.huahsu reviews Lisa Hsiao Chen’s engrossing début novel, “Activities of Daily Living.”
Perhaps you are the type of person for whom there is no question more chilling than: What are you working on? It suggests that you should be doingother than just living, and that, whatever that something is, it should be hefty and unique enough for a thoughtful, possibly rehearsed, answer. For Alice, the protagonist of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s engrossing début novel, “,” this question is not a problem.
She spends the book travelling between New York, where she lives, and the Bay Area, where the Father ends up in a nursing home. Friends drift in and out of her life; her actual job is a bore. She has fragmented recollections of her childhood with the Father and daydreams about the eighties New York that the Artist inhabited, but she seems attached to neither. The only thing anchoring Alice to the world is her addictive, undefined project.
People who saw Hsieh wandering the streets of New York in 1981 and 1982, during his yearlong pledge to never go indoors, might have been forgiven for thinking that he was just another odd drifter. But Alice so keenly empathizes with the Artist’s desire to fully experience the passage of time that the extreme character of his work begins to seem natural.
On January 1, 2000, Hsieh reëmerged after his thirteen-year hiatus and later formally retired from art, though somehave described him as “semi-retired.” In 2009, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, documenting Hsieh’s work on “Cage Piece,” brought attention to his life and career. But he remained straightforward about the meaning of his art works—they were, as he explained in an e-mail, about “doing time, passing time, and wasting time.
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