How ‘Disorientation’ Author Elaine Hsieh Chou Wrote the Funniest, Most Poignant Novel of the Year

To call a book necessary reading often connotes a certain prosaic fussiness, calling to mind a long-avoided homework assignment rather than a pleasurable romp. Taiwanese American writer Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Disorientation, however, manages to tell a deeply vital and insightful story about Asian experience and identity in post-Trump America while still being absurdist to the point of IRL laughter.

In Disorientation, 29-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang experiences a rupture in her calm, orderly life of writing her dissertation on late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou (and coming home to her doting fiance, Stephen, a white literary translator with a penchant for mansplaining and Japanese-schoolgirl costumes) when she discovers that Chou is—wait for it—a total fiction, a character invented and embodied by one white man and propped up by another. Suddenly, Ingrid is thrust into a world of high-stakes espionage, book burnings, and campus protests and is forced to question the things most fundamental to her, including her field of study, her relationship, her friendships, and her identity as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants living in the U.S.

Recently, Vogue spoke to Chou about dealing with fetishization, the cathartic possibilities of anger, and her desire for Asian writers to “get free to reach the point of just writing what we want.” Read the full interview below.

Vogue: Did you have experiences in academia that mirrored or informed Ingrid’s PhD journey at all? 
Elaine Hsieh Chou: Well, I was in a PhD program for two and a half years, and I dropped out; there are a few reasons why, but one of them was this disastrous seminar I gave on intersectionality that people just did not want to hear. They were basically like, “You being a woman and being Asian does not change your experience of the world.” It was very strange, but this was happening in France, where race is officially not recognized. So yeah, I had some issues with academia! Not to the extent Ingrid did—I didn’t uncover, you know, a long-held secret—but I did have that feeling of my experiences being erased and being expected to fall in line and repeat what they believed in. 

In the book, the parts about the protest against the play Chinatown Blues are inspired by that time; when I lived in Paris, I started protesting and organizing, and I just felt exposed to this whole new world. I felt I had a lot of catching up to do, even though I had identified as a liberal my whole life and faithfully voted Democrat. That moment really changed me, and I just realized there was so much I didn’t understand about institutional racism and systemic inequality. Unfortunately, I—like many Asian women—have been subjected to being fetishized, and that’s something that has deeply impacted me. I never really read about it in a book before; I read nods to it but not something that really dived into: What does it feel like to grapple with that? I wanted to read about that, and I wrote it thinking that maybe somebody else would want to read about it too.