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Xing’s parents gave up everything to move from China to America so that he could have a better life, but several years on Xing’s life is terrible. His father is dead and his mother wears herself out by working two awful jobs. Xing (or Kris as he asks to be called, because people often can’t pronounce his name) hates life at school. He is one of only two Chinese students at his school and unlike his best friend Naomi (the other Chinese student) he doesn’t fit in and is just an average student. He longs to be special, but at the same time wants to disappear into the crowd.On the first day of high school Jan Blair arrives, a new student from out of state. She is instantly disliked and teased by everyone, including Xing. Students start to disappear and turn up murdered. No one seems to make a connection between Jan Blair and the murders, apart from Xing. He’s too focused on preparing for a new role as the under study for the school musical to get involved, but it doesn’t look like Xing has any choice, as the universe seems determined to drag him into Jan Blair’s life and into the middle of the murder investigation.
The crux of ‘Crossing’ is the idea of acceptance. Xing wants to be accepted, but when he isn’t his wish for acceptance fractures into a hatred of himself, expressed in a longing to be white and a simultaneous rejection of everything he can’t be. He talks about his childhood when he ‘fantazised that deep within me was a white boy on the fringe of freeing himself from the constricting bamboo chains.’ and asks everyone to call him Kris, but also expresses a deep hatred for most of the white people around him. When he takes the understudy role in the musical Xing is grabbing a lifeline to acceptance and validation, but it’s also an action he undertakes to shame the people who have previously ignored him. After years living without people who understand him Xing is stuck in a cycle where he can’t trust anyone enough to show them his true personality and that caginess (which was created by other people’s reaction to him) alienates people further.
By writing ‘Crossing’ Andrew Xia Fukada seems to be asking whose fault Xing’s situation is. Everyone around Xing seems to place the blame on Xing, even Naomi asks ‘Why are you like that Xing?’ but he places the blame on everyone else. I’m inclined to say that it’s the casual racism of everyone he meets that force Xing into the role he plays. ‘Crossing’ highlights the danger of being someone who can’t, or doesn’t want to, sublimate their original cultural identity and assimilate to the country they move to. Xing’s English, for example, isn’t flawless and he is often reluctant to open his mouth when questioned. His reluctance causes many people to assume that he can’t speak English at all. Whenever anyone asks him if he can speak English it is always done in an aggressive manner as if this perceived inability to speak their language automatically makes him deviant. There is no room for someone outside the norm in the world that Xing inhabits and to be different, is to be persecuted. Naomi seems to show that immigrants can beat the negative expectations of others and become accepted, but she has to assimilate completely in order to overcome their expectations.
Xing’s inability to feel completely at home in America does not stem exclusively from Xing’s negative encounters with white Americans, although their attitudes do affect him a great deal. His longing for his beloved China permeates his whole life. Not only is America hostile to him, America isn’t China and though Xing undoubtedly romanticises the life he could have had in China it’s hard not to wonder if his life in China might have been better:
‘I could see myself, the me that never left China. Always surrounded by friends, always laughing with abandon, always with a twinkle of confidence in my eyes. My skin a deep bronze from the burning sun, my hair tousled lightly in the warm breeze. I am smiling as I run home, shouting my farewells to friends, my voice unhinged in exhuberance, unbridled in its own sureness. I am rushing home to the wonderous smells of home cooking, to the warm greetings of my mother, grandmother, of my father...’
Ah Yuan from GAL Novely talked about Xing’s experiences as a failed American dream and I think she’s spot on. Xing’s parents are seduced by the promise of a better life, only to arrive and find that the better life is reserved for white people who were born in America (which is so damn ironic in the face of white American’s history as immigrants). The way Xing is treated in America calls into question the validity of the immigrant dream, which western countries often promote by contrasting their standard of living with that of other countries in order to appear superior and then renege on when immigrants arrive. One of the central assertions of ‘Crossing’ seems to be the need to look at whether the kind of good life established Americans enjoy is actually available to immigrants. if this kind of life isn’t available to an average immigrant might a life in a land where their race, their language and their culture is the norm, not be beneficial? Does western civilisation sometimes push the idea of the ‘superior life’ at the expense of the people that it encourages to emigrate?
I haven’t really talked about Xing’s status as a possibly unreliable narrator as I think it might spoil the story, but there’s a wealth of significance to be mined from the different interpretations of the story. The unresolved nature of the storyline totally freaked me out, but so good that I continue to think about it now. I keep trying to remember that books with possibly unreliable narrators seem to send me into shock and I Can. Not. Handle. The Tension, but it’s no use because they are addictive. I had to flip ahead a little while reading to see if everything was going to be ok and not because I wanted to see who the murderer was, but because I wanted to see if Xing’s concert was going to go to plan. That’s how tense every strand of this book is, there are multiple opportunities for every aspect of Xing’s life to go wrong and the clipped writing style the author employs, by making extensive use of short sentences enhances that tension to a point where I just wanted to scream:
‘And something else. The cat wasn’t here when he crossed over just twenty minutes prior. He sniffs, doesn’t smell rot or decay.
Shards of glass being stepped. From behind him. He spins round.’
It’s both fun and awful to be taken to the edge like that, then just left with no concrete resolution and this combination of narrators who may or may not be unreliable (as opposed to narrators whose unreliability is clarified at the end of the novel) is something I’m very excited to see more of, even if it does freak me out. Recommended for fans of ‘Liar’, although Ah Yuan says she doesn’t think this is being marketed as a young adult book despite the teenaged protagonists.
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