From Chang E to Change: Unheimlich Homes and Defamiliarised Families in the Work of Ken Liu and Zen Cho

In the work of Ken Liu and Zen Cho we find a complex set of dialogues that relate both to the genre they write in as well as their own positionalities as “writers of the Asian diaspora”. The work of both writers mediates a strong awareness of Asian (de)racination and the complex issues which emerge from this—an unsettled and unsettling nostalgia and an identity in flux being two of these. Science Fiction (S/F), with its inherent dialogue between “here” and “there”, relatability and estrangement, serves as the perfect genre for the conveyance of these concerns. The Asian family featured in the short stories of Liu and Cho serves both as emblem and vehicle for these thematics and mechanics, often manifesting in defamiliarised form, “defamiliarized” here gesturing both to familial estrangement and the distorted, strange, forms that family can be transmogrified into in S/F. This chapter examines how relations in the Asian family, in the works of Liu and Cho, begins with defamiliarisation, but ends with a recuperation and renovation of that trope and its associated values.