By Frankie Martinez
When Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng meet at the Wei’s Fourth of July party in the 1983 suburbs of New York, one of the first things they do together is crash a neighboring stranger’s barbeque. The three of them quietly enter the neighbor’s backyard, make a hamburger for themselves with ketchup, then walk back to the Wei’s in without exchanging more than a few words. Drawn together by an impulse for pranking, Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen continue on to separate lives in New York City with the mutual understanding that they’ll come back together for the next projects to come, whatever they may be. Spanning from the late eighties to the new millennium to a dystopian 2040, Lisa Ko‘s Memory Piece is an epic of placemaking through performance art, digital intrigue, and recordkeeping.
This story is told in four parts with multiple points of view and somewhat overlapping timelines. The first part, “The Lost Notebooks of Giselle Chin,” tells of how Giselle meets Jackie and Ellen in the 1980s, then follows Giselle’s performance art career all the way to the late ’90s in New York. The second, “Jackie Ong at the End of the World,” takes place in the late ’90s and early 2000s and follows Jackie as she attempts to fund her online journaling platform, Lena, all while under the employ of a budding corporation. The third part, “Always Something There to Remind Me,” takes place in the 2040s, where the now-crumbling co-op Sola is still occupied by Ellen amidst the growing tech conglomerate, Lacuna. Finally, the last part, “Memory Piece,” contains a mix of letters and notes from the cast’s past, present, and future.
With the addition of mixed media interludes throughout the novel including black and white, photographs, lists, and inventories of lost items all titled “News From Home,” Memory Piece feels like a spontaneous historical account of separate but similar lives, of which its subjects slowly become disenchanted with the world. Giselle, as she delves into the art scene in New York, grows tired of each new restriction to her performance art due to funding or recognition while Jackie, seemingly isolated to online relationships and terrible coworkers, becomes entangled in the social and transactional complexities of real life relationships while staying at Sola with Ellen later on. And further in the future, an older Ellen finds herself witness to a new generation of reckless collaborators against the powers that be, as well as the despair that comes with becoming a forgotten part of history. In combination with the setting of an ever-changing New York City, each story is pleasantly offbeat, dyed in brutal honesty and occasionally sparkling with something like joie de vivre, especially in the moments when Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen are together again, either in whole or in part.
At times, the narrative voice between each part is so alike that it feels difficult to distinguish personalities between each character, but I found myself wondering how purposeful this was. Each is a story of disillusionment, with clear juxtapositions between the trio’s desire to be remembered and the deep seated need to disappear, but the characters are very different in their approaches. I found myself relating heavily to Giselle’s self-consciousness in her art, Jackie’s restlessness in work and relationships, and Ellen’s resilience in preserving what she’s built. Memory Piece isn’t as uplifting as it is aspirational, a message for anyone who feels like the world is moving without them.
Frankie Martinez is a writer, reader, and editor from Southern California. Her prose has appeared in 3 Moon Magazine, Poetically Magazine, and The Winnow. She is currently a fiction editor at Miniskirt Magazine and has a slice of life column at The Daily Drunk Mag. Find out more at frankiemilktea.carrd.co.