By Matthew Lemas
To what degree can one trust their own perception of reality? It is a question that has spanned Eastern and Western philosophy, various religious traditions, and, more recently, dorm room debates about whether or not we are all living in a simulation. Regardless of its origin, the inquiry’s basic supposition remains the same: the sober reality we so often cherish as reality may be no different than a dream state, or, interpreted differently, the dreaming may be just as real as the waking.
Such a question may seem—at first glance—a strange companion to Mike Fu’s debut, Masquerade, which, in many respects, reads like a typical millennial bildungsroman. At the novel’s start, we are introduced to our protagonist, thirty-one-year-old Meadow Liu, who, for the past ten years, has lived in the well-trodden debut setting of New York City. While that duration has given him the unofficial right to call the city his own, he still feels unmoored, lost in a liminal interiority between what should be his American home and his familial origins in Shanghai. As Fu writes of the plane ride between the two cities, “this nowhere-space is [Meadow’s] home, excruciating and perfect for someone like him, a grown-ass man still clueless about who he is or what he’s doing.”
All the while, Meadow seeks to fill this existential void through both platonic and romantic love. We see the former through his closest friend (as well as the novel’s central mystery), Selma, and the latter through a series of month-long flings that will be all too familiar to those fortunate enough to endure modern dating. Indeed, the quest for a romantic partner is so extreme that Selma tells him one evening, through the veil of cigarette smoke, “You fall easily into that kind of story … for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been so eager for love.”
If this were all the novel was—a montage of Meadow interspersed between solitude and community, questioning his existential worth—it would still be one worth reading. Fu has a knack for capturing that particular malaise endemic to the urban, twenty or thirty-something, the one who is long past the stage of adolescent angst, yet not prepared to call oneself an “adult” in the traditional imagining of the word. We see him ghosted by an ex-lover, seemingly buzzed by after-work drinks more often than not, and engaged in a constant series of apartment parties that project a quotidian, realist view into urban millennial life.
However, as previously hinted, Fu does not limit himself to the typical fare of any one genre. Indeed, in many respects, he wants to try them all—mystery novel, philosophical novel, queer coming-of-age—but perhaps most overt is his fascination with the surreal. It is not so much that Fu resorts to a simple “it was all a dream” approach to the book’s burgeoning mysteries—Selma, for example, seemingly disappears without a trace—but rather layers the work with constant prodding of realism’s otherwise stiff exterior.
This bending of genre begins with the title itself, which shares its name with the book’s novel-within-a-novel, Masquerade. Meadow finds the book in Selma’s apartment, where he is housesitting while she holds an artist residency in Shanghai (sponsored by a gallery not-so-subtly named “Potemkin”). Written in 1940 by Liu Tian, and translated from Chinese, the book follows a Japanese journalist as he enters into the sensual cosmopolitanism of 1930s Shanghai. Fu intersperses summary of the work alongside Meadow’s narration, and as the book progresses, Meadow recognizes that not only does he share a name with the author’s own—Liu Tian being Meadow’s Chinese name—but many events in the book come to mirror those in his own life. Is this coincidence, he wonders, or something more nefarious, a controlled plot only simulated as chance?
The novel’s title, then, becomes more than just reference alone, instead capturing the very essence of the work—that what we see may not be the entire truth. To rely on our senses, and the relationships that come from them, may be to rely on that which is inherently unstable. In such a world, trust becomes a tricky thing, both in oneself and those around him. Other oddities in the novel abound—mirrors that one can fall into, the possible reality of ghosts—so much so that when Fu indulges in a rather long description of a past shroom trip, one allows it without much complaint, if only for the fact that it speaks to the book’s central tension of real versus imagined. In other words, a psychedelic-induced reality may be just as valid as any other.
Is there a way to navigate this reality, shifting as it is? For Meadow, the answer ultimately comes from Selma, who, in that earlier scene, ends her mild admonishment of his recurrent pining for romance with more radical advice: “Remember that the story is always yours to control. When it veers off track, you can invent a new one and start over.”
In that way, perhaps the novel’s central question is not whether what we see is real—after all, real or not, we are living in it, whatever “it” is—but instead how to live in such uncertainty. By the novel’s end, Meadow seems to think that means reinvention through escape, or, more romantically said, a yet unrealized homecoming far from where he is. That may be true—a final, successful realization of Selma’s call to reclaim one’s narrative. However, the answer may also lie in the more banal, yet strangely unexplored reality in the work: that one cannot escape the self, no matter where he chooses to go.
Matthew Lemas is a writer living in Southern California, where he earned an MFA in creative writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. His research interests include queer literature, the bildungsroman, and the influence of Buddhism on Western literature.