asianamlitfans | A Review of Leland Cheuk’s No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019).

A Review of Leland Cheuk’s No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Sometimes I stall on one novel, then I’ll pick up something else. In this case, the “something else” was Leland Cheuk’s No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019). We’ll let the official site give us some background: “Meet Sirius Lee, a fictive famous Chinese American comedian. He’s a no good, very bad Asian. He’s not good at math (or any other subject, really). He has no interest in finding a ‘good Chinese girlfriend.’ And he refuses to put any effort into becoming the CEO/Lawyer/Doctor his parents so desperately want him to be. All he wants to do is making people laugh. A cross between Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Jade Chang’s The Wangs Vs. The World, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN follows Sirius from his poor upbringing in the immigrant enclaves of Los Angeles to the loftiest heights of stardom as he struggles with substance abuse and persistent racism despite his fame. Ultimately, when he becomes a father himself, he must come to terms with who he is, where he came from, and the legacy he’ll leave behind.” So “Sirius Lee”—get it, seriously—is the stage name for a character whose actual birth name is Hor. You can imagine that Hor did not like the various ways in which his name might be appropriated, so when he meets Johnny Razzmatazz, a well-known comic, and finds a kind of occupational inspiration, he creates his new identity: Sirius Lee.

The early stages of the novel reflect Sirius’s growing distance from his biological family. He comes from a lower middle class Chinese immigrant family, which (as you might imagine) is not so supportive of his interests in comedy or performance. In fact, not long after Sirius embraces his life as the protégé of Johnny Razzmatazz, he is essentially disowned by his family. During this period of exploration of his new found career, Sirius continues to pine away for Johnny’s daughter Veronica. While this romance never blooms, Sirius eventually falls in love with Tina, a fellow Chinese American, but her relationship to her family is decidedly different. In any case, as a so-called happy couple, they eventually have a daughter named Maryann. As you can imagine, in a novel like this one, there is no easy happy-ever-after, and soon their marriage begins to fray.

The emotional heart of the novel is in the epistolary address, as it becomes more and more evident that Sirius is conveying his life’s story to his daughter, Maryann. The danger of this kind of novel is that Cheuk must be consistently funny. That is, the story is about a comic, one who sees a fair amount of success on the circuit and in performance. Cheuk is more than up to the task, as his Sirius is quite full of witticism and self-deprecating humor. I especially found this novel to be refreshing precisely for its unique take on challenging the model minority narrative.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu