Chang-rae Lee’s ‘My Year Abroad’ is the tale of a dropout’s wild lesson in love and business
The perfect place to hide from your past may be suburban New Jersey. That's what Tiller, the young narrator of Chang-rae Lee's new book, thinks, anyway.
My Year Abroad
By Chang-rae Lee
Riverhead. 496 pp. $28
Reviewed by Frances Cha
The perfect place to hide from your past may be suburban New Jersey. That’s what Tiller, the young narrator of Chang-rae Lee’s new book, My Year Abroad, thinks, anyway. In his sixth novel, Lee records the adventures of this college dropout in a wild tale that moves coolly between satire and thriller.
Twenty-year-old Tiller is supposed to be in college on an overseas program, but unbeknownst to his dad, he has spent the last few months on a series of bizarre adventures in Asia. Upon their conclusion, he shacks up with a new girlfriend, Val, and her son, who are in a witness protection program and share Tiller’s penchant for hiding in plain sight. Entrenched in her own secrets, Val does not pry into Tiller’s troubles as he attempts to process recent tumultuous events that have left him “smashed to raw bits.”
The best way to forget your problems? Find a whole new set of them. The seemingly sweet Tiller gets wrapped up in Val's troubles, nonchalantly slashing the tire of a sinister man looking for her. That he is capable of such an action regardless of the consequences, he explains, is a result of whatever happened to him during his time in Asia, as he is a changed person, capable of darkness and unafraid of death.
My Year Abroad is quite a departure — in tone, language and backdrop — from Lee’s previous novel On Such a Full Sea (2014). Indeed, it is unlike anything from Lee’s canon of work — Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004) — a testament to the Pulitzer-nominated author’s virtuosity. While the story of Sea was told by a poetic plural narrator and meandered through a hazy dystopian landscape, My Year Abroad is set in the present day and punctuated by the colorful and vibrant language of a college kid. Lee’s tenure at Princeton for many years has no doubt provided him with much material about the preoccupations of a young person in a New Jersey college town.
As Tiller reveals through flashbacks, it was a chance encounter with a fascinating character named Pong Lou that led to an extraordinary turn of events for him. Pong, a Chinese immigrant, is a Big Pharma chemist by day and a rollicking creative entrepreneur by night. He is simultaneously humble and ruthlessly enterprising. The son of artists destroyed by the Red Guards in Maoist China, he has climbed the lowly onion-peeling immigrant ranks of an American Chinese restaurant to arrive at the pinnacle of prosperous New Jersey life as a business owner. Spotting a shining potential in Tiller, Pong whisks him off on international ventures as an assistant. Pong becomes a hero to Tiller, who is running, perhaps, from the sad tatters of his family life, which has been defined by his mother's inexplicable and abrupt abandonment of him and his father.
Pong's greatest appeal as a character lies in the gentle way that he encourages Tiller to explore new undertakings as they travel through Asia — forming an inevitable contrast to Tiller's father, who is well-meaning but seemingly sleepwalks through fatherhood, bewildered as he is from being forsaken by his wife. Some of the most heartbreaking scenes in the novel are those that capture how terribly the father and the son communicate with each other, and all the things left unsaid in the spirit of love and protection.
To the adrift and hungry Tiller, Pong is a revelation. "It was partly the booze talking, for certain, but mostly, I see now, it was that I was tucked in a new groove, this easy-time mixtape of apprenticeship and comradeship and partnership, of being happily equal and unequal at once, which I guess is as good as any definition of being comfortable with someone which in turn makes you feel like you belong in the world and kindles the idea that a little part of the world might someday belong to you."
Thrust into bewildering situation after bewildering situation as Pong convenes with his various business partners in Asia, Tiller discovers he has preternatural talents that he never imagined, including a gift for karaoke which will serve him in unexpected ways. Lee paints Shenzhen, Macau and finally an unnamed valley in Guangdong as the pulsing backdrops for the kinds of very real fortunes being made in China today, and the wild ambitions and audacious brutality of a menacing cast that aspire to them.
As the narrative hurtles toward a shocking and cinematic climax, Tiller's funny and naive observations keep the reader rooting for this wonderfully magnetic lost soul and his enigmatic mentor. Through Tiller's sweet vulnerability and his steadfast grasp on hope, Lee tells a story of what it means to be plucked from darkness into the light of recognition, and in doing so, explores the fundamental human desires to be seen and to love.
Frances Cha is the author of the novel “If I Had Your Face.” This review was written for the Washington Post.