On social media, Sylvie’s friends and acquaintances speak vaguely about a new job, but none of them have any details, as if they didn’t really know her at all. In a phone conversation with Sylvie’s employer, she learns that Sylvie left her job a month earlier under mysterious circumstances that the employer refuses to describe. In the Brooklyn Heights apartment, she finds unpaid bills, a half-empty closet, and no trace of Jim, suggesting that her brother-in-law hasn’t lived there in some time. When Amy tries to confirm this, she discovers that her sister’s seemingly perfect, successful life was largely a facade. Shortly after her grandmother dies, Sylvie disappears, leaving behind a trail of unanswered texts, calls, and emails.Īt first, the Lees assume that Sylvie returned home to New York before she went missing. That sense of security, however, begins to fade when Sylvie flies to the Netherlands to be at her ailing grandmother’s bedside. It’s little wonder that Ma and Pa, first-generation immigrants from China, lean so heavily on Sylvie, that their own tenuous existence in the world somehow feels safer and more secure because of their eldest daughter’s presence in their lives. Meanwhile, Sylvie’s 26-year old sister, Amy, lives in Queens with their parents (referred to throughout the novel as “Ma” and “Pa”), works the occasional temp job, and relies on Sylvie to make the monthly payments on her student loans. And she travels around the world as a management consultant, armored in a wardrobe of high-end designer labels. She lives in an expensive Brooklyn Heights apartment with her loving husband, Jim. At 33, she has an impressive collection of degrees from Princeton, MIT, and Harvard. In Jean Kwok’s engrossing third novel, the title character, Sylvie Lee, radiates a rare kind of success that many young people can only dream of. Another student wrote a creative nonfiction essay in the form of a résumé, chronicling her efforts to find a rewarding career for herself that would also be acceptable to her immigrant parents.

One student wrote a short story about a main character who drove for Uber and lived in his parents’ basement, unable to work through his crippling anxiety to attend a single job interview. Many of my students were seniors looking ahead to life after commencement, and perhaps as a result, the topic of success (or the fear of never attaining it) often came up in their writing assignments.

I READ Searching for Sylvie Lee during the final weeks of a busy spring semester teaching creative writing to undergraduates at a large research university.

Searching for sylvie lee book review