San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Talkiness drowns out real racial activism
Like Steph Cha’s acclaimed 2019 novel, “Your House Will Pay,” Ryan Lee Wong’s debut, “Which Side Are You On,” confronts the history of strained race relations between Asian and African people in America. This coming-of-age story follows 21-year-old Reed, an Asian American Columbia University student who considers dropping out to commit himself to Black Lives Matter after the 2014 reallife fatal shooting of an unarmed Akai Gurley in a darkened stairwell by NYPD Officer Peter Liang. The killing sparked both pro- and anti-police protests, and while Liang was convicted of manslaughter, he never served jail time.
When Reed returns home to Los Angeles to reveal his plans to his parents, his mother, a former activist, tries to educate him on the long history of Black-Asian solidarity in community organizing. In the 1980s,
she co-founded the Black-Korean Coalition, which appears to be based on the real-life BlackKorean Alliance that disbanded in 1992, shortly after Los Angeles erupted in violence associated with the Rodney King beating. Mother and son eat barbecue in Koreatown, do yoga near wealthy Brentwood and drive to South Central to eat Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, and all the while she patiently answers Reed’s earnest but priggish questions. About his mother’s work, he asks:
“If you were working on this issue for so long, why’d the tension with Koreans blow up during the riots. Why were their stores burned down, and why did they form militias? ... If you’re not going to succeed, why try?”
Though his anger is righteous and well-intentioned, Reed’s frequent textbook rants against “racial capitalism” and “respectability politics” will test the patience of even the most ardent leftist. At one point, Reed tells his father, “Well, what then? ... We just stop organizing so that we can secure our professional jobs and rise through this shitty system — maybe become president of it one day?” Reed does not seem to register that his parents might have had to get jobs in that system to raise him.
Reed’s immaturity is counterbalanced by just enough of his self-awareness and self-effacement to keep the reader interested in his fate. The talkiness of the novel, however, which the publisher describes as a “series of intimate, charged conversations,” flattens the drama, and we see precious few glimpses of Reed’s commitment to activism in action — other than the occasional flashback attending a protest or staying up late to make a poster — before an all-too-brief climax.
In short, nothing stops Reed from answering the central question of the novel himself. He should just drop out of college and join Black Lives Matter to learn the hard lessons of social justice work from direct experience like his parents. The novel would then be a more immersive reading experience, and Reed would be lucky enough to have the privilege to go back to college whenever he wanted.
The political divides between battle-scarred moderates and ideologically pure progressives are age-old and ripe for exploration. But one can’t help but wish “Which Side Are You On” revealed Reed’s answer to the titular question through action rather than discourse.