In her debut novel, Disorientation, Taiwanese-American author Elaine Hsieh Chou has fashioned a propulsive literary thriller that smartly deconstructs anti-Asian racism in the U.S., and the parallel influence of fetishes both sexual and academic on Asian-Americans, especially Asian women. Disorientation is narrated by Ingrid Yang, a student in the eighth and final year of her PhD, who is struggling to complete her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, the most celebrated Chinese-American poet, and a former professor at her university. Ingrid is actually not all that interested in Chou, but her advisors in the Asian American studies department (almost all of whom are white) have pushed her into studying the canonical poet rather than a subject matter that is of a more specific interest to Ingrid. Ingrid’s interest in Chou is chiefly that writing an original dissertation on his work could land her a prestigious fellowship opportunity—she finds his poetry a bit bland and non-specific, his descriptions of majestic Chinese landscapes and traditional values feel to her like pandering to a white audience who has specific expectations of Chinese-ness.
But everything changes when a mysterious note leads Ingrid, and her best friend Eunice, to begin unravelling an explosive scandal about Chou’s identity. He is not actually a Chinese poet, but rather a mediocre white man frustrated by constant rejection from literary journals, who alters his identity in order to cash in on an interest in Chinese art and poetry. When Ingrid and Eunice discover Chou’s identity, thus begins a scandal that embroils a number of faculty in the university’s Asian American studies department, many of whom had built their careers off of examining Chou’s work. Thus the entire community at Ingrid’s university is forced to confront their complicity in elevating Chou to such fame, igniting a fascinating but terrifying debate at the university about identity and art.
The nature of Xiao-Wen Chou’s poetry functions as a crucial tool for the novel to pick apart academia’s relationship to identity. His poetry is florid and exoticizes Chinese identity (it is literally the work of a white man who believes himself to be the arbiter of Chinese culture) so its no surprise that the university’s mostly white Asian-American studies department uplifts it as canonical. In an interview with Vogue, Elaine Hsieh Chou explained, “I really did want to show that the reason [Xiao-Wen] Chou could become the most famous Chinese American poet in America was because he did not write about being invisible or about how he had suffered due to white supremacy. He wrote about rivers and teacups and ying and yang and just kept exoticizing the East and keeping it very distant so that American readers wouldn’t feel uncomfortable in any way”.
The scandal of Chou’s poetry is a crucial eye-opening for Ingrid, who begins the novel as an Asian woman with a doting white fiancée, who sees herself in opposition to her rival Vivian Vo, a student in the postcolonial studies department who is outspoken about anti-Asian racism at the university. Ingrid and her best friend Eunice believed “there were two varieties of Asians: Asians like Vivian and Asians like themselves. And that the two varieties eyed each other warily: the former with pity and the latter with resentment for being pitied.” Ingrid and Eunice begin to realize that they have more in common with Vivian than they thought, and that she may have a point when it comes to the everyday racism and fetishistic treatment they receive as Asian women on a predominantly white college campus.
While the novel tackles these complex and nuanced conceptions of identity—Chou meticulously traces the arduous process of a young woman uncovering the insidious daily presence of racism and discrimination in her life—the novel is animated by a really lively sense of humor. Ingrid is a bumbling heroine who’s always struggling to keep things together and putting off deadlines, and her best friend Eunice is a hilarious foil. The character of Ingrid’s fiancée, the classic white man who fancies himself an intellectual and dresses up his obvious Asian fetish as an “interest” in Japanese culture, is also at turns hilarious and quite disturbing. Chou masterfully balances electric energy and wit with a thoughtful take on the modern campus novel. Disorientation is a fascinating consideration of Asian American identity that makes space for complicated and messy conversations, and reminds us that growth and adaptation are not only possible but also necessary parts of realizing our humanity.