Crossing

I made my way up the staircase, each step creaking in time with my aching body. Into the dark bathroom, where I turned on the light switch. A sticky florescent light urinated down on me. In the mirror, I saw blandness, the kind of face passed over in a crowd, the plainness of features that could drive a caricaturist out of business. My blah face, tight nose, earthworm lips, thin eyes (yes, OK, they were squinty, shut up already). An impenetrable mask to all around. Years ago, I used to play with my features in the mirror, using my fingers to push the angled tilt in the corner of my eyes, and picture myself with blond hair and blue eyes. In those moments, I fantasized that deep within me was a white boy on the fringe of freeing myself from the constricting bamboo chains. That one day my eyes would downturn themselves, ovalize, even turn blue. (pg. 15-16)

I remember, when I was a little girl desperately wanting a different nose (or a different chin), brown eyes instead of blue, long straight dark hair instead of chaotic blond curls. My mother sensibly told me that if I did indeed have a different nose it would not go with my chin and vice-versa and I would feel somewhat better. For myself, and for many other people I have known, wanting to be someone other than who you are is a part of growing up, hopefully followed by the onset of self-acceptance. Unfortunately for the narrator in Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda, that self-acceptance doesn’t happen and he never really feels better about himself in this story.

Xing Xu is a freshman at a small town New York State high school and one of two Asians in the school. He doesn’t look like his classmates, and as an immigrant to this country, he doesn’t sound like his classmates, and he doesn’t feel like his classmates. He remains, like he has for his whole life in this town, been either bullied, ridiculed by adults, or invisible. Xing has one friend, the other Asian, a beautiful and smart girl named Naomi – other than that he just tries to get by without getting beat up or ridiculed one more time. Into this mix, students start disappearing and, in some case, turn up dead which sets the student body, administration, and town into a tense stand-off; a stand-off between the horror of what is happening and an inability to get to the bottom of things and prevent it from occurring again.

I found this book to be very unsettling and I am still not quite sure how I feel about it. The writing is decent although somewhat raw in parts. It is the author’s first novel and I think in parts that shows. In other parts, particularly descriptions of people or of the surroundings the writing is well done such as in this example, describing the Music teacher at the high school.

Mr. Matthewman carried with him a reputation of being a piano maestro long past his heyday, a man whose considerable gifts were never fully realized because of some scandal when he was a professor at Julliard. Now he was only a shell of the man he’d once been, full of sour spit and rancid breath.

It is winter, there is snow, and things are getting incredibly tense. And there is the narrator. Just how reliable is his account? Are the students that mean to him, the teachers that incredibly insensitive? How much is real and how much is Xing’s own reflections or perceptions? And, I think the author is asking an even greater question, how much does that matter? If Xing feels this way, what is society’s, or even one person’s responsibility to recognize it and help him through it. This larger question is not answered in the book but it is one of the questions that haunts me even days after I have finished.

This wasn’t an easy book to read and I in all honesty, didn’t like the ending at all. I didn’t want to believe it – surely this wouldn’t be allowed to happen. But we are back to the reliability of Xing, his narration, and what he says and doesn’t say. The reader knows the immediate future at the end of the book but we still don’t know the final outcome leaving us right back into thin ice once more. Reading this book left me very unsettled and yet I kept thinking about it which shows the true strength of the author.