Overview

How can we live with integrity and pleasure in this world of police brutality and racism? An Asian American activist is challenged by his mother to face this question in this powerful--and funny--debut novel of generational change, a mother's secret, and an activist's coming-of-age Twenty-one-year-old Reed is fed up. Angry about the killing of a Black man by an Asian American NYPD officer, he wants to drop out of college and devote himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. But would that truly bring him closer to the moral life he seeks? In a series of intimate, charged conversations, his mother--once the leader of a Korean-Black coalition--demands that he rethink his outrage, and along with it, what it means to be an organizer, a student, an ally, an American, and a son. As Reed zips around his hometown of Los Angeles with his mother, searching and questioning, he faces a revelation that will change everything. Inspired by his family's roots in activism, Ryan Lee Wong offers an extraordinary debut novel for readers of Anthony Veasna So, Rachel Kushner, and Michelle Zauner: a book that is as humorous as it is profound, a celebration of seeking a life that is both virtuous and fun, an ode to mothering and being mothered.

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Reviews

Wong's debut pulls on personal history and was inspired by the 2014 Akai Gurley/Peter Liang case in Brooklyn, New York. -- Library Journal [An] aspiring radical returns home to Los Angeles for a few history lessons...The tale of Reed's reckoning is compelling, and Wong thoughtfully questions various activist practices without rejecting them...A promising coming-of-(political)-age debut. -- Kirkus Reviews [A] hard-hitting and witty novel...Wong handles his narrator's earnestness with understated brilliance--especially when he skewers that very same sincerity. -- Entertainment Weekly [With] electric, and occasionally heartrending, dialogue between mother and son...Wong sets the tone with Reed's youthful irreverence, which unfailingly gets at the truth of the matter. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) In Reed, we find a narrator seeking meaning in radical politics and finding more about his family and himself in the search than he knew was possible. -- Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill Sharp, fast-moving, and often hilarious, Which Side Are You On is a must-read: a story of Asian American relationships--familial, intergenerational, and otherwise. -- Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers This honest, hilarious, and deeply healing novel gets at the heartbreaking core of building connections between families and friends, and solidarities within and between racial communities. -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

[An] aspiring radical returns home to Los Angeles for a few history lessons...The tale of Reed's reckoning is compelling, and Wong thoughtfully questions various activist practices without rejecting them...A promising coming-of-(political)-age debut. -- Kirkus Reviews [A] hard-hitting and witty novel...Wong handles his narrator's earnestness with understated brilliance--especially when he skewers that very same sincerity. -- Entertainment Weekly [With] electric, and occasionally heartrending, dialogue between mother and son...Wong sets the tone with Reed's youthful irreverence, which unfailingly gets at the truth of the matter. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) In Reed, we find a narrator seeking meaning in radical politics and finding more about his family and himself in the search than he knew was possible. -- Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill Sharp, fast-moving, and often hilarious, Which Side Are You On is a must-read: a story of Asian American relationships--familial, intergenerational, and otherwise. -- Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers This honest, hilarious, and deeply healing novel gets at the heartbreaking core of building connections between families and friends, and solidarities within and between racial communities. -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

Blasting easily woke platitudes, this honest, hilarious, and deeply healing novel gets at the heartbreaking core of building connections between families and friends, and solidarities within and between racial communities...I urge everyone to read [Which Side Are You On]. It is an astonishing debut. -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings In Ryan Lee Wong's hard-hitting and witty novel, two generations of Asian American political activists negotiate their relationships with movements, history, L.A., and one another. Wong handles his narrator's earnestness with understated brilliance--especially when he skewers that very same sincerity. Sure to spark conversations. -- Entertainment Weekly Sharp, fast-moving, and often hilarious, Which Side Are You On is a must-read: a story of Asian American relationships--familial, intergenerational, and otherwise--through the lens of Black-Asian histories, community organizing, and radical politics. -- Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

"Electric, and occasionally heartrending, dialogue between mother and son--start to affect Reed's clear-cut views...hinting at the importance of empathy and humanity in the effort to fully understand one's community. -- ""Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)"" The portrait of a sanctimonious young man who wakes up to the reality of generational trauma and well-meaning failure is spot-on. -- ""Shelf Awareness"" Told with the witty brio of our narrator's youth. -- ""Esquire"" Wong's debut pulls on personal history and was inspired by the 2014 Akai Gurley/Peter Liang case in Brooklyn, New York. -- ""Library Journal"" [An] aspiring radical returns home to Los Angeles for a few history lessons...The tale of Reed's reckoning is compelling, and Wong thoughtfully questions various activist practices without rejecting them...A promising coming-of-(political)-age debut. -- ""Kirkus Reviews"" [A] hard-hitting and witty novel...Wong handles his narrator's earnestness with understated brilliance--especially when he skewers that very same sincerity. -- ""Entertainment Weekly"" In Reed, we find a narrator seeking meaning in radical politics and finding more about his family and himself in the search than he knew was possible. -- ""Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill"" Sharp, fast-moving, and often hilarious, Which Side Are You On is a must-read: a story of Asian American relationships--familial, intergenerational, and otherwise. -- ""Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers"" This honest, hilarious, and deeply healing novel gets at the heartbreaking core of building connections between families and friends, and solidarities within and between racial communities. -- ""Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings"""

Author Information

Ryan Lee Wong was born and raised in Los Angeles, lived for two years at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple, and currently lives in Brooklyn, where he is the administrative director of Brooklyn Zen Center. Previously, he served as program director for the Asian American Writers's Workshop and managing director of Kundiman. He has organized exhibitions and written extensively on the Asian American movements of the 1970s. He holds an MFA degree in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark.

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