TROUBLEMAKER
By John Cho with Sarah Suk
In the author’s note for his new middle-class novel, “Troublemaker,” John Cho reflects on one of the central questions of children’s literature: What’s right for young readers? Written with young adult novelist Sarah Suk, Cho’s book is set on the first day of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, which was ignited by Rodney King’s sentence. It follows sixth-grader Jordan Park as he runs through a burning city and tries to touch the gun his father forbade him to the family’s store so that his father can protect himself.
Cho struggled with whether or not to include a gun in a children’s book, as well as how to tackle the adult topic of violence and racism. Then he thought of his own children, who had already had active target practice at school at the age of 7 and 12. He came to the same conclusion as an author that he and his wife had come to as parents when the children saw anti-Asian graffiti on their street: that “to purify the truth too much” “would be a disservice, a relinquishment of our responsibility.” “. to prepare them for independence.”
“Troublemaker” is written in the plain, plain language of the 12-year-old narrator. The atmosphere and social context come through, but Jordan is a kid, so he’s less concerned with the ravages of structural racism than with restoring his relationship with his father. When he gets home from school on the afternoon of the verdict, he can barely face his parents: “I never knew a pair of shoes could scare me so much, but when I see Umma’s and Appa’s sneakers by the door when I walk in “I almost jump out of my skin.” He and his father had shunned each other since their ‘Big Fight’ weeks earlier, and now he’s been banned for cheating on a Spanish quiz. His parents have more immediate concerns. They have a liquor store in South Central, and before Jordan can even speak to them, his father leaves to close it.
When Appa doesn’t call home for hours, Jordan devises a heartbreakingly delusional plan. He finds his father’s gun — which Appa took from the store and put away in a closet the day after a Korean shopkeeper shot and killed 15-year-old Latasha Harlins because she (wrongly) believed Harlins was stealing a bottle of orange juice. put it in his backpack and hitch a ride with his friend Mike and his older brother in hopes of taking the gun (which is unloaded anyway) to the liquor store. “I thought it would prove to him that I can be the person he wants me to be. Someone who can do things right for a change.” It won’t be long before the plan gets off the ground.
Cho has spent much of his acting career fighting for better Asian-American representation. In ‘Troublemaker’ he paints Korean Los Angeles with an invigorating specificity – not only the dynamics of the immigrant family, but also the delinquent church children, the dried squid-eating grandfather and even the ‘damyo, thick and heavy blankets printed with tiger faces and giant Red roses.”
The novel is also a resounding refutation of the model minority myth — not because Jordan is a “bad kid,” as his father regrets saying during the Great Fight, but because he’s quirky and loving, sweet and frustrating, and sure, a bit of a troublemaker. As he traverses the city in search of his lost backpack with his older sister, who came to find him in her car and has secrets of her own, he muses that “when you’re Asian, people think you’re good and quiet and expect you to to stay out of the way. To know your place. … I wish they could see us now.”
