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For Today I Am a Trans Writer

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-2815174

2328-9260

Aaron Raz Link,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

More than anything else, For Today I Am a Boy is a good book. Its spare prose says much with few words, a job not easy to do well and harder to do well without sounding like an imitation of Ernest Hemingway. In Kim Fu's capable hands, the language evokes instead the determination of native Cantonese speakers using English, the minimalism of a good one-liner, and the habit of years of words not said. The style matches the story. It's a tale of the children of immigrants, strangers in a strange land that is also their own. Immigration is perhaps the closest suitable metaphor for transsexual experience, and the novel's protagonist is a transsexual woman who has no idea transition is possible and no language to describe her life. But this book's cardinal virtue is that neither the immigrant nor the transsexual experience here is a metaphor for something else. Both are nuanced and necessary realities of their own. The writer uses them as a specific lens through which readers discover larger human realities: the tension between individuality and belonging, love, family, and the way unrealized dreams may seduce and destroy us while the tangible imperfection of realized ones can set us free.The protagonist spends most of the story as Peter Huang. (Fu's humor is always skillfully integrated, not always subtle. This reviewer found it evocative of both family legends and the realities of transsexual life.) Peter's Chinese name, Juan Chuan, hovers constantly, a present ghost; it means Powerful King. The novel begins with conflicting tales of the character's birth: the mother's, the butcher's at the meat store where she goes into labor, the protagonist's reconstruction of events. Juan Chuan is all we are told of the father's story. Much of the early part of the novel unpacks the meaning held in those two words, the last he ever speaks in Cantonese. In a book too busy being a good novel to be “about gender,” the words stand not for the evils of male hegemony but for the desperate hope of a man who left everything behind in order to become someone and discovered the only someone he could become would be a five-foot-tall Chinese immigrant with a thick accent in a small Canadian town. Juan Chuan embodies the dream of a next generation in which the unrealized dreams of the last may live. “Without you,” the father says, teaching his six-year-old to shave, “I die—no king.” Meanwhile, the mother dreams she is a dead pig, Cantonese food. She gives birth to three girls and a boy who turns out to be a fourth. She is notable mostly for her absence in their lives. After forty years in a small Canadian town, when she outlives her husband and finally does try to show up, she is turned away at the American border as an illegal Chinese immigrant. Peter is the protagonist of the novel and the narrative follows her story. But how all four siblings come to terms with the ways they both are and are not like the generation before them—and the people around them—is the book's central question.This is not a question the people around them can answer, for the Huang sisters understand as young people from the dominant culture rarely do that family and history cannot be denied away. Each generation must either be made to fit the family story or make the family story fit them. In the end, Peter chooses to do the latter. Fu makes clear that Peter's choice is interwoven with the choices of her sisters. One of the book's themes is that the individual choices we make to imprison or release ourselves both mirror and facilitate the same choices in others, particularly in families. The oldest daughter escapes the life of a prodigy to join a slacker commune in Europe; the next becomes a hard-nosed lawyer who drinks too much; and the youngest, a bohemian rebel. Peter, who spends her childhood clandestinely cooking for the family and worshipping an Italian matron on the Food Channel, becomes a chef.The book's tone is often funny, but never flippant, and can also be grim; the terrible seriousness of boys in dead-end rural towns and the macho power plays in tony restaurant kitchens are seen here with dry-eyed clarity. But Fu uses them to reveal, as few books with trans characters do, that boorish working men are as likely to be accepting as anyone else. Difficult circumstances are handled with sly humor: the young protagonist's infatuation with a character she knows only as Chef, a kind of rollicking pastiche of Anthony Bourdain, and her dalliance with a fundamentalist Christian ex-gay movement and a self-hating “ex-lesbian” who also wants to be married. The book's pain and laughter come from the same source, a narrative voice wise enough to know, as in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, that everyone has their reasons.The author plays out her themes of love and belonging with food. Even more than clothing, food is the barometer of situations and relationships, and its images here are often unforgettable: hands grown tough enough to handle hot lemons, sudden loneliness as a cloud of black flies rising from discarded pork skins in an opened trash can, a dysfunctional relationship as a mountain of cookies eaten without thinking.Two of the book's funniest scenes revolve around food. In the first, a hostile waiter tells Peter during a job trial that John, a teenaged cook, is the boss's nephew who “used to be his niece.” Peter responds to the shock of learning that people can transform physically not by dropping beads but by dropping steak.After John discovers that Peter is a closeted trans person, he invites her to dinner, where she meets his friends in what is often called “the trans community”:“The chickpea salad has mayo in it. The green salad has soy sauce in it. The pasta has cheese and gluten in it. But the macaroons are gluten-free, and nothing has shellfish or meat.” …“I don't eat eggs,” said a blond girl. Her eyeliner was drawn in sharp points nearly an inch away from each eye.“And some of us can't eat dairy,” added the boy in the skin-tight baby-blue pants.“Mayo's not dairy,” Eileen said.“Oh.”The floor was now open. “I can't eat wheat,” explained a thick-bodied girl with a deep voice.The girl with the aviator glasses said, “Me neither. And shellfish gives me hives.”“I'm allergic to nuts and soy,” Blue-Pants chimed in. “And mushrooms.”John said, “I don't eat mushrooms either, but that's not an allergy. Something about the texture just makes me want to retch.”Deep-Voice said, “Oh, I'm like that about potatoes.”Eileen turned to me. “I'm sorry, Peter. I forgot to ask you if you had any food sensitivities.”“Um, no,” I said. They seemed to be waiting for me to say something else, so I added, “It's sort of funny that you all do, isn't it? Have so many allergies, I mean. For one group of friends.”“They're not all allergies. Some are intolerances,” Pointy-Makeup-No-Eggs said. …“I read somewhere it's a generational thing,” said Blue-Pants-No-Soy. … “Something about us not getting tapeworms, or parasites, or something. …”Deep-Voice-No-Wheat said, “Or maybe it's all in our heads. We're the hypochondriac generation.”Aviators-No-Shellfish replied, “My EpiPen would disagree with you.”“My stomach hurts so bad when I eat dairy. Like I can't get out of bed,” Pointy-Makeup-No-Eggs said.“Maybe in previous generations they wouldn't have figured it out, and you would have just died,” I said. “Maybe there wasn't as much choice. Maybe you just had to eat what was there or starve.”Blue-Pants tapped the tongs together like a castanet to get my attention. “What are you saying? That we should just suck it up and deal with it? Lisa would asphyxiate, you know. Her throat closes up.”“No,” I said. Even though we all sat around the table, it felt as though they were all facing me. “Sorry. I just meant that no one would have thought to blame the nuts.”“Shellfish,” said No-Shellfish, apparently Lisa.“Shellfish.” It was rare for me to talk so much at once, especially to strangers. “You wouldn't realize it was the shellfish. You wouldn't try it out and think about how you felt afterward. If you lived somewhere where the dominant food was shellfish, you'd just have a reaction and die, and no one would know why.”“Why are you talking about Lisa dying?” asked Pointy.“Sorry,” I repeated. I turned my eyes down to my plate. It was the only one still empty. (214–16)This particular communication gap may never have been so clearly evoked before in writing. In the end, of course, “the trans community” isn't. These friends will be beside her when she first goes out in public in a dress, hear her choose her own name, be a group with which she can face down the terror of murder and make the decision to live. But their presence cannot validate the lives of transsexual people from different backgrounds or replace family and home.Fu's narrative voice is omniscient in the Huang family; in following Peter's first-person story, the reader shares the feelings of the other members. Even when they are enemies, these people know each other's stories. Outside the family the narrative switches to standard first person; Peter is alone with her thoughts. While John's trans community is rendered with insight, sympathy, and respect, they remain friendly strangers.Fu critiques the stereotypical progress narrative in which our hero finds heterosexual salvation and 2.2 kids behind a white picket fence. But the book goes further by revealing that the dream of this narrative is like any other dysfunctional relationship in which people are valued only as symbols. Such substitutes for living can feel like a safe home for people who have been kept down, not because the substitutes are heterosexual but because they are unreal: they require us to do nothing for ourselves. The book also goes beyond the stereotypical progress narrative in which our hero finds queer salvation and 2.2 partners in an alternative community, staying behind its white picket fences. In taking a third path, the author has written not only a skillful book but a mature one. Dreams are necessary here—but as a step toward realities. Themes relevant to both immigration and transsexual transition, which are too often handled in inept and judgmental ways in political writing, are touched on skillfully: what assimilation and difference mean in real life, what is and isn't possible to change about our bodies and backgrounds, the relationship between situations we have to deal with and choices that are our own. The book ends with the deeper questions behind family: who are we and where do we come from? Kim Fu's radical message is that an honest answer to both questions is necessary for us to live our lives fully, and it may require us to connect both within and across the borders we are the most sure separate us. If we read the book as a minority feminist novel, its third-wave message is that being a woman doesn't mean all women's experience is comparable. If we read it as a trans novel by a nontrans writer, it suggests some trans and other minority experiences can be comparable, and we shouldn't assume queer feminism can say more about trans experience than can the kid from the ethnic restaurant kitchen or the immigrant guy on the corner.