I do love a good chick lit romp, especially when it’s by authors of color. Because, even when mainstream (viz. white) authors write people of color, it’s not the same.

Not the focus of this blog post, but I do want to mention Sara Desai, whose books are amazing and hilarious, and her Indian American characters are nuanced and not just hitting the usual suffering-self loathing-immigrant tropes. I hope we see more and more of her work.

I want to talk in this piece about the work of author Helen Hoang. She has written a three part series about the romantic adventures of three Vietnamese American guys, two of whom (Khai and Quan) are brothers, and one (Michael) is their cousin.

The books are, in order, “The Kiss Quotient,” “The Bride Test,” and “The Heart Principle.”

I cannot possibly summarize all the books. They are romances, pure and steamy. Everyone has shit to overcome. They fall madly in love, and we feel all the emotions with them, and sigh with happiness at the close of each book.

I will touch on some of the glorious aspects I picked up on. One of them is that every book has an autistic central character. This is really important! Hoang is herself autistic, and she wrote the stories she needed, and has lived herself.

Just using autism as the main storyline, so many other amazing possibilities emerge, and Hoang tackles them beautifully. In one of the books, the guy is autistic. In the other two, the women are. So we already have how autism expresses differently in men and women, and how society, Asian families etc behave towards the person depending on their own biases.

Relatedly, we have the double weight of Asian daughters not being as valued as sons plus the stigma/disbelief regarding autism in our communities.

And ohmygod, you need to experience these books for yourself because Hoang is a genius at portraying the meeting of sensory challenges and sexual consent. You know how people in the world of disability often say that accommodating disability shows how everyone could and should be accommodated, and the world doesn’t need to be so horrible and cruel? Well, this idea definitely applies to consent in sex.

So I loved how Hoang fulfills the fantasy that a non-autistic partner could want to learn what works for the autistic partner, and enter into how their mind works, instead of sating their own needs at the expense of the autistic person’s safety and spirit.

And, just like we can extrapolate to how all people could bring this agency into their relationships, we can also see how she’s writing about the fantasy about being autistic and people wanting to bring this consent and respect into every area of life, not just sex.

She’s brilliant, I tell you.

Another hugely important idea that Hoang takes on so well is autistic burnout. The pain brought on by masking one’s symptoms, and constantly meeting constantly shifting goals. People in Asian families being all “See? I knew if you applied yourself you could do this. Now try this harder thing,” and not realizing that they are breaking the autistic person down in body and soul.

And yes, the idea of consent for everyone applies here too. But it’s especially significant for autistic Asians because autistic burnout is not well understood by our larger communities, and people don’t realize how serious it is. How it shortens the lifespan of a person. Can make someone catatonic; epileptic; suicidal.

Further, there are accomplishments which are just expected in our communities. They are not supposed to take all the energy you have, so what about the autistic person for whom it did spend all their beans? They are not treated well.

I remember a parent teacher conference where a teacher expressed great surprise that it was taking R all evening and well into the night to complete homework. She said “Nothing I assign is designed to take more than half an hour.” I replied, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. We are staying up for hours, and I have to read out loud to R so he doesn’t lose his shit. He does all his own work, but it’s making him exhausted.”

The thing is, people keep looking for the examples of autistic people who achieve it all, and then they say Look at that person. You just have to find The Thing you are good at.

Hoang has one character, Anna, who embodies this Thing. She is a gifted violinist who burns out after a moment of fame. And her sister keeps trying to get her back to performing, resorting to taunts, bribes, screaming, etc. Refusing to believe that Anna is autistic. She must be making excuses. All this plays out against the backdrop of their father slowly dying.

Anna is castigated for not being able to handle the burden of caregiving. And I kept thinking of my own kids while reading. How, if I bring the weight of Desi parent expectations to engaging with them, they will always be seen as letting me down. So I have had to make stuff up as I go too, and make space for letting them show up for me in their own ways. And, by doing that, I have never felt unloved by them. In fact, they are pure, and almost too bright to look at, because their love is too.

My favorite thing about these books is that there isn’t a redemption arc for every character. That rings very true for families like mine. Sometimes people don’t come back to us. Maybe they don’t want to repair because they don’t think they did anything wrong. Maybe they wish we would hand hold and show them how to be in our lives. Maybe they just don’t want to do the inner work. Maybe they are scared or repulsed by our reality. Whatever it is, I love that Hoang highlights this loss, and how a lot of it is because Asians prioritize elders, so that makes any major concessions towards an autistic young person seem like bad values. Reversal of what should be.

Which of course raises the point that I don’t want my kids to have to cut me loose because my way of perceiving them is making them unable to live in their bodies and minds.

Really, when you break it down to the simplest of terms, we are capable of co-creating different realities with our autistic loved ones. We might be afraid to move so far away from the norms of our communities, but we do know how to do it. The alternative (not making stuff up) means that our loved ones have to absorb all the shrapnel that comes with us not joining them in this endeavor.

And that would make us no different from Victor Frankenstein, who created a living being, then refused to be its loving parent. That’s not a wound that heals.

Radha.