54 pages • 1 hour read
Emily X. R. PanThe Astonishing Color of After
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Role of Memory in Processing Grief
Pan’s novel engages with the processing, storage, and purpose of memories, particularly as they relate to the management of grief. While Leigh’s adventure through her family’s memories dominates the novel’s narrative, it is preceded by Dory’s own attempt to control memory to manage the grief she feels about her estrangement from her family and her sister’s sudden traumatic death. Brian reveals that Dory also distanced herself because she “blamed herself” for not noticing the signs that Jingling was sick; she also felt that without her sister, “there was nothing to close the rift between her and her parents” (424). Dory attempts to erase her family of origin by refusing to talk about them, answer their letters, or teach Leigh Mandarin, a language that she could use to communicate with them.
When Dory accepts Brian’s marriage proposal as a means of “running away from home” (423), she buries her grief in hope of starting a new life. As time passes, Dory reduces her memories of her family to the cruel authoritarian parents who slammed the door in her American boyfriend’s face; she makes the excuse that Leigh will not meet them because they will hurt her like they hurt Dory. She completely erases Jingling from the picture, so that Leigh is unaware she has an aunt until she arrives in Taiwan. In her Author’s Note Pan mentions that she wanted to show that Dory’s depression did not necessarily arise from her past tribulations, but it is clear that her past life in Taiwan and her unprocessed grief over her sister caused Dory a residual level of hurt.
Dory’s suicide note, with its crossed-out injunction for Leigh to remember, is ambiguous, as though she is not sure she wants Leigh to chase the truth about her identity as a means of processing her grief. Still, the apparition of the bird and the box of letters from Leigh’s grandparents in Taiwan indicate that Leigh’s journey through the past that Dory sought to obliterate is necessary. Leigh actively attempts to piece together the truth about her mother’s family and access the memories that led to Dory’s suicide by visiting her mother’s habitual haunts in Taipei, burning vision-inspiring incense sticks, and weaving together a net to catch the bird-mother. Leigh, who develops an obsession with capturing the past, weaves her net too tightly, which symbolizes her attempts to control her memories and attachment to her mother, and exhausts her. She recognizes that there are some happy memories that she could retreat into like “little time capsules,” but that the act of “picking and choosing” which memories to revisit is not “the true nature of remembering” (97). Instead, it is the traumatic scenes that are “rewound and replayed” (97), threatening to imprison the mind and take over the present. This is exemplified through Leigh’s memory of the blood following Dory’s suicide, which “soaked down through the carpet, through the wood […] through my hair and skin and bone, through my skull and deep into my brain. Now it’s staining everything, leaking that blackest black into the rest of the world” (402). Lost in blackness, Leigh worries she could be so overpowered by the memory of her mother’s suicide that it might wipe out the hope of a future for herself.
When Leigh, following Feng’s advice, decides to let the bird go, she surrenders to the fact of her mother’s death and allows the “inky black” to swallow her up, a metaphor for accepting the end of her mother’s life. From this point forward, Leigh is able to move on, as she uses the memories she has garnered to inspire and add color to her art, ultimately concluding that “the purpose of memory […] is to remind us how to live” (462). Leigh thus resolves to learn from the example of her mother’s life and her family’s sadness to make the most of her life and art. She will neither try to control memory nor become a slave to it. Rather, she will use it as a resource that can serve her and those who listen to her story.
The Biracial Teen Experience
All the novel’s primary characters have a clear and explicit ethnic heritage. Dory and her family are Taiwanese, Axel is Puerto Rican and Filipino, and white Americans Brian and Caro are Irish Pennsylvanian and French, respectively. While Pan shows how all the characters’ ethnicities affect their outlook and the way others perceive them, she especially focuses on the challenges faced by mixed-race teens, exemplified through the characters Axel and Leigh, who are the only two “halfies” in their school district. With their ethnically ambiguous appearances, Axel and Leigh feel like their identities are continually in flux and a point of interest for strangers.
Axel, whose Filipino mother left the family, oscillates between wanting to be treated “as if he were a hundred percent Puerto Rican” and wanting to erase all “pieces of his heritage, to blend in and look and act like everyone else in our school” (94). Axel feels estranged from his mother’s culture while simultaneously wanting to appear generically American, as though his ethnic roots could be erased and he could achieve the neutrality that is commonly attached to whiteness in a racist world.
While Leigh understands Axel’s feelings of inhabiting competing cultures, her personal struggle centers on unease in her own skin, owing to how people perceive and label her. On a personal level, she considers her appearance insufficiently Taiwanese and laments that she resembles her Caucasian father more than her Asian mother, “with […] my face, so much rounder than my mother’s […] the shape of my body not at all delicate the way I’d wished it to be, and my hair brown instead of black” (48). Leigh’s lack of conformation to Asian beauty standards, along with her faltering Mandarin, causes her to feel like an alien cuckoo child, especially given that Feng appears like part of the family. Leigh’s lack of resemblance to her mother’s family is also painful because it makes her feel like she does not carry Dory in her reflection, like she cannot access Dory’s memory by looking in the mirror. The physical differences between Leigh and her mother heighten the pathos of Leigh’s attempt to discover the truth about her mother’s identity.
Although Leigh feels insufficiently Asian, her Taiwanese roots are obvious to white onlookers, who attribute values and personality traits to her being half-Asian. For example, Weston, the guy Leigh kisses instead of Axel at the winter formal, deems Leigh “beautiful” because she is “exotic” (380). Although Weston believes he is delivering a compliment by isolating the uncommon nature of Leigh’s beauty, Leigh feels insulted that she has been objectified for her Asian origins and insists that she is “American […] not exotic” (380). Leigh reacts with similar vehemence to author Wilson Edmund Sharpe IV’s assumption that she is “very driven” because she “look[s] like” she has her “mother’s genes” (365). She protests that people often attribute the quality of being driven to her because she is half Asian and rejects such racial stereotyping. These microaggressions, while not intentionally hurtful, make Leigh feel like an outsider who is judged before she can express who she truly is.
Leigh is drawn to Axel because she can be her complete self around him without fear of being misunderstood. While Leigh and Axel do not explicitly talk about being mixed race in the action of the novel, their mutual understanding of this experience bonds them. When they ask each other “what color?” they refer not so much to skin tone as emotion (3). Still, the question reflects their fluctuating experiences of race by indicating that Leigh and Axel see colors and worldviews as entities that are continuously in motion and subject to change.
Ghosts, Fantasy, and the Different Dimensions of Reality
As a novel that utilizes magical realism, the supernatural, and fantasy, The Astonishing Color of After entertains states of being that transcend Western secular binaries of living and dead. With its flashbacks to multiple pasts, the novel also fractures the arc of chronological time. The apparition of Dory as a bird and the subsequent journey to Taipei are the catalysts for Leigh to explore the liminal realms between life and death, past and present. While Brian claims that Leigh’s sighting of the bird is a symptom of unprocessed grief and urges her to return to her therapist, Leigh knows that the bird is real and that she must follow it to Taipei, to learn about her mother and heal.
Once in Taipei, “some strange, inexplainable compulsion” (63) makes her reach toward a dresser that contains a box of incense and a red feather. Pan shows the automatism of Leigh’s attraction to the dresser by describing how her “bare feet slide out of the low bed to find the floor, carrying me to the dresser” (69). This suggests that a force larger than Leigh is guiding her to the incense and the ensuing vision. Prior to the vision, “the smoke fills the room until there’s only black” (70), as though the present reality must be fully erased before Leigh can go back in time to where her mother is alive and playing the piano. While the incense allows Leigh to have visions of the past, burning specific objects, such as the tea leaves her grandmother is so fond of, gives Leigh visions related to specific people. While Leigh can exert some control over the incense-led visions, she cannot control the phenomenon of the 49 days, after which her mother will have processed all her karma and left the earth, nor can she control the necessity of accepting her mother’s death. Indeed, her mother’s message on the 49th day, when a Leigh stands on the moon in her dream, is both a simple goodbye and a plea for Leigh to let her go. Pan thus shows that while magic provides Leigh a window into the past and clues to her identity, it cannot reverse the irreversible facts of her mother’s suicide and death. Leigh must accept and process this reality on her own.
Another supernatural agent in the novel is Feng, the character who appears to Leigh as a multilingual family friend, and to Waipo and Fred as the ghost of Dory’s deceased sister Jingling. Unlike most Westerners, Waipo and Fred comfortably coexist with the realm of ghosts. Fred matter-of-factly tells Leigh that it is Ghost Month, when ghosts “are more noticeable to the living” (336), and Waipo remains “very close” to the ghost of her dead daughter. Leigh sees Jingling’s apparition as Feng, a family friend who does not reveal her true identity. While in the Western tradition, ghosts are ethereal, floating beings, Jingling/Feng favors bright floral prints and is garrulous and constantly eating or talking about food. She acts as Leigh’s interpreter and tour guide, and she reveals that ghosts are hungry and that their relatives leave food for them. While Jingling/Feng’s corporeality may make her a novel phenomenon to Western readers, the peculiar manner of how she manifests before each character obeys a more mysterious ghostly logic. Though Leigh remains perplexed about Feng, she accepts that their relationship was real and embraces it as part of her broader definition of reality, even as she reenters the chronological trajectory of her life upon returning to America.
