Will I love Disorientation?

I was once a doctoral student, and that experience drew me to Elaine Hsieh Chou's book Disorientation: A Novel. The story is about Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese-American PhD student who has devoted years of time, effort, and considerable resources to completing her dissertation on a little-known but revered Chinese American poet.

I immediately empathized with Ingrid’s challenges. Her journey is a tale of self-discovery, racial identity, and the pursuit of truth, culminating in awe-inspiring self-confidence and peace of mind.

I love how this book examines white male cultural appropriation of Chinese Literature and does it to such an extreme extent that it becomes wonderfully absurd. Chou skillfully depicts the discomfort of being Ingrid Yang, a first-generation Taiwanese American woman and Ph.D candidate who is attempting to navigate the elite halls of academia where white men still have all the power.

But what I also appreciated was how Chou examines the main character’s own complicity in the fetishization of Asian women through her relationship with her subtly sketchy boyfriend.