Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong Interview and Review by Margaret Juhae Lee

Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong

ISBN: 9781646221486
Page Count: 192 pages
Publication Date: 10/04/2022
Publisher: Catapult

Interview and Review by Margaret Juhae Lee

Ryan Lee Wong’s debut, Which Side Are You On, could be described as a quintessential LA novel, with much of the action centered around the 21-year-old protagonist, Reed, driving around the city in search of his mother’s past. Reed has been summoned home to LA from Columbia University to visit his ailing grandmother and to tell his parents that he plans to drop out of college to devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. He explains to his parents, “I learned about racial capitalism through Twitter and meetings, not Columbia.” 

While driving to K-Town for a proper haircut and spa treatment, Reed discovers that his mom led a Korean-Black coalition in the 1980s. Other conversations occur on drives to South Central to see Watts Tower and gas up at the exact corner Rodney King was beaten, Inglewood to visit his mother’s former activist co-worker, and downtown, where his mom picks Reed up from a BLM protest gone awry. Brooklyn-based Wong was born and raised in Fairfax, which he describes as a fuzzy “border space or in between space,” where he experienced a wide variety of “different class and race geographies.” Over the phone, Wong notes, “I wanted to capture that feeling in the novel, the kind of surreal way you’re in your car and one minute you’re in one world and the next minute you’re in another and you’re not quite sure when that happens. All of a sudden you look up and everything is in Spanish or Hangul.” 

Which Side Are You On journeys into the territory of autofiction, a la Rachel Cusk or Teju Cole. Wong describes it as, “fiction that is very much based on personal experience where there’s not that much external action, but where the story is very much driven by characters and ideas and thoughts exploring the world in a very reflective way through conversation.” Like Reed, Wong was involved in an Asian American activist group affiliated with Black Lives Matter in New York City. He and his cohorts were shocked when the Chinese American community came out to support Peter Liang, a NYPD officer who shot a young black man named Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a housing project in 2016. Wong realized that he was part of a historical cycle where “all these unresolved questions from 1992 [the year of the LA riots] are with us in a different context, different coasts. But again, an Asian, mostly immigrant community is being pitted against a more politically savvy and conscious black organizing community.”

In the wake of the Liang trial, Wong realized he needed to ask his Korean American mother about her experience working with the Asian American and Black communities so he, like Reed, could “polish it into some tool kit” to circulate to his activist friends. “Like Reed, I wanted answers, and what ended up happening was that I realized I was not going to get the answers I wanted. Instead, I knew that I had to do something with this information. Fiction felt like the way where I didn’t have to take a side. I didn’t have to say, this is right and this is wrong, but I could just tell a story and guide these characters through an emotional journey.”

Mother and son verbally spar throughout the novel with often hilarious results. Millennial Reed spouts Twitter-ready social justice jargon—“I just think we have to be aware of each interaction, or else we’re blindly upholding the white supremacist heteropatriarchy.” Mom, the potty-mouthed, world-weary former activist, is dead set against Reed dropping out of college and is more than capable of holding her own against her son’s sometimes ridiculous diatribes. Again, the relationship between mother and son starts with real life. Wong’s own mother came to the States from South Korea as a young teen in the 1970s and rebelled against the docile Asian woman ideal with third world feminism and raunchy jokes. In his novel, Wong sees the mother character as “a tribute to people I grew up with and this new archetype they’re trying to forge. It’s something that I haven’t really seen that much in Asian American literature.”

Humor propels these charged conversations between Reed and his mom. The barbed prose almost ventures into schtick territory but is saved by Reed’s baby steps towards maturity, such as the realization that his brand of activism is different from what his mother’s was. His is centered in individualism, while his mother’s youthful decisions had consequences he could not comprehend—“I wanted to be a radical, but I wanted it my way. I wanted credit. Mom knew the unromantic reality of radicalism: to follow an order, to be a soldier, to give up your life for a dream that, when it didn’t manifest, meant a lonely lifetime of carrying a decision that no one, not even your child, understood.”

The novel is most affecting when Reed’s mom finally shares stories with him about her childhood and those of his grandmother, who left her abusive husband in South Korea and came to the United States, only to let him back into her life in a new country. “You should know where you came from,” she says, revealing the legacy of historical and familial trauma to her son. She goes on to say, “Koreans have this word, hwabyung, ‘burning sickness.’ It’s when you have so much anger and it’s so repressed, that it destroys you.… I see the same anger in you, Reed, this feeling like everything in the world is wrong, I see it eating you.” 

Near the end of the book is a scene set at a Korean Buddhist temple housed in a K-town garage, a nod to Wong’s own Zen Buddhist practice, a practice he sees as intertwined with his writing. “It’s hard to imagine one without the other. I got serious about both around the same time. Writing helps me to do what we would call ‘looking at karma,’ which is to look at one’s histories, the things that shaped you, that condition you react to in a certain way to different circumstances. Your personal patterns, your family patterns, your historical patterns.” In Which Side Are You On, Reed begins this process of “looking at karma” by softening his own hardened political truths into something more malleable, open, and ultimately compassionate. 

Ryan Lee Wong was born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of a fifth-generation Chinese American father and a Korean immigrant mother. Ryan organized the exhibitions Serve the People at Interference Archive and Roots at Chinese American Museum, both focused on the Asian American movements of the 1970s. He has written on the intersections of arts, race, and social movements. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark and served on the Board of the Jerome Foundation. He lived for two years at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple and is based in Brooklyn, where he’s the Administrative Director of Brooklyn Zen Center. 
Margaret Juhae Lee lives in Oakland, California. Her book Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History chronicles her search for information about her grandfather, who was a student revolutionary in colonial Korea. It will be published by Melville House in 2024. 

8 February 2023