The Expat by Hansen Shu is an engaging and provocative novel about Michael Wang, a recent graduate of Princeton working for General Motors in the research and development of a self driving car.
Michael lives alone in a gentrified apartment above an old school Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. That physical juxtaposition highlights the story’s underlying themes of identity and dichotomy. He has a brand new high end Italian road bicycle he has never ridden and a fancy kitchenware set he’s never cooked with. Instead he has taken up smoking cigarettes and orders delivery of gourmet sushi sets and junk food.
The story is also told in the first person, so you become acquainted with many of Michael’s personality features and foibles. He struggles with his self image and how he relates to people. Michael feels imprisoned by the judgements of others, Asian and American sexism and his own “banal and cynical self-condemnation” as an “un-special Asian nerd”.
He grudgingly accepts the ambiguity of being Chinese and American. Michael’s profession and position in the high tech industry is complicated by his desire for recognition, affirmation and his sense of what is ethical in attaining those things. The story moves back and forth in time adding to the revelatory nature of the chain of events.
Michael meets Vivian, a woman whom he begins to grow attached to. Through her, he begins to move away from being self conscious and stuck. He admires her independence and freedom and unabashed initiative. When they talk about going forward in their relationship, Michael even repeats her words “No living between two worlds” and adding his own assertion “I’m ready.” Always easier said than done.
Enmeshed with Michael meeting Vivian, his work in self driving car technology has caught the attention of a suspicious agency and he is offered a new job in Shanghai and is wined, dined and enticed by a very wealthy, charismatic Chinese CEO. It becomes an increasingly intense procession into a lurid world of high tech industrial espionage, duplicity and Machiavellianism.
As the novel ends, Michael reflects on all that he’s gone through and says: “Nothing is ever completely real, nothing is ever completely fake.”
I once read an article about how the definition of truth has changed over a dozen times in recent decades. Where truth was once understood as objective reality, truth has become a feature of personal subjective interpretation.
Whether it’s sex, lies or media obsession, maybe that is the truth which has paved the way for the fake news, alternative facts and the state of our world today. But it’s not my fault.
