I have a confession to make: I think I’m burning out on writing “Asian American” literature.
I know this is wrong of me. I know all writing is political. I know sharing our stories is an important way for us to work past media stereotypes, find each other, and reconstruct our collective histories. I have reread Babel and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the Green Bone Saga over and over, as if by repeated consumption I could etch them beneath my skin.
Writing about “the diaspora experience,” though. On bad days, it still feels like slicing open a wound that won’t heal. Like vomiting from a sickness still curdled in my stomach. Like—despite Twitter reassurances to the contrary (shout-out to Dr. Lilly Lu!)—it’s the only thing I’ll ever be allowed to write, but I’ll need a PhD to be allowed to write it, in a program I’m not particularly interested in applying to and wouldn’t have the endurance to finish even if I got in.
And it feels deeply unfair, to think I have been assigned a specific set of topics, settings, and themes to focus on, just because of my race.1
So: recently, I’ve been finding shelter in analogue, in metaphor. In books that resonate with my experiences without re-imposing the pressure to present “my people” in a way that is rigorous, “authentic,” and unassailable. I’ve been looking for reminders that stories can still speak to Asian-diaspora issues, to capital-P Politics, even if they’re not lifted near-directly from history books. That the world still has room for my stories, even if I don’t feel myself breaking new ground in this particular area of representation.
That I can use the verbal and visual languages I grew up with—even if they belong to the devouring empire2—to talk about aspects of my life that have historically been marginalized by native speakers of those same languages.
One of these books, for me, is Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light.
Honestly, I’m kind of outraged the diaspora parallel fits so well. This book is so British that Tor kept the two L’s in Marvellous for the North American edition. It is brimming with country manses and peerage-related etiquette and William Morris wallpaper and (ahem) extremely well-placed references to Turner paintings. And reading and rereading Robin’s and Edwin’s journey across the English countryside in search of new magic, pieces of the Last Contract—and, of course, each other’s hearts—has been an unmitigated delight.
One facet of that delight is, for me, interpreting Edwin’s position in the magical world as a diaspora metaphor.
Despite being born into a powerful magical family, Edwin occupies a liminal position between magical and non-magical society. He has much less power than those around him—a teaspoon to the average magician’s full cup—which facilitates disappointment from his father, bullying from his brother, and estrangement from magical society, such that Edwin primarily lives in London among ordinary people. When he’s forced to contend with other magical families, he is met with “pity . . . familiarity, [and] the blatant mirroring of Edwin’s own disgust at what he was compared to what he should be.”3 He himself describes his situation in the language of physical borders: “He’d spent his life feeling worthless around other magicians . . . walking a sort of ditch between road and field, brushing each side of the world, quite desperately alone.”4
Edwin is just close enough to magic for its lack to hurt. And as British as A Marvellous Light’s sensibility is, I also felt echoes of the Keko-Espenians in the Green Bone Saga knowing they would never reach the jade-wielding proficiency of a native Kekonese Green Bone; Mahit Dzmare standing on the outskirts of a Teixcalaanli oration contest, knowing she would never make poetic allusions with the ease of a child born in the City; Griffin Harley, plucked out of China so early that he stopped dreaming in Chinese and lost the only thing Babel valued him for. For all these characters, there’s a sense of having been born with the means to belong, by blood or education, and falling short in a way that feels like their fault.
Yet Edwin—like some of the Kespies, like Mahit, like (to some extent) Griffin—cannot leave the area of his lack alone. Even in self-imposed mostly-exile from his family home, he continues reading about different branches of magic and inventing his own spells, becoming “the only magician in England” who can perform his snowflake crystallization technique.5 It’s a kind of compensation, in the face of not having what comes so easily to others who share his blood; a gathering of proof—that even with the little power he has, he can create something that belongs to him alone. That is not dissimilar, I think, to all the years I spent believing that, if I could just read enough Asian-American literature—if I could take the right college courses, and enter the intellectual spaces where the most current discourse was being put forth—I would finally learn what it meant to be Asian American. I would finally belong, or at least have something to wield against those who reveled in my unbelonging. For both diaspora and magic, then, inheritance is just an entry pass through the gate—one must still earn one’s right to truly stay.
I’m also fascinated by the role that land plays in Edwin’s magic. Whenever he steps onto Penhallick, his family’s estate, he feels a physical unease: “There was an unsettling sense that the grounds themselves would rise up and buck him off like a skittish horse. It always felt identical to the message in his father’s eyes: coded on the best days, and blatant on the worst. I see what you are, and you are not enough.”6 Edwin harbors a visceral sense of rejection regarding the inheritance to which he was supposed to be born, which he conflates with his family’s treatment of him. The land, at first, seems to serve as a physical manifestation of Edwin’s liminality—without a sense of welcome in his own home, he is consigned to a bachelor pad in London, and deeply isolated.
However, this changes after he and Robin visit Sutton Cottage, following a lead on the Last Contract. Flora Sutton recognizes Edwin’s affinity for magic performed on things in liminal states, such as plants on the verge of sprouting: “You can create profound change if you slip in through the gaps,”7 she tells him—and this is a potent metaphor for diaspora as well. Creating one’s own “magic” through liminality has always seemed, to me, like a central endeavor of immigrants and their descendants, at least with regards to art and meaning making: the claiming of in-between spaces, the making of home in a place one was not born to. As Somali immigrant Jamila Osman writes:
I have always belonged at the beginning of the world, and where it seems to end, where the sky meets the sea, where the sea meets the land, on a plane when the two become indistinguishable from one another and you can no longer tell if you are going home or leaving it . . . I am from a place beyond the scope of any map or road atlas . . . I am from a land unmapped and entirely my own.8
To Osman, liminality becomes an entity unto itself: a place capable of holding a person, of holding meaning; of unraveling the bounds of space and language and time. Here, too, is a walking of a ditch between road and field, a brushing of each side of the world.
And A Marvellous Light’s magical liminalities connect explicitly to knowledge, hierarchy, and empire as well. Flora—primarily a self-taught magician, as women in this world are not allowed formal magical education—assures Edwin that “There are more kinds of power than the men of this country have bothered to know”9; Edwin later reflects that “Flora Sutton did magic one-handed, and soaked Sutton in spells I’ve never seen. I don’t think she knew how to practice within the normal rules at all.”10 On a similar note, the poet Yanyi writes about historical trauma involving a different kind of knowledge than is usually touted in mainstream society. Quoting Eng and Han’s summary of Rea Tajiri’s documentary, History and Memory (1991), in which a daughter has a recurring dream of a woman at a well, he relates:
Eventually, the daughter discovers that these nightmares are reenactments of the mother’s histories in [a Japanese internment] camp. Ironically, the mother has history but no memory, while the daughter has memory but no history.”
Yanyi concludes:
Memory is a funny thing. For those of us who inherit historical traumas, we remember without knowing why we remember. We remember without knowing. Domination doesn’t just take land or livelihoods—it takes language. It takes home. It takes a sense of belonging.11
These situations both involve ways of knowing that have been discredited by those in power, silenced by dominant narratives—sourced not from what has been written or recorded, but from lessons worked out in the body itself. And so, for Flora, Edwin, and the dreaming daughter, belonging is found in recovering that knowledge—in accessing older forms of magic and memory that society has deemed irrelevant, and wrapping language around these things they do not know that they know.
Finally, for both Edwin’s magic and for diaspora, inheritance also comes with responsibility. After Flora is killed by those seeking the Last Contract and bequeaths her estate to Edwin, Sutton Cottage responds viscerally to Edwin’s emotions, tilting its floorboards and lighting lanterns to guide his way. At first, this is anxiety-inducing: Edwin feels the estate “a magic not his own . . . pressing around him, eager and impatient, demanding recognition,”12 and believes “it’s just going to be something else for [him] to disappoint.”13 However, after his older brother Walt threatens him on Sutton grounds, and the house reacts to his distress by trapping Walt in a wall,14 Edwin realizes “This wasn’t just an ease of magic and of breathing. This was something ancient and unmapped, the land reminding him that blood-pledge was the oldest contract played out small—power for responsibility, to tend and to mend.”15 Here, then, is what feels like the most beautiful and terrifying aspect of the diaspora parallel: a claim one might not feel complete ownership over, a call that may be above one’s capacity to fulfill. A kind of lineage, even if it does not involve genetics or the native fluencies of others who may share our blood.
I’m still trying to figure out what it means, tangibly, to tend to in-between magics, to even begin to try fixing a vast pile of broken things. But maybe it’s enough to keep wandering around in the dark, when it feels like the spark has burned out. To keep studying and creating and trying to become a person who might be worthy of this thing I have claimed—or, perhaps, that has claimed me.16
In the meantime, however, I’m allowing myself to enjoy this book. To revel in the language I grew up speaking; in the glorious heart-squeeze of character arcs that are nonetheless Western™; in one of the more picturesque facets of a country that colonized both my parents’ and my countries of birth—which, to paraphrase a prophet, I would have good reason to hate myself for loving.17 I’m allowing myself to believe this kind of storytelling can still say something, still mean something, to my capital-P Political in-between. And so: A Marvellous Light renewed my hope that maybe I’ve been making this too complicated. That my stories—sprung out of my own liminal existence, and liminal body, and knowledges I hold beyond language—can give words to some shared experience, whether I exhaustively replicate history textbooks or not; that I can have interests outside of Asian and Asian-diaspora politics and culture without being accused, if only in my own head, of not living up to my full narrative potential.
That maybe writing can be a world I’m allowed to belong to: this small marvel of creation I might still call my own.
1. Which is not to say I’m advocating for people to go wild with writing from any culture, race, privilege level, etc. of their choosing, á la Lionel Shriver or Juniper Song—more that I’ve noticed a tendency for Asian diaspora authors to be more often praised—and paid—for writing about their own specific racial traumas, whereas white authors tend to be granted a more neutral, “universal” ground. This topic is explored more eloquently and in-depth in Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Stand Up” and R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, among others.
2. Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire. New York: Tor, 2019.
3. Marske, Freya. A Marvellous Light. New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 2021, p. 25.
4. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 279
5. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 23
6. Markse, A Marvellous Light, 77
7. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 165
8. Osman, Jamila. “A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home.” Catapult. 9 Jan. 2017, https://catapult.co/stories/a-map-of-lost-things. Accessed 2 Jun. 2023.
9. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 163
10. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 357
11. Yanyi, “Is Choosing to Stick to ‘Westernized’ Tropes Also a Form of Freedom?”. The Reading. 7 Feb. 2021, https://reading.yanyiii.com/letter-27. Accessed 02 Jun. 2023.
12. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 191
13. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 231
14. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 347
15. Ibid.
16. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 371
17. El-Mohtar, Amal & Gladstone, Max. This Is How You Lose the Time War. New York, Saga Press, 2019, p. 55.
P. H. Low is a Locus- and Rhysling-nominated Malaysian American writer and poet whose debut novel, These Deathless Shores, is forthcoming from Orbit Books (US) and Angry Robot (UK/NZ/Australia) in 2024. Their shorter work is published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and Diabolical Plots, among others. P. H. is a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop; a Pitch Wars alum; a first reader for khōréō, a magazine of speculative fiction and migration; and a finalist for the Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award for Disability in Speculative Fiction. P. H. can be found on Twitter and Instagram @_lowpH and online at ph-low.com.