MY GRANDFATHER'S AN IMMIGRANT, AND SO IS YOURS

In Chin’s debut literary novel, a second-generation Chinese American college student shares his experiences growing up in upstate New York.

Billy Chen was raised in conservative Shermantown, New York, where his heritage made him the target of bullying. “I’m half-Chinese,” explains Billy, “but in a place as white as Shermantown, there’s no room for hyphens and halfways. I was other.” His grandfather opened the first Chinese restaurant in Shermantown, where his father was also born. Still, Billy came of age feeling like an outsider. He tells, for example, of harboring a yearslong crush on Valerie Foster, a high-achieving White girl, despite the fact that she expressed racist views in his presence. He recounts his friendship with Mexican American Ricky Soberanes, whose family owned the restaurant next door to Billy’s grandfather’s. Billy also tells of shoplifting from a sporting goods store with a gang of friends called the Boil Crew—a name referring to a chemistry-class experiment gone awry. He struggles with his relationship to his mother, a chronically depressed White woman, and with the expectations that others thrust upon him. Most of all, he wonders if Shermantown was a good or bad place for him to grow up. Billy narrates this story as a student at an unnamed college,where he’s started to take classes tackling sociology and race, and where he lives down the hall from one of the White boys who once tormented him. He addresses his recollections to the girl he’s now dating: a complex young woman whose notable sensitivity helps Billy explore his own. For the first time, he feels like he’s found a place where he belongs—but he still wonders if he truly knows himself.

Chin’s prose is smooth and clean, written in a gentle, intimate tone befitting its framing device. The reader can imagine it as a story delivered across a dorm room late at night, during an extended moment of vulnerability: “I know it bugs you that I go on about Valerie….I mention her because she’s a part of me. A stupid part of me that was more in my head than any part of my life that anyone else could see.” Billy’s memories explore not only incidents of racism and the immigrant experience in America, but also issues of class, consent, homophobia, mental health, and sexual assault. However, the story plods along without the momentum that one might expect from a lengthy confessional account. The problem isn’t that Chin touches on so many fraught and topical issues, or even that he does so without weaving them naturally into a larger narrative. It’s more that the novel is so highly essayistic—driven by themes, rather than by a traditional, incident-driven plot—that the reader expects the conclusions that Billy reaches to be deeper, more emotionally complex, or more original. Instead, it offers few surprises. Billy’s girlfriend, like the reader, may have a rounder sense of who the protagonist is by the end, but he’s still more or less the same as he was at the beginning.

An earnest but flat coming-of-age novel.