Review: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Disorientation–Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel–is a satire of academia covering many issues including mental health, cultural appropriation, identity politics and even White men’s fetishization of Asian women. The novel is often very funny yet also thought provoking, since  it deals with issues that have been frequently debated among liberal and left-leaning intellectuals

When the novel begins, the protagonist–Taiwanese-American Ingrid Yang– is in the eighth year of her PhD in the East Asian Studies department at Barnes University, a (fictional) liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Ingrid is frustrated with her dissertation on the poetry of Xiao-Wen Chou, a canonical Chinese American poet who was also a professor at Barnes for several years. Barnes hosts Chou’s archive and is a major center of “Chouian studies”.  The action of the novel really begins when Ingrid finds a note in the archive that seems to yield new clues about Chou’s identity.  As Ingrid and her best friend Eunice begin to follow these clues, it leads to the revelation that Chou was not really who he claimed to be. 

Identity politics and cultural appropriation are among the novel’s major themes.  For example, the POC Caucus of the Postcolonial Studies department, led by Ingrid’s nemesis Vivien Vo,  protests the casting of a White actress as a Chinese-American character in one of Chou’s plays.  Colorblind casting has recently become more prominent in theater and this would seemingly be a positive development, since it provides more opportunities to non-White actors, particularly in canonical roles. However, there have also been prominent cases of backlash against casting someone of a different race from the character they are portraying.  Thus, the incident in Disorientation will make the reader think about whether such casting is always racist or whether it may be progressive in some cases. Should a director cast the best performer for the role or the most racially accurate one?

Review: Disoriental by Négar Djavadi

Négar Djavadi’s debut novel Disoriental (translated from the French by Tina Kover) is many things at once– a family drama, a history of modern Iran, and the story of a queer individual coming to terms with themselves. The title also works on multiple levels. The most obvious is a pun on “oriental” while another suggestion is a pun on “disoriented”.  A third suggestion is “orientation” (in the sense of “sexual orientation”). 

The novel is told in flashback by the narrator, Kimia Sadr, while she awaits a fertility procedure in a Paris hospital. Kimia begins the story of the Sadr family with the birth of her paternal grandmother Nour in Iran’s northern Mazandaran province.  She  then moves from her grandmother’s story to that of her father, Darius Sadr and then quickly to her own childhood growing up in Tehran during the last days of the Shah and the beginnings of the Islamic Revolution. Darius and his wife Sara are political activists who are opposed to the Shah. While they initially welcome the revolution, they very quickly realize that the Shah has simply been replaced by another form of dictatorship.  Darius flees to Paris and Sara and their daughters are also eventually smuggled out of Iran.  The rest of the novel follows their experiences as exiles in France, which is where the theme of disorientation becomes most prominent.  Darius’s status as an enemy of the Islamic Revolution follows them to France and eventually has tragic consequences.