My Year Abroad: Chang-rae Lee explores what it means to feel like an outsider in an adopted country
- In his latest book, Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee cements his place as master of the ‘outsider’ genre
- He packs the pages with an abundance of food and facts – and sometimes a little too much information
My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee, Riverhead Books
Chang-rae Lee’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, is part-bildungsroman and part-shaggy dog story, a great big novel overflowing with eating, multilingual phrases (including Mandarin, Korean, even Yiddish), the finer points of fast food and high-cuisine, references to German and Japanese knife-making, boating, etymology, more eating, surfing, pop psych, mall architecture, Chinese environmental regulation, scuba diving, drugs, dog sledding and still more eating. (For a true sense, please repeat the following quote between each review paragraph as a chorus:)
“[M]orsels of deep-fried rabbit drowning in chili peppers, ribbons of beef tendon in a sweet, spicy sauce, and handmade noodles with pork and pickled cabbage, sautéed bitter melon, and gooey little tenders of braised eggplant …”
We start with college dropout Tiller Bardmon – an overthinking, “semi-diasporic postcolonial indeterminate” (“one-eighth Asian”, he notes) – living with his older lover, Val (importantly to Tiller, also one-eighth Asian), and her son, Victor Jnr. Victor Jnr at first seems like a home-schooled, “otherwise ADHD/OCD/possibly sociopathic”, gluttonous version of Wilder, the mostly silent younger child from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) – a compelling presence in his silence, but Tiller turns into a charismatically prodigious cook.
Thanks to Tashkentian money-laundering and a disappeared ex-husband, Val is in witness protection – in a town Tiller has dubbed “Stagno” for privacy reasons and because it is as still as a scummed-up old pond.
Stagno contrasts with Tiller’s New Jersey hometown “crusty old Dunbar, where labradoodles outnumber the ethnics and mayonnaise is still the number-one sauce” and where, before this whole witness protection in Stagno strand – we switch between the two storylines throughout the book – Tiller’s mentor, Pong Lou, has drawn Tiller into a circle of overconfident entrepreneurial excess.
Lee’s family moved to the United States from Korea in 1968, when he was three. As early as 1999, The New York Times called him, “a deft and original thinker about the vagaries of assimilation – about what it means to feel like a perpetual outsider in your adopted country”.
The theme continues in My Year Abroad, where Tiller is hyperconscious of his halfness: “Despite my ruddied bloodline […] I was a farang, a Triple-Crème G (gweilo, gaijin, gringo).”
