When Mei Brown’s grandfather hands her the keys to a sedan purchased “with the savings from his life as a mechanic,” she sums up her current circumstance succinctly. “Her father had blown his brains out, she’d dropped out of an Ivy League school and her mother hated her. But Laoye had bought her a car.” With it he hands her an opportunity: clients (mostly sex workers) to drive around — and space from the life she’s trying to figure out.
In Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s debut novel, “Off the Books,” we meet Mei at the early part of a gig driving the handsome Henry Lee from San Francisco to Syracuse, N.Y. Along the way she reflects on the life she’s accumulated on both coasts: the vegan house at Dartmouth (where she’s decided not to finish the two terms she has left to graduate) and the friends who returned from studying abroad in India wearing saris, a career path toward the “elusive and problematic” journalism industry, her unexcavated anger toward her mother for showing so little emotion over her dad’s death.
Mei’s mother, who immigrated from China to join her father, Laoye, in California and speaks English with an accent, is nonetheless “imbued with American culture.” She and Mei’s father, a 6-foot-2 white military man, raised Mei in Oakland. Laoye, whom Mei calls throughout the trip, is a delightful stoner whose love for his granddaughter feels both precious and ironclad. “Your ancestors not gonna build a railroad across America sitting in some Ivory League classroom,” he says.
Henry, with his huge suitcase, frequent break requests and unrelenting, “GQ face” hotness, raises Mei’s eyebrows and her suspicions. It’s not long before we learn his secret: Stowed in his luggage is an 11-year-old Uyghur girl named Anna, whom he’s trying to reunite with her father, who’s in trouble with Chinese authorities. Within this propulsive plot Frazier seamlessly embeds a much larger, more sobering history.
The son of a Chinese Hui Muslim, Henry talks with Mei about the ethnic Uyghur minority in China’s Xinjiang region, whose “Communist Party Secretary called on officials to round up Uyghurs in a ‘profligate effort to eradicate Islamist extremism.’” We learn that the region tracks citizens with ID cards and cellphone searches, and that its schools force students to speak Mandarin and eat pork. There are stories of forced abortions, lynchings and abuse to the point of paralysis: “It’s Basic Genocide 101,” Henry says.
We also get a peek into China’s broader record of Islamophobia beyond Xinjiang: how the government has destroyed mosques and “started re-educating Imams.” About the United States, Mei wonders, “What is our real responsibility toward children who suffer, parents without protection, populations being squashed under a boot?”
This pondering is deftly wedged between the sweet and scrappy efforts at communication between Mei and Anna, who speaks Mandarin and knows only pockets of English. Through drawings, facial expressions and gestures, they will their way toward words like “beaver” and “hat,” Frazier fluent in the language between native and nonnative speakers. When Mei hesitantly starts calling her mother at pit stops to talk about her father, their dialogue is just as meaningful, filled with small misunderstandings and poignant moments that dip into years of despair and then are dismissed. “Too much apology,” her mother says. “We family. No need stand on ceremony. You eat yet?”
While the dialogue feels natural, the choppy narration style sometimes ends up sounding like a screenplay monologue, especially around Mei’s budding romance with Henry. But Frazier captures the relatable toggle between the private and the collective, between sinking into the anxieties of your life and grieving for the cruelties of the world. On the road, Mei does just that, worrying about Anna’s future and remembering the Fourth of July when her father died.
As she beholds the heartbreaking realities of a Uyghur child’s life and confronts her own family’s memories, the toggle grows more extreme. What do any of us do with all that rumination, with all this witnessing? “A good life about more than knowing,” Laoye says. “A good life about doing, too.”
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