Review by Christine Ma-Kellams
HarperCollins/Ecco / March, 2020 / 320 pp
In Days of Distraction, newcomer Alexandra Chang flips the table of tried-and-true plot techniques devised and passed down by the writers that came before her and does the unthinkable for a debut writer: she tells it like it is. Reading her novel is like watching an artist paint before you, observing all the little strokes piling one on top of the other on an otherwise blank and inscrutable canvas. If the usual greats derive their greatness from presenting their readers with well-planned masterpieces full of shadow and light, Chang’s approach seems to be one of disembowelment. Piece by piece, she unscrews each ordinary object in her world and shows you the innards in all their violence and gore.
The premise of the novel is so mundane it makes you wonder if there’s going to be sorcery involved to turn this ordinary problem—a 25-year-old Chinese woman has to decide whether to leave her crappy tech job to follow her white boyfriend, J, to the East Coast for (his) grad school—into a 320-page blockbuster. Turns out, no sorcery is needed. Chang proves that reality is harrowing enough all by itself.
I play out the “if…then" game with myself. If I impress the editors, then I will get the raise. If I get a raise, then I will stay at this job…If I stay at this job, then I might hate myself. If I leave this job, then I might also hate myself, plus no money. If I don’t move where J goes…then all I will have is this shit job…If I move to the middle of nowhere with no job and no raise, then…what?
It’s a droll catch-22 familiar to millennials, and at first glance there seems to be little specific to her plight. After all, Asians remain the so-called model minority, but (or maybe therefore) if there is any place they do not lack representation, it’s in tech offices and colleges and on the arms of white men. But Chang’s simplicity is a ruse; she introduces you to a little pile of ordinary ice, and before you can register its coldness, she shatters your big barge with her bigger iceberg, shamelessly calling out everything that makes the average unsuspecting person, at minimum, a little uncomfortable: casual racial slurs during company meetings, sexual prejudice infiltrating modern love, benevolent sexism by otherwise “nice” men, Asian parenting, yellow fever, the gender wage gap, Nashville’s many Confederate flags. At one point, in reflecting upon her nomadic childhood, Chang notes this about the California city she grew up in and frequently returns to: “Davis is full of the kind of liberals who claim they want to make the world a better place, but who will fight to the death to prevent a homeless shelter from being built in their neighborhood.” And lest we chalk this up to something specific to Davis and its many miles from the actual coast of California, Chang is no less sparing when it comes to portraying the techies from San Francisco she works with (or rather, beneath):
A senior editor is telling me that she knows the tech industry has a diversity problem and that tech publications, too, have a diversity problem. But what can they do when so few women apply for the jobs?…Once you start hiring based on diversity, everyone in the newsroom is going to feel uncomfortable…And where does it stop?…What about gay people, who are also sorely underrepresented? Will you ask them if they’re gay during the interview? You could get sued!
Non sequiturs aside, Chang has a knack for relaying the arguments of those she disagrees with, many of them liberals aware of the parochial limits of their liberalism. But in her voice, their words lose their gleam and logic.
In this sense, Days of Distraction emerges as an unexpected counterpoint to the other debut novel everyone can’t stop talking about—Raven Leilani’s instant bestseller, Luster. Both written by young, twenty-something women of color, each tackles in watchful, witty and ultimately brutal ways the realities of growing up millennial during a time when things should be better and feel better, but don’t and won’t, no matter how hard these women are trying. In Luster, Leilani paints a devastating portrait of the other Black woman in her office, Aria, whose “unthreatening aw-shucks shtick for all the professional whites” means that “she plays the game well…better than I do…she came in to the office meek and gorgeous, primed to be a token.” Yet, “I see her hunger, and she sees mine.” Chang’s narrator isn’t Black, but as a brown girl she shares in the same survival tactics that Leilani references: leaning in so hard Sheryl Sandberg becomes a grateful fan; letting her white boyfriend, J, get away with things that bother her to no end (butchering her Chinese name, Jing Jing, with his gringo pronunciation, and “treat[ing] her outbursts like he does the angry mice he works with. With care, with gloves”), and above all else, not offending the white people in the room.
In sharp contrast to Luster, though, Days of Distraction does not lead the reader along with carefully articulated suspense and questions unanswered. There is no urgency to Chang’s meanderings. If part of Luster’s commercial genius was its ability to propel the gleeful reader forward with situational contingencies that demanded resolution, or else, Chang’s novel doesn’t seem to give a damn about such bait. Its obliviousness to what readers and writers alike expect of a novel is its own form of aggression and protest. In doing so, meekness and inoffensiveness become Trojan horses of a larger cultural war where Chang slays everything you thought you knew about Asian women and white men, tech companies and the millennials that cover them, and quiet little girls who say nothing but see everything, biding their sweet time, waiting to rise up when you least expect them to tell you a thing or two and show you that really, you have no idea.
Christine Ma-Kellams is an assistant professor of psychology at San Jose State University. Her other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Catapult, Saturday Evening Post, the Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.