessed collective. In some ways, one might think of Lee’s work as a refraction of the current global economy, the growing disparity between rich and poor; perhaps, this is the greatest power of the speculative fiction: it tells us what already has become a kind of horror and that we still need someone to worthy enough to merit survival and then to give us hope.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/On-Such-Full-Sea-Novel/dp/1594486107

A Review of Yiyun Li’s Kinder than Solitude (Random House, 2013).



One of the most anticipated releases (at least for me) has been Yiyun Li’s Kinder than Solitude, her second novel (after the superbly dark novel The Vagrants) and her fourth publication (after A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl). I was torn upon completing the novel precisely because—as with The Vagrants—the narrative is particularly depressing. The premise is a kind of murder mystery. A young woman and political dissident (Shaoai) is deliberately poisoned and almost dies. She suffers severe brain damage and it takes twenty years before the effects of this poisoning result in her death. In that time, three main suspects seem to emerge: Ruyu, Boyang, and Moran, who are all high school aged and had visited a chemical laboratory (of Boyang’s mother) from which the poisoning agent was taken. When the novel opens, Shaoai has just died. Boyang is the only one of the three to have stayed in China and he writes both Ruyu and Moran an e-mail detailing Shaoai’s death. In this time, Ruyu has moved to America and along the way suffered the disintegration of two marriages. She finds herself employed in the Bay Area by a rich, upper class woman named Celia. Moran went on to receive a PhD, married and then divorced a man named Josef. Li toggles the narrative back and forth in time. We discover that Ruyu was an orphan, she was raised by her non-blood relatives who have sent her off to a school. Because that school is far away, she is boarded with an Aunt. She comes to develop a very sour relationship with the Aunt’s daughter who happens to be Shaoai. At school, Ruyu develops tentative connections with Moran and Boyang.



Boyang eventually develops romantic feelings for Ruyu, leaving Moran out in the cold. This love triangle is central to the climactic developments of the novel. About halfway through the narrative, Ruyu suffers a traumatic sexual assault at the hands of Shaoai no less; this experience proves to shatter Ruyu’s illusions about the possibility and promise of her own life. Her generally apathetic disposition turns far more pessimistic after this period and it will mark her character for the rest of her life. The novel’s murder plot is ultimately really secondary to Li’s devoted texturizing of the three main characters, but it is finally Ruyu who takes the real center stage. This prickly, challenging, unsentimental character is one that may generate significant discord among readers. There is a point at which I did wonder if Ruyu was borderline sociopathic in some of her tendencies.
At the core of this novel is a polemic about free speech. Shaoai was involved with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and never renounces her position or her political views. This rebellious personality filters everything she does and how she treats her family members. At the same time, once Ruyu and Moran are bonded to each other in the secret that Ruyu had taken the poison from the laboratory, a series of presuppositions and conspiracy theories leave readers wondering whether or not Ruyu was suicidal or murderous. Moran’s decision to alert adults about Ruyu’s theft and possible participation in Shaoai’s poisoning leads to the destruction of their fragile friendships. Whether or not she did actively participate in Shaoai’s death, Ruyu seems to show little regret for what occurs to Shaoai, which makes the ending and her reunion—possibly romantic in its nature—with Boyan extremely unsettling. A novel not for the faint of heart.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Kinder-Than-Solitude-A-Novel/dp/1400068142/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392939133&sr=8-1&keywords=kinder+than+solitude

A Review of Michelle Sagara’s Touch (Daw Books, 2014).



Fans of Michelle Sagara’s work in this “necromancer” based supernatural series may be disappointed by the relative lack of action in the follow-up to Silence, but Sagara’s goal is clearly in setting up what will be showdown between the protagonist of the series, Emma Hall, and her main rival for supremacy of those who have died, the so-called Queen of the Dead. In this work, Emma and her ragtag group of friends—the headstrong Allison, the offbeat Michael, the charismatic Amy, the no-nonsense Eric, and the driven Chase—dodge the malevolent forces of the Queen of the Dead, many of whom are necromancers intent on killing Emma and/or her various allies. The novel begins to gain some plotting steam once Emma comes upon a young dead boy, Mark, who is found alone in a ravine and who seeks help going home. Emma must figure out what to do with this boy: should he return him to his family, especially given the possibility that Mark’s mother may have intentionally left him in that ravine? While Emma figures out what to do, another plot concerning a reanimated necromancer from Silence surfaces: Merrick Longland has been sent to connect with Emma, though his intentions and actual motivations are unclear. Sagara adds an extra level of tension through the ghostly presence of Nathan, Emma’s boyfriend who had died previously and who has found his way back to her. There is some telegraphing to this plot and it seems evident that Sagara is moving toward a showdown between Emma and the Queen of the Dead. I’m not quite sure if this book is intended to be a part of a trilogy, but Emma is being set up to be a different kind of necromancer, one that does not draw power willfully from those who have died. Indeed, her approach exists in contrast to the traditional necromancers who bind those who have died and forcibly draw power from those who are essentially enslaved to them. The novel concludes with Emma and her allies realizing that they must break with their families in order to keep them safe. As I mentioned in my opening, this book is not as action-oriented as the first and the plot takes a lot of time to get off the ground.

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Touch-Queen-Dead-Michelle-Sagara/dp/0756408008/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1393626370&sr=8-4&keywords=michelle+sagara


A Review of Lydia Kang’s Control (Dial Press, 2013).



I’ve still been consuming young adult fiction at an alarming rate. This novel was one of the most highly anticipated ones from my “to read” pile. I didn’t get my flu shot this year and was appropriately rewarded by a nasty sickness. During the time convalescing, I was able to tackle Kang’s debut novel, which weaves together science, a speculative future, and gene mutations alongside the requisite romance plot. Zelia Benten is our first person narrator and protagonist and the opening sees her in a “magpod crash” that takes the live of her father. She and her sister (Dyl) are soon set to be put into foster care, but Zel does not realize that she will be separated from Dyl and taken by separate foster families. These foster families are far from “normal.” Zel soon discovers that she’ll be living with a group of mutants with a particular “trait” attached to them. Some of these teenage mutants have incredible healing powers, others have multiple body parts, and the matriarch, Marka, has a keen ability to smell basically anything (including emotions). For her part, Zel does not have a “trait,” except for the fact that she cannot breathe on her own all the time, meaning that she has to remember consciously to push air into her lungs (an actual physical issue called Ondine’s Curse). As Zel comes to learn more and more about the “off the grid” location in which she now resides (the Carus House), she begins to realize that Dyl has been taken by a group (the Aureus House) that seeks to harvest her genetic potential. The problem is that they do not know what powers Dyl may or may not have. Thus, Zel aims to free Dyl by any means possible, even if that means endangering herself.

spoilers forthcoming

For fans of the X-Men, this particular novel will be of major interest. The one issue I had was that—at least in my opinion—the whole “trait” issue with Dyl was a little bit too telegraphed and it was easy to see what was being set up. Kang also has an obviously extensively knowledge of science, which lends itself to a certain level of realism that this plot really requires. The major conflict at the novel’s center certainly propels the reader forward and Kang’s work dovetails with the continuing issues that are revolving around genetic engineering and the ethics behind gene selection. Devotees of young adult trilogies and other such ongoing serial forms will be happy to know that Kang’s work will have a follow-up!

Buy the Book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/control-Lydia-Kang/dp/0803739044/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389289579&sr=8-1&keywords=lydia+kang