Asian American Literature Fans

Well, Lysley Tenorio has fortunately graced us with his exquisite prose again, with his debut novel The Son of Good Fortune (Ecco, 2020). Let’s let the official marketing description get us situated: “Excel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American teenager. When he’s not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their town’s seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight. But Excel knows that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima’s lifelong martial arts trainer. And years ago, on Excel’s tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret that he must keep forever. ‘We are ‘TNT’—tago ng tago,’ she told him, ‘hiding and hiding.’ Excel is undocumented—and one accidental slip could uproot his entire life. Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies—and existing outside the normal constructs of American society—Hello City offers Excel a chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider? Thrumming with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a luminous story of a mother and son testing the strength of their bond to their country—and to each other.” I adored this novel for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that Tenorio painstakingly crafts the evolution of a prickly relationship between mother and son. Excel is totally at odds with his mother’s life and tries to do whatever he can to leave that life behind. He believes he is doing so by being with Sab, but Excel and Maxima are more linked than he realizes. Indeed, Excel ultimately keeps his undocumented status a secret from Sab until the day that Sab confesses that she is pregnant. When Excel chooses to relay the news at this time, Sab realizes (as do the readers) that the person she has known all this time may be a stranger. In this sense, Excel performs a version of himself in disguise, something that his mother engages in as a matter of profession. While Excel doesn’t involve himself in anything long, he eventually realizes that, to do the things he wants, he may have to reconsider his principles. In this process, he begins to see that he should have been less judgmental about his mother and, at the same time, confront his own shortcomings. It is a novel of maturation, a kind of bildungsroman, but Excel is hardly initiated into some national narrative. Indeed, his status as an undocumented American is the shadow that continually draws over the plot. He cannot feel restful or safe anywhere or in any space, which is why his relationship with Sab seems to offer him the (momentary) salve, a refuge as it were in the arms of someone he loves. In this sense, the novel’s concluding arc is no doubt bittersweet and somewhat naturalistic in tone, but Tenorio gives us enough to understand that Excel is going to make the most of what he has, without apologizing for what he needs to do in order to survive. I’m all in for Tenorio’s next publication already!

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062059574/the-son-of-good-fortune/