By Justine Trinh
Alexandra Chang perfectly encapsulates the monotony and uncertainty of being an Asian American woman in her mid-twenties in her debut novel, Days of Distraction. Chang tackles a range of issues from microaggressions to racial discrimination to the societal implications of the disproportionate number of white-man-Asian-woman couples and presents these uncomfortable truths in kaleidoscopic vignettes. Drawing from her own experiences as a technology journalist and her cross country move to Ithaca, New York, Chang transforms her own malaise into profound introspective observation.
Days of Distraction is about a mostly unnamed narrator (She is not often referred to by name, and the few times she is, she is called by her nickname Jing Jing. However, she is also called Alexandra once referring back to the author’s lived experience.), who is a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication. Her work is often undervalued and overlooked, and she struggles to get a raise while others at her company do. However, when her long-time boyfriend gets accepted to graduate school at Cornell, she decides to take the opportunity for a fresh start. What is meant to be a gesture of love and commitment turns out to be a crisis in identity as she questions her place in a society that renders her invisible.
What originally drew me to Chang’s novel were her observations on multiracial relationships due to my own relationship with a man who is phenotypically white (my partner is half white, half Persian), a topic that has been written about multiple times such as with Chris Jesu Lee’s article “Asian American Psycho” in Current Affairs. As a result, the issue of exploitative labor that dominates the first part of the book is underemphasized in current discussions about the novel.
In his book, Passionate Work, Renyi Hong, assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, states, “Passionate work has become an important site of recuperation, applied anticipatively as a way of allowing subjects to be stretched out in their capacity to be worn down. Whether through career advice, gamification, or coworking, the idea of passion is already deployed to prepare for economic fallout and disappointment, such that workers can be cushioned and encouraged to pick themselves up and reattach themselves to the compromised fantasies of the good life made accessible through work.” In other words, the idea of passion is exploited as a motivational tool to encourage employees to work longer and harder hours and as a cushion to “cheer up” workers with the fantasy that they can attain a better future with work.
Chang beautifully reflects this with her narrator and her inability to get the compensation she deserves. For the first part of the novel, the narrator justifies staying in these exploitative conditions because “long term, [she’d] like to write more features and essays,” stating, “it would be great to take on bigger stories, maybe broader tech and society pieces or even science stuff.” Hence, she stays in order to advance her career even though she expressed in multiple passages that she is miserable and extremely underpaid. This passion, i.e. the “thrill and rush to the reporting, to the deadlines and the potential scoops,” that drives and motivates the pursuit of upward mobility is the same passion that exploits her labor and allows her to be, in Hong’s words, “worn down.” Although she is unsure she will get a raise, since her request keeps getting shuffled from manager to manager, she manages this disappointment by doing more work such as pitching story ideas to a senior managing editor to demonstrate her versatility. Hence additional work proves to be a form of exploitation, managing the worker’s disappointment with the illusive promise that hard work and more work will lead to something more, like a promotion or wage increase.
The publication company utilizes the same rhetoric around passion to deny her a raise that would decrease the pay disparity between her wages and the cost of living in California. Her manager, Corey, states, “You know we don’t have piles of money lying around. This is journalism we’re talking about. This isn’t the kind of job where you make piles of money. It is about loving the work, putting your heart into it.” This discourse on passion, i.e., “loving the work,” justifies the narrator’s measly wages that are barely enough for her to survive on. While the publication company is invested in their workers’ health such as with purchase of standing desks, it becomes a façade for the workers to motivate them to work harder within the office space, where the office space is prioritized over the home space, and the company absolves itself of any responsibility for the workers’ home life. The company will take care of the workers within a space of production but refuses a reasonable wage to survive outside those confines. As Corey so inelegantly states, “it’s about loving the work” (emphasis added). Love becomes co-opted and transformed into a malevolent force that aids the production of docile bodies. The narrator is coerced to work harder regardless of the pay rate because according to the company, money should come secondary to love of the work. Yet if that were the case, why is the company shelling out money for remodeling the office, hiring new people that expect matching pay from jobs that they left, and Corey’s raise? Money and production obviously come first while passion is constructed as a shield for this exploitation in both Days of Distraction and in real life.
While Chang discusses multiple issues around race and discrimination in Days of Distraction, she also highlights the exploitative nature of work and the use of passion to engender docile bodies. The narrator is overworked and underpaid within this prestigious tech publication company while her peers are promoted and paid more than her for the same amount of work. However, she stays in these hostile conditions in the first part of the book because of the possibility of upward mobility in an area she is passionate about, which is generally framed as a positive idea in our modern society, is used to exploit her. The company uses the same framework of passion to justify her low wages. But by taking a critical lens to the idea of passion like what Chang does, we can become aware of the harmful nature of passionate work. While passion is construed as a positive motivator, it is also something that can harm us and justify overwork and underpay, and by becoming more aware of this discourse, we can attempt to address and attend passion in a productive way where we can still do the things we love without being exploited.
Days of Distraction is available from Alexander Book Co, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Skylight Books, and Powell’s City of Books.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.