Fear And Loathing of the Past and a Possible Future: A Review of Lisa Ko’s ‘Memory Piece’

There are fortuitous moments when a text can be both testimony of the here and now and a carefully constructed potential harbinger of things to come. Such is the case with Lisa Ko’s largely successful and at times deeply effective resonant new novel Memory Piece. Where her 2017 debut The Leavers, a National Book Award winner finalist, was a meditation on displacement and cultural shock for a mother-son duo of Chinese immigrants in New York City, Memory Piece is an audacious expansion in both physical scope and theme. With Memory Piece, Ko considers the consequences of what we are living at this very moment: What are the consequences when tech and capitalism get too close? What is the meaning of work and how does (or should) it define us?

We start with a fairly innocent and evocative setting. It’s 1983. Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are teenage friends who draw close to each other out of their shared sense of weirdness. Giselle becomes a performance artist, Jackie an eager participant in the dot com boom of the late 1990s, and Ellen a housing activist. It’s New York City, crawling up in the 1980s from what was conclusively its nadir in the 1970s. Time passes swiftly and decisively in the first section, Giselle’s story told in third person past tense, while we track her projects as a performance artist. There are projects like “The Circle Piece,” “The Coffee Piece,” and “Diet Piece,” all performed in the early 1990’s and all revolving around the repetition of an activity for a certain length of time. Eventually this duration is twelve months, but she has to lead up to it.

Ko’s research here is impressive. She notes in her acknowledgments that much of Giselle’s life and work is inspired by the life and work of legendary performance artist Tehching Hsieh (see page 7), who performed such pieces as connecting himself to another artist by an 8 foot piece of rope for a period of twelve months. For Giselle, the rationale for her highly original pieces was specific:

“Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable.” Giselle’s section, the first third of the book, understandably ends with her announcement that she will undertake a year-long “Disappearance Piece,” during which she will follow the promise of the title. She will return grant money and fade away. Ko makes a jarring change of perspective and tone in the middle third of this book, “Jackie Ong at The End Of The World” Here, we follow the travails and adventures of Jackie as she navigates the booming tech industry of the late 1990s. Jackie is a less likeable or understandable character, which makes this section more difficult to settle in the reader’s mind. Its pace is frenetic, anxious, its characters fueled by paranoia. Jackie is deeply in love with Diane, and the passion is palpable. Still, there are problems. In this section, we get a sense of the future to come:

“Sometimes Jackie thinks things wouldn’t be so bad if everything collapses like the survivalists claim.”

Jackie creates an online blogging forum called Lena, like the many that were so popular at that time (the turn of the millennium), developed in the early days of the internet when it all still seemed “underground.” Jackie is a fervent and unapologetic capitalist, yet she still has the desire to confess, to reveal herself to the world, even the most mundane details. The consequences of this reality tell her otherwise:

“All this time we were writing in public. We thought we were doing everything in secret, but we did nothing but leave tracks…The sites live on in your mind, in cached archives and vast data banks. It was history while it happened; it was already over.”

In the final third, we jump to the 2040s. We’re in full dystopia mode here, with the boroughs of New York decisively separated by guarded borders. Encampments litter the landscape and 71-year-old Ellen has been forced to abandon her activist housing co-op in Manhattan and wander the streets. She lives hand-to-mouth, somewhere in the Bronx, a victim of overwhelming gentrification and a society that valued surveillance of citizens over actual liberty. She reflects:

“You could spend a lifetime subsisting on the fumes of your own memory.”

This section is more than a little frightening in how clearly it reflects our current state of being:

“Online, entire sections of the world were omitted…We had access to selective nostalgias, our devices funneling us into the appropriate memories for our age groups and locations…”

There is no clear resolution or happy ending. Careful readers will think not only of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale but also Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where subtlety is useless and inappropriate. Metaphors have no purpose because all forms of the landscape are simply bleak and unforgiving. This is where Ko is most effective and at the height of her powers. If this triptych of characters has a weakness it’s in Jackie’s section. Ko knows her subject matter, the tech wizards of the 1990s in New York City, but the longer we’re with Jackie and this world of adrenaline-fueled oligarchs in training, the more we want to go back to Giselle and her solitary quest to make the most audacious solitary performance art statement.

In the epilogue (which Ko entitles “Memory Piece”), we get as close to the thesis as we’re going to be. It’s written in the form of a letter to Ellen, who for lack of a better term is the core of this novel. “Our work is to find and collect…Nothing is dead. Everything is alive and waiting. And someday we’ll be the questions for who comes next.” The women have all reconvened in this 2040 world of Ko’s invention. Giselle is “...building an archive in La Tierra, part of a multi-year piece, a personal collection of her own archives.” Its counterpart in real life seems to be The Clock Of The Long Now, the 10,000 year clock in San Francisco owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Which project is more artistic is in the mind of the consumer.

For the most part, Memory Piece is a powerful and important novel, especially for our times. Lisa Ko poses the universal questions as statements: “How do you live (How dare you live) What do you do (What should we do) How do we live? How do we die? What do we need to hear?”

There’s an urgency to the premise here, and what Memory Piece lacks in an overall successful cohesive unit it makes up for in specific singular moments. To quote a line from the late Leonard Cohen’s 1971 song “Famous Blue Raincoat”

“You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.”