Waylaid (review)

Waylaid, a terrific first novel by Chinese American writer Ed Lin revolves around a twelve-year-old coming of age in New Jersey in the 1970s, burdened by his virginity and motivated mainly by the pathetic desire to lose it. Taking place in a seedy hotel on the New Jersey shore, it's a heartbreakingly funny set piece in which a working-class immigrant family from Taiwan struggles to make a better life for itself in the bleakest of environments, but can't.

The unnamed narrator has to grow up quickly, and though he's emotionally fragile he hides his vulnerability with a tough-guy posture. He's preternaturally composed for a twelve-year-old, and the book's tone mirrors his "get down to business" attitude. The kid spends his day in the "prison" of the hotel, where he's "Top Dog" manning the front desk. He rents rooms to hookers and johns, lonely old men whose shirts smell like hotel soap, and families whose homes have been repossessed. He cooks his own meals of eggs and Baco Bits, and generally holds his own against the sleaze and sadness of the world.

The universal pain of growing up is pitted against family obligations that are specific to Asian families. Though he rejects his father's traditional values, there is little to fill the void because he has too much work to do, puttying holes in the rooms, fixing windows, ticking off items from the to-do list his father has taped to his closet door. But the boy wants to go to college, has higher ambitions:

"Next year I show you how to use blowtorch and soldering so you can make copper tubing we need for sinks. Very easy."

"All this stuff you're showing me you don't even need to go to college for. Doing this makes me forget everything I learn in school. Doing this makes me stupid. I don't want to work here for the rest of my life."

"You have to have some practical knowledge. You don't want to learn Chinese, you don't want to eat Chinese food, so you can learn how to fix floors."

The parade of colorful customers and their cultural stereotypes would be enough to deflate anyone's dream: when customers make comments to him about Asians, their frame of reference is usually one war or another—Viet Nam, Korea. But the narrator has a snarky sense of humor.

He is not your geeky pocket-protector Asian protagonist. By turns crude, depressing, desperate, and funny, Waylaid is a raw and honest portrayal of a boy's transformation to adulthood. Its crude honesty is a cause for celebration, like an Asian American hybrid of Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy's Complaint.

If the book is autobiographical, Lin has come a long way from the shores of North Jersey. The author holds degrees in mining engineering and journalism from Columbia University. If this novel is an indication of his writing talents, they are prodigious. I can't wait to see what he writes next.