Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, On Such a Full Sea, is part folk tale, part picaresque adventure, part dystopian satire. It signals a bold departure from both the carefully observed realism that distinguished Lee’s powerful earlier books Aloft (2004) and A Gesture Life (1999) — and the historical vistas of The Surrendered (2010). In eschewing one of his most potent gifts as a writer — his ability to map the inner lives of his characters with sympathy and precision — Lee has produced an ungainly and strangely inert novel. Instead of creating a palpably real flesh-and-blood heroine, he has chosen to center his book on an anime-like character named Fan; and instead of creating a fully imagined fictional realm (as Kazuo Ishiguro did in his bravura sci-fi-like novel, Never Let Me Go, from 2005), he’s dropped Fan into a futuristic world that seems at once overly familiar and unconvincing.
For that matter, Full Sea often reads like a ham-handed mash-up of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. Both Full Sea and Brave New World take their titles from Shakespeare quotations, and both depict socially engineered worlds that have sharply delineated caste systems and embrace stability over freedom, standardization over individuality. Both Full Sea and The Hunger Games feature 16-year-old heroines who defy the established order and find themselves fighting for their lives in the wilderness of a futuristic North America.
Many of the conditions depicted in Lee’s dystopia simply represent satirical extrapolations of current or incipient woes: Climate change has made much of the world subject to extreme weather conditions; income disparities have given way to a rigid class system; and health care for lower-class workers is rationed or out of reach. The rich live in gated communities known as Charter villages; they spend their free time shopping for expensive clothes and building additions to their McMansions, and subject their children to fierce competition for academic and extracurricular honors.
Fan, we’re told, lives in a labor settlement called B-Mor (the former Baltimore), which provides fresh fish and vegetables for Charter villages; in return, B-Mor residents enjoy “estimable housing and schooling, technical training” and health care that has grown increasingly limited, thanks to recent “reforms.” Life in B-Mor, for the most part, is safe, orderly, systematized and highly controlled: In this respect, it represents a kind of communal equivalent of the careful, cautious sensibility evinced by so many of the immigrant heroes in Lee’s earlier novels, which traps them in a “gesture life,” cut off from passion and real emotional connection.
Slender and not quite 5 feet tall, Fan has “the stature of a girl of 11 or 12,” but is skilled at her job as a “tank diver,” charged with husbanding and nurturing the valuable fish that B-Mor raises and sells. Her boyfriend, Reg, helps plant, pollinate, prune and harvest a nearby vegetable garden. One day, Reg abruptly vanishes, perhaps whisked away by Charter doctors eager to study his rumored immunity to the dreaded C-disease that afflicts the population, and Fan, who is pregnant with his child, soon leaves B-Mor in search of him. It’s a move that shocks Fan’s neighbors and friends: The unregulated world beyond the borders of B-Mor is regarded as a dangerous wilderness, and few residents have ventured beyond its tidily groomed boundaries.
The departures of Reg and Fan soon take on a mythic status, and Banksy-like graffiti images of them start appearing on walls and fences, turning them into folk heroes, of sorts. In the wake of their disappearance, the narrator (an unnamed B-Mor resident) tells us, hints of unrest and disorder also begin to creep into the collective consciousness of the community. Fan becomes a symbol, at least to some, of daring, of a willingness to brave the unknown.
B-Mor residents’ imaginations, the narrator says, are “tethered to the universe of what we know, and as wild as our dreams might be, we can’t help but read them with the same grounded circumspection that guided our forebears when they mapped out our walls. Fan, though, made a leap, which was a startling thing in itself.”
Such windy philosophical musings lend this novel a decidedly lugubrious tone and hobble the story of Fan’s search for Reg. Plotting has not been Lee’s strong suit in novels like Native Speaker (1995) and Aloft, and here, Fan’s adventures devolve into a string of bizarre encounters with assorted weirdos and mercenaries, including a former veterinarian turned physician, known as Quig, who has traded and bartered away patients and their relatives; a murderous roving family of acrobats; and a wealthy Charter woman called Miss Cathy, who wants to add Fan to her collection of girls, whom she keeps as a well-groomed menagerie of pet humans.
These encounters have no cumulative power and often feel like random episodes improvised on the fly to lend suspense to Fan’s story. And because Fan remains more of a symbol than a fully fashioned character, we have a hard time caring what happens to her, one way or the other.
In The Surrendered, Lee moved beyond the domestic realism of his earlier books to create an ambitious, symphonic novel that addressed the emotional fallout of the Korean War. Here, he has again tried to push his talents in a daring new direction, but this time, the result, sadly, is an unsatisfying and jerry-built fairy tale.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby