That Asian Kid in 1976 New York

I've never read a novel written by established and Pulitzer-nominated author Chang-rae Lee. Or to me, Lee Chang-rae. He has an upcoming novel 'A Tender Age' slated to be released in August, and there is an excerpt published. This is 'Standings' by Chang-rae Lee, published in The New Yorker on May 3, 2026.

The year is 1976 in New York. The narrator is 10-year-old Jeon-Gi, or J.-G. He is the first-born child of a church-going Korean immigrant family who lives in Cove Complex that has many children of different ethnicities around J.-G's age. He is going on eleven and calls himself "chunky". 

It features J.-G's relationship with other boys who are also his neighbors. In such a setting, of course there are bullies, and also boys picking on J.-G because of his ethnicity as 'the Oriental'. He somehow got into fixing this fight with Joshua Messing, after both of them slung racial slurs at each other. Then there's another weird dude Tommy Reilly who kept picking on him. Tommy was unhinged and actually a menace; he has drawn blood from J.-G twice. Tommy was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. 

There was no one else around, but even if there had been, I’d have known he was addressing me. Periodically I’d get called Bruce by friends and strangers alike, in both friendly jest and as a taunt. It was pointless to try to correct them about Bruce Lee’s roots versus mine, plus sometimes it was advantageous to allow them to attach to me the spectre of deadly inborn skills; my hero Cleon even once took me aside and asked if I was good at kung fu. I smiled and didn’t answer. With Tommy, though, it was different. I desperately wanted to flee, but everybody knows you shouldn’t run from an aggressive animal—in fact, you had to make yourself bigger somehow and stand your ground or even advance on the beast. Was that still true if the animal had been patiently waiting for you?

Finally J.-G snapped at Joshua Messing who pushed him a bit too hard. He had taken a ten-inch carving knife from the kitchen, kept it in his school bag, and he took it out to wave it at Joshua and likely threatened to decapitate him. The latter was physically unharmed, but literally scared shitless, and didn't come out of his flat for a long time. It wasn't clear if Jeon-Gi told the authorities or his parents that Joshua had been picking on him too, except not as badly as what Tommy did. There was this supposed fight club with Joshua in on it too. So the entire long chain resulted in J.-G choosing to do what he did to defend himself. 

Of course this incident blew up. The Messings initially wanted him locked away, but finally agreed that a social-rehabilitation program was appropriate for an almost 11-year-old. J.-G was suspended from school for the whole year. At this point, he still didn't mention anything about being picked on by Tommy, who is a bigger menace and actually brought a pellet gun to threaten two girls in school. Jeon-Gi was not scared of Joshua, but he was terrified of Tommy. 

Was I remorseful? I felt bad for causing everyone such unhappiness, but whether I felt remorse for the act itself was unclear. I didn’t feel too sorry, if at all, about Joshua, for in my mind he deserved to have peed his pants just as he did right then in the schoolyard. In fact, I was almost liking him again, renewed by the idea that we were as allied as ever, now that we both knew what it was to fear so purely.

At the end of this excerpt, I guess the boys all grew up fine, with a few childhood scars, except for Tommy Reilly who would have gotten treatment, and perhaps remanded, then left to his own devices as an adult. Tommy should have gotten his first job after college, but apparently he didn't. He wandered the streets incoherently, and was seen pacing at a bus stop and loudly haranguing to nobody in particular. 

For those who still live in New York, they would occasionally run into one another. Of course the excerpt doesn't tell us what happened to these boys as grown-ups. It's assumed that some of them went to college. Or at least it's indicated that Jeon-Gi did. "But it’s like that sometimes for the rest of us, too. Waiting for a ride to where you want to go but never getting on."

I'm almost curious to see where this story goes, what happens to all the characters we have been introduced to. We know what eventually happened to Tommy. But what about Joshua? What about Jeon-Gi himself? Perhaps I would read the whole book when it's released in August.  

In an interview with the journal, the author had said that in Jeon-Gi, "a lot of his story is also mine". I don't know how things have changed in 1976 versus today. Growing up as a minority in a country you're new to isn't fun, or even if you were born there, people assume you don't belong. To me, America seems to have reverted to its old treatment of immigrants and people of color. It isn't a very nice place now.

Regarding the knife incident in school, in the same interview, the author also explained what might have propelled J.-G to do what he did or if the boy was truly vengeful or malicious at that age. 

Something shocking happens on Jeon-Gi’s last day at the camp. Do all the adults around him, including his parents, view it in the light of what happened in the schoolyard? When J.-G. acts—on the basketball court, in the schoolyard, at the summer camp—is it with intention or pure, unthinking forward momentum? Or is it impossible for him to tell?

I think these states in J.-G. are simultaneously at play. It’s as if there are multiple forceful winds in him, each naturally occurring and vying to prevail. He desperately wants to be righteous and honest. He wants to be a good boy. And yet. As the reader, you begin to wonder whether his visceral reactions and desires have, over time, formed—or maybe deformed—his intentionality, or if it’s simply the way he is. It’s this sort of figure that has always fascinated me as a reader and as a writer, a personage whom you can’t exactly trace, either backward or forward.