The Long Tail of Boyhood Swagger

Tangled themes of violence and masculinity run like buried cables through Chang-rae Lee’s work. One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood, he’s been writing for three decades about assimilation, suburban alienation, and the mystery of how his characters survive loneliness and, often, shocking loss. Lee uses his careful prose to sink slowly and deeply into the minds of men who resist thinking about their feelings, even as they ruminate obsessively about their past griefs.

His new novel, A Tender Age, would belong in this meditative lineage, except that its narrator, a middle-aged man named Jeon-Gi, doesn’t resist emotion in the slightest. He’s as sensitive to—and as fascinated by—its lingering effects as his creator is. And unlike some of Lee’s earlier protagonists, this character wants to know himself. Jeon-Gi opens the book by confessing that he’s consumed by the “nature of certain youthful happenings, how they can become a knot in the flesh that every other occurrence must bypass in order for you to know yourself.” He then recounts, in vivid detail, the events of the summer he turned 11, which have haunted him ever since. The novel wobbles between manhood and boyhood, clarity and confusion, self-knowledge and a windmilling search for identity by a 10-year-old faced with challenges he’s too young to comprehend.

Nearly all of Lee’s fiction—from his debut, Native Speaker (1995), through his war novels, A Gesture Life (1999) and The Surrendered (2010), to his rollicking bildungsroman, My Year Abroad (2021)—shares a worry that the masculine ideals of self-sufficiency, strength, and swagger can lead to brutality. Now, for the first time, Lee traces the concern back to boyhood, a risky move: Young Jeon-Gi’s travails are conventional ones, the fodder of many coming-of-age stories. He gets bullied, lands in trouble defending himself, and then attempts a reinvention. What sets A Tender Age apart is its layered narration, in which a reflective adult and resurrected child together lead the reader onward as Lee strings threats of violence through the text, building thrillerlike tension.

As the eldest child of Korean immigrants, Jeon-Gi feels called on to be “the head of the column” as he, his parents, and his sister navigate life in the United States. Among peers, meanwhile, he feels rising pressure to prove that he’s a cool insider, not a weakling or a “wuss,” to use a word Lee repeats often in the book’s opening section. A lot is at stake in this effort, which abruptly turns Jeon-Gi from a good boy into a troubled youth—a juvenile-justice case, in fact. Lee tracks the adult Jeon-Gi’s fascination with this time in his life, which tested his maturity and masculinity in ways that were both traumatic and exhilarating. In the process, as the novel charts Jeon-Gi’s path toward becoming an American man, Lee dares to linger over the allure of aggression and dominance, probing rather than skirting or accepting it.

Like any coming-of-age story, A Tender Age begins before the Fall. Jeon-Gi, lucky boy, has two Edens: his nuclear family and a “tourniquet tight” gaggle of friends in his neighborhood, a down-at-the-heels 1970s New York suburb where “the adults, for whatever reason, whether they were working a job or not, left us on our own, and to one another.” Jeon-Gi’s mother is an exception. She is the attentive hub of their strikingly close family, and he idolizes her. “I loved my father and my sister to death,” he recalls, “but it was my mother who spun and wove the fabric of my existence.” As her eldest—and as a son—he’s the focus of her doting, which extends to bringing him treats on the otherwise parent-free playground.

Early in the novel, a disturbingly clever bully named Katie Croker targets Jeon-Gi, damaging in one cruel move both his childish dignity and his belief in his mother’s omnipotence. She coerces Jeon-Gi into cursing at his mother, a scene full of the emotional crosscurrents that destabilize and deepen what might seem like a slight book. Deriding his mother’s limited English while clearly envying her warm presence, Katie deploys a well-targeted dig: “You think everybody gets that?” Katie demands of the snack deliveries. “You think it’s normal?”

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Jeon-Gi does, in a sense, assume that the treatment he gets is normal, aware though he is that even his sister, Ella, doesn’t receive it. Looking back decades later, he sees that Ella “learned early on to make the best of whatever she got, to always just move on.” Meanwhile, he “expected things to come to me easily, and when they didn’t, I readily gave myself over to the muck of my frustrated thoughts, allowing the foulness to seep in wherever it had a path and then fill my gut with bile.”

After the Katie incident, Jeon-Gi starts to swing between eagerness to delight his parents and impress his friends and a new readiness to indulge a more anti-social side of himself. He’s been initiated into the reality that his playground world, for all of its camaraderie, also harbors dog-eat-dog energy. He starts scamming a boy who’s bad enough at math to need help calculating change for the ice-cream truck: “I liked Paul and Paul liked me,” he recalls, “but because I loved ice cream and because I could, I skimmed him most every time.” “Because I could” is, of course, highly compelling logic when you’re 10; still, Jeon-Gi’s older self sees something more than ordinary childhood behavior in his new urge to exploit.

Jeon-Gi does have good reason for this budding desire for power, as aggression escalates in his unsupervised realm. A former friend, Joshua, begins calling him racist names, and a troubled older boy tails and sadistically harasses him. Fresh from his Katie ordeal, Jeon-Gi decides not to seek parental or peer help. Instead, he devises a private plan that involves bringing his mother’s bread knife to school and that makes him lonelier than he’s ever been in his ten years of life.

Jeon-Gi’s decision to retaliate awakens him to his own capacity and—more important—his own desire to imagine behaving violently. While smuggling the knife into his book bag, he admires the “steely, dead-faced boy” he sees in the mirror and debates whether he wants his truly scary tormentor “scarred for life or simply dead.” Naturally, nothing goes quite as he anticipated, and Jeon-Gi, child that he is, loses control in a conflict with Joshua. In this moment, unlike anywhere else in the text, Lee allows the grown-up Jeon-Gi to dodge his memories. He relates the scene as if he’s blacked it out: “They say I screamed, in Korean and English. You wanna die? Ju-gu-leh? You wanna die right now?” But the lines that come next show that Jeon-Gi has not erased all of the moment. He admits that he can still feel the knife sometimes, and adds, referring to Joshua, “To this day I’ve never seen a person so scared.”

For the rest of the novel, the young Jeon-Gi is consumed by the question of whether he wants to be scary. As he travels through the justice system, the professional verdict is no, he doesn’t. He gets sent to therapy rather than detention, in part because in the world of juvenile courts, as the adult Jeon-Gi recognizes, he’s “a rare creature, akin to some tiny tree primate who foraged only at night, this clean-cut, soft-spoken, somewhat overcourteous Oriental kid who came from an intact and evidently loving, supportive family.” As a child, he hardly grasps the reprieve his demographic rarity offers him. He’s too immersed in the mystery of whether he’s a gentle child or a “dead-faced boy.” Although drawn at times to the latter, he recoils from envisioning his parents burdened with the stigma of a deviant child. As he searches himself for signs of inherent violence, the tenor of the narration wavers between fear and hope, familiar emotional poles in Lee’s work.  

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The grown Jeon-Gi wavers too. He can hardly bear to remember brandishing the bread knife, yet can’t let go of the thought that he really could have been a violent boy. Lee captures his enthrallment in the novel’s most gripping, surreally disorienting scene—a tour de force in which Jeon-Gi gets sent to visit a prison alongside a group of teenage offenders deemed in need of being scared straight. He clearly doesn’t belong there, and the narrative shifts between wannabe tough guy and nervous child with almost every new paragraph. Even as his adult self recalls hoping for a “tour-ending treat of an ice cream sandwich,” he also remembers feeling thrilled at the “breathtaking” power wielded by a frighteningly charismatic young inmate. By the day’s end, the young Jeon-Gi is newly confident that he can “step outside of a moment in order to commit some transgressive act”—a capacity that most if not all people have, but that he wants to see as a sign of his toughness. When he soon heads to Korean church camp, he is sure that he’s effectively an adult, or at least “someone not easily besieged by emotions.”

Of course, Jeon-Gi is still a child, though in fact his two-week-camp agenda is a mature one in its way: He sets off having decided that he will demonstrate that he’s a good son, not a cause for adult concern. But once he arrives, A Tender Age takes on a threatening tone. Lee weaves in warnings that something awful is coming, and hints that Jeon-Gi will cause it, which freights the boy’s ordinary transgressions—lying about his home life, cheating at games—with suspense. The prose slows down, taking on a luxuriance that makes each scene ominous. When Jeon-Gi and his bunk mates hike to a waterfall, they stand below it in a “natural quarry, its walls composed of a smoother, darker rock almost completely covered in moss.” Beautiful though this “amphitheater of a deep, earthy green that surrounded various pools of water” is, it seems the perfect backdrop for a dangerous spectacle.

Yet A Tender Age’s oscillation between light and dark never lets up. Its foreboding camp scenes are shot through with understated humor and a lingering sense of innocence. Take Jeon-Gi’s infatuation with an independent, enigmatic girl named Susan, which is strikingly pure. The older Jeon-Gi recalls that sex “was as distant from me as the idea of going to a job each day like my father did. I understood it was coming for me but had zero desire.” His crush is all about watchful worship, a fascination with nonconformist autonomy; so is Jeon-Gi’s idolization of his thoughtful counselor, Ben Frost, a religious hippie whom Lee always calls by his full name, as if to remind readers of how snowily white he is.  

Counselors aside, the camp is an all–Korean American idyll where for the first time, Jeon-Gi can imagine himself as a hero “at the center of the throng, celebrated by raw throats and hearts.” Still, vengeance and violence reappear when a smooth bully named Dickens becomes his nemesis. Jeon-Gi devises a plan to leave the older boy “marked forever with something like a limp, such that every step he took he’d have to think about what he’d done.”

Ultimately, the camper who goes home “marked forever” is not Dickens but Jeon-Gi. The novel’s climax—about which I will say only that the novel’s escalating tension pays off—bequeaths him the permanent “knot in the flesh” he mentions at the book’s start. In an effort to loosen it, he moves as far as he can from “the old places,” yet, as the novel attests, he remains consumed by this childhood interlude. The identity of the dead-faced boy he saw in the mirror evidently remains the conundrum of his life.

A Tender Age ends without answers, though Lee grants Jeon-Gi one closing moment of clarity, a move he has made in many of his novels. In this case, it’s a memory that is less a knot than a touchstone. He describes a Sunday when, as a “striving, struggling young man,” he broke his rule of avoiding the sites of his childhood and walked by the church that had sent him to camp. As he drew near, “scores of well-dressed congregants and their children were coming out from the nave and down the main steps, like so many fish streaming down the chute of a river.” Church and rushing water—that fraught summer comes to mind, but the image is centrally one of community and connection, of family, of a life of forward momentum. Jeon-Gi can’t join or understand the “swaying, merry-sounding talk” around him: His old congregation has switched languages, from Korean to Chinese. Still, he approaches with great hope. “It could have been wonderful,” he recalls. “I waded in.”