By Audrey Fong
Sitting in my sixth grade class, I received the first (and only) creative writing lesson of my K-12 education. My teacher emphasized the importance of an opening sentence to us, quoting Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies as one that would surely appeal to the young adult readers he was targeting: “The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”
As a writer today, I struggle with opening sentences. That lesson reverberates in my head and makes starting a new story daunting, as if a reader won’t continue my story unless that critical first line is brilliant. I often tell myself that it’s ridiculous to suppose that a reader would give up so quickly.
However, I turned out to be just that type of reader when I read the first sentence of Kathryn Ma’s The Chinese Groove: “The relatives treated me rudely, beating me and calling me names, and so on my eighteenth birthday my father buried his head in his hands and cried until the bottle was empty and his tears were spent and he was at last decided.”
While this sentence is eye-catching, it is also the reason why I put down the book the first two times I attempted to read it. Like the beginning of Susie Yang’s White Ivy, the reader is immediately brought into an abusive Asian family, one that Min Jin Lee has suggested, in a now deleted Tweet, that Asian American writers should stop writing out of fear of perpetuating Asian stereotypes. While I don’t agree 100% with Lee and tend to side more so with Cathy Park Hong in her response to Lee’s Tweet that “it’s also important for AAPI to write their truth, whatever that may be,” this perpetuation of stereotypes in the first sentence of The Chinese Groove made me wary of what was to come next and I questioned why Ma would start off her novel that way.
For no clear reason, I picked up the novel a third time, telling myself I would finish it this time.
The Chinese Groove follows Shelley Zheng, an eighteen-year-old who leaves his hometown of Geiju for a better future in the U.S. just like so many other immigration stories. Under false pretensions, he believes the Zheng family branch in the U.S. is successful, so that it’ll be easy for them to host him and let him work in their department store. Upon arriving in San Francisco, he learns that all the stories the Geiju relatives told him of the U.S. Zhengs are false and that they live much humbler lives.
Additionally, Shelley learns that he does not have the proper paperwork to stay in the U.S. indefinitely and that, instead, he has two weeks to figure out what he will do in the U.S. Ever optimistic, he does not let these obstacles stop him. After all, Shelley cannot let his father down, and he looks forward to reuniting with his American girlfriend. And then there’s the fact that he believes firmly in the Chinese groove, “a belief in the unspoken bond between countrymen that transcends time and borders.”
Finally finishing the novel this time around, my feelings remain mixed towards it.
On one hand, The Chinese Groove offers unexpected twists that take the reader through the Chinese ethnoburbs of California, offering commentary or at least awareness of certain trends like pregnancy tourism. Additionally, while Shelley initially grated on me, after seeing how he responded to each hurdle and twist, he grew on me. His compassion, perseverance, and sureness endeared him, so that at the end of the novel, I actually rooted for him. While I do not believe that a character must be likable, I mention this shift in my feelings towards Shelley to comment on Ma’s ability to successfully write a story of change and growth and to write plot twists that aid the character’s arc.
Additionally, The Chinese Groove can be quite funny from time to time. Ma utilizes repetition (“Henry tried so many times to reach Huntington that the extra-large buttons on his extra-large phone got extra-large stuck”) and alliteration (“the coot had flown the coop!”) through the novel to establish a fun syntax that brings to mind the rhythm of Dr. Seuss. These fun sentences also help illustrate Shelley’s childlike naivety as someone who desperately still wants to make his father proud and whose upbeat personality helps him take every challenge in stride.
However, The Chinese Groove can also be repetitive, making it difficult to get through. For example, the novel constantly mentions the Chinese groove, using it to explain someone’s excessive politeness or why Shelley can trust a waiter he’s just met to deliver something to his family back in China. Some of these instances felt exaggerated in its insinuation that all Chinese people would go above and beyond to help each other, especially when juxtaposed against Shelley’s Cousin Deng, who betrays both his own girlfriend (and mother to his child) and Shelley, which isn’t very “Chinese groove” of him. It felt too simplistic to explain it all by some mythic bond that connects the Chinese. Similarly, Shelley tells the reader of certain traits like the Zheng nose or the mole on all of the men in his family’s ears repeatedly. While it acts as a proof of relation for Shelley, it doesn’t add much to the story and is mentioned too often, leading me to skim over these sections.
Where Ma succeeds with The Chinese Groove though is in her quietly funny depictions of someone adjusting to a new culture, scenes that point out how confusing American culture can be. When Shelley explains to his aunt that he does not want to wake up a dog to take a photo of him for a child who’s moved away, she replies, “For Pete’s sake….Get him up! This is for Leo!” To which, Shelley thinks, “I didn’t know who this Pete was,” before retiring to his room. While this scene is not critical plot wise, it is important in how Ma uses it to point out the oddities of the English language and American culture. While there are parts of the novel that contribute to the exotification of the Chinese, these moments offer balance by showing how American culture, likewise, has its oddities, that for people born outside of the U.S., there is plenty about American culture that is exotic. And for Shelley, that includes languages and the way homes in San Francisco are built to accommodate the hills they’re built on among many other cultural curiosities.
While The Chinese Groove is initially difficult to get into, it did grow on me and I enjoyed the way it covered many Chinese enclaves across California (the familiarity of neighborhoods like Rowland Heights and Irvine felt like Easter eggs meant for Southern Californian ABCs). The biggest strengths of the novel are the ways that it successfully integrates plenty of plot twists that build up to a satisfying ending and the way it flips perspective to exotify the U.S. as much as U.S. media has historically exotified China, pointing to how any culture can be seen as confusing or ridiculous depending on the eyes that view it. Let’s hope that after reading this novel, readers will approach all new cultures with the same gumption and optimism with which Shelley approaches his time in the U.S.
The Chinese Groove is available from Bookshop, Chaucer’s Books, Elliott Bay Books, Green Apple Books, Skylight Books, and Unabridged Books.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.