Edge Case

June 7, 2021
Chin makes an impressive debut with this sharp take on faltering romance, the American dream, and self-realization. Edwina and her husband, Marlin, are both Malaysian immigrants working for tech startups in New York City. Edwina endures a sexist and uninspiring work environment at AInstein, hoping that if she excels in her job her employers will sponsor her green card application. Then she comes home one day to discover Marlin has moved all of his things out. For the next 18 days, Edwina searches for her husband and tries to figure out how their marriage went wrong. When Edwina met Marlin, she was drawn to his logical mind, but more recently Marlin had turned to psychic dowsing and other forms of divination in the six months since his father died. While Edwina was alarmed by Marlin’s behavior, she also wonders whether her mental health has been damaged by her mother, who constantly criticizes Edwina’s weight and suggests that Edwina’s struggles are the consequences of transgressions committed in previous reincarnations. Edwina’s wry outlook and wrestling with thoughts about what it means to make it in America will resonate with readers. Those who enjoy the work of Charles Yu should take a look.

July 1, 2021
A Malaysian immigrant in New York embarks on a journey of self-discovery after her husband walks out on her. Edwina comes home one day from her exhausting job at a New York tech company and finds that her husband, Marlin, has gone missing. He's been acting strangely for months now, ever since his father died, talking about "spirit guides" and wielding a crystal pendant. Edwina just wants her old Marlin back, the logical engineer who complemented the liberal arts major in her perfectly. When she eventually does track him down--he's crashing at a friend's place in Queens--he refuses to even look at her, much less talk to her. To make matters worse, things at work are going poorly: She's the quality assurance analyst--and the only woman--at a startup called AInstein, which is creating a joke-telling robot. When she informs the oblivious or downright boorish software engineers that their robot's jokes are sexist, she's told to focus on her own job. But time is running out on her and Marlin's work visas; they need their employers to sponsor their green cards or they'll have to return to Malaysia or become undocumented. And Edwina is trying to hide everything from her mother, a judgmental woman who constantly criticizes her for being fat. Amid all this, Edwina reconsiders everything she thought she knew: her identity, her relationships, and her feelings about her adopted country. Chin's novel is littered with genuinely funny moments; Edwina's voice is a chatty, engaging one that belies her depth. "It wasn't the first time I'd hoped for psychic transformation and ended with diarrhea," she cracks after eating far too many Chicken McNuggets in an attempt to understand Marlin's drastic change (he's vegan, she's vegetarian). The novel also presents a layered view of racism: Marlin is detained at a New York airport for his dark skin (he's half Chinese, half Indian), while Edwina has a run-in with racist cops but gets away without injury. Malaysian culture, though, has its own "atmosphere of...poisons": "In Malaysia I was supposed to go back to China. In America I was supposed to return to Malaysia. Was this progress? If I moved to China, would they tell me to piss off to America, thus resulting in some sort of infinite loop?" An endearingly offbeat story with particularly timely themes.

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June 11, 2021
Eighteen days is all it takes for the (d)evolution of a marriage in Chin's debut novel. Edwina and Marlin are green-card-seeking Malaysian transplants to New York City. She's a quality-assurance analyst (and only woman) at AInstein, where she works on joke-telling robots. He's a software engineer. Their two-year-old marriage implodes with a bang when a steam-pipe explosion at the start-up sends Edwina home early to discover that Marlin gone. By the time she meets him again two-and-a-half weeks later, she'll have become a carnivore, learned to dowse, been assaulted by a co-worker, accidentally swiped ""yes"" on a dating app, and find herself just about ready to consider a new future. Chin's non-love story moves back and forth in time, interspersing Edwina's desperate day-by-day search with her (occasionally unreliable) back story as half a couple. To that dual time line, Chin clumsily appends a distracting frame in which Edwina addresses a (not-quite) therapist as ""you."" Even an abundance of Very Important Issues--body-shaming, women in tech, profiling, inter- and intra-racial prejudices, immigration inequity, and animal welfare--ultimately can't save Chin's narrative from disappointment.

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