Poetry in motion

The full title and busy cover of this gripping memoir are rather misleading. A Warhol-esque multi-panelled silkscreen with loud-coloured photos of author Jen Sookfong Lee backdrops all-caps, off-kilter text, together seemingly announcing a tongue-in-cheek romp through pop culture and one person’s frantic emotional connection to it. One picks up the book, marvels at the comically graffitied images, reels from the loud title font and immediately expects a coy take on an almost silly topic.

Not so.

That is not what this book is at all.

East-Vancouverite Jen Sookfong Lee is a very well-established essayist, broadcaster, novelist, and podcaster (Can’t Lit). Many will know her from her celebrated debut novel, The End of East (2007), or perhaps her third, The Conjoined (2016), or perhaps as a Canada Reads advocate (2009).

What Lee is offering now is her heart-wrenching chronicle as a nearing-middle-age Chinese-Canadian woman, daughter, sister, lover and mother. And she gracefully extends this personal offering in rich, beautiful, liquid prose that makes one guess (if one does not know already) that lurking here is not a memoirist, nor an essayist, nor a journalist, nor a non-fiction writer of any stripe. What lurks here is a poet. Now a narrative poet, now a lyric poet, now an elegiac poet, now an odic poet. Every word is so very obviously carefully chosen and precisely positioned. The assembled package stuns.

What that snazzy subtitle does accurately forecast is the theme that stitches these select words together: pop culture and Lee’s adoration of and near-obsession with it. But that is all in the service of what the book is really about: Lee using her own fascinating, meandering biography as a single but harrowing exemplar of the Chinese-Canadian experience.

In essentially evenly sized chapters, Lee 11 times takes an aspect of that experience, props forward a rumination on it emerging from her own history, and then bounces all that up against a lauding of an item (or two or three) from her beloved popular culture. Each time these pop references first arrive, they seem a stretch. But Lee makes the theme and the artifacts dance together. And then, just as deftly, she undermines her own praise for those pop memories, tells the tale of her heart breaking (again and again) as this becomes clear to her as she has aged, bursts the big bubbly bubble and lays bare the ramifications of the entire mess that results. It is pristine choreography.

So, for just one example, in the chapter The Boys on Film, cherished ’80s flicks Dead Poets Society and Say Anything are at the vanguard of a roster of boy-driven films that Lee first embraces before us and then, ruefully, excoriates. These films don’t beguile: they deceive. They don’t refresh: they perpetuate. They dine out on horribly oppressive stereotypes and they ensure the damage keeps damaging.

The other central popular culture artifacts seen through Lee’s lenses: Anne of Green Gables, Bob Ross (yes, Bob Ross), Princess Diana, Amy Tan and Ali Wong, Rihanna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sia, Hailey (and not so much Justin) Bieber, Awkwafina and, almost inevitably, the Kardashians (especially Kris Jenner). Sometimes, Lee is entirely in the business of undermining her selections’ traditional reception. More rarely, she finds long-hidden redeeming features. Always, she turns things on their heads.

There are here films, television shows, comedies, dramas, actors, pure celebrities and on and on. One does get the sense that Lee is at her most piercing and most enthusiastic when it comes to music (once again: the poet shining through) but the energy and initial puppy love for these characters and products is ubiquitous and contagious. The maturing, new glance is therefore always devastating.

That is the artistry and unusual value of this book: one leaps into each example alongside Lee, happily guided down memory lane, nodding and smiling along the way — but then she uncorks the story of her rude jilting by that cultural thing. All is suddenly cleverly revealed: this is not a simple window into a single person’s life and her eclectic pop-cultural intake. No, Lee pulls back the full curtain and the vile, full truths stand there. Plain. Exposed.

The rosy, familiar picture vanishes, and the big, ugly picture emerges.

Racism. Misogyny. Fetishism. Exploitation. Oppression. Pain. Suffering. Loneliness.

Heartbreak.

In the end, the most indicative part of that flashy book cover is that single verb in the subtitle: “How pop culture broke my heart.” That’s what this book is about: things broken, lives broken, relationships broken, families broken, dreams broken. Understandings shattered.

Pop culture did break Jen Sookfong Lee’s heart. Over and over. It is not coy and it is not silly. It is raw and it is profoundly upsetting.

And once the penny drops and you realize what is happening, Superfan will break your heart too. Eleven times.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg.

If you value coverage of Manitoba’s arts scene, help us do more.
Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project.