Fiction, 2022
When my friend gave me Disorientation to read, she cautiously handed it over with a warning: “This is decidedly not for everyone. I loved it.” It is with the same wariness that I hand this over to you.
Meet Ingrid Yang, a Ph.D. student writing her thesis on a canonical Chinese American poet, Xiao-Wen Chou. She is engaged to a man she’s known for years, stressed about her work, and has an addiction to antacid pills. Basically, she’s completely ordinary, and every day follows the same unspoken ritual of mundanity. By the novel's end, no strand of her life remains the same.
The process of reading Disorientation is accurately, deeply disorientating. There is a lot on the plate, and a lot at stake; race in academia, racial passing, the meaning of cultural or ethnic identity, racial fetishization, power imbalances in interracial couples, and women competing against women–to name simply a few.
The only tying thread throughout is the knowledge that at every turn, the most bizarre situation that can happen will happen. Like Murphy’s Law for the insane. The seriousness of a campus setting is soured and electrified by hilarity, and then some tears. It deftly juxtaposes absolute eccentricity with themes that are real enough for every laugh to rub at a gut feeling you’ve always had. I polished it in three days.
Film - The Chair (Not a film, but a mini-series. You’ll forgive me because it has Sandra Oh in it)
Song - As It Was - Harry Styles
P.S. I apologise for the lack of a newsletter last week. I was so ill that I couldn’t think, let alone write.