Kamaljot Gill Dr. Park ASAM 202 Lady Tammamo: A Representation of Healthy Queer Relationships Edinburgh by Alexander Chee is a coming of age novel. The novel follows Aphias Zhe (Fee), a 12 year old biracial Korean-American boy, as he undergoes and survives child molestation by his entrusted choir teacher, Big Eric. The novel follows him until he ultimately confronts his past though unknowingly meeting the son of his rapist, Warden, and initiates a relationship with the young boy who happens to be his student. The book ends with the death of the Big Eric and Fee leaving his relationship with Warden. This novel can considered both part of Asian American and Queer Literature (or perhaps a better classification would be Queer Asian American literature). …show more content…
“My father tells me a the story of her when I find a red hair on his head, growing from his left temple. This is all that remains of her, my father tells me, when he tells me the story… in my beard, the red threads grow” (Chee, 2001, p. 3). When his father tells him the story of the fox then points to the red hair on his head and states that is “all that remains of her”, he frames the red head to symbolize the manifestation of the fox demon within the ancestry of Fee. Through this framing the folktale takes on a new life and becomes ancestral history rather than imagined folktale. The tale of the fox demon is part of Fee’s Asian-American identity. It was provided to him through his Korean family members and physically manifests on his body in the form of hair. Throughout the novel, the fox demon is appears at several points. Sohn, an Asian American Studies professor, points outs that the demon appears during times of identity crises within the novel. When Edward Speck, a researcher of 14th C Europe, tells Fee he looks Russian, Fee relates this new description back to Lady Tammamo. “Half Korean, I say, and half Scottish-English. You look like a Russian, he