life-style, books,

In "Reviewing Course Evaluations: The Drinking Game", Steph Jeffries, writing for McSweeney's, urges university teaching faculty to: drink 'three shots' if you are female and an underrepresented minority, because '[e]ach shot will help you lower your expectations of fairness before you read through the [students'] comments'. At the outset, Catherine Chung's The Tenth Muse is about the unfair odds faced by a woman mathematician from a Chinese-Jewish background in the post-war U.S., and how the obstacles the character faces are (somewhat) overcome. The formative memory of Katherine, the main character of Chung's novel, is of an experience she has in third grade. She readily gives her teacher the answer to two maths problems that have been designed to keep her class occupied, and is dealt equally swift punishment: forced to stand with her nose touching the blackboard, she misses her bus and her knees and back ache. This, the novel says, is what it feels like to be punished for being an intelligent girl with a Chinese parent. The Tenth Muse reveals the ways that Katherine experiences prejudice as she attends college and graduate school. Its portrayal of the world of the university and the academic discipline of mathematics, while written for a lay audience (Chung has a degree in maths and her website says that she had a 'brief one-sided affair' with the discipline) nonetheless feels accurate. In its articulation of the obstacles Katherine faces, the novel reminds the reader that as recently as 2005, the then-President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, attributed women's 'failure' to achieve parity with men in STEM disciplines to biological differences. Rather than dwell entirely in a (logical) feminist rage at the obstacles Katherine faces, which include being disbelieved when another student plagiarises her work, and being undermined by a male lover who finishes a crucial proof, the novel focuses on Katherine's lived experience. That said, despite some scenes which are rich in sensual detail, the text often relies on a retrospective summary of Katherine's feelings and responses. But The Tenth Muse is more than a story of Katherine's surmounting of these obstacles. Katherine experiences challenges in her career, yet her biological parents, she discovers, who were a student from China and a Jewish woman-both mathematicians-were killed while trying to escape occupied Europe under Hitler. Chung draws a very delicate connection between the obstacles faced by two generations. While acts of anti-Semitism under the Nazis resulted in genocide, bigotry on the basis of race, religion and gender is still well and truly alive during Katherine's time, even though she lives in more enlightened era. The novel implies that biases and exclusions from the academy exist on a kind of sliding scale. As a counterbalance to Katherine's traumatic realisation about the fate of her biological parents, and their promising, yet curtailed careers, are a series of narratives woven through The Tenth Muse. Katherine obtains a letter written by her mother to her cousin, which tells the story of their attempt to reach an unnamed border. Her parents come across an abandoned hut in a pumpkin field and, since they have been hungry for days, feast on a pumpkin cooked by Katherine's father on an open fire as 'the whole night went dark around us'. This story of her parents' love for one another appears along with Chinese fairy tales about wise and dauntless Goddess-Princesses, and the stories of Katherine's adoptive father and mother, who separately survived the Second World War. While Katherine's biological parents' lives end tragically, many of the stories that Katherine encounters entail survival, even if endurance has come at a cost. These narratives, read alongside Katherine's story, add up to more than the sum of their parts. Towards the end of The Tenth Muse the narrative feels over-stuffed with dramatic stories: the tale of how Katherine came to be adopted, and the story told by her cousin about his role in her mother's eventual capture. At times, these narratives seem implausible, and yet many autobiographical tales of survival and capture from the 1940s are similarly unbelievable. The Tenth Muse nonetheless deftly frustrates any desire for a nicely-resolved romantic subplot. It also explores-albeit briefly-the little-known experiences of Chinese students caught up in Hitler's Europe. While Chung's The Tenth Muse sometimes relies on well-worn tropes - the daughter trying to discover her lost heritage; the precious notebook sequestered and claimed as lost by an enemy - the novel nonetheless includes both a coming-of-age story from a unique and important perspective, and a tale of how continuity and resilience are reinforced by ancient and new narratives.

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