A Year in Reading: R.O. Kwon

The other night, at a party, someone asked if I consider my writing to be political. I said no, but also yes, always, what else can it be, since I’m an immigrant, a woman, and a person of color, living in a time and place in which more or less every aspect of who I am has been politicized. Every day, to pull up the news is to see part, or parts, of myself attacked, threatened, and marginalized.

And it’s not just the news. Not long after the 2016 elections, my parents were in a minor car accident. A car drove into the parking space next to theirs; the stranger’s car scraped my mother’s open door—no big deal, you might think, except that the other driver, the one at fault, lost it. He yelled at my parents. He terrified my mother, one of the gentlest women I know. What did he yell? The tired obvious: “Go back to your country,” he shouted, standing in a parking lot, in my hometown, where my parents have lived the past 25 years. My father shouted back. “This is my country,” he said, sure of himself, defying the racist shit spitting in his face.

As I look back at my year in reading, I’m thinking of my parents. A word about methodology: since any list like this leaves out more than it can include, I’ll call out writers of Asian descent whose fictional worlds have been, for me, lifelines. Also, I prize and require short stories and essays and poems and memoirs, but my first love, my lifelong obsession is the novel, so I’ll limit myself to long-form fiction; finally, I’ll restrict this round-up to books by women because it’s 2017, and, my god, what a year it’s been for us. But dear Umma and Abba: fuck that guy in the parking lot. This is your country, and this write-up’s for you.

All hail Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, a tender, brilliant evocation of one woman’s experience of profound loss and gain. I loved, too, Katie Kitamura’s powerful A Separation, about a woman whose husband goes missing on a Greek island. I read it in one hypnotized go. I know you’ve probably already heard you should read Celeste Ng’s thrilling Little Fires Everywhere, but I can’t help adding to the chorus. In addition to its other signal merits, the book includes one of the best portrayals of artistic ambition I’ve read since I don’t know when.

Some of the writing I most crave, these days, is fiction that finds its way into what’s often called unimaginable. Along these lines, I admired A Good Country by Laleh Khadivi and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, novels that incisively, wisely imagine the lives of people drawn to religious extremism. Jimin Han’s impressive A Small Revolution brings to life a different kind of terrorist, one so much more prevalent in this gun-crazed country of ours: the angry man who goes on a shooting rampage.

I was riveted by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You and Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, both of which feature those most maligned of women, mothers who leave their sons. In the haunting Lucky Boy, Shanthi Sekaran spotlights a different kind of parent-child split, when an undocumented woman loses her child to foster care. Patty Yumi Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is centered upon a sister’s loss, and is by turns startling, harrowing, and compassionate.

Chemistry by Weike Wang is a funny and beguiling account of a graduate student uncertain if she wants to keep pursuing a life in chemistry. There’s also Dina Nayeri’s big-hearted Refuge, about the plight of a geographically divided family, as well as Arundhati Roy’s epic, vital The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness. Finally, especially in these hateful times, I want everyone to read Min Jin Lee’s much-lauded Pachinko, a novel chronicling some of the challenges endured by Korean immigrants in Japan.