A Review of Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass (Tor.com, 2024)

[uttararangarajan]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Tor.com is always at the forefront of shorter novels and novellas. Such is the case with Nghi Vo’s latest publication The City in Glass (Tor.com, 2024). I’m a huge fan of Vo. The Chosen and The Beautiful, her brilliant re-writing of The Great Gatsby tickled my global modernist sensibilities. It reminded me of the similarly brilliant work by Monique Truong in her supplementary narrative to Stein’s Toklas in The Book of Salt. I am still awaiting other great modernist re-writes by Asian American authors! In any case, let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot. And then the angels come, and the city falls. Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned. She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever. Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again. The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.”

 

I didn’t read much paratextual material going into this one, so I was pretty surprised at how the narrative develops. This one reminds me a bit of Wang’s rental house, because the plot is frankly minimal. Instead, much like Wang’s work (despite the radical difference in genre), the focus is really on relationships. In this case, the anchor of this text is Vitrine’s antagonistic connection to a fallen Angel. Vitrine naturally hates the Angel, but over the course of the text, we see their relationship evolve. At first enemies, the Angel comes to understand Vitrine’s love for humans, with all of their flaws, over the course of narrative. He comes to exist in a position similar to Vitrine in the sense that he watches over the humans and begins to have investments in their survival, success, and overall well-being. At first, the Angel is judgmental, dismissive, and imperious, but his tethering to Azril changes and humbles him. The one element of this text that I wanted more was related to world-building elements involving the angels and demons. Vo gives us just enough to understand that demons have an ability to transform into other beings; they also can seem to carve and to alter material elements before them. They can compose themselves of different things, and they can reformulate their bodies even if they are seemingly disintegrated. Angels seem to be generally impervious as well, but they cannot engage in questionable activities. They cannot lie or steal, so the Angel’s ability to intervene in the lives of mortals is decidedly limited. In other words, the Angel sometimes needs Vitrine’s explicit help once he becomes enmeshed in the lives of mortals. The ending—and here, I will provide my requisite spoilers, so look away at this point lest you want to discover what occurs between the two—was perhaps not what I wanted for these two characters. I appreciated their antagonists and even their mutual respect, which has accrued essentially over centuries, but I didn’t see them as a romantic pairing at all. While a minor quibble, I did absolutely adore Vitrine’s attachments to the mortals. She archives them through a book she holds inside of herself, and throughout the text, we get a sense of the history of Azril and all that were lost when the Angels destroyed the city. In this way, the text ultimately becomes a kind of grief archive, one that exists in the elastic bounds of the speculative fictional world.

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A Review of Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024)

[uttararangarajan]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

There’s a couple of new presses that have come out with the name Z at the beginning. There’s Zando and then there is Zibby! Zibby has already impressed with its initial slate of books, and Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024) is a testament to the incredible acquisitional and editorial work that their team is doing. What a GUT PUNCH this memoir is. You’ll see why after you read the marketing description: “Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds' move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy's family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive. Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment. What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held ‘truths’ about what the grieving process looks like. Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis' death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.”

 

As I continue the memoir kick I’m on and as I toggle back and forth between fiction and creative nonfiction (maybe it’s finally time to add in some more poetry? Drama?), I have seen Lin’s work get more and more publicity. It follows in the tradition of works like Zauner’s Crying in H Mart in the way that it so totally embraces the profound complications of bereavement. What I especially loved is the use of white space throughout this text. Chapters are really snippets that read like prose poetry, and the white space that surrounds each block begins to accrue a kind of emotional intensity that perhaps helps to mirror that sense of loss — one that most of us can’t even begin to imagine — that has befallen the author. The medical crisis that Lin must navigate on her own are a very dangerous series of clots that require a stent to be put into her body. Without that stent, she may end up having a life-threatening or life-ending stroke. As you might expect, Lin is ambivalent about getting the stent: after all, what is there to live for now that Kurtis is gone? Despite such ideations, Lin also knows that she must find a way to navigate the after: she goes to therapy regularly and also signs up for a new grief counselor. She also consistently meets with a fellow widow, which sometimes helps her process her unique positionality. Days stretch out, like the white blocks that surround each page, as she struggles to find the energy to do anything. Outwardly, friends and family start to assume she is doing better, but Lin knows that she is not. She eventually adopts a puppy, despite more ambivalence about whether or not she can actually care for this other living thing, which may die at any moment. What I appreciate most about Lin’s memoir is that she takes the time to dispel a lot of myths about the grieving process. There are no developmental stages of grieving, nor do projects about how bad grief will be map onto any common template. If anything, we are reminded that the cost of profound love will be catastrophic grief, but Lin also reminds us that one method to dealing with grief is in a communal process. That is, you use the tools you have in order to address grief. For Lin, to address grief is to write about it. The logical step that she may not have at first anticipated is that this writing would be the basis for a creative publication. But it all makes sense. It is Kurtis, after all, who tells Lin that she is a writer, even before Lin has published her first short story, about embracing that identity. It comes full circle with Lin’s coruscating meditation on bereavement, so we see that one way that Lin comes to honor and to grieve Kurtis is in the process of narrative reconstructions. There may be no end to grief, as Lin’s memoir reveals, but it can and should be shared.

 

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A Review of Youngmi Mayer’s I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying (Little, Brown and Company, 2024)

[uttararangarajan]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn 

Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As a continuation of my speculative fiction palate cleansing reading (LOL), I pick up Youngmi Mayer’s I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), which is a real departure from the other books I’ve read in terms of tone. I have to say: balancing the comedic with the dramatic is incredibly difficult, but Mayer manages to do it in a way that reminds me so much of the Korean American bestie who wants to keep it real with me. In any case, here is the marketing description: “It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before her: it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering. In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own parents: a mother who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to her: The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.”

Mayer grows up in a really challenging milieu. She clearly loves and respects her parents, but they do make things difficult, and there is no question that Mayer’s departure on her own from Korea as a very young adult is partly based upon the instability of her home growing up. To become independent would mean to find the means to support herself without any of the complicated strings that might come with family. Indeed, it’s unclear to me if she has been in touch with any family members since coming to the United States. The early chapters of the memoir detail her itinerant life. Mayer, though born in the United States, is soon whisked off to many locations, including Korea and Saipan. She makes her way back to the United States, lands in Palo Alto at first, then heads up to San Francisco. These early sequences in America have a dark humor to them: she finds a good deal in a sublet in Treasure Island. She can’t believe her luck, until we all find out that she’s actually in a place filled with methamphetamine addicted residents. She eventually moves out (thankfully) and also eventually finds a measure of financial stability, all the while embarking on a life-changing relationship with Danny Bowien, who himself will find major success as a chef. There were points in this memoir where I wasn’t sure if I should be shocked or amused, but that’s part of the point of the title: that there’s a thin line often between what we find traumatic and what we find funny. Mayer makes the most of making those lines blur, emphasizing that the comedic is a palliative to the strange and often challenging obstacles that life throws our way. Mayer will end the memoir realizing that she has always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and she ultimately lets go of all these things holding her back. She finds her most fulfillment at this stage in life, admitting that everything before seems primarily as an in-between, limbo space, where she has been sort of living life without a fully realized purpose. The concluding arc also has some pretty frank ruminations on new motherhood, including the revelatory moment that the body has these incredible capacities to help support the life of a developing living entity. Before reading this memoir, I hadn’t known much about Mayer’s stand-up career. There is something about this particular moment, where there are different levels of fame and social visibility, as we are atomized across media platforms. I’ll definitely be looking out for Mayer in the future.
 

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