Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get a free audiobook
Indie Press Audiobooks
The perfect last-minute gift
Shop credit bundles
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
The perfect last-minute gift
Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support your local bookstore!
Start giftingWhich Side Are You On
A Novel
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.
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.
Featured in these playlists...
Reviews
“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.”
“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.”
“[A] hard-hitting and witty novel…Wong handles his narrator’s earnestness with understated brilliance—especially when he skewers that very same sincerity.”
“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.”
“[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.”
“Told with the witty brio of our narrator’s youth.”
“The portrait of a sanctimonious young man who wakes up to the reality of generational trauma and well-meaning failure is spot-on.”
“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.”
“Wong’s debut pulls on personal history and was inspired by the 2014 Akai Gurley/Peter Liang case in Brooklyn, New York.”
Expand reviews