A Long Stay in a Distant Land: A Novel Book

Cute Immigrants (2013)

Chieng, Chieh (2005). A Long Stay In A Distant Land. New York: Bloomsbury.

This quirky, multi-generational family story begins in southern California. The Lum family are Chinese-American and seem to be middle class. Louis works for a magazine but moves back home to tend his father after his mother is killed in a traffic accident. The father has vowed mortal revenge on the driver of the ice cream truck that killed her and Louis has to prevent that and attempt to talk his father out of it. But then his uncle Bo disappears, suddenly moving to Hong Kong to see what the Old Country is really like and in part, also to escape his suffocating grandmother. Louis goes to Hong Kong to find Bo, where additional adventures ensue.

The novel is advertised mostly as a comedy, because the reader is supposed to be charmed and amused by the zany antics of the Lum family. The humor is dry and often funny but degenerates to cute. The basis of the humor is that members of the family are not completely acculturated into America, or Hong Kong either, so they make mistakes in both cultures with charming misunderstandings and mispronunciations. In that sense the humor is condescending.

Most of the humorous situations arise when a Lum fails to appreciate subtle mainstream cultural connotation or is unable to adequately express context in the second language. It reminds me in some ways of the often goofy, loopy humor of Native Americans. Think of the joke in Smoke Signals about John Wayne's teeth - a total nonsequitur but funny in some indefinable, almost child-like way.

"Oatmeal and chocolate both count as pastries," Sonny said in defense of grabbing two chocolate bars for himself. "You got three bags of oatmeal. I prefer the oatmeal, but I want you to have it…Chocolate can give you cancer. Uncle Phil told me about research that proves it…" For weeks afterward and despite Esther's prodding, Larry would not eat chocolate for fear of cancer.

Hilarious? No. But amusing in a charming, child-like sort of way.

Or consider this example, when Bo joins the Boy Scouts.

Melvin decide Bo had to learn to start a fire before his first Scout meeting. "A basic skill he needs to know."

"Are the other boys going to ask him to start a fire for them when they meet?" Esther asked. "Is he going to have to bring them the head of deer, too?"

...Bo's first fire-making lesson began with Melvin placing a piece of cloth at the end of a stick. He lit the cloth with a match and then tossed in into a coffee can to snuff out the flame. Bo watched silently.

"What are you doing?" Esther asked.

"Charring the cloth," Melvin said.

"Why?" she asked.

"It'll catch sparks that Bo will make. It'll burn easier after it's charred."

"You just lit it with a match. If you didn't put out the fire, you would have fire."

"Yeah," he said.

Cute, cutesy, and mildly humorous. The scenes are deadpan like that, no nudge, nudge, wink, wink to the reader, giving the reader plenty of distance to look down his or her nose at the cute immigrants. I found it not only tedious, but slightly offensive. Also, notice how the clunky tagging of every utterance in the dialog parallels the family's clunky use of English.

It's a well-reviewed book by an up-and-coming young author, but I found the writing loose, the humor predictable, and pointless contrived scenarios clever for the sake of being clever. If there is a serious theme in the novel, it is the expression of what it's like to be a person (and a family) caught half-way between two cultures. I didn't hate the book; it just left me indifferent.