'Gingko Season' explores beauty, trauma, and love in diaspora

Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel "Gingko Season" redefines beauty, intimacy, and generational trauma through a Chinese American archivist’s emotional journey.

Illustration by Daria Zaseda

By Novanka Laras and Adila Ghina

In her emotionally layered debut novel Gingko Season, Naomi Xu Elegant crafts a deeply moving narrative about inherited trauma, cultural displacement, and the precarious beauty of human connection. At the heart of Gingko Season is the story of Penelope Lin, a 25-year-old Chinese American archivist working in a Philadelphia museum, whose life is suspended between the artifacts of a distant past and the ache of her own fractured family history.

Elegant sets the tone early in Gingko Season by confronting a historical symbol of pain masked as beauty: the tiny, intricately embroidered shoes worn by women subjected to the brutal Chinese tradition of foot-binding. In her museum exhibit, Penelope proposes a bold idea—to let visitors touch the shoes and see projected images of the women who wore them. But her request is denied, underscoring the theme that beauty is often curated to hide suffering. These shoes, Penelope argues, existed “to mask man-made deformity with prettiness.”

Gingko Season reappears frequently, anchoring the story in its symbolic exploration of aestheticism and inherited pain, a dynamic that guides both Penelope’s scholarly work and personal evolution.

A past that won’t stay buried

When Gingko Season opens in September 2018, Penelope is already carrying the emotional weight of two major abandonments: first by her bipolar mother, who left when Penelope was only 13, and later by her emotionally distant, drug-tripping artist father. These memories from her childhood in Beijing are so painful that she refers to her younger self with detachment—“I felt pity for the child who experienced them, but I no longer felt that child was me.”

Now living in a cramped Chinatown apartment in Philadelphia, Penelope prefers intellectual analysis to emotional vulnerability. She avoids personal attachments and instead immerses herself in academic debates with her closest friends, Apple and Inno. Both are high-functioning corporate professionals who channel their own anxieties into endless philosophical sparring. Their post-2016 election dynamics—Apple weeping as Inno laughs—perfectly capture their irreconcilable temperaments and Penelope’s role as a mediator in a world that feels increasingly incoherent.

A quiet romance unfolds

Amid the chaos of her emotional detachment, Gingko Season introduces Hoang, a gentle lab tech who disrupts Penelope’s carefully guarded life. Their first meeting is quirky and disarming: Hoang admits to secretly freeing lab mice meant for euthanasia, an act of kindness that unnerves and charms Penelope. “I’m a trusting person,” he tells her.

This trust becomes the foundation for their slow-building, epistolary romance, which unfolds not through modern digital messaging but through handwritten letters scribbled on postcards and torn-out pages from books. Hoang, refreshingly phone-less, represents an analogue form of intimacy that both attracts and terrifies Penelope. After a toxic and consuming relationship with her ex, Paul, she’s determined to “enforce passivity” this time. The novel, however, gently undermines that resolve.

Hoang’s unfiltered affection and principled activism—he even starts a worker’s union at the hotel where he bartends—begin to crack open Penelope’s emotional armor. When her friend Apple jokingly tells her that joining the union effort is “the closest you’ve gotten to having sex in like five thousand years,” it underscores both Penelope’s romantic stasis and the novel’s signature wit.

Language, intimacy, and generational memory

Elegant structures Gingko Season as a literary mosaic, where conversations about sex, labor rights, Chinese poetry, Napoleon, and ethics weave through the narrative like threads in an old silk robe. These dialogues rarely lead to plot twists; rather, they explore how Penelope and her friends use language to avoid pain. Unlike in a Sally Rooney novel—where dialogue often serves as emotional catharsis—here, it functions as a shield.

The exception is Hoang, whose openness stands in contrast to everyone else’s guarded irony. Through his simple, sincere messages—like “Thought of you this morning when I jumped into a freezing lake... The water was like fire, I never felt so alive”—he shows that vulnerability need not be weakness. His words evoke the central paradox of Gingko Season: that pain and beauty, truth and illusion, can coexist in a single human experience.

Penelope’s profession as an archivist mirrors her personal journey—sorting, categorizing, and preserving fragments of the past, all while attempting to forget her own. The act of archiving becomes a metaphor for emotional repression, but also for the fragile possibility of understanding and healing. As her relationship with Hoang deepens, Penelope begins to recognize the value of emotional memory. She must confront the trauma inflicted by her parents, the cultural wounds of diaspora, and the ways her own silence has perpetuated her loneliness.

A literary debut marked by restraint and resonance

Gingko Season is not a novel that traffics in dramatic revelations or high-concept gimmicks. Rather, it is a character-driven meditation on how the intersections of race, gender, and mental health shape intimacy in the 21st century. Elegant’s writing is precise and graceful, marked by quiet emotional intelligence and a deep sensitivity to the nuances of personal history.

Gingko Season serves not just as a title but as a metaphor for decay, transition, and renewal. Like the ginkgo tree—an ancient species known for resilience—Penelope’s story unfolds with quiet endurance and understated transformation. By the novel’s end, she hasn’t completely healed, but she has begun to reconcile the competing forces within her: intellectual distance and emotional need, cultural inheritance and self-definition, memory and hope.

With Gingko Season, Naomi Xu Elegant emerges as a powerful new voice in literary fiction, offering readers a profoundly moving story about the costs and possibilities of connection. It’s a novel that reminds us how love—whether romantic, platonic, or familial—can be both an excavation and an offering, and how beauty, even when born from pain, can still illuminate the path forward.

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