To build something that outlasts the present: a Review of Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
My struggle with Memory Piece began with turning a slow and uncomfortable eye toward my own internalized ideas of Asian-Americanness, a perplexing identity that had sat just past understanding for most, if not all of my life. I’m not American — I’m a Chinese-Singaporean who spent most of her adulthood trying to find a way to establish herself in the US; I inherited this full-throated embrace of the American dream from my father, who failed this same goal without trying even half as hard as I did. I spent so much of college assuming that I would entrench myself so much in American life and Americanness that it wouldn’t be possible to leave. But the American Dream hinges on failure, and in my own failure and excruciating return home, I finally understood the price of chasing that particular dragon.
It’s hard to shake the idea of America, especially if it’s been the backdrop for much of your family history. On their first date, my grandparents rode the rollercoaster on Coney Island and eventually got married in New York; in college during the summer they both got table-waiting jobs at a Dirty Dancing-style resort upstate for room and board. When I think of what could have happened if they’d stayed in the US instead of returning to Singapore, my brain shuts down — for a while I could only frame this as a parallel world of opportunities lost because staying in America formed my conception of leading a meaningful life. And during my tenure there, I lived uncomfortably and immediately adjacent to the Big Asian-American Identity Complex, an unavoidable behemoth which sat squarely in view wherever I went, whoever I befriended, whatever I did. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to avoid sorting through all of this until I signed up to read this book.
It’s been a while since I finished Lisa Ko’s latest novel, and I still can’t find the exact, right words for it, but I can tell you that it’s been living rent-free in my head for weeks. On the surface, Memory Piece is a sweeping coming-of-age story that spans decades, following the lifelong friendship of three Asian-American girls in (mostly) New York City. Young Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen are as different as they are uniquely awkward and precocious in varying ways. Over the years, Giselle moves naturally, almost seamlessly into the role of avant-garde performance artist, Jackie moves into the tech world, and Ellen, a prickly grassroots activist that my brain refused to stop coding as Awkwafina.
Most of Memory Piece doesn’t dwell on Asian-Americanness directly; it is mostly during childhood, against the backdrops of family, culture, and white neighbors in New Jersey enjoying classic American barbecue that Ko pokes and prods at the girls’ second-gen immigrant experience with varying results. She takes a sort of goldilocks approach in this section of the book to focus on Giselle, a chameleon cut from middle-class suburban cloth; she’s sandwiched between the aloof and fabulously wealthy Jackie, and bold, abrasive Ellen, who mostly exists off-screen in the city like a strange cipher of working-class drama.
Ko avoids the trap of defining her protagonists by their heritage; she also puts great care into framing their respective diasporic backgrounds as quintessential parts of the modern American experience without relying on stereotypes. At the same time, there are some curious choices here, like a childhood incident where the girls encroach on Giselle’s white neighbors’ backyard barbecue — an obvious mirror to their own Asian diaspora gathering — to help themselves to classic American food. It’s an odd choice mostly because the girls march back to their side of the fence with their burgers before the neighbors can say anything — and look, you know, white people in the suburbs absolutely would say something — because it’s the sort of incident that hinges on a non-existent racial tension that never arrives. It’s obvious that our protagonists exist on the periphery of whiteness, but this isn’t really ever explored in their adulthoods except through inference. I understand why, but the backyard barbecue thing continues to eat away at me like a stubborn dog gnawing at a very carefully, deliberately prepared bone.
We quickly move beyond this diaspora-centric introduction as the girls become adults; all keep their family at arm’s length, which makes sense for a story that is essentially about found family and shared values in what makes for a meaningful life. This isn’t a story of tiger moms and type-A family structures bound together with rigid cultural dogma — nor should it be, obviously — but a broader picture of fragmented childhoods, fragmented families, and the idea of finding a place in the world. And yet, there’s a strange undercurrent that cuts through all of the book’s portrayal of non-traditional life trajectories — perhaps with the exception of Giselle, who gets frustrated with the trappings of the art world and ghosts — and weakens its bite.
It’s true that a lot of adult life, if not all of it, revolves around jobs, labor, roles, functions, direction, purpose. Giselle, on her way to becoming a lowkey cult icon, reminds me of a handful of friends who always owned their idiosyncrasies and found ways to meld them into their work. It makes sense that the chameleon moves through the world with a sense of detachment, silently observing and learning and working things out in her head; I once knew a guy who claimed six degrees of acquaintance with Julia Roberts, and that engaging with her as Julia Roberts was like looking at a blank page if she wasn’t inhabiting a role. We never get a chance to understand what Giselle’s bread-and-butter art involves, only her major “piece” installations, nor do we really get to know her, but view her through a party photographer-style lens: the inscrutable art star keeping a stiff upper lip through all the bullshit And through it all, she still manages to feel the most real out of all of Ko’s characters.
Jackie’s creation of cult internet journaling phenomenon was a high point in the book; over time she goes through a sexual awakening, a conflict of principles, and a glow-up evolution into a sort of high-powered millionaire hacker MILF in bespoke tailoring that feels like a waste of everything that came before; this is a story we see repeatedly (for good reason) in various incarnations on both page and screen, but Jackie’s feels at once tepid and at times, cartoonishly easy. This isn’t to say her journey through corporate limbo, replete with microaggressions and personal disappointments, isn’t engaging, but her style of detachment, a little too similar to Giselle’s, lends a flatness to the novel that is hard to shake. But theirs are also the two strongest portions of the book — when we get to Ellen, it dispenses entirely with the pacing and measured cadence of the Giselle/Jackie continuum.
Ellen, whose presence only really flares to life in mid-to-late adulthood, is the epitome of the most in-your-face social justice activist you know — the sort of friend you know who is integral to making the world a better place even if you can’t be around them for more than ten minutes. Ellen’s section of the book is also the most curiously and perplexingly uneven. It has all the right ingredients for a dystopian final act: the women are spread out across the country doing their own thing, and Ellen, in her sixties, is doing gig economy work in an adult diaper and still living in a communal squat, Sola, that Ko spends a lot of time working hard to characterize as an entity of its own.
That Ellen has a really shitty time isn’t the problem here — Ellen’s world extremely sucks, and Ko consciously builds this future suckage out of familiar parts that we can recognize and taste in the present: invasive surveillance, feckless militarization, citizenship crackdowns and so on. Ellen’s friends are old and they’re scared and they’ve hit a point where all they can do is think about all the things they did in the past to beat back this wave of fascism. The problem is that this constant revisitation gets tired real fast, with cyclical conversations about how they had to give up documenting their own lives to avoid surveillance. Repeated invocations of “do you remember when….?” is the sort of navel gazing that works best in out-of-touch establishment editorials and less well in the third act of a book that’s trying to tie the sum of several decades worth of work together.
Because that’s what Memory Piece really is: an exploration of work and the meaning that these characters find in it. If our life is defined by work — which so much of my life and experience in America was, to the point where I changed the shape of my body to fit the demands of a job, which in turn defined my place in the world — these women did all right, because they were shepherded through their world by an overly forgiving hand. This isn’t to say that Jackie doesn’t have some real bullshit thrown her way, or that Ellen wasn’t doing the lord’s unsung work standing her ground in Sola to the very last minute. Ko, to her credit, is clear on the toll that gig economy labor takes on an older body, and to this end, Ellen, who remains true to her core from the beginning to the end, is the only one of the three that really commits to living in the present reality of the world with the hoi polloi.
There’s a curious sterility about Memory Piece overall that I feel has a spiritual link with the essence of Giselle’s final project — a longtermist’s wet dream that falls under the same broad umbrella as the Clock of the Long Now. The real-life clock, which lives under a mountain in Nevada on land owned by Jeff Bezos, is supposed to keep time for the next ten thousand years. It is a project beloved by billionaires and science fiction writers and Brian Eno because it embodies what many think is a meaningful labor — to build something that outlasts the present, to help people think about something bigger than them. It is part of a movement that would rather build arks and vaults to preserve endangered languages and practices than actually use its power to address systemic failures. Ko, I think, has consciously tried to weave the core ideas of Memory Piece around this conflict, and for the most part, Memory Piece does pull it all together in the end, with varying effects.
But there’s something missing in this carefully, meticulously planned world — something that I still can’t put my finger on, after all this time. That Memory Piece, while a polished work, has a strangely flat perspective and flavor that doesn’t quite do justice to existing forms and ideas of non-traditional work and radical art and labor. Life, in this case, is stranger than fiction.
