Asian American Literature Fans

I saved the reading of this novel—Rishi Reddi’s Passage West (Ecco, 2020)—when I needed it most, in this time of unrest and desperate need for racial justice. It seemed especially fitting to read it now given the concerns that the novel brings up. Let’s let the official HarperCollins/Ecco description do some work for us:

“A sweeping, vibrant first novel following a family of Indian sharecroppers at the onset of World War I, revealing a little-known part of California history 1914: Ram Singh arrives in the Imperial Valley on the Mexican border, reluctantly accepting his friend Karak’s offer of work and partnership in a small cantaloupe farm. Ram is unmoored; fleeing violence in Oregon, he desperately longs to return to his wife and newborn son in Punjab—but he is duty bound to make his fortune first. In the Valley, American settlement is still new and the rules are ever shifting. Alongside Karak; Jivan and his wife, Kishen; and Amarjeet, a U.S. soldier, Ram struggles to farm in the unforgiving desert. When he meets an alluring woman who has fought in Mexico’s revolution, he strives to stay true to his wife. The Valley is full of settlers hailing from other cities and different continents. The stakes are high and times are desperate—just one bad harvest or stolen crop could destabilize a family. And as anti- immigrant sentiment rises among white residents, the tensions of life in the west finally boil over. In her ambitious debut novel, Rishi Reddi, award-winning author of Karma and Other Stories, explores an enduring question: Who is welcome in America? Richly imagined and beautifully rendered, Passage West offers a moving portrait of one man’s search for home.”

As the description reminds us twice, this novel is Reddi’s first, but she does have a wonderful short story collection I’ve taught a couple of times (Karma & Other Stories, which used to be on regular rotation in my Transnational Asia/Pacific class). In any case, this novel is so intriguing precisely because it really brings up the fraught dynamics of interracial and interethnic alliances and coalitions. There are ostensibly three main protagonists: Karak, Ram, and Amarjeet. Karak and Ram are flip sides of the same coin, as both ultimately want to derive a financially profitable life through the land. Where they diverge, at least at first, are their commitments to an ethnic heritage. Karak eventually marries a woman of Mexican descent. Ram is dismissive of this relationship but over time, he realizes that he will be unable to reunite with his wife, Padma, who (along with her son Santosh) is denied entry into the United States because she is perceived to be polluted due to a disability that derived out of a childhood illness. Ram’s growing loneliness leads him to engage in an extramarital affair to someone related to Karak’s wife Rosa, a woman named Adela. Of course, there are many problems and intricacies related to the harvesting of crops that occur, and some of these issues lead the novel to move toward its final climax. Amarjeet, I found to be the most compelling character, as he is the ostensible “new generation” of South Asian Americans, someone who wants to be a patriot and thus enlists during World War I, along with his Japanese American best-friend, Harry. Amarjeet goes through quite an interesting character arc, but somehow his story felt most incomplete, as Reddi positions the novel ultimately around Ram, through brief frame narratives that move us closer to the contemporary moment. It is through Amarjeet that we get the strongest sense that racial justice must be pursued as a political project, and he is the character that obviously resonates right now, as our country continues to confront both its racist legacies and its racist present. Reddi’s Passage West, in conjunction with all that is going on today, reminds me of the activist possibilities that first propelled me down the past of race and ethnic studies. The novel energizes me to continue to see how literature and social contexts, the representational and the actual, still are necessarily and politically intertwined.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060898793/passage-west/