Alexandra Chang

This lovely novel/memoir is part of a new trend where authors feature themselves and real people in their writing but call it a novel, and this one works beautifully. Alexandra Chang writes for a magazine in San Francisco, and her long time boyfriend has just accepted a post doc position at Cornell in Ithaca, NY, far from their Davis, CA hometown and far from his first choice. Everything that follows tests the survival of their relationship, including an intense and descriptive cross country show more drive. Alexandra, who is Chinese-American, is seemingly suddenly aware of her ethnic status in relation to her upbringing amongst whites, and to the pairings of Asian women/white men that seem to be so common. She also threads the story of Yamei Kin, one of the first Chinese doctors licensed in America, into the narrative. Alexandra’s father has lived in China on and off throughout her life, and in the final chapters, she leaves Ithaca to visit him there, not knowing if she'll return. The entire book is told from her point of view and consists primarily of her musings about her work, family, and boyfriend, and it's a delightfully poignant journey, filled with discoveries and decisions. This reader felt very close to her by the end of the book.

Quotes: "When in all aspects of life the odds are entirely against you, it can be worth paying for even a tiny increase in hope."

"There are distances neither of us wants to traverse, as though going from where one stands to where the other stands is to break from as essential part of oneself. And if both of us remain as firm in our positions, then what?"

"Not all of us are lucky enough to get to choose how the world defines us."

“It felt nice to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go.” show less

There’s a tendency to assign overall representation of a minority group to a single person and I hate that. Like one woman’s experience of a STEM career is the only one. Or a black man’s view of anything is the only view. It’s patently untrue, but we all kind of do it and I did it here; pitying and shaking my head at the protagonist in the story for all of her anxiety. I kept asking myself if all young people are this freaked out all the time or if it’s just her or just the show more character. But it is constant and exhausting even to read. If she really feels like this or did for a while, it must have been really awful. I mean...just let it go. It’s not worth the energy to fixate over - like a person walking up to your cube in the office...that’s terrifying? Get a grip. I just can’t imagine being that afraid of basically everything all the time. At one point the woman in the story becomes afraid of the dark and needs a blankey. What are you, three? OMG.

The fact that she was so timorous, cranky and touchy made it really difficult to empathize with her although I did try. On page 212 in my copy, she and boyfriend J start a disagreement about her reaction to being offered a job teaching in her field. She is pissed off because it feels like pandering to the diversity quotient at the college she would work at. The boyfriend tells her she’s overreacting and at first I thought so, too. Then she works through why she feels that way and I had to hand it to her in finding a logical reason for her emotional reaction.

Just prior to reading this I had a heated discussion with two women friends about how one of their husbands came over and snow blowed my driveway. He did it because he thought my husband was away. When I told him he was home he was embarrassed. That’s the sticking point for me and the thing my friends couldn’t understand. To them he was only being nice and doing me a favor. When I asked them why he got embarrassed at doing it for my husband but not for me, they couldn’t give me an adequate explanation other than the old male territory thing. When I pushed that it wasn’t embarrassing to do it for me although I’m more than capable with a snow blower, they turned from trying to get me to understand to blaming me that I was taking it wrong. I told them they were now blaming the victim and telling me my reaction was wrong - that it was my fault. Further that he would never do me another favor ever. Fine with me, but they didn’t get it. Same with J in this story.

And although I do get it - receiving some kind of ‘perk’ that can result in being paraded as and example is an awful feeling. Receiving some kind of ‘perk’ so that a white person can do a lot of moral signaling and back-patting is also shitty. But at the same time she (the character and probably the author) complains about lack of representation - that the whole department or college was a sea of white people. Ok, that may be true, but if everyone of color turns down jobs because of anti-tokenism, it will always be a sea of white faces. Change has to come from somewhere. There has to be a first. So you can’t have it both ways.

But overall I didn’t enjoy this very much. It’s written like a blog with a lot of quotes, newspaper articles, references to off the wall incidents that happen during the day and other distractions which I suppose supports the title and if that’s the case, brava. I think I’m too old to connect with her and as an adult have always been too confident to understand the extreme meek and timid personality of the protagonist. Grow. A. Spine. Jeez.

This is good though -
“It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside, their inner workings built both from memories and habits and histories made up from the exterior world, and from those known only between the two involved, that exist only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other.” p 303 show less

3.5/5

i feel like every story was either 10/10 or 3/10, so we'll stick right down the middle for this one. i really enjoyed the explorations into mundanity here, but the stories that really hit for me had the added elements of technology and identity that were very compelling.

Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang is a collection of short stories that will move an active reader to ponder lives and life choices, especially as many poor choices here are made for fully understandable reasons.

Admittedly these won't appeal to every reader. Ones who need complete closure and if they don't feel closure believe that means there is no closure may not enjoy the fact these stories are meant to stay with you as a sort of present rather than the basic, though quite effective as show more well, tendency of many stories to stay with you as you consider only what happened in the past, meaning in the fully contained story. Some readers need that feeling of having the pretty bow at the end, some of us are content to be given the ribbon and tie the bow ourselves.

Even the fantastical stories seem grounded in the real, so the characters are relatable while the circumstances, even when far removed from what most of us have experienced, also remain relatable as well. We can understand dealing with traditions we don't fully embrace, setbacks in life that could seriously derail our future plans, disappointment in conditions we thought would be different. This all allows us to relate, even if we think we wouldn't do the same things, to the characters and their plights.

I'm not sure any collection has to have a common theme, especially an explicit one. If you read these stories actively, however, you will find a theme in the types of characters and the situations they find themselves in. No, it isn't all cookie cutter, and the term I might use and the sentiment I might have may well be different from yours. What you will find is that they are not all the same, even if one could argue the world of each story (as in "the world of the work" and not simply China or San Francisco) carries similar emotional undertones. Those undertones, that similar yet slightly different feeling you get from each story is, if you need a "theme" to understand a collection of short stories, that theme.

I would recommend this to readers who like to tie their own bows at the end of stories and don't necessarily need everything pre-packaged for easy consumption. Active readers will have several of these stories stay with them for some time.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less