8Books Review: Across a Green Ocean, by Wendy Lee

Wendy Lee’s debut novel Across A Green Ocean presents the story centered around two siblings, Michael and Emily Tang, struggling to find their identity as the children of immigrants and after the passing of their father. When Michael finds a letter to his father sent from China, he decides to avoid his problems in the US–his unwillingness to come out to his family, his recent layoff–by finding the mysterious sender. In the process, he hopes to learn something of his equally mysterious father. His sister Emily pushes against her mother Ling’s yearning for grandchildren, throwing herself into her career as an immigration lawyer.

Touching on familiar themes of loss, identity, family, and immigration, Lee spins a deeply emotional and transnational tale. At various points honing in on the relationship between two specific characters–be it Ling and Emily, Emily and her husband, or Michael and his father’s childhood friend–the novel allows its characters to grow within these ascribed roles.

Overall, Across a Green Ocean is lyrical in what one might call an easy page turner (and by easy I don’t mean simplistic, but rather smooth and well paced). Not overly cheery in content, it is also not overly grim with a networked plot that flows swiftly without stalling–jumping time periods and focal characters without giving the reader whiplash.

To give just one example of Lee’s language and style, we start with the son Michael standing at the edge of Qinghai Lake on his visit to China:

The vastness of the sky and water around him, the fields and the mountains, makes him feel wonderfully small and inconsequential. No matter what he does, what he says, it won’t make a drop of difference. As time passes, and people come and go, the landscape will stay the same. Michael is reminded of a vacation his family took many years ago, to the south of Florida. They’d made the trip down by car, and his mother had packed a huge amount of sandwiches into a cooler that rested in between the front and backseats.

Now situated firmly in the past, Michael recalls a moment with his father at Cape Canaveral:

A wave came up and hit Michael in the chest…but he couldn’t turn around, couldn’t tear his eyes from the figure before him. His father had stopped now, and was looking out toward the empty space where on other occasions there would be the cottony trail of smoke, the winking star of a shuttle hurtling toward space. Try as he might, Michael couldn’t see what his father was looking at in the brilliant blue sky, whether it was something in the future or the past.

At some points, the novel feels almost predictable in its unfolding and themes, with comparisons between mainland China and life in America, discussion of the identity crisis of modern American women, and a tightly connected circle within its main story about father and son, but that’s not the point. What is, and what makes this book and the writing compelling, is watching the character’s cope with their emotions, their discoveries, and the changes in their lives.

And for Asian American readers, and particularly Chinese American readers, there is a faint, sometimes more than faint, familiarity to the choices and struggles (depending of course on the reader). That in itself lends a kind of comfort and emotional relation to the story, that while I believe would be true for anyone encountering the novel’s family, is that much more poignant. For me, a second or third generation Chinese American (I never know which way to count), many threads rang true: there’s the desire to look to China for origins and histories and answers; there are silences within families about the past; there are disparities between Chinese immigrant stories depending on when you came and from where, evidenced by Ling and Han; and so many other subtle but important reflections on human nature, immigrant families, and one fraction of the Asian American experience.