By Audrey Fong
Sit back and think about your childhood best friend. How’d you meet? Where are they now? Are you still in touch with them? And most importantly: are you still best friends?
I met my childhood best friend in kindergarten. We bonded over Hello Kitty, crayons, four square, and our pets. We’re still in touch, but neither of us consider the other our best friend now.
If you’ve ever been lucky enough to have experienced deep friendship, then Jean Chen Ho’s debut book, Fiona and Jane, may take you on a wild nostalgia-fueled trip through your childhood and teenage years. It’ll make you want to text your childhood bestie and ask them to dinner. It certainly made me think about every childhood friend I’ve ever had and wonder what they’re up to now.
Told from alternating perspectives, Fiona and Jane covers almost four decades of friendship between the titular characters. From throwing up in parking lots during alcohol-fueled hangouts as teenagers to navigating romantic relationships and confronting parental trauma, Ho does not hold back in her depiction of these two Taiwanese American women and their far-from-perfect lives. Naturally beautiful Fiona finds herself in one toxic relationship after another with partners continuously cheating on her and one stealing thousands of dollars from her. Jane, on the other hand, flits back and forth between dating women and Korean men who are unable to commit to a relationship with her, while also struggling with the guilt she feels for outing her father to her mother, which she believes led to his isolation and suicide. Additionally, she still feels guilt for not answering any of his year’s worth of calls, especially the one right before his death:
I’d given up hope my father would ever return to LA…Take up a position as a regular part of my life again. I was angry with him, and whenever he called me up I’d send him straight to voicemail. It happened like this, every time…Near the end his call volume dwindled to two or three times on a single day, then just one try, the last Sunday. I remembered declining that call, too. The next Sunday, when my phone didn’t light up with his number, I felt strange. I realized I’d drawn an uncanny comfort from the routine, rejecting his incoming attempts.
What makes Fiona and Jane unique is the way it straddles the line between a novel and a short story collection. Each chapter stands individually as its own story, yet when compiled together – the way they have been in this book – the stories come together to logically lead to its conclusion, making it feel almost like a novel. Yet, unlike a novel, there is no unifying plot line; rather the stories work to chronicle chapters in their friendship, or moments in their lives when they’re separated, to help create a fuller portrait of each Fiona and Jane respectively. This fleshing out of the characters is definitely more successful with Jane than with Fiona because each chapter revolving around Jane is told from a first-person perspective in her voice while Fiona’s chapters are all in third-person. By doing this, Ho gives us access to Jane’s inner thoughts and feelings, while Fiona remains distant from the reader, reflecting how Jane feels Fiona is perpetually guarded, “always looking behind her, watching her back.”
Because of this stylistic choice, I felt myself more invested in Jane’s story and how it counters the model minority myth, which NBC Asian American defines as “a persistent stereotype that paints Asian Americans as inherently successful and problem-free, particularly in contrast to other minority groups.” This myth encompasses a large range of stereotypes – that Asians are good at math, that we follow rules, that we don’t need government handouts, and that we become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants. Jane, however, does not follow this life path. She drops out after a brief stint at Santa Monica City College, holds a variety of odd jobs, sleeps around, is a lesbian (which can be taboo in some immigrant households as this reel jokingly points out), and by her late 30s, remains unmarried still.
This inclusion of a character who goes against the model minority myth is refreshing in a world that consistently has Asian American characters conform to this myth by minimizing their struggles and placing all emphasis on their success (think about how, despite poverty and teenage parenthood, Girl in Translation’s Kimberly Chang effortlessly glides into becoming a doctor, or how Jade Snow Wong in Fifth Chinese Daughter overcomes patriarchy and racism with next to no mention of either). By this, I’m not saying that all Asian American works should be struggle-focused; rather, the consistent glossing over of the work and the barriers we face ignores the cost of the successes we are perceived to easily attain. Ho’s refusal to have Jane conform to the expectations placed on Asian Americans works because she paints Jane in such a believable manner. Never does it feel like Ho shaped these characters a specific way for “woke points.” Even in the areas where Fiona fails to live up to the model minority stereotype (such as when she drops out of NYU Law), the stories read more like tales of two clumsy women barreling through life than tales of diversity for the sake of diversity.
Ho’s debut book is an intimate look at what it means to be best friends with someone – the ways best friends weave in and out of each other’s lives, the deep love and respect they have for each other, the ways they come back to each other, and how they can share the darkest moments of their lives. Both of her protagonists feel fully realized and while their mishaps are specific with many references to geographical locations unique to Southern California, there are many moments that feel universal that readers from all backgrounds can relate to. What I appreciated the most about Fiona and Jane is its depiction of two women who do not have it together in their 20s or 30s and who defy the model minority stereotype, painting what feels like a more heartfelt and genuine depiction of what it means to be a young adult hurtling into middle age. It left me wondering what the future looks like for my childhood friends and me as we head deeper and deeper into our adulthood.
Fiona and Jane is available from Barnes & Noble, Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Laguna Beach Books, and Roscoe Books.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.