The Secret Talker

Starred review from March 29, 2021
Qiao Hongmei, the heroine of this riveting tale of suspense from Yan (The Lost Daughter of Happiness), met Glen, her professor husband, years ago as a student in an English class he was teaching in Beijing. The two are now married and live in California, where he still teaches and she’s finishing her PhD thesis. One morning, Hongmei receives an anonymous email from someone who saw her at a restaurant the previous evening while she was dining with Glen and another couple. Vaguely dissatisfied with her marriage, Hongmei begins to correspond with her “secret talker,” revealing details of her early life in China that she has never disclosed to anyone and letting her long-repressed regrets come to the surface. The tone of the secret talker becomes gradually more alarming and even threatening: “you brought this on yourself. You can’t escape now. Invasion always hurts a little.” Yan’s pacing is impeccable as she delicately but inexorably builds toward a thought-provoking finale. Readers of tense literary fiction will find much to like. Agent: Marysia Juszczakiewicz, Peony Literary.

March 30, 2021
Conflate "secret" and "talker" and you'll land on "stalker"--which is what "this stranger on the internet" proves to be in author and screenwriter Yan's latest Anglophoned novel, English-enabled by award-winning Singaporean writer and translator Tiang. Originally published in Chinese in 2004 means well before the ubiquity of all-revealing social media, leaving the would-be stalker and (not-quite) victim to communicate via email. After dinner out with her husband, Qiao Hongmei receives an anonymous missive revealing that the sender has "evidently . . . taken note of her every move and gesture." She's more flattered than alarmed, noting "his tone was a little presumptuous, but she liked his writing style, almost like a blend of Neil Gaiman and Emily Bront�." Their exchange continues: encouraged by the secret talker's own confessions, Hongmei readily divulges intimacies, from betraying her current husband with her former spouse, her abortions, her growing malaise. Only the stranger's observations seem to penetrate Hongmei's tiresome self-absorption to guide her toward some semblance of self-awareness. Alas, this tale is unnecessarily coy for being rather obvious, and, sadly, tedious.

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