INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book * Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, TIME, and Marie Claire “A manifesto to happiness—the one found when you stop running from who you are.” –New York Times Book Review “An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements—and this is a book that moves…My Year Abroad is a wild ride—a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.” – Vogue From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection. Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself. In the breathtaking, “precise, elliptical prose” that Chang-rae Lee is known for (The New York Times), the narrative alternates between Tiller’s outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future. Rich with commentary on Western attitudes, Eastern stereotypes, capitalism, global trade, mental health, parenthood, mentorship, and more, My Year Abroad is also an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion—on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs. Tinged at once with humor and darkness, electric with its accumulating surprises and suspense, My Year Abroad is a novel that only Chang-rae Lee could have written, and one that will be read and discussed for years to come.

The first thing that all of us at NUBClub agreed on was that My Year Abroad was a good book. Lee wrote a funny, poignant, and insightful novel with interesting characters, clever twists, and a good dash of craziness. A lot of conversation talked about the way that identity played in the book. Some of that had to do with racial identity. Tiller's understand of his own Asian identity mirrored nicely Pong's transformation as he left the United States and became less and less American as the novel progressed, and Lee has some great send-ups of the kinds of Americans who go abroad for experience. At the same time, the novel looks a lot at the identities that people hold in families, and the domestic situation of Tiller, Val, and Victor Jr is a great counterpoint to the travel plot, given us a chance to see how fathers, mothers, and children can co-exist and what their responsibilities are to each other. While the plot moved in a pretty obvious way, there were a lot of interesting parallels between all of the ways that the main characters (Tiller, Val, Pong) came from broken homes of one form or another, and then how those experiences led them to either take responsibility or betray those that they loved in different ways. The description of Pong's parents and how they were destroyed by Mao's Cultural Revolution was stunningly good writing -- that could have been an entire great novel by itself. And Lee's identity exploration spills nicely into the lies we tell ourselves, whether that's Tiller's willingness to believe Pong's false praise of his talents as Pong tricks him into being the fall guy for the con, or the unclear level of talent of Victor Jr. and what their domestic life is or can be. The novel makes a major turn to the absurd in an almost Pynchonesque way in the last third, and as the con that Pong has pulled on Tiller becomes revealed, the books starts to slip a bit. It's hard to take the anguish Tiller suffers after the con is revealed when that torture is using a giant mortar to make curry eight hours a day. Lee confusingly has some very weird elements (a yoga competition and then a later scene were someone is killed by having his back bent in half) that strain credibility, but also makes some very obvious moves (how Val and Tilller's plot resolves) which makes the end of the book a bit uneven and tonally mixed. And we wished that Pong's motivations for the con were more compelling -- it seemed a bit duct-taped how Pong got involved in a plot that could destroy several people's lives. But none of this criticism was that harsh. In the end, we liked A Year Abroad. It's not the best novel that we've read, but as a fun, absurd, and occasionally very beautiful novel, it was definitely worth the trip.