‘Chinkstar’ By Jon Chan Simpson

Reviewed by Jonathan Valelly

Meet Kwong. Also known as King Kwong. Also known as the Chink King, Emperor Easty, the Celestial Warrior, Smash Hands, Yellow Orang, Swag Sapien, His Chi-Ness — well, there are endless names for the local icon of Red Deer, Alberta, a Chinese Canadian rapper whose inimitable lyrical finesse has created an entire culture of Asian rap fanatics called “Apes” in the most unlikely of places.

Now meet Run. Run is the narrator of Chinkstar, and also happens to be Kwong’s younger brother, with nary a fraction of the charisma and popularity of his kin, and even less of an interest in the glitz and glamour. It’s through his captious eyes that we enter the world of the chinkstas (a neologic hip-hop slang for Chinese gangstas) and their white, truck-driving rivals, the Necks, in the midst of Kwong’s sudden disappearance and the mystery which surrounds it.

Written in a thick, hip-hop inspired vernacular, the debut novel from Jon Chan Simpson is a freewheeling thriller that is as much about the search for a missing hero as it is about the search for a complicated identity. Like any good suspense story, the action is fast-paced and full of unexpected left turns.

That said, the plot often takes a back seat to Simpson’s primary experiment, which is developing a conceptual merger of Asian diasporic identity and the appropriated machismo, prestige, and language of rap culture. It’s an uncomfortable and inconsistent mix, with Simpson’s use of slang often ringing wholly inauthentic. Slang awkwardly punctuates a more traditionally worded narration, but reaches full force in dialogue. For instance, an encounter with fans at the mall:

‘What up, slants? I seen you at that bushparty, C. Good times, good times, but no small disappointment. True fact: your brother’s like deified. Yellow jesus, f ’real.’

‘Got them saviour-type beats, man, walk-on-water-type flow and all a that.’

‘True,’ said the other.

‘Mad true,’ confirmed the one.

As a white guy who grew up obsessively collecting and memorizing local rap CDs from West Philly record stores, it’s hard for me to point out just what’s so awkward about Simpson’s reimagining of hip-hop — and by necessary proxy, black American — vernacular. Regional specificities are forgotten. “Y’all” gets used as a singular. Mostly, it just feels like a very misguided attempt at being cool.

Simpson tries to learn and repurpose a complex and pre-established slang, suffusing it with small bits of Cantonese and references to familiar, perhaps stereotypical East Asian imagery like pagodas, chopsticks and emperors. In doing so, he clearly wants to challenge the reader to imagine why or how one marginalized group might meaningfully adopt the culture of another. But, although there are good answers to that question, Simpson’s appropriation and decontextualization doesn’t provide the reader with the tools to find them.

It’s not to say the book is all bad. The light romance of Run and his Juliet, the Neck-affiliated Ros, is a light and sweet story housed within the action-packed goose chase at the novel’s centre, and the comical and genuine blips of family dynamics with the Kwong parents are actually quite fun and sweet. Above all, the coming-of-age of Run, marked by a deepening of his connection to his brother and his culture, is the novel’s strongest force.

Interestingly, the chapters are also interspersed with remixes of the Tao (“The hater hears of the Tao and laughs aloud. If here were no laughter, the Tao would not be what it is.”) and the fugal parable of the fugitive A-Gung, itself a shorter and more straightforward suspense narrative.

Despite these few charms, though, it’s hard to overlook the general discomfort of the book’s premise and actualization. Even with the most generous reading, Simpson’s debut comes up short on sensitivity and nuance. Chinkstar is an attempt at cultural fusion that is at best silly and at worst offensive.

Coach House Books | 208 pages | $19.95| paper | ISBN# 978-1552453063