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caleb_tankersley's review
5.0
Inventive and heartbreaking. Lily Hoang is one of the most underappreciated writers out there today.
dandelionfluff's review
4.0
Really, really different. At first I thought it was poetry, but it's really a novel set in the pattern of the I Ching. For anyone looking for something nontraditional, and maybe even a bit mysterious and confusing, I recommend this to you.
meganmilks's review
5.0
i just reread a lot of CHANGING to teach it in a class on innovative writing and holy cow. this book is sui generis.
i wrote a review a long time ago - here's an excerpt [ETA: This book is a NOVEL not memoir and I regret this error which repeats throughout the review]:
In Changing, Hoang translates her life into the “I Ching”, and vice versa, telling her reader’s fortune by narrating her own. The “I Ching” is changed: transformed into a linguistic organism that is highly idiosyncratic while retaining the source text’s enigmatic force and capacity for interpretive proliferation. In its unusual form the narrative works multivalently, functioning as novel, memoir, prophecy, and fairy tale as much as it functions as an (albeit loose) English-language translation of a Chinese text.
Visually structured after the “I Ching”, Changing’s 64 chapters correspond to the source text’s 64 hexagrams. Hoang’s translation interprets the hexagram—traditionally six stacked horizontal lines that are either broken (Yin) or unbroken (Yang)—as six discrete text blocks, some of which are broken into two columns.
Some of these text blocks are directive, instructing the reader in how to read; others, similarly meta, deal with the process of translation; some take up the story of Mother and Father and their immigration to Houston; others of Brother, or of Sister, both of whom are dealing with personal crises; others of little girl (the child version of the narrator); and arguably the most central thread follows with searing honesty the story of the narrator’s romantic relationship, her lover being one of two “you”s in the book (the other “you” is the reader).
Meanwhile, yet another thread involves retelling Western fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Jack and Jill—with important changes. These different tales are sometimes merged, Jack and Jill becoming Hansel and Gretel, Jill showing up again later as a girl who lives with the woman who lives in the shoe. Often these tales are deployed to demonstrate issues of gender and power that run through the other threads. Always, they show the narrator appropriating and revising familiar stories as she makes sense of them for her own experience.
...
This kind of opening up of the reading experience, allowing us multiple paths to follow, fits well with the overarching theme of the book, which insists on change, on evolution, on multiplicity of meaning, but also on repetition and the shaky determinism of destiny. Changing proposes story as divination, divination as story: there is a tension here, a moving back and forth between what has happened, what will happen, what must have happened, what must happen. In Changing, we are made to reckon with that vexing struggle between possibility and fate.
i wrote a review a long time ago - here's an excerpt [ETA: This book is a NOVEL not memoir and I regret this error which repeats throughout the review]:
In Changing, Hoang translates her life into the “I Ching”, and vice versa, telling her reader’s fortune by narrating her own. The “I Ching” is changed: transformed into a linguistic organism that is highly idiosyncratic while retaining the source text’s enigmatic force and capacity for interpretive proliferation. In its unusual form the narrative works multivalently, functioning as novel, memoir, prophecy, and fairy tale as much as it functions as an (albeit loose) English-language translation of a Chinese text.
Visually structured after the “I Ching”, Changing’s 64 chapters correspond to the source text’s 64 hexagrams. Hoang’s translation interprets the hexagram—traditionally six stacked horizontal lines that are either broken (Yin) or unbroken (Yang)—as six discrete text blocks, some of which are broken into two columns.
Some of these text blocks are directive, instructing the reader in how to read; others, similarly meta, deal with the process of translation; some take up the story of Mother and Father and their immigration to Houston; others of Brother, or of Sister, both of whom are dealing with personal crises; others of little girl (the child version of the narrator); and arguably the most central thread follows with searing honesty the story of the narrator’s romantic relationship, her lover being one of two “you”s in the book (the other “you” is the reader).
Meanwhile, yet another thread involves retelling Western fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Jack and Jill—with important changes. These different tales are sometimes merged, Jack and Jill becoming Hansel and Gretel, Jill showing up again later as a girl who lives with the woman who lives in the shoe. Often these tales are deployed to demonstrate issues of gender and power that run through the other threads. Always, they show the narrator appropriating and revising familiar stories as she makes sense of them for her own experience.
...
This kind of opening up of the reading experience, allowing us multiple paths to follow, fits well with the overarching theme of the book, which insists on change, on evolution, on multiplicity of meaning, but also on repetition and the shaky determinism of destiny. Changing proposes story as divination, divination as story: there is a tension here, a moving back and forth between what has happened, what will happen, what must have happened, what must happen. In Changing, we are made to reckon with that vexing struggle between possibility and fate.
coffeeandink's review
an experimental novella/long prose poem about the recurring conflicts and relationships in the life of a young Vietnamese American woman, with a structure modeled on the I Ching, and recurrent imagery from "Jack and Jill." The unnamed narrator (the little girl, the sister little sister) disagrees frequently with the Translator, and the reader, whom she addresses directly, is sometimes "you lover" and sometimes "you reader" (the reader of her narrative, the reader of the oracles). As far as I can tell, this succeeds in what it sets out to do, but what it sets out to do doesn't appeal to me.
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