Despite being on the other side of the world in Hong Kong, overlooking a marina shrouded in a cool fog, Asale Angel-Ajani says her nostalgia for the place she once called home was at the forefront of her mind while writing her debut novel.
“When I sat down to write, I couldn’t stay away from the landscape of my childhood,” Angel-Ajani said in a recent phone interview from New York, where she’s a professor at City College of New York. “I thought I would never want to go back, but it was the place that kept calling me.”
The author, who spent a decade in Hong Kong, yearned for the desert heat and San Bernardino mountains, and these would become the backdrop and inspiration for her debut novel, "A Country You Can Leave."
A Stanford University graduate with a doctorate in Anthropology and an MFA in creative writing, Angel-Ajani grew up in Riverside County in an unincorporated area near Perris, and the changes to the Inland Empire were on her mind as she wrote.
“There is a part of California, even for those of us in the last 15-20 years, that we don’t recognize anymore,” Angel-Ajani said. “These are landscapes and experiences that are disappearing and being radically altered by climate change and development, so there is something that we both gain and lose from that.”
“A Country You Can Leave” centers on a biracial teenage girl named Lara and her bartender mother, Yevgenia, a defector from the Soviet Union who raises her daughter without the child’s Afro-Cuban father. While her parents struggled to assimilate, Lara creates a uniquely American identity for herself, which creates some friction with her mother.
Lara struggles against preconceived notions of who or how she should be. Her mother wishes she had a stronger relationship with Russian culture, and some neighbors in the Oasis Mobile Estates can’t fathom how she can have Black and Cuban heritage. For Lara, rather than getting caught up on her mother’s attachment to the Soviet past, she’s working out who she is and who she will become.
“That declaration is a way she creates space in a lot of the same ways that especially first-generation immigrant kids have to make a claim of who they are even in the face of their parent’s positioning in the U.S.,” said Angel-Ajani.
While the novel isn’t autobiographical, the characters reflect people she knew growing up; Angel-Ajani said they are all pieces of herself.
“A lot of the people featured in the book are an amalgamation or a collective and come from a historical fact of my life,” she said. “That’s part of the homesickness and trying to recreate a home when I was so far away, living in Hong Kong for all those years.”
The novel also doesn’t shy away from addressing day-to-day poverty and the anxieties of living in a system that can reinforce the cycle of hardship. Angel-Ajani has written two nonfiction books that touch on some of the topics in the novel, “Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade” and the upcoming “Intimate: Essays on Racial Terror.”
“This is the thing that is so profound about the Inland Empire,” Angel-Ajani said. “While you have these distinct communities that are carved out on racial lines, the thing that is a common factor is poverty and how poverty shapes a more common experience. We see that more in the Inland Empire, perhaps because people are accessing similar services in the same buildings, so you have to interact with each other, and that’s where we overlap.”
Although dealing with painful realities, the novel has many funny and heartfelt moments. The most comical instances occur with Yevgenia’s constant philosophical advice about men and the different sections of the novel that begin with her sex advice about men.
“I think it’s both humorous and utilitarian, and it says more about what she’s trying to get Lara to do as a woman in a society that struggles to see women as in control of their own bodies,” Angel-Ajani said.
“A Country You Can Leave,” which takes its name from a Joseph Brodsky quote, is also a book about books. Yevgenia is obsessed with reading Russian authors, such as Tolstoy. She dismisses any other work that isn’t Russian as childish and insists that Lara read nothing else, but Lara still sneaks in some Harry Potter books. While Yevgenia reads to navigate reality and Lara reads to escape, Angel-Ajani hopes readers can relate and find pleasure in the reading process.
“I hope that it sparks joy and that they see my characters as companions while they read the book,” she said. “I hope that if there is someone out there who feels alone, that they feel less alone and more seen.”
