In the previous chapter, a differentiation between internal and external tension was made to develop the idea of collective tension. In this chapter, the division between internal and external, which is reconfigured as a difference between depth and surface, is challenged. In Yongsoo Park’s 2002 novel Boy Genius both meaning and change are located on the surface. Full of absurd imagery, the novel turns the horrors of assimilation into a challenge to the racism of color blindness and depth. If, as Christopher Pinney argues, the stable identities of the “depth” are the product of colonial regimes, then the surface can become an angry “site of the refusal” of such oppressive certainties. In doing so, what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call “surface reading,” or what Rosalind Galt calls the “experiential force of the image’s visuality,” which can also be found in Park’s novel, is foregrounded. What Park’s novel adds to the discussion is that if the anger of oppressive regimes is enacted on the surface of the body, then it is on the surface of the body that an angry counterattack can be launched. In other words, the coordinates of assimilation are turned into a means to smuggle in the possibility for difference and change. Other novels, such as Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face (2020), Matthew Salesses’ Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (2020), and Gene Kwak’s Go Home, Ricky! (2021), are used to develop some of the ways that surface and depth are in tension with each other to foreground the potential anger has to enact change.