A Cross-Atlantic Immigrant Mystery

Searching for Sylvie Lee     Jean Kwok     (2019)

Jean Kwok sets up a tantalizing mystery while at the same time constructing a moving story about an immigrant family in today’s highly mobile global economy.

The mystery:  Successful 30-something New Yorker Sylvie Lee has disappeared on a trip to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother. Her younger sister, Amy, flies to Amsterdam to look for her. This mystery component keeps the pages turning as chapters skip back and forth in time, presenting alternating narrators.

The immigrant family:  Originally from China, the extended Lee and Tan families emigrated to the Netherlands and to the United States more than a quarter century ago. Members of the younger generation are assimilated and fluent in multiple languages but still face bigotry in both countries. As one Chinese American character puts it, “I think that wherever you are, to live in the world as a white person is a completely different experience than a person of color. Discrimination is invisible to them because it does not affect them. They are truly shocked.” (227)

The dual settings (Amsterdam and NYC) add a layer of interest, since the attitudes toward immigrants have both similarities and differences. Social class is another factor. Even though Sylvie attended all the right schools and landed high-paying jobs, she laments, “I never mastered the art of the graceful shrug, the careless indifference of those who summered on private islands and tied clove hitches on sailboats.” (198)

I found the syntax and word choice in this novel particularly arresting. With each chapter, the language changes to suit the narrator of that chapter. So, when Ma, the mother of Sylvie and Amy, narrates, the sentences are shorter, with nouns often lacking articles, because Ma speaks very little English. The invoking of proverbs—such as “Those who wish to eat honey must suffer the sting of the bees” (198)—also varies. Ma’s narrative is chock full of traditional sayings, but the more Westernized Sylvie and Amy cite proverbs somewhat less often. The characters whose native language is Dutch speak in sentences that mimic the patterns of that language. Of course, we’re reading the words of fictional Dutch speakers, who are speaking Dutch that has been “translated” by Jean Kwok into English.

The fine character development in Searching for Sylvie Lee overshadows any deficiencies in the plot department, so I won’t downgrade the novel for its few melodramatic twists. In the end, Amy concludes: “How my knowledge of Sylvie, of Ma, of myself has changed. We had all been hidden behind the curtain of language and culture: from each other, from ourselves. I have learned that though the curtains in the Netherlands are always open, there is much that can be concealed in broad daylight.” (312)

For reviews of other fiction about immigrants, click on Immigrant Stories in the Archive column on the right. For another novel that combines mystery with the immigrant experience, see my post reviewing The Other Americans by Laila Lalami.

The Upper-Middle-Class Façade

Little Fires Everywhere     Celeste Ng     (2017)

Ah, adolescents in late-1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio.

The first chapter of Little Fires Everywhere lures the reader in with a blazing house, then backtracks about a year to paint portraits of the four teenaged Richardson children who resided in that house (Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy)--plus the new 15-year-old in town, Pearl Warren. The Richardson family lives the American Dream, with trendy clothes and cars, luxurious vacations, and bright career prospects for the kids. Most of the Richardsons are also selfish and self-centered. Pearl, in contrast, is a smart but naïve vagabond who roams the country in an old VW Rabbit with her single mother, Mia, who’s an accomplished photographic artist. Pearl and Mia rent an apartment in a Shaker Heights duplex owned by Mrs Richardson and furnish it sparsely with castoffs, in distinct contrast to the elegant six-bedroom Richardson mansion. Tellingly, Ng refers to most adults as “Mrs” and “Mr,” but Mia Warren is always “Mia.”

The social commentary on economic inequality and lifestyle choices inherent in this setup would be enough to fuel a novel—and a spectacular house fire. But novelist Celeste Ng plunges far, far deeper into the problems in Shaker Heights, where she herself has lived. This suburb of Cleveland was established early in the 20th century as a planned community, with rigid rules about all aspects of outward appearance and organization. Near the end of the book, Izzy Richardson thinks about “life in their beautiful, perfectly ordered, abundantly furnished house, where the grass was always cut and the leaves were always raked and there was never, ever any garbage in sight; in their beautiful, perfectly ordered neighborhood where every lawn had a tree and the streets curved so that no one went too fast and every house harmonized with the next; in their perfectly ordered city, where everyone got along and everyone followed the rules and everything had to be beautiful and perfect on the outside, no matter what a mess lay within.” (323)

The “mess” behind the gorgeous façade of Shaker Heights includes unplanned pregnancy, controversial interracial adoption, prejudice against immigrants, unethical journalism, and parents who pay little attention to their wayward kids. Ng’s narrative is complex, with multiple strands tightly interwoven, and all her characters, no matter how peripheral, are drawn with exquisite care. The reading becomes unstoppable as the novel barrels along toward the fire that will inevitably consume the Richardson home.

The “little fires” of the title are the blazes on the gasoline-soaked beds that the arsonist lights. But these fires are also the incendiary issues shoved under the beds of upper-middle-class Americans: bigotry, greed, and a general disdain for those who diverge in any way from the norms set by their communities. Ng doesn’t preach; she shows.

Bonus Post: A Woman in the Chem Lab

Chemistry     Weike Wang     (2017)

Don’t let this book fool you. The simple declarative sentences and frequent thematic tangents might lead you to believe that it’s the work of an unsophisticated novelist. Not so. Weike Wang makes her readers think hard about the role of immigrants in American society, about the difficulties that women (of any race) face in choosing careers in the sciences, and about the tensions between the personal and the professional in the lives of talented people.

No one in Chemistry except the narrator’s boyfriend, Eric, is given a name, which emphasizes the universality of this tale. The first-person narrator is a young woman who should be heading into her final year of a doctoral program in chemistry at a prestigious university—never named but presumably Harvard. She’s Chinese American, brought to the United States as a young child and raised by parents who would make Amy Chua of Tiger Mother fame seem tame. Boyfriend Eric is a paragon, a white guy who has had spectacular success in pursuing science degrees and who is just embarking on what will undoubtedly be a rewarding academic career. He wants to marry the narrator, but she demurs, worried about forfeiting her intellectual capacity. Added to this tension is a side plot about the narrator’s best friend, a physician in New York, who talks to the narrator frequently on the phone. On the edges of the novel are also students whom the narrator tutors in math and science topics.

Readers glimpse about two years of the narrator’s life, as she gets counseling to help with her decisions, eats a great deal of carryout pizza, drinks too much wine, and muses about scientific topics ranging from the details of electrical circuitry to the discovery of radium. Should she plow on with the doctorate even though the highly competitive lab work no longer gives her any joy? Should she marry Eric, a man very well suited to her personality and intelligence, even though he can never fully understand her family’s culture and language? If she doesn’t pursue chemistry, what should she do with her life? And if she moves to the Midwest to follow Eric, should she take her comical, untrainable dog with her?

The narrator touches on these questions, wanders off, and then circles back to them. Chemistry doesn’t give readers all the answers, but that’s it’s charm. And Weike Wang is an author to watch.

Chinese American Metafiction

The Fortunes     Peter Ho Davies     (2016)

Peter Ho Davies has crafted a heartbreaking metafictional novel about the experience of being Chinese American. I was skeptical at first about the designation of “novel,” since the dust jacket details four separate sections, each with distinct characters, set in various time periods over the past 150 years. Perhaps, I thought, this is another book of short stories, like Davies’s two previous collections. By the time I’d finished reading The Fortunes, however, I could see that it is a novel, with the sections linked in hundreds of intricate ways. It may even be that the first three sections of the novel are intended as the fictional work of the fictional main character in the fourth section, hence the “metafictional” designation. Got all that?

It plays out in this way. The first section, “Gold: Celestial Railroad,” is about Ah Ling, a half-Chinese, half-white immigrant to California during the building of the railroads in the 1860s. First as a laundry worker and then as servant to Charles Crocker, a railroad baron, Ah Ling is thrust into controversies over Chinese labor on the Central Pacific Railroad. Throughout this section, the longest of the book, Ah Ling struggles with his identity, his relationship to other Chinese Americans, and his place in the emerging society of the American West.

Next, in “Silver: Your Name in Chinese,” we meet Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actor in the early days of Hollywood. Wong is portrayed as holding her own in an industry that blatantly discriminates against Asian Americans, routinely casting white actors to play Asian characters. Wong gets lesser roles as temptresses or discarded mistresses. Off camera she takes on numerous white lovers, both male and female.

Moving ahead in time to 1982, the section titled “Jade: Tell it Slant” recounts the story of Vincent Chin, an unarmed man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two Detroit auto workers angered by the rise of Japanese auto manufacturing. They thought Chin, a Chinese American, was Japanese. The narrator in this section is a friend of Chin’s who fled the scene and feels guilty about it even thirty years later. Since I live in southeast Michigan, I’m very familiar with this crime and with the lack of punishment for the perpetrators. Still, I found the grisly descriptions of Chin’s death hard to read. It’s small comfort that the Vincent Chin case brought to the public’s attention the racist attitudes toward Asian Americans in our nation.

Finally, in “Pearl: Disorientation,” we meet Chinese American John Ling Smith in the present day. Smith (who has a white father and a Chinese mother) and his wife (who is Irish American) are in China to pick up a baby they are adopting. We learn that Smith has begun to write a historical novel about the Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad. He’s also made a start on books about Anna May Wong and the Vincent Chin case, but he hasn’t completed any of these projects. He feels vaguely guilty that he holds a university teaching position.

Aha—this is where the reader sees some metafictional possibilities. Maybe the preceding sections of The Fortunes are actually John Ling Smith’s unfinished attempts to make sense of the Chinese American experience in the United States. The first three sections of the book, after all, feature historical characters, albeit in fictional scenarios. Smith is totally fictional, but his fictional character is grappling with the same issues of racial discrimination and cultural assimilation that Ah Ling and Anna May Wong and Vincent Chin faced.

Davies doesn’t pull any punches in depicting the racist attacks on Chinese Americans, both verbal and physical. I was taken aback by the huge number of offensive epithets, jokes, and fake accents that Asian Americans endure—about the folds of their eyes, the size of their genitals, and the tone of their skin. The most extreme attack is the brutal murder of Vincent Chin.

The connections that Davies creates between the four sections of his novel astonished me at every page. The word “jade” comes up as the color of the water that Chinese immigrants see on their journey across the Pacific Ocean, as the cigarette holder of Anna May Wong, as the elephant charm on a neck chain that Vincent Chin is wearing when he dies, and as the trinkets that adoptive parents buy when they are in China to pick up their babies. Elephants (real and toy) keep appearing, as do bamboo cages and baskets. Railroad cars trundle in and out of the stories. In 1860s California, the bones of dead railroad workers are carefully sent back to China; in circa-2000 China, John Ling Smith marvels at the unearthing and reconstruction of the Terra Cotta Army, part of a necropolis for an ancient Chinese emperor. We’re told that Smith attended college at Caltech, having been rejected by Stanford; the historical figure Leland Stanford, who founded Stanford University, appears in Ah Ling’s story. The linkages go on and on.

Every person interacting with society must grapple at least occasionally with questions of identity, class, and status. Chinese Americans also carry the weight of one of the great cultures in the history of the world. Davies’ characters straddle East and West; read this novel to see how they handle it.