Micro Review: Chang-Rae Lee's 'My Year Abroad'
Debuting a new section: micro reviews by community members
My Year Abroad is the sixth novel by award-winning author Chang-Rae Lee of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea. It's an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.
Micro Review from Giaae Kwon
When we first meet Tiller, the narrator of Chang-Rae Lee’s sixth novel, MY YEAR ABROAD, he’s in a place he calls Stagno, living with an older woman and her son in witness protection. The novel jumps between Tiller’s present and not-so-distant past, the few months he spent under the tutelage of Pong Lou, a Chinese American entrepreneur. Pong is self-assured and confident, and Tiller is more than willing to be taken under his wing, following Pong all the way to China for a new business endeavor. In China, though, things go majorly awry.
MY YEAR ABROAD unfolds slowly in Lee’s assured prose. A seasoned novelist, Lee isn’t a flashy writer but one who asks for and earns the trust of his readers. In his newest novel, he subverts expected portrayals of foreignness and suburban America by decentering whiteness with characters of color, major and minor, who comfortably take up space and are not defined by Otherness. As Lee writes, "the center [of the world] has already shifted." (220) Emotionally, Lee asks poignant questions about what it means to be a father figure, whether through Pong’s relationship with Tiller or Tiller’s relationship with his girlfriend’s son.
The novel’s strengths, though, are ultimately tested by its length. A steady but plodding novel, MY YEAR ABROAD is drawn out into a long 477 pages, and, though the pages turn easily, the novel lingers too heavily in its scenes and feels too weighed down by the meandering story for it to be truly impactful.
Giaae Kwon is always hungry. Her writing has also appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed Reader, and elsewhere, and she writes the Substack I Love You, Egg. She lives in Brooklyn.