post-American dream – Misryoum reviews two Asian American novels that probe reinvention, identity, and the risks behind America’s promises.
Starting over in America sounds like a clean slate, but two new novels arriving this month insist the story is messier, darker, and more complicated than the promise suggests.
Sarah Wang’s “New Skin” follows 26-year-old Linli Feng as she returns to Los Angeles to care for her mother. Fan-Ju. an immigrant from Taiwan whose life has become entwined with plastic surgery.. Linli’s relationship to her mother is already strained by competing visions of what “success” should look like. and those tensions sharpen when the federal government shows up with an indictment tied to alleged illegal cosmetic injections.. The novel’s premise turns personal upheaval into something stranger still: Fan-Ju is also accepted as a contestant on a reality show centered on botched surgeries. mixing the private desperation of reinvention with the public spectacle of judgment.
In a moment that lands with both bite and absurdity. “New Skin” makes the American dream feel like an industry that consumes bodies as easily as it sells hope.. The novel’s most disturbing questions are not just about appearance. but about what happens when survival and self-making are forced to share the same stage.
Wang builds her narrative through a series of pressures that extend beyond one family: fear of raids by federal immigration authorities. uncertainty around medical coverage. and a larger system that treats immigrants’ vulnerabilities as both leverage and collateral.. Even when the book leans into humor. it keeps returning to the emotional cost of trying to become “new” while refusing to fully escape the forces that shaped the old life.. Linli eventually finds herself caring not only for her mother’s immediate crises. but also for the history underneath them. including the immigrant bargain that looks conditional on looking right.
Tom Lin’s “Babylon. South Dakota” takes the idea of starting over in a very different direction. setting a multigenerational immigrant saga on a remote Midwest farm.. In the years after the Cultural Revolution. a Chinese couple arrives with almost nothing but seeds tied to a childhood in China. including chrysanthemums marked by violence and loss.. The flowers survive, then thrive in unexpected ways, spreading across the land and even evolving their own rhythms over decades.. In the novel’s atmosphere. nature itself becomes a kind of memory. rooted in old trauma while stubbornly refusing to die.
But the idyll does not last.. Military planning reaches the family’s property. and what begins as a claim on land turns into a confrontation between private life and state power.. The book draws a line from personal longing to geopolitical logic. using the missile site on the “Babylon” property to explore how deterrence. technology. and secrecy can reshape a community without asking permission.. It is a story about how borders and national interests intrude even in places that feel far from politics.
What ties these two books together is not just that they are immigrant stories. but that they treat reinvention as a site of risk.. Together. Misryoum reads them as critiques of the idea that America offers a simple reset button. arguing instead that institutions. markets. and governments can follow you into every new beginning.
Both novels also read like meditations on the limits of escape: “New Skin” shows how bodies become battlegrounds when dignity is priced in. while “Babylon. South Dakota” suggests that even the deepest roots can be disturbed by national ambitions.. The result is literature that feels intimate. yet persistently political. reminding readers that the post-American dream is rarely a clean break from the world that came before.
As Misryoum takes in these May releases. the lesson is hard to ignore: when reinvention is demanded by culture. government. or economics. the cost is often hidden until it’s impossible to deny.. These books leave that question hanging. not as an answer. but as a challenge to the stories Americans tell about what “starting over” really means.