But soon-and rather abruptly-“Dear Cyborgs” widens this sensation of noticing that which is hidden in plain sight. And, at first, their story dwells inside this marginal space, a private friendship with its own shorthand and codes. They’re invisible-a theme that runs through a lot of Asian-American literature. It’s as though the narrator and his friend, Vu, the son of Vietnamese refugees, are physically present in the world, yet are beholden to an altogether different plane of possibility. “We journeyed through junior high on an entirely separate path from the others.”
“We were such outcasts that our isolation hardly pained us as we could barely consider an alternative,” Lim writes. They’re just on the cusp of their teens-a deeply impressionable time, when an unusually self-confident friend’s world view can easily become your own. They are kindred outsiders who share a fascination with fantasy worlds, whether from comic books or from the far reaches of their own imaginations. The novel follows two young Asian-American boys growing up in a small town in Ohio. I also wanted a better sense of where the story had taken me it was impossible to imagine “Dear Cyborgs” finding any kind of resolution. I wasn’t motivated only by a desire to stay longer in Lim’s bizarre yet familiar universe, though that was part of it. I was a few pages from the end of Eugene Lim’s wondrous new novel, “ Dear Cyborgs,” when I flipped back to the beginning and started again.
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