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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And despite Ng commercial success I take issue with here writing her themes her characters and her poor me attitude. Now the real person is revealed. [/quote]
Is Ng's book like the Reese Witherspoon show? That show was so ham handed and stupid. Every single person was an over the top caricature, obvious, one dimensional and so dumb. Couldn't stand it. It watched like a cheesy soap opera.[/quote]

I read LFE before it got a TV deal and felt like her prose was a cut above "grabbed it at the airport kiosk" but the plotting was very heavy-handed and predictable.  I'm not surprised it got a TV deal because of the themes and soapiness, but I am surprised to learn this week that she's considered Literary Fiction and not just . . . fiction.[/quote]

It must be because she has an MFA. I find her writing prosaic and clunky, at least in the excerpts I've skimmed. Not a reader of hers. [/quote]

I guess I will be the dissenter. I read LFE well before it got the TV deal and really loved it. In part I think I loved it because while closer to commercial fiction in tone, it brought in a host of complicated and sometimes unlikeable female characters and gave them lots of room to be themselves. That is so, so rare in mainstream fiction. It's becoming more normal, thankfully, but I would credit LFE a bit with showing that there is a huge audience for that kind of thing and that protagonists don't always have to be charming or weak or in love. I also feel that Ng made a lot with her familiarity with both Shaker Heights, and put her intimate knowledge of that place and time to good use, especially in exploring the intersection of class and race. It's not a perfect book but I did feel it was a good one and different from much of what was out there at the time. I tried watching the TV show but agree with all the criticism above -- it just didn't capture the nuance from the book for me. I actually think the book was not as ripe for a soapy TV adaptation as, say, Big Little Lies.

A thought that has come to me now after all of this, though, is that it is interesting HOW Ng writes about class and race in Shaker Heights. Notable to me is that she chooses to place all the white characters on one side of the SES divide (rich) and all the POC on the other side. I think it works in the book specifically because there are these other themes (largely around art, ownership, and motherhood) that connect characters and create sympathies in interesting ways. But it does not reflect Ng's own background. She grew up middle to UMC in Shaker Heights as a WOC. She was the child of immigrants, but they were scientists and academics. Very unlike the AAPI immigrants in LFE, who as I recall work in a restaurant and live in poverty or close to it. Her other major novel does explore a family more similar to the one she grew up in, but it's interesting that the book that made her famous portrays all the POC as much more marginalized than what Ng has actually experienced in her life.

To be clear, I am not saying Ng has not experienced racism -- I am certain he and her parents experienced plenty of it, in many forms. Being an educated immigrant, especially if a POC, can be an easier road but it is by no means free of oppression. And I'm sure the same is true of Larsen. However, having now also read Larsen's story, something that jumps out at me that both of these women grew up as middle class, fairly assimilated POC, but both choose to write about characters who are much more othered. Ng made the POC characters in LFE extreme outsiders to the white, UMC culture of Shaker Heights. Larsen writes about a Chinese-American woman with a Chinese name and husband, while Larsen is herself mixed race and could be white passing.

Again, not trying to say these women don't have something valuable and important to say about being POC in a country that has always been and is still white supremacist. [b]In some ways I wonder if they are writing about more marginalized, less assimilated POC characters because they know that is what many white readers expect to see, and that their own more nuanced experiences may be too complex for a predominantly white audience to understand.[/b] But after seeing these women also accuse Dorland of being a white savior and using white womens tears to oppress a WOC, I also wonder if they have a hard time reconciling with their privilege alongside their oppression. Because there is privilege in both of their backgrounds, a lot of it.

Just thinking out loud here.[/quote]

This argument strikes such a negative, false note to me. Meaning, I just must reject it out of hand. I find it incredible anyone could really think this: that Ng desperately wanted to write something else and cannibalizes the experience of much more marginally settled immigrants/POC because of a White book-buying audience or White women who edit for the big 5 or who run publicity. I reject it. I’m angered by the consistent refusal (NOT by you, PP! I am not laying this at your feet as an individual reader at all) to treat some of these abusive, top of the heap authors as less than full adults, as less than fully responsible for their output and their behaviors. I am TIRED of it.

Ng wasn’t forced to do some kind of SES minstrel act in fiction because no one wants to read about a wealthier girl/woman. I know it’s not the same kind of art, but Kevin Kwan found a way. I’m not saying she has any obligation to only write her lived experience. But the Joshua Luna thread on Twitter (dropped into this thread at least a couple of times) touches on this. She, and Gay, and others, want to move that privilege needle where ANY White author from any background may be fairly presumed to overstep in ANY social or professional dynamic and that is a crock of shit. And she knows that. But if she can pretend that her assimilation was essentially never achieved, and that she is her parent, instead of a later generation, and that she has greater economic struggles, that SHE is like Luna, then her behavior is always right and how dare you look at it. It’s outrageous and intellectually dishonest, and I’m guessing some of the readership of LFE didn’t think her characterizations of the Asian-American experience at a low SES level, the non model minority experience, was that well etched. That’s my guess. But she is inhabiting that territory for a reason.  And of course she may well have been subject to hideous treatment at different multiple moments of her life expressly because of her race/ethnicity. But she’s playing a card game now. [/quote]

PP here and I'm not offended and I agree with you. That's basically how I feel but I was trying to make the best argument in favor of Ng/Larsen because I wanted to extend them the benefit of the doubt that they refused to offer Dorland. But yes, while I liked LFE (I didn't like The Kindness, for the record), when I saw this pattern in thinking about Bad Art Friend but instinct was to feel that these women are exploiting their proximity to marginalized people by writing about characters much more marginalized than they are and then kind of imputing that experience onto their own lives. As though those are their experiences. But they aren't. They might be experiences of people they know and are close to, they might be experiences that resonate in their families. But it's not their live experience. Which is fine! In fiction you don't have to write only about your own lived experience, that's what imagination and creativity and craft are for. That's the whole point.

But I wonder this is part of what bothered them about Dorland. Here was this white woman writing about a marginalized experience that she actually lived, writing about white characters experiencing poverty and doing so from a place of authenticity and understanding. I wonder if this bothered them, somehow. This really seems to be part of the conflict, this idea that Ng and Larsen are entitled to some greater empathy or allowance because of their race, but that Dorland is not entitled to the same due to her background. And as someone who is the children of two white people who experienced profound poverty, abuse, and trauma in their childhoods, that bothers me. I think Dorland might have something really valuable to say about these issues. So for it to be communicated to her by Grub Street and Larsen and the CMs that her perspective doesn't matter is very uncomfortable to me. I mean, what is Dorland supposed to do, write about rich white people on Cape Cod like Chip Cheek even though she has much more limited experience with that world? The whole thing is very strange to me.[/quote]

Really thoughtful posts. I’m really enjoying the insights and discussion on this thread (although let’s not detour back into personal publishing/ social media experiences please!)[/quote]

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