Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Juliana Sohn
Lisa Ko’s new novel looks at a surprising transformation. One day you might be a listless preteen circling the potluck table at a mandatory Chinese family gathering, barely able to mutter anything to the other kids your drunk parents have forced you to mingle with. The next day, you’re an adult with agency and actual social skills, and so are those awkward party acquaintances. It’s bizarre. Maybe you respect them now; maybe you actually like each other.
Following her 2017 novel, The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece opens in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, when three Chinese American girls — Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen — cross paths at a Fourth of July barbecue and soon become friends. As they grow up, they face their own challenges; they drift apart, then come back together. Giselle, a recalcitrant performance artist whose stunts include dwelling in an abandoned mall for a year, crosses over into elite art spaces. Jackie, a coder who watches her peers rake in money during the dot-com boom, wrestles with the choice between integrity and scale. And Ellen, a community activist living in communal housing, faces down a hostile, gentrifying city intent on pushing her out.
Ko took a trip down memory lane for the book, reminiscing about her own experiences hanging out in early microblogging spaces and attending Chinese camp in suburban New Jersey. “I actually don’t remember much, except that we had to get up every morning and do calisthenics and there was a woman yelling at us in Mandarin over a bullhorn,” she says. “I didn’t even understand Mandarin. It was so stressful.”
I’d love to know about the genesis of Memory Piece. Why did you choose to focus on the theme of friendship across generations?
It took me about seven years to…
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