The End of East

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

3. The End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2008)

Sammy Chan, the protagonist of The End of East, is newly returned to Vancouver, having left behind a boyfriend and thesis in Montreal in order to look after her widowed mother. Soon after, she discovers some papers belonging to her late grandfather, and the story begins to weave in and out of the past, looking at the lives of Sammy's parents and grandparents, the family's relationship with Chinatown, and the way familial bonds are both borne as burdens and desperately sought.

I have a general rule about stories featuring dysfunctional families: I already have one of those, so if I'm going to read about an imaginary one, there had better be something more going on than "Tsk, isn't that awful?" Jen Sookfong Lee does some interesting things with distance in this book (Sammy's point of view is so immediate that it may be difficult to have any idea what's really going on with her, but her family is presented from afar, so objectively that emotion may be blunted), and there are individual scenes that are written beautifully and subtly, but on the whole, this story felt underdeveloped and needlessly episodic to me, and too familiarly bleak and brittle for me to enjoy on an aesthetic level.

This is the author's debut novel, and based on the things I did like about her writing here, I would pick up one of her subsequent works, but I wouldn't be interested in re-reading The End of East.

Additional note: For those who look to avoid such content, The End of East contains a fairly graphic and sudden rape scene.