Understanding Migration and Race Means Understanding Your Relationship With the World, and With Yourself | Recommending Some Good Books

Over the National Day holiday we asked eight young writers to recommend books they think are good. Each has built a reputation in their own field and enjoys sharing new knowledge and ideas. This is the last of them, Hu Peiling.

Around this time last year, QDaily asked a few interesting people behind big accounts on Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu to recommend us some books. They included Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Guokr founder Ji Shisan, Zhang Wei, who started the WeChat account “Shixiang”, Wu Miao, who started the WeChat account “Leviathan”, and screenwriter Shi Hang. The invitation then was simple: recommend a book from the past year that you thought was good — one that may have helped your work, or one you simply liked. Chinese or English, either was fine.

This year we decided to change the approach a little.

In any era, expert readers are scarce. The judgments they make when they recommend and review books can be an important guide to what we read, and sometimes the reviews themselves become books worth reading — Tony Judt's Reappraisals, for instance.

The writers we invited do not all brood over the history of the 20th century the way Judt does in that book. They are younger, more interesting, sharp-eyed, and none of them writes for a living; each has some influence in their own field and enjoys sharing new knowledge and ideas.

We wanted to introduce them to you through a book list plus a long review, as a small guide to the modest business of reading.

Because their experiences differ, the books they pick and the reviews they write come in distinct styles, and puzzling over those differences is itself rather interesting. Over the National Day holiday just past, we published one writer's reading list and review each day. We hope they are useful. If you know other good expert readers around you, leave a comment and tell us — you may see their piece before long.

This is the last one, Hu Peiling.

Hu Peiling teaches at Tunghai University in Taiwan and writes book reviews. She holds a PhD in English and American literature from Rutgers University, a master's from National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and a bachelor's in English from National Chengchi University. Her fields are race studies, human rights and literature, postcolonial and neocolonial theory, and world literature. That is why most of the books she recommends are foreign literature, including one or two works of Black writing you probably don't pay much attention to.

Book Recommendations

By Hu Peiling

The Girls

Author: Emma Cline

Publisher: Random House

Published: June 2016

The most closely watched American debut of 2016 has to be Emma Cline's The Girls. The book was already famous by the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair, where the well-known literary agent Bill Clegg sold it to Random House for $2 million, a record. After two years of waiting, it finally came out in June 2016.

The Girls is set in the hippie America of the 1960s and narrated by Evie, a former hippie girl now in middle age, who looks back on the year she turned 14 and lived close to a hippie commune. The commune in the book is modeled on the Manson family of 1960s America, a group built around its leader, Charles Manson, whose members were mostly young women. These girls had run away from home and survived on the margins of society for all sorts of reasons; they were fiercely loyal to Manson. They stole for him, slept with him, and in the end killed the people he wanted killed. Beginning in the late 1960s the Manson family committed a string of cold-blooded murders. Manson and several of the women involved went to prison and are serving their sentences to this day, and the Manson case became a stain in American history that people would rather not look at again.

Plenty of books have examined the Manson phenomenon over the years, but very few start from the girls' own point of view and ask why so many young women, most of them from good homes, were willing to submit to Manson — why these seemingly helpless, pink-hearted teenagers came to kill for him. The Girls is a novel that starts with the Manson girls. Evie, the narrator, joins the family coolly and passively. She comes from a well-off single-parent home; at 14 she is stuck in the awkward stretch between girl and woman, hungry for the attention of the male world and at the same time resisting every social rule she is supposed to obey. That makes her the family's ideal victim. In the last second before the murders, Evie is pushed out of the car, which spares her prison but traps her for life in a single question: if I had gone along, what would I be now? What does rebelling against society get you? And if she had not rebelled, what would someone like Evie have lost? With this book, Emma Cline puts her finger precisely on the tangle behind those pink hearts.

The Fishermen, published in simplified Chinese as 《钓鱼的男孩》 (“The Fishing Boys”)

Author: Chigozie Obioma

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Published: April 2015

Nigerian literature has held the attention of the world's readers since its very first generation of writers. That generation includes Chinua Achebe, who wrote the classic postcolonial novel Things Fall Apart, and the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. In recent decades Nigerian writing has been carried almost single-handedly by Chimamanda Adichie, whose two TED talks have drawn more than ten million views each and are held up again and again as models of what a talk should be. Her 2013 novel Americanah follows a Nigerian girl who emigrates to the United States and swings between the two countries — in spirit, in language and in love. How does a newcomer build a life in a new country?

After Adichie's brilliant run, 2015 brought another Nigerian newcomer who impressed me a great deal. Chigozie Obioma announced himself with his first novel, The Fishermen. Unlike Adichie, whose recent work has moved steadily toward the immigrant experience, Obioma's debut stands and looks squarely at Nigeria. It follows four brothers in a Nigerian family whose father has to leave home for work. Once he is gone, the four boys turn into fishermen and spend their days fishing beside the city's notorious big river. One day at the river they meet a madman, Abulu, who prophesies that the eldest brother will one day be killed by one of his own brothers. The words seep into the eldest brother's mind like poison. From then on he treats his brothers as enemies, picks quarrels with them, grows more erratic by the day, and finally brings the tragedy about himself. A happy, settled middle-class family falls apart.

In interviews Obioma has said the story is also a parable about Nigeria's past and present. The four brothers stand for Nigeria's three main ethnic groups, each with its own language, religion and customs, and Abulu stands for Britain, the madman who came to colonize the country. The madman's ruinous prophecy is Nigeria's independence in 1960. Three groups thrown together for the convenience of colonial rule had neither the grounds nor the possibility of forming one nation, so the prophecy of nationhood, and the Nigerian people's belief in that prophecy at the founding, both led to the chaos and collapse Nigeria lives in now. The tragedy is this: even after the madman Abulu is killed, once a tragedy has been set in motion, once the poison of belief has entered the hearts of the people involved, there is no way back. In the same way, Britain has long since gone and the nightmare of colonization has been destroyed, but Nigeria's tragedy will not end any time soon.

The People in the Trees, published in simplified Chinese as 《林中秘族》 (“The Secret Tribe in the Forest”)

Author: Hanya Yanagihara

Publisher: Anchor

Published: May 2014

This strange novel from 2013 is still, years on, one of my favorites. Hanya Yanagihara was then a magazine editor, and fiction was a sideline. The People in the Trees brought her some name and some attention, but it did not make her a star. What turned Yanagihara into a bestselling author was her second book, A Little Life, which landed with a shock in 2015. At more than 700 pages, A Little Life was praised from every direction, held a place on The New York Times bestseller list for weeks, and won Yanagihara a long list of literary prizes. But I have always thought The People in the Trees is her best work. Its imagination has no edges, and the questions it pushes us to think about have far more height and depth.

The People in the Trees tells the story of Norton, a scientist who discovers the secret of eternal youth on a small island west of Tahiti. The islanders eat the meat of a giant turtle to stay young forever, but the secret has a flaw: turtle meat keeps the body young and does nothing to stop the mind from aging. The scientist smuggles a turtle back to the United States to study, publishes a discovery that stuns the world, and wins a Nobel Prize. Drug companies and other scientists then descend on the island looking for a way to perfect the secret. No one succeeds, and the island withers. Norton, who never marries, is at the height of his fame and success accused by one of the many children he adopted from the island of years of sexual abuse, and goes to prison. After he is paroled he vanishes, and no one knows where he went.

A story this odd is hard to shake off years later. What the book does with science's fixation on the unknown, and with the human confusion over how to find real love, deserves applause. At the end, Norton says to the adopted son who accuses him, “I love you. I give you my heart.” Love that selfish leaves you pitying and furious at once — much as with Norton's pursuit of the unknown world and of science: is it right to go on chasing answers? Can an endless chase after real love be forgiven? Through a novel whose plot is genuinely shocking, Yanagihara handles a different kind of guilt: moral guilt, guilt that has nothing to do with law or with good and evil, guilt born of wanting and chasing too much. This novel is good. Very good.

Lean In, published in simplified Chinese as 《向前一步》 (“Step Forward”)

Author: Sheryl Sandberg

Publisher: Knopf

Published: March 2013

The second central figure at Facebook is its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. She graduated from Harvard Business School and held senior posts at Google before moving to Facebook. Sandberg, only in her forties, is what American society calls a woman who “has it all”: a brilliant career, a happy marriage, a son and a daughter. In the balance and the trade-offs between work and family, she has shown women the best possible example. Because she has lived it, Sandberg knows how much drive and how much stubbornness a woman needs to do well at both family and career. So alongside her work at Facebook she uses talks and this book, Lean In, to push all women forward. Don't treat giving up your own ambitions for your family as a matter of course, she argues, and don't spend the start of your career planning for the day you will quit and go home. Hold that attitude and your career momentum starts out lower than your male competitors', you end up achieving less than men do, and you find it easier to decide to leave work at the decisive moment. It is precisely because so many women underrate their own ability and believe family and career cannot both be managed that the number of women at chief-executive level never grows in a straight line, even as more and more women get a higher education.

Sandberg's very motivating book gives all women one governing rule: lean in. Leaning in means pressing ahead and throwing yourself in completely. She offers a great deal of useful advice, and the line most worth thinking about is “don't leave before you leave.” Many women, she notes, start easing off the moment they marry, or consider getting pregnant, or actually get pregnant. Holding back at those moments is always too early, she argues, and stopping too soon only makes it harder to catch up with your peers later. Keep your foot on the accelerator, she urges, and sprint until the moment you really do have to go, so that your return is worth more and comes with more confidence.

A call for confidence from Facebook's chief operating officer to women everywhere: it is hard not to find it rousing.

Book Review

Between the World and Me, published in traditional Chinese as 《在世界与我之间》

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Published: July 2015

Between Hope and Giving Up — Between the World and Me, the Most Important Book in Contemporary Black American Writing

By Hu Peiling

The German philosopher Nietzsche once wrote: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Nothing could be a better warning for the racial conflicts in America today. The Oscars ceremony protested that no Black actors had been nominated and, in the same breath, coldly made Asians the butt of a joke — has this kind of Black civil rights movement become another monster of racial discrimination? Beyoncé's much-argued-over performance of her new single Formation at the Super Bowl halftime show promoted “black beauty” and “black power,” and its message was that white people should step aside because she is the best. Does that, in the end, only build another Black myth, one that looks down on everyone else and is full of separatism?

The most important nonfiction book published in America last year, and the most representative work of nonfiction in contemporary Black American literature, Between the World and Me, walks exactly this dangerous line. The book takes the form of a letter from its author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to his 15-year-old son. As Coates describes, resists, reflects on and picks apart American society's racial bias against Black people, he sometimes holds a steady neutral ground and sometimes falls into the pit of demonizing or mythologizing himself. What is interesting is that he knows perfectly well that mythologizing Black history or Black power is not the answer, so across the whole book you feel the strain and the anxiety of a man walking back and forth between the two. How to fight entrenched power and insist on your own worth without the bluster that an inferiority complex breeds, or the self-deception of building yet another god — this is one of the biggest and hardest problems in the movement for racial equality. Coates resolves it by affirming, optimistically, the worth and even the superiority of Black people on one side, while insisting, pessimistically, on the other that Black people should never expect American society to treat them as equals, because racial injustice and discrimination in America will always be there.

So unlike the Black civil rights leaders and advocates before him — Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, or more recently President Obama — Coates refuses to hand out any hope or dream of equality; nor does he argue for the possibility of Black nationalism, as Malcolm X did. The message Coates gives Black Americans, his son included, is a cold, negative gray with none of the false glitter. Racial discrimination is a pain injected into his body, into his bones, a pain that could not be more real to Black people: the piercing pain of a body that is not yours to command, a body this society can trample and abuse and ruin as it pleases. Every word Coates writes is an accusation; every word is a blade. It is this honesty about the truth and its ugliness that has led many people, the Black American writer Toni Morrison among them, to call Coates the heir to James Baldwin, the famous Black writer and civil rights advocate. The book's letter form in fact follows Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, written to his nephew. But Coates differs from Baldwin in one large way: Baldwin's bold indictment of an unjust society was meant to encourage a younger generation of Black Americans to fight for the chance of equality, while Coates wipes that chance out completely. He writes his indictments not in hope of sympathy, understanding or a solution, but to tell Black Americans to give up on it, because history tells them they will never get a chance to turn things around, so there is no point arguing with American society about any of this, or proving anything to it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a columnist and reporter for The Atlantic. His articles dissect where Black Americans stand at every level of American society, and his prose is always sharp: it attacks the way white privilege is taken for granted over and over, and the way injustice toward Black people is papered over and over. His first long work of nonfiction, The Beautiful Struggle (2008), established his distinctive cool, gray register. The essays that followed — “Fear of a Black President” in 2012 and “The Case for Reparations” in 2014 — carried him to the peak of his writing career. Coates can call up the history of Black struggle at will; he can explain the psychological structures behind the beatings Black people repeatedly take from the police; and he has no hesitation about going after Obama, the Black president America worked so hard to elect. All of it has made him the most important Black commentator of the Obama years.

Coates sees the condition of Black Americans very differently from Obama, which is why many people read Between the World and Me as his answer to Obama's eight years in office. Obama was the first American president with Black ancestry, yet he rarely turned to race directly while in office. Across both terms his answer to racial conflict was always “hope,” “empathy” or “integration.” He painted a rose-tinted future and asked people to believe in a present with no racial problem, only a class problem. But Obama is not a descendant of American slaves, and he did not grow up in a poor Black city forever on the edge of unrest and explosion, the way Coates grew up in Baltimore. Those differences make Obama's Black identity less heavy, less absolute, less impossible to shake off. Coates argues that if a Black identity born in poverty and raised amid street riots hems you in and binds you from childhood on, then talk of empathy is a castle in the air, because in society's eyes, and among the options life hands you, you will never be offered the choice of “not being Black.” If you can never step outside that identity, how can you talk about empathy at all? Obama's calls for “empathy” or “integration” are, to Coates, no better than asking why the starving don't eat meat.

So Between the World and Me plainly strikes a posture of refusal toward what Obama proposes. Coates does not talk about empathy and he does not talk about integration; he says no to (white) American society and only urges Black Americans to find their own worth in the war against it. His argument, besides being thoroughly despairing, can fairly be called thoroughly inward-looking and withdrawn. This posture of saying no leads to an extreme that is unsettling. One passage in the book takes up September 11: Coates watches lower Manhattan burned to ash and feels nothing, because his life already held too many tragedies. He watches white police officers and firefighters rushing in to help, and the whole country filled with a sense of unity, and he finds it absurd, because, he says, these heroic rescuers are “no different” from the police officers who shot his friend dead. But the question is: does being failed justify indifference? Does the difficulty of asking for empathy justify withholding even plain sympathy? Does the question of race sit above every other question? Outside the frame of racial argument, outside the problems Black people face, can Coates see, or feel, or care about anything else?

In one interview Coates said he is not a cynic, he is only stating the facts. There is no doubt, as Toni Morrison said, that anyone who wants to understand how tension between Black and white Americans rose and fell in the Obama years, or to analyze the changes in social structure, will find Coates's Between the World and Me an absolute “must read.” What we might think about, though, is whether there is more possibility, more of a way out, beyond and after “stating the facts.” In the end, a message for the age that offers the future no hope at all may get only the most hopeless future.

(This piece first appeared on the website Books.com.tw on March 8, 2016; some renderings have been adjusted.)

Cover image from: nytimes