Fixer Chao

A cult classic, and named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in 2001, by New Yorker contributor Han Ong, delivers a sharp and insightful narrative about racial and social hierarchy, personal identity, and alienation William Paulinha—a resourceful, observant gay Filipino sex worker barely getting by in New York—is determined to turn his life around when he crosses paths with Shem C., a once-celebrated author now disgraced and exiled from both his marriage and the city’s literary inner circle. Shem is furious at the world that cast him out, and William, with his keen instincts and hunger for something more, becomes the perfect accomplice. What begins as an unlikely friendship quickly mutates into an audacious con. Under Shem’s tutelage, William reinvents himself as Master Chao, a charismatic and enigmatic Feng Shui consultant catering to New York’s wealthiest and most self-satisfied classes. As doors swing open and fortunes are rearranged, William is pulled ever deeper into the private anxieties, secret desires, and moral rot of the powerful, discovering just how much people will pay to believe their lives can be purified and saved. Blending razor-sharp satire with tenderness and psychological insight, Fixer Chao traces a dazzling ascent built on illusion and the personal costs that come with it. By turns funny, devastating, and electrifying, Ong’s writing asks what it takes to remake oneself in America—and what, if anything, remains when the performance finally ends. “An astringent depiction of the high life and the low in Manhattan. . . .[ Fixer Chao] is a novel that, for its images and metaphors, draws on an impressive range of sources. . .and it takes a deep, knowing look inside the immigrant dream.” —Jonathan Yardley , Washington Post Book World “Ong [has a] gift for quick, acerbic caricatures and piercing observations about contemporary culture.” — The New York Times “ Fixer Chao is an extremely satisfying and even moving novel….An unrelenting aria of high bitchiness and scathing satire.” — Salon