The Partition

February 7, 2022
Korean American writer Lee (Lonesome Lies Before Us) delivers a stylish set of erotic stories. His characters are Asian Americans who wrestle with estrangement from their homelands, alienation in the United States, and a longing for intimacy in a world of fleeting romance. In “Late in the Day,” an indie film director has a one-night stand with a girl in Chicago, only to meet her again much later in Hawaii when she is no longer glowing with youth. The title story features an androgynous academic who translates a transgressive Korean novel and then flies to Texas to meet the book’s surprisingly glamorous author. The collection ends with “Les hotels d’Alain,” a triptych of stories that detail the life of Alain Kweon, an actor who eventually becomes the owner of a successful chain of artisanal boba tea shops in San Francisco. Lee has a habit of overdoing the details, such as a superfluous explanation of the Mission District’s gentrification, but when he allows his stories to run, they offer gorgeous, psychological portraits of men and women caught in the throes of middle age. This smart collection about love and belonging will leave readers wanting more.

Nine stories feature complicated Asian American characters living insightfully depicted lives in the worlds of moviemaking, restaurants, and bedrooms. The complicated, frustrating, sometimes self-defeating experience of Asianness defined by Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings receives kaleidoscopic treatment in Lee's sixth work of fiction, returning to the concerns of his landmark debut collection, Yellow (2001). Like the frustrated film director in the first story here, "Late in the Day," Lee has, in his interim novels, given us narratives that include Asian characters but are not mostly about ethnicity. Now he dives back in, deconstructing the exponential complications of Asian identity. In the spellbinding title story, the lead character confounds people. "Was she Chinese? Japanese? (She was Korean.) Subsequent was her nationality. Was she a North Korean or South Korean citizen, then? Or an immigrant? Did she have a green card? (She was a naturalized US citizen.) Then there was the question of her name, Ingrid Kissler. Was this an Americanization of her Korean name, something she had made up? Or had she once been married? (She'd been adopted by a white couple from Chanhassen, Minnesota, at the age of two, from an orphanage in Seoul.)" This character is in trouble--her tenure application is being blocked because her translation of a Korean novel has been revealed to be full of errors. Actually, she's not fluent in Korean. Her meeting with Yoo Sun-mi, the author of the novel, takes place in the wilds of Colima, Texas, a location evoked brilliantly here and in parts of the final sequences of three stories. This trilogy, called "Les h�tels d'Alain," follows the life of minor film star Alan Kwan in three incandescent episodes showcasing, from the title on out, the author's signature dramatic irony. The first is set in Alan's youth as a CIA agent's son living in a hotel in Tokyo; it revolves around a disastrous date at an Eric Clapton concert. The second features Alan's experience during the boiling-hot, seemingly endless shoot of a narco film in El Paso. Playing a hit man forced to speak his single line in the stereotypical "Oriental" accent, he essentially destroys his career. And finally, on to his trials in middle age as a bubble tea mogul in San Francisco. Smart, sexy, darkly funny, and enlightening stories from a master of the form.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022
Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Lee's signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections. "Truth was a collection of falsehoods," Lee's filmmaker protagonist ponders in the opening "Late in the Day" as he reconnects with a one-night fling, "with which you chose to define yourself, and for which you were grateful." Deceit haunts "Commis," as a junior chef helps close down her family's Chinese restaurant in Missouri during her pandemic unemployment and confronts the married older man with whom she had an affair as a teen. Cheaters also populate "Confidants," in which suspicions (and a gunshot) terminate an already-tenuous relationship; in "UFOs," a television journalist chasing lurid stories avoids commitments with married lovers. Lee further showcases his ingenious narrative acrobatics in "Years Later," in which a final assignation between two twentysomethings also reveals their separate futures, and in "The Partition" (the collection's highlight), which manages to gleefully skewer both academia and the international publishing world. "Les h�tels d'Alain" is a triptych novella, which follows an untethered Korean Hawaiian teen through contented-enough middle age. While Lee' s devotees will joyfully relish casually dropped references to previous titles, new readers should savor plenty of first-time delight.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.