Light from Uncommon Stars

In this section, the Tran family’s discovery in relation to the motif of food plays into the theme of The Inevitability of Change and Transition. The Trans have been replicating seemingly perfect donuts, yet their customers continue to dwindle. Lan theorizes in Chapter 16 that “humans suffered a ‘taster fatigue.’ It was a curious defect. A favorable food source is a favorable food source, is it not? If one enjoyed a food today—why should one not enjoy the same food tomorrow?” (151). Lan’s inability to understand the nuances of human food is similar to her inability to appreciate music. Lan approaches both subjects with a utilitarian perspective that misses their real purpose, operating on her initial assumption that humans are simple, even backward. Aunty Floresta and Edwin’s experiments with food, however, make increasingly clear that the duplicated donuts don’t attract customers because they lack a certain amount of variety. Like the music of Tamiko Grohl, they are “technically near flawless” (16) but devoid of originality and humanity. Change and transition, including flaws and inconsistencies, are critical to life.

Katrina’s music, in contrast to Tamiko’s, is born from her pain and longing for safety. As Lucy Matía recalls her grandfather saying, “great music is all about weakness, uncertainty, mortality” (90). After being treated as a normal person during her shopping trip with Shizuka, Katrina is overwhelmed with the pain of her own humanity:

Why was she born this way, a human being? Why did being human hurt so much? Why couldn’t she have been different, without a soul, without worth? Why couldn’t she have been the thing her parents might have wanted? Why couldn’t anyone have treated her this way before? (201).

Katrina’s difference, her transgender identity, makes her not “the thing her parents might have wanted” (201), but the implication is that what her parents wanted was a perfect but soulless donut. Katrina’s relationship to the theme of Identity and the Struggle for Self-Acceptance is what fills her music with life, allowing her to touch her audience in ways no one else can.

The musical showcase, which is the first of Katrina’s two major performances in the book, establishes a point of contrast for the latter performance. Unlike her defiant performance of the Bartók piece in the climax, which emphasizes unapologetic self-acceptance, her performance at the showcase gives comfort and security to her audience. The piece she plays is from Axxiom, a universe-generating game, and through her violin, she builds worlds for her audience:

To let there be light, let there be colors, then calculus and molecules and starlit vistas, let there be home after home after home where no one yelled and no one was beaten. You can do this, Katrina’s song seemed to tell them. This is your universe. Your creation. Please don’t be afraid. Let’s not be afraid anymore (213).

In spite of her unsteady start, Katrina reaches her audience on a deep emotional level, creating a place for each of them where they will have what she never had: safety, comfort, and love. This scene is among the most powerful demonstrations of The Transformative Power of Music. After the show, people approach Katrina with tears in their eyes, wanting “to talk about what they felt when Katrina played, the pain in their lives, and how they felt no one had spoken to them like that before” (214). When the video of her performance spreads online, she receives comments like “I couldn’t stop crying” and “It was like someone finally heard me” (217). Tamiko, who came to the showcase to compare Katrina’s skill to her own, realizes that her intense training could never let her achieve what Katrina did: “Katrina Nguyen, someone who could not perform a proper ricochet […] had played some sort of video game music. And she created worlds” (216). Shizuka reflects that when she used to play, it never changed anything, but Katrina’s music would stay with people.

In this section, we also finally get an explanation for the Endplague, as well as a flashback revealing how Lan escaped from the empire with her family, another emotional scene that explores The Struggles of Refugees and Outsiders. Lan explains that once a civilization advances to a certain point, it begins to stagnate: “And that will be your death sentence. For in that equation, there will be no forever, no eternity. Nothing. And this collapse, and all its attendant despair, is the Endplague” (188). Shizuka is puzzled by this explanation, seeing it as no different than someone realizing their own mortality. Without knowing it, Shizuka has intuitively grasped the cure for the Endplague: “If the Endplague was a type of despair,” she thinks, “then it was less an affliction of the mind than of the heart. And for afflictions of the heart, did they not have anything like poetry, music, or even sappy movies with star-crossed lovers?” (189). Lan has so far viewed such things as primitive and unnecessary. However, after her breakup and reconciliation with Shizuka, Lan develops a more open mind. She makes an effort to listen to Shizuka’s talk about music, and she allows herself to appreciate the simple pleasure of eggplant parmigiana at Olive Garden. This shift is Lan’s first step toward her epiphany that Shizuka’s music is the antidote to the Endplague.