Read this book with your device handy — it's a millennial coming-of-age story with QR codes
New fiction from Sheung-King, the multiple-award-finalist author of 'You Are Eating An Orange. You Are Naked,' takes us into the heart of the Hong Kong protests
Glue, the protagonist of Sheung-King’s inventive new novel "Batshit Seven," is struggling. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Glen Wu (Glue’s real name) studied in Canada, but returned to the special administrative area after leaving his creative writing program. Living in the same apartment where he grew up (his parents have moved to Macau for the post-retirement tax benefits), Glue teaches ESL remotely, but mostly spends his time drinking and smoking weed, hanging out with his friend-with-benefits (who may have stolen from him), and trying to figure out where he belongs in the world. He masturbates too much, and defecates too little (his constipation is a recurring concern).
In short — dare one say it — Glue is stuck.
Readers have seen this late adolescence/early adulthood ennui before. "Batshit Seven" resonates, in places, with "The Catcher in the Rye" and Jay McInerney’s "Bright Lights, Big City," but the stakes for Glue are markedly different than they were for Holden Caulfield and McInerney’s second-person narrator: Glue returns home in time to witness the massive anti-government protests of 2019 and 2020 (and, more subtly, the slowly rising threat of COVID-19). His attempts to understand himself and his place in the world incorporate concerns about imperialism and post-imperialism, racism, orientalism and self-Orientalizing (he describes 2020 primary candidate Andrew Yang as “self-Orientalizing, making jokes about being good at math because he’s Asian”). The novel is threaded through with insights from the likes of psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon (Glue muses at one point, “‘The cause is the consequence,’ writes Fanon, ‘you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.’ The Orientalized, objectified and powerless, becomes a blank screen onto which white fantasies are projected.”). For Glue, the political is not only personal, it is inescapable.
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Sheung-King (the pen name for writer and educator Aaron Tang), whose first novel "You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked" was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Award and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, approaches Glue and his concerns with a deep knowledge and seeming familiarity. Born in Vancouver, Sheung-King was raised in Hong Kong, and now divides his time between Canada and China. The novel, as a result, provides the reader a deep immersion in Hong Kong, its geography and its internal dissension.
The novel also results in a deep immersion into Glue himself, but Sheung-King approaches the character from a detached, nearly omniscient point-of-view. The narrative bounces back in time (as Glue recalls his lover in Canada and the end of their relationship), and forward, into Glue’s future, and future events which will support his view of the world (Yang’s presidential run, for example, occurs after the events of the book, a fact which the narration makes clear). This point of view is supported by footnotes in the form of QR codes, which link to what Glue is eating, watching, and listening to (no pornhub links, thankfully, though Glue spends a considerable amount of his online time there).
This detachment creates a strange sort of authority for "Batshit Seven" (the title may be a reference to Glue’s age). Because the narration is not sunk into Glue’s voice, Sheung-King avoids any sense of wallowing (a significant risk with Glue), and instead presents his story with the restrained force of an ethnographic study. The result is, somewhat surprisingly, incredibly powerful, rendering "Batshit Seven" a highly unusual, highly effective examination of both contemporary society and the quest for identity.
