Days of distraction, by Alexandra Chang

Like Ocean Vuong’s “On earth we are briefly gorgeous,” I suspect this is a thinly veiled memoir, but it is a successful and affecting novel as well. Jing Jing is an Asian American from a somewhat troubled family. Her father seems to have permanently decamped from northern California to China, where she spent some of her childhood, years after he and her mother divorced. Jing Jing attends high school in Davis where she meets “J” and they become a couple. Now, still together, they are contemplating moving to Ithaca NY so J can do graduate work at Cornell. Their overland journey from California across the west and midwestern states is an adventure, but once established in Ithaca, Jing Jing finds herself adrift. In California, she had been a successful tech writer/reviewer for a major Silicon Valley company. In upstate New York, with no real work, she is has time to and is more and more forced to contemplate what it means to be an Asian American and in a relationship with a white man. A thoughtful and well-written coming of age story. 312 pp.