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[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. 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. 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]

I enjoyed the book and the TV series, but now they are tainted to me. Just as an aside - I recall that a difference between the book and the series was that Ng did not make the artist character a Black woman, but the series did. In stories I read, Ng said that she was thinking about having the character be a Black woman, but she was uncertain about her ability to write a Black woman's perspective. I thought that was interesting.

But forget all that, because I'm never reading Ng again.

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