Reading The Foreigner, Francie Lin's debut novel, was an unusual experience. For at least the first half of the book, I wasn't really sure what was going on and I wasn't really sure whether or not I was enjoying it. But at the same time there was something oddly compelling about it, and the desire to get to the bottom of the story was strong.
And eventually what became clear was that the mystery and the disorientation was a key element of Lin's dialogue. Emerson Chang, the foreigner of the title, spends much of the book equally mystified by proceedings, held in ignorance by the alien nature of his circumstances and surroundings and his inability to see beyond his own conformist and conservative horizons.
When the scales finally fall, The Foreigner is a fascinating book. Although it comes with a crime fiction billing, and despite the criminal conspiracy Chang eventually uncovers, The Foreigner has an ambition that extends well beyond the confines of the genre. It is at its most intense and most beguiling in its examination of conscience, of family ties and of being "other", a stranger in a strange land.
The twist here is that Emerson Chang, an American financial analyst of Taiwanese background, is a foreigner wherever he goes. The Foreigner tells the story of his trip from his San Francisco home to Taiwan to seek out his errant, estranged brother, Little P, following the death of their mother, an overbearing hotelier. When the terms of her will show that the hotel, the wonderfully named Remada, has been left to Little P, Emerson is enraged at this incomprehensible betrayal and goes off to find answers from his sibling as well as to inter his mother's ashes (which play a dramatic role in the events that follow).
In San Francisco, Emerson is a prisoner of his mother and her refusal to allow him to embrace American life, which she views as corrupt, as fully as he would wish. By way of example she insists upon,her 40-year-old virgin son marrying a Chinese girl. As a consequence he is single and lonely, although relatively successful in his career, and with her death bereft.
But what he finds in Taiwan, where he is alienated by a language he does not understand, is even more difficult and well beyond his analytical abilities. Taipei is hostile and alien. His family is much the same, including Little P, who is working for their uncle in karaoke establishment that even the naive Emerson is quick to realise is a front for something darker and (probably) illegal.
Emerson is a genuinely extraordinary character. If he was female I'd call him an ingenue, and I can't quite think of a word that better sums him up. His anchor is up and he is adrift on the sea, seeimgly unable to control his own destiny and at the mercy of events. In this he is peculiarly unsympathetic and at first not very likable, the sort of character you want to shake some sense into. But as he gradually comes to grips with Taipei and his brother, and has his sinews stiffened by Angel, a resourceful Taiwanese-American restaurant critic who becomes his only trustworthy ally, you can almost see him growing a spine, and I became more comfortable with him.
As with Emerson, so with The Foreigner. As the mists cleared it became easy to admire Lin's debut work. Her narrative is brave. It is a risk inviting readers into a strange world and not giving them a map detailed enough to show them where they are going, and I wouldn't be surprised if some were lost forever en route. But I found being off-beam strangely satisfying and the second half is exciting and tense. Her writing is crisp and seductive.
A fine work, and I look forward to future work from Ms Lin.
