San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Hiding beneath facade of sweetness, docility
This book will make a great movie. The modern story of clashing cultures and classes already reads like “Crazy Rich Asians” meets Donna Tartt’s “A Secret History” meets “Paul’s Case,” Willa Cather’s classic story of a desperate middleclass climb. But “White Ivy,” the propulsive debut novel by Susie Yang, is more than plot twists and love triangles. It’s also an astute chronicle of cultures, gender dynamics and the complicated business of selfcreation in America.
Ivy Lin doesn’t even remember her parents when she is finally sent by the grandmother who raised her in China to Massachusetts to reunite with what amounts to a new family, complete with an infant brother she didn’t know existed. The Lins’ Massachusetts is a long way from the brick streets of Boston’s Beacon Hill. They live in the burbs, surrounded by KMarts and Dunkin’ Donuts
and other immigrants struggling to learn the American ways. There is little room in the Lin household for anything other than scrimping and working. Affection, conversation and social life are foreign and unnecessary. When enough money is finally saved to bring Ivy’s grandmother over from China, she becomes Ivy’s teacher, quickly instilling in her granddaughter “the two qualities necessary for survival: selfreliance and opportunism.” For most of Ivy’s childhood, this mainly manifests as shoplifting. Ivy manages to hide her talent for thieving and lying under the cover of how white Americans see her: dutiful, quiet, studious. The typical Asian girl.
It is only when she enters a private middle school because of her father’s employment there that the differences between her family and the families of her wealthy, Waspy classmates come into full relief. Ivy, in love with Gideon Speyer, the class golden boy, is invisible in this world, a condition she tries to overcome by eschewing her family’s values and attempting to remake herself in the image of her privileged peers.
While the story of immigrant children straddling the two cultures to which they belong is welltrod territory, Yang manages to avoid any cliches with wonderfully precise writing and by creating in Ivy a deeply flawed character we aren’t sure we should root for at all.
By the time she is reacquainted as a young adult with Gideon — picture Brad Pitt growing up as a Kennedy — she is so eager to sublimate herself into the blueblood reality of summer cottages and boat shoes that she no longer has any real sense of self. There is no true love, no true calling. All that is left of her is opportunism and the ability to hide her true nature under the facade of sweetness and docility.
Although the book is nearly addictive in its readability from the beginning, it’s in the unfolding of Ivy’s adult life that the story really stretches into something dark and thrillerlike. As “the picturesque and heroic” life she wants seems as if it might slip from her reach, Ivy’s desperation allows her to twist the lessons of her grandmother into something sinister and drastic, a last act that clears the path for her hardwon, fully constructed life.
“White Ivy” has already been optioned by Netflix, and although it’s easy to see why, it’s also a shame that some people might wait for the screen version. The book is a rare thing: an insightful and keen observation of our culture and psychology cloaked in a plot that keeps you up past your bedtime.
Samantha Schoech is The Chronicle’s books consultant. Email: books@ sfchronicle. com
At the heart of Felicia Luna Lemus’ new hybrid memoir, “Particulate Matter,” is a marriage. Marriage is a fraught and oftdiscussed word, especially when it applies to queer people. Samesex marriage was legalized throughout the U. S. a scant five years ago and is under real threat with the current and probablefuture Supreme Court. Samesex marriage was and is lauded as a major civil rights win, and it was. But as an institution, it sits at a complex intersection of oppression and liberation. The phrase “samesex” is itself far from radical, and many argue that marriage is a poor marker for LGBTQIA+ rights when more acute oppressive forces continue to threaten queer and trans people’s very survival. At the same time, queer people deserve the right to be married, and to have the legal and emotional access that accompanies it.
It is important that “Particulate Matter” is about a queer marriage, not because of its politics, which are not discussed, but because it just is. It exists in a tender and desperate way, both within and because of another ( politicized) reality of presentday America: environmental damage and toxicity.
“Particulate Matter” is a tiny, powerful flame of a book. It chronicles the year in which Lemus and her wife, Nina, were forced to live apart due to illness. Nina’s adultonset asthma reached a crisis point after 20 years of living in Los Angeles, to the point where she had to move to an unnamed place with cleaner air. Lemus was unable to follow right away, so she drove for hours back and forth every day. Then, wildfires began to rage — an increasingly common and terrifying reality for the entire West Coast that was again exemplified in 2020.
“Particulate Matter”
Lemus’ writing lands like sparks and ash, fragmented and tinged with grief. She observes the lemon tree, the dog, a bird’s nest; she observes her memory. Some pages contain only a single word, including a series of Spanish words around nosiness, messiness, scandal: “Metiche. Chismosa. Escandalosa. Greñuda.” She reflects briefly on her Indigenous Mexican heritage, on spelling her name for the barista; she muses on “Optics. Tattoos and orthotics.” These grains of thought, bits of heart, land all around the reader like embers, bringing them into the broken circle of narrative.
There is love in these fragments, too — a heavenly cup of peppermint tea, clouds that “almost look like something tonight.” One passage reads simply, “You. Heaven.” Lemus captures the wisps of longing that pull people toward each other, toward an idea of home. Meanwhile, the context for this humanity is always the Earth on which we live. “It’s cooled down at night for the first time in weeks,” Lemus writes. “I almost believe this summer will end someday.” And then, “The grass is going to die. All the jade, too. The lemon tree, avocado tree, and nightblooming cacti will live. They’ve survived world wars.” And then, “I gather what matters. … One in the morning, I text you, hose down the yard and the fence.”
“Particulate Matter” is a small book that accomplishes in remarkably few words a deeply felt narrative — that is, an exploration of the simultaneity of delight, yearning, grief and confusion of being in love with a person and a place. Of being alive at all.
Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer and book critic. Neilson can be found on Twitter @ sarahmariewrote.