Tropic of Orange: Where’s the Appeel?

Barbara Chen

Bob's Thousand Gold

In Tropic of Orange, Karen Tei Yamashita combines culture, aspiration, and--believe it or not--produce in a tumultuous, yet atypical Los Angeles traffic jam. Her characters run the gamut--Rafaela Cortes, Bobby Ngu, Gabriel Balboa, and Emi Sakai are the less fantastical characters in conceivable situations, while others--Buzzworm and Arcangel?--require a more poetic mind for comprehension. At any rate, they all manage to entangle themselves in what some have called "an apocalypse of race, class and culture". The one thing they have in common, as the book cover would suggest, is a mutant orange, which unbeknownst to all of them, is both the cause and solution to all of L.A.’s upheaval. Sound confusing? Welcome to the Tropic.

With its catchy chapter titles alluding to the technological and trying times of L.A. (Promos-World Wide Web, Second Mortgage-Chinatown, Drive-By-Virtually Everywhere), Yamashita’s novel promises to include enough of what is tangibly perplexing with what is virtually nonsense. Even with its few references to localities and modernism--the Rafu, Jefferson and Normandie, Howard Stern-- you’ve got a read that’s more orange pulp than a citrus punch.

Don’t get me wrong, Tropic does begin with characters that seem to be well-developed and complex. Bobby Ngu’s personal history exudes cultural assimilation-turned-dissimilitude: he’s Chinese but from Singapore, and came to the US by pretending to be Vietnamese as a boy. (Food for thought, he speaks fluent Spanish, too.) Emi’s the girl from Gardena that refuses to fulfill the stereotype of Submissive Asian Female, but in her quest becomes completely faux-cultural. Her journalist boyfriend Gabriel is more latte than Latino, but more central to his character is a cataleptic concern for Rafaela, his housekeeper and the mother of Bobby’s son. Buzzworm is a black Vietnam veteran who has taken it upon himself to prevent the destined-to-be-bad from becoming so, and he wears three watches on each arm. These are the less fantastical characters, being that by the end of the book I still hadn’t decided who this Arcangel character was or what he (it?) symbolized. The climactic structure of the story leads the reader to anticipate an explosive ending, but instead the plot is wound up so tightly that its points fade under the tension of too many characters and too little concentration on theme.

Yamashita’s story begins by charging at issues such as social apathy and racial/cultural identity but fails to tackle them as intended. Instead the reader is left to decipher the underlying meanings in her seemingly poignant characters’ decisions and revelations, if not to decide whether there are any in the first place. The novel is set between a very visible Southern California and the Mexican border, the story somewhere between realism and delusion. While the beginning of the novel suggests great possibilities, the book as a whole contains more mentionables than message. Had the author developed her story more fully around the latter instead of jumping from the believable to the overly-whimsical, Tropic of Orange would truly be an insightful tale of human flaw and the complex mechanics that make up L.A.