Disorientation

Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese American doctoral candidate, is 29 and nearly finished with a dissertation on the late poet Xiao-Wen Chou, a figure already placed among the canon. Years of research have left her with a junk food habit and a sore stomach, and she has resolved never to study anything "Chinese-y" again. One afternoon in the Chou archives she finds a strange note, and she convinces herself it will be her way out of the program.

The note turns out to be far more than she expected. Her bumbling efforts to decode it set off a chain of events that includes book burnings, hallucinations caused by over-the-counter medication, public protests, and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda. Her friend Eunice Kim stays close by her side, while her rival Vivian Vo keeps pace behind her. The discovery shakes not only her sheltered life inside academia but also the world outside it.

In the fallout, Ingrid begins to see everything differently, including her fiancé, Stephen Greene, who is gentle and devoted to her. When he leaves on a book tour with an exceptionally kawaii Japanese author whose work he has translated, she feels doubt and insecurity for the first time. As the consequences of her actions keep growing, she must face her complicated relationship with white men and white institutions, and above all with herself.

This is the debut novel from Elaine Hsieh Chou. Written as a satire, it is aimed at readers who enjoyed Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. It takes aim at privilege and power in America, explores individual complicity and suppressed anger, and asks who gets to tell our stories and how those stories change once we tell them ourselves.