asianamlitfans | Nov. 3rd, 2023

Nov. 3rd, 2023

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

*reviewer’s note: In my aim to cover as much ground and texts as I can, I’m focusing on shorter lightning reviews that get to the gist of my reading experience! As Asian American literature has boomed, my time to read this exponentially growing archive has only diminished. I will do my best, as always!

Ah, I am reviewing Katherine Lin’s You Can’t Stay Here Forever (Harper, 2023), which is essentially The White Lotus meets Helen Wan’s The Partner Track. Let’s see why I gave it this description by checking out the marketing block below: “Desperate to obliterate her past, a young widow flees California for the French Riviera in this compelling debut, a tale of loss, rebirth, modern friendship, and romance that blends Sally Rooney’s wryness and psychological insight with Emma Straub's gorgeous scene-setting and rich relationships. Just days after her young, handsome husband dies in a car accident, Ellie Huang discovers that he had a mistress—one of her own colleagues at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. Acting on impulse—or is it grief? rage? Probably all three—Ellie cashes in Ian’s life insurance policy for an extended stay at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France. Accompanying her is her free-spirited best friend, Mable Chou. Ellie hopes that the five-star resort on the French Riviera, with its stunning clientele and floral-scented cocktails, will be a heady escape from the real world. And at first it is. She and Mable meet an intriguing couple, Fauna and Robbie, and as their poolside chats roll into wine-soaked dinners, the four become increasingly intimate. But the sunlit getaway soon turns into a reckoning for Ellie, as long-simmering tensions and uncomfortable truths swirl to the surface.”

If you watched the second season of The White Lotus, you’ll recall the very sticky quadrangle that was one of the major plots. At the same time, Lin’s novel also deals with someone in a law firm. Hence, my equation: The White Lotus + The Partner Track = You Can’t Stay Here Forever. The lazy equation aside: the novel’s incredibly immersive, so much so that I thought about bringing it with me on an airplane flight. I ended up not bringing it because I was already halfway through, and I didn’t want to have to start a new novel and bring two books with me on the plane, so I left it fallow for about a week, then finished it upon my return. The novel’s an interesting meditation on grief and Asian American identity and how grief is the propulsion that encourages Ellie to figure out what it is she actually wants to do. Up to that point, Ellie’s been sort of coasting, as she can kind of line up her life alongside the normative expectations held up for her: continue to move up the corporate ladder, marry well, and you’ve made it. This sort of approach is catastrophically upended by her partner’s death and the discovery that he’s been having an affair. The novel is as much about grieving the illusion of her life as it is about the death of her husband. An engaging and notable debut!

Buy the Book Here

ccape

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

*reviewer’s note: In my aim to cover as much ground and texts as I can, I’m focusing on shorter lightning reviews that get to the gist of my reading experience! As Asian American literature has boomed, my time to read this exponentially growing archive has only diminished. I will do my best, as always!

Wow! I am reviewing David Masumoto’s Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm (with illustrations by Patricia Wakida) (Red Hen Press, 2023), which packs a serious punch. The description on Red Hen’s home page provides us with this description from the author: “I discover a ‘lost’ aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a ‘ward’ of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.”

There is so much to praise about this text. It’s part memoir, part history, and certainly part of a desire to reconstitute Masumoto’s aunt as part of the family. Though the time lost can never fully be recovered, Masumoto takes the time to contextualize the challenges that faced a Japanese American farming family in the early 20th century and why the incarceration experience would result in such an incredible rupture. Masumoto’s steady voice and gift for narrative storytelling guides us throughout. It is clear that this journey is also one in which Masumoto is learning, not only about his family history but also the complications of a disabled existence. In this specific intersection, the memoir adds to the growing discourse in Asian American Studies and literature that brings race and disability together. Patricia Wakida’s relief blockprinting illustrations are extraordinary and truly bring to life the vibrancy of Masumoto’s aunt. In this respect, this publication is also ultimately collaborative. A finely wrought, finely textured memoir of loss and recovery, as well as an elegy to a complex life.

For more on this text, go here.

ccape

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

*reviewer’s note: In my aim to cover as much ground and texts as I can, I’m focusing on shorter lightning reviews that get to the gist of my reading experience! As Asian American literature has boomed, my time to read this exponentially growing archive has only diminished. I will do my best, as always!

Well, there’s something in the water with Asian American writers exploring the “quitting narrative,” as is evidenced by Elysha Chang’s surprisingly affecting debut A Quitter’s Paradise (Zando, 2023). I read this one on the heels of Katherine Lin’s You Can’t Stay Here Forever, which also involves the main character engaging in a major live pivot that ultimately ends up with her quitting her job as a lawyer. Let’s let the marketing description give us more context for Chang’s novel: “Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she’s keeping secrets from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn’t understand the person you’ve lost? Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path toward confronting her present. As Eleanor’s avoidance of her feelings results in a series of outrageous—often hilarious—choices, her actions begin to threaten all she holds most dear. Meanwhile, glimpses of Eleanor’s childhood and family history in Taiwan unfurl, revealing long-held secrets, and Eleanor starts to realize that she will never be able to escape her grief, or her family, despite her wildest attempts. But will she be brave enough to withstand the reckoning she’s hurtling toward? At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter’s Paradise is an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of grief, family bonds, and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.”

This novel was a really quirky read; I sometimes didn’t know where the novel would take us, and I especially appreciated that it is filled with quiet surprises. The other thing that the description does not detail, and which is a major part of the plot, even early on, is that Eleanor is engaged in an extramarital affair with someone from her former lab. This relationship, though certainly awkward, anchors the novel emotionally, because we get a fuller sense of Eleanor’s inner turmoil. While she presents a certain picture to her husband, there is clearly so much more going on beneath the surface. In this way, the novel paints a picture involving a character that might be said to be going through an early life crisis. I had just also finished reading Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, and it was interesting to read two books side by side that involved women in traditionally male-dominated spaces like scientific laboratories. You could immediately sense that, for Eleanor, this space is not fulfilling, and that she is desperately seeking a way to address not only her grief (her mother has passed away), but also the fact that she feels especially alone without strong biological anchors. This novel also reminds me of a handful of others involving Asian American women who ultimately quit their Phd programs—Weike Wang’s Chemistry, and Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation—so we’re getting these narratives that truly complicate the model minority stereotype. Chang’s got a really unique style, and I look forward to what she has in store for us next.

Buy the Book Here

ccape

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

If Gina Chung’s debut Sea Change (Vintage, 2023) signals a “sea change” that might be occurring in genre fictions, then I’m all here for it. Gina Chung’s work is an interesting amalgam of family, friendship, and relationship melodrama, Asian American literature, climate fiction, and science fiction all rolled into one. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for it: “Ro is stuck. She's just entered her thirties, she's estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at the aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (Mountain Dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeño). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro's only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro's last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager. When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro realizes she can either lose herself in the undertow of reminiscence, or finally come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.”

Chung is able to pack a ton into this novel in a way I wasn’t at first entirely prepared for. Ro, short for Aurora, is our Korean American first person storyteller. This description does an excellent job of catalyzing the main plot dynamics, but I will have to provide some key spoilers, which are actually revealed quite early in the novel, so look away unless you’re okay with being in the know.

Okay, so you find out that Ro’s life is in disarray specifically because her father’s research takes her to a strange area in the ocean called the Bering Vortex, which is Chung’s analogue for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and those of you who enjoyed Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being should seriously then check this one out). In this case, the Bering Vortex is far more science fictional: the strange alchemy of chemicals, objects, and things in this area has caused environmental change, including in the beings that live there. Lo, short of Dolores the Octopus, is part of the living beings impacted. Chung isn’t intent to state simply that man-made environmental change is just bad. Indeed, in Lo’s case, she has some sort of mutant properties that allow her to change colors in ways that normal octopi can’t. She also seems to have attained a potential level of sentience and engagement that make her unique. But the Bering Vortex isn’t all about these interesting mutations, it’s also a site of great environmental instability, as is evidenced by her father’s disappearance.

The other issue that Chung weaves in is the fact that Ro’s relationship with her boyfriend, Tae, is cut short when he is selected for a competitive space program that will take him to Mars. Part of the ethos of that mission is specifically related to conservation and planetary succor: perhaps humans can establish a colony there that will allow them a second chance at life, especially since Earth seems on a collision course with catastrophe. But these science fictional and cli-fi elements that open the novel will ultimately take a backseat to the contemplative, sly humor that tracks throughout the text, as the impact of these two departures/ruptures ends up rocking Ro’s life. In this sense, part of Chung’s novel is a meditation on grief. The element that best makes this clear is an incredible sequence toward the novel’s conclusion from Ro’s past in which her family had taken a tense trip to Hawaii. In one more idyllic moment, Ro and her father experience the beauty of the sea at night; it recalls, at least for me, that incredible scene at the ending of le’s The Gangster We are All Looking For. You’ll understand more profoundly the loss that has been shaping Ro, her inability to confront Tae’s departure, her struggle to recognize her mother’s need for companionship, and the fact that her closest friendships are also subject to serious, but necessary changes. It is here that Chung stages her most robust negotiation of grief: that we never “move on” from those that we have lost, but that our losses inform how we can still productively traverse a world that is, in the wake of death, so profoundly changed. If there is a minor quibble that I have, as a genre fiction fan, it is simply that I wanted to know more about the Bering Vortex and the circumstances surrounding Ro’s father and his disappearance, but perhaps that is a story for another day. Fortunately for us, Chung already has more in store, with the publication of Green Frog: And Other Stories, so we can feast upon Chung’s prose, once more, quite soon.

Buy Sea Change here

Pre-order Green Frog: And Other Stories here

ccape

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

*reviewer’s note: In my aim to cover as much ground and texts as I can, I’m focusing on shorter lightning reviews that get to the gist of my reading experience! As Asian American literature has boomed, my time to read this exponentially growing archive has only diminished. I will do my best, as always!

Michelle Min Sterling’s Camp Zero (Atria, 2023) is one of those books I took a chance on to bring with me on an airplane flight. I tend to pick books I think will be incredibly immersive, something to take me away from the cramped seating! Sterling’s debut did not disappoint. Let’s let the official marketing description give us some information: “In remote northern Canada, a team led by a visionary American architect is breaking ground on a building project called Camp Zero, intended to be the beginning of a new way of life. A clever and determined young woman code-named Rose is offered a chance to join the Blooms, a group hired to entertain the men in camp—but her real mission is to secretly monitor the mercurial architect in charge. In return, she’ll receive a home for her climate-displaced Korean immigrant mother and herself. Rose quickly secures the trust of her target, only to discover that everyone has a hidden agenda, and nothing is as it seems. Through skillfully braided perspectives, including those of a young professor longing to escape his wealthy family and an all-woman military research unit struggling for survival at a climate station, the fate of Camp Zero’s inhabitants reaches a stunning crescendo. Atmospheric, fiercely original, and utterly gripping, Camp Zero is an electrifying page-turner and a masterful exploration of who and what will survive in a warming world, and how falling in love and building community can be the most daring acts of all.”

This novel had an intricate plot and interspersed narrative perspectives. One of the more disappointing characters was none other than an elite-turned-English teacher who realizes that his idealistic desires to teach art in a remote location turn out at best to be misguided and potentially deadly at worst. A side plot involving a group of female scientists turns out to be an important narrative thread, which comes together in satisfying fashion by the novel’s conclusion. Of course, the emotional center of the text is none other than Rose, who we see is spurred into the titular camp with the hope that she can help her mother out. Rose has one form of capital that she’s been using to help get her through a science fictional dystopian future: her beauty, which she wields to get her access to better jobs as well as better resources for herself and her mother. Perhaps the most intriguing element of this text is that it places way more tension at the US-Canadian border due to climate change. As the weather patterns shift, more and more of Canada becomes habitable, while parts of the United States become flooded. In this respect, Sterling’s work treads the well-worn cautionary tale of dystopian narratives in which the science fictional future seems not far off from our lived reality.

Buy the Book Here