By Sarah Sukardi
There’s a moment in Cathy Park Hong’s seminal essay collection, Minor Feelings, where she writes, “I’m of the extreme opinion that a real show about a Korean family—at least the kind I grew up around—is untelevisable. Americans would be both bored and appalled. My God, why can’t someone call Child Protective Services!”
Upon reading this, I felt a kind of queasy recognition. If representation of Asian American families on TV is softened to “cute banter” and “gentle, sitcom-friendly accents,” then what would Hong’s authentic representation look like in television? And what about literature and art?
Hong takes pains to specify that she speaks from her own Korean upbringing, but she also says this in response to a TV show about a Chinese American family, and slyly generalizes her statement to the “Korean family” after her qualifier. And while Hong does not speak for all Asian Americans, and neither do I, I’ve come to believe that Hong’s saying is applicable to broader kinds of Asian American domestic experiences that extend beyond Hong’s own family, or the Korean family, too.
So, if we take Hong’s statement as tentatively, uneasily true, then what is the outcome when someone does try to faithfully depict Hong’s certain sort of boring, appalling Asian American domestic experience in art, with its immigrant traumas and half-truths and secrets? My belief is that it would look something like Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise.
A Quitter’s Paradise is about Eleanor, a Ph.D. dropout in her mid-twenties living in New York, and grappling with the recent death of her mother. It would be an understatement to call Eleanor avoidant: if she were to be exemplified by a sentence construction, it would be the passive voice. Things are done to her. Of Eleanor, Chang writes in a dazzling, brutal passage:
“[She] was not that bright a student. She had a good memory and an inclination for following directions, but aside from this, she was not an exceptional or even very capable thinker. Literature did not touch her. History was an exertion of pure memory. Though her grades were good, she was never a standout among students; too shy to be called charming, too careful to be considered gifted. Eleanor was simply quiet and could be for long periods of time.”
Eleanor finds herself, almost against her will, in a lackluster marriage to Ellis, a white man enrolled in her Neuroscience Ph.D. program. He is a “rising star;” she is not. She is flailing, depressed, and grappling with the recent death of her mother Rita, with whom her relationship is the sort of strained, secretive one in which Eleanor waits six weeks to tell her mother of her marriage, and does so by “text[ing] her a picture of our marriage license.” Half the project of the book is to understand the toxic nature of this mother-daughter relationship, and how it has shaped Eleanor’s avoidance.
The book is structured in chapters which alternate between Eleanor’s present day life in her twenties, and her parents’ past. Chapters in the present day are numbered and written in the first person, and those in the past are given titles and written in the third. Using this narrative technique, Chang deftly builds tension between two bleak storylines. In the present, Eleanor is a dropout working in her husband’s lab and sublimating her grief into rogue experiments involving arson and marmoset kidnapping. And in the past, we learn about Eleanor’s parents and their loveless marriage; Eleanor’s reckless sister, Narisa; and the slow disintegration of their family.
This is not a beautiful book, though Chang is a beautiful writer. It contains expulsion and deportation and human trafficking, and it is often difficult to read. It is often appalling and tiresome to witness Eleanor’s recalcitrance reiterated on the page.
The ugliness, however, is the point. Sometimes, relationships do not improve, because they have been too far mangled by trauma. Sometimes, daughters do not come back home, and sometimes, what is appalling must remain so.
And though it may not be lovely, A Quitter’s Paradise is brilliant, extraordinarily controlled, and devastating. Rarely have I read a book that got so close to depicting the truth of Hong’s “appalling” Asian American family. This is not a book that insists on being liked, but it does insist on being believed.
A Quitter’s Paradise is available from Bookshop, Green Bean Books, Prairie Lights Books, Strand Book Store, Vroman’s Bookstore, and 27th Letter Books.
Sarah Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.