Second-generation thoughts
Part 1 of a few, I suspect, this one about Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
While I was on sick leave, and even in the weeks before, I recommitted myself to reading for pleasure. Academics in the humanities—and I’d say this is especially true for academics in history and English/literature—pursue a PhD and a career in academia because to some degree they love reading. If we didn’t (and for the purposes of this newsletter, I’m still considering myself an academic because I was one at the time in question and this is still a legacy of my time as an academic), we would never pursue careers that involve such an astonishing volume of reading. And I’ve singled out English/literature and history here because I think their jobs require the most reading of all academics, and I’ll give you my biggest hot take, of the week at least: historians read the most of them all.
One of the ironies of academic life, much less obvious perhaps to those outside of academia than to those within it, is that because of the sheer volume of reading required from the earliest years of graduate school (in a North American PhD program at least) through the end of one’s career, reading for pleasure becomes tainted and difficult. For me, it’s never been difficult in the sense of feeling like reading for pleasure is frivolous. Though I’m sure some subscribe to that, perhaps the same people who pretend that TV isn’t fun, I never have, nor do many academics. But something happens in your brain when reading, and reading critically and incisively while amassing an encyclopedia of knowledge in your head and in your notes, is at the foundation of your professional identity.
If anything, reading becomes even more associated with stress when it is both the essential component of the core work academics do—we can neither teach nor research without reading—and the component that is most crowded out by the ever growing demands on university academics. Periodically in my time working in UK universities, I’d tweet some version of the question: when are we reading? I often found that any time I was reading for work felt fraught because careful reading is slow work, and I could almost feel a raft of other demands piling up while I read, as did the stress. That of course could only spill over into all other reading I did.
This is a very long way of introducing Grace D. Li’s Portrait of a Thief, which I read over Christmas and into January. This isn’t a review or a recommendation, exactly, since you’ll know if this is the kind of book you’ll like. But it is a book that I could feel sticking to me as I read it for a unique set of reasons that most of its readers won’t share.
No spoilers here, but the basic premise is that a motley crew of Chinese-American college students embarks on a series of heists to steal back five Chinese sculptures to return them to China. It’s fun, light, and very well-paced. If you go to books like this for watertight heist mechanics, this isn’t quite that novel, as the fact that these are college students should probably suggest. But there are moments of heist swagger that are very enjoyable.
So why has this book stuck with me? First, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately about the experience of being a second-generation immigrant in the US (in other word the child of at least one parent who immigrated from another country), and we seem to be in a moment where American fiction is exploring this much more. I’ve been enjoying the Boxwalla American Fiction subscription box that Alexander Chee is curating, and several of those novels are written by and/or about second-generation immigrants. Some future projects of my own are likely to start dipping into some of this stuff, but I am as much a Black American whose enslaved ancestors date back centuries in the United States as I am a second-generation immigrant, whose enslaved ancestors were also laboring in Jamaica. For me, these two experiences are inseparable in how I understand myself, my history, and my country, so reading books where other people are navigating their own way through second-generation experiences and examining the United States through that lens has been really revelatory. As Chee wrote in the letter enclosed in the first box about two novels specifically about the children of immigrants, “[these novels] know America a little better than America knows itself.”
In Portrait of a Thief, the five college students all have different relationships to China. One is technically a 1.5 generation immigrant (born in China, but came with his family to the United States as a young child). Three are second-generation, but among other things class differences among them shape the levels of contact they’ve had with China. The two siblings from an affluent family have been to China several times, studied abroad in China, and so on. The other second-generation character, a woman from a less affluent background, has never been before the events in the novel. (Not a spoiler, this happens within the first 40 pages.) And then, especially interesting, is the third-generation character for whom Chinatown looms larger in her own identity formation than China.
This all stuck with me for a few reasons. First of all, although my relationship to this is incredibly complex and always changing, this is a diaspora of which I am technically a member, a fact that hasn’t shaped my personal life nearly as much as it has shaped my professional life. Although it was a meandering road, it is no coincidence that I landed on post-emancipation Jamaica as the period of focus, since before I was even 10, before I knew anything at all about Jamaican history, I knew that indentured workers from China had ended up in Jamaica in the nineteenth century. So there was some personal interest there. But I also think Grace Li captures better than anything else I’ve read how much college/university is an important moment when many children of immigrants start building their own relationship with their heritage and the “home country,” as it were.
You’ve moved away from home, especially for the elite colleges that these characters attend. You’re introducing yourself to tons of new people who know nothing about you, and your parents aren’t around as much to shape other people’s impressions of who you are. What name are you using, especially if your name is hard to pronounce for whatever reason? (In my case, I have always resisted nicknames that use any of the four common shortened versions of my name, so here I am, 40, and still battling people over my name. But on the other hand, I have also collected a handful of other names, which means that I too, like many a Jamaican, am often not called by my full name by friends and family.) What is your relationship to the country of family origin, and how is that changing? My own relationship to Jamaica has necessarily changed as I’ve grown up, especially since the people who connected me to it died when I was young. College was the place where that relationship began to change for me, as personal distance (my mother died four months before my freshman year of college) grew at the same time as professional closeness. Portrait of A Thief captures the intensely personal connections and disconnections that each of us make and are always endlessly making to the home country.
And it is also the college setting that drew me to this novel most. Li is a Duke alum, as am I, and a recipient of one of Duke’s merit scholarships, as was I—though not the same one—and as is one of the characters. Perhaps there’s a vast collections of novels set at Duke and in Durham that I haven’t read, but as far as I am aware, this isn’t a college experience that has been widely captured in fiction, especially not from the perspective of POC characters. Nor has Durham, a city I really love, featured in any of the fiction I’ve read. There were moments when it felt perhaps too on the nose, and yet the experience of living in Durham and going to Duke is actually about those Cookout milkshakes and it is about the way the view unfolds before you as you turn onto Chapel Drive. I am one of the few people reading the book who don’t know Li who has lived in the quad her characters do—and in fact there is a possible reference to the specific room I lived in, since it was a fairly unusual room.
But that also wasn’t all, because what absolutely floored me was the character Lily. Apart from the fact that Lily was not the scholarship recipient—that was her roommate, sister of the group’s ringleader—I doubt I will ever read a character whose college experience was as close to mine as hers. Both of us from coastal port towns, both of us kept from our languages, both of us drifting a bit in the world of wealth that is Duke, and both of us finding freedom in driving—and especially driving to Duke and around Durham.
When they crossed the state line, out of Texas, out of this place she had spent her whole life, Lily had felt something in her open up. College, the future—for once it did not feel so impossibly far away. (15)
Okay so I didn’t become the getaway driver for a series of international heists, but I have never once read something that understood my relationship to driving so well, the way that was forged in large part in Durham, all without the shallow grandiosity inherent in the “Great American Man on The Open Road” cliche.
So if any of that floats your boat, read Portrait of a Thief! I’m also looking forward to Li’s next book, which, if social media is any indication, will involve at least one of the characters from her first. (I’m a fan of this kind of daisy chaining, which both Tana French and Jasmine Guillory do very well.) And if there are good novels about the second-generation immigrant experience that you love, please let me know!
And this is apropos: the best article I’ve read in the past few weeks is this story about Generation Connie, the Asian-American women named after journalist Connie Chung. It’s incredibly moving, especially learning that Chung had no clue that so many women were named after her. (And don’t miss the detail that the photographer is also a Connie.) In my household, Gwen Ifill had a similar presence, the model of the kind of professional I could be.
As a recovering academic, I recognize the changing relationship with reading that comes with and - hopefully - after the job. Reclaiming reading for pleasure is a work in progress, and for me that involves audio books.
One of the first novels I listened to after leaving my academic job was R. F. Kuang's Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution that, as a speculative/historical fantasy about colonialism, language and academia, totally would have been on my 'read for work list' and would have been a great fit for one of my syllabi. Enjoying the (well narrated) audio book despite this was liberating. Li's novel sounds like another one that I can now enjoy without a writing implement in my hand, so thanks for writing about it.