The Great Chinese American Novel

Last summer, I came up with an idea for The Great Chinese-American Novel.

To be honest, this is something that I have been mulling over for quite some time. I’ve always wanted to write The Great Chinese-American Novel, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been done before. Chang-Rae Lee’s “Native Speaker” might be considered a close winner, if you can overlook the fact that most of the characters are Korean.

I first learned about the concept of the Great American Novel in my ninth grade language arts class. The “Great American Novel,” Mrs. Johnson explained—and there were many that different people considered to be equally “Great American”—was a work of fiction that captured the essence of American culture and, in doing so, dignified the unique American historical experience. Great, I thought—Totally on board with that definition. Then she gave us the laundry list of nominees—“Moby Dick,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Grapes of Wrath”—and I remember feeling a little disappointed that there were no Chinese characters in any of these works. Maybe, I thought, we should get our own Great Novel. That would only be fair, right?

Looking back, the real reason why I wished for a Great Chinese-American Novel was because I wanted someone else to do the work of figuring out what it meant to be Chinese-American for me. Upper middle-class Chinese America, and especially the immigrant version, is a pretty unglamorous place. It’s mostly a lot of potlucks, piano lessons, and mild corporal punishment—a culture so steeped in humility, frugality, and Confucian virtue that it simply cannot accommodate the concept of a “mid-life crisis.” For the longest time, I struggled to put all the pieces together, until I had the good fortune of being sent off to boarding school in New England, where I promptly forgot I was yellow.

That is, until embarrassingly recently, at Harvard, when I took a class called “Asian-American Literature.” As a result of my schooling, I often feel like an Asian guy pretending to be a white guy pretending to be an Asian guy. Now if only there was an authoritative Great Chinese American Novel I could use as a mirror or crystal ball, to point to and say Aha! That is me, and I am that.

Anyway, here is my prospectus for anyone who does want to write the thing. Feel free to use part or all of this. My protagonist’s name is Michael Wang, and he is an unremarkable and somewhat repressed 26-year-old software engineer at a huge tech company in San Francisco. Michael lives in Chinatown because the rent is too high anywhere else. But the thing is, he feels out of place amongst all the other immigrants running their restaurants and laundry services, who, for some reason, all seem way more Chinese than he does.

Michael never gets promoted above the bamboo ceiling, so his days are filled with ennui. And then one day, this woman (named Vivian, of course) from a rival Chinese company shows up from Beijing and tricks Michael into falling in love with her. Her plan is to recruit him to work as a double agent, stealing his company’s intellectual property. She pays Michael a lot of money, and he gets to work. He experiences a jarring mix of emotions: self-loathing and disgust, alongside spite and excitement. He starts flying to Beijing a lot, with Vivian, who takes him on wild and crazy adventures through the city. Inevitably, these trips leave a paper trail, and before long the theft is exposed. Vivian disappears, abandoning Michael, who changes his name and retires into obscurity in Chengdu, where he meets a foreign tourist and tells this story.

Maybe to you this prospectus, this skeleton of a story, feels somewhat confused or arbitrary. Why Michael, why Vivian? Why Chengdu (reason: because it’s where I was born, and because nowhere else in China feels more remote to me)? In keeping with the theme of the tale I should admit that its central idea—that espionage is the metaphor for the Asian-American experience—was stolen from no other than Chang Rae Lee himself. But anyone who hasn’t read him probably isn’t ready to write this story yet.

From what I can tell so far, this plot line is missing at least a few things: for example, the Gold Rush, railroads, and Triad violence. So the challenge will be how to incorporate all of it in a plausible way. I’m thinking time travel is probably your best bet, but please make sure the inventor went to UC Berkeley.

Hansen Shi, ’18 is an English concentrator living in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.