Reviews
[Starred] Nine stories feature complicated Asian American characters living insightfully depicted lives in the worlds of moviemaking, restaurants, and bedrooms.
The complicated, frustrating, sometimes self-defeating experience of Asianness defined by Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings receives kaleidoscopic treatment in Lee's sixth work of fiction, returning to the concerns of his landmark debut collection, Yellow (2001). Like the frustrated film director in the first story here, "Late in the Day," Lee has, in his interim novels, given us narratives that include Asian characters but are not mostly about ethnicity. Now he dives back in, deconstructing the exponential complications of Asian identity. In the spellbinding title story, the lead character confounds people. "Was she Chinese? Japanese? (She was Korean.) Subsequent was her nationality. Was she a North Korean or South Korean citizen, then? Or an immigrant? Did she have a green card? (She was a naturalized US citizen.) Then there was the question of her name, Ingrid Kissler. Was this an Americanization of her Korean name, something she had made up? Or had she once been married? (She’d been adopted by a white couple from Chanhassen, Minnesota, at the age of two, from an orphanage in Seoul.)" This character is in trouble—her tenure application is being blocked because her translation of a Korean novel has been revealed to be full of errors. Actually, she's not fluent in Korean. Her meeting with Yoo Sun-mi, the author of the novel, takes place in the wilds of Colima, Texas, a location evoked brilliantly here and in parts of the final sequences of three stories. This trilogy, called "Les hôtels d'Alain," follows the life of minor film star Alan Kwan in three incandescent episodes showcasing, from the title on out, the author's signature dramatic irony. The first is set in Alan's youth as a CIA agent's son living in a hotel in Tokyo; it revolves around a disastrous date at an Eric Clapton concert. The second features Alan's experience during the boiling-hot, seemingly endless shoot of a narco film in El Paso. Playing a hit man forced to speak his single line in the stereotypical "Oriental" accent, he essentially destroys his career. And finally, on to his trials in middle age as a bubble tea mogul in San Francisco.
[E]nlightening stories from a master of the form.
—Kirkus Reviews
"[O]ne of the top practitioners of fiction working today…The Partition—smart, sexy, and darkly funny—continues our education in the Asian American experience."
—Marion Winik on "The Weekly Reader" on WYPR (starts at 1:41)
"The Partition is a collection of tales of the universal dilemmas in being human. We are prisoners of our own subjective experience and that leads to having blind spots we didn't even know we had. The Partition may help us get out of our defensive crouch and enjoy the ride."
—Diana Y. Paul, New York Journal of Books
"Don Lee is one of those masterful storytellers who is both classic and modern, who can transport you into any setting, with any character…I chose The Partition for the precision and control with which Lee writes about Asian American identity, about race and quite simply, about people and their relationships with themselves, in the great big world."
—Weiki Wang for the TODAY Show
"Not only are these nine stories illuminating, but they are told in fine prose, clear and full of precise details…They examine numerous contentious individual lives and social scenes with clarity and a light touch, never straying into the realm of treatise. It is a rare kind of fiction-writing that can address hot-button contemporary issues with elegance and authority, stories that reveal and challenge conventional assumptions without simplification or feeble provocation."
—Walker Minot for Shelf Awareness
"Few fiction writers have worked as tirelessly to subvert stereotypes about 'Orientals' as the Korean American Don Lee. The protagonists in his debut, the 2001 story collection 'Yellow,' range in ethnicity (from Korean to Japanese to Chinese) and occupation (from professional elites to mad poets), suggesting the heterogeneity of contemporary Asian American life. Lee’s novels, whether about Asian spies in 1980s Japan ('Country of Origin') or bohemian Asian artists in Cambridge, Mass. ('The Collective'), also span a broad spectrum. But the organizing conceit of all his fiction has remained consistent: Asian Americans are not monoliths. 'The Partition,' Lee’s first collection of stories since 'Yellow,' represents a return to form, replaying many of the same thematic and stylistic concerns from his debut."
—Jane Hu, "Don Lee's Long War on Asian American Stereotypes," in The New York Times Book Review
"I cannot be more effusive in my praise for The Partition: this is a special book that is pure magic on several levels.…this just might be one of the best story collections to come along in some time and should be sought out by readers interested in Asian culture. It’s a true keeper and should be savoured by all."
—Zachary Houle on Medium
"This collection of nine stories is a stunning and far-reaching exploration of Asian American identity. Award-winning writer Don Lee has been telling stories of Asian America for over two decades, and this latest book is yet another display of his craft and mastery.""
—Patricia Thang, Book Riot
[Starred] "Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Lee’s signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections. ‘Truth was a collection of falsehoods,’ Lee’s filmmaker protagonist ponders in the opening ‘Late in the Day’ as he reconnects with a one-night fling, ‘with which you chose to define yourself, and for which you were grateful.’ Deceit haunts ‘Commis,’ as a junior chef helps close down her family’s Chinese restaurant in Missouri during her pandemic unemployment and confronts the married older man with whom she had an affair as a teen. Cheaters also populate ‘Confidants,’ in which suspicions (and a gunshot) terminate an already-tenuous relationship; in ‘UFOs,’ a television journalist chasing lurid stories avoids commitments with married lovers. Lee further showcases his ingenious narrative acrobatics in ‘Years Later,’ in which a final assignation between two twentysomethings also reveals their separate futures, and in ‘The Partition’ (the collection’s highlight), which manages to gleefully skewer both academia and the international publishing world. ‘Les hôtels d’Alain’ is a triptych novella, which follows an untethered Korean Hawaiian teen through contented-enough middle age. While Lee’ s devotees will joyfully relish casually dropped references to previous titles, new readers should savor plenty of first-time delight."
—Terry Hong, Booklist
"Korean American writer Lee (Lonesome Lies Before Us) delivers a stylish set of erotic stories. His characters are Asian Americans who wrestle with estrangement from their homelands, alienation in the United States, and a longing for intimacy in a world of fleeting romance. In 'Late in the Day,' an indie film director has a one-night stand with a girl in Chicago, only to meet her again much later in Hawaii when she is no longer glowing with youth. The title story features an androgynous academic who translates a transgressive Korean novel and then flies to Texas to meet the book’s surprisingly glamorous author. The collection ends with 'Les hotels d’Alain,' a triptych of stories that detail the life of Alain Kweon, an actor who eventually becomes the owner of a successful chain of artisanal boba tea shops in San Francisco.…[These stories] offer gorgeous, psychological portraits of men and women caught in the throes of middle age. This smart collection about love and belonging will leave readers wanting more."
—Publishers Weekly
"In the shockingly never-released-in-paperback Lonesome Lies Before Us, Don Lee wrote the anti-ethnic ethnic novel, where only a plate of food might hint at a character’s brownness. So in an about face, The Partition’s stories are packed with hapa haoles, gen 1.5s, and lots of where-are-you-from inquisitions. I loved the story ‘Late in the Day’ in which a filmmaker’s labor of love (itself an anti-ethnic ethnic film) is called out for using a biracial actor and instead takes a mercenary job as director of a short vanity film, only to see it picked up by PBS. Another of my favorites is ‘UFOs,’ where a television reporter takes two lovers, a married White guy and an earnest Korean American doctor who can spot her plastic surgery. Just about every story turns messy, and why should it be otherwise? The way these stories span decades and the tone of melancholy punctuated with humor make The Partition’s stories almost Alice Munro-esque. A worthy bookend to Lee’s first collection, Yellow, and here’s hoping it will be seen as similarly groundbreaking."
—Daniel Goldin, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)
Blurbs
"The Partition is flat-out brilliant: a witty, kaleidoscopic tear through questions of race and identity in America today by a writer who has wrought luminous fiction from these issues for years. Don Lee's collection offers vivid, entertaining proof that ethnicity is never straightforward or easy—no matter who we are, or where we stand."
—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
"Whatever you’re hiding from may find you in a Don Lee story. But this isn’t a warning. The Partition is, again and again, about Asian Americans in ways we don’t always admit we need, a collection about how we alternately cheat and show up for each other and ourselves. And the whole time, there’s a canny, shrewd love, guiding us the way through."
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
"I'm a huge Don Lee fan. He's smart, wry, funny. There’s also his humane view of humans, and the startling fairness with which he provides everyone’s point of view. I admire the graceful way his stories unfold, as if their pleats are intrinsic, once we stop to notice desire’s contradictions, and life’s wrinkles."
—Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck
"Where would we be without the work of Don Lee? He is for so many of us our guiding light, the writer we look toward, emulate, and wish we were. Over the course of four novels and a story collection, he has not so much pushed the envelope but blasted it open and created anew the landscape of the Asian American experience with rigor, joy, hilarity, and the most generous of hearts. The Partition is storytelling at its finest and further proof of Lee's mastery—a stunning portrait of who we are now and where we’re going."
—Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters