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Start giftingWhich Side Are You On
A Novel
Narrator
Scott Takeda
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
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Length
5 hours 38 minutes
Language
English
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.
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Reviews
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Told with the witty brio of our narrator’s youth.”
“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.”
“A thought-provoking and poignant coming-of-age story.”
“Scott Takeda dazzles in his narration of this thought-provoking novel…Takeda takes on this novel of ideas, embodying each character’s unique dialogue.”
“Wong handles his narrator’s earnestness with understated brilliance—especially when he skewers that very same sincerity.”
“The story, both moving and funny, is sure to speak powerfully to the many who struggle to find hope and joy in an unjust world.”
“[A] delightfully laid-back debut…which attempts to think through one of the great questions of our times.”
“[A] dynamite debut novel…The portrait of a sanctimonious young man who wakes up to the reality of generational trauma and well-meaning failure is spot-on.”
“A promising coming-of-(political)-age debut.”
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