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Everybody talks about Pachinko, but Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires is the book I wish I had discovered five years earlier when I really needed more stories about protagonists with ravenous ambition and no sense of real purpose to point her due north. I saw a lot of myself in Casey Han, the Korean American protagonist, as she navigates her mid-twenties as a young professional in Manhattan. The novel itself is fun: the cast of characters and their subplots remind me of some of my favorite TV dramas with their moneyed lifestyles, illicit affairs, scandals and family intrigues. But what makes this novel so good is the way Lee's characters migrate across cultural, intergenerational, and socioeconomic borders as well, channeling the overarching themes that make being Asian American feel so fraught.
From the very first chapter, Casey struggles to relate to her immigrant parents' dreams for her bound by their definitions of success. She craves the easy comfort of the American Dream, that life could be whatever you make of it, and yet she doesn't know what to do with the accumulation of guilt from letting her parents down with her life choices again and again. And for what? The most frustrating part is that she doesn't even know what it is she really wants for the majority of the novel, and that casts doubt on whether fighting with her parents has been worth all the pain in the first place.
The unnamed narrator in Chemistry by Weike Wang faces a similar dilemma. She is so close to having everything she's supposed to want—a proposal from her successful and supportive boyfriend, the prestigious PhD in chemistry, and the hard-earned approval from her Chinese immigrant parents—but instead of reveling in it, she slowly abandons it all instead. The narrator is paralyzed by a newfound sense of ambivalence towards her picture-perfect life, and over the course of a year she struggles under the weight of having to live up to her parents' success:
"My father's is the classic immigrant story.
He is the first in his family to go to high school and college and graduate school and America. He is the first to become an engineer.
Extraordinary, some people have said when he speaks now of how he got here.
Through hard work, he says, and the learning of advanced math.
Amazing, others have said. But such progress he's made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon."Stylistically, Chemistry is like a book of proverbs on navigating the gulf between other people's expectations and finding your own way forward. Like Free Food for Millionaires, this novel contemplates the cultural heritage of filial piety with American values of self-determination and individualism. How do you reconcile the person your parents want you to be with the person you're discovering you actually are? As the child of immigrants, are you personally obligated to live your life in a way that makes your parents' sacrifices worth it?
I am grateful for E.J. Koh's memoir The Magical Language of Others for telling what feels like a nontraditional immigrant story but is heartwarming all the same. In some sense, Koh's story is a reversal of the unnamed narrator's in Chemistry. Rather than valorizing the ways in which immigrant parents sacrifice their best life so that their children have a better chance at success, Koh's parents are the ones who ask their children to let them go pursue better opportunities and leave them behind.
Koh has to shape her selfhood around the absence of her parents' immediate presence starting from the second half of her teenage years: after immigrating to the United States and establishing a successful career in the Bay Area, Koh's parents leave her and her brother behind in California while they go back to pursue an even better professional opportunity in Korea. The offer was supposed to be only three years, but as the company extends their timeline for more years to come, Koh recounts stories from her late teens and early twenties with letters from her distant mom interspersed throughout.
With improved Korean language skills and the benefit of hindsight, Koh discovers her mother's desire for forgiveness and her daughter's love through translating the box of letters over a decade later. Love is expressed in both the tender, explicitly written love you miss yous and the sheer act of writing about the daily vignettes in an attempt to share a life from thousands of miles away.
But how do you share your love and your life with your mom when language is doomed to fail you? Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a beautiful and haunting semi-autobiographical novel that's framed as a letter from a son to his Vietnamese immigrant mother:
"Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are."This is a novel about trauma, race, violence, masculinity, war legacies, drug addiction, and sexual identity; it's also a story about love and identity and what it means to become American. Vuong strikes an extraordinary balance between the big, sweeping themes and the intricacy of all the details that make a life feel true. The main character, Little Dog, tells the story of his life to his mom in richly poetic English, despite the fact that she only knows basic Vietnamese and is completely illiterate in both languages. The lack of a common language underscores the desperate desire we have to be seen, to be known; sometimes the ones we wish would understand us the most are the ones who never truly will.
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In addition to these four titles, I put together a quick spreadsheet with about sixty other books by Asian and Asian-heritage writers I've read over the last five years here. If you've read and loved any of these books, want to know more about any of these books, or think I'm missing a book (or two, or ten) in my repertoire, let's talk!
xoxo, vivian
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