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Disorientation
"A struggling PhD student makes a shocking discovery about a famous Chinese American poet that sets into motion a series of escalating events, both humorous and fraught, that culminates in an incendiary reckoning of her relationships, beliefs, and identity"--
416 pages, ebook
First published March 22, 2022
About the author
Elaine Hsieh Chou
1 book310 followersElaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, her short fiction appears in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online, and Ploughshares. Disorientation is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,858 reviews
December 22, 2022
Satire makes you smarter.
At least, I'm hoping it does. My brain felt like a balloon immediately after finishing this, so either I had recently become a brilliant scholar on par with Einstein or Hawking or the person who invented the deep-fried Oreo, or I was having a minor medical emergency.
I appear to be unaffected entirely now, so. Could've been either.
400+ pages of satire is a lot to get through, and never exactly a beach read in terms of fluffiness / immediate gratification / ease of experience. But this was a smart and all-encompassing one that managed to cover approximately 11 different yet related social issues and do it wisely, so 400 pages it is!
This was also similar in themes to Days of Distraction, a novel I read earlier this year as part of my Cannot Tell How I Feel About Books With Perfect Endings phenomenon, and that book is not a satire. And also I liked it a little bit more.
I don't know why that's relevant. I guess if you thought this was interesting but also think your brain deserves a small break from time to time?
I'm describing myself.
This is one of the weird reviews, huh.
Bottom line: A very impressive work that is also the kind of satire that isn't really funny ha-ha! (My preferred kind of funny.)
(This is not a criticism.)
------------
currently-reading updates
title is my resting state
------------
reading books by asian authors for aapi month!
book 1: kim jiyoung, born 1982
book 2: siren queen
book 3: the heart principle
book 4: n.p.
book 5: the hole
book 6: set on you
book 7: disorientation
At least, I'm hoping it does. My brain felt like a balloon immediately after finishing this, so either I had recently become a brilliant scholar on par with Einstein or Hawking or the person who invented the deep-fried Oreo, or I was having a minor medical emergency.
I appear to be unaffected entirely now, so. Could've been either.
400+ pages of satire is a lot to get through, and never exactly a beach read in terms of fluffiness / immediate gratification / ease of experience. But this was a smart and all-encompassing one that managed to cover approximately 11 different yet related social issues and do it wisely, so 400 pages it is!
This was also similar in themes to Days of Distraction, a novel I read earlier this year as part of my Cannot Tell How I Feel About Books With Perfect Endings phenomenon, and that book is not a satire. And also I liked it a little bit more.
I don't know why that's relevant. I guess if you thought this was interesting but also think your brain deserves a small break from time to time?
I'm describing myself.
This is one of the weird reviews, huh.
Bottom line: A very impressive work that is also the kind of satire that isn't really funny ha-ha! (My preferred kind of funny.)
(This is not a criticism.)
------------
currently-reading updates
title is my resting state
------------
reading books by asian authors for aapi month!
book 1: kim jiyoung, born 1982
book 2: siren queen
book 3: the heart principle
book 4: n.p.
book 5: the hole
book 6: set on you
book 7: disorientation
March 28, 2024
disorientation is literary fiction written in the style of a (seemingly brainless and/or logic-defying) romcom. it is a sally thorne manifesto. tessa bailey political commentary, if you will. this is literary fiction in the same way that a starbucks iced chai latte with sugar-free vanilla is "coffee." i love and echo this bit from cat's review: "If you want this kind of didacticism, why not just read an op-ed instead? [Disorientation is] not stylistically innovative or funny enough to excuse its obviousness."
i'm definitely to blame for some of the disappointment i felt while reading this book. generally, i like to go into new novels knowing as little as possible (i avoid reviews at all costs + ignore blurbs/summaries). this is mostly because having contextual knowledge of a new book before i crack it open sets my inner critic up for success—i.e. the annoying little voice in my head will start racing ahead of the narrative trying to predict plot points.
i've seen disorientation recommended all over the more literary-inclined side of booktok, so even though i knew almost nothing going into it, i'd somehow created a false impression of the book based on my own lit fic favorites. in other words, i went into it expecting raven leilani levels of prose + female disillusionment with society, and if you've read luster, you know that that is a tough act to follow for an mfa debut—even if both authors ostensibly wrote their first drafts at nyu.
so you can imagine my surprise at the prose in this book, which tries its best to hit the same stylistic beats that a romcom would (i assume political satire is more palatable to general audiences this way). for the first 8% of disorientation, i couldn't decide if i was reading satire or something super unself-aware. ingrid, an 8th-year phd candidate, at one point signs off an email to a stranger with "XOXO." i'm still months out from starting my graduate degree, but even i understood this to be an act of academic warfare. for this and other reasons, i am formally inducting ingrid into my damn, bitch, you live like this? mc bookshelf.
following the 8% mark, it became abundantly clear that this was a work of satire. nothing else could explain a woman of color balking at the thought of calling a white person "white." i soon began to understand the comedic limits of the world chou had constructed.
one of the reasons i would describe the satirical underpinnings of chou's novel as limiting is because you can only reasonably stretch satire so thin before it begins to recoil in the opposite direction—or even fail entirely. satire is the perfect comedic device to pack quick punches; in short-form (and when done well), it is incredibly successful. think about the SNL skit format (when SNL isn't completely unfunny), think about political cartoons, think about the onion headlines, think about your favorite memes/tiktoks. their delivery is predicated on the short-lived absurdity of a (devastatingly accurate) punchline. satirical movies + tv shows, while rarer, can also be a success, perhaps because we're more inclined to suspend our disbelief when dealing with distracting visual media.
to sustain political satire for 400+ pages—that is, 7+ hours of reading for the average kindle user—without once veering off course or making readers roll their eyes at the narrative's internal logic is probably impossible. if disorientation's delivery were subtler, i don't think it would ring quite so hollow, but because its satire is unflinchingly heavy-handed practically from the get-go (in your face, mouth foaming, spittle flying, slapped into oblivion levels of heavy-handed), the humor falls flat and the caricatures feel unforgivably cartoonish. the ya genre would be more forgiving of this kind of clumsy flagrance (think faridah àbíké-íyímídé's ace of spades, which follows 2 teenagers trying to unravel an institution's secret racist history, and does a great job of understanding its genre + audience). adult fiction? less so.
disorientation's concept would be far more enjoyable as an hbo limited series, for example, or even a technicolor a24 film. in other words, a novel like this needs a visual foundation to offset its utterly illogical surrealism and plot/character inconsistencies. it should have began as a script (tighter constraints, less room for meandering description, greater comedic potential made possible by a cast of professional actors and their very distinct delivery).
my first and most important critique of the novel is then this: it is way too damn long. if nothing else, this narrative should have been cut in half (think 100-150 pages). but chou elected to chase sweeping conflict + character arcs....even though all of her characters are (self-identified) caricatures? to sustain sweeping conflict without losing momentum, you need three-dimensional characters—typically characters with at least a little bit of redeemable personality. here, we're supposed to buy the character development of unabashed parodies who are largely insufferable hypocrites. it just doesn't work. at this length and size, the novel's satire (as straightforward as a bludgeon to the head) quickly becomes nauseatingly redundant.
i'm sure on some level this was an intended stylistic effect, as chou quite literally includes swathes of faceless dialogue that could have been lifted straight from a 300+ comment reddit thread or the mentions of a viral AOC tweet. but i cannot explain to you how little i want to read vitriolic internet discourse in book form. for the chronically online (and for leftists in particular), there is little enjoyment to be found in rehashing the same deranged political arguments we see every time we open social media and try to defend our right to exist without persecution.
for certain audiences, this book would make a hilarious gift (and a fun, flirty wake-up call). for people of marginalized communities, it's a bleak 400-page slough, so i would take that into consideration before recommending this without an attached disclaimer. it's discourse distilled into novel format.
that's another issue. disorientation suffers from a confused attempt at satirizing any + all semblance of ideological alignment. satire as a comedic device—in its intended format, and when most successful, in my opinion—seeks to subvert systems of power. good satire punches up. never down.
disorientation, however, satirizes up, down, left, right. if you're in the splash zone, you're going to get hit, and chou spares no one. i think my issue with this egalitarian angle of attack—where even well-meaning leftist protesters seem laughably absurd—is that the satire then becomes purposeless. if successful satire notches an arrow and aims for the rich and racist sitting high up in their ivory towers, disorientation bumbles up to the castle with its bow and arrows...only to also maim the poor low-class farmers idling nearby.
to what effect...?
vivian vo, the leftist lesbian leading the charge against ingrid's racist college, receives the same or similar treatment as her alt-right counterparts. she looks just as insane, silly, and misguided for most of the novel, and though she and ingrid eventually "join forces" (if it can even be called that), i can't help but feel vivian was owed better—or at least more. john, the culprit of decades of yellowface, gets to tell his own version of events in a drawn-out 1st person interlude, but vivian remains a mystery and is detested by everyone for reasons i still don't understand. we don't know her history or her motives. she's watered down to the loud lesbian trope, as if disruptive advocacy is at its core obnoxious + overbearing (that is, an inconvenience to the 'normal' apolitical majority). she and her reputation are briefly sabotaged by michael's ilk, with seemingly no explanation from the novel? we don't get to see an actual friendship between her and ingrid develop. we're told that ingrid grows to care for her, but we never see any bonding between the 2, nor does vivian receive half of the redemptive valorization that characters like alex (who actually spew harmful beliefs) do.
though i do think there's comedy to be found in any political activism (and even enjoy a little leftist v leftist bullying), chou's choice to satirize everyone and everything only works to diffuse and scatter the comedy until it becomes surrealism without any rhyme or reason. logic is abandoned in favor of stupid characters being stupid—for the sake of stupidity. the result of this slipshod, aim-everywhere approach is uncontrolled chaos. in addition to being so unsubtle (and so simplified) as to verge on ya political preaching, my impression of the narrative's choice to make everyone—even leftists—look absurd is that political advocacy of any kind is pointless white noise. everyone in this book is just yelling nonsense, to no effect.
so while i hated the lack of dialogue in a book like black cake, the overabundance of seemingly meaningless arguments and character interaction in disorientation (between characters we don't even know by name, whose conversations leave nothing to the imagination) that went on for pages and pages made me want to brain myself against a brick wall.
all of you have said enough stuff! no more stuff needs to be said! we've exhausted all possible stuff! this is literally leftist internet discourse 101! and i have long ago graduated to 400-level discourse!!! i would much rather watch twitter bisexuals with sickles in their display name debate robert pattinson's influence on fka twigs' "CAPRISONGS" (2022)!!!!
again: perhaps this was chou's intent. perhaps she was simulating internet discourse so we could all take this as a sign to go touch grass. if so, great job. it still sucked to read 🤣
onto ingrid yang. she says it best herself: "'I'm not being 'political.' I'm just summarizing facts.'" addendum: she's just summarizing facts [told to her by others, facts that she doesn't really understand in any meaningful way but still feels compelled to parrot]. for obvious comedic purposes, ingrid is a dumb, sheltered main character, exhibits an alarming lack of moral integrity, and is beautifully inconsistent (read: all over the place) throughout the novel. in other words, she is an ideological void. she has moments of lucidity over the course of disorientation, where she seems to suddenly buck up against her insane, nonsensical characterization, only to immediately regress back into self-hating obliviousness. this character inconsistency makes the narrative and its logic unbearable to follow. one moment ingrid has decided to drop out and abandon her dissertation; a page later, after a single interaction with vivian (after we've already established their friendship?), ingrid rescinds this decision out of jealousy and greed—and yet i'm supposed to believe that these two like each other.
again, it seems this was on some level intentional:
this perfectly sums up the characterization in disorientation—albeit more kindly than i would. i'm not sure if chou was hoping to strike moral nuance here (unlikely) or simply demonstrate that all humans are on some level unlikable, hypocritical, contradictory creatures performing politics with ulterior motives (more likely), but i can't buy it. the character writing is too lazy and reductive.
in addition to being an ideological void—or better yet, an ideological mirror designed to echo anything she's told, with no sense of identity or personality—ingrid is so desperate for male validation that every woman (especially women of color) she encounters become victims of her internalized hatred. i know—this is intentional! and yet, in attempting to confront her fiancé's asian fetish, ingrid (and the novel) unintentionally contribute to the rampant hypersexualization and glorification of light-skinned east asian women. what a paradox, right! the narrative casually reinforces a colorist beauty standard that totally disregards the existence of southeast asian women. ingrid's obsession with east asian women and their bodies (and how those bodies are viewed as inherently sexual/desirable by the world around her) begins to feel almost pointed, like any asian woman who isn't a petite light-skinned "anime" caricature is beneath her notice—and is in fact not a threat to her status as the object of a racist fetishist's affections.
because ingrid's own contributions to this beauty standard are never really directly addressed by the narrative, this feature of her personality (and the novel) works to strengthen the shameless overrepresentation of one kind of east asian woman, particularly in media and desirability politics. there's almost a subtextual colorism running beneath disorientation, as if the systems it critiques are felt equally by all asian women and do not disproportionately affect those that fall outside of its aesthetic norms (i.e. cis, straight, skinny, light-skinned women). this one kind of east asian woman is framed as the ultimate victim, while southeast asian women go forgotten. the problem of a political satire that claims to cover so much ground—that purports to be all-inclusive—is that there will inevitably be areas left abandoned. this is one of those areas.
another: alex. as a character, he's infuriating. his (hypocritical) use of white women is written off as a small detour on his path to ideological enlightenment before he settles down with a woman of his own ethnicity, but speaks to a larger patriarchal symptom called "women are most useful to cis straight men as sex objects." his moment of """redemption"""—"'oh, tiffany—the playboy model.' he laughed. "are you kidding? she's not someone i want to get serious with.'"—has significant implications that go unquestioned. after all, sexual women only serve one purpose, right? they're not marriage material, even to the agents and beneficiaries of their hypersexualization. if this moment was solely racial commentary (a way to applaud a self-hating man of color who finally learns to view korean women as desirable/dateable), why was tiffany's status as a playboy model included? why was her character introduced to ingrid solely through the lens of pda and sexuality? why was alex's new korean girlfriend ji-eun identified to readers through her proximity to his christian church (the sector of "virtuousness" + untainted sexuality)? here, we see another one of disorentiation's blind spots. for even the woman who plays into patriarchy (tiffany) is unable to escape its domination and subsequent disposal. in this way, sexual women are "single-use" only.
if i were an editor, i would suggest using alex's character for the purposes of metafiction. imagine him instead as a fourth wall break—a character designed to point out the artificiality of the world he's in + its faulty logic. this might bolster disorientation's satire and also give voice to the disbelieving audience reading chou's work, thus making them feel heard. if instead of being a misogynistic pig trying to figure out his own internalized racism, alex had interacted with ingrid like an audience self-insert or a straight man ("When a comedy partner [like Ingrid] behaves eccentrically, the straight man [in this case, Alex] is expected to maintain composure. Whatever direct contribution to the comedy a straight man provides, usually comes in the form of a deadpan." [x]), this book might have actually made me laugh.
when alex was first introduced, this is actually where i thought his character was going, so i can't help but mourn his lost potential. i can perfectly imagine ingrid swinging by eunice's place to prepare to commit burglary, only for a meta version of alex to look at her blankly and go, "You're...planning to break into the house of a white man named John Smith...? In order to finish your dissertation...for a degree putting you in tens of thousands of dollars of debt...?" and when ingrid impatiently insists that, yes, this is the key to graduating and gaining tenure track position, alex could take a slow bite of a cold hot pocket and say, "And is this guy also married to a Jane Doe? Do they have a white picket fence and a golden retriever?"
anyway. this is still a better satire than my year of rest and relaxation, and despite its poor execution, disorientation's depiction of academia did ring true for me (and i'm sure many others) on a fundamental level. 2.6/5 stars.
on that note, if you're going to read this book, know that it is best summarized by the following line:
i'm definitely to blame for some of the disappointment i felt while reading this book. generally, i like to go into new novels knowing as little as possible (i avoid reviews at all costs + ignore blurbs/summaries). this is mostly because having contextual knowledge of a new book before i crack it open sets my inner critic up for success—i.e. the annoying little voice in my head will start racing ahead of the narrative trying to predict plot points.
i've seen disorientation recommended all over the more literary-inclined side of booktok, so even though i knew almost nothing going into it, i'd somehow created a false impression of the book based on my own lit fic favorites. in other words, i went into it expecting raven leilani levels of prose + female disillusionment with society, and if you've read luster, you know that that is a tough act to follow for an mfa debut—even if both authors ostensibly wrote their first drafts at nyu.
so you can imagine my surprise at the prose in this book, which tries its best to hit the same stylistic beats that a romcom would (i assume political satire is more palatable to general audiences this way). for the first 8% of disorientation, i couldn't decide if i was reading satire or something super unself-aware. ingrid, an 8th-year phd candidate, at one point signs off an email to a stranger with "XOXO." i'm still months out from starting my graduate degree, but even i understood this to be an act of academic warfare. for this and other reasons, i am formally inducting ingrid into my damn, bitch, you live like this? mc bookshelf.
following the 8% mark, it became abundantly clear that this was a work of satire. nothing else could explain a woman of color balking at the thought of calling a white person "white." i soon began to understand the comedic limits of the world chou had constructed.
one of the reasons i would describe the satirical underpinnings of chou's novel as limiting is because you can only reasonably stretch satire so thin before it begins to recoil in the opposite direction—or even fail entirely. satire is the perfect comedic device to pack quick punches; in short-form (and when done well), it is incredibly successful. think about the SNL skit format (when SNL isn't completely unfunny), think about political cartoons, think about the onion headlines, think about your favorite memes/tiktoks. their delivery is predicated on the short-lived absurdity of a (devastatingly accurate) punchline. satirical movies + tv shows, while rarer, can also be a success, perhaps because we're more inclined to suspend our disbelief when dealing with distracting visual media.
to sustain political satire for 400+ pages—that is, 7+ hours of reading for the average kindle user—without once veering off course or making readers roll their eyes at the narrative's internal logic is probably impossible. if disorientation's delivery were subtler, i don't think it would ring quite so hollow, but because its satire is unflinchingly heavy-handed practically from the get-go (in your face, mouth foaming, spittle flying, slapped into oblivion levels of heavy-handed), the humor falls flat and the caricatures feel unforgivably cartoonish. the ya genre would be more forgiving of this kind of clumsy flagrance (think faridah àbíké-íyímídé's ace of spades, which follows 2 teenagers trying to unravel an institution's secret racist history, and does a great job of understanding its genre + audience). adult fiction? less so.
disorientation's concept would be far more enjoyable as an hbo limited series, for example, or even a technicolor a24 film. in other words, a novel like this needs a visual foundation to offset its utterly illogical surrealism and plot/character inconsistencies. it should have began as a script (tighter constraints, less room for meandering description, greater comedic potential made possible by a cast of professional actors and their very distinct delivery).
my first and most important critique of the novel is then this: it is way too damn long. if nothing else, this narrative should have been cut in half (think 100-150 pages). but chou elected to chase sweeping conflict + character arcs....even though all of her characters are (self-identified) caricatures? to sustain sweeping conflict without losing momentum, you need three-dimensional characters—typically characters with at least a little bit of redeemable personality. here, we're supposed to buy the character development of unabashed parodies who are largely insufferable hypocrites. it just doesn't work. at this length and size, the novel's satire (as straightforward as a bludgeon to the head) quickly becomes nauseatingly redundant.
i'm sure on some level this was an intended stylistic effect, as chou quite literally includes swathes of faceless dialogue that could have been lifted straight from a 300+ comment reddit thread or the mentions of a viral AOC tweet. but i cannot explain to you how little i want to read vitriolic internet discourse in book form. for the chronically online (and for leftists in particular), there is little enjoyment to be found in rehashing the same deranged political arguments we see every time we open social media and try to defend our right to exist without persecution.
for certain audiences, this book would make a hilarious gift (and a fun, flirty wake-up call). for people of marginalized communities, it's a bleak 400-page slough, so i would take that into consideration before recommending this without an attached disclaimer. it's discourse distilled into novel format.
that's another issue. disorientation suffers from a confused attempt at satirizing any + all semblance of ideological alignment. satire as a comedic device—in its intended format, and when most successful, in my opinion—seeks to subvert systems of power. good satire punches up. never down.
disorientation, however, satirizes up, down, left, right. if you're in the splash zone, you're going to get hit, and chou spares no one. i think my issue with this egalitarian angle of attack—where even well-meaning leftist protesters seem laughably absurd—is that the satire then becomes purposeless. if successful satire notches an arrow and aims for the rich and racist sitting high up in their ivory towers, disorientation bumbles up to the castle with its bow and arrows...only to also maim the poor low-class farmers idling nearby.
to what effect...?
vivian vo, the leftist lesbian leading the charge against ingrid's racist college, receives the same or similar treatment as her alt-right counterparts. she looks just as insane, silly, and misguided for most of the novel, and though she and ingrid eventually "join forces" (if it can even be called that), i can't help but feel vivian was owed better—or at least more. john, the culprit of decades of yellowface, gets to tell his own version of events in a drawn-out 1st person interlude, but vivian remains a mystery and is detested by everyone for reasons i still don't understand. we don't know her history or her motives. she's watered down to the loud lesbian trope, as if disruptive advocacy is at its core obnoxious + overbearing (that is, an inconvenience to the 'normal' apolitical majority). she and her reputation are briefly sabotaged by michael's ilk, with seemingly no explanation from the novel? we don't get to see an actual friendship between her and ingrid develop. we're told that ingrid grows to care for her, but we never see any bonding between the 2, nor does vivian receive half of the redemptive valorization that characters like alex (who actually spew harmful beliefs) do.
though i do think there's comedy to be found in any political activism (and even enjoy a little leftist v leftist bullying), chou's choice to satirize everyone and everything only works to diffuse and scatter the comedy until it becomes surrealism without any rhyme or reason. logic is abandoned in favor of stupid characters being stupid—for the sake of stupidity. the result of this slipshod, aim-everywhere approach is uncontrolled chaos. in addition to being so unsubtle (and so simplified) as to verge on ya political preaching, my impression of the narrative's choice to make everyone—even leftists—look absurd is that political advocacy of any kind is pointless white noise. everyone in this book is just yelling nonsense, to no effect.
so while i hated the lack of dialogue in a book like black cake, the overabundance of seemingly meaningless arguments and character interaction in disorientation (between characters we don't even know by name, whose conversations leave nothing to the imagination) that went on for pages and pages made me want to brain myself against a brick wall.
all of you have said enough stuff! no more stuff needs to be said! we've exhausted all possible stuff! this is literally leftist internet discourse 101! and i have long ago graduated to 400-level discourse!!! i would much rather watch twitter bisexuals with sickles in their display name debate robert pattinson's influence on fka twigs' "CAPRISONGS" (2022)!!!!
again: perhaps this was chou's intent. perhaps she was simulating internet discourse so we could all take this as a sign to go touch grass. if so, great job. it still sucked to read 🤣
onto ingrid yang. she says it best herself: "'I'm not being 'political.' I'm just summarizing facts.'" addendum: she's just summarizing facts [told to her by others, facts that she doesn't really understand in any meaningful way but still feels compelled to parrot]. for obvious comedic purposes, ingrid is a dumb, sheltered main character, exhibits an alarming lack of moral integrity, and is beautifully inconsistent (read: all over the place) throughout the novel. in other words, she is an ideological void. she has moments of lucidity over the course of disorientation, where she seems to suddenly buck up against her insane, nonsensical characterization, only to immediately regress back into self-hating obliviousness. this character inconsistency makes the narrative and its logic unbearable to follow. one moment ingrid has decided to drop out and abandon her dissertation; a page later, after a single interaction with vivian (after we've already established their friendship?), ingrid rescinds this decision out of jealousy and greed—and yet i'm supposed to believe that these two like each other.
again, it seems this was on some level intentional:
Just when [Ingrid] thought she had a handle on who someone was, on the exact shape and size of their character, on the precise quality of their goodness and badness, they insisted on changing.
this perfectly sums up the characterization in disorientation—albeit more kindly than i would. i'm not sure if chou was hoping to strike moral nuance here (unlikely) or simply demonstrate that all humans are on some level unlikable, hypocritical, contradictory creatures performing politics with ulterior motives (more likely), but i can't buy it. the character writing is too lazy and reductive.
in addition to being an ideological void—or better yet, an ideological mirror designed to echo anything she's told, with no sense of identity or personality—ingrid is so desperate for male validation that every woman (especially women of color) she encounters become victims of her internalized hatred. i know—this is intentional! and yet, in attempting to confront her fiancé's asian fetish, ingrid (and the novel) unintentionally contribute to the rampant hypersexualization and glorification of light-skinned east asian women. what a paradox, right! the narrative casually reinforces a colorist beauty standard that totally disregards the existence of southeast asian women. ingrid's obsession with east asian women and their bodies (and how those bodies are viewed as inherently sexual/desirable by the world around her) begins to feel almost pointed, like any asian woman who isn't a petite light-skinned "anime" caricature is beneath her notice—and is in fact not a threat to her status as the object of a racist fetishist's affections.
because ingrid's own contributions to this beauty standard are never really directly addressed by the narrative, this feature of her personality (and the novel) works to strengthen the shameless overrepresentation of one kind of east asian woman, particularly in media and desirability politics. there's almost a subtextual colorism running beneath disorientation, as if the systems it critiques are felt equally by all asian women and do not disproportionately affect those that fall outside of its aesthetic norms (i.e. cis, straight, skinny, light-skinned women). this one kind of east asian woman is framed as the ultimate victim, while southeast asian women go forgotten. the problem of a political satire that claims to cover so much ground—that purports to be all-inclusive—is that there will inevitably be areas left abandoned. this is one of those areas.
another: alex. as a character, he's infuriating. his (hypocritical) use of white women is written off as a small detour on his path to ideological enlightenment before he settles down with a woman of his own ethnicity, but speaks to a larger patriarchal symptom called "women are most useful to cis straight men as sex objects." his moment of """redemption"""—"'oh, tiffany—the playboy model.' he laughed. "are you kidding? she's not someone i want to get serious with.'"—has significant implications that go unquestioned. after all, sexual women only serve one purpose, right? they're not marriage material, even to the agents and beneficiaries of their hypersexualization. if this moment was solely racial commentary (a way to applaud a self-hating man of color who finally learns to view korean women as desirable/dateable), why was tiffany's status as a playboy model included? why was her character introduced to ingrid solely through the lens of pda and sexuality? why was alex's new korean girlfriend ji-eun identified to readers through her proximity to his christian church (the sector of "virtuousness" + untainted sexuality)? here, we see another one of disorentiation's blind spots. for even the woman who plays into patriarchy (tiffany) is unable to escape its domination and subsequent disposal. in this way, sexual women are "single-use" only.
if i were an editor, i would suggest using alex's character for the purposes of metafiction. imagine him instead as a fourth wall break—a character designed to point out the artificiality of the world he's in + its faulty logic. this might bolster disorientation's satire and also give voice to the disbelieving audience reading chou's work, thus making them feel heard. if instead of being a misogynistic pig trying to figure out his own internalized racism, alex had interacted with ingrid like an audience self-insert or a straight man ("When a comedy partner [like Ingrid] behaves eccentrically, the straight man [in this case, Alex] is expected to maintain composure. Whatever direct contribution to the comedy a straight man provides, usually comes in the form of a deadpan." [x]), this book might have actually made me laugh.
when alex was first introduced, this is actually where i thought his character was going, so i can't help but mourn his lost potential. i can perfectly imagine ingrid swinging by eunice's place to prepare to commit burglary, only for a meta version of alex to look at her blankly and go, "You're...planning to break into the house of a white man named John Smith...? In order to finish your dissertation...for a degree putting you in tens of thousands of dollars of debt...?" and when ingrid impatiently insists that, yes, this is the key to graduating and gaining tenure track position, alex could take a slow bite of a cold hot pocket and say, "And is this guy also married to a Jane Doe? Do they have a white picket fence and a golden retriever?"
anyway. this is still a better satire than my year of rest and relaxation, and despite its poor execution, disorientation's depiction of academia did ring true for me (and i'm sure many others) on a fundamental level. 2.6/5 stars.
on that note, if you're going to read this book, know that it is best summarized by the following line:
What in God's name was wrong with him? He had the dimensionality of a cartoon.
May 13, 2022
Thank you to Netgalley for giving me an ARC!
This read was a hot mess.
Read that sentence carefully. This read was a hot mess. Not the book. Just my experience with it.
This is a classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me.”
First of all, I’m definitely not the target audience for this book. I think it’s either New Adult or intended for teenagers who are far more mentally advanced than I am, because I could not, for the life of me, enjoy it. It just wasn’t happening. The narration style and plot points weren’t suited to me at all.
Is this book enjoyable? Objectively, yes. Just not by me. I don’t know if it’s my tastes, my age, my (questionable) maturity or just the genre and subject matter, but whatever it is, it’s not my style.
The plot of this book was actually really appealing from the synopsis. Ingrid Yang is a PhD candidate hoping to finish her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou and be done with anything and everything involving East Asian studies. But when she finds a note in the archive that upends everything she’s working for, as well as the lives of everyone around her, it’s safe to say that her entire life is destroyed.
The actual execution of the plot was not as enjoyable. It just felt really pointless and I didn’t see a reason to actually care about any of the events of the book. I don’t think a book needs to be high-stakes and 90% action for me to be engaged, but it definitely should not feel this juvenile.
Especially not when it’s from the point of view of a 29-year-old working toward a doctorate. Which brings me to my next issue: the writing.
The narration of this book was so childish and immature - I think it was meant to come across as comical and slightly clueless, but it mainly just got on my nerves. I find it almost impossible for an adult woman to be so fucking dumb, even if her name is Ingrid Yang and she’s been in college working on the same thing for eight years. Considering how her childhood was described, you’d expect her to have some semblance of a brain cell.
The POV felt like (if it hadn’t involved political perspective and adult subject matters like sex, drugs, racism and abusive relationships) it could have been something out of a middle-grade book. It just felt so exaggerated.
My main issue with the book was just how stupid everything came across. The characters and the plot weren’t far-fetched - in fact, they were very realistic situations - but they were done in a way that just made me roll my eyes and cringe at every sentence. Like I said, I think it was supposed to be humorous, but I couldn’t take it that way.
Ingrid Yang was one of the absolute dumbest characters I have ever read. Sure, her life situation was pretty sucky for most of the book, but she had absolutely no right to whine about it when everything could have been solved if she had a fucking backbone.
Ingrid was the kind of character who tries to avoid conflict, which, yes, is a pretty original and unorthodox style of main character for most books. But she apparently tried to avoid controversial opinions by having no opinions at all. In fact, most of the time it felt like she didn’t have thoughts.
Granted, she got a lot of development over the book. I will give her that. She grew and learned so much.
I just hated her narrative with a burning, cringing passion. Everything about her got on my nerves. Her mindset and thought patterns were hell for me. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t relate to her (except for the Asian-American experience since that’s very widely shared). Maybe I just couldn’t connect to her. But I hated her.
Eunice was enjoyable at first, but I also thought she was extremely hypocritical and could be selfish. She was an interesting character when I first met her, but I eventually just started hating her. She had no layering, little development, and I got over what little amiability I had toward her as a character.
Vivian was by far the best character in the book, which is ironic considering that she started off as the most hated. She was unique and actually had some depth and perspective, which is a lot more than I can say for everyone else. I was actually okay with reading about her. Her development and characterization came out really well for me.
Stephen was such an asshole, in my opinion. I couldn’t deal with him, even when he and Ingrid had a happy relationship. He was just so annoying, so disgusting, and I just couldn’t tolerate his presence on the page.
Lastly, Michael. I hated him. From the beginning to the end. I hate this man with a burning passion that is far beyond what I expected from a book that I thought would elicit nothing but disappointment and eye rolls.
The characters were all pretty much just caricatures of personalities that we all know. They were realistic enough that we would obviously know that they’re real and that everyone will run into people like that, but also so exaggerated that it was ridiculous. I kind of hated how stupid it was.
The best thing about this book was by far the perspective it provided on current issues. It went so deep into racism and political issues and American freedom in a way that I haven’t seen in other books - and who knows, maybe part of that is from the narration style that I hated so much.
This book addressed racism with an honesty and brutal bravery that I have trouble recognizing - it went straight in with the controversy and the questions and all the confusing issues that make politics what they are.
This book addressed whitewashing and yellowface and cultural appropriation and political protests. It went into so much and addressed it all in such a trippy way that I still don’t know what to think. It was blunt and clear and yet confusing as fuck.
Basically, the narrative of this book just fucking exposed America and its academic corruption and racism.
Honestly, I strangely loved the way Ingrid’s perspective went into this shit. It was so honest and yet perplexing that it was realistic. It made really good work of how we see racial issues and American rights and the world of academia, and I don’t really know how to get over it. Considering the fact that I hated almost every minute I read the book, but also enjoyed the ending with a weird amount of satisfaction, I just don’t know how to handle this book.
Maybe I’m too young for this, since it goes into PhD and doctorates and academia life, which naturally are not things that I know anything about. But whatever this book went into, it did a good job of it.
Overall, I don’t know how the hell to convey my opinions about this book.
It was an awful experience for the most part, since I hated the narration and I hated all the characters and I wasn’t into the plot - and those three factors are my most important criteria for books.
But it was also really good. Not in a way that means I enjoyed it, because - obviously - I didn’t. But it was so well-written and went into things with so much depth that it’s really hard to hate it? It was so in-depth and culturally accurate that I have a hard time hating it, just because it was so good in that aspect.
Does that intelligence and honesty make up for how much I hated it? Maybe. I can’t say I would ever want to reread it, but I might actually recommend it to some people if you want to learn more about race and cultural issues.
Or maybe if you need a laugh. It’s not my type of humor and not my type of book, but I can actually really see some people enjoying it.
Whether or not you like this book if you read it, I think it would be really hard to deny that Disorientation does an amazing job of providing national introspection in a very thought-provoking way. Just not the way that I like thinking.
September 14, 2022
Overall I enjoyed this book! I liked how Elaine Hsieh Chou directly confronts topics of internalized racism and the racist underpinnings of Asian woman/white man relationships. I notice people, including fellow Asian Americans, often get defensive and reactive surrounding these issues and it felt refreshing to see a writer address these topics in a holistic and history-informed way. Furthermore, I appreciated seeing our protagonist Ingrid Yang’s growth from someone with a ton of internalized racism into someone who feels more comfortable and interested in fellow Asian Americans. By the end of the book she’s more on her way to contributing to social justice instead of hampering it, thankfully.
I had mixed feelings about the satirical narration of the book. First, I felt that Stephen Greene (Ingrid’s Japan-loving, fetishizing white boyfriend) wasn’t too helpful of a character. While I totally know white people who do fetishize Asian people and I recognize that that’s important to address, I’m concerned that readers might miss the nuance that internalized racism can underlie your attraction to white people *even if the white people aren’t explicitly problematic*. Second, this book really does center whiteness. I see how this book is important for Asian Americans with internalized racism and who want to disentangle themselves from whiteness. However, I hope more books can come out that center Asian Americans without white people being involved at all, similar to the television show Insecure that focuses on the complex, humorous lives on Black millennial adults. Then we can explore deeper topics within the Asian diaspora outside of whiteness. Kelly Loy Gilbert’s young-adult novels When We Were Infinite and Picture Us in the Light stand out to me as examples of Asian American books that center on Asian Americans without undue attention to white people.
An intriguing book that I could see eliciting engaging discussion. Not gonna lie, I really vibed with Vivian Vo and Alex, Eunice’s sister. I did laugh a few times, like when Vivian shares that she’s writing an article “Still Thirsty: Why Boba Liberalism Will Not Save Us” (LOL). Curious what other folks think of this one!
I had mixed feelings about the satirical narration of the book. First, I felt that Stephen Greene (Ingrid’s Japan-loving, fetishizing white boyfriend) wasn’t too helpful of a character. While I totally know white people who do fetishize Asian people and I recognize that that’s important to address, I’m concerned that readers might miss the nuance that internalized racism can underlie your attraction to white people *even if the white people aren’t explicitly problematic*. Second, this book really does center whiteness. I see how this book is important for Asian Americans with internalized racism and who want to disentangle themselves from whiteness. However, I hope more books can come out that center Asian Americans without white people being involved at all, similar to the television show Insecure that focuses on the complex, humorous lives on Black millennial adults. Then we can explore deeper topics within the Asian diaspora outside of whiteness. Kelly Loy Gilbert’s young-adult novels When We Were Infinite and Picture Us in the Light stand out to me as examples of Asian American books that center on Asian Americans without undue attention to white people.
An intriguing book that I could see eliciting engaging discussion. Not gonna lie, I really vibed with Vivian Vo and Alex, Eunice’s sister. I did laugh a few times, like when Vivian shares that she’s writing an article “Still Thirsty: Why Boba Liberalism Will Not Save Us” (LOL). Curious what other folks think of this one!
April 19, 2022
For the first 50 or so pages I thought this book was fine — funny and quick-moving, if not somewhat basic like a Netflix comedy. But as the book went on, it became so painfully tedious and predictable. Every character is fits a tidy type: the white fetishizer boyfriend who loves Japan, the white race-baiter who's actually named "John Smith," the other white fetishizer who becomes a white nationalist, the loudmouth campus radical who sees oppression everywhere, the whitewashed Asian who learns to finally leave the white fetishizer guy and embrace their culture, etc etc. If you want this kind of didacticism, why not just read an op-ed instead? It's not stylistically innovative or funny enough to excuse its obviousness. (I wasn't enamored with Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown, but that strikes me as a more inventive way of approaching tropes.)
April 12, 2022
Disorientation follows a 29-year-old Taiwanese American PhD student Ingrid Yang (cishet) as she works on her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, a fictional “Asian American” icon. Ingrid starts out as someone who is ignorant on the subject of racism and other social justice issues, which is the realm of her nemesis and fellow graduate student Vivian Vo (sapphic, Vietnamese American). Throughout her research, Ingrid finds substantial dirt on Xiao-Wen Chou, and it becomes the start of her journey of unlearning as well as sets off catastrophic events in Barnes University.
Chou utilizes drug hallucinations and the fictional poet to discuss Asian fetishism, yellowfacing, and brings in other themes of justice/injustice. Disorientation is satirical and delivers everything pretty heavy-handedly (like it is supposed to be in the set up of this novel). It breaks down the sometimes-difficult subject of how a person of color can be racist and that people who come across as open-minded can also be awful bigots.
Ingrid’s point of view is not a pleasant place to be in, but throughout the book, we see that she is relearning and growing. She realizes Timothy Liu (Taiwanese American) is being used as a racism shield (a person of color who makes racist comments so that white people can say “hey my Asian friend here says it, too”), her fiancé Stephen Greene who translates Japanese works and seems to date exclusively Asian women most likely has an Asian fetish, her best friend Eunice Kim (Korean American) definitely has some issues with race given that she is dating the sorry excuse of the white tech bro Thad, etc. The major plot points revolve around who Xiao-Wen Chou really is and what made him such an icon in the scope of the story.
Perhaps you also noticed the oddness in the name “Xiao-Wen Chou” the first time you saw it: “Xiao-Wen” is obviously Pinyin, but what about “Chou”? I still don’t know if there is a last name that is spelled “Chou” in Pinyin (edit: per Robert’s comment below, it is possible as 丑 and 醜 are family names). Like the author’s name, “Chou” is most commonly found as a last name that uses Wade–Giles Romanization. Anyway, that might clue you in how there is something fishy going on with the “iconic” poet.
Disorientation gave me a lot to think about, not only about race (again, yellowfacing, fetishizing Asian people and culture, etc.) but also about art—specifically, the author–reader relationship when it comes to audience and why you cannot separate the art from the artist. I’m not naming names here, but suppose an author has some terribly bigoted beliefs. Can we support their works while denouncing their beliefs? Without even considering the financial rewards the author would get through people purchasing their works, should we separate the work from the artist? Read Disorientation and you might know why we should not and cannot if you don’t already know.
Some parts of the story is told through Ingrid’s hallucinations, a side effect of her drug abuse. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not, much like a lot of things going on in the world that seems unreal to begin with. How can things turn out so awfully in Disorientation? Looking back at our real world, it is easy to see that Chou isn’t even exaggerating.
All in all, Disorientation made me angry about the world, and I recommend it.
(And if you have not heard about Yi-Fen Chou, here is an article on The New Yorker which might be spoilery for Disorientation.)
content warnings: drug abuse, physical abuse, racism, graphic sex, yellowfacing, hallucination (from drugs), eugenics, cissexism (... not challenged), emotional abuse (including gaslighting), racial microaggression, trespassing, physical assault, strangulation, r slur (somewhat challenged by Ingrid), infidelity
I received a digital review copy from Penguin Press via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review.
Chou utilizes drug hallucinations and the fictional poet to discuss Asian fetishism, yellowfacing, and brings in other themes of justice/injustice. Disorientation is satirical and delivers everything pretty heavy-handedly (like it is supposed to be in the set up of this novel). It breaks down the sometimes-difficult subject of how a person of color can be racist and that people who come across as open-minded can also be awful bigots.
Ingrid’s point of view is not a pleasant place to be in, but throughout the book, we see that she is relearning and growing. She realizes Timothy Liu (Taiwanese American) is being used as a racism shield (a person of color who makes racist comments so that white people can say “hey my Asian friend here says it, too”), her fiancé Stephen Greene who translates Japanese works and seems to date exclusively Asian women most likely has an Asian fetish, her best friend Eunice Kim (Korean American) definitely has some issues with race given that she is dating the sorry excuse of the white tech bro Thad, etc. The major plot points revolve around who Xiao-Wen Chou really is and what made him such an icon in the scope of the story.
Perhaps you also noticed the oddness in the name “Xiao-Wen Chou” the first time you saw it: “Xiao-Wen” is obviously Pinyin, but what about “Chou”? I still don’t know if there is a last name that is spelled “Chou” in Pinyin (edit: per Robert’s comment below, it is possible as 丑 and 醜 are family names). Like the author’s name, “Chou” is most commonly found as a last name that uses Wade–Giles Romanization. Anyway, that might clue you in how there is something fishy going on with the “iconic” poet.
Disorientation gave me a lot to think about, not only about race (again, yellowfacing, fetishizing Asian people and culture, etc.) but also about art—specifically, the author–reader relationship when it comes to audience and why you cannot separate the art from the artist. I’m not naming names here, but suppose an author has some terribly bigoted beliefs. Can we support their works while denouncing their beliefs? Without even considering the financial rewards the author would get through people purchasing their works, should we separate the work from the artist? Read Disorientation and you might know why we should not and cannot if you don’t already know.
Some parts of the story is told through Ingrid’s hallucinations, a side effect of her drug abuse. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not, much like a lot of things going on in the world that seems unreal to begin with. How can things turn out so awfully in Disorientation? Looking back at our real world, it is easy to see that Chou isn’t even exaggerating.
All in all, Disorientation made me angry about the world, and I recommend it.
(And if you have not heard about Yi-Fen Chou, here is an article on The New Yorker which might be spoilery for Disorientation.)
content warnings: drug abuse, physical abuse, racism, graphic sex, yellowfacing, hallucination (from drugs), eugenics, cissexism (... not challenged), emotional abuse (including gaslighting), racial microaggression, trespassing, physical assault, strangulation, r slur (somewhat challenged by Ingrid), infidelity
I received a digital review copy from Penguin Press via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review.
January 11, 2022
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou is a book that I want to give a standing ovation to. I didn't know what a journey of self-discovery this book would take me on when I first started reading it, but it is so ridiculously good, so wildly clever, that I want to talk about it with everyone I know.
Ingrid Yang is in the 8th year of her doctoral dissertation about a Chinese American poet named Xiao-Wen Chou, halfheartedly researching a subject that she isn't particularly interested in but was persuaded to pursue by her advisor, when a bizarre note she finds in the archives leads her down a rabbit hole like she could never have imagined. I don't want to give away much more about the plot because taking the journey firsthand is what made this such a delightful and cathartic reading experience for me, but suffice it to say that I've never read a book quite like this before.
I consumed this 400+ page book in three sittings. It reads so smoothly, it's like having a kind of bizarre and slightly uncomfortable but absolutely fascinating story recounted to you by a good friend who's much cooler than you. Chou dissects Ingrid's experience as an East Asian woman with incredible finesse. There's a lot here that resonated with me - the self-erasure that happens when you’re desperate to fit in as one of very few Asians in a predominantly white community, the emotional distance that growing up immersed in American culture puts between children and their immigrant parents, the unsettling feeling of having to regard every white guy to show interest in you with a tiny bit of suspicion.
The cast of characters is multidimensional and vividly drawn. There are no stock villains, no reductive stereotypes, no easy dichotomy of good or bad, sympathetic or contemptible. Ingrid's blind spots are frustrating, but her inevitable growth is all the more heartfelt for it. Even the characters who defend yellowface or hold white empowerment rallies have nuance and depth and carefully crafted back stories. Elaine Hsieh Chou is the real deal, you guys. I know this is only her first novel, but I will obsessively read whatever she writes from now on.
If you can't think of the film Breakfast at Tiffany's without seeing the horrifying face of Yunioshi or have ever felt just a little bit miffed that a white woman named Pearl got a Nobel for writing about Chinese people 62 years before anyone from China was recognized, you'll certainly feel empowered and maybe vindicated by this book. It's an odyssey that should refresh your soul and decolonize your mind, and everyone should read it.
Ingrid Yang is in the 8th year of her doctoral dissertation about a Chinese American poet named Xiao-Wen Chou, halfheartedly researching a subject that she isn't particularly interested in but was persuaded to pursue by her advisor, when a bizarre note she finds in the archives leads her down a rabbit hole like she could never have imagined. I don't want to give away much more about the plot because taking the journey firsthand is what made this such a delightful and cathartic reading experience for me, but suffice it to say that I've never read a book quite like this before.
I consumed this 400+ page book in three sittings. It reads so smoothly, it's like having a kind of bizarre and slightly uncomfortable but absolutely fascinating story recounted to you by a good friend who's much cooler than you. Chou dissects Ingrid's experience as an East Asian woman with incredible finesse. There's a lot here that resonated with me - the self-erasure that happens when you’re desperate to fit in as one of very few Asians in a predominantly white community, the emotional distance that growing up immersed in American culture puts between children and their immigrant parents, the unsettling feeling of having to regard every white guy to show interest in you with a tiny bit of suspicion.
The cast of characters is multidimensional and vividly drawn. There are no stock villains, no reductive stereotypes, no easy dichotomy of good or bad, sympathetic or contemptible. Ingrid's blind spots are frustrating, but her inevitable growth is all the more heartfelt for it. Even the characters who defend yellowface or hold white empowerment rallies have nuance and depth and carefully crafted back stories. Elaine Hsieh Chou is the real deal, you guys. I know this is only her first novel, but I will obsessively read whatever she writes from now on.
If you can't think of the film Breakfast at Tiffany's without seeing the horrifying face of Yunioshi or have ever felt just a little bit miffed that a white woman named Pearl got a Nobel for writing about Chinese people 62 years before anyone from China was recognized, you'll certainly feel empowered and maybe vindicated by this book. It's an odyssey that should refresh your soul and decolonize your mind, and everyone should read it.
Want to read
September 8, 2023asian girl experiencing burnout in academia?
wait. is this fucking play about me?
wait. is this fucking play about me?
November 9, 2022
How am I meant to describe the utter pure enjoyment I got out of reading this book.... I've truly never been prompted to laugh that hard, been so enraged by the insolence of certain characters, or been entertained as fully as I had with this book. I don't understand why I saw so many negative reviews of this on Instagram. This may be my peak. I'm afraid nothing will be topped. This is being added to my all time favorite books list.
Ingrid Yang is in the last year of graduate school, this close to obtaining her PhD and finishing her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, the Chinese-American author she had been studying for the full length of these past eight years. I would go into deeper depths, but I think the greatest experience you can get out of this novel comes from walking into it not knowing anything. So yeah. Do with that what you will and take this as encouragement to pick this up immediately (not sponsored).
Fine, I'll be the first to say it! This is one of those stories that could be deemed comparable to the comedies of Shakespeare. It was both so camp and so raw in its depiction of jealousy, fear of academic failure, and of course, its theme of integration of Asian culture in America. It posits a barrage of questions regarding what is right and what is wrong, some the author answers for us through her perspective, and some she leaves up for us to decide. I wish I could read this again for the first time.
Ingrid Yang is in the last year of graduate school, this close to obtaining her PhD and finishing her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, the Chinese-American author she had been studying for the full length of these past eight years. I would go into deeper depths, but I think the greatest experience you can get out of this novel comes from walking into it not knowing anything. So yeah. Do with that what you will and take this as encouragement to pick this up immediately (not sponsored).
Fine, I'll be the first to say it! This is one of those stories that could be deemed comparable to the comedies of Shakespeare. It was both so camp and so raw in its depiction of jealousy, fear of academic failure, and of course, its theme of integration of Asian culture in America. It posits a barrage of questions regarding what is right and what is wrong, some the author answers for us through her perspective, and some she leaves up for us to decide. I wish I could read this again for the first time.
September 16, 2024
Twenty-nine-year-old Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese-American graduate student at Massachusetts' Barnes University (BU), is writing a dissertation about the exalted Chinese poet Xiao-Wen Chou.
Before his death, Xiao-Wen Chou was a faculty member at BU, and he's now enshrined as the school's shining star.
The problem for Ingrid is that everything that CAN BE written about Xiao-Wen Chou's work HAS BEEN written, and she's struggling to find a topic for her research. Moreover, Ingrid is in her eighth and final year in BU's Ph.D. program, and her funding is about to run out.
Ingrid spends her days in BU's Xiao-Wen Chou archives, looking through boxes of the poet's papers and pretending to work.
Ingrid can't sleep, binges on snacks, has pains in her stomach, pulls out her hair....and makes no progress. Worse yet, Ingrid's Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Michael Bartholomew - who heads BU's East Asian Studies Department - keeps asking Ingrid when she'll complete her dissertation and schedule her Ph.D. defense.
Then one day, an apparent miracle occurs. Ingrid is languidly looking through a box in the Xiao-Wen Chou archives when she finds a cryptic note....a note that's clearly meant for Ingrid. The missive opens up a new, and VERY controversial, area of research about Xiao-Wen Chou.
With the help of her best friend, Eunice Kim, Ingrid pursues this new topic, which involves consulting a private detective, sneaking into files, breaking-and-entering, confronting a dyed-in-the-wool white nationalist, and more. All this is hilarious, which is expected, because the book is a satire.
That being said, the novel addresses serious topics as well, through the ensemble of characters. For instance, Ingrid has only dated White men, but resents White men who prefer ('fetishize') Asian women; Ingrid's White fiancé Stephen translates Japanese literature into English, though Stephen can't speak Japanese....it's strictly dictionary work; Ingrid, who has Taiwanese ancestry, is infuriated when people call her Chinese; Ingrid resents a fellow graduate student, Vivian Vo, who protests for the rights of minorities - because Vivian is high-profile and showy; as a child Ingrid forbid her parents to speak to her in Mandarin, and never learned the language; Dr. Michael Bartholomew marries a native Chinese woman named Cixi, expecting her to be a 1950s type housewife - but Cixi learns fast, to Michael's dismay; faculty and students at BU, when the opportunity arises, protest affirmative action and insist on their right to spew discriminatory speech; and more.
Some of the plot points, like the 'white nationalist' bent that crops up at BU, struck me as highly unrealistic (it sounds more like 'John Birch University' than a Massachusetts college.) In any case, the novel speaks, in part, to the concerns of Americans with East Asian ancestry.
The central theme of the book - Ingrid's unexpected discovery - demonstrates how far some people will go for fame and success. And it's quite far indeed!
I enjoyed the book and recommend it to readers who like literary novels.
You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.com
May 7, 2022
Part literary mystery, part satirical take on the American campus novel, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut’s a blistering exploration of what it means to be an Asian American woman in contemporary American society, represented through her central character Ingrid Yang. Ingrid Yang’s a variation on the classic “innocent abroad”, born to Taiwanese parents she’s spent most of her life attempting to pass as white, she only dates white men, and she avoids the company of the more politically-vocal Asian American student body. Through happenstance, and the blatant manipulations of her almost-exclusively white tutors, she’s ended up in the Asian American Studies Department in Barnes University. Now in her eighth year of post-grad study, she’s stalled on her thesis. Her subject’s the work of Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou, aka the “Chinese Robert Frost”. Xiao-Wen Chou has become a canonical figure, the voice of Chinese American experience: extracts from his poems feature on posters and the kind of inspirational images routinely found framed in restaurants and dentists’ waiting rooms. He’s been so exhaustively researched Ingrid’s struggling to find anything to add to this vast body of existing material. Then a chance discovery sets her, and close friend Eunice, on a quest to uncover a mystery that will change everything, reaching into every corner of Ingrid’s existence.
What starts out fairly conventionally shifts gears into full-on satire after a major plot twist – one that will lead to scenes of absurdist proportions. What Ingrid uncovers takes her deep into a web of literary fraud and academic conspiracy. But, more importantly, it also forces her to confront the issues she’s been dodging: from racial stereotyping to tokenism and quota filling. Chou’s narrative’s a wonderfully wry, incisive take on the intricacies of racism towards Asian Americans from cultural appropriation to full-on violence. Chou also constructs a deeply-convincing, well-researched, portrait of the devastating impact of white male fetishization of East Asian women throughout recent history, a theme which she's expanded on in her searing, viral essay “What White Men Say in Our Absence”, and here goes hand in hand with exposing the hypocrisy that can lurk behind a veneer of support from white people. I found Chou’s work accessible and fluid, deceptively so at times, the territory she covers, and the questions she raises, are important and timely. There are, admittedly, moments when her narrative threatens to go off the rails but even then, I still found it lucid and compelling.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC
What starts out fairly conventionally shifts gears into full-on satire after a major plot twist – one that will lead to scenes of absurdist proportions. What Ingrid uncovers takes her deep into a web of literary fraud and academic conspiracy. But, more importantly, it also forces her to confront the issues she’s been dodging: from racial stereotyping to tokenism and quota filling. Chou’s narrative’s a wonderfully wry, incisive take on the intricacies of racism towards Asian Americans from cultural appropriation to full-on violence. Chou also constructs a deeply-convincing, well-researched, portrait of the devastating impact of white male fetishization of East Asian women throughout recent history, a theme which she's expanded on in her searing, viral essay “What White Men Say in Our Absence”, and here goes hand in hand with exposing the hypocrisy that can lurk behind a veneer of support from white people. I found Chou’s work accessible and fluid, deceptively so at times, the territory she covers, and the questions she raises, are important and timely. There are, admittedly, moments when her narrative threatens to go off the rails but even then, I still found it lucid and compelling.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Picador for an ARC
March 13, 2022
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the eARC.
Ingrid Yang, our protagonist, is stressed because of her dissertation, she has to investigate everything she can about a really famous Chinese poet and she cant come out with anything, but after some trying, she sure does find interesting stuff about him.
From there we unravel the absolute chaos this book is, I recommend you to not read the synopsis since it uncovers a lot of the plot, you can choose to be as surprised as I was to be experiencing all of this with Ingrid. I saw some people complaining about how there was a lot going on, I dont think it was "too much", it's a really specific story yes, but nothing felt overdone. (Also, you can expect this book will be chaos when you see the cover)
The author did an amazing job at keeping you engaged, each plot was really well made (for my liking), complex and intriguing. I'm actually impressed the author gave some kind of closure to everything she "opened".
One of the most interesting things was Ingrid's POV, I would have expected her to be raging from page , but it was so nice to see her learning about what was going on and "growing into a new person", or just, figuring herself out.
Each one of the side character were incredibly distinctive and captivating, in some way, they all had something to add. Someone I really enjoyed was Vivian, the complete opposite of Ingrid, who also had some... questionable moments, regardless, it seemed like everyone had an opportunity to grow up, to be/do better, no one was 100% good/bad and it was nice to see the change throughout the book.
A stunning debut for sure, one read that I would love to experience for the first time again but I think I'll be content by re-reading it someday.
Also... the epilogue??? cant believe the author gave something out even in the last page.
Ingrid Yang, our protagonist, is stressed because of her dissertation, she has to investigate everything she can about a really famous Chinese poet and she cant come out with anything, but after some trying, she sure does find interesting stuff about him.
From there we unravel the absolute chaos this book is, I recommend you to not read the synopsis since it uncovers a lot of the plot, you can choose to be as surprised as I was to be experiencing all of this with Ingrid. I saw some people complaining about how there was a lot going on, I dont think it was "too much", it's a really specific story yes, but nothing felt overdone. (Also, you can expect this book will be chaos when you see the cover)
The author did an amazing job at keeping you engaged, each plot was really well made (for my liking), complex and intriguing. I'm actually impressed the author gave some kind of closure to everything she "opened".
One of the most interesting things was Ingrid's POV, I would have expected her to be raging from page , but it was so nice to see her learning about what was going on and "growing into a new person", or just, figuring herself out.
Each one of the side character were incredibly distinctive and captivating, in some way, they all had something to add. Someone I really enjoyed was Vivian, the complete opposite of Ingrid, who also had some... questionable moments, regardless, it seemed like everyone had an opportunity to grow up, to be/do better, no one was 100% good/bad and it was nice to see the change throughout the book.
A stunning debut for sure, one read that I would love to experience for the first time again but I think I'll be content by re-reading it someday.
Also... the epilogue??? cant believe the author gave something out even in the last page.
Shelved as 'dnf'
May 4, 2022DNF 40%
I hate dnfing books so far in but when reading something feels like a chore I don't see the point in persevering through a book just for the sake of finishing it.
I admit that I approached this novel with the wrong expectations. I thought I was going to read something in the realms of Elif Batuman's The Idiot or Brandon Taylor's Real Life (tonally and stylistically these are two very different books but they both deal with mcs trying to navigate the treacherous waters of academia) or even Alexandra Chang's Days of Distraction or YZ Chin's Edge Case (both books are centred on asian american young women who work in white-male-dominated workplaces). The first few pages made me adjust said expectations as the author's offbeat style brought to mind authors like Hilary Leichter, Sayaka Murata, and even Weike Wang. There is a zany and very absurdist quality to the characters and scenarios populating Disorientation, one that gives the story a surreal sense of hyper reality. Oddly enough however, while the conversations, topics, and scenes that make up the story struck me for their realism (in that i could all too easily believe the microagressions experienced by ingrid both in the academic world and outside of it) the author overdoes it, so that much of what happens or is being said becomes ridiculous. The characters are cartoonish and caricatures of certain types of people. I can appreciate satire but there was no subtlety or nuance to these people. Don't get me wrong, the world in someways would be a lot easier to navigate if Bad People went around like they do in this novel. Every white man Ingrid encounters is a breathing, talking, walking red flag. While readers obvsiouly know this the author makes Ingrid an ingenue, someone who somehow, after years spent in the academic world in a faculty were discussions about gender equality, racism, post-colonialisms, etc., have been happening for sometime now. Of course, many universities (my one included) content themselves with lip-service, and rarely back up their words with actual changes. But the author chooses to make Ingrid wholly ignorant about these things. She can barely bring herself to say the word race or is unaware of how misogynistic and racist many members of her faculty are. Her ignorance struck me as very manufactured, and results in a childish point of view. Which may have worked better if the story had been narrated by Ingrid herself and not from 3rd pov. In this way I was reminded of a novel I actually hated, The World Cannot Give. Both authors have chosen to emphasise how naive their heroines are by making them sound like 10-year-olds from the 19th century (exclamations marks abound!). The humor was so forced and wavered between cheesy and cringe. The author even includes sections of writing that are lampooning certain media: from fanfiction to peer reviewed articles and translated novel. None of these struck me as clever or insightful. Her social commentary was both crude and simplistic, which is a pity as I appreciated the issues she tackles: racism within and outside of academia, cultural appropriation, whitewashing and yellowface, misogyny, representation, academic burnout, and these are only a few. But the way these are discussed and presented on the page rubbed me the wrong way. They were handled in a slapstick and facetious manner. I'm all for wry humor and scathing social commentaries but tonally Disorientation reminded me of those animated adult tv shows that really hold no appeal to me. Maybe this type of humor would translate better to the screen, I'm thinking of shows like Fleabag or Chewing Gum but on the page it just did niente for me. There was this running gag about how Ingrid can't bring herself to say gay, and I just did not find that particularly funny.
I gave up when we get four pages of just lines from people arguing over the casting of a white actress to play a non-white role. All of these lines seemed straight out of twitter and there is a reason why I avoid social media.
Believe me when I say that I really really really wanted to love this. There were passages that stood out to me, particularly those pertaining Ingrid's studies and dissertation. I was also angry on her behalf: the way the white people around treat her is infuriating (they gaslight her, making her into the 'problematic' one, minimise her experiences with racism and or manipulate her into studying something she's not passionate about because she's Asian and therefore must feel strongly about Chinese poetry). But these moments were I sympathised with her or found the story compelling were far and few between. The childish tone, outlandish and laboured dialogues, the simplistic yet exaggerated characters failed to reel me in.
Maybe future me will be able to like this but at the moment I am giving up on this one.
PS:
1) i recommend you read reviews from readers who actually finished this book
2) i do not hate this book so please refrain from leaving comments that suggest as much
3) my reading tastes are constantly changing so i can actually see myself giving this book another try sometime in the not so distant future.
I hate dnfing books so far in but when reading something feels like a chore I don't see the point in persevering through a book just for the sake of finishing it.
I admit that I approached this novel with the wrong expectations. I thought I was going to read something in the realms of Elif Batuman's The Idiot or Brandon Taylor's Real Life (tonally and stylistically these are two very different books but they both deal with mcs trying to navigate the treacherous waters of academia) or even Alexandra Chang's Days of Distraction or YZ Chin's Edge Case (both books are centred on asian american young women who work in white-male-dominated workplaces). The first few pages made me adjust said expectations as the author's offbeat style brought to mind authors like Hilary Leichter, Sayaka Murata, and even Weike Wang. There is a zany and very absurdist quality to the characters and scenarios populating Disorientation, one that gives the story a surreal sense of hyper reality. Oddly enough however, while the conversations, topics, and scenes that make up the story struck me for their realism (in that i could all too easily believe the microagressions experienced by ingrid both in the academic world and outside of it) the author overdoes it, so that much of what happens or is being said becomes ridiculous. The characters are cartoonish and caricatures of certain types of people. I can appreciate satire but there was no subtlety or nuance to these people. Don't get me wrong, the world in someways would be a lot easier to navigate if Bad People went around like they do in this novel. Every white man Ingrid encounters is a breathing, talking, walking red flag. While readers obvsiouly know this the author makes Ingrid an ingenue, someone who somehow, after years spent in the academic world in a faculty were discussions about gender equality, racism, post-colonialisms, etc., have been happening for sometime now. Of course, many universities (my one included) content themselves with lip-service, and rarely back up their words with actual changes. But the author chooses to make Ingrid wholly ignorant about these things. She can barely bring herself to say the word race or is unaware of how misogynistic and racist many members of her faculty are. Her ignorance struck me as very manufactured, and results in a childish point of view. Which may have worked better if the story had been narrated by Ingrid herself and not from 3rd pov. In this way I was reminded of a novel I actually hated, The World Cannot Give. Both authors have chosen to emphasise how naive their heroines are by making them sound like 10-year-olds from the 19th century (exclamations marks abound!). The humor was so forced and wavered between cheesy and cringe. The author even includes sections of writing that are lampooning certain media: from fanfiction to peer reviewed articles and translated novel. None of these struck me as clever or insightful. Her social commentary was both crude and simplistic, which is a pity as I appreciated the issues she tackles: racism within and outside of academia, cultural appropriation, whitewashing and yellowface, misogyny, representation, academic burnout, and these are only a few. But the way these are discussed and presented on the page rubbed me the wrong way. They were handled in a slapstick and facetious manner. I'm all for wry humor and scathing social commentaries but tonally Disorientation reminded me of those animated adult tv shows that really hold no appeal to me. Maybe this type of humor would translate better to the screen, I'm thinking of shows like Fleabag or Chewing Gum but on the page it just did niente for me. There was this running gag about how Ingrid can't bring herself to say gay, and I just did not find that particularly funny.
I gave up when we get four pages of just lines from people arguing over the casting of a white actress to play a non-white role. All of these lines seemed straight out of twitter and there is a reason why I avoid social media.
Believe me when I say that I really really really wanted to love this. There were passages that stood out to me, particularly those pertaining Ingrid's studies and dissertation. I was also angry on her behalf: the way the white people around treat her is infuriating (they gaslight her, making her into the 'problematic' one, minimise her experiences with racism and or manipulate her into studying something she's not passionate about because she's Asian and therefore must feel strongly about Chinese poetry). But these moments were I sympathised with her or found the story compelling were far and few between. The childish tone, outlandish and laboured dialogues, the simplistic yet exaggerated characters failed to reel me in.
Maybe future me will be able to like this but at the moment I am giving up on this one.
PS:
1) i recommend you read reviews from readers who actually finished this book
2) i do not hate this book so please refrain from leaving comments that suggest as much
3) my reading tastes are constantly changing so i can actually see myself giving this book another try sometime in the not so distant future.
August 25, 2023
i could write the 150 page dissertation paper that ingrid was procrastinating on this book bc it's literally yellowface on crack
January 27, 2023
WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW
As the East Asian Studies Department falls into chaos following a shocking revelation, Ph.D. student Ingrid Yang wrestles with a simmering rage. It’s a quiet rage that pushes the narrative forward, forcing Ingrid to make uncomfortable realizations about her identity as an Asian American woman, her relationship with white men, white institutions, her family, her friends, and her gaslighting/fetishizing fiancé.
Although the satirical elements are quite heavy-handed, they are carefully undercut with moments of tenderness and introspection. The plot itself is both absolutely ridiculous and purposefully predictable.
Thematically, it reminds me a lot of R.F. Kuang’s ‘Babel’ in the way it questions the potential violence of translation, and how academia leverages the immigrant experience for its own gain.
(Side note: I suspect this would also make a nice companion read to her upcoming title ‘Yellowface’—which I am very much looking forward to comparing/contrasting. Also desperate to know if Kuang or Chou have read each other's work).
Although thematically similar, Chou’s use of blown-out satire establishes a comedic tone which, in contrast to Kuang’s heaviness, acts as a humorous counterpoint to the larger discussions of identity, white supremacy, and white ownership of the racialized experience. I actually quite enjoy how over the top the satire is as it balances out the painful realizations which set Ingrid on a sobering growth arc.
Chou gives each character their own distinct Asian American experience, all of which act as a foil for Ingrid, both challenging her and slowly stoking the fire of her unspoken rage. She’s frustrated with herself for mirroring elements of the stereotypical Asian woman and for blindly acting against her best interests. As the white world of academia rears its ugly head, Ingrid must move past her complicity and step into herself.
As the East Asian Studies Department falls into chaos following a shocking revelation, Ph.D. student Ingrid Yang wrestles with a simmering rage. It’s a quiet rage that pushes the narrative forward, forcing Ingrid to make uncomfortable realizations about her identity as an Asian American woman, her relationship with white men, white institutions, her family, her friends, and her gaslighting/fetishizing fiancé.
Although the satirical elements are quite heavy-handed, they are carefully undercut with moments of tenderness and introspection. The plot itself is both absolutely ridiculous and purposefully predictable.
Thematically, it reminds me a lot of R.F. Kuang’s ‘Babel’ in the way it questions the potential violence of translation, and how academia leverages the immigrant experience for its own gain.
(Side note: I suspect this would also make a nice companion read to her upcoming title ‘Yellowface’—which I am very much looking forward to comparing/contrasting. Also desperate to know if Kuang or Chou have read each other's work).
Although thematically similar, Chou’s use of blown-out satire establishes a comedic tone which, in contrast to Kuang’s heaviness, acts as a humorous counterpoint to the larger discussions of identity, white supremacy, and white ownership of the racialized experience. I actually quite enjoy how over the top the satire is as it balances out the painful realizations which set Ingrid on a sobering growth arc.
Chou gives each character their own distinct Asian American experience, all of which act as a foil for Ingrid, both challenging her and slowly stoking the fire of her unspoken rage. She’s frustrated with herself for mirroring elements of the stereotypical Asian woman and for blindly acting against her best interests. As the white world of academia rears its ugly head, Ingrid must move past her complicity and step into herself.
Want to read
March 23, 2023The only literary fiction I want to read is books about women who don't have their shit together
July 9, 2022
A smart and sharp campus satire about race and academia. This book is always ten steps ahead of you, at one point I felt like Chou had covered so many different aspects of race and the Asian-American experience that I didn't know where she would go next. But she still had plenty left to dive into.
At first this book just feels a lot like real life. After all, there are many books about dissatisfied PhD students, about young twentysomethings looking down thirtysomething and feeling like they have done nothing with their lives. It takes a while for this book to change into its truest form and it goes just a little at a time. At the beginning it is so normal and at the climax it is basically a nonstop fever pitch.
When we really dive into the satire, this is a book that has so many surprises up its sleeve you will think it has run out when its only just gotten started. Eventually you get used to being slightly off kilter. And whenever you think, Hmm maybe this one is a bit too extreme then you can put down the book and look at the real world and realize nope not too extreme at all.
I just don't want to ruin any of this for anyone, it was such a wild ride, such a trip, and really a unique novel that deserves your time and attention. I might not have been compelled by the early chapters if I hadn't had the endorsement of other people I trust, so please consider this my endorsement that you stick with it until it starts getting weird.
At first this book just feels a lot like real life. After all, there are many books about dissatisfied PhD students, about young twentysomethings looking down thirtysomething and feeling like they have done nothing with their lives. It takes a while for this book to change into its truest form and it goes just a little at a time. At the beginning it is so normal and at the climax it is basically a nonstop fever pitch.
When we really dive into the satire, this is a book that has so many surprises up its sleeve you will think it has run out when its only just gotten started. Eventually you get used to being slightly off kilter. And whenever you think, Hmm maybe this one is a bit too extreme then you can put down the book and look at the real world and realize nope not too extreme at all.
I just don't want to ruin any of this for anyone, it was such a wild ride, such a trip, and really a unique novel that deserves your time and attention. I might not have been compelled by the early chapters if I hadn't had the endorsement of other people I trust, so please consider this my endorsement that you stick with it until it starts getting weird.
July 30, 2022
Audiobook….read by Jennifer Kim
…..11 hours and 45 minutes
“You’re not supposed to look like you’re undercover when you’re under cover”.
Ingrid Yang, twenty-nine years of age, Taiwanese American, is an East Asian studies Phd student.
She uncovered a conspiracy by the respected Chinese poet she’d been doing research on for her dissertation.
There were sushi-wasabi laughs, social justice issues, racism and sexism examinations, academic institutions, cross cultural exchanges, issues and expectations from family, fiancé, and friends.
Mostly ….
Ha….the TITLE is appropriately named.
I found it to be a disconnected silly satire ….
I didn’t hate it — in fact I kept expecting it to get better and better — but in the end — I remained ‘neutral-to-meh’ about it in its entirety.
A low 3 stars.
…..11 hours and 45 minutes
“You’re not supposed to look like you’re undercover when you’re under cover”.
Ingrid Yang, twenty-nine years of age, Taiwanese American, is an East Asian studies Phd student.
She uncovered a conspiracy by the respected Chinese poet she’d been doing research on for her dissertation.
There were sushi-wasabi laughs, social justice issues, racism and sexism examinations, academic institutions, cross cultural exchanges, issues and expectations from family, fiancé, and friends.
Mostly ….
Ha….the TITLE is appropriately named.
I found it to be a disconnected silly satire ….
I didn’t hate it — in fact I kept expecting it to get better and better — but in the end — I remained ‘neutral-to-meh’ about it in its entirety.
A low 3 stars.
December 13, 2021
Thank you Netgalley for an ARC!
As a current Asian American English major, I REALLY wanted to like this book, but I was disappointed. I think I came in expecting a heavy-hitting literary novel based on the blurb and artsy cover, but really it read more like a middle-grade novel in terms of plot, characters, and writing style.
The “mystery” was so obvious, I saw all the plot twists from a mile away, which makes the protagonist’s cluelessness very frustrating. She seemed 14, not 29. I thought the writing quality was rather juvenile and not as funny or ironic as it believed itself to be. Lastly, the commentary on racism was heavy-handed and obvious, even for a satire. Which is a shame, because as the show Dear White People demonstrates, there is a lot of hunger for subversive POC views on academia.
If you're looking for a better book with similar themes, I think Alexandra Chang's Days of Distraction, about an Asian American woman of the same age who becomes dissatisfied with her sweet, doting long-term white boyfriend, as well as Brandon Taylor's Real Life, which focuses on a gay Black man's alienation within a toxic PhD program, demonstrate far more emotional subtlety and literary rigor.
I want to commend the writer for her ambitious themes, banger title, and excellent premise, but in the most respectful way, I actually think this would’ve been better as a YA mystery novel.
As a current Asian American English major, I REALLY wanted to like this book, but I was disappointed. I think I came in expecting a heavy-hitting literary novel based on the blurb and artsy cover, but really it read more like a middle-grade novel in terms of plot, characters, and writing style.
The “mystery” was so obvious, I saw all the plot twists from a mile away, which makes the protagonist’s cluelessness very frustrating. She seemed 14, not 29. I thought the writing quality was rather juvenile and not as funny or ironic as it believed itself to be. Lastly, the commentary on racism was heavy-handed and obvious, even for a satire. Which is a shame, because as the show Dear White People demonstrates, there is a lot of hunger for subversive POC views on academia.
If you're looking for a better book with similar themes, I think Alexandra Chang's Days of Distraction, about an Asian American woman of the same age who becomes dissatisfied with her sweet, doting long-term white boyfriend, as well as Brandon Taylor's Real Life, which focuses on a gay Black man's alienation within a toxic PhD program, demonstrate far more emotional subtlety and literary rigor.
I want to commend the writer for her ambitious themes, banger title, and excellent premise, but in the most respectful way, I actually think this would’ve been better as a YA mystery novel.
July 18, 2022
I didn’t know much going into this, as often happens with me when I select an audio book. I didn’t love the audio-narrator, although she was neutral enough for me to get over that. And at first I thought that this was one of those superficial books about a young woman stressed out about her dissertation, when slowly it built into much more. It’s fun going into a story cold, knowing nothing. I made connections: she’s studying the most famous Chinese poet and trying to find a unique take; she’s Taiwanese but everyone calls her Chinese; she feels threatened by another East-Asian female PhD candidate at her school who turns out to be an activist against oppression. Her fiancé is a white male. And then the protagonist, Ingrid, gets what feels more like a break in a case than a thematic focus, and the story gets fun and nutty, all the while providing nuanced insights into the racism and sexism we all embody, even against ourselves. And so in this scenario of playful extreme, no one gets a pass, all get the microscope, while simultaneously serving to underscore just how much the privileged can pull off.
April 8, 2022
oh my god this was so good!!!
February 12, 2024
i love messy women so much
August 8, 2022
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.
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.
January 20, 2022
This book is brilliant. One of THE smartest satires I’ve ever read. Absolutely blew me away, I read it in one go. Totally unhinged, in the best way — a refreshing addition to the “Asian American genre”.
I will say based on reading some early reviews, this book might be hard to appreciate if you’re not ~Asian American~ but if you are, somehow Elaine hits so much? And even if you’re not, if you’re familiar with academic spaces, you’ll probably find it hits close to home anyway. The characters are SO well done, and the commentary is so sharp while still being funny (plus the footnotes pulling so much from real life, Margaret Atwood WISHES that Handmaid’s Tale was this smart). Will warn, a bit absurdist, but also in the best way.
I recently read “The Loneliest Americans” and I feel like it totally fell flat for me with what he was trying to do. While that was a nonfiction, somehow I read this book and felt like Elaine covered the points the other book tried to — and actually pulled it off. What does it look like when we try to examine being “Asian American” and especially, which I think Elaine is self aware of that the other book is not, from the ivory tower? This is a nuanced discussion about what being “[East] Asian American” even means; the novel doesn’t pretend anyone is perfect or has it figured out, because we don’t. Elaine hits the many intersections and complications that we struggle with, all while staying so funny! Cannot recommend this enough.
I’d say definitely for fans of “Severance”, “Interior Chinatown”, maybe “Catherine House”, and honestly, even the movie Get Out.
I will say based on reading some early reviews, this book might be hard to appreciate if you’re not ~Asian American~ but if you are, somehow Elaine hits so much? And even if you’re not, if you’re familiar with academic spaces, you’ll probably find it hits close to home anyway. The characters are SO well done, and the commentary is so sharp while still being funny (plus the footnotes pulling so much from real life, Margaret Atwood WISHES that Handmaid’s Tale was this smart). Will warn, a bit absurdist, but also in the best way.
I recently read “The Loneliest Americans” and I feel like it totally fell flat for me with what he was trying to do. While that was a nonfiction, somehow I read this book and felt like Elaine covered the points the other book tried to — and actually pulled it off. What does it look like when we try to examine being “Asian American” and especially, which I think Elaine is self aware of that the other book is not, from the ivory tower? This is a nuanced discussion about what being “[East] Asian American” even means; the novel doesn’t pretend anyone is perfect or has it figured out, because we don’t. Elaine hits the many intersections and complications that we struggle with, all while staying so funny! Cannot recommend this enough.
I’d say definitely for fans of “Severance”, “Interior Chinatown”, maybe “Catherine House”, and honestly, even the movie Get Out.
February 4, 2023
this definitely dropped off in the last act, but i really enjoyed the majority of it, and loved the writing style and story
October 29, 2022
I was extra eager to read this book each time I picked it up.
It is a romp...a satire with smart, funny and cutting social commentary. It was fast paced; the plotting was intricate and clever. I also appreciated the "Lucy & Ethel" moments.
There is a wink-wink, nudge-nudge when the author uses her last name for a main character.
It was satisfying to have a diversity of Asian subgroups represented: Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese.
All the characters evolve or our initial impressions of them changes over the course of this book. The books features three white men who
I noted that the author has a tendency towards a level of thoroughness. She lists movies that had racist fetishization of Asian women, recounts films where white people did yellowface, etc.
I think this is one of the essential titles that reflects Asian American consciousness. It reminds me of Don Lee’s The Partition and The Collective and of Cathy Hong's Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
And I especially appreciated that the model minority myth, the third world liberation movement, Japanese American internment, the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, and other key Asian American events/concepts are mentioned.
I liked this interview where she describes what inspired this book and how the book’s three white men are depicted. https://www.publicbooks.org/elaine-hs...
This book is a solid example of a West Coast Asian American writing about East Coast Asian Americans with insight and accuracy. I strongly believe that the reverse is not true.
A couple quotes:
"I have measured out my life with porcelain spoons," he whimpered before wedging a stray page into his mouth.
"...It's not your fault white supremacy has conditioned you to be who you are. It's not your fault you play into the destructive myth of the model minority. It's not your fault you have shucked and jived for the white man. I forgive you. I forgive myself."
It is a romp...a satire with smart, funny and cutting social commentary. It was fast paced; the plotting was intricate and clever. I also appreciated the "Lucy & Ethel" moments.
There is a wink-wink, nudge-nudge when the author uses her last name for a main character.
It was satisfying to have a diversity of Asian subgroups represented: Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese.
All the characters evolve or our initial impressions of them changes over the course of this book. The books features three white men who
I noted that the author has a tendency towards a level of thoroughness. She lists movies that had racist fetishization of Asian women, recounts films where white people did yellowface, etc.
I think this is one of the essential titles that reflects Asian American consciousness. It reminds me of Don Lee’s The Partition and The Collective and of Cathy Hong's Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
And I especially appreciated that the model minority myth, the third world liberation movement, Japanese American internment, the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, and other key Asian American events/concepts are mentioned.
I liked this interview where she describes what inspired this book and how the book’s three white men are depicted. https://www.publicbooks.org/elaine-hs...
This book is a solid example of a West Coast Asian American writing about East Coast Asian Americans with insight and accuracy. I strongly believe that the reverse is not true.
A couple quotes:
"I have measured out my life with porcelain spoons," he whimpered before wedging a stray page into his mouth.
"...It's not your fault white supremacy has conditioned you to be who you are. It's not your fault you play into the destructive myth of the model minority. It's not your fault you have shucked and jived for the white man. I forgive you. I forgive myself."
March 17, 2022
Added to that, Ingrid was obsessive and neurotic, traits well suited for academia. The real world, or nonacademic world, frightened her with its largeness and unknownness— far better to cozily burrow into old texts, to safely engage with dead authors who couldn’t talk back to her.
3.5 ⭐
Surprising, charming, occasionally too much but it for sure kept my attention.
This book ended up being nothing like I expected. It took me a moment to dive into the story, as the plot wasn't exactly what I would normally pick up. I also had a bit of a problem to connect with the characters.
But just when I started to think this is going to be a miss for me, the plot got a few unexpected turns, and I just had to know what was going to happen next.
Honestly, I still have no idea what I thought about it. I kind of liked it, but also – what did I just read? And the ending was its own kind of messed up. The title actually turned out to be eerily accurate.
I’m sure this book has its target audience, but for the life of me I can't figure out whom to recommend it to. I guess if you like quirky reads that cover social issues... but even then you'd need to like a specific kind of quirky.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou in exchange for an honest review.
3.5 ⭐
Surprising, charming, occasionally too much but it for sure kept my attention.
This book ended up being nothing like I expected. It took me a moment to dive into the story, as the plot wasn't exactly what I would normally pick up. I also had a bit of a problem to connect with the characters.
But just when I started to think this is going to be a miss for me, the plot got a few unexpected turns, and I just had to know what was going to happen next.
Honestly, I still have no idea what I thought about it. I kind of liked it, but also – what did I just read? And the ending was its own kind of messed up. The title actually turned out to be eerily accurate.
I’m sure this book has its target audience, but for the life of me I can't figure out whom to recommend it to. I guess if you like quirky reads that cover social issues... but even then you'd need to like a specific kind of quirky.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou in exchange for an honest review.
June 29, 2023
The FOMO is 100% to blame for my TBR being completely unmanageable. Each Tuesday when new books are published I am the first one in line banging on the library’s double-doors hoping to score every hot release. Sometimes it works, sometimes I stay on the waiting list for perpetuity. Thus was the case with the highly touted Yellowface, so when someone on the ‘Gram posted that they actually preferred this novel I jumped all over it as it was immediately available for my greedy self.
I don’t think I was smart enough for this one. I’m admittedly not a big fan of satiric humor, but this sort of went all over the place from what started with zany slapstick style antics and accidental near overdosing on “allergy pills” to serious subject matter like a MAGA type movement and the fetishizing of Asian women to the aforementioned satire. If this would have been streamlined to around 250-300 pages rather than 400 I think it would have worked better for me. Or maybe . . . .
I don’t think I was smart enough for this one. I’m admittedly not a big fan of satiric humor, but this sort of went all over the place from what started with zany slapstick style antics and accidental near overdosing on “allergy pills” to serious subject matter like a MAGA type movement and the fetishizing of Asian women to the aforementioned satire. If this would have been streamlined to around 250-300 pages rather than 400 I think it would have worked better for me. Or maybe . . . .
May 29, 2022
I am disoriented!
March 23, 2023
4.25/5 this was such a chaotic and messy read but in the best way
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