Jen Rawlinson Reviews Sheung-King’s You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.

Sheung-King. You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. Book*hug Press. $20.00, 195 pp., ISBN: 978-1771666-41-1

When asked how he chose the title for his debut work of lyrical fiction, Sheung-King said the title evokes a moment that perfectly captures the character of the lover, an unnamed woman with whom the narrator spends three years in a romantic relationship. It’s a small moment in a sea of small moments when words struggle to contain the ideas they represent. The lover is a person, and a person is more than what she eats and what she wears (or doesn’t wear), but in this instant, naked and eating an orange is exactly who she is.

You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. tells the story of two young people struggling to maintain their transnational identities without defining themselves through political borders like the ones that delineate Macau, Hong Kong, Toronto, Tokyo, and Prague.  They are always on the move, crossing invisible boundaries belonging to people and governments. They are and are not a couple. They are Chinese and Japanese and Canadian. They are all and none of the above.

Resisting definition in this way is no easy task in a post-colonial world, especially for two racialized people in majority-white spaces. You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. shines in the way it challenges “classic” (read: European) notions of form and structure. The book is told in the second person, defying the more commonly used first- or third-person perspectives, to put the reader – no matter your background – inside the narrator’s lived experienced. Characters draw wisdom from traditional Eastern folk tales, but also from modern film, television, books, music, and art. And they do it with while delighting in eschewing lauded Western favourites.

“‘I hate Lost in Translation,’ you say, out of nowhere. ‘The film, Lost in Translation. I hate it,’ you continue. ‘Watching the film made me a little uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure why. After seeing those Buddha statues, I realize that I hate that film. I hate that it won so many awards and that so many people love it so much!’ There is a pause. And then you continue, ‘Someone told me to watch it last week, saying that I’d like it. After seeing the film, I said nothing and went home. But now I realize I hate it.’”

The tender soul of the novel is a love story between the narrator and his lover. It is a book about two people navigating the human heart’s most precarious barriers rendered in language made all the more stunning by its plainness: “I notice a little mole on your lower back, to the right of your spine. For some reason, at this moment, I feel like I know you.” Even the way the romance proceeds shrugs off preconceptions of how good relationships happen. The first incident between the couple is when the lover abandons the narrator in Macau to go party in Hong Kong because she was “sick” of him. In a different book, this would spell doom for the couple, but this is far from the end of this relationship.

You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. benefits from careful reading, as every object, setting, and reference is chosen with intention. The novel points to the ways in which our identities are constructions that never really help us to locate what exactly makes us who we are. It creates a space in between this and that, where its characters, and its reader, are allowed simply to be.

Jen Rawlinson is a book person: Reader. Writer. Designer. Reviewer. Editor. ebook Maker. When things go bump in the night, she investigates. Her writing has appeared in the Hamilton Review of Books. You can follow her on Twitter, but she mostly forgets it exists.