‘Days of Distraction’ examines work, race and identity

Alexandra Chang’s debut novel finds artistry in an everyday plot.

Jing Jing, narrator of Alexandra Chang’s spiky and contemplative debut novel, “Days of Distraction” (Ecco, 336 pp., ★★★g), is a tech journalist. And like every tech journalist, part of her job is worrying about how many people are reading her. “I am consistently middling, with the occasional bump,” she notes.

She’s talking about page views, but she’s also talking about everything. As a Chinese-American woman on a staff with few people of color, she’s underpaid and promised a raise ... someday. She’s scraping by in San Francisco and wants to move, but her living situation is a function of her boyfriend, J, who’s applying to Ph.D. programs in biochemistry. Her parents have split, with her father living in China and imploring her to visit. But she feels too at odds with herself to go.

Until she has her life sorted out, her work is a series of racist microaggressions and banal job tasks. “I post about an app-controlled massage pillow, an app-controlled oven, an app-controlled blood pressure monitor, an app-controlled fork,” she writes. Sometimes the bumps are potholes.

This seems like extremely thin fictional material, but Chang has plainly inhaled the work of a generation of contemporary novelists – Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk, Dana Spiotta – with a knack for making gripping fiction out of banality. The lack of outward drama in “Days of Distraction” belies the stormy consciousness of a woman who’s struggling to define her identity as others try to do the job for her.

A main trigger for Jing Jing’s reckoning is J’s landing a slot in Cornell’s biochemistry program. To spell her loneliness in upstate New York, she takes a job at a history museum, where she stumbles on a photo of Kin Yamei, a pioneering Chinese-American doctor with an independent streak. (Her divorce was the stuff of national news in 1904.) Kin isn’t exactly a mirror for Jing Jing – though she does have second thoughts about her relationship with J – but she helps her feel less alone in her disconnection.

Early on, she craves J’s assuredness as a white man: “If there were an app that let me see the world as J sees the world, I’d pay more than two dollars for it and would give it five out of five stars,” she writes. But no one filter will resolve her identity. Visiting her father in China is not the revelation she hopes for, and the country reveals its own class and racial divides, not to mention dad’s prattling on about meals. “What I wanted were answers,” she thinks, “and all I’m getting is food commentary.”

Chang’s strength is her ability to give a sense of confusion contours: Jing Jing’s observations are pointed, witty, and free of easy resolutions. And Chang’s deadpan style offers up moments of absurd humor. (A former editor offers up some work: “Do you want to do a roundup review of mechanical pencils? No rush, it’s evergreen.”)

Ultimately, though, Chang shows the challenge of trying to raise issues about racism that even those closest to her wish to avoid. Struggling to spark a conversation nobody wants to have, she conducts an engrossing one with herself.