When Lidia, a blocked Latinx artist in her sixties, goes on a group
tour of Namyan, a fictional Southeast Asian country reopened to the
world after a long dictatorship, she gets much more than the
vacation she thinks she's signed on for. Against a backdrop of
pagodas and enigmatic customs, she and the disparate crew of
eighteen Americans on the tour encounter one adventure after
another-experiences that challenge their assumptions about their
host country's placid surface of beautiful pagodas and wandering
Buddhist monks. Along the way, Lidia finds companionship and sexual
pleasure with Haynes, a Black man seeking adventure-even danger-in
Namyan. On a nighttime excursion among mysterious ancient
buildings, they watch the nighttime sky. Lidia remarks that the
stars look upside down - a metaphor for Namyan as a foreign place
and for her. She enjoys being with Haynes but is conflicted. The
final chapter reveals a secret, the source of her conflict, and her
steps towards a new freedom. An Upside-Down Sky's cast of
characters, including their Namyanese guide, mirrors America:
straight, gay, gender-fluid, black, brown, white, progressive,
conservative, artistic, repressed, old, young. Some of them accept
Nanyam's charming facade at face value, while others seek to
understand the country's brutal repression by the military and
ongoing ethnic conflicts. And most, resistant as they might be to
change, are transformed by their time there.
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