No Party Like a Chee Party
Best American Essays, edited by Alexander Chee: A Review
Most writers I know have a love/hate relationship with Best American Essays, published annually by an imprint of HarperCollins. We love celebrating our field, we love being included, either in the collection or in the notables, but we also can’t help but take offense with “Best.” The anthology only draws from pieces that are already published, so even before the VIDA count, we knew the published landscape historically skewed white, established, and male. The last Best American Essays that I actually bought was back in 2013 when Cheryl Strayed was the guest editor. “Let’s see what’s selling in nonfiction,” I cynically thought as I picked it up in an airport. I read half of the essays and skimmed the other half, more so a pleasure reserved for anthologies than an insult to the book. Alexander Chee (gay, Korean American, sometimes-drag queen, tarot reader, writer and teacher of fiction and nonfiction) was the guest editor for Best American Essays 2022, out now, and from his introduction right through to the last pages, he’s done something difficult and magical: he’s used the platform to de-tokenize otherness in a mainstream anthology.
In Chee’s 2022 collection, I read every single essay. More than half embody the normalness of being queer; that is, they are essays that don’t exclusively explain the author’s identity. In the first essay, the author is arrested deep in Mormon country for squatting in a house he’s trying to buy with his husband. A few pages later, a queer woman confronts her alcoholism. A few pages later, a queer person struggles with lockdown. In each essay, the author’s queerness is simply a narrative fact. In other years’ collections, my friends and I would skim through a volume looking for “the gay one” or “the essay about sex” or “the Korean one.” To be sure, there is plenty of identity-centered writing here, from people experimenting with their gender expression, to a white guy named Jason Brown who is mistaken for another, to a woman on a pilgrimage contemplating her vulnerability.
What does it mean to de-tokenize writers in a collection like this? Recent books by Asian Americans — Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner are just a couple — discuss scarcity mindset, the idea that there can be only one Asian American woman (or gay person, or Black man, or, or, or) in a classroom, a band, a television show, etc. because there is never enough to go around. In a recent op-ed about whiteness in literature, a professor lamented that on a college syllabus full of the dead, white, male canon, the inclusion of Langston Hughes as the only Black writer was a mere token, he wrote.
Chee, it seems, is trying to tell us that it’s lonely to be tokenized, but that it’s also a choice by editors to reserve ONE issue or ONE selection for a group of people. Straight white people took, had, so much for hundreds of years. The job of an editor is not a light task. A simple editorial choice closes or opens doors, for both writers and readers. Chee’s level of inclusion creates a depth of understanding that readers are owed in a time of headlines about trans-therapies, gender-based violence, institutional discrimination, disease, death, and debt.
There is, of course, a finite number of slots in Best American anything, but Chee is arguing that even that premise is not a justification for scarcity mindset. One of my favorite essays, “China Brain,” started out irritating me. In it, Andrea Long Chu opens with a confusing mental health treatment, referring to herself in the third person. I sighed my way through this POV experiment until the first page break, which made me actually, literally LOL. It’s so hard for a book to actually make me bark out a laugh into my empty apartment, embarrassing me for no reason because no one was there. The essay is so genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, so clever, so well-researched, so personal, so academic, so moving. I never saw the punchline of the narrator coming, and it was a rare delight; the author’s girlfriend was mentioned, the author’s transness only for those who know or search. The other essays are just as moving in other directions. Debra Gwaltney’s essay “Fire and Ice” about the wildfires of Oregon and death of her husband chronicles a large-scale disaster with a heartbreaking keyhole into her personal disaster. In “Mother Country” Elias Rodriques perfectly encapsulates the feelings of first-generation American children towards our struggling immigrant parents. “If You Ever Find Yourself,” an instructional essay on poverty and adultification compelled me to look up the author, Erika J. Simpson, hoping to read more of her work only to learn she recently graduated her MFA program and this essay was her first published work — which just astonished me. There are a couple of misses: Anthony Veasna So’s braided essay, “Baby Yeah” about a Pavement deep cut and the death of a dear friend was too explanatory compared to the author’s other work, and I say that as a Pavement superfan. It pulled me away from the momentum of the other essays. The final essay, “The Lost List,” by Ryan Bradley is a listicle contemplation of wayfinding that made me think “This is ‘Best-er’ than Nicole Walker’s “These Tubes of Ours??” [included in the Notables].
These are remarkable essays, and a remarkable cohort. Several trans authors, several queer, several Asian, several Black, several mixed race. There are well-established white, straight authors like Gary Shteyngart, contemplating his penis in the painful, neurotic “My Gentile Region,” a considerable upgrade from what might be the most famous penis essay, “The Disposable Rocket” by John Updike. An improvement, to be sure, although I wouldn’t exactly say that I enjoyed reading about Shteyngart’s medical trauma. And perhaps my very favorite essay, “Among Men,” by Calvin Gimpelevich, is a study of the expressions of masculinity of gentile and Jewish men, penned by a trans, Jewish author as he takes testosterone. These two essays juxtaposed together is just rhetorical perfection.
Like all the volumes in the series, the foreword is by series editor Robert Atwan. For 2022, he writes about “Once More to the Lake” by E. B. White. “Open any first-year writing anthology and there it was,” Atwan writes. I took him up on this challenge, opened the book I use to teach my freshman comp class, and easily found it. In a beautiful essay that is destined to be plagiarized by freshmen for years to come, Atwan offers a well-contextualized close and critical reading of the classic essay. But my recurring thought while reading through this anthology is that, actually, this 2022 collection would be a much better Freshman Comp textbook than almost anything I’ve used in class (I’ve taught intro English for well over a decade). The volume opens with a professor getting arrested. What more could entice a new college student to get lost in these pages?
There are readers who always buy Best American, every year, no matter the editor. There are readers who will pick up this volume just because of Chee’s name. But neither will be disappointed with the range of essays represented here. This volume is just as much for the writer, the MFA student, the insider, as it is for the random bored grandma who buys it in the airport. “Oh,” she’ll think. “Literature is queer now,” she’ll shrug. Best is best, and perhaps this hypothetical reader will just accept that there can be multiple queer, trans, and nonwhite writers who are talented and singular, just as readers used to accept that all the good writers were white and cis-male, with only one woman or person of color invited to the party. How easily we used to accept those notions from the editors of the world.
Overall, this collection is worth your time, much more so if you are interested in Chee and the lens he offers: queer, biracial Korean, rural — all of which apply to me as well. It’s intoxicating to feel so niche, then to see that exact niche up on the big stage, directing the show, pulling other people up into the spotlight. As Chee writes in his introduction, “Welcome to my party.”
