San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
On a comingofage sojourn through Asia
Do you miss fun? Eating in restaurants and staying out all night singing karaoke? Going absolutely anywhere? Well you’re in luck — Changrae Lee’s comic novel, “My Year Abroad,” is an ideal quarantine read, a vicarious escape that reminds us how hedonistic life can be.
This comingofage story centers on Tiller, a New Jersey college student, who is oneeighth Asian — a “Low Yella,” passing through life with “near whiteness” and a glaring lack of purpose or sense of belonging. While earning cash to help pay for his study abroad year, he meets Pong, a magnetic Chinese American entrepreneur who irrevocably alters his fate by inviting him on a business trip through Asia.
In a classic bildungsroman, there is often an emotional loss sending the protagonist on a quest. In the case of Tiller, his mother abandoned both him and his dad, and Tiller never fully recovers. When someone asks him why he seems so desperate, he thinks, “The easy answer, of course, was that I was minus a mother.”
It’s this lack of a maternal figure that makes Tiller so vulnerable to the adults around him and attracted to their confidence. Of the charismatic Pong he reflects, “I liked being drawn along in the curling wave of his wake.” It doesn’t hurt that Tiller sees himself as average and Pong sees more. In a particularly remarkable karaoke scene, Tiller, who swears he can’t carry a tune, ends up singing Electric Light Orchestra’s “When I Was a Boy,” silencing the room with his perfect voice.
“My Year Abroad” alternates between Tiller’s thrilling and harrowing journey through
Asia and the following year where he sets up a quasifamily in the American suburbs with Val, a depressed 30something woman, and her son, two people living under witness protection whom he happens to fall for in the food court of the Hong Kong airport on his return home.
There are so many nested stories here that the novel threatens at nearly every turn to come undone, and any summary of this book’s multiple plot lines would make it sound absurd.
I suspect while writing this book, Lee might have doubted being able to pull it off, yet this actionpacked yarn succeeds at holding together, barely. The book is crammed with so many moments of pain and pleasure — a gruesome scene with a humansize mortar and pestle, and enough food to make you feel on the verge of throwing up — that you end up feeling like you’re simultaneously on a bender and coming off one. These numerous wild adventures make it almost easy to miss the more salient through line: that Tiller, a whitepassing Asian growing up in a bland American suburb, is only able to discover himself on a trip to Asia and through his relationships with Asian men. Throughout his career, Lee, a Korean American who teaches at Stanford University, has always explored themes of cultural assimilation and alienation, and this story is no exception.
At the novel’s outset, we see a young man who doesn’t see himself in his surroundings. While Tiller learns many things about himself on his trip to Asia, he also discovers he doesn’t belong there, either. It’s only upon returning to the American suburbs, infused with new knowledge about himself, that he’s able to find a sense of home as he embarks on building a blended family with Val and her son.
While this book is both hilarious and horrifying at the same time — we see everything from suicide attempts to surreal sex acts — in the end it’s a moving saga about family and loss, embedded in what reads like a romp. Ultimately, Lee has succeeded in creating that rare type of novel, one which is both sneakily profound and a blast to read.