Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
What it should have been: I’m opening with a correction notice, which takes me right back to the newsroom. My last newsletter instalment incorrectly mentioned the concept of the “model minority,” when I meant to write “model modernity.”
This understandably caused some confusion. I have fixed the reference! Thank you for your patience; and thank you to the reader who called my attention to the error.
Hauntology and hantu elegy
Remember what I said about signing up for too much extrinsic motivation?
I need to get started on my first chapter, because I shopped it to the organisers of a conference that will be held in Q4 2024, but they want to review a 4,000-word version by end-August 🫠
Guess I’m bringing primary texts on vacation with me… To prepare for the outlining and drafting, I just reread YZ (Ying Zhu) Chin’s novel Edge Case (2021), her second book after the linked short story collection Though I Get Home (2018). In what passes for my professional opinion, Chin offers an overlooked and underrated perspective on the world and in Asian American literature, and she does so with panache.
The novel is a drama with a saucy conceit. Edwina, its narrator, is—like Chin—an English major working in New York City after graduation, smack in the middle of the Trump administration. With the clock running out on their work visas, her marriage to fellow Malaysian tech professional Marlin is unravelling—and so are their psyches.
Marlin, grieving the death of his father, has become a diehard spiritualist who suspects Edwina of having cheated on him in a past life. Edwina—already struggling with her mother’s body-shaming habit, plus the racism and misogyny at her workplace—copes with the stress of Marlin’s walkout by giving up vegetarianism for disturbingly visceral flesh consumption.
And the entire narrative is told retrospectively to a surprising narratee: Edwina has turned her post-breakup dating app match into an unofficial therapist. There are so many intriguing avenues for exploration, but here’s some of what jumps to mind:
America demands yet more supreme leaps of fancy. I juggle forked lives in my head: an intense love for the great nation of the United States should my green card come through, and a heavy loathing for this uncaring, capricious machine of a country should I fail to be legalized.
Edge Case takes its epigraph from Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s memoir Among the White Moon Faces: “Her memory, like her guilt and early love, is involuntary, but her choice of the United States is willful.” It suggests an intertextuality in Southeast Asian American literature, but, more importantly, returns to the dilemma of becoming American. (Indeed, in Buddha is Hiding, Penang-born sociologist Aihwa Ong, another Malaysian American who first came as a foreign student, characterises permanent residency and then American citizenship as “a difficult moral issue for me.”)
Handlebars dug into my spine. Spittle flew overhead. I looked at my shoes. No matter how hard I tried to shrink into myself, something or someone was always pressing against me. Hard elbows, soft thighs, mud-crusted wheels, unyielding plastic seats, they were all around me, crowding in.
Much of the narrative in Edge Case centres on the psychic aspect of Asian racialisation in the United States, like Marlin’s resentful fear of being reduced to a machine (“So, what? I’m a robot? I can only follow my programming?”), and Edwina, who compares herself to Victor Frankenstein, obsessively evaluating how shaped she is by “this mediated lens of caricature imposed by entertainment.”
Psychoanalysis has never been my strong suit, which is why talking about Edge Case will be positively challenging for me.
I’ve read Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race (2001), of course, and David Eng and Shinhee Han’s Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation (2019); recently, I also read and enjoyed Takeo Rivera’s Model Minority Masochism (2022) and Wen Liu’s Feeling Asian American (2024). I’ve not made much progress on Jeffrey Santa Ana’s Racial Feelings (2015) or Vivian L. Huang’s Surface Relations (2022), but I’m planning to bring a copy of the latter on vacation with me, and I have a feeling that it’ll come in handy.
What I wanted was a physical manifestation of my suffering. Bodily pangs that would legitimize this psychic hurt, make it quantifiable from smiley face to frowny face: How bad is the pain?
Finally, one of the sub-plots in Edge Case is the insistence by both Marlin and Edwina’s mother that, in a past life, Edwina was a village pontianak (“banana tree spirit”) who was sexually unfaithful to her fiancé Li Shen, whom Marlin believes was his own past life. Rosalind Galt writes of speculative fiction author Zen Cho’s novella The House of Aunts: “The Chinese pontianak, though, throws into disarray the neat alignment of these terms (race/language/religion) in Malaysian public discourse. This pontianak is Malaysian but not Malay, and Cho’s ability to combine Malay folklore with Chinese-Malaysian experience works to reshape the discourse of Malayness.”
Why does Edge Case refract racial narrative through the “banana tree spirit” story-within-a-story? How does this device fit in with the larger picture: of racial feelings—of the informal therapist setting—of Edwina’s conviction “that I was born into diaspora, that I had merely moved from a place that wasn’t mine [Malaysia] to another place that also wasn’t mine [the United States]”?
(Indeed, Edwina and the mixed-race Marlin—who is Chindian, which Edwina acknowledges “wasn’t a term familiar to Americans”—initially meet at a Chinese New Year dinner, where “[t]he attendees were all from some country that was neither the United States nor China, and we all identified (or were identified via peer pressure) only with the aesthetics of being Chinese.” The parenthetical is an aside in Edwina’s retelling—but also very revealing and sus.)
The tentative thesis that I submitted in my conference abstract is that this novel explores the psychic alienation of “racial nowhere” (a term from Eng and Han) through the use of a temporary resident as its protagonist, and thus expands the articulation of Southeast Asian diaspora in the United States.
This is still terribly imprecise, and I have a few weeks ahead to continue refining my argument, so I’ll be thinking hard.
Book pairings
I reread Edge Case the same day that I finished Susan Choi’s second novel, American Woman (2003)—another book about an Asian woman on the edge. The juxtaposition made for an intense, interesting experience. Pulitzer finalist American Woman is loosely based on Wendy Yoshimura and her relationship with fellow fugitive Patty Hearst in the 1970s. The novel’s structure and narrative technique calls to mind what Choi had first tried to do in The Foreign Student, but executed, I think, with greater confidence and sophistication, and I liked it better.
To continue with my schtick of recommendations in triads, I would put Edge Case and American Woman on the same list as Charmaine Craig’s My Nemesis (2023). The protagonist, Tessa, is a writer and, not unrelatedly, a real piece of work. A reader has insinuated himself into Tessa’s marriage, and she, for her part, dedicates herself to her jealousy of his wife Wah. The entire narrative is the self-absorbed Tessa addressing a nun (!) to justify her behaviour (!!), beginning with her fateful decision to publicly berate Wah as a disgrace to womankind (!!!).
I found the deliberately narrator’s distant affect off-putting the first time I read it, but, upon reread, the novel struck me as smugly brilliant. “From early on, I committed myself to the memoir form because I believed that, as far as experience goes, mine is all I have to go on and because I’ve felt that to write about others—imagined or ‘real’—is to participate in appropriation, not to mention lying,” Tessa declares in the opening pages of the book. With this premise of disingenuous white womanhood, My Nemesis lays the groundwork for a darkly inverted commentary on the nominally confessional genres of both women’s memoir and, of course, ethnic autobiography.
This past week, I also read Caroline Vu’s That Summer in Provincetown (2015), a novella that takes pains to stress that it is a work of fiction. In a deceptively slim volume, Vu tells a story of secrecy, shame, and conspiracy, wrapped up incestuously in homophobia and paedophilia.
At points, I find the narration to be too arch in how it breezes over historical events, and the central character of Daniel feels gimmicky at points, but That Summer in Provincetown excels when Vu allows the prose to sit and breathe and focus on characters’ interiority. I would say the novel is a prime candidate for the discussion of literary “fucked families” in Linh Thủy Nguyễn’s Displacing Kinship!
I also want to push myself to read more Asian Canadian literature (especially beyond classics like Mrs Spring Fragrance, Obasan, or The Jade Peony).
Browser history
I enjoy a good museum as much as the next person, but I have to admit that history is not my favourite discipline to read research in. The methodology is very different from what I’m used to, and it takes a lot to get me jazzed. (Which is not to say that there aren’t history books that I very much enjoy, like John N. Miksic’s Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea (2013), which I believe the youth call the bomb dot com.)
Eric Thompson’s The Story of Southeast Asia, just out from the National University of Singapore Press, is not up there with the greats, for me. I found it a stolid textbook giving a solid historical overview, even if I ended up bogged down and just bopping along to the big picture. Ultimately, every decent Southeast Asian history book amounts to the same argument: that Southeast Asia is a fluid, cross-cultural, hybrid space. Luckily, that argument never gets old. (It’s why I’m here, after all.)
On the other hand, I struggled to find an engaging thesis in the late Dawn Bohulano Mabalon’s Little Manila is in the Heart (2013). One clear influence on the work is Dorothy Fujita-Rony’s American Workers, Colonial Power (2003), which studies Filipinx Seattle, but Little Manila is in the Heart unfortunately doesn’t do justice to that model or offer a satisfying account of the corresponding history further south.
Even a change as small as moving the epilogue to the preface would have gone some way to explaining the context and contemporary significance of the work. That is a pity, because Mabalon’s book represents painstaking and welcome archival and oral history research into an important and overlooked history: Filipinx community life in the agricultural heartland of Stockton, California in the twentieth century.
Well, that’s it from me until the new academic year begins.
In the meantime, lots of museums are in the offing for me. I’ll report back. 🫡
Correction notice: I accidentally referred to Marlin as “Marvin” in an earlier version of this post, and, yes, I had the Looney Tunes character pictured the whole time.