You Should Read THE SENSE OF WONDER by Matthew Salesses
Reading Notes
As a dutiful older sister, I attended many of my sister’s basketball games and practices, which really meant that I spent hours upon hours reading books in noisy gyms. The things we do for family! Had I foreseen the enthusiasm with which my daughter would pick up basketball this year, perhaps I would have paid better attention.
As it happened, when my daughter took a shot during her first game, I was the mom in the bleachers who yelled, “She scored a goal!”
My mom smacked me and said, “It’s a basket.”
“She scored a point!”
“Two points, actually.”
Who knew? Well, now I do, and let me tell you, there is nothing more joy-filled than watching a gaggle of second graders guard each other and shoot on their own hoops. We’re talking absolute delight.
I am sharing this to let you know that I, an utter failure of a basketball fan, enjoyed The Sense of Wonder by Matthew Salesses so much that I read it in a day.
The Sense of Wonder draws inspiration from Linsanity, the craze surrounding Jeremy Lin’s 2012 NBA season. As the first Taiwanese American in the league, he inspired Asian American pride across the country. Although Salesses researched Lin’s experience, he didn’t base his character, Won Lee, on Lin specifically. Rather, he opens the novel with a quote that Mark Viera of the New York Times made about Lin: “Coaches have said recruiters, in the age of who-does-he-remind-you-of evaluations, simply lacked a frame of reference for such an Asian-American talent.” Salesses uses Won Lee to build that frame of reference.
As the novel opens, Won has just joined the Knicks. He is now a teammate of his childhood idol, a Black player named Paul Burton and known as Powerball! Their coach has no time for Won until Powerball! gets injured. When Won takes his place and leads the Knicks to seven straight victories, a stretch known as “the Wonder,” he is dubbed the “Won-derkid” by fans and sportswriters alike. One such sportswriter is Robert Sung, a former high school teammate of Powerball! Robert has built his career lavishing praise on Powerball!
As Won observes, “He wrote about Powerball! because he got money to write about Powerball! But also, if you envy someone, it’s only natural to want everyone to think they are the best. How embarrassing to envy someone just okay” (5). It’s a flawed code of journalistic ethics. Robert writes about Powerball! because he has no frame of reference for not writing about Powerball! He has looked up to Powerball! since their high school days, and if Powerball! is not the hero he believes he is, then what is to be said about Robert’s professional life covering him?
But Robert’s hero-worship of Powerball! is challenged during “the Wonder.” At first Robert supports Won, but as the winning streak ends, Robert becomes critical of him. Powerball! also presents a problem when he returns to the court. Watching a disastrous game on TV, Carrie Kang, Won’s girlfriend, watches with dismay: “There’s only so much empty space on a court, and they didn’t know how to share it. The paint seemed to shrink” (70).
Carrie can’t spend long worrying about Won’s career because she’s trying to build her own as a producer. She’s landed a job helming a popular K-drama based in Seoul, and she hopes to build the momentum into a new show about “a romance between an American journalist and a Korean basketball star, shot in both countries, a perfect setup for transitioning K-drama to America” (69). It’s a bold plan, considering the inherent differences between K-drama and Hollywood drama. As Carrie explains, “Unlike in Hollywood, in Korea, plot happens because of who people are, not because of what they choose. They have to deal with the circumstances of their lives whether they cause those circumstances or not” (50).
This perspective is evident in Carrie’s K-drama, “For the Love of Your Future Self.” Midway through the novel, Salesses transitions from the first-person POVs of Won and Carrie into a third-person section about the show, which follows a woman who sees ghosts and falls in love with a man who sees the future. They fall in love not because they want to but because they can’t help it: “K-drama fates two people together who would otherwise convince themselves they should be apart” (100). Despite their supernatural struggles, the pair remain together, bound by a shared vision of standing “together in a beautiful green field” (104).
Carrie’s admiration for K-drama also helps her process her sister’s aggressive cancer. As she watches K’s body diminish through chemo, she encourages K to feel her feelings, even when they make those around her uncomfortable. Carrie reflects, “What I knew about the kind of love K described, between self-destruction and survival, was what I knew about K-drama. Romance lives on the edge of a blade on which one side is rejection and the other desire. What Westerners call ‘chemistry’ is really a passion convincing enough that we can feel that edge” (154).
This book, despite the misleading cover image of the original hardback, is Carrie’s book as much as it is Won’s. Carrie understands that Won’s rise to the top “made Asian Americans feel . . . wonder. His story made our own more possible. We loved him because we wanted to love ourselves” (173). By pitching a new show to bring K-drama to America, she is “making [her] own wonder” (173). She is building a frame of reference for herself, too.
Salesses could have called this book “The Sense of Possibility.” Early on, explaining how he fought to play basketball despite his father’s hopes for an engineering career, Won says, “What a person does with his life is about what he is led to believe is possible” (26). But “wonder” captures an imaginative quality, a not-quite-realness, that “possibility” doesn’t, and that distinction is crucial to the story.
With this novel, Salesses not only introduces readers (like me!) to basketball and K-drama, but also reimagines how a novel can be structured. This book’s non-linear timeline and shifting POVs thrilled me with possibility, especially stuck as I am in my own writing rut.
Whether you’re looking for a book to shake up your perspective, or maybe, like me, you’re looking for a book to help you connect with the boys in the back of your comp class who spend all period talking about basketball, The Sense of Wonder is a book you shouldn’t miss.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2023
Timeline: a single basketball season, with flashback and jumps forward
Narrator: 1st POVs (Won & Carrie) along with some 3rd POV about K-drama
Setting: mostly New York City and Seoul
Pairs Well With: Colored Television by Danzy Senna; spicy jjamppong; March Madness brackets
Book Club
After Powerball! sabotages Won’s All-Star game, Won is surprised by his own response:
“I felt numb in the center of my back, and the feeling slowly spread across my skin. I am going to be angry, I thought, but anger didn’t come. What came was pity and dread. Even with a career like his, Powerball! still felt threatened by the idea of an Asian dude taking his place.”
What was your reaction to Won’s response? Have you ever been surprised by your own emotions in a similar way?
Reflecting on Powerball!’s marital drama, Won thinks,
“Once again, I had mistaken my feelings as other people’s feelings. It was a lesson I needed to learn, about which master empathy served, who empathy rewarded.”
What does Won learn about empathy (and its limits) throughout the book? To what extent does his experience complicate, challenge, or reinforce your own ideas about empathy?
Close Reading
While K suffers through chemo, Carrie retells their favorite childhood memories:
“The memory that came to me first was when she broke my arm, the day after we all went to the circus. We were playing dolls on the top bunk of the bed we shared, and with no warning, she shouted, ‘Acrobat!’ and pushed me off. She looked so shocked when I didn’t perform a trick, as if it was my fault. In those days, she hurt me many times this way, acting as if I was already a part of the game in her head. I wished I knew what was in her head now.”
This passage echoes an earlier insight shared by Won. When describing his father’s struggle to understand his drive to play basketball, Won says, “What a person does with his life is about what he is led to believe is possible” (26). The circus acrobats showed K an entirely new way to move through the world. Acrobatics became possible to her only after she saw their feats in person. To her childish mind, all an aerialist required was to be in the air, so she pushed Carrie off the bed. It took Carrie’s broken arm for K to realize that acrobatics require more than just time off the ground.
Creative Writing
Nonfiction: Won describes the final game of the Wonder: “From the start, I had the rock in my hands. First I hit a jumper from the elbow. On our next possession, I found an opening and drove. Then I crossed my man over and hit a three in his face. I scored our first seven and assisted for nine” (28). If you’re not a basketball player, this scene could be hard to visualize! But technical jargon also lends it a sense of authenticity. Choose a hobby or skill you’ve mastered. Write a paragraph using all the jargon you can think of for that topic. Then rewrite it using none of the jargon, as if you’re writing for someone who has never heard of it. Once you’ve got both extremes, examine how you can combine them for maximum impact. Which terms are so specific that they can’t be replaced? Which details lose their meaning if a reader lacks appropriate context? See if you can strike the right balance.
Fiction: The Western idea of creative writing, in my experience, is obsessed with character agency. A protagonist must make the decisions that drive a story’s momentum. But Carrie explains the difference between Western and Korean dramas: “Unlike in Hollywood, in Korea, plot happens because of who people are, not because of what they choose. They have to deal with the circumstances of their lives whether they cause those circumstances or not” (50). Start with a title: “The Fate of _____.” Begin at the ending for your character. Once you know where they end up, determine how they get there. To what extent did they make choices and to what extent did they face unavoidable circumstances?
Sentence Study
Carrie describes a piece of advice from her sister:
“‘Don’t let anyone kill your wonder,’ she said, which at first disappointed me, that she would use her ‘last’ words to me to pun on my boyfriend’s name—but she meant, she explained later, that to keep our wonder we had to stop fighting and denying our grief.”
In a single sentence, Salesses takes us from a line of dialogue to Carrie’s immediate reaction to K’s later explanation. The brief clause “she explained later” does the heavy timeline lifting here, letting us know not only that Carrie is writing about this later but also that K lives long enough to explain herself.
Salesses’ use of paired infinitives in the final part of the sentence is reminiscent of an aphorism. Think about this line from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Emerson’s saying is memorable in part because of the paradox equating two states—being great and being misunderstood—that seem to be opposites.
Similarly, Salesses ends his sentence with an equation: “to keep our wonder we had to stop fighting and denying our grief.” His paradox pairs the positively connoted “to keep” with the negatively connoted “to stop.” A paraphrase of this clause could say that maintaining our astonishment at life requires us to acknowledge our fear and grief. But “maintain” and “acknowledge” both fall on the positive end of the tone spectrum, which makes the observation less powerful.
Even writing that “to keep our wonder we had to give into our grief” is less effective because “to give into” has a sense of weakness. “To stop,” however, requires strength. It requires a choice rather than a sort of sinking into the unavoidable. Furthermore, the consonance of “keep” and “stop” lend a musicality to the sentence (not to mention that they are both four-letter words, which in terms of balance outdoes Emerson).
