Kat Tang's sleek debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, takes aim at the dehumanization of gig workers through a superb story about genuine connections. Here, an unnamed narrator works for Rental Stranger, an app through which anyone can hire him to play a role--proposing boyfriend, college professor, wing man. Only a few self-imposed rules guide the narrator: he won't do anything illegal, and he won't do anything more intimate than hug. Yet his long-term role as father to Lily, a whip-smart nine-year-old unafraid to ask hard questions, might break his most important rule: don't get attached. Through the narrator's floundering attempts to avoid attachments, Tang shrewdly explores how relationships flourish.

Tang's narrator sees Lily every Thursday. His scripted job as a truck driver keeps him on the road, away from his family. In reality, he lives alone, works diligently to maintain his five-star rating by perfectly pretending to be someone he's not, and goes to bed having communicated with no one except clients. Once a week, he dotes over his fake daughter, encouraging her fleeting hobbies, nurturing her fastidious drive to learn, and delicately maintaining the charade. Mari, Lily's mother, hasn't told Lily that she pays the narrator to play the role of her father. Having a seemingly intact family unit is important to Mari, especially when she's otherwise overburdened by keeping her boss happy so as not to lose the little income her position pays. Lily, however, starts noticing discrepancies, and the narrator must work harder to evade her questions, must be perfect.

The narrator's compulsive perfectionism--down to a scheduled morning bowel movement ("fouling up someone else's bathroom destroyed the illusion of a perfect husband, boyfriend, in-law, what have you")--mirrors his deceased mother's fastidiousness. He practices "a subtle wink and mischievous smile" a hundred times in preparation to meet one client. Similarly, his mother was an aspiring actress so obsessed with her craft that the image he remembers of her isn't her actual face but her headshot. Her workaholism spilled into emotional unavailability: "If I comfort you when you're upset, you'll just be upset more often to seek comfort," she once explained, and so the narrator learned to hide negative emotions. Even in death, she holds sway over him. He wants to atone for spewing "hateful vitriol" at her and for bringing home "the stench of sex" as a teenager when his mother thought the act vile. As a Rental Stranger, he wants to "rebalance the cosmic scales by making happy in equal measure to where [he] made hurt."

Guaranteeing happiness, however, comes at a cost--one Tang dexterously shows her narrator acknowledging without having him mine its depth. His phone's photo reel contains zero pictures; his contact list is empty. His studio, which no one ever visits, primarily serves as storage for his job's required wardrobe pieces; takeout menus paper the windows ("efficiently ensuring my privacy and also expediting the process of choosing what to eat") and his kitchenette has two burners he uses only for boiling water. The narrator even treats himself as a purchasable good, evaluating his reflection "as one would a product" and wondering if "it" needs a shave rather than "do I" need to shave. At one point, so unfamiliar with himself, he looks up to smile at someone only to realize it's his own face in a mirror.

Tang thus presents a man so committed to connecting with no one--not even himself--that his clear affection for Lily soars with emotional power. Tang zeroes in on the care that comes with authentic love. The narrator, after noticing Lily's unraveling clothes, watches half a dozen videos on fixing loose threads. He buys her a new winter coat so her wrists won't be exposed to chafing winds. When a boy teases Lily about her nose, the narrator jumps to console her: "I say your nose is perfect, and do you believe some boy in your class or do you believe your dad?" Often, Mari arrives home past the narrator's paid end time, yet he won't replace her with a better-paying client. Accepting Mari's overtime pay doesn't sit right with him either; that money would be better spent, he thinks, on replacing Lily's worn-out skirts.

Amid the wit and humor of the first-person voice is a brilliant condemnation of commodity culture and a shrewd pronouncement that being lonely while surrounded by others is all too common. "Most people didn't realize [what] they truly wanted when they hired me--a nonjudgmental emotion receptacle: part therapist, part priest, part garbage bin," the narrator shares, suggesting that his clients' openness is rarely witnessed by their real contacts. Tang also cleverly weaves in society's ignorance and stereotypes surrounding Asian American individuals. The narrator never directly states his identity (his mother has a Chinese surname; his biological father was white) and he accepts Japanese, Korean, and even simply "Asian" roles freely. He is told by multiple people that he's " 'actually good looking,' the 'actually' undercutting the compliment as though it were an achievement for someone of [his] genetic makeup to be attractive." Tang blends together comedy and tragedy to portray an undeniably sincere man on a fool's errand to live life alone, creating a resonant and heartfelt tale about what's behind--and the necessity for--positive, meaningful relationships. --Samantha Zaboski

Kat Tang (photo: Colleen O'Connell Smyth)

Kat Tang is a graduate of Columbia's MFA program, where she taught as an Undergraduate Writing Fellow. Born in China, relocated to Japan, and raised in California, she is fascinated by how we make and fake human connection in a technologically evolving world. Her short stories and graphic narratives have appeared in Electric Literature, The Margins, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She lives in St. Louis, Mo. Five-Star Stranger (Scribner, August 6, 2024), Tang's debut novel, follows a professional Rental Stranger resolutely devoted to his perfect rating but whose long-term gig as a young girl's fake father is in jeopardy.

What made you decide to keep the narrator of Five Star Stranger unnamed?

Name and identity--especially for someone like me who tried on various names after immigrating to the United States--are closely tied together; for a narrator who is both unknowable to himself for a large portion of the book and a mystery to the audience, it made sense to me that he would remain unnamed.

Was it also a significant choice that he fills roles for other Asian identities beyond his own?

Asians in America are often mistaken for one another, so why not use this to his advantage? Make money from the ignorance of others?

The narrator is obsessed with maintaining his five-star rating, claiming it can make or break his profile, but it also seems to have slipped into his personal sense of worth. 

Yes. I think our society is obsessed with rankings. We (by which I mean, I) can't even choose a restaurant to eat at without checking its reviews. It seemed natural that on an app where people are being ranked and reviewed, this would seep into his sense of self-worth.

It's because of his fraught relationship with his deceased mother that the narrator endeavors to succeed at this job. How did you find ways to instill in your narrator such an authentic portrayal of guilt and emotional strain? 

I think guilt can be a powerful motivator, especially for people who are very conscientious. It also can be a very selfish emotion--thinking that your guilt matters or makes a difference. I drew on both of these to flesh out the narrator's emotional tension.

The narrator's arrangement to be Lily's fake father is his only long-term assignment. But because he otherwise spends his time alone, this also makes it his only relationship, right?

Yes, and that isolation is self-imposed as part of his atonement for his relationship with his mother. He's afraid of making connections because he's afraid of hurting or being hurt by other people, but he wouldn't readily admit this to himself. Instead he would say that he's too busy to maintain relationships, that any outside relationships would compromise his ability to be a perfect Rental Stranger, or that there's no point in fostering a relationship for free.

At one point, the narrator notes that sometimes his customers "conflate kindness with love," yet he seems to agree with Darlene when she describes the inability to love as "something defective in you that you're not capable of kindness." Why, then, does he work so hard to keep kindness and love compartmentalized? 

The former, what the narrator performs, is a pretend kindness. It's like the "let me know if you need anything" when you know that the other person isn't going to take you up on the offer--a performance, an act. I think what Darlene is talking about, however, is a true kindness--a care that extends beyond the self. A kindness that bridges the self to others. He keeps this difference in mind because he's afraid of the latter, afraid to tether himself to another--to love.

Lily, the narrator's fake daughter, doesn't know he is not her real dad. What was the challenge in creating a bond between two characters based on a lie?

The difficulty was balancing the lie with the true affection that the narrator has for Lily. Even though he is paid to act like a perfect father, his feelings for Lily urge him to act in imperfect ways: being rude to Lily's friend Piri, for example. This blurring of the lines of what makes a relationship "genuine"--affection? official title? thoughts? actions?--is something I hope readers will be left questioning.

There are such beautiful details marking his love for Lily, such as when he realizes her exposed wrists would chafe in the winter air. How did such vivid images come to you?

Some time ago I began to associate the act of noticing with love. When writing from the perspective of someone who really cares about someone else (that second type of "kindness"), I try to think about what they might see and what small details they would pay attention to that no one else, not even the person they care about, notices.   

Are there any books that inspired your novel? 

I was inspired by the article in the Atlantic, "How to Hire Fake Friends and Family," by Roc Morin back in 2017, and wrote a very early rough draft then. By the time I was ready to write this version in 2021, I had a couple books rattling around in my head: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oë, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, among many others. 

What are you working on next? 

I'm actually quite far into the first draft of a novel about a woman from the Bay Area who runs away from her problems by traveling to Japan, where she befriends a mysterious, enchanting woman. When her new friend goes north to visit family, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami strikes--cutting off all contact. In an effort to find her new friend, the protagonist travels to Tohoku to search among the destruction. It's been one hell of a ride researching and writing it so far. --Samantha Zaboski