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A review by mandirigma
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin
3.0
I’m prone to giving books high marks if I actually manage to finish them. This one was weird — it was easy to keep turning the pages, but I was unable to put it down because I wanted more, and I kept hoping I’d find it on the next page. I don’t know if it’s just that this book comes highly recommended by all the blogs that maybe I just expected too much.
The premise was compelling to me: a Taiwanese immigrant family living in poverty in 1980’s Alaska, and dealing with the loss of the youngest child. In the first chapter, ten year old Gavin comes home from school with meningitis, and he wakes up a week later to find out that his younger sister also contracted meningitis but didn’t survive. The book details the slow unraveling of this family, and it’s almost too slow.
The characters — especially the parents — often acted in ways I didn’t understand, and while this could’ve easily been explained as a side effect of grief, the prose was too spare and vague and created too much distance between me and the characters to get me there. The pacing was weird in parts, and it made the climax frustrating to read through.
There’s a really important thread here, though. (And this might be a spoiler.) The father is ambivalent about Taiwan and seems wholly uninterested in going back to visit, despite both being unable to let go of (or unable to stop lying about) his accomplishments back in his homeland and also being so afraid of America that he refuses to ask for help from others. This is such an important part of the Asian male immigrant experience. However, we don’t really get the gravity of this until the final third of the book.
This might have just been a matter of taste, but I needed more from this book.
The premise was compelling to me: a Taiwanese immigrant family living in poverty in 1980’s Alaska, and dealing with the loss of the youngest child. In the first chapter, ten year old Gavin comes home from school with meningitis, and he wakes up a week later to find out that his younger sister also contracted meningitis but didn’t survive. The book details the slow unraveling of this family, and it’s almost too slow.
The characters — especially the parents — often acted in ways I didn’t understand, and while this could’ve easily been explained as a side effect of grief, the prose was too spare and vague and created too much distance between me and the characters to get me there. The pacing was weird in parts, and it made the climax frustrating to read through.
There’s a really important thread here, though. (And this might be a spoiler.) The father is ambivalent about Taiwan and seems wholly uninterested in going back to visit, despite both being unable to let go of (or unable to stop lying about) his accomplishments back in his homeland and also being so afraid of America that he refuses to ask for help from others. This is such an important part of the Asian male immigrant experience. However, we don’t really get the gravity of this until the final third of the book.
This might have just been a matter of taste, but I needed more from this book.