The face on the cover of Chang-Rae Lee's new novel, On Such a Full Sea, is featureless, and it's the face of Fan, the sixteen year old female protagonist of Lee's first dystopian fantasy fiction.
Fan is quite the opposite of heroines like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games trilogy; Fan doesn't have a distinctive personality, a trail-blazing individualism or the prettiness/inventiveness of Katniss. Neither does she possess the innate leadership potential of the usual teen protagonists of Western fantasy fiction.
Might Fan's facelessness be on account of the a new breed of colonizers who rule America in Lee's dystopia? For, the new colonizers are Asians who are said to come from "New China." Facelessness and communal structures are what the colonizers import from their homeland and transpose on the ruins of a broken America.
Fan, as a New York Times review tells us, is more of a cipher on whom the fears, desires, hopes and despairs of the community are projected. No sooner than the novel begins, Fan disappears, in search of a lover who had freed himself from his societal constraints and gone elsewhere. Much of the novel traces the mental and physical journeys of characters who, in turn, go in search of Fan, their appointed savior.
Fan is more like the Panchen Lama, the boy appointee who is sought out in the world by the community of believers and then anointed the king.
On the whole, On Such a Full Sea looks and feels, says the review, like a fantasy fiction inspired more by "Phillip Roth than by Phillip Dick."
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