Fiction Review
Chinkstar
by Jon Chan Simpson
Toronto, ON: Coach House, 2015
202pp, $19.95 paperback
What does it mean to reclaim something? How does one break away from stereotypes when doing such reclamation? Can we imagine a world with an Asian rap star, when we don’t have one yet in reality?
These are the questions that kept circling my mind as I read through Jon Chan Simpson’s debut novel, Chinkstar. My first reaction to the title, along with its bright yellow cover featuring a red microphone, was to feel a little bit cautious, and also a bit provoked: are we ready for this? Shouldn’t Asian Canadians have a bit more cultural capital before we throw this word out to the mainstream?
Perhaps that cultural capital is happening right now; with the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” entering major cable television for the first time since the early 90s, Whether the show is a step forward or not is still up for debate, but it has undoubtedly put Asian Americans back in the cultural conversation. As an Asian Canadian reader who was/is hungry for narratives and characters that mirror my own, I felt both excited and slightly nervous before hitting the pages of Chinkstar.
If the title doesn’t grab your interest, the unlikely and unique premise should: a new style of rap called Chinksta rap has taken the small town of Red Deer, Alberta, by storm. When Chinksta rap’s originator and star, King Kwong, goes missing and his mother gets hit with a stray bullet, Kwong’s teenage brother Run must rise to the occasion and solve the mystery — and save his family. At the heart of the mystery is the mobilizing potential of Chinksta rap for the Chinese community — and the threat it poses to the rival gang, the “Necks.”
Told from Run’s perspective in first person, Chinkstar is also a coming-of-age story of the underdog brother who has felt eclipsed by his brother’s larger-than-life presence, but must rise to the occasion to rescue that same brother. Of course, no coming-of-age story is complete without a love interest; for Run, that person happens to be a sister of a rival “Neck.”
Simpson’s language resembles that of Junot Diaz, with mash-ups of references and aggressive undertones. Mosquitoes get “secondhand-f*cked on the whisky” that the teenagers have consumed, which cause them to “kamikaze looping and crashing.” Chinese references and culture make their way into Simpson’s prose without English explanations; Run muses about his parents’ reaction to his brother’s fame: “what did my parents think of their little siu mai turned rapper, all grown-up and taking over the world?” (Siu mai is a type of dumpling served during dim sum).
At first, Red Deer seems like an unlikely place where Run’s—and Kwong’s—hybridity can flourish into a Chinksta revolution. The monotony of small-town life is palpable, as Run describes the stretch of box stores, obesity, and “volunteerism out of control.” However, Simpson challenges the stereotype of a homogenous small town by giving us the unique “halfchi” (Chinese/Scottish) identities of Run and Kwong. The Red Deer of Chinkstar contains Chinese legends, 90s hip-hop, and the varying spectrum of Asian food that go from run-of-the-mill chicken balls of a Chinese restaurant to pho. In fact, the symbolism of a Vietnamese restaurant is used ingeniously to describe diversification of a town by one of the characters:
You got to be good with chopsticks to eat pho […] [N]oodles in boiling liquid take dexterity. So. The number of pho joints in a city and how much paper they pull are good indicators of ‘stick literacy.’
Confident in its tone and unapologetic in its uniqueness, Chinkstar is an unforgettable experience, and one that makes me hopeful to see more unique Asian Canadian voices in the literary scene soon. To end in the words of King Kwong: “Black is the night, but yellow is the day.” Indeed.
