[the notes from the book were retrieved with kobogarden, with the purpose of aiding to create a map of the ideas the book left me. The full list of book highlights can be found here.]

This was a chance read; not a particularly interesting one, but it kept me around as, I suppose, a sense of familiarity progressively grew — and it is, by the way, a story with a strong twist (no spoilers ahead); that is one of the strongest assets of the work.

Hua tells his story fitting both the memoir and the coming-of-age spectra; being set in the late nineties, it also overlaps with poignant temporal highlights, like an earnest account of faxing as medium of communication, and the early days of the internet and email; and with his being a second-generation Asian American, it paints a thorough picture of that experience — and the back-and-forth, long-distance fax-based conversation with his father is truly precious (it is the second book I recently read that accounts for immigrant perspectives in the US, a topic that I am not very well versed in — Strangers To Ourselves had Naomi's powerful story as a struggling African American at odds with its racial history).