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WORK TITLE: The Emperor of Shoes
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://spencerwiseauthor.com/bio/
CITY: Tallashassee
STATE: FL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2018024657
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3623.I826
Personal name heading:
Wise, Spencer
Found in: The emperor of shoes, 2018: ECIP t.p. (Spencer Wise) data
view (Born in Boston, Spencer Wise is a graduate of
Tufts University and the University of Texas at Austin
and worked in the editorial departments at Sports
Illustrated and Time Out New York. His work has appeared
in Narrative magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, The
Florida Review, and New Ohio Review. He is the winner of
the 2017 Gulf Coast Prize in nonfiction. Wise teaches at
Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee.)
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PERSONAL
Born in Boston, MA.
EDUCATION:Tufts University, B.A.; Florida State University, Ph.D. Received degree from University of Texas at Austin.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, professor, 2014–.
AWARDS:Gulf Coast Prize, 2017; Vermont Writer Studio fellow.
WRITINGS
Editor for Time Out New York and Sports Illustrated. Also contributor to New Ohio Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Gulf Coast.
SIDELIGHTS
Spencer Wise has long been involved in the world of professional writing. He pursued degrees from Florida State University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Tufts University. He has also held editing jobs with Time Out New York and Sports Illustrated, before moving on to Florida State University, where he serves as an instructor of creative writing.
The Emperor of Shoes, Wise’s introductory work, comes partly from Wise’s own personal life. His father worked for years in the shoe industry, and while Wise chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, he was nonetheless intrigued by that particular line of work. Wise took it upon himself to travel to the country of China in the year 2015, in order to learn more about the shoe industry and those who labored within it. Wise’s experiences and observations there inform much of the novel.
The Emperor of Shoes stars a young man by the name of Alex Cohen. Alex was never given the chance to decide his own path in life; as the son of a shoemaking professional, Alex’s only path in life has been to someday manage the factory led by his father. While Alex has his own visions for what type of factory leader he would like to become, he grapples with whether to simply bend to his father’s wishes or act on his vision for, what he believes, the benefit of the environment and the company at large. It isn’t until Alex journeys to China personally that his views ultimately begin to shift once and for all. Alex soon learns that the company his father oversees mistreats its employees. In fact, the conditions there are so poor that one employee is driven to suicide. Things become even more complicated for Alex once he meets and becomes attracted to Ivy, another employee at the factory who wants to try to enact change however she can. As Alex learns more and more about the workplace abuse taking place in China, as well as the country’s longstanding history with social change, he begins to gather the courage to try and help transform the factory for the better, as well as hold his ground against his father.
“Although this is a fascinating look at China’s race for economic growth, the Jewish businessman stereotype is unsettling and makes this first novel less compelling than it could be,” remarked one writer in Kirkus Reviews. The vast majority of reviews were more positive. Booklist contributor Mary Ellen Quinn praised the book’s plot, and felt that the book “offers a fascinating look at contemporary China.” In an issue of Publishers Weekly, one writer said: “Wise … skillfully depicts the interdependent yet strained relationship between Chinese factory workers and foreign capital in this revealing story.” Brian Haman, a reviewer on the New York Times Online, felt that the book (as well as Number One Chinese Restaurant, a novel with similar themes) “underscore the extent to which the promise of economic opportunity still moves people across great distances on our planet.” On the Jewish Book Council website, Daniel Paul said: “Ultimately, the reader’s experience with The Emperor of Shoes will boil down to their impression of its narrator.” He continued: “And here, Wise has smartly expended much of the novel’s energy.” Jersey Magazine writer Fran Wood stated: “[Wise’s] illuminating debut novel, with its dark subplot, is an eye-opener on China’s poor laborers and their often perilous attempts to seek justice.” A contributor to the Liz Loves Books blog commented: “There are some brilliantly thought provoking themes explored, the author’s eye for characters is wonderfully engaging and it’s one of those books you fully absorb yourself into.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of The Emperor of Shoes, p. 18.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2018, review of The Emperor of Shoes.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, Louisa Ermelino, “If the Shoe Fits…: A Jewish Bostonian finds revolution and redemption in the world of Chinese shoe factory workers,” p. 22; April 16, 2018, review of The Emperor of Shoes, p. 66.
ONLINE
Jersey Magazine, https://www.nj.com/ (June 10, 2018), Fran Wood, “What Fran’s Reading: ‘The Emperor of Shoes,’ a powerful debut novel,” review of Emperor of Shoes.
Jewish Book Council, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (August 13, 2018), Daniel Paul, review of Emperor of Shoes.
Liz Loves Books, http://lizlovesbooks.com/ (July 16, 2018), review of Emperor of Shoes.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 26, 2018), Brian Haman, “Neither Here Nor There: Living and Loving Between China and America,” review of The Emperor of Shoes.
Spencer Wise website, http://spencerwiseauthor.com (September 4, 2018), author profile.
Tallahassee Magazine, https://www.tallahasseemagazine.com/ (May 1, 2018), Steve Bornhoft, “In His Novel, Spencer Wise Explores His Shoemaking Past.”
Spencer Wise was born in the North Shore of Massachusetts where people give directions relative to Dunkin’ Donuts franchises (ie. Two Dunks down the road, turn left, at the next Dunks, bang a right).
After attending Tufts University, he did community organizing in the South End. Then he followed a girlfriend to New York and worked at Time Out NY and Sports Illustrated for a number of years and kept writing stories. One of them he showed to his close friend at the Tavern on Jane, who set the story down and said, “You know, you don’t have to be a writer.” Scarred but undeterred, Wise returned to graduate school in creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, finally earning a Ph.D. at Florida State University. He stayed in Tallahassee where he has the privilege of sharing his passion for literature and writing with the amazing students at FSU. He lives with his brilliant partner who rocked a beret with leopard trim for most of her childhood. Unsurprisingly, they have two cats.
His current book, The Emperor of Shoes (HarperCollins/Hanover Square Press), will be released June 5th, 2018. He comes from a long line of shoemakers dating back many generations to the shtetls in Poland. To research the book, Wise lived at a dormitory in a shoe factory in South China where the novel takes place.
His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry can be found in journals such as Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Florida Review, and The New Ohio Review.
He was recently awarded a fellowship to attend the Vermont Writer Studio this summer.
Spencer Wise
Spencer Wise
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In His Novel, Spencer Wise Explores His Shoemaking Past
Wise’s debut novel, and Florida State University doctoral dissertation, is set for release in June.
May 1, 2018
Steve Bornhoft
Wise’s debut novel, set for release in June, is about corruption and exploitation of workers in a Chinese industry that Wise’s family knows well. Photo by Phil Sears
Spencer Wise spurned shoe business.
His great-grandfather left Vilnius, in Lithuania, in 1907, sailed to the United States as a passenger aboard the SS Carmania, was processed at Ellis Island, settled in Boston, and sold leather from a horse cart.
His father, as a boy, swept the floors in a shoe factory owned by his grandfather in Amesbury, Massachusetts, became an apprentice and went on from there, a “shoe-dog” forever on the run, landing in far-flung places where it was possible to make shoes cheaply: Taiwan, Italy, Yugoslavia, Brazil and, for the last 30 years, China.
But Professor Wise, who teaches creative writing at Florida State University, has opted for a career in letters rather than leather.
“My dad has supported my decision, and that has been moving and beautiful and has really helped me keep going as a writer,” said Wise, whose older sister and an older cousin also declined to try on shoes.
“A part of him didn’t want me to go into the business. He spent my entire childhood flying back and forth to China. He furnished our house by redeeming frequent flier miles.”
Wise, however, is so near shoemaking that he was motivated to write about it as the subject of his first novel, The Emperor of Shoes, scheduled for release (Hanover Square Press) on June 5.
He traveled to China in 2015 and spent a year, mostly in the factory town of Foshan, doing research for the book, which would become his doctoral dissertation at FSU.
Alex Cohen is the protagonist in the more than loosely autobiographical work that is a rite-of-passage novel, yes, but has also been likened by its marketers to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel which exposed deplorable working conditions in the meat-packing industry in early 20th-century Chicago.
Cohen reluctantly becomes a partner in his father’s shoemaking enterprise, and increasingly discovers that it is rife with corruption, bribery and the exploitation of workers.
Cohen is crimped further by the strong arm of a party boss at whose pleasure his father operates his factory.That conflict intensifies as Cohen’s affections for Ivy, a seamstress, grow, and Ivy tries to draft Cohen into the underground Democratic Revolutionary Party for whom she is working as an organizer.
An embittering realization inexorably advances: In this life, “you can’t play it from both sides forever. Eventually, you had to betray someone.”
Or do you? Is it possible to simultaneously satisfy the interests of government, a company and its workers?
Wise believes his publisher bought his novel in large part due to the parallels between the Chinese workers it depicts and itinerant workers in the United States.“Given the Trump presidency, the timing for my book was perfect,” Wise surmises.
Novelist Spencer Wise (at left) confers with his mentor, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler. Photo by by Phil Sears
“Ostensibly, you have Donald Trump running the country, but you also have migrant workers running the country. Kick all the recent ethnic immigrants out of the United States and see what happens. America would come to a halt.
“We have people who build the country and keep it running who are not entitled to basic freedoms. I think people are becoming increasingly uneasy about that.”
Observes Ivy in Emperor about disfranchised workers: “You have in the States the same problem. People come to pick grapes, mow lawns, cook. Outsiders. They are invisible in your country, but you need them. So here they circuit-board iPads instead of washing dishes. Live like unwanted guests here in their own country.”
The world, Ivy advocates, must be caused to see the unseen.
“He’s part of American life that we choose not to look at,” Wise said about his father.
“We are disconnected from the sources of the products we use and the foods we consume. How disconnected can you become before that distance starts to separate you from who you are? We don’t make anything or understand where it comes from. The chair in the living room, the chicken in the freezer, the clothes and shoes we wear. It all just comes.” Emperor succeeds in embodying the invisible.
Wise has confronted his father with difficult questions: For especially a Jewish man to participate in an industry that exploits people, is that not grievously hypocritical? Do you feel complicity, culpability in that? What is the rationale that permits you to live with what you do?
Those questions, Wise said, always have gone unanswered.
“My dad read my manuscript and liked it,” Wise said. “It does honor our culture to an extent, but, in many ways, it is a cultural critique. Maybe, out of pride, he missed that.
“He doesn’t really think that he’s part of an exploitive system and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s as simple as the imperative to survive. We have to provide for our families, keep Jewish traditions alive, keep marching through the desert. Maybe that overwhelms every other concern.”
Too, as Wise points out, his father is thoroughly a businessman who’s “probably read 10 books in his life.” He’s a shoe guy.
Cohen’s father is at once hopelessly pragmatic, unwittingly hilarious and given to an unending series of petty complaints. He sets aside a serving of beans because they are “squeaky,” registers his displeasure with a frivolous family outing by wearing a woolen suit and hard shoes to the beach, reduces Marc Chagall’s most famous work, I and the Village, to a “stupid goat.”
He is Morty Seinfeld and, however successful, there is a Lomanesque quality about him. He is, somehow, a compassionate figure who is better than his insistence that “leather’s worth more than labor.” And, always, there is a “storm just outside his door.”
Wise is indebted to his father — shoe money put him through Tufts University in Boston — and to a host of people who helped him with his book, including most especially the head of his dissertation committee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler.
“He is the best mentor,” Wise said. “I don’t think I could have gotten the book done without him. He reeled me in when I went off the rails.”
Referring to boxing’s most renowned manager, Wise said of Butler, “He was my Cus D’Amato.”
Everybody needs a cut man, an interviewer tells Wise.
“That metaphor works two ways,” Wise replies. “Bob was in my corner, and he cut my manuscript when it needed to be trimmed. I had 20 pages in the book where I described step by step how you make shoes. He wanted to know why I included such a lengthy digression. I told him I thought it was fascinating and he told me, ‘It’s not.’ It’s good to have a little guidance like that.”
The Emperor of Shoes
Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist. 114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Emperor of Shoes.
By Spencer Wise.
June 2018. 336p. Hanover Square, $26.99 (9781335145901).
Alex Cohen is being groomed to take over the family business, the Tiger Step Shoe Factory, in Foshan, China. The factory has relied on cheap labor to manufacture "casuals for the masses" back in the U.S., but sales are starting to flag, and Alex has his own ideas about taking the business in a new direction. At the same time, his interest in Ivy, a seamstress, leads him to explore the China outside his father's circuit of the factory and the Intercontinental Hotel. Ivy belongs to an underground group that wants to stage a one-day strike at the factory, but after Alex agrees to lend his support, he is enlisted by the local party boss to help root out radicals. The more Alex learns about how workers are treated, the more he questions where his loyalties should lie. Wise's debut offers a fascinating look at contemporary China, but its greatest strength is the struggle between a hard-to-please father bent on preserving what he has worked so hard to build and a son who is trying to find his own way.--Mary Ellen Quinn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Quinn, Mary Ellen. "The Emperor of Shoes." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268041/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=44d2c76d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268041
If the Shoe Fits ...: A Jewish Bostonian finds revolution and redemption in the world of Chinese shoe factory workers
Louisa Ermelino
Publishers Weekly. 265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p22+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Spencer Wise is the heir to a shoe-manufacturing dynasty that began five generations ago in New England. Today the family business is about producing goods in China, and, though Wise knows all about shoes, he's chosen not to make them but to write about them.
I first heard about Wise's debut novel, The Emperor of Shoes, in the PW offices. And if you've followed me at all, you know that a novel set outside of my world, on a subject about which I know nothing (making shoes is not buying shoes--there I have great expertise) is going to get my attention. The Emperor of Shoes is the story of a young Jewish American man, Alex Cohen, who takes over his father's shoe factory in Guangdong and encounters the culture, the country, and Ivy, an activist seamstress who wants to unionize the workers being exploited under a corrupt system.
Boston is Wise's hometown, and his father ran the family shoe factory in Amesbury until the 1962 Trade Expansion Act sent manufacturing overseas. Closing the factory in 1972 sent Wise's father overseas as well and began Wise's obsession with his father's travels to Brazil, China, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia. Wise says that he always knew he wanted to write a book that combined the elements that dominated his upbringing. So in 2013 he went to work in the shoe factory in southern China that his father had contracts with. "I lived in the factory, I worked on the line--it was a real apprenticeship."
Wise says he knows how to make a shoe from scratch, and in one of the novel's early drafts, which he showed to Robert Olen Butler, his mentor at Florida State University, he had a 40-page section explaining the process. Butler had a clear opinion: "What makes you think anyone cares?" Wise explained that he was "channeling Melville--that passage in Moby-Dick where he describes building a ship?" But he cut the shoe making bit.
What Wise brings to a story of hot-button issues is a light hand, a mix of sensitive characters, a propulsive plot, and humor. When Alex comes to meet Ivy's grandmother, he brings her "the hopelessly lame present of espadrille heels from the factory," but realizes, "Better I should have given her a head of cabbage."
For Wise, 2013 was about writing, researching, and interviewing people in China. "They accepted me because I was legitimately interested in the culture, and also I think they liked that I was Jewish," he says. "They associate being Jewish with being hard working and successful, and the Chinese find this admirable."
Wise had come to Florida State, where he's a visiting lecturer, especially to work with Butler, and fortunately, Wise says, "he liked my writing." More than that, when the manuscript for Emperor was finished in early 2016, Butler asked around about young agents looking for new clients. One of them was Duvall Osteen at Nicole Aragi, an agency with an impressive and diverse list of authors; one of three agents at the agency, Osteen had started six years ago as Nicole Aragi's assistant. Butler called and sent Osteen the book. "I was flattered when Bob called," she tells me. "He simply said, 'There's this kid, and he's the best in my class.' "
Osteen had previously read a story of Wise's, "The Farm," about a Jewish boy from Boston meeting his Southern girlfriend's parents in Georgia. "I'm from the South, and I still remember this scene at the dinner table where they are saying grace, holding hands, and at the end of the prayer, the father adds, 'Shalom,'" she says. "I was thinking I should sign this guy up right now. Spencer finds your comfort zones and boots you out of them. I think of him as a less mean Philip Roth."
She read the manuscript at the end of March 2016, and they started working together. "The novel had so much going for it: father-son relationship, coming of age, romance, and the world of Chinese factory workers, which is a world we never think about." Despite all that, the novel didn't sell on its first round out. After revisions, Osteen sent it to only one editor, John Glynn at Hanover Square Press, who told her, "Hold this for me--I'll get right back to you."
Hanover is a new imprint under Harlequin's umbrella, formed in November 2016, with Peter Joseph as editor. Glynn arrived there in April 2017 after five years at Scribner, where he'd worked on an eclectic list of fiction and nonfiction. "It was a dream to get to shape a list from the ground up," he says about his new gig.
The Emperor of Shoes was Glynn's first acquisition. He was looking for the perfect book and is convinced he's found it. "It's fiction with a pulse," he says, and "it's a subject that is underrepresented in fiction--it felt timely and prescient." (When he received the manuscript, he had just read about labor practices at a Chinese company that produces Ivanka Trump-branded shoes.) Glynn appreciated the book's authenticity, that it was anchored by Wise's experiences of China as a gweilo (a Cantonese slang term that literally means "ghost man").
Glynn bought North American rights in May 2017 for "a modest amount" (Wise was thrilled) and got first serial rights for an excerpt in Narrative magazine. The book pubs in June in the U.S. and July in the U.K. with No Exit Press. The publication of Emperor is a trifecta of beginnings: a debut novel, a new imprint, and a young agent. The stars converge.
Caption: From top: Spencer Wise in China, factory assembly line
Caption: From l.: Duvall Osteen, John Glynn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ermelino, Louisa. "If the Shoe Fits ...: A Jewish Bostonian finds revolution and redemption in the world of Chinese shoe factory workers." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 22+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5cc25762. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839736
Wise, Spencer: THE EMPEROR OF SHOES
Kirkus Reviews. (May 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wise, Spencer THE EMPEROR OF SHOES Hanover Square Press (Adult Fiction) $26.99 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-335-14590-1
Since the day of his birth, Boston-born Alex Cohen has been expected to follow in his father's footsteps and run the family shoe factory in southern China.
Now 26, Alex is caught between his desire to oversee a company where workers are respected and operations follow the latest energy efficiency standards and, at the same time, keep his money-worshipping father happy. It's impossible. Dad is almost a caricature, soulless, greedy, opportunistic, and crass. He's proud that his sweatshop is highly profitable and that his merchandise is sold in countless U.S. department stores. He's also pleased by his ability to ingratiate himself with the corrupt, easily bribed politicians who are happy to look the other way on health and safety standards. At first, Alex finds his father's modus operandi simply disagreeable. But after a worker kills herself because she can no longer take the constant abuse meted out by the company's hard-driving overseers, Alex realizes that things have to change, and fast. As he gets to know Ivy, a somewhat older college-educated worker who intends to organize the plant, and then becomes romantically entangled with her, he not only learns about the international struggle for human rights, but has to parse for himself the never-ending debate over whether nonviolence can succeed in creating social change. The legacy of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square is vividly rendered, and Ivy's eyewitness account leaves Alex shaken. In concert with his employee's suicide, it also helps propel the inevitable confrontation between father and son. The showdown is tense, if predictable, and leaves both men with a clear understanding that business as usual is no longer possible. Although this is a fascinating look at China's race for economic growth, the Jewish businessman stereotype is unsettling and makes this first novel less compelling than it could be.
Though this book can be nuanced and engaging, it's ultimately disappointing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wise, Spencer: THE EMPEROR OF SHOES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e49431fa. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571235
The Emperor of Shoes
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p66+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Emperor of Shoes
Spencer Wise. Hanover Square, $26.99 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-335-14590-1
In Wise's dynamic debut, the American heir to a shoe manufacturing company comes of age in southern China and has a crisis of conscience among factory workers fighting for their rights. Alex Cohen is in China to learn the ropes of his father's shoe company. While there, he meets and falls for Ivy, a member of an activist group hoping to start a union among the workers. Alex wants to support her cause, as he knows that workers are being exploited at the factory. But his father is pressuring him to fall in line and step into his new management role. Then a government official asks Alex to bring him the names of the union organizers, Alex finds himself at a crossroads. When an opportunity comes for him to start fresh with a company that would treat its workers with dignity and generosity, but will he take it or will he bow to the pressure to maintain the status quo? Wise's well-paced novel moves inexorably forward with functional but never brilliant prose. While Wise resists simplifying the story by contrasting the life experiences of Alex and Ivy, readers will be more interested in Ivy and wish more time had been dedicated to her version of events. Wise, who has worked in his own family's shoe factory in southern China, skillfully depicts the interdependent yet strained relationship between Chinese factory workers and foreign capital in this revealing story. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Emperor of Shoes." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 66+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532685/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=376755a0. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532685
Neither Here Nor There: Living and Loving Between China and America
Image
Lillian LiCreditMargarita Corporan
By Brian Haman
July 26, 2018
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
NUMBER ONE CHINESE RESTAURANT
By Lillian Li
290 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $27.
THE EMPEROR OF SHOES
By Spencer Wise
328 pp. Hanover Square Press. $26.99.
Culture and commerce have long been easy bedfellows in the complicated relationship between the United States and China, so it’s unsurprising that two first novels by young American authors, “Number One Chinese Restaurant,” by Lillian Li, and “The Emperor of Shoes,” by Spencer Wise, should feature a Chinese-American restaurant and an American-owned Chinese shoe factory, respectively, as the hubs in which lives, loves, languages and histories intersect.
Li’s novel revolves around the tangled inner workings of the family-owned Beijing Duck House, in Rockville, Md., and the multigenerational enmities and aspirations of its owners and workers. The middle-aged Jimmy Han, who inherited the restaurant (along with its tired menu and timeworn décor) from his late father, hopes to open his own pan-Asian fusion restaurant in modish Georgetown. However, in order to realize his plan, he must rely on the financial clout of Uncle Pang, a shady, nine-fingered fixer, and obtain the consent of the family matriarch, Feng Fei.
For the elder, Chinese-born family members and workers, the Beijing Duck House has displaced Beijing itself as “the heart-center of the universe.” But among their largely directionless American-born offspring — including Annie, Jimmy’s niece, and Pat, the son of a manager named Nan — the attachment is more casual. Nan is in a bicoastal marriage (her husband owns a restaurant in California), which doesn’t stop her from developing a relationship with a fellow restaurant employee named Ah-Jack, a man a generation older and still married to his terminally ill wife. Goaded by Uncle Pang, Pat, along with an unwitting Annie, starts a fire that eventually guts the restaurant, forcing these long-simmering relationships and rivalries into sharp relief as priorities and allegiances are tested and reassessed.
Although Li’s prose can be uninspired (“the trouble with life was that life needed trouble”), more often it engrosses, especially when she allows the external world into the virtually airtight space of the restaurant, as she does when describing Jimmy’s camaraderie with the multiethnic cohort of kitchen cooks outside working hours, or Ah-Jack’s affecting relationship with Nan. For the most part, though, Li’s fictional America is suggestively insubstantial, her characters seemingly unable to step outside “the shadow of the Duck House,” itself a metaphor for their “Chineseness” in the United States — whether perceived or self-imposed.
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Spencer WiseCreditMolly Hamill
Questions of family and identity also figure prominently in Wise’s first novel. Alex Cohen, a 26-year-old Jewish Bostonian and partner in his father’s shoe factory in southern China, falls in love with a factory worker-cum-clandestine union organizer named Ivy. Soon he’s acting on a newfound commitment to workers’ rights, which appears incompatible with his father’s bottom line and the vigilant gaze of local Communist Party officials.
Garrulous, jocular and culturally insensitive, Alex’s father, Fedor, is wedded to the status quo — outdated shoe designs and the bribes to party officials necessary to ensure his factory’s smooth operation. Wise has also endowed Fedor’s character with an exaggerated Jewish-American identity, one marked by Yiddishisms and shtick and often verging on caricature. (“Vey iz mir!” Fedor says in a typical passage. “We’re shoe men, Alex, artists! Have I slaughtered a bull lately? Have you?”)
Throughout his time in China, Alex is haunted by the question of belonging: He is not strictly American, by virtue of his expatriate status, but nor is he Chinese. (Locals refer to him as gweilo, or “ghost man,” in Cantonese.) His sense of purpose and identity gradually emerge through his involvement with Ivy, a veteran of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, and her (fictional) Democratic Revolutionary Party, which he allows to organize a workers’ strike at his father’s factory.
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Despite nods to recent Chinese history, Wise’s novel stands on shaky ideological ground. Only through a relationship with a disadvantaged Chinese factory worker does his privileged American protagonist come to affirm what are understood to be Western values of equality and human rights, a plotline that risks reducing China and its problems to mere cultural props in a Western man’s coming-of-age story. With Chinese novels increasingly available in English translations, readers wishing to avoid such Western-centrism might consider provocative alternatives like Lu Nei’s “Young Babylon,” and Sheng Keyi’s “Northern Girls.” (“Factory Girls,” a nonfiction account by Leslie T. Chang, and “Iron Moon,” an anthology of poetry by Chinese workers, also provide illuminating depictions of factory life.)
Nevertheless, both “Number One Chinese Restaurant” and “The Emperor of Shoes” underscore the extent to which the promise of economic opportunity still moves people across great distances on our planet. The Greek root of the word “planet” — planetes — means a wanderer or traveler, and in the sense that we are increasingly global citizens, we are all wanderers. After all, to travel is to experience the volatility of identity and the uncertainty of home. “So we’re the bridge,” Alex says to an American-born friend in Wise’s novel. To which his friend replies: “Right. The middle step. We ain’t Chinese, but we ain’t American. We live here, from there. Inbetweeners.”
In our current climate of exclusionary politics based on privileged citizenships, how much more empathetic it would be to acknowledge the shared “in between” moments of our existence. As Alex reflects at one point, “I pictured myself at peace, in a place where I stood out so goddamn bad that I finally fit in.” In this respect, both Li and Wise have written novels of our times.
Brian Haman is the book review and interview editor of The Shanghai Literary Review.
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Inbetweeners. Order Reprints
The Emperor of Shoes
Hanover Square Press 2018
The Emperor of Shoes, the debut novel from Spencer Wise, follows in the tradition of many other Jewish coming-of-age stories but also nods to the classic novel of the westerner abroad. (We could imagine an alternative title being The Not-So Quiet American.) The story follows Alex, an American Jew in his twenties, living in Southern China and helping his father run the shoe factory that he will one day inherit. Alex is placed on the fault line between his father, a not particularly scrupulous business man, and Ivy, a factory worker who, thankfully, has sufficient stamina to function both as a love interest for Alex and as a mouthpiece for the dissonant movement that upends his sense of morality. As the plot unfolds, Alex is forced to ask whether one should “honor thy father” even if “thy father” runs a sweatshop.
At its best, this collision between individual and social conflicts has the potential to heighten both. By making Alex’s feeling of being out of place both physical and emotional, the novel forces him (as well as the reader) to think about place from different angles than one might otherwise. And by setting the story during a period of labor unrest, the book focuses on the relationship between politics and emotion too often ignored in political discourse. There is also an interesting element to juxtaposing a particularly Jewish coming-of-age story with the setting of China, as Alex is forced to ask what it means to be Jewish while separated from his home and community in Boston. While the concept of diaspora is foundational to so much of Jewish history, it is easy for a character like Alex (and many potential readers) raised in established Jewish American communities to lose sight of it. This sense that Alex is trying to understand his Jewish identity at the same time he adapts to living in another country (best expressed in the entertaining collisions of Yiddish vernacular with Chinese descriptive details) is an example of how the novel takes admirable advantage of its conceit to ask interesting questions of Alex.
There are, however, risks to this approach as well. Staging a coming-of-age/love story in the midst of a Chinese social conflict runs the risk of having characters operate as metaphors for politics, and becoming stretched in their dual roles as being both people and symbols. There are also always challenges when depicting another culture without defaulting to stereotypes or settling for exploitative caricature. At times the book comes a little close to the line for comfort, as with the case of the father’s mistress, whose broken English just happens to cause her to speak in double entendres.
Ultimately, the reader’s experience with The Emperor of Shoes will boil down to their impression of its narrator. And here, Wise has smartly expended much of the novel’s energy. Alex is a fine disciple of the anxious and articulate narrators in whose footsteps he follows. Many readers will be taken in by him and the well-constructed plot of the book. And for those readers for whom Alex is not enough? Well, even if The Emperor of Shoes cannot be said to “change the conversation” regarding the western travel novel, at least it does add some Yiddish to it.
What Fran's Reading: "The Emperor of Shoes," a powerful debut novel
Updated June 10, 2018 at 11:57 AM; Posted June 3, 2018 at 6:30 AM
("The Book Browsers," oil painting by Fran Wood)
By Fran Wood
For NJ.com
Novels set in foreign countries can expand our understanding of globalism and illustrate how interconnected the world has become. Spencer Wise's debut, "The Emperor of Shoes" (Hanover Square Press, 322 pp., $26.99), is just such a novel.
Its protagonist is Alex Cohen, a 26-year-old Jewish-American living in southern
image001.jpgHanover Square Press
China where his father is grooming him to take over the family's shoe-manufacturing company. It is a business made complex by abundant regulations, some seemingly capricious, some clearly government-imposed and politically-motivated.
Alex is indifferent to his future as boss until he falls for Ivy, one of his factory workers. Through her, he begins to see the ways in which government corruption and his own father's payoffs - soon to be his payoffs - are exploiting their workers.
When Alex and Ivy travel to Bejing for a Tiananmen Square anniversary, where Ivy's sister died, Alex begins to make troubling connections between the abuse inflicted on his Jewish forebears and the abuse the Chinese workers in his factory are suffering at the hands of his family. He knows his father expects him to fall in line with the dictates of the Chinese government.
When Ivy introduces Alex to a man who intends to organize the factory workers for a high-profile revolt for fair pay and better working conditions, Alex realizes he will be forced to make a monumental decision, one that could destroy the business his father has spent his life building and now has handed over to him.
Wise's own family runs a business in China, so he brings a reliable understanding of working conditions and China's powerful government to his story. His illuminating debut novel, with its dark subplot, is an eye-opener on China's poor laborers and their often perilous attempts to seek justice. "The Emperor of Shoes" is a story that will stay with you.
The Emperor of Shoes Spencer Wise Blog tour review.
By LizLovesBooks | July 16, 2018 | Blog Tour
Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant’s vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex’s own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line. When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow laborers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite?
The Emperor Of Shoes is a poignant and beautifully written novel following Alex, a Jewish son who starts to take over the family business only to have his eyes opened to the exploitation within.
This is a strong and compelling family drama with page turning appeal as we see Alex adapt to a new reality, come to terms with his own moral standpoint whilst having his loyalties tested all the way.
There are some brilliantly thought provoking themes explored, the author’s eye for characters is wonderfully engaging and it’s one of those books you fully absorb yourself into. It is a revolution all of its own and the interactions between Alex and Ivy and how they affect each other is a strong anchor here.
I loved it. Something different to my usual books and a pleasure to read.
Recommended.