You are eating an orange. You are naked. by Sheung-King

My friend Aaron's first "novel," although it might be more accurate to call it a collection of stories. The stories follow the unnamed first person protagonist ("I") and his unnamed girlfriend, who is always referred to in second person ("you"). The couple travels to various locations all over the world--they are rootless, transnational subjects--and talk about stories and books, this and that. The dialogue between the pair and the exploratory freedom with which the book is written reminded me a little bit of Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master.

The book begins with the anxiety of separation; there is the reference of the thirty cans of pineapple in Chungking Express: "I am a can of pineapple. Cop 223 is as well. We're watching Chungking Express. On April 1, Cop 223's girlfriend, May, leaves him" (p.9). This is one of the only consistent themes throughout. It serves as a weak connection for all of the stories and adds a latent tension. This theme is returned to in the concluding story, "Kafka's Guide to Love," as a way of wrapping up the book. Some of the stories lacked connective tissue to such an extent that I wondered if this was deliberate. The story "Snow in June" ends with "I wake up the next morning and you are not next to me. You don't leave a note, nor do you answer the phone... Maybe you'll be gone for a while" (p. 83). The next story, "Grocery Shopping in the Desert," begins with "We are naked" (p.85): an ellipsis... Perhaps Aaron is attempting to subvert Western novelistic narrative conventions?

The writing is quite experimental. Different writing conventions are used: some stories are sub-divided using numbers (a la Milan Kundera in Aaron's own admission, although it was used differently than Kundera; Kundera modeled his novels after the structure of musical compositions, and used numbers to control the "tempo" of his sections); some stories use screenwriting conventions to mark dialogue (e.g. "You: Your eyes are brown"); in the chapter the "Kitchen God," Aaron experiments with a summative triplet at the end of the sub-sections.

Various texts are referenced in all of the stories. These texts modulate and actively shape the stories by providing a new frame of reference with which to understand the story, (e.g references to Goethe and Barthes in "I Am the One Who Waits") and by seeping into the writing itself (the first chapter, "Do You Like Pineapples?" is a good example).

Whether as homage or play, Aaron subtly references images, characters, and scenes from other writers in the book. "I notice a little mole on your lower back" (p. 12) (Murakami), man in a baseball hat in Macao (felt like some of Murakami's male characters), "you" smokes Virginia Slims (Wind-Up Bird Chronicles), "Is it you?" (p. 113) (Yoko Tawada's "The Bath"), the lunch meeting serving as an interpreter for a rich Asian couple (Yoko Tawada's "The Bath"). I noticed mostly references to Murakami and Yoko Tawada, although I am sure there are others.

​I thought that the best story is "I Am Writing about a Hole," which was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. Aaron writes that "When the hole is present, the part of you that wants to speak vanishes and you lose the desire to say anything..." (p. 134). The hole is tangentially connected to racism and Orientalist discourses. Aaron uses the films of Clint Eastwood, an essay by Salman Rushdie, Lost in Translation, and more to try to better understand the hole. He decides "to look for ways to deal with such issues without getting angry" (p. 143). Through Mo Yan, Haruki Murakami, and Yoko Tawada (all non-Western writers), he learns how to deal with the hole. And as he writes about the hole, the hole disappears--a Nietzschean move of overcoming through art.

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