Though I Get Home
by YZ Chin
April 10, 2018
ISBN 978-1-93693-216-0
At the center of a swirling set of intertwined stories, a young woman named Isabella Sin struggles to turn herself from a small-town girl into a significant poet. Inspired by the rain, she quits her job and moves from her home town of Taiping, Malaysia to the larger city of Kuala Lumpur. Shortly after her move, she is arrested for writing a pair of poems that the government deems obscene. The first story of the collection opens during her hunger strike. Around her, another woman, inspired by Starbucks, considers breaking up with a man who has already broken up with her. An old man gambles with his friends on the weather. A young man flies halfway around the world to vote in an election that he knows is rigged — or that’s what he tells himself.
Though I Get Home, a collection of short stories, is the debut book of YZ Chin. Subtly, Chin infuses the stories in this book with a sense of the destabilizing effects of Western colonization on Malaysia’s societal and political landscape, and its urban infrastructures. Taiping, where the stories are largely set, is portrayed as a place “with the infrastructure of a small town and the population size of a city.” Young characters throughout the stories move to larger cities and other countries for educational and economic opportunities. Chin re-appropriates these social indicators used by American news media as cues for “backwardness,” and tells a bigger story, allowing readers to see the full context of how individual lives are affected by the global legacies of colonialism.
Each story in Chin’s debut teases out the ways that individual choices are encircled by commerce and politics on a global scale. Some of these influences seem subtle, like one character’s grandchildren choosing to eat KFC. Others are larger, like a man’s marriage prospects changing as he chooses between staying in the United States or moving back to Malaysia. Do they have the power to affect the political forces above them? Or escape them? In Isabella Sin’s case, does it matter that she didn’t write those poems? Can she still stand for freedom and democracy if she is not the woman that the government is trying to silence?
It’s not only the characters in the book whose intimate lives are controlled by global forces. The author, YZ Chin was born in Taiping, Malaysia and emigrated to the United States for college. She currently lives in New York, where she works full time as a software engineer and writing by night. In her essay for The Riveter, Chin explains how difficult it is to secure an American work visa. Her desire to write provocative, political work makes it difficult to return to Malaysia, which has strict censorship laws. Her desire to be a writer at all makes it difficult to stay in the U.S. because she needs to be employed by a company that can sponsor her work visa.
“Though I Get Home” is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, which honors author Louise Meriwether by publishing a debut work by a woman or nonbinary writer of color.
Review by Molly Higgins