Yellow (review)

The stories of Yellow, Don Lee's first collection, set in the fictional town of Rosarita Bay, issue from the same literary heartland as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. But these well-crafted takes on American tradition come with a twist: most of their characters are Asian
American.

Starting with the book's title, Lee's stories complicate and question. In the title story, yellow is obviously the color of Danny Kim's Asian skin, a fact he spends his life trying to escape. But the word takes on other, equally significant meanings. When, during one of the story's defining moments, a Hispanic boxing opponent calls Danny "yellow" during a match, does the insult refer to Danny's race—or his lack of courage? Or does the color flag Danny's penchant for Midwestern blondes who have that "inherent wheat-field glow"?

Asian by ancestry, the diverse protagonists in Yellow lead an ordinary Californian life: they have fish barbecues, go surfing, teach elementary school, and visit Japan as awkward gaijin. Their lives outside of work are likely to consist of "one-pot meals and nights alone with videos and errands invented to get out of the house." Friends and lovers loom larger in these stories than parents do, and the past—cultural, familial, or personal—rarely dictates the present.

However, in these stories ancestral inheritance is a powerful vestige: battered against, recovered, surrendered to, and hidden behind. Lee's characters find that the American dream of an endlessly mutable identity—of "colorlessness"—is impossible; in "Lone Night Cantina," Annie Yung's attempts at the American West are more pitiful because she is so obviously Asian. No matter how much she perfects her "howdy-doody accent," no one will ever mistake her for a cowgirl.

Neither is it possible to go back. Lily Kim's adolescent stint as a "born-again Korean" in "Yellow" doesn't last; when she reappears in "The Possible Husband" as a thirty-nine-year-old artist, her "roots pilgrimage" to Korea is only one of a series of youthful travels, all of which have faded into the distant past.

Yellow pays tribute to the rural roots of American literature while dragging its small-town solidity into a twenty-first-century landscape of transience and marginality. This collection, so American in form and tone, challenges its readers to recognize that its culturally jumbled, post-immigrant content is, by now, more American than apple pie.