The Astonishing Color of After (2018)

The Astonishing Color of After is a young adult novel by Emily X.R. Pan, published March 20, 2018 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. The novel addresses topics including suicide and mental health through the story of a biracial teenager, Leigh, in search of her mother, whom Leigh believes has transformed into a red bird following her suicide. She follows the bird to Taiwan, her mother’s birthplace, where she meets her grandparents for the first time and tries to learn what the bird is trying to teach her before the end of the traditional Ghost Month. Throughout the story, Leigh uses colors to describe emotions and her art as a way to process her grief. Meanwhile, she is also in conflict with her father, who does not believe she is handling her grief well and also thinks she should be pursuing something more practical than art.

The Astonishing Color of After’s Asian-American cultural representation, as well as depiction of topics such as mental health and teen suicide, has led to critical and scholarly discussion of the novel's pedagogical value.

TIME included The Astonishing Color of After on its list "The 100 Best YA Books of All Time."

Plot summary

At the novel’s opening, Leigh states that her mother Dory has turned into a red bird after her suicide, after leaving a note with the crossed-out statement: “I want you to remember”. Leigh experiences trauma from these events and feels that she cannot confide in her best friend Axel. This is because, in Leigh’s mind, their friendship has become complicated because she kissed him on the same day of her mother’s suicide. Leigh is an artist and relies only on pencils and charcoal, refusing to add colors to her artwork.

Leigh’s father, Brian, refuses to believe that her mother has turned into a red bird, even after a bird visits their home. Leigh’s father nonetheless buys her tickets to meet Leigh’s Taiwanese grandparents, Waipo and Waigong (grandmother and grandfather in Mandarin, respectively). Dory’s estrangement from her parents led her to not teach Leigh Mandarin, so there is an immediate language barrier between her and her grandparents. Leigh learns that her grandparents burned the box the red bird had brought her. Additionally, her father gets into an argument with Waipo and leaves for Hong Kong.

Leigh meets an English speaker named Feng who is a close friend of the family. Leigh also burns incense that allows her to see her parents’ memories. At night, she begins to burn special incense and items that mean something to the owner to see memories of the past, such as photographs, a necklace, or a letter. These memories include those of her parents, her grandparents, and herself. Occasionally, she thinks of Axel and events that took place over her freshman year of high school, such as him asking out one of their classmates, Leanne.

Desperate to find the red bird, Leigh asks to go to her mother’s favorite places. Leigh, Feng, and Waipo travel to many of these destinations. At one point, a frustrated Leigh yells at Feng to leave, but quickly regrets this and finds Feng to apologize. Throughout these travels, Leigh continues to see memories of her family’s past including recollections of her aunt Jingling who died of an aneurysm in college. This is revealed to be one of the reasons that Dory left Taiwan. Leigh also has memories of her increasingly confusing friendship with Axel as the two share many close moments despite his relationship with Leanne. Leigh remembers how Dory had struggled with growing depression and with her father spending most of his time away on business, Leigh had difficulty adapting to it.

After numerous attempts to see the red bird and as she experiences insomnia and recalls the memories of her loved ones, Leigh begins to see cracks in her dreamscape world. She calls her father back and tries to show him, Waipo, and Waigong the same memories that she had been seeing. When she wakes back up, the cracks are gone and she reconnects with her father. She then learns that Feng was the ghost of Jingling, who has finally passed on. The family spreads Jingling and Dory’s ashes together. Once Leigh and her father are home in America, she learns that she has been chosen to showcase her artwork in Germany and her father affirms to her they are going together. She creates art based on the memories she was shown, using colors in her drawings for the first time.

Background

Emily X.R. Pan was raised in Illinois by her Taiwanese and Chinese American parents and closely collaborated with her extended family in Taiwan while researching and writing the novel. Although the novel is not explicitly autobiographical, Pan echoes certain details of her like Leigh being the only child of a professor and a piano teacher. In an interview, Pan detailed how she drew inspiration from her own grandmother’s life to create Leigh’s mother’s story. In an interview with the School Library Journal, Pan shared that similar to Leigh, she lost a family member to suicide and has experienced firsthand the effects of depression. In the novel's "Author’s Note" section, Pan emphasizes that “it was important to me that while Leigh’s mother had experienced some terrible things in her life, there wasn’t a reason to explain her having depression”.

Themes

Mental health, suicide, and grief

The Booklist praised Pan's "...sensitive treatment of mental illness: Leigh learns many heartbreaking things about her mother's life, but those moments are never offered as explanations for suicide; rather, it's the result of her mother's lifelong struggle with severe, debilitating depression".