Look Who’s Morphing is Tom Cho’s debut novel. Published in 2009 by Giramondo Publishing in Australia, it places Cho in the bosom of postmodern literature. A book of eighteen short stories, touching on themes of identity, popular culture, nostalgia versus technology and racial biases in Australia. In the postmodern context, it invites a reader to consider the impacts or impacts of transhumanism or simulation using an entertaining blast of postmodern cultural flattening.

Many of the stories are narrated by the protagonist, Tom Cho. This fictional character interacts with family members, has identity awakening adventures and is occasionally absent from the story. This places Cho in a canon of migrant fiction while dodging cliches associated with them. Instead, he grabs our biases and rubs them in our face while we laugh along, occasionally feeling a bit vulnerable and punched in the guts with a dose of healthy self-reflection. 

This book is a confluence of fan fiction, queer fiction and Asian-Australian Literature that gives Australian literature a very contemporary feel. There’s something very right-now about the feeling this book gives a reader although Cho admits to not having “properly watched TV since the 80s” in his interview with Pham in 2009. The choppy, social media-esque sentence structures & nano-stories contribute to the sense that this is an uber-moder release. 

Reminiscent of a picaresque novel, with its rougeish protagonist, episodic structure, social critique, realism and the sense of the wandering nature of Tom Cho, in a variety of settings and interactions, places the author in a lineage including Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. The dream-like quality of many of the short stories invites the book to join the ranks of Surrealism, Magical Realism or Slipstream while standing aside from them simultaneously. 

Cho personally inhabits a number of under-represented identities including queer, trangender and Asian Australian. A number of the stories including Dirty Dancing, The Exorcist, Learning English and A Counting Rhyme highlight the exclusion of these identities in modern popular culture by simply including them in this textual format. Did we even notice they were missing? 

Scathing, picaresque style parodies are dotted throughout the short stories, played out through the lens of familiar popular culture narratives. The stories in the collection parody and revise existing works across a number of modes including cinema, televisions programs, nursery rhymes and even childhood games. Cho weaves in these critical revisions with the familiar to create intimacy; we are in on the joke, we are not othered and somehow through this inclusion a reader can get a sense of othering that may be enacted in the popular culture.  

Look Who’s Morphing uses a mix of nostalgia and technology coupled with the family and popular culture. The, at times, bizarre or future oriented topics are layered together in a way that creates empathy for the other than human intelligences we deal with today. How can we hold it against a robot who destroys an entire building and hundreds of people when they made it very clear they are sometimes not compliant and prone to doing it their own way? Especially when that trans-human seeks the comfort and reassurance of their mother. This juxtaposition is even more relevant today than it was in 2009.  

Australia’s racism can be a hard pill to swallow. We’re egalitarian aren’t we? We’re multi-cultural aren’t we? Cho’s work gives readers a peek behind the curtain to gain some insight into the racial biases faced by Asian-Australians. The number of actors, musicians and characters referenced are all non-Asian and yet Cho’s idolism for these characters helps a reader consider the blatant removal of the Asian identity in the culture of those times. The racial assumptions that family members would have inherited generational recipes or line up to be served at a bain marie showcases some of the fetishisation of Asian culture in Australia.

Dirty Dancing, the first story in the book, delivers a strong dose of absurdity and dream-like tone. The gender ambiguity and queer leanings parody the assumptions of the existing heteronormative narrative. It questions the requirements of intimacy and sexual connection. The simulation of the main character morphing into Bruce, with his uber masculinity demonstrates simulation as do many of the other stories in the collection. The reunion of the main character with his parents later in the story and their babying of him ties the name of the main character as Baby in a dream-like way where concepts are related and unrelated at the same time. 

In I,Robot, Cho invites the reader into a future where transhuman features such as becoming a robot are normalised. To bridge the discomfort of this concept with all the ethical, moral and unintended consequences connected to it, the introduction of a familiar robot, C3PO builds empathy in the reader. We can relate to his neuroticism and the limitations of his programming. We have our own internal associations with the Star Wars franchise and our own nostalgia that the introduction of these attributes illicit. The action-movie style narrative intensifies the familiarity and we get another nudge of the absurdities of modern cinema with the “he’s dead – it’s over, oh no he’s not, oh yes he is” of the main character with a twist; the good guys don’t win against the rogue robot. The robot rises to cruise the “familiar” streets of Manhattan. As Australians, we are somehow expected to find those American geographies comforting and this rapport with Cho as outsiders increases the intimacy we have with the author and their sense of exclusion. 

For children of the eighties, this book gives plenty to laugh out loud about. The many popular culture references create immediate intimacy springboards for a reader. The dream-like, fantastical elements make the characters and narratives enjoyable whether or not you are in on the joke. May no-one take this beautiful work and hide it away from the rest of the world. Readers want to be the ones to walk in the sun. Readers just wanna have fun. Readers just wanna have…

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