The second chapter leaves behind the high-concept science fiction of the first, and we enter an entirely different story stylistically, set in another world and time and with another set of fonts. The man who will turn out to be the novel’s main character, Soon Sheen, is Park’s most likely alter ego in the sort of autofiction he is satirizing in these sections. Like Park, he is a Korean American who grew up in Buffalo (as did Parker Jotter), and we could say he is what Ed Park might have become if he had never become Ed Park: Sheen is a former short story writer living out his literary afterlife in a town named Dogskill in upstate New York and working at an amorphous tech company called GLOAT, where none of the employees really knows what the name means or stands for. His daughter is named Story, suggesting that he is at least the parent of a Story if not a writer of stories, and his dog is named Sprout—a nod, I think, to the villainous boss of the same name in Personal Days. Sheen’s entire world is something of a loving joke about the life and work of Ed Park, even as it is also a poignant reflection on those who give up on the writing life.
Sheen arrives at a Koreatown restaurant in New York called The Admiral Yi for a night of drinking that will change his life. A night in a Koreatown restaurant, a tilt-a-whirl of Asian American literary fame, ambition, and cultural anxiety with Korean barbecue smoke on the inside and cigarettes on the sidewalk. All around him is a mix of the new and old guards of this scene, with everyone jostling uncertainly and alternating between feeling like you belong in the good way and feeling like you belong in the bad way.
His college friend, Tanner Slow, now the publisher of the indie Slow Press, is throwing this party in honor of his new author, a bad-boy, avant-garde Korean writer named Cho Eujin, and he has invited exactly the New York City Asian American literati Sheen fears will show up. Soon he is hugging his old friend Monk Zingapan, a Filipino writer he knows from their time together at a culture magazine named N.Y. Whip; Yuka Tsujimoto, an ex-girlfriend from college, now an award-winning playwright; Padraig Kong, the rakish director of the Asian American Watchdog and Creative Writers’ Association, “commonly pronounced ‘Awkward’”; Loa Ding, a Hawaiian Asian American tastemaker who once interviewed him as a teen for her Asian diasporic culture zine and calls Sheen “Footnote,” her way to remind him that that is his fate if he never publishes again; and Daisy Oh, Cho Eujin’s translator, a superfan of Sheen’s as he discovers, to his dismay, when she slaps his back after being introduced and says, “Dude, I’ve read your book five times.”