A Tender Age

by Chang-rae Lee

Genres: General Fiction; Asian American; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?”—The Los Angeles Times

"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." —Jhumpa Lahiri

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence

A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.

Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.

Release date: August 11, 2026

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

A life can catch up to you.


It’s a wonder, really. One morning, maybe you woke up too early, the span of years will collapse and meet you in full. There’s no great thwack. Hardly even a jolt. You could follow the usual motions of the day.


But here you are, resolving to pay more attention. You need to pay more attention. Otherwise, you can easily misplace your everyday fortunes, the fact, say, that you have a loving spouse who is inordinately talented and impassioned; children who have grown up to be wry and kind, and for whom you’d give your life without pause; work that is consuming enough but not ruinously; friends to share food and drink with, and to tell silly stories. Still, I don’t always cherish things as deeply as I should. I try as hard as I can and continue to fail. I want to be here, even if I’m often dreaming. Each moment is a singular moment, particular in its coordinates, the countless dimensions in which those coordinates can be observed and measured a marvelous conspiracy that fixes us in a way that will never be repeated.


And yet we can’t help but keep going back to old times, futilely scratching at a spot. It doesn’t matter how significant a certain event or instance was, sometimes the barest irritation will draw incommensurate attention and the skin can go raw before you realize it. Lately, I can’t seem to help but linger on this time or that, those tender ages rife with curiosities, and go over in serial fashion what I might have done or said to defuse a tricky situation or take a more principled stand or else assuage my frustrated heart. So many chances, ceded. What remains are these disparate patches of existence that end up knitting vaster and less randomly than you would have ever imagined.


The other day, for instance, I was suddenly thinking about the circumstances of how our girls got our dog. It’s no big thing. We met him when he was three months, while we were on a vacation in Florida. Old friends happened to live there, a family with a boy and a girl the same ages as our daughters, and during an afternoon visit with them the wife casually mentioned that they were looking for someone to adopt their new puppy. Our girls were playing tug-of-war with the dog, a black-and-white toy terrier and shih zhu mix, squealing as he wrenched at the snout of the armadillo plush toy and made his tiny throaty growls, and when they heard her say adopt they both cried out, “Please, Momma, please!” They knew not to entreat me, as I was firmly against having a pet—we traveled too often, was my rationale—but my wife, whose neck instinctively flushed with their joy, let out a long sigh and met my eyes, and I understood what had now become the inevitable. The puppy was undeniably cute, with wistful, floppy ears and a corkscrew tail that shook like a rattler’s, and he seemed sweet-mannered besides, and so with genuine curiosity and a last hope for a reprieve I wondered aloud how they could possibly give him up. Our other dog is super jealous was one response, The puppy sheds too much was another, both somewhat lame justifications that of course only ensured that we would take him.


After lunch, while our families took the dogs for a walk, my friend and I had a smoke and whiskey on his back deck, which overlooked the waterway. We’d known each other since childhood, but he’d been transferred away from the New York area just after our first children were born, and we exchanged news of the old gang, the comings and goings of jobs and moves, half joking about our sudden-onset middle age and various physical diminishments. The usual breezy stuff that precedes the more real turn in the conversation—raising kids, paying school fees and mortgages, the sex after many years of marriage—which in turn signals the conversation’s near end. All fine. We could hear our families entering the house—my friend’s son, oddly, had a habit of hooting like an owl—and we clinked our tumblers, finishing them off.


“Hey, thanks for taking on the little guy,” my friend said. “Better for all.”


“Except me,” I said. “I’ll be the one picking up his shit.”


“At least they’ll always be one-handers,” he said. “I bought him for Colt. I hoped he would stop bothering Pepper.” Pepper was their other dog, an adult Pekingese.


“Well, looks like Pepper always fights back.”


His face seemed to shade, and I was going to pursue it, but then everybody came out with ice cream sandwiches, and we watched the fishing boats and pleasure yachts pass by. It was a perfect way to end a good visit. When we departed the girls had their new puppy and all his accompanying gear and food and treats, and back at our vacation rental, they immediately filled his food and water bowls and knelt beside him as they coaxed him to eat. But the “little guy”—as yet renamed—had trouble. He surely was hungry, but it was all he could do to simply approach the bowl. Every time he got within a muzzle’s length he’d suddenly recoil, as though the food might leap up and snap him. The girls initially found this humorous, but he really wasn’t going to get close enough to eat, and when my younger daughter nudged him forward he began whimpering, literally digging his heels into the carpeting. He lost it and peed. Eventually we figured out that if one of the girls held him in her lap he’d accept the dry food; he was still anxious but gently plucked the kibble from their fingers, which made them very happy.
Pu-chu, I must admit, has been a fine dog. He’s feisty and barky with strangers, but soon enough he’ll be extra-friendly, even clingy and docile. He’s certainly never bitten anyone. The girls are no longer living at home so it’s just the three of us. My wife is by far his favorite, he never leaves her side, although when she’s out he’ll sometimes come around and curl himself up next to my desk chair. It’s true that he sheds a lot, faint sprays of white fur perennially dusted about the house. I complain when I vacuum but don’t really mind.


And he eats almost like a normal dog once you get him going. Just before he’ll attempt the first jawful his gears grind, there’s a stuttering in his neck, something blocking him from finally reaching it. After a couple taps of the index finger next to the food on our kitchen floor—Pu-chu still can’t abide a bowl—he’ll break the chain and gobble as quickly as he can, his claws skittering on the tile the moment he’s done as he scrambles away. We have theories as to why he eats this way. All of them feature Colt, the little boy who hooted, especially after we heard what his sister told our daughters, that her brother pretended his new pet was a special military type, born with astounding capabilities of strength and agility; that he’d perch the pup in the middle of a lemon tree, to see how he would get himself down; or that he’d start a small leaf fire on the driveway and compel Pu-chu by leash to leap it; or what my daughter later recounted witnessing the very day of our visit, that Colt placed him near the edge of their ping-pong table, quite a height for such a young, toy breed, and then started slowly pushing him off.


They haven’t been together since, but you can’t help but wonder how Pu-chu would react if Colt, who by now must be college age, suddenly appeared in our kitchen. The scent of him would surely collapse the years. I’d like to think Pu-chu would growl, maybe even leap at him. But what’s most likely, what’s sadly fated for any warm-blood thusly forged during a seminal time, is that our little guy would do nothing, maybe not even move, his paws stuck in a cold glue of dread.


But then I like pretending, too. I imagine myself commandeering Pu-chu’s stout little form, building up the spring in my hind legs, and instantly attacking the kid. I’d tear a chunk of ankle or calf, or at least viciously bark and growl, force a full retreat. To dispirit a certain kind you must be malign, become as bent as your nemesis. You must shock even yourself.


Only then can you be free.


When I was a kid there were some rough times. All of us go through it, a period when it can feel as if your life is a morass of poor timing and odd people that you can barely escape. Mine spanned the near-year that led up to my eleventh birthday during camp in the summer of 1976, a time when I was still a mere boy and had no yearnings to grow up or know anything more. My family was living then in a town north of New York City, a thirty-five-minute ride on the local commuter train, a town that was much darker-skinned and poorer than the surrounding villages and hamlets, which were and still are mostly white and wealthy. Those other villages had community pools with cordoned swimming lanes and multiple high-dive platforms. Their public high schools fielded complete symphony orchestras and produced not one but two musicals yearly. Their tidy parks and playgrounds were thick with mothers and au pairs and scrambling toddlers, and on the weekends, fathers who monitored the action or even horsed around with the kids.


In our 1970s town, the adults, for whatever reason, whether they were working a job or not, left us on our own, and to one another. This was suitable. We also knew very little else. Evidently there were some rich people in the area, a string of glittery beach houses on the Sound, and inland hillside enclaves of creepy Gothic mansions, but you never saw them except inside their big Cadillacs motoring quickly through our more typical neighborhood of low-rise tenements and modest one- and two-family houses. After the school day or during the summer we were always out on the double-parked streets playing some ball game or in our cruddy playground, with its rusty jungle gym, and splintery wooden swings, and riven, sticky asphalt you could pry up with your bare fingers.


My family lived in a sprawling redbrick rental apartment complex built after the war for the light industrial, service, and clerical workers who were saving up for their own houses in a better area. Our neighbors were Blacks and Puerto Ricans, working-class Irish and Italians, and some Jews who hadn’t yet moved on, plus the legions of us new immigrants, from Asia and Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. The whole diverse lot of us, before diverse was an operative notion, made a mix that seemed natural and right despite how tense and fraught it could sometimes be. Were we all “friends”? I suppose we were. We were young enough—we ranged in age from eight to twelve—that the bonds felt fierce, like in a tribe, tourniquet tight, yet our tribe was fueled by constant disagreements, contentions, sometimes outright bloodletting, which made everything dire and fragile. Again, I rarely saw anyone’s parents or guardians, or ventured into their apartments, and it was easy to believe that we somehow existed on our own as we tilted in our pastimes.


I should say that we were mostly boys, though there was a handful of older girls who infrequently played with us who were, depending on the activity, as vaunted and intimidating as the most athletic boys. One who stood out was named Katie Croker, a tall, angular blond-haired fifth grader who was rumored to have been left back one year and looked like one of those smushed-faced cats with a permanent glower, though it would be unfair of me to say that she wasn’t also kind of pretty whenever she smiled, which was usually after she’d triumphed in one of the games. Her mode was to be aggressive and menacing, and most fearsome in one of our favorite games, Running Bases. It’s a classic game where there are two catchers, each posted at a base, and everyone else, after three initial throws, running between them in a baseball-type rundown. If you got tagged you were out. The last remaining runner won, and then the two who’d been tagged first would have to be the catchers for the next round. I was good at the game, being swift and dodgy, and if I didn’t win, I was usually tagged later in the rounds and rarely had to play catcher. Katie Croker, while big and wiry and strong, wasn’t terribly agile and thus regularly got tagged out early. This infuriated her, and she’d always try to knock the ball out of the tagger’s mitt, or just totally bowl them over like she was rushing home plate. But it was when she played catcher that she was at her most terrorizing, her sparkly green eyes only going greener, the bulbous hull of her forehead a livid, shining white, and as she threw high into the air the third and final throw she’d shriek, Go! and we’d sprint for our lives.


Katie Croker had a rifle, as we’d say, a whipping sidearm delivery that I swear generated Major League velocity. I don’t know where her motion came from, but it was wicked, her ball seeming to rise as it missiled across the weedy apartment complex field, where it was heading nobody knew, including Katie Croker. Or maybe she did. We ran half ducking, shoulders to ears, moving in a herd in the illusion of safety, sometimes breaking off solo in a reckless dash, our necks and backs tensed against an impact that you feared would be lethal. One time my little sister wanted to play, and as we scurried, I had to shield her with my body as if we were under sniper fire, taking one in the thigh. Everyone got nailed at some point, in the butt or the kidney or the shoulder or how Gregory Fluss got it, beaned right in the temple, which was kind of scary when he didn’t come to for a few seconds, and especially after we finally got him upright, when a nub of turd fell out of his shorts. We made him promise not to tell his parents.


After that we replaced the rubber-coated baseball we always used with a tennis ball—some wuss, maybe me, entreated the rest of us with this safety protocol—and although we were now spared the heaviest bruising and near-fractures, the actual pain of being struck was just as intense, for Katie Croker only threw harder, and at closer range, fueled with the fury of the thwarted. I dreaded that bright yellow felt. Once, she even caused Cleon Washington, our apartment complex alpha, to well up after she hit him square in the solar plexus. Cleon was a handsome, tall, soft-spoken kid who had his own tight crew and was a champ at every sport and game, and although he didn’t always join in whenever he graced us, we couldn’t help but saunter in his way and speak in his laconic style and attempt to impress him with our physical zeal, if not skills. He often sported a pick in his perfect halo of an Afro, and my mother was perplexed by my request for one, which she bought me anyway, and which I’d futilely try to perch in my limp, straight hair. I’d never seen him so disenabled. When Cleon composed himself, he jumped up and shoved Katie Croker hard, and she shoved him hard back, triggering a collective gasp, and although I was terrified, I registered even then an unsavory, fetishistic surge at this particular tangle of humanity. Would he punch her? Would she punch him? Might they wrestle? Kiss?


It turned out nothing happened except for a stone-cold stare-down that verified why Katie Croker’s presence in our games went unquestioned even though she wasn’t anyone’s friend: girl or boy, here was the baddest s.o.b. around, and even our playground king Cleon knew it. They both derisively chuckled, neither quite backing off, and maybe it was because there were never adults around to adjudicate that we often witnessed this sort of détente, at least between relative equals. The rest of us, we endured. To be a kid was to be bullied, no exceptions. Even Cleon had to deal with his much older brothers and their crew, hardened grown men they seemed to me, with aims and interests light years beyond our conception.


At that point I had already suffered my own private miseries with Katie Croker, episodes she appeared to have completely forgotten but that rooted thick enough in my throat that sometimes I felt I could hardly breathe. I still think about those times, more often than makes any sense in the wider context of my life. This is the nature of certain youthful happenings, how they can become a knot in the flesh that every other occurrence must bypass in order for you to know yourself, in order for you to grow.


One afternoon when I was ten, Katie Croker surprised me while I was peeing in the shadowy hollows of the huge laurel bushes at the far corner of the complex property. No doubt she intended to do the same; everyone peed there, for while our apartments were merely a minute’s sprint away, the distance might as well have been a mile, given how long we’d all hold it in, never wanting to stop playing. Plus there was a rusty drinking fountain at the playground whose water was sometimes lukewarm and metallic and sometimes ice cold and clean, and when cold like that in the summer was the most wonderful water you could ever have. Katie Croker hadn’t really acknowledged me before that, I was just another boogery, lard-cheeked boy with grungy fingernails and hands, and to me she was the queenly ten-year-old with the pinkish sun-kissed shoulders and scary diamond cat eyes, and when I realized she was watching me I tried to stop.


“Hey! Keep going!”


I shook my head, wincing as my stream flagged.


“I want to see!”


I didn’t want her to see, but it was too painful to do otherwise, and I let go, startling us both with the furious flow coming from that tiny hole.


She whinnied in dark delight, and as I frantically tucked myself back into my trousers, scraping hard against the metal zipper, I realized I was crying, both from the pain at the tip of my already extra-sensitive member—it was as tender as a just-birthed gecko back then, even the shower made it hurt—and the burning humiliation of her regard. And yet I was also sharply aware of my mother. It’s funny how you can be stricken by the oddest point of focus in such moments, it’s the same way in dreams, I could not stop thinking of how my mother would periodically run a bar of Ivory soap along the zipper of my winter coat, of my zip-up galoshes, the zippers of my shorts and trousers, as they always seemed to seize up and snag in my hasty hands. Had she not done so with this pair? I was desperate for that soap, that milky white bar I wished I could hold on to and cover my shame.


“Okay now, get lost,” she ordered, pulling up the hem of her emerald-green smock dress with the appliqued sunflowers as she began to crouch.


I ran back to my mates pretending nothing happened. Like me they were infantile and clueless and ruled by sensation, and none of them noticed that I’d gone to the bushes, or that Katie Croker had been in there, too, or that she had now emerged and was gazing at me with her characteristic mouth hang, that diffident, lightless cave. Nor did they catch on to how she would regularly follow me into the laurel, where she would compel me to pee according to her whim, straight up in the air or zigzagging or splashing that mossy rock, or once, directly on the palm of her hand.


“It’s so gross and hot,” she said, her disgust only surpassed by my own. I was miserable, certain that what we were doing was wrong, maybe evil. Up to that moment all I knew was what any reasonably fortunate child knew, namely, the simple lessons of pain and pleasure, alternating bouts of elation and disappointment and boredom, the sustenance of genuine attention and love, but now I was sopped by a piss-smelling fog of guilt that in my child’s consciousness was condensing into the special muck of a novel psychic state: self-loathing.


Ah.


Then you’re remade, the first of countless times. . . .


You’d think I’d learn not to drink so much water or resolve to run up to our second-floor apartment and pee in private, but something about our encounters kept me heading for the pungent glade of the laurel bush. Yes, I was being dominated, I was being debased, thoroughly and abjectly humiliated, and yet there was a measure of exchange that I began to crave, if not enjoy. Of course, young children can have erotic feelings (and I certainly did), but I don’t believe ours was some inaugurating and momentous psycho-sexual stamping. She simply needed me, a notion I in turn needed, and so I served.


Nothing lasts. Either she got bored with the exercise, or she began to resent my willingness in the role, and after a couple more hand showers, and a final command that I foul my own sneaker, Katie Croker left me to pee alone.


*


My given name, Jeon-Gi, with a hard G, was one she enjoyed deforming. She made fun of me with it, as some others did and would, though her taunts were oddly soothing and dulcet, if tinged with a maniacal lilt, these sly meow-ings of Chun-ky, Chun-ky. As skilled bullies will do, she was weaponizing a truth; for I was a chunky kid, bordering on fat from my one-a-day habit of a large Snickers bar, boxes of which my mother would stock for me as long as I ate the food she made, which I happily did. She and I were a tight pair that way, coconspirators in a plot to ensure my full indulgence, in every way, as I was her first born and only son. In ensuing years I’d become uncomfortably aware of the expectations behind all that spoiling—to be number 1 in my studies, in my sports, in even my citizenship, such as being class president—that I wanted very much to realize for her and lavishly envisioned for myself but could never achieve given my natural laziness and lack of resolve, much less talent.


But in those first few summers at the apartment complex, I only knew a princely feeling, its herald my mother’s velvety ring of a voice calling from our kitchen window that looked out onto the playground and abutting patch of field.


Jeon-Gi-ya! Jeon-Gi-ya!


Wa-suh chum-shim muh-guh!


Come and eat lunch!


More beckoning words didn’t exist; no matter what was transpiring in our games I would sub myself out, or simply quit, my mates grumbling but also jealous, as none of their mothers ever summoned them, or came out bearing snacks (as she sometimes did, with my sister Ella in tow), potato chips or Ritz crackers. We’d crowd around her, and she’d unpeel the brown wax paper from the baton of Ritz and let each of us take a few. I had to wait until the end, for in this instance they were our “guests.” Katie Croker seemed to disappear whenever any adults came around, there was something of the stray cat about her, but she watched us from the periphery as we munched the crackers and drank the lemonade or iced tea my mother would pour from a big red-plaid-colored Thermos into paper Dixie cups that we would then nest in a stack in her hand before sprinting off. I would instantly reimmerse myself in the play, never thinking twice about my mother’s kind and solicitous efforts, but Katie Croker must have been paying attention because one day while my buddies and I were combing the high grass at the far boundary of the complex grounds for grasshoppers (to suffer as conscripts for a long-jump contest), I heard a distant murmuring of “Jeon-Gi-ya, Jeon-Gi-ya . . .”


Naturally a warm current uncoiled through my body, but the summons confused me, as I had just been inside for lunch. I looked to our narrow kitchen window on the second floor. Like most of the others on this south façade it was shaded and shut tight against the summer heat. I heard the calling again, this time more clearly, and I drifted toward it. There was a timbre of injury to the voice, one more mental than physical, as if something were oppressing her. My mother was an innately sturdy, resolute person, but living in a foreign place with few friends and no other family and not speaking the language was steadily dissolving a vital part of her. This was one thing I was painfully aware of, even then. How surprisingly fragile she was, collapsible.


As such I was constantly afraid for her, which made me afraid, too, the fear forming me to be a sometimes-brutal little boy. Most people didn’t notice. My brutality was the colder variety, the kind that you had to peer closely to see but that was startling when you did.


Still, here in the playground, here at the apartments, I was one of the pliables. So when I found the source of the calling to be none other than Katie Croker—she had positioned herself in a service stairwell leading to the basement of our building, deviously bouncing her voice against the red brick—I stood before her as she reprised her uncannily accurate mimicry of my mother, though now it was with a sneer, making it seem as if the most loving and important person in my life were taunting me. I was miserable and angry and yet utterly useless; I simply stared down at the grass-stained white rubber toecaps of my brand-new sneakers and began to whimper.


“Why are you crying?” Katie Croker rasped. “You have nothing to cry about, you know that? You’re a spoiled brat. Spoiled!” She was the one getting animated now, sounding more like a grown-up than a girl of eleven. “You just play your little wuss games with your little wuss friends and have snacks brought to you. You think everybody gets that? You think it’s normal? Do you?”


I didn’t know what to say. I probably did think it was normal, for I knew nothing outside of our parochially secure if periodically beleaguered immigrant existence. The only times I felt something off was when my father or mother encountered some misunderstanding out there in the abstruse, backward world of our town’s streets and shops and offices, but I was still young enough to uphold them as being infallible, or at least never wholly at fault. Our life—or more accurately, my life—was happy enough. It was as it was meant to be. Of course I couldn’t explain any of this to Katie Croker, much less articulate it to myself. All I knew was that I couldn’t bear to displease her more, or have her think me a selfish, bratty boy, so with frantic grasping childish logic I unzipped my shorts and poked out and tried to pee for her.


“Stop that! God! You’re so gross! In fact, you’re revolting!”


I didn’t know what “revolting” meant but the word hotly stabbed me where I was softest. My tiny piddler shrank even more, practically retracting itself. And now Katie Croker was dragging me by the elbow up the stairs and down the meandering paved walkway that snaked along the straight long side of my Building A. I enjoyed leaning into those curves on my bicycle, but they seemed needlessly tortuous now. Where was she taking me? Only the other buildings of the complex, B and C, lay ahead. Katie Croker lived in B, and rumor had it that she lived only with a father, or maybe only with a brother, whom nobody had ever seen but was much older and even meaner than she. Either way it was too weird and scary a scenario to think about, especially for a coddled kid like me. Yet sometimes I couldn’t help but imagine their evening meal, taken under a weak bulb, a severe, empty-feeling table. Even now, as she dragged me forth, I should have been in a full-on panic, but a part of me wondered: What did the Crokers eat? And who was cooking it? I felt a sadness thinking about their probably cold dinners; I pictured a bologna sandwich, something I liked, but this one was crude and hastily put together, a tongue of pinkish meat flaring out from the white bread, like a dead animal’s. I had shown my mother how to cut off the crusts like Gregory Fluss’s mom did, my sandwiches now even more perfectly edged and square than his, for this was the way my mother liked things, too.


Katie Croker stopped us short. Her broad, curving forehead loomed bright, like the sheer face of an unscalable granite peak. And yet she no longer appeared as angry with me. She released my arm. Maybe she was done with the tormenting, done with our dirty little rituals, done, at last, with finding me so abjectly intolerable.


“You know any curse words?” she asked.


I nodded. Along with our ready currency of racial and ethnic slurs, I’d recently picked up some foul new terms from the gang, bathroom stuff, sexual stuff, all rankly misogynistic and homophobic, and none of which I understood.


“Let’s see.”


I let out an exhilarating string of fucks and shits and faggots and dykes and assholes and pussies and tit-lickers and cocksuckers, epithets that were clearly impressive and deeply pleased her.


“Okay, call for her.”


I didn’t know what she was asking. “Call who . . . ?”


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