Korean Culture - Fall 2001

BOOK REVIEW

Leonard Chang's Over the Shoulder: A Novel of Intrigue

Reviewed by Charse Yun

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In his latest novel, Over the Shoulder: A Novel of Intrigue, writer Leonard Chang pushes the envelope of Asian American fiction by blending elements of crime fiction with the classic literary novel to tell a suspenseful tale of a Korean American's search for his family history. The result is an unorthodox, but stunning take on a conventional theme. With rapid-fire dialogue and a swift, linear plot, Chang has created an immensely readable novel that blends familiar genres together into a startingly different hybrid. Over the Shoulder is a superb accomplishment that should be a welcome addition to the recent growth of Korean American fiction.

Chang has always been obsessed with the darker themes of violence and transgression. His first novel, The Fruit 'N Food, which won the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction in 1996, presented a violent, brooding picture of race relations in New York with a disturbing conclusion that refused any pat, simple resolutions. His more sophisticated but equally dark follow-up novel, Dispatches from the Cold, took the point of view of a white sales manager who has an affair with the wife of his Korean American boss. The complicated narrative structure in Dispatches reflected a more mature writer who was confident enough to tackle issues of race, class, sex, and violence without flinching.

A Straight Noir Thriller?

On the surface, Over the Shoulder seems to be a straight noir thriller. It tells the story of Allen Choice, a 30-year-old Korean American living in the Bay Area who works as a security specialist at ProServ, an executive protection agency. After witnessing the murder of his partner on a routine case, Allen discovers a mysterious connection with the death of his own father in an accident at a shipping company twenty years prior. With the help of a struggling newspaper reporter, Linda Maldonado, Allen unravels a series of connections that lead to Roger Milian, his father's former employer. The fast-paced plot has Allen and Linda begin a dizzying journey into Allen's family history. One of the figures who reemerges to give clues to his father's past is Allen's own estranged Aunt Insook, an emotionally distant woman who was forced to raise Allen after his father's death.

Some readers might dismiss the intricate crime plot--a murder mystery that has the main character becoming the prime suspect--as a superficial novelty. While working within the crime fiction format, however, Chang does more than simply insert an ethnic hero into a hardboiled storyline. Allen Choice is a cool, introspective man who feels isolated and removed from society. His philosophical musings, as several erudite critics have pointed out, point more to Camus and Hume than to Sam Spade. In his sympathetic portrayal of Allen Choice, Chang has placed a Korean American male as the valid subject of a serious literary novel.

Searching for the Father

As with much other Asian American fiction, the center of the story revolves around a search for one's origins and identity. As a second-generation Korean American who loses both his parents at an early age--his mother at birth and his father at age ten--Allen Choice knows little about his parents or their past. Forced to live with his Aunt Insook, the relationship is filled with unspoken tensions, abruptly ending with Allen disobeys his aunt and drops out of college.

Here Chang's use of the noir genre is highly effective. Using the elements of trauma and mystery with a series of evocative, childhood flashbacks, Chang expertly weaves a tale of transgression and violence that is really about uncovering the mystery of one's own past.

From the opening prologue, Chang thus enters into the familiar Asian American territory of memory and ethnic identity, with a haunting sense of childhood loss pervading the novel. Chang's writing in these series of passages is exquisite and graceful, showcasing some of Chang's most lyrical writing to date.

In particular, it is the poignant 20-year-old memories of his deceased father that give the story much more of its evocative power. In one scene a long dormant memory suddenly resurfaces of Allen as a child sneaking in front of his sleeping father to watch TV: "Yes, this is it. I remember watching the tail end of newscasts, waiting for the bad sitcoms. This was how I sat, cross-legged, my hands pressed together in my lap, my torso leaning forward and my head angled up. My neck begins to hurt. The room is still. It was exactly like this. If I turn around, I'll see my father sleeping."

Passages such as these convey an achingly beautiful sense of unprocessed trauma, loss, and longing that is on bar with the best Asian American writing out there.

The Character

The noir genre has traditionally been filled with strong, tough-talking male protagonists--"outsiders" and "underdogs" dealing in the urban underworld. In Chang's world, however, the outsider status is inextricable linked to race. His very identity, as well as his name (an Americanization of the Korean surname "Choi"), forces him into an aggressive, outsider position: "My appearance jars them. I see quick calculations, adjustments of expectations."

Allen is a character that feels disconnected from life, even coming up with his own existential terms such as "dis-ease," "removement," and "the inertial deception" to describe his uneasy existence. As Allen muses: "It's a vague uneasiness, a sense of always being unsettled and off-balance, of looking around me and feeling disconnected." While Chang hints at a metaphorical connection to the marginalized status of the Asian American male (reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), he remains loyal to Allen's character, rending it as the plight of one individual, not an entire ethnicity: "That I am a nobody doesn't bother me as it might some people. I prefer anonymity, unobstructed movement through a crowd with neither a first nor second glance in my direction. I used to think it had something to do with my job, but if pressed I'd have to admit that I was always like this."

Chang is able to deftly touch upon issues of race and class without ever derailing the swift pace of the plot. In one scene Allen infiltrates a private party with his partner Linda:

She asks, "Did you notice that I was the only Chicana woman at Milian's?"

"Not many women there."

"There were six or seven others, I think, other than the help."

"You counted."

She says, "Didn't you?"

I smile and wonder how often I do that. It took me less than a minute to see I was the only Asian there.

Scenes such as this are scattered throughout the book--Linda's hardened facial expression when a Latina maid serves coffee during an interview, Allen rejection by a beautiful Asian executive where he works the front-desk security--and subtly point to the pervasive reality of race and class for the characters. By doing so, Chang renders a sophisticated look at these tensions without being bogged down by the weight of these issues.

The Emergence of the Second-Generation Korean American Male

Sensational debuts in the past half-decade or so by Korean American writers such as Chang Rae Lee, Helen Kim, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Susan Choi, Nora Okja Keller, and Mia Yun have received both considerable critical acclaim and popular success. Yet with the notable exceptions of Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker, and more recently, Don Lee's Yellow, the second-generation Korean male has been relatively absent in Korean American fiction. Moreover, there has been a tendency in writers to base their stories in Korea, using Korea's tumultuous history as backdrop and theme to their narratives. While some second-generation reimaginings of Korea have succeeded brilliantly (such as Susan Choi's The Foreign Student), other writers have been less successful, treating Korea as a primordial site where Korean Americans seem to "come to terms" with their ethnic identity through historical memory. At times, charges of auto-Orientalism and self-exoticization have been raised to due to the writer's unfamiliarity with Korea's culture, language and history.

In contrast, Chang has resolutely stuck to the contemporary Asian American experience. In fact, one of Chang's major contributions has been the depth and realism given to the second-generation Korean American male whose everyday experiences are described with intense, psychological detail. While allusions are made to Korea in terms of post-1965 immigration and even to the "Koreagate" scandal of the mid-1970's, Over the Shoulder is a stylish, intelligent representation of how an American of Korean descent makes his way through the world. By doing so, Chang goes beyond other recent narratives that have re-imagined or invented historical memories about Korea with mixed, uneven results.

Conclusion

With Over the Shoulder, one gets the impression of a talented writer who has consistently improved at his craft with each work and it is Chang's most sophisticated and best novel to date. His prose has never been tighter or more precise, the dialogue snapping into place as snugly as a revolver in a shoulder holster. With this work, Chang has broken new ground, and it may prove why he is considered to be one of the most audaciously independent and intriguing writers in Korean American fiction today.

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About the reviewer:

CHARSE YUN is in the M.A. program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is a staff writer for KoreAm Journal.