A Small Blond Pile of Emptiness Shot Through with Strange Human Feeling

Review of Joon Oluchi Lee’s Neotenica (USA: Nightboat Books, 2020)
By Marylyn Tan

Seeming to derive from the root ‘neotene’ or ‘neoteny’—that is, of the juvenile—supplied with the suffix ‘-ica’, Neotenica, the title of Joon Oluchi Lee’s most recent novella, brings to mind a series of childish erotic notions—strategically unsophisticated, yet authentic and unashamed of what one desires. Neotenica spans experiences and encounters, both past and present, of intimacies varying in nature and intensity. This particular adolescence scuttles within an intersecting glass box of entwined narratives loosely revolving around a married Korean-American couple, Young Ae and her husband, who live in New York, and the satellite characters that flit in and out of their lives through chance encounters, sexual hook-ups, friendships, and kin ties. The events superficially do not link up together nor progress in a specific direction, but taken together they present a tangle of sexuality and diasporic Korean-ness, one that intersects languidly with questions of class, gender, and aesthetics. The novella revels in the open-endedness and dispassion that characterize identity formation in adolescence, and how this characteristic may persist long into adulthood, even adopted as a general approach to life.

The language of the novella follows a clear-eyed frankness that refrains from the overly perfumed, brutally vulgar, or apathetic. This is a linguistic choice that juxtaposes and buttresses the characters’ own dispassionate feelings towards life and existence. The tonality almost veers into the territory of the wry and clinically detached, but never does—Neotenica isn’t concerned with the dysfunctional so much as it is with cheeky and matter-of-fact emotional honesty. In an early chapter, Young Ae recounts her first meeting with her husband: “The way he said the words to her made it clear that it was not a confession, although his tone was not dispassionate.” The candor of the work turns an honest eye on sexual proclivities, wants, and needs, making what might have been artlessly confessional into something lighthearted, unself-conscious.

Stylistically, Lee utilizes naming conventions in playing with the idea of the self—many characters remain either unnamed, or have several names and identities, such as the actress Lisa Marie Rodgers, originally Laura Rodgers, or the man whom Young Ae has a liaison with, Donny, a.k.a. Blak Mass, a.k.a. Sunday’s Child. The only characters with straightforward names are Young Ae; Ji Eun, Young Ae’s best childhood friend; and Bettie and Marilyn, two female dogs. As such, the reader experiences maleness in the story as constructions in counterpoint to, or extensions of, female characters and femininity. Contrast Young Ae’s heterosexual yet homoerotic husband—described variously as having “huge feet and a little, dainty penis” and “muscular with a touch of gut”—against Young Ae and Ji Eun’s sharp, weaponized femininity as trained ballet dancers and as individuals. For Young Ae and Ji Eun, their gender expressions are wielded as a strategic delicateness. Lee frames femininity as a grueling art form, describing the dancers as having “ascetic musculature” with a “beautiful stiffness in [their] motion,” and loving “simple gestures that [get] to be unnecessarily complicated". Young Ae, in particular, is described as “a knife trying to cut something harder than herself,” and having a “tendency to lecture.” In this way, characters come into their power or self-possession through existing in relation to femininity—in particular, Young Ae’s femininity.

Lee flits too between third- and first-person perspectives, using omission of certain details or angles to make sure the reader never feels, at any point, like they have the whole story in their palm. Young Ae, as the fulcrum upon which the narrative turns, is never the subject of the first-person ‘I’—making a compelling statement about the nature of the reader’s relationship with the central character. While there is an intimately detailed, candid quality surrounding her narrative, Young Ae is never laid bare for inspection in the vulnerable way that a first-person narrative would present her. In the third person, the character is more an agent of action, even if the omniscient narrator describes Young Ae’s thought processes: “She felt guilty and a little mean, but as she had always been a tad kleptomaniac, didn't act upon the moral feeling.” A power balance between Young Ae and the reader is discerned—Young Ae is impenetrable in a way that the male characters are not.

This perspective choice influences Neotenica’s preoccupation with the constructed self. Some of Lee’s most compelling passages rest in how each character describes the other. We come to know Young Ae through the way other people perceive her—her husband, during the first time they have sex, thinks “he was gratified by her brusqueness, her nonchalant lack of coquettishness.” Meanwhile, one of his hook-ups reveals a latent jealousy when seeing her photograph: “Her skin isn’t silky smooth; you could see all the striations of the muscles on her shoulders and arms, and her neck is kind of thick; she’s kind of beautiful, but not exactly pretty.” The latter resonates with how Young-Ae seems to perceive herself—in a chance meeting with the actress Lisa Marie, she says, “I feel so frightfully lean and male!” Thus, a single character is introduced and re-introduced, which in turn creates layers upon layers of understanding even if, by the end of the novella, we still don’t know their name, much like an anonymous sex encounter.

In Neotenica, Lee wields the language of sexuality to interrogate the relationship between intimacy and vulnerability. In intimate moments, for example, Neotenica presents a glaring omission of tenderness, perhaps in a move authentic to the quotidian nature of hookups. One of my favorite passages from Neotenica is written in first person from the perspective of an unnamed gay man who hooks up with Young Ae's husband for sex. He explains his method for procuring sex with a blasé tone:

The ads I answer don't vary too much. Mostly they tend to ask for some sort of servitude, phrased in a vaguely homophobic and openly misogynistic way: "seeking cocksucking bitch,” "Need Bitch With Boy Pussy." I answer these ads because experience taught me that the violence of the language is an oversized shirt under which a mild boy sits with a hard-on. In my own invitations for these gentle assholes I describe myself as "cocksucking bitch,” "Bitch With Tight Boy Pussy" or more rarely because it doesn't seem as effective in tempting horny guys, "Queer With Quivering Boy Pussy." Even when you are horny sometimes you feel like staying political. I draw the line at calling myself a "bottom" because I don't believe in gay labels.

While this unnamed gay man, like many of the other satellite characters, only briefly features in a single chapter, he speaks from the first-person, allowing the reader to map for themselves his personal identity and the ways his sexuality is performed. Lee divorces sexual desire from the vulnerable or the shameful, making it a mere extension of the self. Consequently, the reader encounters intimacy with the characters in situations that depart far from the traditionally erotic. In the first chapter of the novella, Young Ae’s husband is physically assaulted by a gang of youths on the subway. Instead of fighting back he submits to the violence, and then “quietly and gently fuck[s] that pink memory” of being beaten up while waiting for the next train.

This relationship between intimacy and pleasure likewise translates to an intriguing relationship with materialism, and consequently, class and social mobility. One of our introductions to Young Ae’s husband comes from the description of his home: “His apartment was a spacious luxury loft that looked as if it couldn’t bear to have anything to do with luxury. It had been lulled into submission by his radical indifference to material objects.” Material objects and luxury, then, become symbols of a lackadaisical fatalism that characterizes the spirit of existing as Young Ae and her husband do as diasporic, fully-assimilated inhabitants of San Francisco, where possibility in terms of class mobility, wealth, and status abound but emotional richness is not guaranteed. This is most clearly demonstrated by the way Young Ae and her husband wear tattered, sweat-stained shirts under their designer outfits—materialism and the trappings of wealth are a vehicle in which they both navigate class expectations, seeming to desire rebellion: not outwardly or ostentatiously, but by wearing pyjamas under their clothes, or allowing dog vomit to seep into a new designer coat. The characters do not seem to take pleasure in material comfort, even if Young Ae is described as “being happier with beautiful things.”

Perhaps Neotenica subverts the nature of what we have come to expect of desire itself. There is no sexual force that drives, for instance, Young Ae’s deep fascination with and love for her friend and fellow ballet dancer Ji Eun. What compels Young Ae to say that she “had never and could never love another girl as much as she loved Ji Eun,” that she has “an urge to crush [Ji Eun] back into a storm of sweet dust?” Indeed, the cleanness of desire sans arousal is revisited when Young Ae views her son, who is described as having an uncanny resemblance to Ji Eun in both features and mannerisms. She sees him clasped and pirouetted in the air by another boy, sharing “a laughter that was secretive, but also clean.” This phrase seems to be characteristic of most of the language used to expound upon desire. Neotenica works to decouple desire from arousal, to separate it from easily acquired physical pleasures. The desire Lee is interested in is emotional vulnerability: often complex and unexpected, even puzzling and troubling.

This leads us back to a greater consideration of the plot. This refusal or disavowal of sexual desire perhaps reflects a spirit of anti-climax in Neotenica’s structure of events. Lee’s characters do not suffer from expected dramatic conclusions: Young Ae's husband for example, though anticipating being excluded from his mother’s will, eventually receives an equal share alongside his brothers (after accounting for endowments to various Buddhist temples). Readers find out that actress Lisa Marie, who predicted with certainty that she would remain in the film industry till a tragic death, "never became a big fat movie star, or a serious actress who would star as Grushenka in a passion project of the film of The Karamazov Brothers, but neither did she grow fat, happily or in depression, [...] nor did she, for a long time to come, by her own hand or another's or accidentally, die." Neotenica is less concerned with conclusions and resolution than it is fascinated with what its characters' endings are not, curling around neatly to meet the notion of neoteny expressed in the title. By embedding itself fully in this present, stark moment of contact between characters and with the reader, Lee’s novella invites us to partake in moments of nudging familiarity presented against a backdrop of what could be, but is not.

In all, Neotenica presents itself as a balletic maze of grace and wonder in the minutiae; the erotic poetry of the body and its attendant quality of tactility; the sometimes chuckling, stark but never unpleasant, clear-eyed but not vulgar. Even in a passage detailing an act of fellatio, with Young Ae's husband's anonymous sex partner dripping precum and saliva from his mouth, Lee refuses to shy away from euphemism. What remains is a certain glib playfulness and delight in sensation that makes Neotenica unpretentious but uncavalier, light-footed yet unflinching, and genuinely surprising.


Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean, linguistics graduate, poet, and artist, who has been performing and disappointing since 2014.  Her first volume of poetry GAZE BACK (Singapore Literature Prize 2020, Lambda loser) is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Her work trades in the conventionally vulgar, radically pleasurable, and unsanctioned, striving to emancipate the marginalized and restore the alienated, endangered body. She is the founder of multidisciplinary arts collective DIS/CONTENT (hellodiscontent.carrd.co) and can be found at instagr.am/marylyn.orificial or facebook.com/mrylyn.