Disorientation

Description

NYPL Young Lions Finalist * Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * A New York Times Editors’ Choice Book * A Best Book of 2022 by NPR, Vogue, Jezebel and Book Riot * A Malala Book Club Pick * A Phenomenal Book Club Pick
 
A Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness ignites eye-opening revelations and chaos on a college campus in this outrageously hilarious and startingly tender debut novel

Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about “Chinese-y” things again. But after years of grueling research, all she has to show for her efforts are a junk food addiction and stomach pain. When she accidentally stumbles upon a curious note in the Chou archives one afternoon, it looks like her ticket out of academic hell.

But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, upending her entire life and the lives of those around her. What follows is a roller coaster of mishaps and misadventures, from book burnings and OTC drug hallucinations, to hot-button protests and Yellow Peril 2.0 propaganda. As the events Ingrid instigated keep spiraling, she’ll have to confront her sticky relationship to white men and white institutions—and, most of all, herself.

A blistering send-up of privilege and power, and a profound reckoning of individual complicity and unspoken rage, in Disorientation Elaine Hsieh Chou asks who gets to tell our stories—and how the story changes when we finally tell it ourselves.“[F]unny and insightful, with plenty to say about art, identity, Orientalism and the politics of academia.” —New York Times Book Review

“The hyperactive satire is so consistently funny it almost makes the reader forget about the serious societal issues that undergird the humor . . . Disorientation does what great comedies and satires are supposed to do: make you laugh while forcing you to ponder the uncomfortable implications of every punchline.” —The Washington Post

“[A] literary satire that takes a hilarious and refreshingly honest look at the power dynamics of college campuses . . . This one will have you rolling over with laughter and texting your college group chat.” —NPR, Books We Love 2022

“A rollicking, whip-smart ride through the hallowed halls of academia.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“The pleasures of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s campus satire are in high supply . . . In the tradition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Chou has written a delightful new chapter of dark academia.” —Vogue

“As the best comedy does, Disorientation manages to highlight uncomfortable truths, capture gray areas and hard lines, and resist sliding into easy binaries of heroes and villains.” —Vanity Fair, Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month

“[H]ilarious and harrowing… Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation is a rollicking satire of graduate-school life, Asian-American overachievers, and the peculiar injustices of the university . . . Disorientation is a page-turner studded with razor-sharp one-liners . . . Its twists and turns propel the plot while skewering topics from anti–affirmative action sentiment among Asian Americans to the jargon-heavy stylings of academic prose to the diabolically chameleonic quality of the American right. Along the way, Ingrid’s archival mystery leads her out of her dissertation funk and into a tangle of betrayal and deception that forces her to reevaluate her own self-deceiving beliefs about what it means to be an Asian scholar and an Asian woman in America.” —New York Review of Books

“This book has so many stifle-a-strangled-laugh lines you might want to refrain from reading it in a library or a train’s quiet car. Chou’s novel is a send-up of the polite, cardigan-draped white supremacy of liberal arts colleges . . . Between hiring a private investigator, staging a break in, flooding a gender neutral bathroom, and smoking weed with a professor, she uncovers a shocking truth—an act of racism in the academic world that had gone unnoticed for decades . . . In an entertaining takedown, Chou explores who the university really belongs to.” —Glamour

“This funny, fearless debut novel about a student’s dissertation on a fictional poet dives into the maelstrom of topical arguments about race and comes up fighting . . . [Disorientation] gets candid about the concept of model minorities, the stickiness of inter-racial dating and the way misogyny violently affects Asian women.” —The Observer

“[Disorientation] is captivating, irresistible, and intensely readable, and what we ultimately come to literature to find . . . The book expands in scope with each passing page, integrating newer and more experimental forms and swallowing larger subject matter. We begin at the campus novel, at critiques of university hierarchy, and end up considering all of American politics and the evolution of racism, fetishism, and social stratification . . . [W]hat Disorientation shows us is that there is power in the page-turner, that literary merit and a unique, propelling story are not mutually exclusive.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Fans of blistering American satires like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown won’t want to miss Elaine Hsieh Chou’s electrifying debut Disorientation, which turns the campus novel on its head with its portrait of a Taiwanese American PhD student lost in her own research. Taking on fraught topics like appropriation and the ‘model minority’ in academia, it goes big in the best way, announcing an exciting new voice.” —Chicago Review of Books, 12 Must-Read Books of March

“[A] page-turning, thrilling satire of American academia, tangled in literary mystery . . . Ingrid blossoms in a complex coming-to-consciousness as she discovers racial power dynamics and incommensurable concepts of identity. Chou skewers Sinophobes and Sinophiles alike with wit as sharp as a samurai sword mounted on a white guy’s bedroom wall. The writing is almost intolerably funny: intolerable only because the wellspring of Disorientation’s satire is our racist reality. As Ocean Vuong writes: ‘I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.’ Elaine Hsieh Chou is out for blood.” —The Saturday Paper

“Both deeply moving and rivetingly funny, Disorientation is a master class in satire with surprises around every corner. It is a roaring meditation on the ivory tower and Asian American identity that does not mince words about anyone in its illustrious cast of characters. Chou’s first foray into fiction left my mind sharp, my heart full, and my belly weak from laughter.” —Foreign Policy

“If there is one book you read this year, let it be Disorientation . . . [L]ucid and hilarious and hopeful and grim; in the same absurd style of Paul Beatty, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s intellectually sexy book hits all the hot topic arguments of Asian American discourse and higher education identity politics. She lays out the ideological stakes—the personhood of Asian women as people, not objects—and the threat posed by pervasive and internalized racism.” —The Michigan Daily

“Addressing weighty issues with humour is quite a difficult task for many writers—but Elaine Hsieh Chou has accomplished that and more in her explosive debut novel. Disorientation is hilarious and entertaining, while also examining racism and politics in academia, societal changes, and the importance of telling your own story. It’s not every day that we get a laugh out loud satire, sharp cultural commentary, literary fiction, mystery, and a relatable heroine in one book.” —Malala Literati Book Club, April 2022 Selection

“Chou’s distinct, self-effacing voice makes for a fun ride into a highly charged realm, with a plot that naturally escalates as she looks into various claims about truth in art, who appropriates whom, the limits of allyship, and how we gaslight ourselves in order to accept everyday racial horrors. Chou reflects a world that’s complex and entertaining, one that will leave readers with a renewed perspective.” —Booklist, Starred Review

“Calling [Disorientation] merely satire about a racial awakening isn’t enough . . . I was not the same person at the end of reading this book that I was before reading it.” —Book Riot, The Best Books of 2022 So Far

“[S]earing satire . . . Chou details her protagonist’s struggles with dry humor and wit.” —Time

“Chou’s debut novel is a provocative, satirical take on academia, full of surprising twists.” —Time, Best Books of March 2022

“Disorientation is a deeply smart, satirical novel that takes a critical look at racism in academia.” — Buzzfeed

“[A] gleeful satire about student activism and academic bluster.” —Financial Times, The Best Debut Fiction

“A fresh, hilarious and thoughtful satire that’ll make you think about cultural identity in a whole new way.” —Good Housekeeping, The 15 Best and Most-Anticipated Books of 2022

“A deft twist on the campus satire.” —Vulture, Notable New Releases

“Chou’s debut novel is a searing literary satire of campus politics.” —Entertainment Weekly, The Best New Books to Read in March

“Disorientation satirizes academia, PC culture and every other topic it touches, bringing into question the very etymology of its title . . . Though you would never know it from how fun this wild ride is, Disorientation is a seminar bursting with lessons on race, gender and culture, complete with a bibliographical Notes section and everything. Chou clearly did her research.” —Associated Press

“Disorientation has been called a campus satire, but it’s also so much more. In it, I found a lifetime’s worth of self-interrogation and growth. Lessons on how to survive and fight when your entire life is consistently and flippantly diminished by strangers . . . Elaine Hsieh Chou will be one of the foremost voices of our time.” —Singapore Unbound

“Here is a writer whose rage and acerbic wit is both a joy and a relief. Sometimes surreal, always sharp, and wonderfully capacious, Disorientation is the whodunnit we need right now.” —The Adroit Journal

“Disorientation is an inventive campus novel that satirizes academia in an over-the-top, compulsively readable mystery . . .  [N]ot only an outrageously enjoyable academic mystery, but also a moving portrayal of self-discovery.” —Ploughshares

“Gleefully dark and incisive . . . Chou’s examination of the catch-22s faced by Asian Americans, particularly women, straddles the line between satiric and searing . . . Disorientation is the best combination of entertaining and thought-provoking, and Chou is an exciting new voice in novel-length fiction.” —Shelf Awareness

“An epic novel of satire, an intelligent romp with sparkling tender moments.” —SNACK Magazine

“[A] deeply smart (and funny) satire on the pressures, power imbalances, and racism within the academic world.” —theSkimm

“Disorientation takes us on a whirlwind romp that combines academic satire with a who-dunnit mystery thriller.” —Electric Literature
 
“No one is left spared from critique in Chou’s satire, much to the reader’s delight. Anyone who has experienced the pretension of academia, thought extensively about racial dating preferences, or reveled in takedowns of white institutions will find much to cackle about while reading these pages. But Disorientation shines most in its ability to give Asian American readers an entry point to examine and forgive their own potential hypocrisies.” —The Cosmos Book Club

“Chou effectively skewers a world that takes itself all too seriously . . . This will charm a wide set of readers, not just those pursuing PhDs.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Disorientation is a multivalent pleasure, a deeply original debut novel that reinvents the campus novel satire as an Asian American literary studies whodunnit, in which the murder victim might be your idea of yourself—no matter how you identify. I often held my breath until I laughed and I wouldn’t dare compare it or Chou to anyone writing now. Wickedly funny and knowing, Chou’s dagger wit is sure-eyed, intent on what feels like a decolonization of her protagonist, if not the reader, that just might set her free.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Disorientation is an irreverent campus satire that skewers white sclerotic academia, creepy Asian fetishists and twee boba liberalism, but lastly and most importantly, it’s a satire, inspired by recent controversies, about an orientalist tradition and its manifestations today. Helmed by a memorable screwball protagonist, the novel is both a joyous and sharply-drawn caper.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

“Chou’s pen is a scalpel. Disorientation addresses the private absurdities the soul must endure to get free, from tokenism, the quiet exploitation of well-meaning institutions, and the bondage that is self-imposed. Chou does it with wit and verve, and no one is spared.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster

“Disorientation is the funniest novel I’ve read all year . . . This uproarious tale of a young woman’s quest to uncover the truth about the world’s most famous Chinese American poet is packed full of sly truths about race, love, and life in general—all of which you’re going to miss, because you’ll be laughing so hard.” —Aravind Adiga, author of The White TigerElaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and NYFA Artist Fellow, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares, The Atlantic and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2023 Fred R. Brown Literary Award. Her short story collection WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM is forthcoming from Penguin Press. Find her at www.elainehsiehchou.com

Chapter 1 The Curious Note

 

On September ninth, Ingrid Yang could be found cramped over a desk, left foot fallen asleep, right middle finger bruised from writing. She had Xiao-Wen Chou on the mind, so much so that his allusions and alliterations seemed to spill from her every orifice: ears, mouth, nose, vagina. She was chewing at the ends of her hair, then sniffing the paintbrush-like bunches, before scratching at the papery patches of eczema on her ankles. Her eyes were pink veined and sore from having slept three hours the previous night, punctuated by unnecessary trips to the bathroom. She simply sat on the toilet with her eyes closed, nothing going out of, or into, her body.

 

Even on the occasions she did manage to sleep through the night, Ingrid was plagued by a constant, pinching pain in her stomach. Sometimes she imagined, hopefully, that she was developing ulcers. No one could fault her for failing her dissertation because of stomach ulcers, could they? Pneumonia, then? What about mono? But how to contract these illnesses was another question entirely. There was always the black market-or perhaps she simply had to attend an undergrad frat party.

 

Pulling her laptop close, she searched “how to contract mono,” followed by “top ten deathly illnesses.”

 

No, Ingrid Yang was not doing well.

 

She was twenty-nine years old and in mounting debt from her undergraduate degree. Four years ago, she had passed her comprehensive exams and started her dissertation. This year, the eighth and final year of her PhD, her funding would run out-an unhappy situation in any circumstance, but compounded by the fact that her student loan deferral was expiring. Somehow, in spite of all this financial doom and gloom, this was also the year she had to produce two hundred fifty pages on Xiao-Wen Chou. And not just any two hundred fifty pages-they had to be shockingly original and convincing! Enough to pass muster with her exacting advisor and an even more exacting dissertation committee. Enough to secure her the prestigious postdoc fellowship created in Xiao-Wen Chou’s name.

 

But after hundreds of hair-pulling hours spent at the archive, all she had accomplished was fifty pages of scrambled notes on Chou’s use of enjambment. Plus an addiction to antacids.

 

Make no mistake, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried. She had come up with ideas of her own! Chou’s poetic sprawl representing the eternal inner conflict between eastern selflessness and western individuality. Assimilation into American society in Chou’s poetry. The theme of familial deference in Chou’s poetry. Chou’s poetry and the impossibility of cultural translation. Chou’s poetry and the longing for irretrievably lost motherland and mother tongue, etc.

 

The problem was that some other scholar had, of course, already written about it. No other Chinese American poet had been so widely read in America, had been so consistently analyzed and reprinted year after year. The so-called Chinese Robert Frost was taught to students in high schools and colleges all across the country (and occasionally in advanced middle school classes). In every bookstore and library, a good twelve inches of space were devoted to his prolific work. Even those who wanted nothing to do with literature, who could not tell you Chou’s name much less how to spell it, had nonetheless come into contact with his poems. In restaurants, dentist offices and middle-class homes, his quotations adorned boxes of tea, wall decorations and watercolor calendars. Xiao-Wen Chou was loved and respected-more so after he passed away from pancreatic cancer seven years ago.

 

What could Ingrid possibly offer on the late canonical poet no one else had? She had memorized Chou’s poems backwards and forwards, riffled through innumerable archive boxes, worn out her copy of his biography, read incomprehensible secondary sources, read them a third time. She had even attended a pricey international conference in the hopes of gently plagiarizing some Argentinian or Swedish scholar’s paper. When she was still a TA, she had surreptitiously assigned her undergrads essay prompts that fed directly into her own research. She had let her other interests fall to the wayside, not to mention healthy eating and exercise. She had postponed planning her wedding for another year. From the moment she woke up to the moment she tried to sleep, Chouian sonnets, villanelles, odes and elegies consumed her. What more could she possibly do? Hire a ghostwriter?

 

Alas, Ingrid was approaching the problem as though it held a logical solution. There was another reason behind her dissertation woes: she had never wanted to research Chou in the first place.

 

 

As an undergraduate student at Barnes University, Ingrid had not known what to major in. She plodded along in her general education classes, dozing off in Physics of Music and floundering in Beginning Russian, all while fretting over her aimless, and expensive, academic taste testing. Unlike her classmates, who adhered to strict ten-year plans on becoming a CEO (of what, they hadn’t decided yet), Ingrid didn’t know what she was good at or what she loved.

 

Then, to fulfill a writing requirement, she enrolled in Early 20th-Century Poetry taught by Professor Newman.

 

Judith Newman didn’t walk into a room; the room opened up to accommodate her. She had terrifying pale blue eyes and cropped silver hair and dressed like she was on her way to an avant-garde art exhibit in Berlin. She made the auditorium erect with attention. Even the boys in Ingrid’s other classes, who were always shoehorning an obscure philosopher into every single discussion in a bid to win their professors’ admiration, were awed into submission. Judith taught without notes, for one thing, and without the crutch of technology (she pitied her colleagues who relied on Word Art graphics to dazzle bored undergrads). She paced back and forth in front of the blackboard, stopping only to unexpectedly call on a trembling student. When Judith lectured on modernist poetry, it seemed to Ingrid as though she were pulling back the curtain of reality. What was once a poem was now an ideological stance on language, war, life, death! She was seduced by the modernist obsession with form over content, the abstract over the concrete (suffice it to say, classes on postcolonial and feminist lit made her feel . . . uncomfortable).

 

And so Ingrid fell into the arms of her first great love. She spent hours in the library fashioning a poem into something greater than what was written on the page. While her roommate gave a halfhearted hand job to a lacrosse player in the top bunk bed, she hid under her covers with a flashlight in the company of Stein and Mallarmé. Analyzing poetry was cool-it was like literary detective work. Did people actually believe a poem about a red wheelbarrow was about a red wheelbarrow? Philistines! It was about existential dread, obviously. Ingrid derived no greater satisfaction than from spotting what swam beneath the surface of words.

 

And she was good at it. Her paper “Words That Won’t Stop Proliferating: Waste, Différance and the Loss of Center in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land” had received a rare, highly coveted A from Professor Newman. At the end of the semester, she invited Ingrid along with four other students to dine at her house. And what a house it was! Professor Newman’s interior design scheme was in fact modeled after an avant-garde art exhibit in Berlin. It was nothing like Ingrid’s parents’ house, which was cluttered, tacky and did not feature a marble bidet in every bathroom.

 

Judith was married to a bearded philosophy professor who possessed dual Italian citizenship and, from what Ingrid could tell, excellent calves. For that evening’s dinner, he cooked homemade pasta with clams and whipped up a tiramisu for dessert that somehow tasted . . . erotic. They were parents to twins who sagely commented on the day’s foreign policy scandals, as if they weren’t still dependent on training wheels.

 

Ingrid gazed at the perfect family before her, woozy with thirty-year-old wine and imported shellfish, and that was when she knew: she was meant to be a professor of modernist literature. Just like Judith Newman.

 

Being a professor would resolve several of Ingrid’s hang-ups, one of which was the intellectual shortage she felt the moment she’d stepped onto campus. While her classmates compared notes about reading a Dickens novel at age ten and watching a Truffaut film at age thirteen, she looked down at her lap. Her parents had never bought her such books or rented her such movies. It was like she arrived at college missing half the baggage they’d been prepackaged with.

 

Then, too, was the latent fear someone like her was not supposed to be good at English. In first grade, she had been placed in remedial English not because it wasn’t her first language, but because she had been too shy to speak up in class. Then, in sixth grade, her English teacher had accused her of plagiarizing her Of Mice and Men essay because she’d used the word “thus.”

 

Added to that, Ingrid was obsessive and neurotic, traits well suited for academia. The real world, or nonacademic world, frightened her with its largeness and unknownness-far better to cozily burrow into old texts, to safely engage with dead authors who couldn’t talk back to her. To live inside the past was to debark from contemporary events and concerns, floating away until she landed on a minuscule, highly specialized planet where only a dozen other beings spoke the same language. Ingrid could conceive of nothing better.

 

She even imagined an entirely new wardrobe to match her future title as Professor Yang: brooches, sensible but devastatingly fashionable eyeglasses, perfume that reminded people of their great-aunt (in a good way).

 

But when she asked Judith to be her senior thesis advisor, Ingrid was met with a cruel shock: Judith was leaving the English department to join the Comparative Literature department.

 

“C-Comp Lit?” she stuttered.

 

“Don’t look so surprised, Ingrid. Modernism and deconstruction and post-structuralism-it’s all a dying field,” every other word punctuated by a quick half smile. “Now comparative literature, on the other hand. Being able to move between mediums, be it film or graphic novels-that’s where the future of academia lies. You want to think past the degree, consider what job opportunities are out there. It’s a tough game, academia. You need to have a unique . . . angle.”

 

Here Judith squeezed her hands together, and, Ingrid imagined, her thighs under the desk.

 

“And your particular background is so unique, Ingrid. It doesn’t have to be a disadvantage-it can be an advantage. Do you understand what I mean?”

 

Ingrid nodded enthusiastically and jotted down the words “unique” and “advantage” in her notebook.

 

“Good. I’m glad we’re on the same page. In fact, you’d be perfect for a new project I’m working on.” Judith paused. “Research assistantships are usually reserved for graduate students, but I could make an exception for you.”

 

And so Ingrid, being neither Japanese nor interested in Japan, wrote her thesis on Japanese silent film from the 1920s. Afterwards, the jump from Comp Lit to East Asian Studies was a relatively short one. When Judith was poached by a more well-endowed university, she left Ingrid with a parting gift: a new academic advisor, Michael Bartholomew, a “dear colleague” of Judith’s.

 

“I know you’re interested in pursuing a PhD,” she said. “Talk to Michael. He’ll know exactly what to do.”

 

 

Barnes University made up the center of Wittlebury, Massachusetts. It was a private research university of some one thousand undergraduate students and nearly double that amount in its graduate programs. Founded in 1889, it was not a top-tier nor a lower-tier university. It was a firmly middling institution, propped up by private donations, nepotism and one illustrious (former) professor: Xiao-Wen Chou. The campus was attractive, with redbrick buildings scattered between green lawns, clusters of well-groomed trees and a quad designed to discourage protests.

 

Inside the main library’s basement was the Xiao-Wen Chou archive. Acquired after his death, it housed all the distinguished poet’s books, journals, secondary sources, published reviews, letters, personal photographs and other miscellany. In addition to the archivist’s desk were eight large desks, each furnished with a globe lamp. The dark mahogany walls were accented with photographs of Chou and prints of traditional Chinese paintings, characterized by plum tree blossoms, mountains, cranes, peasant women bent over rice paddies, that sort of thing. Chou’s book covers looked more or less identical, though they also featured flowery fans and chopsticks resting delicately on porcelain bowls.

 

Ingrid got up from her desk, left foot still asleep, and hobbled to the archivist’s desk. She planned to check out box number fifteen, the same one she’d examined yesterday, and guessed it would be an equally fruitless endeavor, but what other choice did she have? She needed to kill time, as if it were a thing with a neck she could wrap her hands around until it produced, say, an original and convincing idea.

 

She stood before the archivist, smiling widely, hoping Margaret Hong would smile back at her. They had never exchanged many words, but Ingrid liked to imagine they shared an unspoken intimacy. She spent a significant amount of time studying her instead of the archive materials.

 

Margaret only ever wore thick brocade embroidered with vulgar-looking peonies, peacocks or pagodas. After stalking her online, Ingrid learned she sewed them herself and sold them for exorbitant prices. She kept a packet of salted dried plums in her desk drawer, which she discreetly sucked on and indiscreetly spat into a napkin stashed in the same drawer. Ingrid often saw her slip her shoes off to stretch her plump toes in their sheer stockings. When she thought no one was looking, she’d cough and reach around to the back of her skirt, where Ingrid surmised she was ungluing her underwear from between her derriere. Word around the archive had it that Margaret was either a martial arts grandmaster or the heiress to a catnip fortune or on the run from the Bulgarian government.

 

Most recently, Ingrid liked to picture Margaret having an illicit affair with Daryl Abrams-Wu, the lanky archive intern. Daryl habitually wore a spiked dog collar, painted his nails black and maintained a long slick of hair strategically placed over one eye.

 

“I said, did you reserve the box online,” Margaret repeated.

 

The image of Margaret straddling Daryl on the accessible toilet evaporated.

 

“Uh, no. Sorry.”

 

Margaret sighed heavily, as if Ingrid were the most useless archive visitor she had ever encountered. Ingrid watched her walk to the back and return with a gray box and a pair of white cotton gloves.

 

“Thanks!” she said with a forced smile.

 

Margaret didn’t smile back. Perhaps things weren’t going well with Daryl.

 

Ingrid carried box number fifteen to her desk and yawned. For an hour, her gaze alternated between her laptop and legal pad. She wrote one sentence, then crossed it out. Typed another one, then deleted it. Clicked undo, changed a preposition, then deleted it again.

US

Additional information

Weight	12 oz
Dimensions	0.8700 × 5.5000 × 8.4200 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780593298374
ISBN-10	0593298373
Author	Elaine Hsieh Chou
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC054000, FIC052000
Subjects	asian fiction, FIC052000, satire, Taiwanese, humor books, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, satire fiction, humorous books, FIC054000, asian authors, higher education, liberal arts, yellowface, yellow face, cultural appropriation, Taiwanese American, PhD, campus satire, gifts for women, fiction, novel, book club books, humor, novels, funny, asian, poetry, graduation gifts, Literature, funny books, literary fiction, academia, books for women, book club recommendations, contemporary fiction, Asian American, dark academia, funny gifts
Format	General Trade