In computer engineering, an edge case occurs when someone is writing code and accidentally misses something small, but crucial, that eludes bug-testing. YZ Chin’s new novel, Edge Case, centers around a young Malaysian woman named Edwina who works at a start-up in Manhattan and is in charge of investigating edge cases. But when her husband, Marlin, suddenly disappears, her focus changes from artificial intelligence coding to figuring out what happened to her marriage. She and Marlin had had rough patches over the years, but nothing that would cause him to leave without a trace, apart from taking a suitcase and their robotic pet cat. Or was there something Edwina had missed that was in front of her the whole time?
Marlin’s disappearance comes within months of their work visas expiring. Both were waiting for the right moment to ask their employers to sponsor them for green cards. This pressure to extend their visas, with the hope of obtaining permanent residency, is at the heart of Edwina and Marlin’s stories.

In her search for Marlin’s whereabouts, she reflects back on their marriage, her contentious relationship with her mother, and why she moved to the United States. After Edwina arrived in the US a decade earlier to attend university and learned she could make friends and fit in through humor, her start-up—which is developing a robot that tells jokes—turns out to be a toxic environment for women. There’s also a particularly annoying colleague who pushes his dreadful unpublished novel on Edwina and asks regularly for her feedback all while boasting how wonderful it is.
One of the appeals of moving to the United States was to free herself from the unrelenting harassment at the hands of her mother, who is convinced Edwina did something to bring shame on her family in a previous life. According to her mother, Edwina in her present incarnation was reborn as a plain, plump, and defiant daughter.
In that supposed past life of mine, I possessed great beauty but acted rashly and dishonorably. As punishment, I am doomed in my present life to be homely. For most of my life my mother has urged me to not “eat like a pig,” later amended to be “like an American” after I escaped to New York. She herself was svelte and youthful, and she relished nothing more than to be mistaken for my sister.
A mother’s “concern” for her daughter is not culturally specific to Malaysia, but Edwina has faith that people in the US are more accepting of body size. Because of this distance from her mother and because she and Marlin have stable careers in New York, Edwina will do anything to apply for a green card.
As Edwina continues her search for Marlin, she realizes his optimism about their life in New York changed after his father died in Malaysia. The couple flies back for the funeral, but Marlin is never the same again. On top of missing his father, Marlin is detained for some hours at JFK airport on their return. His dark skin—he’s half Indian, half Chinese—and his foreign passport from a Muslim country do not bode well in 2018 when the pair tries to re-enter the US after the funeral. As a Chinese Malaysian, Edwina can better slip through the grasp of Homeland Security’s racial profiling because her skin is light. Sometimes she imagines what it would be like to return to Malaysia.
But even if I were to return to Malaysia, it wasn’t like I could slip back into my previous identity like it was a pair of comfortably worn shoes. I had changed, and so had the country. I’d have to discover anew just who I was, though a few traits of this ghost person could already be divined: a loser who couldn’t cut it overseas; a banana who uncritically idolized the West, yellow only on the outside; a pretender who adopted a fake American accent. If I were an expat, then there wouldn’t be a problem. My time away would have been for the perfectly justifiable mission of “finding” myself. But I am not an expat. I am an immigrant.
Chin’s background, apart from writing, is also in software engineering, a field in the US that depends to no small extent on immigrants, the bulk of which are from Asia. Edge Case often reads like a psychological thriller infused with humor, which Chin balances with great skill.
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