My Year Abroad

by Chang-rae Lee

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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Travel, Asia, Audiobook, Book Club

424 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 2, 2021

About the author

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Ari Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5, rounded up. I enjoyed thinking about this reading experience after it was over, and found surprising, revelatory, hilarious, and disgusting moments in almost every chapter, but this is a bloated, sprawling, and spectacular mess.

This is a very loose picaresque novel about the various forms of pleasure (luxury shopping, thrills, sex, drugs, food, booze, wellness, yoga, tourism) that the global 1% are privileged to obsessively pursue under late capitalism, how these high-end modes of luxury consumption fill their gaping ontological/psychological voids, and how legions of global wage slaves grind themselves into oblivion while laboring to enable these pleasures.

Tiller, our first-person narrator, is a callow 20-year old college bro, passively drifting through the hoops of upper-middle-class achievement in Dunbar, a wealthy suburb suspiciously like Princeton, New Jersey. Seeking a father figure, he apprentices himself to Pong, a fantastically wealthy Chinese immigrant chemist/entrepreneur, who ensnares him into embarking upon a grotesque parody of a junior year abroad exploring East Asia's grungier megacities as an accomplice in an elaborate business deal/laughable multi-level marketing scam involving nutritionally-optimized Indonesian tropical-fruit juice. Tiller is one-eighth Chinese, with a smattering of college-level Mandarin, and is swept along on this bizarre journey with the whoa-dude enthusiasm of a first-time backpacker, or late-1980s Keanu Reeves.

Lee delivers episodes of an exhilaratingly perilous surfing trip in Oahu, royal pig-outs on robatayaki in Shenzhen, producing industrial quantities of Thai curry paste in a huge human-sized mortar and pestle, Daoist alchemy involving the mass-production of vats of mercury to ensure immortality, a yoga competition involving the world's most limber instructors, monumental tokes of primo THC, and kinky Stakhanovite sex with the daughter of a mysterious crime boss/real-estate mogul with the ridiculous pan-Asian name "Drum Kappagoda," who lives in a Bond-villain lair high in the hills of Guangdong.

This contemporary stoner David Copperfield was much more entertaining to recollect as I write this review than it was to actually read over about a week of evenings. Lee doesn't plausibly channel the voice of a Zoomer, and delivers some real clangers, like a cringeworthy Steve Buscemi "How do you do, fellow kids!" meme. Tiller's emotional bandwidth is so narrow, and his personal agency is so limited, that all of this forced weirdness feels numbingly monotonous by the novel's halfway point.

(Into the middle of the novel, Lee shoehorns one of the least convincing and most under-researched Cultural Revolution narratives I've ever read, in a misconceived attempt to endow Pong with some kind of psychological depth.)

For reasons we don't learn until the very end of the novel, this business deal has imploded most heinously, and Tiller flees back to the States to avoid processing any of these traumatic experiences. After meeting cute in the food court of Hong Kong International Airport, he follows a depressed 30-something woman named Val and her cloyingly precocious 8-year-old son Victor Jr. back to a post-industrial working-class suburb, somewhere in the tri-state area, that Lee ironically/wincingly names Stagno.

Lee awkwardly alternates episodes from Tiller's year abroad with more grounded observations of his life as a house-husband and homeschooling pseudo-parent in the 'burbs, where Val is living under federal witness protection, after testifying against her ex-husband's felony-level involvement with a Tashkentian crime syndicate. These nearly-eventless domestic chapters feel like they've been parachuted in from an entirely different novel, and Lee gets bogged down in prolix descriptions of Victor Jr. opening a pop-up supper club and cooking obscenely elaborate and Instagramable gourmet meals for the neighbors.

This exuberant, uncontrolled experiment in maximalism really doesn't play to Lee's strengths as a writer, as he demonstrated in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life: restraint, withholding, obliqueness, deliberate silences.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modern update on the classic bildungsroman that is absolutely full of surprises. It is packed full of enough themes for a college lit course, but strongest among them are love, identity, race, and the old trope of East meets West.

When I say this is like a classic bildungsroman, I mean it quite literally. In the early chapters I had the impression I was reading something like David Copperfield or Jane Eyre. The way our narrator addresses us, the way he refers to the adventure he is about to undertake, it is all carefully crafted. And yet in the midst of that 19th century setup is a distinctly 21st century story, our hero, Tiller, is at the beginning a person of little consequence. He is a little below average in almost every way, he has hardly any distinguishing characteristics besides the fact that he is biracial (he is 1/8th Korean) but passing as white and that his mother left his family when he was young. The narration has that old school feel in part because the voice never really feels like a 20-year-old man, not even a little, even when the prose is dotted with slang or strange references, it feels like a 20-year-old the same way a Dickens story does.

Our story gets going when Tiller meets Pong, a Chinese immigrant and entrepreneur. Pong is one of those charismatic people who seems to know and be friends with everyone. He is the guy you call when you need almost anything. He is generous and happy to help his friends. And when he meets Tiller he sees something immediately. This is a surprise to Tiller, who doesn't see all that much in himself. But he hasn't yet realized the deep longing he has for a parental figure, for someone who is proud of him, that makes him entirely vulnerable to do anything Pong asks, including a business trip to Asia where things get... weird.

You know they will get weird because Tiller tells you so, as the chapters switch between his going back to tell his story and looking to where he has landed afterwards, as the semi-boyfriend and semi-stepfather to an older woman and her son. This is not a particularly normal story either, and it seems a strange place for a 20-year-old man who was supposed to be heading back to college. This story has its own unusual twists and turns, but is more rooted in Tiller's ever-growing connection to this quasi-family and his own reckoning with the loss of his mother and of Pong.

As Tiller travels, everyone sees something in him that he has never seen in himself. Everyone imbues him with their own confidence in his skills, which is terrifying and exhilarating for him. And how he sees himself begins to change. Especially as his time in Asia is not so much a trip abroad as it is a kind of homecoming, a way to discard the American-ness he has never been fully comfortable with and pick up a new identity.

This is a long book, and I cannot really capture here how strange it is, but I really enjoyed reading it. I was worried it was going to be too long or too difficult but it never was. It was completely readable, though I found the prose to be sometimes too much of a highwire act, it is certainly distinctive in its voice, and there is always something unfolding to dive into. I finished it quite quickly, actually.

There aren't an abundance of content warnings here but the most notable are the use of a kind of roofie, sexual assault (kind of, this one is a weird one but there is definitely a loss of bodily autonomy and a sexual element so this is the best fit), and attempted suicide.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiller is a 20 year old living with Val, his 30 something, suicidal girlfriend, and her 8 year old son. Val is in the witness protection program. The son is an aspiring chef. Tiller is taken under the wing of Pong, a wealthy Chinese American entrepreneur. Pong takes Tiller on a business trip to Asia where Tiller encounters karaoke, yoga, prostitutes and beatings. He also becomes a sex toy. The book alternates between Tiller’s life with Val and his trip with Pong.

Unfortunately, this long book didn’t really grab me, although I was interested enough to read to the end. Maybe I just can’t relate to a 20 year old, or at least not to this particular 20 year old. I was so much more interested in Pong’s backstory and his current ventures. I’m sure the book will be very popular. It’s the sort of literary coming of age story that critics eat up, so it doesn’t need me to like it.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Jenny Lawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One hell of a ride. 4.5 stars.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very wild ride with amazing writing and vivid, memorable characters. The narrator makes this book sing.

That said, this one is going to be an acquired taste, like black licorice or gin martinis, and I think it’ll be a “love it” or “hate it” experience for readers. Count me firmly in the “love it” group. I feel a classic book hangover coming on.....the kind you get at the end of a novel when you just can’t bear to leave the characters behind.

Truly memorable.

[kami · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my god, where do I even start?

For several years, I was not an avid reader. I spent most of my high school days toiling in extracurriculars and rigorous academics, only reading novels deeply enough to gather obscure details and quotes for book tests and essays. When I moved to New York for two months during my gap year, I needed, of course, a book to read as I romantically sat at a bench in Central Park every day (scrolling through Tik Tok is unfortunately not main character energy). I ambled through the Upper East Side, finding myself in a small bookstore, the book cover and description of My Year Abroad catching my eye.

I did not purchase it in that moment. And thank god that I didn’t.

Instead, I found other essay collections and novels to draw me back into the world of reading. When I had gotten through four or five novels that I enjoyed, I purchased My Year Abroad, feeling like I fulfilled the role of a Reader enough to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate this book.

I knew that Chang Rae Lee was an award-winning and important Asian American writer of our time, and that he was also a professor at Stanford, which I am attending in the fall. Reading My Year Abroad felt like a necessity — I would read it, appreciate the endlessly quotable prose, and end up beaming with pride at the end, feeling not only more worldly and cultured, but also ready with questions and praise for Lee in the fall when he was my writing professor.

The book certainly surprised me. In the first few chapters, I immediately realized that this was not going to be the cohesive, string of narration that the most recent novels I’d read had possessed. Instead, it was an amalgamation of seemingly unrelated and (perhaps overly and unrealistically) imaginative plot scenes.

In the very first chapter, we’re introduced to Tiller, a 20 year old white and 1/8 Asian (which is, for some reason, an repeated detail that is shallowly referenced throughout the book every time Tiller wants to feel less bland than he actually is) college-age kid. He lives a secret domestic life in Stagno, NJ with Val, a much older white mother, and her son, Victor Jr (VeeJ). One of the first scenes is Tiller noticing a black SUV, quickly changing his appearance to masquerade as a teenager. He answers some of the Man in the Black SUV’s questions, vaguely, so as to protect Val, who is part of the witness protection program.

The book alternates between Tiller’s adventure to China and his domestic life with Val, the former of which we are reminded has plot relevance in his domestic life (Tiller’s continuous reminders, “all of this I learned while abroad, of course, which I’ll get to later”), which ultimately doesn’t really. Both narratives seem detached from each other, the only running thread being Tiller himself.

When we begin to learn about how Tiller got to China, each scene is so excruciatingly laden with unnecessarily high-level vocabulary and details that it doesn’t feel convincing or real. Sure, I can *kind* of force myself to conceptualize why a 20 year old white kid would have a secret relationship with a 40 something year old mother. But when Lee begins to describe how Tiller gets to China, all reason is abandoned, seemingly. Tiller meets Pong, a Chinese entrepreneur, as a golf caddy, and is invited to have drinks with Pong and his investment group friends (for some odd, inane reason). Pong sees something in Tiller that causes him to take him under his wing? Pong invites Tiller to taste-test his yogurt flavors chemically concocted at his yogurt shop? Pong gives Tiller a tour of his mansion? Pong invites Tiller to China with him on a business venture to sell jamu juice????

I am all for the employment of a creative license, and I have great respect for authors who can use the experiences of their lives and the experiences of others’ lives to invent a great story of their own. But this just made no sense to me. What interest does a 50something year old Chinese immigrant man have in pampering a stranger 20 year old white golf caddy? This is an extremely important plot point, because it is the entire reason that Tiller ends up in China, which is the journey that is supposed to transform and enlighten him, as advertised by the description and title. But it lacks cohesion and sense, and is flimsy and implausible, making it seem like Lee just thought of the idea while sitting on the toilet and ran with it as the starter building blocks of his entire narrative.

From this point on, the scenes became increasingly weird, and difficult to imagine ever happening. Tiller is swept away to China (for free), and taken on luxurious adventures, scuba diving in an aquarium with investment partners (what the hell?) and being forced into a room to sleep with a Filipina-Indian prostitute. I get that these scenes are supposed to read as exciting and flashy, but they are confusing to say the least.

Back (“or in fact, forward”) in Stagno with Val, we see that Victor Jr. is slowly becoming a master chef, which soon attracts neighbors and Stagnoites to their home, where they hold generous free meals (made by none other than Victor Jr.) to strangers. In the Stagmo narrative, we slowly learn of Tiller’s backstory, whose mother left him at a young age, which has left him afflicted with an array of mommy issues, partially explaining his strange choice of partner and living situation. Val, we learn, is canonically suicidal, searching for a social life and purpose that will give her life more meaning than just hiding away in the suburbs of NJ. None of the present-day Stagno narrative feels even remotely important or related to the in-past Traveling to China narrative.

By the time I got to the middle of the book, I had already been reading for five days. I told myself that I would get 60 pages done every day, and felt aggrieved every time I’d end up with a headache at the end of my daily reading sessions. On the fifth day, I said To hell with it, and decided to knock the second half of the book out in a day. To aid my marathon, I signed up for a 30-day free trial Audible subscription and cranked the reading to 2x speed.

The second half of the book was somehow more redeemable, but only made more interesting because of Val’s two scarily-near-successful suicide attempts and our finding out that Pong’s business venture was a whole scam (again, both being unrelated). Tiller is left in China at Drum Kappagoda (Pong’s business partner)’s former-hotel-turned-mansion, where he is forced to work as a slave to Chillies, a Thailand-born ethnically-Chinese kitchen despot, making chili paste and being brutally beaten any time he asks for outside contact. Constance, Drum’s daughter, also takes a liking to Tiller, roofying him and using him as a sex toy. In the end, we are left with a classic Villain-reveals-all scene, in which Pong has been brutally beaten to a pulp for scamming Drum, and is weakly explaining the whole backstory to Tiller. Pong was sincere in his jamu juice business venture, but was also selling a poisonous mercury to Drum, slowly killing him.

Lee’s explanation that the entire thing was a con is somewhat gratifying, since it gives Some meaning to the otherwise absurd string of events that happened prior. However, it still left me feeling cheated, because I had spent days on this book that only ended up being somewhat pleasurable in the last 100 pages. Further, the explanation itself still leaves me with a huge, looming question: why was Tiller apart of this entire fiasco to begin with? Did Pong bring him to Drum’s home intentionally to have him become a chilli-paste-making-slave? Pong, in his final monologue, reassures Tiller that he took him on as an apprentice because he saw talent and potential in him. It makes sense why Pong fled the scene, so as to avoid being caught by Drum as a conman, but why not bring Tiller with him, given that he was talented enough to be his pupil? The whole thing, still, makes no damn sense.

In the final page of the book, we are left with this message: “Truth is, mastery is beyond someone like me. […] The rest of us, as capable as we are, as earnest, have enough burden simply becoming. We figure our way in halfway bounds, eternally not getting there. Yet we keep on. Eyes open, mouths wide. Ready.” I assume this is pointing to some larger idea about pouncing on opportunities that arise, open to the idea of being fundamentally altered by experiences, whether pleasant or not. However, the novel is so scatterbrained that this mantra barely holds any meaning. Tiller’s experience in China only ties back to his domestic life in Stagno in two ways, which feel lazy and gimmicky at best: first, when we finally find out that the “magic black credit card from Pong” that has been financially supporting Tiller, Val, and Victor Jr. the whole time was given to Tiller to continue the jamu juice venture before Pong died; second, when Val is about to kill herself with a curling iron and a bathtub, the Japanese folding knife that Pong bought for Tiller falls out of his pocket and cuts the curling iron wire. These aren’t even plot twists or “aha!” moments in any sense, just vague connections to objects that barely held any meaning even when Tiller received them in China.

After finishing the book, I thought that I would feel contented and satisfied, having at least understood Tiller’s and Pong’s motivations. But instead I was left mystified and bereft. These characters are random and unrelatable. Tiller is supposedly the age of a college sophomore, but does not talk or act like one. Pong is a quinquagenarian Chinese entrepreneur, but has strange and unexplained motivations and judgments (namely, choosing a random college kid as his business partner).

I wanted to like this book, I really did. After it came in the mail, I excitedly took a picture of the cover, texting my close friends that this Pulitzer Prize Finalist was going to be my next read. Even in the first half, when I was grudgingly forcing myself to reach a page goal per day, I told people that the writing was advanced but I’d probably end up feeling more worldly in fulfilled by the end. Unfortunately, this was not the case at all. I finished the book on a rainy Saturday afternoon, feeling aggrieved and wronged, furiously typing away at a Goodreads review. Imagine that you are at a high-end Michelin-star restaurant, and there is an expensive wine on the menu that is presented as refined and rich. It has been fermented for an entire year, and receives only the greatest laudation from wine critics across the world. Excitedly, you purchase the wine, knowing that it is of high quality. But you take a sip, and it just tastes bad.

That is how I feel about My Year Abroad. I cannot give it zero stars because I can recognize that the writing itself is incredibly precise and detailed. These scenes are accurate to a T, and one of the reasons they are so difficult to imagine is because Lee describes a very, very specific place and situation with each paragraph. I am knowledgeable enough to know that this requires an incredible amount of skill. Still, just because writing is advanced and critically-acclaimed, does not mean that it is enjoyable in the slightest. The characters are random and the situations are farfetched, in an attempt to be imaginative and inspiring, but ending up seeming like an R-rated Mad Libs instead. The plot itself, as I’ve duly noted, has several problems with it alone. I found myself constantly checking the page numbers every few pages to see how close I was to the end, numbers that you’re supposed to forget about if a book is really good. Thus, I shall bequeath My Year Abroad a glowing one star.

I will note that there was one (1) singular section of the book that I genuinely enjoyed reading, which was the one chapter in which Pong took on the POV and described his childhood. Perhaps it was because the tale of a young boy growing up as the son of professors during the Chinese Cultural Revolution was more convincing (which like, duh, it was an actual event in history) than whatever fucked-up mash that Lee was trying to present as a cohesive storyline. But Lee only took on Pong’s perspective for one chapter, throwing just a few bones of hope to my starving, agonized soul. Immediately after, we returned to the nonsense jumble of My Year Abroad’s actual plot.

I will end this review with a single quote from the book that I actually enjoyed.

“Perhaps this got me obsessing about eventualities, such as how our time together might end. It’s not like in a story. In stories, the endings are ones we can handle, even if they aren’t so happy, because they let you linger, they let you go on, sustaining you with morsels of wonder and hope. But when you have to say goodbye to the person you love — and it is a person, it’s not the same with an object or idea — bid that true and final goodbye, and I mean final final final, it’s the safest, most startling thing. Utter desolation. Okay. It’s when the goodbye is one-sided that trouble buds, maybe lowering eternal.”

Goodbye, My Year Abroad. May we never cross paths again.

P.S. - For a book titled My Year Abroad, it takes a remarkably long time before Tiller actually arrives in China (Chapter 12/27). Further, as aforementioned, the Stagno storyline has only superficial connections to Tiller's experience in China. I've considered changing my rating to two stars, but can't even bring myself to do that.

[Traci Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really strong writing but ultimately not my kind of book. There are some great vivid scenes that glue the book together, but in between i found myself losing interest. This is for sure for the fiction lovers out there. A little too much going on and certainly too long. I can appreciate the skill with which Lee writes but the story didn’t ever capture me until the end.

[Nadine in California · Rating 5 out of 5]

Narrator Tiller Bardamon is a 20 year old who lives on the “poor side” of an exclusive New Jersey suburb clearly based on Princeton,“where Labradoodles outnumber the ethnics”. In fact, being ¼ Asian, he practically IS the local ethnic. In the fall he plans to go on a year abroad program and he does, but it's not the one offered by his college. Instead Tiller impulsively travels to Asia with a local, highly successful and charismatic Chinese businessman, and his experiences are wild in ways you can't imagine. Trust me, you can't. The book's title is a riot of an understatement, and typical of the book's style of humor.

Tiller is such an engaging character for me - internally insecure and needy, but outwardly modest, uncomplaining and hard-working. I felt the weight of Tiller's emotional pains, but his voice is so wry and self-deprecating it never seemed heavy ("I'm so sorry,” I said, unable to help but fluff the downy pillow of my self-pity.) Tiller narrates the story after he returns from Asia, but the chapters alternate between time frames – the before, during, and after of his trip – so it all feels present tense, and the pacing never flags.

I can see how some readers might think that Lee went a little over the top with Tiller's experiences in Asia (not as in gory, but just being a shade too fantastical), but for me he stayed just shy of the line. A couple of exceptions: Tiller's great singing voice - I can't imagine how he'd have got through life not knowing he had vocal talent. Also, Vincent Jr's cooking skills at age 8 might have overtoed the line. But then, I can forgive easily in the face of such pitch-perfect and entertaining writing. I don't want to give the impression that this book is solely entertainment, though - it has an overlay of gentle melancholy I've seen in the other Lee books I've read, and it does look at profound questions, but never sinks into profundity. Still, it's the entertainment factor I keep coming back to, since I found delights on every page. Some were simple, trenchant observations of modern life, like “...taking a picture of a plate of food is by now an involuntary human response.” Others were just plain beautiful, like this description of eating a perfectly cooked omlette: ““...this fluffy, buttery masterpiece that was like gliding tongue-first into a cloud.”

Lee also conveys nuanced thought in a clear, visual language, as in this example on race:

“...I took an unconsciously intense gander at her, to pick through the genetic runes of her face, her hair, her body, and retroactively analyze whatever thing she'd said or done through this new spyglass. But this new spyglass is a trick, you actually have to peer through it the other way and back onto yourself to understand that it's all about you, and always has been, particularly if you're a semi-diasporic post-colonial indeterminate like me...”

Finally, a more extended example of just how entertaining Lee's writing can be, with this (single sentence!) description of scuba diving for the first time:

“The thing about scuba is that it looks so fun and easy on the cable shows, you imagine flippering through the blue perfection with a majesty that will reconnect you to a primordial yearning for the serene gill-based existence we once enjoyed and maybe should never have evolved out of, when the truth is that the first time you strap on the mask and stick the regulator in your mouth you feel like you've been transformed into a badly designed personal submarine that features poor visibility and a gag so you can't scream.”

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

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I had high hopes for this one after really enjoying his previous novels: Native Speaker, The Surrendered and On Such a Full Sea.

The novel starts off good - reminding me a lot of one of my favorite books of the 2010s The Goldfinch in a lot of ways (mother missing, replace Boris with Pong, crazy trip, etc), but at some point I got really bored after the karaoke scene where Tiller demonstrates a sort of (hard to believe) supernatural skill at karaoke with Pong and his business associates.
There is a technic used by the author switching back between the present of Tiller's life with Vicki and VeeJ and his voyages with Pong which is fine, but the moments he chose for the transitions did not always make sense to me. There was also a lot of 3rd level dropbacks to his life with his laid-back dad Clark. Perhaps this was the best way to tell his story, but it felt awkward and read somewhat painfully at points.

I think that the intrigue dropped off when Tiller described in nauseating details his partying with Pong and the crew as well as his sexual escapades with Constance, and that was really what put me off because, unlike scenes of debauchery in The Goldfinch, they were not really essential in understanding the characters in my opinion.

However, being the great writer that he is, there were some nice quotes:
One day it was gone and I hardly missed it, like what happens when a huge tree comes down after a storm; you think the bright new hole in the sky is never going to get filled, but then a few days later everything has somehow recalibrated and it's as if the tree never existed. (p. 60)
[there were] first-rank artists whose works might someday be national treasures, but against the surging of the Red Guards, who with stunning speed and conviction improvised a complete (if temporary) control wherever they went, they were no sturdier than anybody else, mere saplings in the path of an avalanche. It was a time, my father would tell me later, when one could feel very large and very small and when neither scale nor perspective held any meaning. (p. 123)
At our most ideal we are windows onto the wider realm. (p. 268)
so this kept it from a 2-star rating.

Another thing I noticed was that for this book he used the first person singular (as in Native Speaker) whereas for On Such a Full Sea he wrote in first person plural and third person for The Surrendered. I think that his best writing was in the third person to be honest.

In any case, I don't see this one winning the Pulitzer 2021. Hopefully, Lee's next novel will reach the peaks of the other three I read and appreciated far more.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Year Abroad is an unusual coming of age story. Tiller Bardaman, age 20, grew up in a suburb of Dunbar, New Jersey (an enclave that strongly resembles Princeton). He is a vulnerable youth of Asian- European ancestry. Tiller's father, Clark, raised him after his mother left when Tiller was very young.

At the book’s start, Tiller works as a caddy at a Dunbar Golf Club, earning money for a typical year of study abroad, when he meets Pong, a Chinese- American entrepreneur. Pong takes Tiller under his wing, wines and dines him, and convinces him to work for him, marketing Elixir, an Indonesian health- drink that he claims can cure most ailments. Pong brings Tiller with him to Asia to meet, party, and sell to the wealthy elite.

Pong’s back story is one of the most interesting segments of the book. His parents were members of China’s artistic elite, painters who taught at China’s most prestigious art Institute. His parents met their demise during the Cultural Revolution. Lee vividly describes how this trauma and his later experience demise as an immigrant to the US are crucial to understanding his character.

The book has two alternating storylines. Tiller describes his time in Asia, which is followed by his life in a working-class New Jersey town with his older girlfriend Val and her eight-year-old son, who are in witness- protection. Chang- Rae Lee is a skilled writer who makes all of these disparate elements mesh into a subtle engaging work of fiction.

[Liz Hein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars and I almost DNFed this book twice. If it wasn’t for a buddy read I would have, and this is now my favorite piece of fiction published in 2021 (so far).

This is a SLOW start, and that’s clearly very intentional. The story of Tiller’s life is slowly unveiled to us in two timelines. The first being his experience meeting a somewhat mystical and larger than life business man named Pong. Pong takes Tiller under his wing, igniting the “year abroad”. The other timeline is post year abroad where Tiller is living with his partner and her child from a previous marriage which necessitates them living in somewhat hiding. We jump back and forth between these two timelines, slowly, and I mean slowly, learning more about the characters backstories. But by the end, I was sitting there literally hugging the book and thinking about what is important in life and how very fleeting it is.

I already sort of knew this about my reading taste, but this book really solidified it: I am a sucker for a strong ending and My Year Abroad’s ending was perfect. I’m not exaggerating when I saw I was struggling and thought this was a 3 star read for beautiful writing for basically 400 pages. But Chang-Rae Lee knew exactly what he was doing.

I would recommend this to fans of Remains of the Day and slow character drive stories.

[Jessica J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Year Abroad is the kind of book that I think might be more well-written than the amount of enjoyment than I got from the story. It often comes across as a generic "Important Male Literary Novel" kind of book, even down to the gross descriptions of women's bodies, but I do think Change-Rae Lee was doing some interesting things with his structure and themes.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Other readers have pointed out that Chang-rae Lee's My Year Abroad is a profound work, steeped in ideas, but also "a blast to read." Yes on all counts. It's long, very long, and dense, with two timelines playing out through the voice of Tiller, whose very name describes how he navigates through his experiences. In a recent interview Lee responded to the question of genre, whether this could be called picaresque or a bildungsroman, by saying that he didn't want it to be categorized as such. Lee went on to say a coming of age novel is usually a debut, but at age 55, he wanted his narrator's voice to be younger and naive, and thus made Tiller's voice shift between teen and young adult as he matures over the course of his experiences.

So in the backstory line we have Tiller meeting Pong, a highly successful local businessman of Chinese ancestry, who takes him on as a sort of intern, flying him business class to Asia, and the over-the-top experiences he encounters as they market a health drink to off-the-charts billionaires. In present day, Tiller lives with his lover and her son who are under federal witness protection in somewhere USA. In both storylines, the importance of food and the nostalgic power of music play heavily. Food, not just the taste and preparation, but its properties of of home, connection to the past. But interwoven here also is Pong's history, told by him in his distinctive voice, which is the core of the narrative. His family history particularly with respect to Mao's Cultural Revolution and the resultant effect on his life. How he built his business empire.

As I say in the beginning, there are a lot of pages in this book, but at no time did it feel labored. There's much humor, and descriptions of meals are mouthwatering. Highly recommended.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know what to say about this book other than it meanders. The first 100 pages make you think there is going to be a big reveal and you keep reading to see what that is. It never really happens though. The main character is abandoned by his mother at a young age and has a very superficial relationship with his father. When he meets Pong a seemingly successful Chinese American businessman who takes him under his wing and to China on a trip the protagonist is clearly searching for something more than an apprenticeship. He becomes very attached to Pong and looks up to him in many ways.

This is only one half of the story however. The other half is about the main characters time with his girlfriend whom for various reasons in in the witness protection program. He lives with her and her son. The deeper meaning of this part of the story is superficial at best. Honesty it was hard to take this story line seriously after a while. Without any spoilers I will say this: the writing is witty and interesting. However, there are times when the story is not believable and you simply end up questioning why you want to read to the end. I wound up finishing it but considered giving up.

I gave this two stars because of the quality of the writing not for the plot or the character development. Both of which are lacking. This is an easy but long book that I am not sure I can recommend you spend your valuable reading time on. I really wanted to like this. I really did. It just didn’t work for me.

[Jeff Matlow · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got 30% of the way through the book and had to throw in the towel. Every page was a battle.

Books like this make me wonder why the editor isn’t completely redlining the entire thing, and maybe sending the author to a writing workshop.

It seems to me there is a good story hidden in this novel - every 20 to 30 pages there is a hint of an intriguing journey. But whatever the story is gets washed up in endless and meaningless blather that needs to be removed from the book.

The author writes long rambling sentence after long rambling sentence, oftentimes using vocabulary that is so unnecessary for the topic at hand. Let me give you an example of the cadence:

“Val’s soul seems to me a crock of honey set on a warming plate, it’s flows exchanging imperceptibly from top to bottom so that there’s hardly any gradient within, one example being that even when Victor Jr is at his petulant, grating worst Val will bat her eyelashes twice, very slowly, while expelling the lightest of sighs, and then try to reason with the beast”

There are so many words and thoughts crammed into these never ending sentences, once you read it you still have no idea what it means and why it took so gosh darn long to say it.

I can’t in good conscience recommend this book until it gets a serious rewrite.

#netgalley #myyearabroad

[Kat(ja) · Rating 2 out of 5]

*I was provided with an eARC by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!*

CW: parental abandonment, suicidal ideation, mental illness, forced labor, forced sexual intercourse, sex work

Let’s get it out of the way. Unfortunately, I was not the right reader for this book.

I had been very eager to pick up this novel, because of my own experiences abroad. Be it during my formative High School years or later on in life, every time I went to a different country for a longer period of time, I learned something about the world, about people and most importantly myself. No matter where I stayed, it changed me and taught me valuable lessons. I cherish those experiences and thought it would be a great connection to this story. But no matter how hard I tried, I constantly found myself losing interest.

Told between alternating timelines of now and the adventure that got Tiller to his present situation, I couldn’t always quite make the connection between the different scenarios. I felt that the story was disjointed and didn’t evoke the emotional effect I had hoped for. The journey abroad and its aftermath were so important, yet Tiller doesn’t even leave his country until about 40% into the book.

While everything Tiller describes has a purpose, it’s still hard to follow him as he finds value in situations you wish he had never gotten into. I don’t think anything ever goes smoothly when you set out for something potentially life-changing, but where he found himself along the way was among the worst that could happen. There are some clear themes around parenthood, taking action (which Tiller does very late in the book, mostly being an inactive protagonist who things happen to rather than someone who makes things happen – but that’s all part of the journey!) kinship and the privilege of certain opportunities. And yet, I still couldn’t always grasp the fondness for certain people and experiences I would have rather never thought of ever again, while Tiller had them on the highest of pedestals.

Ultimately, I think that this style of writing just wasn’t for me. I can see many literary fans rejoicing in the details, but I found myself drifting off mid-sentence as the descriptions became ever more elaborate and lengthy. In general, this book was just too long, offering pages of minute details of various foods and drinks or other things, just information on top of information, but not the connection to me as a reader I really sought. I am certain others will be able to appreciate Lee’s craftsmanship and skill more than I could.

Fazit: 2/5 stars! Unfortunately, My Year Abroad failed to capture me.

[Diane Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee's novel about Tiller's year abroad may make college students regret their safe journeys while away from campus. Then again, our twenty-year-old Tiller, isn't a typical fellow, even though he is portrayed as your average student. After caddying for some rather wild entrepreneurs, Tiller is invited to go to Asia on a business trip, to help promote this miracle drink, because Tiller has such amazing taste buds. While in Asia, he also learns he can sing, do yoga, make love for incredibly long periods, and withstand a fair amount of pain, when the joyride ends and he is expected to make curry.

Returning home, he meets a woman in her thirties with her eight-year-old son, on their way to their new witness protection home, and he moves in with them, quickly becoming her lover, and more gradually the young boy's father.

If I were to read these two descriptions of the novel, I'm not sure I'd read the novel. Why his wild, zany novel works is because Lee has such amazing writing, and he provides some incredible insights and details, both humorous and sad, and even though we go from Asia to a nondescript town in Jersey, back and forth like a pinball game, what holds this novel together is the beautiful writing, the joyful truths, and the bleak realities.

[Rob S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose style is off the rating chart for me, one sentence and scene after the next.

The story itself is currently a timely pandemic distraction since most of us have not been going much of anywhere. I’d skip trying to model this particular trip abroad but not the story. Sip, savor and enjoy! Lee’s charismatic Tiller, Pong and supporting cast of characters will be hanging out in my head for awhile.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

a chore but not the worst one on your list, like sweeping the kitchen

[Farrah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. What a total slog. Went nowhere, verrrry slowly. Clearly written by a man for men. College frat boy narrator was not my jam. Stupid, almost totally nonsensical plot.

[Candace · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "My Year Abroad," Chang-Rae Lee shows he is a writer at the top of his game. This is a complicated novel, and all of it is immediate and true. it's also the best use of bookending I may ever have read. Isn't that device supposed to keep tension and build suspence about how point A got to point B? In "My Year," it will keep you guessing.

When we first meet Tiller, he's moving into a rented house in a hard-scrabble rust belt town with Val, a woman in her late 30s and her 8 year old son, whom he met in Hong Kong Airport. She is witness protection for turning her mobster husband in to the Feds, and now 21 year old Tiller has gone through Witsec with her and is joining her in exile.

Only a year before, Tiller was one of the less affluent of his affluent New Jersey suburb, which is why he was washing dishes and filling in as a caddy to help fund his junior year abroad. We never know what country he's going to, but it doesn't matter because he doesn't go there. He fills in caddying for a friend and meets an interesting group of wealthy investors, and one of them takes a shine to him. Pong Lu is a chemist but also owns businesses --mostly food related--all over the area. Pong has a quiet chrisma, a gentle, deliberate way of bringing special talents out in others. He invites Tiller to come with him on a week-long business trip to Asia. The trip is extended and strange things begin to happen. A lot of drugs and sex, strange smoothie conoctions, weird cultish behavior, but it is all okay and Tiller feels safe as long as Pong is there. And then, suddenly, Pong is not.

And there you have your bookends. Tiller's in the town they call Stagno with a strange woman and her "XL little boy." Why is he there? Why didn't he go home? Where's Pong?

This is a long book,, but I wished it were longer. The pages shoot by. The mysteries pile up. The sections of crazy rich partying in various parts of Asia went on too long, but were always reeled in by the presence of Pong and Tiller's unsuspected reactions. The part set in Drum's compound near Shenzen stretched patience, but never enough to put the book down. and say "I'm done."

"My Year Abroad" is a good novel for these times. Will we ever have answers? Does it matter?

Thanks to Riverhead books and Netgalley for the pleasure of reviewing this novel.

~Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader

[stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

i just feel like if you're an author who writes "her legs scissored girlishly" and describes a girl's tits as "resilient and nipply" you should uh. not be an author.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Chang-rae Lee's sixth novel. I have read every single previous one and loved each one in different ways.

I loved My Year Abroad for several things: the smart, sassy and delicious writing; the hero Tiller and his viewpoint as an Asian/American young man; the absolute richness that Chang-rae Lee brings to all his novels.

Let's go right to Tiller. In many ways he is a mess and yet he is wide open to experience. He has a secret sorrow and is so emotionally vulnerable I just wanted to give him hugs all the time. He is so game and willing when he follows the other main character, Pong the Chinese/American entrepreneur, into Asia. He just keeps trying to be whatever Pong seems to see in him. Many wild adventures ensue, seemingly millions of meals, predatory men and women of all levels of Asian society, and scenes that are barely believable.

There is an alternating time line in the story concerning Tiller's life in New Jersey, both before and after his year abroad. This was somewhat annoying except by the end I realized the author did me a favor. No matter the horrors Tiller experienced in that year, you know he made it through and you are shown his inner strengths in the kindest way possible.

That last paragraph may sound like a spoiler but it is not because you know all along that he did survive. The wonder of the book is that you still worry he won't.

The smart and sassy aspect includes Lee's deftness with the way college age Americans speak and behave. Also the exact truths he writes about our modern times, stereotypes, global trade practices, the effects of capitalism as a global phenomenon, all done in emotional yet humorous ways.

In case you are thinking this is a lot to unpack, you are right. You will know quite soon in the book whether it is your kind of story or not. It certainly was mine.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

tbh have not made up my mind about this one yet. on a language and structural level, it’s well written but it wasn’t a fun read all the way through per se. it’s just... really really weird. like really weird. it’s like a weird vivid pipe dream. the underlying conceit is SENSATION—the most vivid extreme of every kind of sensation. food, sex, etc. it goes without saying that sensation ad absurdum is a gut punch—a constant maximalist experience. it’s about having and cultivating “taste,” and how a taste for life can be exuberant but excess can also be dangerous, even deadly

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very odd and fantastic book.  The reading experience was rich and full, I'm sure many of these scenes will stay with me; but my expectations were high and that made my disappointment with the ending very, very deep, which is why I'm rating this 3 stars, because it was a 5 star journey with a 1 star ending.

It’s rather like The Odyssey, it starts with Tiller going on what he expects will be a short and straightforward week-long trip (although of course you know it won’t be, it’ll be a YEAR), and then there are so many tangents.  So many.  It’s told in a choppy way, starting in the present day with Tiller alluding to something that happened, then leaping back to the beginning, then to the middle, then to the distant past, back to the present, and so on.

Tiller's one over-riding quality is his desire to belong, to be closer, to be more, to fit, to be held:

And although I didn't perfectly fit in this latest of Pong's pan-Asian lineups there was also nothing to say I couldn't someday belong, for as his loyal protégé and new friend, I felt I was being rekeyed, my notches bearing a freshened edge, brighter and more defined, ready for serendipitous use.

Aren't we all master keys, if we truly want to be?

The Tiller of the past, bopping around Dunbar, washing dishes, peeing in fields, and trailing in Pong’s wake, sounds very young.  The Tiller of the “present” in “Stagno” (which I pictured as Ohio, but it could have been Pennsylvania or Indiana or West Virginia or Kentucky - Stagno is land-locked, working-class, and about a day's drive from Dunbar NJ) sounds so much older.  It was fascinating how Lee could subtly pull that off.   

This story is aimless and meandering and it seems like not much happens, but ... so much happens.  Events become more and more insane as the story goes on.  I really love Lee's writing, he has a real talent for creating characters that I immediately care about, and I usually didn't mind the meandering, but (BUT) a meander like that needs a good ending to make it all worthwhile for me.  This book didn't have that.  In this case only the journey mattered, not the destination (I suppose that's one more parallel to the Odyssey, since Ithaca was never more than an afterthought for Odysseus).  

Tiller's adventures are often outlandish and fantastical, as is fitting for a personal odyssey.  Who were his Sirens?  the karaoke-singing Drum, with Constance and Chilies as Scylla and Charybdis?    Or maybe Constance is better viewed as Circe, inviting Tiller to stay with her, and Chilies is Polyphemus  (I'm pretty sure Tiller cries out "I'm nobody!" to Chilies at some point),  and Val is Calypso.  Poor Clark, Tiller's father, is Penelope, but he is forgotten and alone, with not even any suitors.    And who does that make Pong?  Is he Agamemnon? Aeolus?  Zeus (who was always a sneaky trickster)?  We learn a lot about Pong, but all we really know about Pong is that he tells a good story - there's no way to know if any of his stories were true.

I could have fun all day thinking of parallels, but none of that changes the flubbed ending for me.  First of all, how did Tiller get away from Drum's country villa?  Did he just ... walk?  Was he able to find his things somewhere in the house, and regain his passport?  How did he get to Hong Kong?  And ...  What is Tiller going to do now?  Is he just going to stay with Val & VJ forever, raising VJ and never finishing his college education?  Is he hoping for retroactive mercy from his college, and then try to finish his senior year ... somehow?  I assume Tiller's phone call home to his dad and talk of Thanksgiving was implying that Tiller was planning to bring Val and VJ to Dunbar ... eventually?   ... I was also hoping for more info on what sort of holding pattern Val was in.  Was she in permanent Witness Protection, or was she waiting to go to trial again and be a witness for the prosecution?  Was her life in danger?  What's going to come of the thug, "Todd Brown," who had come sniffing around looking for her - surely other thugs will show up next?  ...  What was going to happen when Tiller returned to Dunbar?  Surely Pong's wife would seek him out and ask questions?  I needed some sort of closure for some of these questions.  I guess this will be a good book club book - LOTS of discussion points here!!!

I was reminded at times of On Such a Full Sea, this had that same feeling of aimless meandering combined with huge (personal or global) world-changing events, the protagonist is a sort of Everyman who is also Superman.

[Elena L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

MY YEAR ABROAD focuses on Tiller, an American college student whose life is transformed when he goes on an investment trip to Asia as an associate with Pong, a Chinese American entrepreneur.

Alternating between dual timeline - Tiller's time abroad and his life after the overseas expedition - we follow Tiller's maturation and growth in wisdom as he goes through adventures and unusual events. He is a passive person who finds value in different situations which could be less meaningful for the majority. By detailing everyday mundane tasks, Lee is gifted at evoking emotions in some reflective insights and capturing the vulnerability in portraying the sincere essence of humanity. Throughout the story, it felt like the narrator was having an ongoing conversation with the reader with a genuine and humorous tone. What I mostly enjoyed is how Lee approached the song/music in the novel. Don't read this book with an empty stomach because the food, yum the food!

I can tell that Lee is an experienced writer from his accurate and skilled writing. While I appreciated reading thought-provoking commentaries on parenthood, politics, love, belonging, race, culture, immigration, mental illness, capitalism and power, I wasn't the right reader for this book. In this observant narrative, readers can be overwhelmed by the abundance of details and information and I couldn't grasp Lee's intention in the experiences detailed. Only after Pong's introduction that my interest picked up a bit and since I was craving for a "familiar" ground, I was therefore eager to reach the "my year abroad" part. I thought that the characters development was overall in-depth yet the uneven pacing dragged my reading experience. Unfortunately I wasn't invested in the story till the end and it felt too long.

If you enjoy a slow-built, character-driven and utterly literary storyline, MY YEAR ABROAD might resonance with you in the most intimate way.

[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Riverhead books - in exchange for an honest review ]

[alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

getting through this book was psychological warfare… not my cup of tea (or jamu)

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've loved Lee's other novels, and this one is exuberant, overflowing, baggy, and wearying. The writing is witty and word-drunk, but at about page 200, I found myself only partly engaged. There are two main narratives: the present-day, where 20-year-old Tiller Bardmon -- one-eighth Asian and otherwise white, a rising junior at a prestigious liberal arts college, from a privileged suburb of little diversity, where he lived with his single father, his mother having disappeared from family life --meets Val and her 8 year old son, Vic Jr. at a food court in the Hong Kong airport as he travels back home after a harrowing overseas expedition with Chinese businessman Pong Lou, whom Tiller met golf caddying for Pong in the summer. Pong is a chemist for a pharmaceutical giant, who has various partners and owns/has invested in yogurt places and hot dog places and is working on many other projects, including the development of a premium elixir that can be modified to suit each consumer and may extend life. When we meet Tiller, Val, and Vic Jr., they have already returned to the US, and are living together in Stagno, where Witness Protection has placed Val and her kid, after she informed on her husband. The second narrative, in the past, is Tiller's harrowing overseas expedition, when he accompanied Pong on a junket to China to raise money for his elixir. Tiller plays the role of newcomer to whom all must be explained, thereby educating the reader on a wide range of topics and themes, and there are many, a few among them include identity, the global economy based on the fulfilling of desires and appetites that exploit race and national borders, the inequities in the world, the nature of modern-day multiracial suburbs, and perhaps, happiness. The too-muchness of the novel finally overwhelmed me.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible- Lee is obviously a genius- I continually was amazed at his mastery of language and storytelling. Comedic, ridiculous, poignant, and surprisingly sweet. It is LONG with a lot packed in on each page- so be patient. But once you get into the rhythm, this book is an absolute wonder. A young man who thinks very little of himself finds belonging and self worth through the way the people around him reflect him back to himself in a series of absurd hijinks. Gonna go read everything Chang-Rae Lee has written.

[a.rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

sometimes i forget how many men write about women as if they’re only there for physical appreciation and pleasure and then i read something like this and every single description of a female character makes me cringe and want to throw the book across the room :))