Review of Weike Wang''s New Novel and Feature of a Memoir by Jon M. Chu, film director

Books by Weike Wang

 I read Wang's third novel, Rental House, reread Chemistry, and already read Joan Is Okay. I gave them all five stars, as I loved the way the books are written and the stories told in an often whimsical style .

 Rental House by Weike Wang

Published December 3, 2024; Riverhead Books

Keru and Nate seem to be opposites, yet they meet at an Ivy League college and land up getting married. Keru's well educated immigrant Chinese family is the opposite of Nate's rural American working class family, and the couple fit each other more than they fit into their own families.

The family dynamics play out in a shared family vacation at a rental house, with both sides spending time with each other, and then later visiting Keru and Nate at their home. The imbalance of their situation and their families leads Keru to take the lead in keeping everyone together. She felt she had to be always present to "right the course" and handle their families together.

"They would take better care of each other and their dog. The unit had to be protected and she would protect them. They were codependent, she and Nate. Without her, he lost grounding, but without him, she could be relentless and too focused."

An amazing solution to a situation full of contradictions and different life styles and expectations from the families of both sides.

Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The Journal, Ploughshares, Redivider, and SmokeLong Quarterly.

Currently reading 

Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen by Jon M. Chu, 

July 23, 2024; Random House

Description

Jon M. Chu, movie director of Crazy Rich Asians and Wicked, has written an inspiring memoir of belonging, creativity, and learning to see who you really are. Long before he directed Wicked, In The Heights, or Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu was a movie-obsessed first-generation Chinese American, helping at his parents’ Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley and forever facing the cultural identity crisis endemic to children of immigrants. 

Growing up on the cutting edge of twenty-first-century technology gave Chu the tools he needed to make his mark at USC film school, and to be discovered by Steven Spielberg, but he soon found himself struggling to understand who he was. In this book, for the first time, Chu turns the lens on his own life and work, telling the universal story of questioning what it means when your dreams collide with your circumstances, and showing how it’s possible to succeed even when the world changes beyond all recognition.

What are you reading or watching this week?

Memes:  The Sunday Post, It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Sunday Salon, and Stacking the Shelves 

Korean-American Day

 A presidential statement today was made in honor of Korean-American Day, January 13. Exactly 121 years ago, the first Korean immigrants landed in the U.S., which now has the largest number of Korean immigrants anywhere in the world. 

I have noticed that there are more and more Korean-American and Korean authors whose books reflect their history and their arrival in the U.S. I have read several contemporary books, nonfiction and fiction, by these authors who bring their reality to readers everywhere. 

The memoir offers very personal stories about growing up in America in a Korean immigrant family.

Thanks to Grace Fell, senior publicist at Spark Point Studio, for the NetGalley ARC and the follow up hard copy of Kinda Korean: Stories from an American Life by Joan Sung (February 25, 2025 by She Writes Press). Grace recommends the memoir as perfect for Korean American Day (January 13). Click on the title link for my Goodreads review of the memoir. 

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Publisher description of Kinda Korean :

Korean diaspora | Coming-of-age angst & pain

Torn between her two identities as a Korean woman and a first-generation American, Sung bares her struggles in an honest and bare confessional. From her experiences with microaggressions to the over-fetishization of Asian women, Sung connects the COVID pandemic with the decades of violence and racism experienced by Asian American communities through her research on race and representation. 

Joan Sung breaks the generational silence that curses her family in this courageous memoir of parental love, intergenerational trauma, and perseverance. By intentionally overcoming the stereotype that all Asians are quiet, Sung tells her stories of coming-of-age with a Tiger Mom who did not understand American society.

 

About the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Published: Feb. 25, 2020 by One World. 

"Cathy Park Hong was born to Korean immigrants in 1976 and raised in a bilingual home. She recalls her childhood in Los Angeles as a “profoundly lonely experience,” during which she first began to comprehend the cultural invisibility of Asian Americans in the United States."

Book Description: Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. 

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth. 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, FINALIST FOR PULITZER PRIZE, WINNER OF NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, AMERICAN BOOK AWARD, ONE OF BEST TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2021

These are just two of the books written by Korean-American women about their experiences as immigrants to the U.S. I think they bring valuable insights that many immigrants, no matter from which part of the world, might feel or experience as newcomers to a new society. 

Cathy Park Hong's memoir was written four to five years ago. Hopefully, things have improved somewhat for her situation since then. 

Have you read any other memoirs or novels by Korean-Americans?