Cleo Qian’s is a world of young Asian artists and seekers with international ties in LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO.
The first story, “Chicken. Film. Youth.,” is set in a drizzly Los Angeles, at Mr. Kang’s chicken restaurant. Four casual friends have gathered; Dake, Eileen, Jessica, and Luna are all 28. They are starting to feel that time is not on their side as their friends make advances in their lives: “What about all our potential? Where had it gone?” The proprietor of the K-town restaurant, Mr. Kang, shares that he was a former director. He invites the four to a theatre in the back of the restaurant and shares a film of his life. Even as practical considerations come to the fore, the artful passions of people do not disappear. It is perhaps a human need to share stories.
The film follows Mr. Kang’s life and his meeting with a famous director Park Myungjae. Park has an uncle who can imitate voices; he is hired by a wealthy man with various lovers who wants to keep them in the dark about each other, so the voice talent pretends to be the wealthy man in whispering sweet nothings to the various male and female paramours. How the youth will navigate their own lives is top-of-mind as they slink out from the home theatre and realize that the prosaic will not satisfy them, but how can they advance their dreams?
“Monitor World” follows Nora, better known as “N,” as she works at an online publicity farm that is a “parasite” of sorts on social media platforms. It is not a particularly sophisticated setup, with the staff caught out because of how many accounts they’re making from the same IP address. She is 25 and works at a makeshift office outside an airport hangar. She takes her lunch outside and is stared at through aviator glasses by a man on a regular basis. N flirts online and goes on a one-night stand with an older man in his home. N wants the thrill of danger but with some safety, even as the man makes strange comments and has some unusual artifacts in his home and is obsessed with Charles Manson. They are both in it for the sex but not the intimacy, albeit she more than he. N’s mother is an emergency room doctor, and she comes home with cautionary tales based on the patients she deals with. Still, N is in a sleepwalk in her life choices and maintains her “flimsy” connection with the man even as she is repulsed by him, by his physicality. His being older is also a turnoff, without the easy familiarity between people of the same generation and age range. The ending is O. Henry-ish with a modern twist, with a shock of attraction elsewhere that is revelatory.
“Zeroes:Ones” opens in a fashionable new tier 1 city, Suzhou, in China. The narrator, Luna, is a writing tutor, who works with Marcus, a Princeton graduate and a Caucasian man whose Chinese language is better than the narrator’s. She lives in a studio apartment provided by the Chinese university. She has a supervisor who is in his mid-30s and is pretty hands-off. She has a conflicted sense of China, the country of her origin, but she is a U.S. citizen. She does not have a sophisticated sense of geopolitics but is starting to explore. She thinks that her time in China will help her become more whole and complete:
…if I went there, that country both homeland and exotic, and understood it, then through this experience I would change and become a full person. I would nourish the half of me that had always been stunted, and by gaining the knowledge and full identity and sense of enoughness I had been denied the rest of my life, my full selfhood would be reclaimed.
She has a friend who is also Asian, Melissa, who has moved abroad to Europe and has been visiting various countries on that continent. Luna has major FOMO for her friend’s adventures, which she observes on social media postings. The protagonist is socially awkward as she makes her way in the world.
Cao Jinyi works at Sichuan Radio Station and has her own segment of a radio show, in “Wing and the Radio.” She works for Manager Tian who is not particularly savvy nor cool and promotes music from Cao’s mothers’ generation for Magic Happy Hour. They are finding it hard to create a winning formula that can attract a wider audience. Manager Tian’s is a hodge-podge approach, comprised of “a misguided grab bag of advertising and whatever content he could pull out of his audio files from Internet forums, rehashed celebrity gossip, and, not even occasionally, fabricated stories and fudged interviews.”
Then, Sun Wonseok (aka “Wing” and “Body Roll King” for a dance move) comes to town. He has a rabid fandom with mass-scale crushes on him, expressed sometimes in dangerous ways. A fan has a posted sign written in her own blood: “Neon daylight take my soul! Wing-oppa, I’m eternally yours!!” His talent bridges the countries and languages of East Asia. This is a world of WeChat, Weibo, and other social media platforms. Are there ways that this radio station can take advantage of the drama of the moment?
The 24-year-old Cao, who goes by the name “Terry” (after NPR’s Terry Gross, whose voice she likes), learns something about her industry and herself:
She thought her voice, her beautiful voice, and her hard work and strong principles would be enough to make her successful. But now she saw herself for who she really was: a mouthpiece for sleazy, sensationalist content that exploited teenage girls.
When her oppressive supervisor is away for a short moment, Cao can either take her shot or stay on track career-wise while compromising her sense of self.
“The Girl with the Double Eyelids” follows a teenage narrator who is encouraged to make herself beautiful by using various means to add a fold to her monolid eyelids, first through makeup and tape and later through surgery. When she has surgery, she is suddenly more observant, as if a new dimension had opened for her. She sees “tattoos” on people that are a Dadaist visual grammar revealing something of core personalities. She is discovering her personal attractions to others even as she watches a chemistry teacher, a friend of the family, having various affairs. She has a second sight that reveals the truths of the relationships between people around her and the discrepancies between the fake-social-politesse and reality. This story evokes the beginning of the end of the naivete of childhood. Seeing clearly requires a grit and strength: “Reading was better than seeing. Real life hurt too much to look at.”
“The Virtuoso” plays on a trope of Asian helicopter parents. Nora Ren is competing in a music contest, and in that experience, she learns that there are more ways forward in life than the “golden tickets” that parents may have designed for her.
“Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go” follows a gathering of four young people, who have loose ties with each other. Emiko, Lily, Raiya, and Goto are hiking together on Mount Haruna at a retreat created by the artsy Anti-Civilization Committee. Art and reality overlap here, and social performance and real relationships. There are cameras around them, so the experience reads like a reality show with artifice and manipulations. The experience is surreal and brings out various aspects of character among each of the four. The organization has cultic echoes and adheres to a philosophy of “cheerful nihilism,” with the acknowledgment that nothing truly lasts. As to entertainment, Qian writes:
People thought they wanted stimulation and excitement, but what they really wanted was the bleed of authenticity. This was why there was such outrage when people found out reality shows were actually scripted, or the incredible memoir they’d loved turned out to be fake…For their audience, it was the very ordinariness they consumed that anchored them to reality in an increasingly unreal world.
As the tensions play out, one of the four is revealed as a true believer to the philosophy.
“Power and Control” follows a relationship between Greta and “Keychain,” which turns abusive and controlling. One tries to use various spells to control her lover. There are transgressions of trust and safety. The work is surrealistic and dystopian. In an intriguing subplot, a botanist grows a plant wife to replace his late wife. Everyone is striving for partnership with significant others using the tools they have.
“We Were There” opens with the protagonist Luna at a summer party. A young man, Kane, with aspirations to art catches her eye. She starts a relationship with Aaron, another. And the story isa bout the tentativeness of relationships and intimacies for modern youth.
Another work deals with challenges of romance and family. “Messages from Earth” describes the struggles of a by-the-book Asian woman who experiences breakages with her family when she comes out as gay. Where Luna, the protagonist who observes her friend Vicky’s struggles, determines that religion is a narrative placed over a chaotic serendipitous universe. She thinks that there would be “no final answer to anything” and “no arbiter of how they should be, no guarantee of how they were going to turn out, who they would become, what lives they would live, what the outcomes of the choices they made would be.” Ahead is only “more uncertainty.”
“Seagull Village“ reads as a dreamy interstice between the living and the dead. The narrator is taking a road trip to some holy mountains in Japan and meets Miho, who is walking out on the surf. Aimee (“Ames”) discovers her essential and desirable aloneness as a writer.
Qian’s Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go is a memorable and evocative collection. The works read as magical realism, with a dose of biography. The author is based out of Southern California and identifies as a queer fiction writer with “she/her” pronouns.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
