'Disorientation': Fiction

Elaine Hsieh Chou makes a trenchant debut with this coming-of-Asian novel.

A novel about a Taiwanese American graduate student who’s in the midst of an intellectual crisis that allows the author to comment on academia, the culture wars and Asian American identity? Sign me up.

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Call it a “coming-of-Asian” novel.

In “Disorientation,” Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel set at a fictional modern-day university, the author sets out a number of classic tropes: The Ph.D. candidate overcome by dissertation fatigue. The students passionately railing against white supremacy and patriarchy on one side, and the students who push back from the other side, commandeering victimhood for themselves. The cottage industries that academia can so readily create around a single figure deemed worthy of canonical stature. Chou tees them all up as targets.

Her biggest target is her protagonist, Ingrid Yang, 29, a doctoral student whose years-long study of the work of a leading Chinese American poet has ground to a near halt. She drags herself regularly to the university archives holding his work, but no longer expects to find any spark of inspiration. What keeps her going is the thought that once she has received her degree, she’ll never have to embrace Asianness again. She doesn’t even like speaking Mandarin to her Taiwanese immigrant parents.

Meanwhile, the people who loom largest in her life — her fiance, her best friend, her adviser, her main academic rival, the late poet on whom she’s staked her academic career — all have a surer sense of their direction than she does. Ingrid is primed to reorient herself.

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I love the pun in the title “Disorientation.” Chou delivers on it delightfully, placing her uncertain protagonist into all sorts of situations that are target-rich for satire. To begin with, Ingrid didn’t pick her dissertation topic; her white adviser more or less backed her into it, using her ethnicity to pigeonhole her. Next there’s her fiance, Stephen, who’s essentially the least objectionable in a line of unfulfilling partners, though Ingrid’s not quite sure what to think about the fact that he doesn’t let his ignorance of Japanese and his white maleness keep him from translating a best-seller by a Japanese woman.

Then there’s Ingrid’s willful disorientation — her holding of her Asian American identity at arm’s length — something that felt especially relatable and poignant for this reader.

Chou sets Ingrid on her journey of reorientation with a mysterious handwritten note that Ingrid comes across while re-examining a folder in the poet’s archive. When Ingrid decides to investigate this note — the first daring and decisive action she’s taken in a while — she finds herself pulling on a thread that begins to unravel her academic life. Chou has a grand time tugging the reader by this thread through numerous plot twists, each more jaw-dropping than the next.

By the time Ingrid reaches the end of the thread, her life has become very different. There have been consequences, and not just for her. But she’s no longer disoriented. I do like a happy ending.