Ratings35
Average rating4.1
A Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startlingly tender debut novel.
Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about “Chinese-y” things again. But after years of grueling research, all she has to show for her efforts are junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, she convinces herself it’s her ticket out of academic hell.
But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, upending not only her sheltered life within academia but her entire world beyond it. With her trusty friend Eunice Kim by her side and her rival Vivian Vo hot on her tail, together they set off a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda.
In the aftermath, nothing looks the same to Ingrid—including her gentle and doting fiancé, Stephen Greene. When he embarks on a book tour with the super kawaii Japanese author he’s translated, doubts and insecurities creep in for the first time… As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and, most of all, herself.
For readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, this uproarious and bighearted satire is a blistering send-up of privilege and power in America, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage. In this electrifying debut novel from a provocative new voice, Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.
Reviews with the most likes.
way too much going on and the author, despite their very best efforts, could not get me to care about any of it. so sorry :/
I enjoyed this satire of White Western attitudes toward Asian people and cultures. Written from the perspective of a Taiwanese American permanently stuck in code switch mode, humor ranges from laugh out loud to cringe. Certain reactions from white characters and their motivations may seem outlandish, but I have heard most of it, even the main twist, in person.
29 year old PhD candidate Ingrid Yang is in the 8th year of her dissertation on the late Xiao-Wen Chou, colloquially known as the Chinese Robert Frost, with his accessible poetry about rivers and teacups whose quotes adorn the walls of middle-class homes and ornate tea boxes.
Things are not going well for Ingrid. She's facing mounting school debt, a likely ulcer, aggressive eczema, a growing addiction to her allergy medication and the chilling realization that she's just not that into Chou's body of work.
Things take an abrupt turn when she discovers a strange note in the Chou archives. Shenanigans ensue. A lot in fact. And while it's clear it's satire, we've come to a place where truth is stranger than fiction. Most of the wilder plot points are based on actual events and half the fun is uncovering their real world origins. Disorientation does feel like a debut in that it can't help but throw an entire universe of ideas onto the page.
Yellowface, red-pilling for profit, cultural appropriation, MRAzns, weebs, internalized racism, campus politics, performative wokeness and more. Sure there are inevitable hits and misses but I'm here for the often messy, sometimes contradictory, and regularly weird nature of a second generation Asian's racial awakening. Satire is hard, and your results may vary, but I am here for Elaine Hsieh Chou's Ingrid Yang.
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