More than “Fine”: Thao Votang is a New, Respectable Voice in American Fiction https://ift.tt/HlT5NcS
Vietnamese American Linh Ly is a little more than preoccupied with her mother’s post-divorce dating life. Linh Ly investigates each man her mother dates, and she goes so far as to follow her mother to movie theaters and restaurants. When Linh is not playing private investigator or organizing clever disguises so that her mother will not recognize her in public, she is living the quintessential Millennial and Gen Z crisis: her job provides her with a meager income and little satisfaction, and how could she begin to think about pursuing marriage and parenthood as America brims with racism and capitulates to climate change? Beneath Linh’s exploration of selfhood and adulthood, nonetheless, lies an intimate exploration of womanhood and mother-daughter relationships that few works of fiction effectively portray. However, Thao Votang’s Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine is not just another work of fiction. It is deeply moving, extremely thought-provoking, and it establishes Thao Votang as a new, respectable voice in a vein of America’s literary canon that has only recently been tapped thanks to publishers like Alcove Press who are willing to uplift multicultural voices.
One cannot read Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine without noticing Linh’s caustic, deadpan humor about the place she loves to hate: Texas. For Linh, Texas is a place of old oil money, privileged white people who spend too much time at elite country clubs, and everyday racists who would like to see the likes of Linh and her mother moved elsewhere. However, in Votang’s novel, Texas is merely a microcosmic representation of America’s larger culture wars. Throughout the book, Linh constantly balances Vietnamese and American cultures. She makes observations about America’s obsession with individuality that will resonate with anyone who comes from a culture where community is a central focus: “Maybe that was a very American thing, to have things that are only yours. All that ownership and individuality.” She describes Texas as a place “where racism, covered up with not-quite-Southern hospitality, poisoned everything, like mold spreading from a water leak behind a wall.” She acknowledges that, “White Texan Baptists were the type to raise children who would tell their friends that their pets were going to hell.” Linh’s observations about Texas tug at social and religious extremes which have sadly become the Lone Star State’s norms.
What also makes Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine and Linh herself even more intriguing is that Linh challenges common tropes of womanhood that have long-permeated not only conservative, Southern female ideals, but also the tropes of womanhood inherent in general society. She reflects how “as a woman, people sincerely expected” Linh “to be excited as if someone else’s marriage or baby” should give her joy. She asserts that people assumed that she “didn’t enjoy being alone without the responsibility of keeping another human alive” and that they expected her to go forward as though “climate catastrophe and war didn’t exist.” The questions she poses —“What kind of person brings a new life into certain disaster? How delusional did you have to be? How self-assured did you have to be to think you could protect your children from the harms of the world?”— are more and more valid as climate change continues ravaging vulnerable landscapes and populations. In this regard, Votang’s novel resonates with the likes of Gina Chung’s Sea Change, which also examines Asian American womanhood and female existence in the face of America’s increasing racism and losing battle with the consequences of climate change.
As one follows Linh through her social mishaps, mother monitoring, and self discoveries, they come to recognize that, ultimately, Linh is a true philosopher, and the philosophies she shares with the reader are ones carefully developed through her keen sense of self-awareness. For example, Linh is comfortable with being alone — an attribute that usually stands as a glaring red flag for some. She observes, “Loneliness in a crowd wasn’t new to me. It was harder for me to think of a time when I hadn’t felt that way.” Unlike a few of her tennis teammates, or even her mother, Linh does not believe marriage is a “fix-all” for her problems. Instead, she recognizes that she “couldn’t see how happiness could be achieved in today’s world through romance, and certainly not through marriage. Marriage didn’t solve problems.” However, Linh’s comfort with aloneness is not necessarily a sign of weakness. Rather, it can be seen as a sign of self-assuredness, since Linh does not have to rely on others, on social expectations, or on social situations for validation and affirmation. It is Linh’s emotional and intellectual depth that make her the perfect narrator for such a book as Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine, because she possesses the necessary awareness about her cultural and socio-economic juxtaposition with the majority of the Texans portrayed in the book. Unlike those characters who rely on social status and wealth to develop their self-worth and self-confidence, Linh — particularly because of her lack of support during her childhood — has had to develop those on her own. Thus, she becomes a heroine in her own right, particularly for Gen Z a generation frequently described as “the most isolated generation the world has seen.”
Linh Ly is Doing Just Fine possesses a philosophical pizzazz most contemporary fiction lacks, and Linh Ly becomes a heroine for a new generation of multicultural Americans who have struggled to find their place in America and, in particular, states like Texas. Votang’s novel parallels works like Dorothy Chan’s Return of the Chinese Femme in its exploration of Asian American identity, and it is a serious, yet hilarious, novel that readers will not forget quickly. In fact, if readers pay close attention, they will find that Linh Ly’s lessons about life, family, and selfhood have something to offer everyone — even if readers were not necessarily looking for Linh’s brand of life-coaching.
0 Commentaires