Bottom Line Upfront: A smart book by a talented author. Well worth your time.
Middle Kingdom Life was a gold mine of information for people wanting to go live in China–particularly that niche of personality that teaches English as a Second Language, a gig requiring little more than the ability to speak English natively (and a white face, depending on your school). MKL covered every aspect of expat life imaginable, and in their section on Chinese women, the authors advised that the Chinese women who could speak English well were not representative of Chinese women as a whole, a not-so-subtle way of warning us to watch out for visa hunters and the women unwanted (perhaps for valid reasons) by Chinese men as they approach their third decade of life.
The reverse is also true: the people from the West who find themselves in China, teaching English with literary pretensions or teaching English while nurturing their nicotine and alcohol addictions (often hand-in-hand with literary pretensions) are not representative of your average person in the Westerner. It takes a particular type to go to China in the first place; a peculiar type to stay and yearn to go back.
So then, what kind of person does this? Who would walk away from their life and their family to go teach English in China for less than the minimum wage back home? In America, you could live in an apartment with no insulation and no central heat and air, you could use only public transportation and eat street food.
Would you Instagram it?
Would you tweet about your exotic American adventure?
For so long you had simply drifted through life with your head down but now you were constantly on display and although you hadn’t thought that you would like it, you did. You were talented in China. You had never been that good at anything, really, back home.
Unwelcome by Quincy Carroll captures the life of many young American men. It’s a smart book. Our main character is Cole, an unwanted guest in his brother Abraham’s apartment and (we’ll come to find out) not much wanted anywhere else. In China, Cole felt special, and he has something else going for him too: he’s biracial, a Chinese father, American mother.
There’s insinuations throughout the book that his father is partly responsible for Cole’s current malaise: lack of a strong masculine role model led to a lack of confidence, and lack of confidence leads to overcompensation. Cole himself isn’t a very active character, and when he does take action, he goes overboard.
Quincy Carroll does a great job letting us see all this without telling us. Cole is half-Chinese and we understand this from reading…but there is no direct mention of his hapa status until page 146. We don’t get a description of his physical appearance until his Tinder date, but by then we know. A lesser writer would have told us in the first few pages—indeed, if Quincy took this to any of the literary agents or writing groups I’ve participated in during the past few years, not only would they have admonished him for not describing Cole’s appearance on page 1, they likely would’ve suggested that Quincy have Cole look into a mirror, a neat narrative trick.
Unwelcome respects its readers far too much for this. Nothing is spoonfed to us, and we’re allowed to draw our own conclusions. Not only does Cole have issues in America, but in China too.
The key difference is that in China it’s easier for Cole to bullshit himself. Cole works for a beer distributor and has success. Hired for his language skills, working on his second-person POV novel in his spare time, it’s not long before Cole’s co-workers, Sam and Paul, discard him for a local, Marbury, who speaks Chinese better and understands local mores (he suggests having a hotel owner try the beer in front of them rather than relying on her promise that she will), and of course, this dismissal comes after Cole has properly trained his replacement.
The part of Unwelcome that resonated the most with me was Cole struggling to belong in the States and the memoir throughout the book, a second-person narrative where Cole embraces the truth about himself, veering away when time comes to address what happened with his girlfriend. I did live in China for a few years, and returning to the States was one of the most difficult things I ever did. Even the most loving families will struggle to understand what you’re doing and why—it’s not just friends who drift apart.
Unwelcome also deals with toxic masculinity. This is most apparent in the Vegas bachelor party for Cole’s brother (with a mound of white privilege almost as big as the coke they’re snorting) and of course, Harmony.
The way Cole and Harmony first meet is clever, and his drunken insistence on a date reflects his own cluelessness on how to treat women. I also get the impression that Harmony fetishizes Cole. Him being white was good enough, but discovering that he’s half-Chinese? You can’t miss her excitement, at least as we see it from Cole’s POV.
Which brings us to the incident. In the second-person narrative, Cole denies (a bit too specifically) that he raped her. Perhaps he did—at the bachelor party, Cole punches another guy in the face for joking about assaulting a passed-out girl. Harmony gives her take in a bilingual first-person epilogue. It’s not definitive what happened (nor should it be), and the idea that men should engage in psychological tricks to get women hearkens back to that “alpha male” bullshit that dominated the college scene in the early 2000’s. The chief proponents of those ideas have since moved on to new grifts but the underlying issues for young men remain.
All in all, Cole is unwelcome, he’s awkward, another clueless young man, product of a dysfunctional family, an apathetic society, or perhaps above all else, his own life choices.
Buy Unwelcome at Amazon or directly from the publisher.
Also check our Quincy Carroll’s first book: Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside
