Don Lee’s Long War on Asian American Stereotypes

THE PARTITION
Tales
By Don Lee

Few fiction writers have labored as tirelessly to subvert stereotypes about “Orientals” because the Korean American Don Lee. The protagonists in his debut, the 2001 story assortment “Yellow,” vary in ethnicity (from Korean to Japanese to Chinese language) and occupation (from skilled elites to mad poets), suggesting the heterogeneity of up to date Asian American life. Lee’s novels, whether or not about Asian spies in Eighties Japan (“Nation of Origin”) or bohemian Asian artists in Cambridge, Mass. (“The Collective”), additionally span a broad spectrum. However the organizing conceit of all his fiction has remained constant: Asian Individuals aren’t monoliths.

“The Partition,” Lee’s first assortment of tales since “Yellow,” represents a return to type, replaying most of the similar thematic and stylistic issues from his debut. The opening story, “Late within the Day,” follows the failed profession of a once-promising indie filmmaker who now makes vainness initiatives for wealthy Californian Asians. “Confidants” lingers on the on a regular basis romantic exploits of two Asian Individuals: one a highschool dropout who shortly lets us know he’s “not a mannequin minority,” and the opposite an alluring English professor at Johns Hopkins. In “UFOs” (an acronym for “Ugly Orientals,” with an unprintable adjective in between), a Korean American information reporter who has cosmetic surgery and Anglicizes her title to Victoria Crawford concurrently dates two males: a white man with an Asian fetish, named Richard, and an Asian physician and purported UFO named Yung-duk Moon. The story ends with a twist, maybe a predictable one in Lee’s palms; Victoria dumps Yung-duk in a second of sudden cruelty, solely to comprehend later that the true UFO is likely to be herself.

Right here we meet the identical figures and tropes from “Yellow”: striving artists who promote out; slackers; lovers with internalized self-hatred that turns them violently bitter and paranoid. Many alternative faces fall beneath the free and muddied class “yellow,” although “The Partition” is essentially populated by these of East Asian descent (that’s, those that have traditionally been put into this class); South and Southeast Asians not often seem in his books. Nonetheless, Lee narrates from a collective perspective, his tales providing a kaleidoscopic imaginative and prescient of all of the methods it feels to be yellow.

Many of the tales in “The Partition” function getting old characters who look again nostalgically on an ancient times of their life. “Years Later,” the shortest story within the assortment, depicts a younger lady’s erotic encounter, climaxing in a proleptic imaginative and prescient of her hitherto unknown future: “She wished it to final ceaselessly, this sense — youth, time, glory, the whole lot nonetheless earlier than her, ready, her extraordinary life — however she felt it rolling over her and gave in to it.” Sentences like these, supposed to maneuver the reader, typically tip into overwritten melodrama. Lee’s tales are sometimes about disappointment, however his prose, too, can disappoint in deflating moments comparable to these.

The ebook concludes with an bold three-story cycle titled “Les Hôtels d’Alain,” which tracks the itinerant bildung of 1 Alain Kweon from his youth as an aspiring thespian to his lonely middle-aged years as a washed-up actor, who now runs a profitable chain of artisanal boba outlets. “I had had this amorphous concept that my boba tea enterprise could be a technique to affirm and have fun my — and different Asian Individuals’ — racial heritage,” Alain displays late within the remaining story. “But boba tea wasn’t Korean or Okinawan or the rest of mine ethnically. It’d merely been one other appropriation, one other commodification within the guise of cultural id. What did it quantity to? … Had all of it been a lie?”

These questions resonate fearfully all through “The Partition.” In some methods, Alain is a sort of Everyman — the aimless, alienated American male overpopulating the traditional quick tales of John Cheever, J. D. Salinger and Richard Yates. When he’s seen by the lens of Lee’s vital profession and contributions, nevertheless, it’s exhausting to not learn Alain additionally as a metaphor for the collective struggles of up to date Asian American self-representation. And the way a lot there may be nonetheless left to do.