I first heard of Franny Choi in 2013 when we were both finalists for Write Bloody’s book contest. My own education in poetry being poor (it’s okay, I was the fiction part of a book on writing), my poet co-author was gobsmacked by the company we found ourselves in. So when I was asked to read We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg, Choi’s new collection of essays, I jumped at the chance to get to know Choi’s work better and to meet on the prosaic ground I mostly inhabit. What I didn’t know is how much our interests would overlap and also how they would stretch my thinking on some projects that have obsessed me for a long time.
Conversing with Culture
Remember the good ol’ days when everyone at school or work would be watching the same show and the stance you took on the latest episode felt like a crucial part of your personality? We Radiant Things took me back there as Choi uses movies, TV, and music I know well as lenses with which to explore the things that interest them. It doesn’t matter that I watched Humans ages ago, I still remember Gemma Chan’s Anita vividly (and not just when my husband says, “Why don’t you share?”). Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots joined our record collection this year, and Blade Runner feels like it has been in the background of my whole life.
Bouncing ideas off this shared landscape gives Choi a way to instantly ground us in a conversation before taking us somewhere we might not have gone on our own. It’s a smart way of stretching a reader. They write in another essay of the struggle of “having to learn to make yourself liquid enough to slip through the bars of other people’s myths,” but it is this hard-earned facility with understanding and subverting expectations that Choi uses to force open eyes of “those whom privilege has soothed into ignorance.”
“I can’t deny that what drew me first to Kyoko—and to all the Asian women cast as androids, cyborgs, Cylons, synths, fabricants, Windups, Realdolls, and AI companions—was something like beauty. I wanted to be close to them, or maybe I wanted to be them, which is another way of saying I desired them queerly. Terrified, I drifted toward their light, knowing that I was also approaching my own becoming.
It was only then that I could confront the terribleness of the image, that I could mourn the things I’d been made to be.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things
Inviting Readers into the Openness
Despite my admiration for how Choi leads readers to explore a thought, the essay I think I loved most was “Notes Toward an Essay on Blade Runner (1982).” Though the disjointed sentences and scant paragraphs of this essay could be mistaken for notes for an essay (and there’s a feeling that they did in fact start there), the openness Choi creates by setting sentences like “Blade Runner has, in its set design, many Asian references. It also has some Asian people, who are mostly inscrutable, comedic, or both” alongside “Blade Runner‘s Asians are, mostly, part of the set design” invites the reader to collaborate with Choi’s thought process. As we fill in what connects these ideas, it’s easier to inhabit their perspective. The connections get more prescriptive as the essay advances, but by then the reader is already part of the team and is eager to see where the ideas go next.
Exploring Class and Work
Choi eventually landed on a topic I’m obsessed with at the moment: social class, both the immutability of it and our failures to see across class lines. “Good Job!” looks at the role of robots in labor (and the sometimes pleasure of robotic actions as we labor). And “I, Roomba,” helped me understand something I’ve felt deeply but never been able to articulate about the way we internalize our worker roles on a personal level. Despite differences in our races, I felt seen when I read about the division of domestic labor with their partner, “[T]here is no level of housework equality within the tight space between us that would make it feel just… We’ve each absorbed too many lessons about what we’re for—the thing we can do, and do well, that makes us worth the sticker price.”
As with the rest of the book, the discussions in this essay are richly layered, exposing inherent contradictions that only lead to deeper exploration of subjects. Some other sentences from the various essays in We Radiant Things that I’ll be thinking about for a long time include:
“Ghost in the Shell” and the Development of a False Self
“In recent years, you have begun to suspect that all your careful blending is actually keeping you distant from others, rather than bringing you closer.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things
“The Reboot at the End of the World” and the Difficulty of Changing the World
“Soon, all this will happen again… In the meantime, you are not the same person you were the last time you were forced to encounter your twin.
“Tell me how many times we’ll each have to reawaken from the dream of certainty before we finally get it right.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things
“Imitation Games” and the Gift of Multilingualism
“At school, the grammar questions were always my favorite. I loved how I could feel when the sentence was wrong, like the heat that sometimes emanates from an injury.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things
“Sympathy for Robot Vengeance” and the Responsibility of the Writer
“I found a place where the thing I was most ferocious at—writing—could meet the ferocity of my desire to reorder the world.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things
“Love, Death and Pink Robots” and Remembering to See Humans
“Any scene organized around the fantasy of a people has the power to make the people themselves feel like ghosts.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things
I took a lot of pleasure from reading Choi’s ideas and thinking about the ways they structured those thoughts. We Radiant Things is a brilliant book that will sneak up on you, entertaining you while stretching you in the best of ways. Just like a humanoid robot, it’s both familiar and strange, and I look forward to reading it again to see what else it has to teach me.
The book isn’t available until October, but you can pre-order it now (and if you use this link, I get a commission).
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