 Asian American literary scholar Ruth Hsu argues that the images of the novel "decenter[s] the dominant Anglo-Euro-American narratives about Los Angeles, the ones that empower and maintain the dominant image of white and Western superiority.And the novel does so by appropriating and redeploying the hegemonic tropes of cartography and geography in ways that map Western colonialism and the buried sites (longitude and latitude figured in the parole of history) of prehistoric rivers, flora, and fauna, and 'native' resistance as well as the ongoing transgressions of African Americans, Asian migrants, Latino/as, just to name a few of the other who have and are inhabiting the geography—in the deep sense—of Los Angeles.