Earlier this year, when I sent a note of congratulations to author Sanjena Sathian about her new novel Goddess Complex, she cheekily responded with, “Our doppelgänger books are doppelgängers of each other.”
And it was true. Similarly to Goddess Complex, my new novel The Other Lata features an Indian American woman who receives messages meant for another woman with the same name. Both of our novels are about how our protagonists meet their doubles, resulting in unexpected journeys of self-discovery.
Doubles and doppelgängers are having a huge moment in pop culture right now, as exemplified by the hit TV show Severance and the popular, acclaimed movies Sinners and Mickey 17. And of course, literature has a rich history of these stories as well, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double to Jekyll and Hyde to Tom Ripley, but what’s especially interesting to me is how prominently they’ve been featured in novels by Asian and Asian American authors in recent years. Bestsellers like Kirstin Chen’s Counterfeit and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface immediately come to mind, as does Kazuo Ishiguro’s modern-day classic Never Let Me Go. But the past five years have also seen Padma Viswanathan’s The Charterhouse of Padma, Matthew Salesses’ Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, Amanda Jayatissa’s My Sweet Girl, Liann Zhang’s Julie Chan is Dead, and Mansi Shah’s upcoming release Saving Face.
It’s because we’re always being mistaken for one another.
While doubles are largely defined as having a similar if not identical resemblance to another, doppelgängers have a more a supernatural or otherworldly quality and serve as a manifestation of a character’s deepest fears. In some cases, their existence makes the protagonist reflect on what they are lacking, holding up a mirror to their insecurities. And in other cases, it can be a story of identity theft, in which the doppelgänger seeks to assume the protagonist’s life (or vice versa). Doubles and doppelgängers books written by AAPI authors tend to have characters assuming someone else’s identity as a way of navigating their complicated relationship with their own, as a reaction to the high expectations they feel from society or within their communities, to transcend their circumstances, or some combination of all of these.
Kirstin Chen reminded me of what also makes this terrain of particular interest to Asian and Asian American authors, particularly children of the diaspora: “It’s because we’re always being mistaken for one another.”
While in Julie Chan is Dead, Julie can easily take on her identical sister’s identity due to their shared resemblance, it’s nearly as seamless for the unrelated characters in Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, The Other Lata, and Goddess Complex to swap identities too, for the reason Chen stated.
My inspiration for The Other Lata was an email mixup I experienced in the early 2000s, when someone who shared my first name forwarded me an email mistakenly sent to her. And while this mixup lingered in my thoughts long enough to inspire my third novel, what made me believe I could pull the premise off was a more recent experience.
A few years ago I attended a literary festival that only had one other South Asian author. We were constantly mistaken for another, as if we had inadvertently cast ourselves in the bookfest version of The Parent Trap, completely interchangeable because we were both authors and had brown skin. We would get called by each other’s names, my dinner order would be delivered to her, and when I went to get a drink at a bar, the bartender told me, “You were already here.”
It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this in my life. But because the festival took place in a small town over the course of a weekend, the way the two of us were so often conflated was particularly memorable. And it inspired this line in Lata:
“If someone isn’t looking to see a difference, they simply won’t notice.”
Cons and scamming lie at the heart of several of these novels. And it’s not a coincidence that wealth and luxury are motivators for this duplicity.
The doppelgänger motif arises as characters grapple with the extremes they will go to to level up in socioeconomic stature. In The Other Lata, Lata Murthy longs for the extravagant Manhattan lifestyle promised by Sex and the City. When she begins receiving invitations to fancy parties and soirees for a Mumbai socialite who shares her name, Lata seizes upon the opportunity to accept the invites and pretend to be the other Lata to gain entry into elite circles.
In Julie Chan is Dead, Julie Chan and Chloe VanHuusen are identical twins who were separated at a young age. Not only did they have little contact, they also end up living vastly different lives: Julie works as a grocery store cashier while Chloe is a popular influencer. Upon discovering her sister is dead, Julie literally steps into her twin’s shoes and takes over her social media accounts, at last having the opportunity to try on the glamorous life she had long coveted.
Both Lata and Julie find that the easiest way to take over their doubles’ lives is to brandish the markings of success, such as a high-end wardrobe, expensive jewelry and designer shoes and handbags. That the characters’ need to wield these status symbols to be fully accepted as their doubles also speaks to the class anxiety that is a shared commonality of the Asian and Asian American experience.
Class consciousness and materialism also plays an important role in Counterfeit, though it is not a traditional doppelgänger story. Ava and Winnie’s counterfeit luxury handbag business is predicated on how smoothly, and with minimal effort, Asians can be mistaken for another. The pair use the model minority myth to shield them from being detected in their subterfuge.
These protagonists are acutely aware that their lives do not measure up to what is expected from Asian Americans.
“The model minority myth is grounded in flattening differences between East Asian immigrants, a vast and wildly disparate group of people,” says Chen. “When I was writing Counterfeit, it was really fun to think about how Ava and Winnie could weaponize the very stereotype that was so often used against them.”
The model minority myth looms as a more menacing presence in a pair of novels in which the authors draw from their identities—specifically, their own names—for their doppelgänger novels. Goddess Complex’s Sanjana (the character shares the same first name as the author except for a slight difference in spelling) and Disappear Dopplegänger Disappears’s Matt are at their absolute lowest when they learn of their respective doppelgängers. These protagonists are acutely aware that their lives do not measure up to what is expected from Asian Americans, both within their communities and the expectations conferred on them from being in the “good” minority.
Sanjana does not regret her decision to have an abortion, but in doing so her life has become rootless: she is broke and near-homeless after dropping out of graduate school and walking away from a troubled marriage. Matt, a divorced novelist estranged from his daughter and adoptive family, feels so invisible while moving through the world that he actively wonders if he is disappearing from it. What makes encountering their doppelgängers an even more shocking and disorienting experience is not just the oddness of these doubles’ existences, but how Other Matt and Sanjena (spelled with an “e”) seem to be the better, more socially acceptable versions of themselves. To Matt and Sanjana, these figures are painful reminders of how they are failing, at least when measured against the concept of the model minority.
By naming their main characters after themselves, Salesses and Sathian add a metatextual layer to Disappear and Goddess. Sathian was consciously playing with the tropes of autofiction and the idea that readers often conflate the protagonist with the author. She says that the fact Sanjana and Sanjena share a resemblance and similar names also reflects the idea that “there is a homogeneity to the Indian American diaspora because of the way we are socially engineered to enter America.”
From an early age, many first and second generation Indian Americans have the same mandate to focus on schoolwork over a social life, attend the most prestigious colleges with the goal of establishing careers in stable, lucrative fields such as medicine, tech, and law, and to get married and have children with someone given that same mandate. If we are often mistaken for each other by non-desis, one of the reasons might be that so many of us are following the same “model minority” playbook.
“As our diaspora matures, it makes sense that [doubles and doppelgangers have become] a collective preoccupation,” Sathian adds.
Salesses also addresses the self-imposed conformity that accompanies the oppression of the model minority myth. In Disappear, Matt is astonished by his discovery of a parallel reality that includes his doppelgänger, Other Matt, who is smart, successful and well-respected—qualities that make this other Matt not just seen, but valued. Other Matt’s disappearance allows Matt to step into his doppelgänger’s life, yet it isn’t the quick fix that Matt desires. Too many malignant forces still seek to erode him from without and within.
The novel was published during the first Trump administration, referencing Matt’s anxiety and unease in a world where a presidential candidate is pointedly supported by citizens proudly sporting red hats. The invisibility that Matt struggles with stems from racism, as evidenced by the book’s preface, a list of legislation targeting Asians in America, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882, the first major law barring immigration based on ethnicity, and the executive order that forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps during WWII.
In an interview with Ploughshares about Disappear, Salesses noted that “racism makes it difficult to love yourself, and encourages people to make themselves into the image racism prefers, in order to get some sort of approval.” Matt, as so many in the diaspora, ponders how much of his feelings of invisibility can be blamed on assimilation. It is an act of self-preservation in the wider world, yet at the same time costing him his self-worth and connecting to those most important to him.
As we are faced with the return of an administration that wants to further erode liberties, it might not be a stretch to say that our current timeline has an unfortunate doppelganger too.
So much of diasporic fiction is preoccupied by the notion that the better self is the one we were never allowed to choose.
Matt also has to face another disquieting reality, this one in relation to the passing of time. “He is at an age of dwindling options: Each choice he made limited the choices he had left.”
And it taps into a universal truth: as we get older, reinvention eludes us. The plentitude of opportunities we feel in our youth narrows as the hours and minutes go by. Doubles and doppelgängers represent the idea that what we hoped for ourselves was possible after all, if only we had made better choices. Or if only we had the freedom to make those choices at all.
So much of diasporic fiction is preoccupied by the notion that the better self is the one we were never allowed to choose. As immigrants, the children of immigrants, or transracial adoptees, we know there is a version of ourselves that could exist if we had never left our homelands. Who would that person have been?
Viswanathan mused on this in an essay about her novel for LitHub, writing:
“I would have grown up vegetarian, plus Indians’ posture and gait are different—as well as different cultural influences and values…But how different would I be fundamentally?”
We might be forever chasing this idealized version of ourselves that our families, communities, Western culture and Asian cultural norms tell us exist—and are not us. A fundamental question that will never have an answer. Except in fiction, when we can continue exploring ourselves, and the potential promise of these other versions of ourselves that remain ghostly, spectral and perpetually out of reach.