Review: The Astonishing Color of After

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"What is memory? It’s not something you can physically hold, or see, or smell, or taste. It’s just nerve impulses jumping between neurons. Sometimes it’s a matter of choice. Other times it’s self-preservation, or protection."

This beautifully written Young Adult novel deals in part with the taboo of depression, mental illness, and suicide in Asian culture and the legacy of loss felt by those, of any culture, left behind after a suicide. Deftly employed magical realism is woven into the story of a teenage artist processing the suicide of her mother. Leigh, whose mother was Taiwanese and father is Irish-American, struggles to make sense of her mother's life, her death, and the exquisite pain of her loss. Leigh's way of processing is that she is sure her mother has become a bird, a red bird, and that this bird has told her to go to Taiwan to find something important. Her father, struggling to absorb the loss of his wife and help his daughter, takes her to visit the maternal grandparents she has never met, who live in Tapei. There Leigh begins to unravel the deeply buried secrets of her mother's life and family.

"That bird. My mother. Her light flickers out, and then there's only ash and night. Cold, inky black swallows me up, and there's nothing left to see. Nothing at all. No galaxies. No constellations. Just me and the abyss."

Color has symbolic meaning in Chinese culture, relating to the Theory of Five Elements. Leigh is a synesthete who associates colors with emotions, experiences, and music. She sees white as the color of her mother's loss. White is a color intrinsically associated with death and mourning for the Chinese. Black is the color of heaven and of the Dao/Tao, or the path. Red, the color of the bird Leigh believes her mother has become, is the color of joy. Color is also a bond between Leigh and one of her best friends, Axel, an artist, and musician. Leigh and Axel have sort of grown up together and in committing suicide, Dory, Leigh's mother, has provided Axel with the second loss of a mother figure, since his own mom took off several years back. Axel is not able to be as supportive of Leigh in the weeks following Dory's suicide but then Leigh, who was in the complicated position of kissing her longtime best friend at the very moment her mother was committing suicide, has also been busy pushing him away. Their relationship is part of the backdrop that I guess was necessary for this to be more of a Young Adult novel, but it sometimes got in the way of the story a bit. For me, the character of Axel became more of a device to explore Leigh's sense of color, her art, and her difficulty in expressing her feelings. The latter is a direct tie to her mother and her mother's family. The magical realism aspects of this story deftly explore the only ways that Leigh can deal with her mother's death. She searches for her mother's bird, for her mother's roots, and ultimately seeks an understanding of her mother's depression which sadly is an understanding that may never be gained. Sometimes the reasons for depression are ineffable and inscrutable.

"Back at home, sometimes people say I look exotic or foreign. Sometimes they even mean it as a compliment. I guess they don’t hear how that makes it sound like I’m some animal on display at the zoo."

Leigh's trip with her father, in pursuit of understanding, puts her in touch with her Taiwanese roots and highlights another theme in this book, that of feeling like you don't quite fit in either culture you belong to. Leigh is weary of being considered "exotic," a "halfie." This is another bonding point with Axel, since he's Fillipino and Puerto Rican and they both are the only noticeably mixed race kids at their school and are kind of tired of people assuming that's why they gravitated to each other. But poor Leigh- she arrives in Taiwan only to find she is often remarked upon as "hunxie," mixed blood or biracial. She struggles to steady herself in this country of her heritage, to understand why she needed to come. She finds Feng, a young woman who supports her adapting to the home of her grandparents and the culture of her origins, and who comes to support Leigh's search for her mother's bird.

"There’s no point in wishing. We can’t change anything about the past. We can only remember. We can only move forward."

Leigh manages to find peace in the face of terrible loss, build a better relationship with her father, and with Axel, and forge a family relationship with the grandparents she never knew during her mother's life. This all brings her to a point in young adulthood where she can try to forward with her life, honoring her mother's love by pursuing her art, a gift of which her mother was immensely proud.

This is a beautiful and moving story. There were things I could quibble with but it's an extremely memorable and accomplished debut novel. Leigh's story won't fade...

"YInMn, they said, was supposedly fade resistant. I scoffed a little when I saw that part. Everything fades."

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