Blah Blah

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

For a very long time, I avoided reading in the doctor-memoir genre. I think part of my hesitation was that it brings up complicated personal feelings given that I gave up a spot in medical school to go after this thing called a doctorate in literary studies. Of late, I’ve been more willing to dive into this genre, certainly in part due to the rise of interest in disability and illness studies, and here I am reviewing Sandeep Jauhar’s My Father’s Brain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). We’ll now move to the marketing description: “A deeply affecting memoir of a father’s descent into dementia, and a revelatory inquiry into why the human brain degenerates with age and what we can do about it. Almost six million Americans—about one in every ten people over the age of sixty-five—have Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition, an affliction that some fear more than death? In My Father’s Brain, the distinguished physician and author Sandeep Jauhar sets his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s alongside his own journey toward understanding this disease and how it might best be coped with, if not cured. In an intimate memoir rich with humor and heartbreak, Jauhar relates how his immigrant father and extended family felt, quarreled, and found their way through the dissolution of a cherished life. Along the way, he lucidly exposes what happens in the brain as we age and our memory falters, and explores everything from ancient conceptions of the mind to the most cutting-edge neurological—and bioethical—research. Throughout, My Father’s Brain confronts the moral and psychological concerns that arise when family members must become caregivers, when children’s and parents’ roles reverse, and when we must accept unforeseen turns in our closest relationships—and in our understanding of what it is to have a self. The result is a work of essential insight into dementia, and into how scientists, caregivers, and all of us in an aging society are reckoning with the fallout.”

 So, at this point, I’ve read a couple of different texts—both nonfictional and not—that deal either with dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. The former term is a broader one that encapsulates various types of degenerative brain diseases, including things like Pick’s Disease (etc.). The caregiving aspect is what will stay with me the most, as Jauhar must constantly work with his siblings to find out what will preserve his father’s quality of life, on the one hand, and while on the other hand the family members try to carve out their own futures. This balance is very difficult, given demanding jobs and the children that each of the siblings must care for. Fortunately, Jauhar’s father has a very enterprising live-in housekeeper named Harwinder, who often engages in the brunt of the day-to-day care work, but even this assistance is often not enough. This description also fails to mention the important fact that Jauhar’s mother passes away from Parkinson’s related issues around the time that Jauhar’s father begins the most precipitous descent into dementia. So, even as the family must grieve, they are simultaneously dealing with the increasing debility of their father, both in mind and body. What is perhaps most disappointing about what Jauhar reveals is how little assistance is given to those who need it most. Dementia-related research and aid pales in comparison to other illnesses, such as cancer. Further still, there are few effective treatments that slow or halt the disease progression, especially once the disease has advanced. In this sense, to write about someone suffering about dementia is to place oneself in the role of the witness, and this aspect is perhaps the clearest form of care and love that Jauhar demonstrates in this work. What I appreciated most was the balance of accessible scientific information that appears alongside the more common conventions of the memoir. In this way, readers are able to get considerable context about the history of dementia and how it has been treated along with the more intimate look that Jauhar generously provides us. One of the most impressive elements of this memoir is Jauhar’s willingness to dive into the occasional fractures that emerge when family members differ in the approach to an ailing loved one’s care. At the end of the day, Jauhar and his siblings understand that they must put the needs of their father front and center, even as they sometimes debate over the course of action. In this spirit of tenderness amid so much heartbreak and volatility, Jauhar’s memoir has much to teach us about the challenges that come with the lengthy journey that is dementia.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon (Del Rey, 2025) may be one of the first books of fiction that I’m reviewing that was published in 2025. Yes, I’m behind, but so is everyone else who studies and reads Asian American literature because it would literally be a full-time job now to just be on top of the what is coming out LOL. So, for those in the know, Yambao previously published under Samantha Sotto. Long ago, we reviewed her debut, Before Ever After. I’m not sure why there is a change in the publication name, but that’s more of a detail to us. Between Before Ever After and Water Moon, there was an e-only publication called Love and Gravity. This publication was one of the first moments that I had where I was firmly dismayed by the changing landscape of reading because there were things that were only being published in digital form. I still to this day do not understand why there can’t be a print on demand option for anything that is primarily marketed as digital! We analogue kings and queens still demand our material culture. Water Moon came at a time of  really bad insomnia, and I was really happy to have this novel, which really is like some of what the blurbs said, connecting this novel to Spirited Away. Okay, let’s get to that marketing description: “On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets. Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it. Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds. But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.”

This book has a LOT of weird details and weird worldbuilding issues that I didn’t fully understand. For instance, you can travel on rumors or travel through puddles. You can fold paper and thus fold time. You can buy almost anything in this dark shadow world for a price. Choices take the form of birds, which are also souls, and then there are malevolent creatures who want to take these souls because they do not have souls of their own. There are unsouled children who then develop into these malevolent creatures, who seem to be made only of inorganic parts. The description is not entirely accurate I guess, and so I will provide my spoiler warning: have you looked away? If you have not, you will find out that Hana absolutely knows that her father staged the ransacking so that the malevolent overlords of this shadow world do not think Hana is involved and may actually give up on looking for her father. Hana realizes that her father thinks that his wife, Hana’s mother, may still be alive, even though everyone thought she was executed when she failed to deliver a “choice” to those malevolent overlords. Thus, what ensues is really a detective quest. Hana is eventually accompanied by a physicist who happens upon the shop on the same day of the ransacking. The physicist is clearly into Hana romantically, so he’ll pretty much do anything to spend time with her, despite the fact that he’s in a shadow world where physics seem to have no meaning. I’m always the most skeptical about this element of the plot in fantasies only because it seems to stretch credulity—at least to me—that a person will simply go into a dangerous under world without really knowing the stakes of what might befall him. And they are in danger ALL.THE.TIME. But, the true romantics in these readers will love this dynamic duo because they persist in the face of demons, monsters, and everything in-between that might be trying to push them off the path of their quest. Eventually, Hana discovers that her mother is indeed alive, but there is no happy reunion, only knowledge that the world in which she has been born into is structured through various conceits that eliminate the possibility for much free will and agency. The ending was wrapped up a little bit too neatly, and because the worldbuilding rules are so strange, I actually wanted to find out what happened to Hana when she is forced apart from her dashing romantic paramour. And spoiler warning again: they are eventually be reunited but not after a long time apart. On the level of my insomnia, I will say that the novel did its purpose. It helped relax me in a time of great stress and anxiety, and so we sometimes see the salve that fiction can offer, at least in the form of closure.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Alexandra A. Chan’s In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic (Flashpoint, 2024) continues my trend of reading some creative nonfictional publications. The book actually comes out of a hybrid publishing company that also has a self-publishing arm called Girl Friday Productions (the full link for this book can be found below).  This text is an absolutely gorgeously produced work, much in the same vein as Satsuki Ina’s The Poet and the Silk Girl. There are full color illustrations, high quality glossy pages, and full color photographs. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “A left-brained archaeologist and successful tiger daughter, Chan finds her logical approach to life utterly fails her in the face of this profound grief. Unable to find a way forward, she must either burn to ash or forge herself anew. Slowly, painfully, wondrously, Chan discovers that her father and ancestors have left threads of renewal in the artifacts and stories of their lives. Through a long-lost interview conducted by Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, a basket of war letters written from the Burmese jungle, a box of photographs, her world travels, and a deepening relationship to her own art, the archaeologist and lifelong rationalist makes her greatest discovery to date: the healing power of enchantment. In an epic story that travels from prerevolution China to the South under Jim Crow, from the Pacific theater of WWII to the black sands of Reynisfjara, Iceland, and beyond, Chan takes us on a universal journey to meaning in the wake of devastating loss, sharing the insights and tools that allowed her to rebuild her life and resurrect her spirit. Part memoir, part lyrical invitation to new ways of seeing and better ways of being in dark times, the book includes beautiful full-color original Chinese brush paintings by the author and fascinating vintage photographs of an unforgettable cast of characters. In the Garden Behind the Moon is a captivating family portrait and an urgent call to awaken to the magic and wonder of daily life.”

I’ll start out by saying that this work doesn’t fit into a single genre, though it probably hews closest to the memoir. Chan chooses to structure the work through the Chinese zodiac calendar. While it would seem like the memoir would be linear, it actually is not. The placeholder years really exist as the beginning point of each chapter, which often moves forward and backward in time. Chan has done some painstaking work, not only in ensuring that a larger archival footprint of her family is shared with readers but also in the background research that she conducts to fill out her family’s lengthy genealogy. This creative nonfictional work is anchored primarily by Chan’s attentiveness to grief. Indeed, the emotional core emerges through Chan’s close relationship with her father, which she conveys through the larger historical tapestry that is unveiled by detailing his life. He grows up in Georgia at a time where there are very few Chinese Americans; he serves in World War II; he marries and gets divorced and marries again (having dealt with the problematics of legislation that impeded interracial unions). Adding to the author’s loss is the fact that her mother will also die of a rare cancer a number of years before the death of her father. But Chan’s modus operandi is to find a way through the grief. Thus the subtitle also reminds us of the centrality of both myth and magic as ways that we confront devastating loss. The “magic” of this particular text surfaces especially in the signs that Chan sees that tells us that her relationship with her parents endures whether or not they are physically with her. She’ll visit faraway places and see traces of her parents in the majestic vistas before her, and she’ll know that the memories she carries means that she will never lose her parents. As the memoir moves forward—and I provide you with a spoiler warning here—Chan’s research into her family history yields a shocking discovery. Her father discovers that their ancestral background ties them to African Americans. Chan comes to find out that an ancestor who was purportedly from South America had actually come to pass as half-Chinese and that she and her family members are part Black. The depth to which Chan continues to mind her biological background is perhaps not surprising, given that she is an archaeologist, but Chan also has an astutely analytical mind as a scholar. Indeed, she comes to consider her father’s mixed race background as one of the reasons why he was so compelled to achieve and to move forward so diligently in life, knowing that the shadows of racial difference could overwhelm him. Chan’s memoir soars precisely because of this impressive balance between self-reflection and excavation, which provides readers with an enduring tribute to a uniquely American family.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As part of the memoir kick I have been on, I finally finished Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021). I started this memoir probably over two years ago, but I crashed out of it. I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten older, I’ll be in the middle of reading like four or five books at the same time. I don’t know when this bad habit started, but it causes me to leave books unfinished for very long periods. In any case, let’s let the marketing description get us started: “In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to ‘beautiful country.’ Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly ‘shopping days,’ when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.”

I think the most important part of the description occurs at the end, when it states that the author is grounded in “her childhood perspective.” I didn’t realize that about 99% of this memoir would be told in this way. That is, Wang really attempts to resituate herself at the time of her childhood, even though the memoir is clearly being told in past tense. There are only a handful of times where it becomes apparent that the memoir is really being told in retrospect, so I did find this technique a bit jarring. The level of detail that Wang evokes throughout is really incredible, and I did wonder (and was hoping that we might find out) how Wang was able to cobble together the earlier sections. Did she have to outline? Did she have journals that she had kept? Whatever the case, the memoir essentially covers her time from elementary school up until about junior high and early high school. It then fast forwards over one chapter from college all the way to Wang’s contemporary moment, when she becomes a lawyer. The main throughline of this memoir is the unceasing fear that the undocumented migrant feels while being in the United States: they must do everything they can to avoid detection, even to the point of potentially harming themselves. This issue becomes most pressing when Wang’s mother becomes very sick, and there is no option but for her to be taken to the emergency room. Wang’s mother is diagnosed with a mass, and her convalescence is long, but the fact remains that no one is deported. This moment figures prominently in this memoir precisely because it becomes one point in time when the family begins to realize that their categorical self-surveillance may be a little bit too oppressive. The pressures of this kind of life also begin to take a considerable toll on Wang’s parents, who become increasingly distant from each other. A tense encounter involving physical abuse becomes the propelling factor for Wang’s mother to get Wang and herself out of the house and into Canada, there they can be full-fledged citizens, out from the under the weight of their fears. Wang’s father eventually joins them, but what Wang’s memoir ultimately reveals are the painstaking sacrifices that undocumented migrants make in order to find their way to the United States. Of course, it’s never what they hope it will become, and the brutalities of everyday life are made apparent in Wang’s assured narrative voice, however childlike it may be. Through her vision, we understand the godsend that a free meal might be, how much a $50 gift certificate she wins to the bookstore means, and the glory of a radiator’s heat when insulation is faulty. These minor miracles are the ones that move Wang forward through the desperation that clouds over so much of her childhood. Wang’s steadfastness is only paralleled by her forward-thinking mother, who becomes the focal point for a future that is more than just survival.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’m lucky to be part of a little reading group with some brilliant folx, and this year’s selection is none other than Aysegül Savas’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). Occasionally, at AALF, we look a little bit further eastward and such is the case with Savas, who is a Turkish anglophone writer who lives in Paris! In any case, her novel is an interesting one because it functions partly through general abstracts, which is certainly one of Savas’s aims: “Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. ‘Forget about daily life,’ chides her grandmother on the phone. ‘We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.’ Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?  Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas' distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.”

This official marketing description is super useful because of the quotation provided by the grandmother! Part of the whole point of this novel is to document the ordinary and the quotidian, even in the abstract. There’s something that Saval is wrestling with here about evacuating the text with particularity and even historical and cultural specificity. Readers are never given an exact sense of where the story is set (which city is it in?) or the ethnicity of specific characters (though we know, for instance, that Manu and Asya are foreigners, as are many of their friends). Don’t expect food references to help you, as Savas also declines specifying too many of the foods. The only area where I thought we might get a glimpse of where we actually are is when a character mentions needing a residential permit and that this document might limit their movements in and out of the city, but my knowledge of urban centers is extremely limited. In any case, this book meanders and is reflective and seems more philosophical. It is not driven by plot, though there are three main strands. The first involves the repeated sections titled “future selves,” which focuses on Asya and Manu, as their tour properties to find a more permanent place to level. The second involves the documentary that Asya is making which is contained more or less to the sections called “in the park.” Asya is clearly focusing on the ways that community is forged in the unnamed park location. These sections are again pretty pedestrian, but that, I think, is part of the point: to find some semblance of what is important about the ordinary and the everyday.  The final repeated sections, “Principles of Kinship,” were probably my favorite because it details the complications of developing alternative community formations beyond heteronuclear structures. In this novel’s case, Asya and Manu have one clear close friend named Ravi, but around that major friend, a number of others orbit, including Lena; Tereza, an elderly neighbor; and a handful of others. The heft of the novel, at least for me, appears here, and I will provide the spoiler warning. Have you looked away? Well, if not, then it means you either already know or don’t care: the ending leaves us in a situation where Manu and Asya do find their new place, while Ravi moves away with one of their other friends, leaving behind the fledgling kinship that they hoped would endure. The documentary doesn’t seem to be a major element to the conclusion, so the novel really leaves us with the connections that people make as they grow older. The novel makes you wonder about the endurance of these non-heteronuclear family formations we attempt to make, especially in the guise of migrant communities. Overall, Savas’s work seems almost to be less of a novel than a series of vignettes, which the intent to show the complications of the immigrant everyday. An intriguing and spare narrative.

 
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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve been on a bit of a creative nonfictional kick lately, and I think it’s because I’m trying to balance all of my high fantasy reading with something that’s a little bit more grounded in explicit social contexts. This time around I’m reviewing Laura Lee’s A History of Scars (Atria, 2021), which is a debut memoir that concerns mental health, caretaking, and the balance one needs to survive in a complicated home environment. The text brings to mind what separates a memoir from a book of essays. After having read a good number of each, I am beginning to see that books marketed as essays are a little bit more wide-ranging, staying away from the central life or recollections of the author. Other than that, the differentiation is really a matter of degree and intensity. But I digress, so let’s get to that marketing description: “In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In ‘History of Scars’ and ‘Aluminum’s Erosions,’ Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World,” Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea. Through the vivid imagery of mountain climbing, cooking, studying writing, and growing up Korean American, Lee explores the legacy of trauma on a young queer child of immigrants as she reconciles the disparate pieces of existence that make her whole. By tapping into her own personal, emotional, and psychological struggles in these powerful and relatable essays, Lee encourages all of us to not be afraid to face our own hardships and inner truths.”

This memoir was at times pretty gut-wrenching, and I am beginning to see that such stories are perhaps the foundation of many creative nonfictions. There is perhaps a writing “cure” or at least therapy at work here, with Lee exploring the vulnerable childhood she had under the hands of a physically and emotionally abusive father. These dynamics are soon complicated by the fact that Lee is beginning to take care of her mother, who is eventually diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. For many years though, Lee has no idea, and because Lee’s father is expelled from the home at some point, Lee, as the only one who is still around, is eventually expected to take care of her mother, whether or not she wants to. Lee has two older siblings, but the home dynamics make it clear that they need to get out of there as soon as possible. Lee’s relationship with her middle sister is complicated because that sister ends up emulating some of the propulsive anger modeled by their father. Lee struggles to keep herself afloat in this world. It is climbing that she turns to for a form of escape, where the presence of mind required to move up a sheer rock face is the kind that becomes meditative and constitutive. The memoir also explores how Lee is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, which she astutely notes cannot be solely understood as a biologically-activated mental disorder. Lee considers how impactful her difficult upbringing would have been and how it likely was involved in the development of schizophrenia. What also anchors this text is Lee’s enduring relationship with a Pakistani woman. In this respect, Lee’s memoir is one of the few that considers the queer Asian American experience from the women’s perspective. Though the memoir ends with Lee’s struggle with the day-to-day experiences of a woman afflicted by mental health issues, it is more than apparent that Lee turns to writing as a way to help document her complicated life journey and to find some level of empowerment, however provisional, that exists on the page. Readers will also be incredibly buoyed by Lee’s glorious prose.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

There’s a couple of new presses that have come out with the name Z at the beginning. There’s Zando and then there is Zibby! Zibby has already impressed with its initial slate of books, and Amy Lin’s Here After (Zibby, 2024) is a testament to the incredible acquisitional and editorial work that their team is doing. What a GUT PUNCH this memoir is. You’ll see why after you read the marketing description: “Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds' move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy's family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive. Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment. What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held ‘truths’ about what the grieving process looks like. Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis' death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.”

As I continue the memoir kick I’m on and as I toggle back and forth between fiction and creative nonfiction (maybe it’s finally time to add in some more poetry? Drama?), I have seen Lin’s work get more and more publicity. It follows in the tradition of works like Zauner’s Crying in H Mart in the way that it so totally embraces the profound complications of bereavement. What I especially loved is the use of white space throughout this text. Chapters are really snippets that read like prose poetry, and the white space that surrounds each block begins to accrue a kind of emotional intensity that perhaps helps to mirror that sense of loss — one that most of us can’t even begin to imagine — that has befallen the author. The medical crisis that Lin must navigate on her own are a very dangerous series of clots that require a stent to be put into her body. Without that stent, she may end up having a life-threatening or life-ending stroke. As you might expect, Lin is ambivalent about getting the stent: after all, what is there to live for now that Kurtis is gone? Despite such ideations, Lin also knows that she must find a way to navigate the after: she goes to therapy regularly and also signs up for a new grief counselor. She also consistently meets with a fellow widow, which sometimes helps her process her unique positionality. Days stretch out, like the white blocks that surround each page, as she struggles to find the energy to do anything. Outwardly, friends and family start to assume she is doing better, but Lin knows that she is not. She eventually adopts a puppy, despite more ambivalence about whether or not she can actually care for this other living thing, which may die at any moment. What I appreciate most about Lin’s memoir is that she takes the time to dispel a lot of myths about the grieving process. There are no developmental stages of grieving, nor do projects about how bad grief will be map onto any common template. If anything, we are reminded that the cost of profound love will be catastrophic grief, but Lin also reminds us that one method to dealing with grief is in a communal process. That is, you use the tools you have in order to address grief. For Lin, to address grief is to write about it. The logical step that she may not have at first anticipated is that this writing would be the basis for a creative publication. But it all makes sense. It is Kurtis, after all, who tells Lin that she is a writer, even before Lin has published her first short story, about embracing that identity. It comes full circle with Lin’s coruscating meditation on bereavement, so we see that one way that Lin comes to honor and to grieve Kurtis is in the process of narrative reconstructions. There may be no end to grief, as Lin’s memoir reveals, but it can and should be shared.

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Written by Stephen Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

As you know, we occasionally set our sights to other allied communities and writers of varying BIPOC backgrounds. One of our favorite writers is none other than the prolific Louise Erdrich, who graces us with another brilliant novel: The Mighty Red (Harper, 2024)! This robust marketing description gives us quite a bit of information: “In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.  Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.  Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.   Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own. Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day. The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.”

As is common for Erdrich, there are always a ton of characters, but Erdrich is an obvious pro and knows exactly how to cultivate the depth of these figures, even down to the most minor of these individuals in terms of their import to the plots. I will admit: the first 1/3 of the novel or so I found taxing: the central love triangle between Kismet, Gary, and Hugo just sort of drove me crazy, but I suppose I don’t give enough room for the messiness that is young love. In any case, I eventually settled into these dynamics, especially because we discover the reason behind much of these complicated and dysfunctional connections. The other main elements involve the older residents of the town, the thirty, forty and fiftysomethings or so that are the older generation above Kismet, Gary, and Hugo. There’s a book club that links most of the major female characters. Hugo’s mom, Bev owns a bookstore Bev’s Bookery, that brings these women together. Kismet’s mom Crystal is in a strained marital relationship with a man named Martin. Then there’s the fact that there’s been a major tragedy that befell the town some months back that has impacted all of the youth there. This latter issue is the one that was the most surprising to me, as it emerges in the back end of the text. The community generally talks around what has happened but when we finally get to see what it is that is keeping some of the characters so guarded, the novel really gains momentum as some actual healing and reconnection can begin. What I loved best about this book though is something that I haven’t seen in Erdrich before: I feel as though Erdrich always pushes herself stylistically and, in this novel, she uses more clipped sentences than I’ve seen in the past. It is also paired with a sly humorous undertone that I think is more prominent than other novels that I’ve read. There’s also the way that Erdrich will just come up and surprise you with a narrative sleight of hand. There’s always a little bit of magic and mischief in Erdrich’s fictional world: a ghost will pop up in this novel’s case and then there’s the fact that a short chapter is taken from the perspective of a river and how it handles the various beings that fall in it. If there is a minor quibble it’s that twenty years pass by in the blink of a couple pages at the conclusion, which suggests that there might have been hundreds of pages of material for a different novel. After all, Erdrich is the one who has been compared to Faulkner for quite some time, and we can see how maybe there might have been more threads to pull together for another story. Whatever the case, Erdrich is clearly at her heights of creative genius, and we are all the more fortunate for how productive she has been as a writer and as an artist.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Melody S. Gee’s We Carry Smoke & Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion (University of Iowa Press, 2024) is my continuing work to give myself a break from all of those high intensity speculative fictions I’ve read over the past year. When I originally picked up this one, I didn’t read much paratextual material, so I was pleasantly surprised by all of its religious content. I say “pleasantly,” because this text is one that I know my mother would have loved to have read (she was a huge fan of accessible religious philosophy and Gee certainly comes from this lineage as well), and so I found myself thinking a lot about her while reading it. These are the unexpected gifts of reading. Let’s move to the marketing description: “Answering an unexpected call to faith in her thirties, Melody Gee contends with what saying “yes” to conversion requires of an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants. Faced with a new framework for her place in the world, grief and doubt shadow her tentative steps toward becoming a believer. She looks for answers and consolation in her family’s story of immigration trauma and cultural assimilation, in the ways their burdens and limitations made her answer-seeking both impossible and inevitable. In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion’s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves.”

So, I read this one not long after Amy Lee Scott’s essay collection, and they do have some similarities. While Scott’s work often paired the personal with the apocalyptic, the ordering framework of Gee’s text is to rethink her family and personal life in the context of her conversion to Catholicism. Also, both authors are adopted, so that element does become important for both texts. What I found especially engaging about Gee’s essay collection is the way she is so reflective about her immigrant background and family. One of the standout essays, “Chinese American” focuses on the unique genealogy of her loved ones, who come to California, but essentially isolate themselves ethnically while they build a life around a restaurant. The other part of this essay that is so striking is the way that Gee comes to understand her grandfather more fully after he has passed away. Indeed, Gee uses the essay as a way to address a sense of lack: “In the eulogy I should have written, my grandfather was born on February 2, 1914,” but this is only an American date and we never celebrated it” (39). Gee thus employs this essay in part to address something she felt she should have done around the time her grandfather passed away. I found this moment particularly compelling, and it serves as a way to consider creative nonfiction as a realm that can address things latently. I found that the essays in this collection accrued more might and import, as I read on. Toward the conclusion, “Redemption Story,” functions as one of Gee’s strongest essays. It delves into Gee’s mother and her immigration history, which is set amongst the turbulent Chinese modernization of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Given the continual movement that Gee’s mother experiences due to political instability and migration, Gee comes to the conclusion that her mother is a kind of perpetual exile, and that she must be better at coming to terms with some of her mother’s idiosyncrasies. The essay following that one, “Two Adoptions,” elegantly considers Gee’s background as an adoptee, on the one hand, and her decision to convert to Catholicism, on the other. In both contexts, Gee meditates upon what it means to find a home, however metaphorical or alternative it may be. Gee ultimately leaves us with the insight that, whatever (difficult) path we might take or are forced to traverse, we should find our spiritual center and keep the faith. A uniquely positioned work that combines the best in Asian American creative nonfiction with religious philosophy and spirituality.

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I’ve been toggling for whatever reason between a lot of high fantasy and memoir. I guess that’s just the reading mood I’ve been in for the last couple of months. I’ve especially been catching up on the so-called Asian-inspired fantasy trend, which is pretty much everywhere and frankly its own market now, with dozens of titles coming out year after year. The next one that appeared on my radar was Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess (Harper Voyager, 2022), which is a super engrossing read and certainly one I’d recommend for fans of this genre. Let’s let the marketing description move us a bit forward on this book:  “Growing up on the moon, Xingyin is accustomed to solitude, unaware that she is being hidden from the feared Celestial Emperor who exiled her mother for stealing his elixir of immortality. But when Xingyin’s magic flares and her existence is discovered, she is forced to flee her home, leaving her mother behind. Alone, powerless, and afraid, she makes her way to the Celestial Kingdom, a land of wonder and secrets. Disguising her identity, she seizes an opportunity to learn alongside the emperor’s son, mastering archery and magic, even as passion flames between her and the prince. To save her mother, Xingyin embarks on a perilous quest, confronting legendary creatures and vicious enemies. But when treachery looms and forbidden magic threatens the kingdom, she must challenge the ruthless Celestial Emperor for her dream—striking a dangerous bargain in which she is torn between losing all she loves or plunging the realm into chaos. Daughter of the Moon Goddess begins an enchanting duology which weaves ancient Chinese mythology into a sweeping adventure of immortals and magic, of loss and sacrifice—where love vies with honor, dreams are fraught with betrayal, and hope emerges triumphant.”

This description doesn’t outline that there is a central romance triangle, which is absolutely instrumental to our engagement with the plot! Xingyin does eventually become enamored with the prince of the Celestial Emperor. Xingyin and Liwei seem like a pretty good pair, until the readers eventually find out that that Liwei has already been promised for marriage to another! GASP! Xingyin ends up deciding to go her own way and part of that process involves getting work in the celestial army, working under Captain Wenzhi. Whereas the sparks immediately flew with Liwei, things work at a slower pace with Wenzhi, but eventually, Xingyin develops feelings for Wenzhi, thus leading to our central romance triangle. There are various adventures which occur throughout this novel: Xingyin must battle merfolk, dragons, and demons, all with the ultimate intent that she might find a way back to her mother. She must also figure out how to pivot around the Celestial Emperor and Empress, who at various points drive Xingyin into specific actions which could endanger her life. One of the most perilous sections is a kind of trap: Xingyin is tasked to retrieve the pearls of dragons, not realizing that in doing so, she would be forcing the dragons to give up their agency. Xingyin, with her ethically centered self, always manages to find a way around such obstacles, and this aspect of her personality is what grounds this novel at every point, despite the hazards she consistently faces. But back to this romance plot: Despite the fact that Wenzhi seems like a good match (after all, he *is* single), Xingyin continually finds her thoughts moving back to Liwei. And here I will provide us all with the requisite spoiler warning, so please turn away unless you want to find out what all goes down. Though using what I would consider to be a common twist, Tan is able to cover it up in a way that, at least for me, produces a serious level of surprise. What you eventually find out is that Wenzhi is not who we thought he was. He is in fact the heir to the demon realm, and Xingyin must eventually defeat him in order to save Liwei and the more broadly the Celestial Kingdom. For her efforts Xingyin does eventually gain the favor that she wants. Her mother is freed from her imprisonment, and she will be  allowed to return to her mother without fear of reprisal from the Emperor. Overall, I really enjoyed this one; it’s quite different from the other Asian-inspired fantasies I’ve read. Many in the kingdom are immortals and most have various powers that enable them to defeat magical monsters and figures. Tan’s world building is both assured and expansive, letting readers into a rich world filled with memorable characters.

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