In the novel, sex nearly always occurs in moments devoid of love, save for a faint glimmer of “redemptive love” seen in a slim minority of cases. The characters are either receptacles of physical desire, or are deprived of sexual autonomy. In either case, all of the cruelty and grief they suffer takes shape in one form: loneliness.
Kevin Chen’s novel allowed me to once again glimpse something in the distance: that each of us in our process of growing up has on some level endured and repressed the desire to scream out loud, and buried it deep beneath the memories of our pain. We think we’ve passed through it and thus, we are healed. We believe the dust has settled over the past and we slowly forget. We think the blood no longer flows from the wound, so we must be fine. Thus, the pain becomes a distant place within ourselves, the spiritual distance towards which we must journey.