One way to read Map of an Onion is as a quest myth for the contemporary self-discovering, revealing, asking deeper, inquiring layer by layer toward the onion's core, which is, ironically, unlocatable. Self as sensorium of perception, self as "animal, bird," as family member, as the inheritor of eight centuries of Liu heritage, self as man, as Japanese-Chinese-Taiwanese-American living on borrowed Lenape Native land in a suburb of New Jersey, self as unstable construct, as citizen, diplomat, flaneur, saboteur, artist, as tech-savvy, code-switching trans-lingual being. Kenji Liu's illuminated Map of an Onion is a koan of deconstructions which interrogates within the fissures of difference those spaces within us and between us, as charged spaces of potential and becoming. A booklength question in a hard, graceful calligraphy, asking deeper, asking better, what does it mean to be a self, this Self, to "translate this search / between my family's four languages,"-emergent, reassembled of an
