Mixed race identity and The Ministry of Time

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.

Over the winter holidays, I finally had a chance to read The Ministry of Time, the debut novel by Cambodian-British writer Kaliana Bradley. The key word here is “finally.” Bradley’s novel was published May 7, 2024 and by June, I had friends asking to meet up with me over coffee so they could shake my shoulders and tell me I just had to read this book. 

My friend Sarah Beth was the first: “RG,” she said, “this book is all over BookTok. How have you not heard of it?”

I’d taken a three-month break from TikTok, feeling exhausted by the break-neck speed of trends on the app. I always felt guilty about reading the books I wanted when others were trending, or felt guilty when the trendy books I read were suddenly surpassed by new trends. I couldn’t keep up and I was desperate to find a way to preserve the joy I’d found in reading as a child.

When I asked what The Ministry of Time was about, no one could quite tell me, but the list of hand-delivered, personal recommendations was growing exponentially, so I knew I needed to get my hands on a copy.  

There seem to be moments when I have a precognition that a book will change my life. (I felt this way about Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow from the use of the word espied in the opening line.) I wouldn’t say I knew that right away about The Ministry of Time—but I did know it was one I needed to pay attention to. I received it on loan as an ebook through my local library at a busy time. I tried to read the first chapter at the hair salon, but those first few sacred moments with the page where the reader and the artwork become necessarily bonded were just too fragile to subject to the Top 40 Hits and the deafening blast of hair dryers straight at my ear canal. I shut off my ebook, and eventually my hold lapsed. 

I ended up getting back into an ever-growing hold list three times before going in to borrow a surprisingly available physical copy, and as soon as I passed the ten page line, that’s when I knew that Bradley’s debut novel would change my life. 

Hailed as an exuberantly cross-genre work, The Ministry of Time follows an unnamed English civil servant in the near-future as she is tasked with the duty of helping expat Graham Gore, a temporally displaced polar explorer, acclimate to modern England.

“As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machines,’ ‘Spotify,’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire,’” the blurb reads. “But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.”

Bradley’s work accomplishes so much in its few hundred pages. Part romance, part spy thriller, part workplace comedy, it manages to upend expectations of genre fiction and weave together anticipated tropes. Beyond this, I found the work to be delightfully relevant in its diverse representation and questions of diversity across history. Polar explorer Graham Gore blushes at the mention of homosexuality, but admits that men in the arctic take what companionship they can get. Another expat from Victorian England embraces the concept of lesbianism, a term that her lifetime had just predated. And I would even argue that the core cast of characters, two men and two women, begin to form a sort of polycule in the eyes of a perceptive reader.

Maintaining such close quarters with her expat, the narrator begins to fall in love with Graham Gore. Like the author, the narrator is also a British-Cambodian woman. As an emerging Asian American writer who constantly grapples with the implications of my own skin complexion coupled with personal familial strife, I couldn’t help but wonder if Bradley’s novel was written especially for me. The narrator’s sister is an author who writes about her experience as a mixed race person of Asian descent, discussing aspects of trauma experienced by her parents and grandparents and how it affects her generations later.

 The narrator, however, takes issue with this, criticizing her sister for marketing off of her “Asianness” instead or airing out what she feels is personal information for their mother, or perpetuating the commodification of racial trauma. The sister defends her work, saying it is her story to tell, too. There were some emotional internal monologues where the narrator grapples with not feeling Cambodian enough, or being categorized with “other Asians” like Chinese because of someone else’s ignorance of Cambodian culture..

Meanwhile, the narrator faces internal struggles as she validates her Cambodian heritage to Gore, a product of Imperial England. Even as she does so, the narrator grapples with questions of being white-passing, racial privilege, and imposter syndrome.  I was enamored by the way Bradley could combine such intense yearning with such prevalent questions in the BIPOC community, how she could so masterfully intertwine the obscure past with futures both distant and not-so-distant, all the while with such a relevant voice and message for today.