A Tender Age is a work of subtle brilliance. Author Chang-rae Lee perfectly captures the nexus between childhood and adolescence, evoking both the acute innocence and distress of growing up in America.
Lee is the author of six other novels, including such master works as Native Speaker, A Gesture Life and The Surrendered, which was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. He teaches writing at Stanford University.
At the start of the book, the narrator is a middle-aged man looking back on his boyhood. “When I was a kid there were some rough times,” he recalls. Jeon-Gi, or “J.-G.” to friends, lives with his Korean immigrant parents and younger sister in a lower middle-class town north of New York City. At the age of ten going on eleven, he is at that “tender age” just before puberty.
Outside of home and school, the kids, both boys and girls, are in their own rough-and-tumble world, roaming neighborhood streets and playgrounds unsupervised, with their own rules and social order. A favorite game is Running Bases, a baseball-like tag game played between two designated bases. Tensions can run high and in one incident, J.-G. brandishes a knife at school intending to threaten his chief nemesis, Tommy, a young tough and bully. J.-G. is caught, suspended from school, nearly locked up, and ordered to undergo a psychological assessment.
Lee seamlessly integrates observations about race and cultural heritage into the storyline. Jeon-Gi and his family live in a multi-ethnic neighborhood together with Jewish, Irish and Italian Americans. His parents typically speak to him in Korean and he responds in English. He is the only Asian kid among his playground friends. Recalls J.-G., “I would have been happily grouped with another Oriental – this the only polite term by which I knew myself – but there were no others around our age and so I had to bear alone any diatribes, epithets, stereotypes, all flung about with great bluster and ignorance in the context of our bristling group friendship.”
His main exposure to Korean culture (besides his parents) comes at a Korean church in Queens that his family attends sporadically, but he finds it difficult to relate to his peers. In the summer when he turns eleven, his parents send him to a sleep-away camp in upstate New York, called Charminster, organized by the church and attended by kids from other Korean churches. A social worker has suggested to J.-G.’s parents that he would benefit from socializing with kids “more like [him].”
The camp experience, the focus of the second half of the novel, proves to be formative and life-altering. The summer proceeds innocently enough and Lee presents a charming and nostalgic look at camp life. Campers are bonding nicely and the counselors are wholesome leaders and idols. The kids are having loads of fun with camp activities and competitions. J.-G. forms a classic grade school crush on Susan, one of the girl campers. He and a friend spy on counselors smoking pot and having sex.
Despite some troublesome behavior, J.-G. has shown himself to be an appealing fellow: a good son, brother and friend. He becomes close to his fellow cabinmates and campers, his first real friendships with Koreans of the same age. “You’d think it would be easier to make up stories or play loose with details or outright cheat or lie to strangers and other people who didn’t know you and you didn’t care about, but measure by measure, day by day, I found the opposite happening.”
Because the knife incident looms in the background, the reader is expecting a dramatic twist, and then comes the culminating hike and overnight campout.
As the narrator of this story, Jeon-Gi is not exactly unreliable, but he is prone to elide key details, hinting at darker outcomes. This heightens the mystery and foreshadows the misfortune to come. J-G. muses about one of his fellow campers during the hike: “I kept thinking how in a certain way the world was made up of people like Mickey and people like me, and how unfair it was that the people who lied, who cheated, who did terrible secret things, knew more about the truth of it all than those who simply went about their good and decent way.”
Because Lee has built the tension so steadily and inhabits the kids’ bodies and minds so thoroughly, the novel packs a powerful ending punch. And it makes for an exquisite reading experience.
Chang-rae Lee will discuss his new novel, A Tender Age, at the Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave., Seattle, with novelist E.J. Koh on Aug. 18, at 7 p.m.
David Takami is the author of Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle, numerous essays and online content about Asian American history, and dozens of book reviews published mostly in The Seattle Times. He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, NY and has lived in Honolulu, Tokyo and Seattle. He now lives in Kenmore, Washington.
