Review of "Disorientation: A Novel" by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Twenty-nine-year-old Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese-American graduate student at Massachusetts' Barnes University (BU), is writing a dissertation about the exalted Chinese poet Xiao-Wen Chou.

Before his death, Xiao-Wen Chou was a faculty member at BU, and he's now enshrined as the school's shining star.



The problem for Ingrid is that everything that CAN BE written about Xiao-Wen Chou's work HAS BEEN written, and she's struggling to find a topic for her research. Moreover, Ingrid is in her eighth and final year in BU's Ph.D. program, and her funding is about to run out.

Ingrid spends her days in BU's Xiao-Wen Chou archives, looking through boxes of the poet's papers and pretending to work.



Ingrid can't sleep, binges on snacks, has pains in her stomach, pulls out her hair....and makes no progress. Worse yet, Ingrid's Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Michael Bartholomew - who heads BU's East Asian Studies Department - keeps asking Ingrid when she'll complete her dissertation and schedule her Ph.D. defense.



Then one day, an apparent miracle occurs. Ingrid is languidly looking through a box in the Xiao-Wen Chou archives when she finds a cryptic note....a note that's clearly meant for Ingrid. The missive opens up a new, and VERY controversial, area of research about Xiao-Wen Chou.



With the help of her best friend, Eunice Kim, Ingrid pursues this new topic, which involves consulting a private detective, sneaking into files, breaking-and-entering, confronting a dyed-in-the-wool white nationalist, and more. All this is hilarious, which is expected, because the book is a satire.



That being said, the novel addresses serious topics as well, through the ensemble of characters. For instance, Ingrid has only dated White men, but resents White men who prefer ('fetishize') Asian women; Ingrid's White fiancé Stephen translates Japanese literature into English, though Stephen can't speak Japanese....it's strictly dictionary work; Ingrid, who has Taiwanese ancestry, is infuriated when people call her Chinese; Ingrid resents a fellow graduate student, Vivian Vo, who protests for the rights of minorities - because Vivian is high-profile and showy; as a child Ingrid forbid her parents to speak to her in Mandarin, and never learned the language; Dr. Michael Bartholomew marries a native Chinese woman named Cixi, expecting her to be a 1950s type housewife - but Cixi learns fast, to Michael's dismay; faculty and students at BU, when the opportunity arises, protest affirmative action and insist on their right to spew discriminatory speech; and more.





Some of the plot points, like the 'white nationalist' bent that crops up at BU, struck me as highly unrealistic (it sounds more like 'John Birch University' than a Massachusetts college.) In any case, the novel speaks, in part, to the concerns of Americans with East Asian ancestry.

The central theme of the book - Ingrid's unexpected discovery - demonstrates how far some people will go for fame and success. And it's quite far indeed!

I enjoyed the book and recommend it to readers who like literary novels.

Rating: 4 stars