2018 international women's day.

March 8, 2018

hye-young pyun, the hole (skyhorse, 2017)
han yujoo, the impossible fairy tale (graywolf, 2017)
patty yumi cottrell, sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney's, 2017)
samhita mukhopadhyay & kate harding, eds, nasty women (picador, 2017)
shobha rao, girls burn brighter (flatiron, 2018)
carmen maria machado, her body and other parties (graywolf, 2017)
kim fu, for today i am a boy (HMH, 2014)
jessica b. harris, my soul looks back (scribner, 2016)
rowan hisayo buchanan, harmless like you (sceptre, 2017)
ayobami adebayo, stay with me (knopf, 2017)
jenny zhang, sour heart (lenny imprint, 2017)
julie buntin, marlena (henry holt, 2017)
molly yeh, molly on the range (rodale, 2016)
yoojin grace wuertz, everything belongs to you (random house, 2017)
kamila shamsie, home fire (riverhead, 2017)
kristen kish, kristen kish cooking (clarkson potter, 2017)
kim thuy, mãn (PRH canada, 2014)
chinelo okparanta, under the udala trees (HMH, 2015)
julia turshen, small victories (chronicle, 2016)
sylvia plath, the letters of sylvia plath, vol i: 1940 - 1956 (harpers, 2017)

here's my annual stack for 2018 international women's day, and i love making these stacks so much. i love that i can populate them with predominantly women of color, that finding queer women (and, more importantly, queer WOC!!!) is not like hunting for that needle in a haystack, that i'm left thinking, ah! i should have added this title and this title and that one, too!

diversity makes my cold, little heart warm and swell, and i'm not interested in any celebration of womanhood that celebrates only white women or straight women or mainstream women. in relation, i'm not interested in feminism that excludes certain economic classes, feminism that says that we can be a part of their community only if we have the means to gain admittance into their playground. i'm not interested in feminism that only pays attention to the marginalized when they fulfill a specific need, more often than not a PR one.

and i know that i have to do better, too; i'm not trying to claim that i'm perfect or so much better off than anyone. i know i need to widen my geographic scope and read more from women all over the world. i know i need to read more from trans women. i know i need to read more from women who are not able-bodied.

that said, if you want to start reading more from women who aren't white and/or straight, here's a place to start. for full disclosure, i haven't finished every single book in this stack, and i didn't love them all equal amounts, but i stand by them. there are definitely a few books i've been pushing harder than others — like, oh my god, if you haven't read patty yumi cottrell's sorry to disrupt the peace or julie buntin's marlena or jenny zhang's sour heart yet, i highly, highly recommend you hurry up and do so. if you want to get your heart wrecked, read shobha rao's girls burn brighter and kim fu's for today i am a boy. and, if you're wanting to get into the kitchen more but are kind of intimidated, julia turshen's small victories is so freaking fabulous — and julia's so worth following on instagram and twitter because she actively boosts other women, especially WOC, using her platform to bring attention to issues and pressing concerns and needs.

should i not be spotlighting a few books over all the others? but, wow, i shamelessly admit that i'm stealing time between tasks at work to get this post up sooner than later.

so, hey, to keep this short and sweet: to all my women out there, WOC or not, queer or not, keep telling your bombass stories. keep putting your voices out there and sharing your strength. keep being the heroes of your stories.

and keep listening to the stories of your fellow women and keep supporting your communities and keep lifting up the voices of your fellow women, especially those marginalized among you.

together, may we continue to thrive.

find my stack for 2017 here and 2016 here.

2017 in books and 4500-ish words.

January 3, 2018

today, when i told you to behave, you roared angrily: I’M BEING HAVE.
today, after i took my socks off, you touched my ankles — the impressions that had been left.
today you put my hand on the impression left by your sock. my hand could circle your whole miniature ankle.
today, after you lost a tooth, you cried that you looked like a pumpkin.
today i had to stop by the post office, and you looked around and said, aghast, “this is errands?”
today, while i was changing your brother’s diaper, and putting baby powder on him, you burst into tears and begged me not to put too much salt on him.
today you were so readily impressed by me. (khong, 101-2)

let's talk 2017 and books.

i started off 2017 with rachel khong’s goodbye, vitamin (henry holt, 2017), which i read mostly while i was on the road and trying to ignore the way my heart was breaking. i drove from brooklyn to los angeles in january, leaving behind my home city to return to the city in which i was raised, the city i’d been trying for so much of my life to flee, and i left brooklyn in disappointment, my tail between my legs. new york city is a tough city, even for those who love her and find solace in her streets.

goodbye, vitamin is a novel that sneaks up on you. it’s not a book that hooks you and keeps you reading maniacally; it’s a book that crawls onto you and sinks into your skin and settles in your heart. khong’s writing is warm and funny and wise, and the premise is so totally human — 30-year-old ruth returns to her parents’ home because her father has alzheimer’s. she’s recently broken up with her fiancé. she’s in this in-between.

i tend to believe that, sometimes, books find us when we need them, and goodbye, vitamin was one such book. january kicked off 2017 brutally, and i was in a horrible place, grappling with heartache, insomnia, anxiety, the worst and most prolonged bout of suicidal depression i’ve had yet. i didn’t know what the hell i was doing with my life. i felt like i’d failed at everything, unable to find a full-time job, to make enough to make ends meet, to finish my book and find an agent and sell it. needless to say, i didn’t much feel like reading.

when i drove across the country, i had a van full of books, but goodbye, vitamin was the one i carried with me. i read it during solitary meals at momofuku ccdc (DC), xiao bao biscuit (charleston), surrey’s (new orleans), solid grindz (tucson), king’s highway (palm springs), and i read it in snatches because i couldn’t focus long enough on words, on story — everything still hurt too much. it was comforting, though, tapping into bittersweet nostalgia because goodbye, vitamin, at least to me, is steeped in nostalgia. ruth, too, is returning to los angeles, to her parents’, and, at the time i was reading the novel, i was as well.

there was a lot that i personally identified with, too — my paternal grandmother passed away from alzheimer’s the summer of 2012. i didn’t live at my parents’ at the time, but i was in school an hour away, and i’d come over on the weekends to stay with her so my parents could go to church. she’s the grandmother who raised me, who doted on me, who loved me most of all her grandchildren, and she’s the reason i’m bilingual, bicultural. maybe it’s wrong to pick favorites, but she’s the grandparent who meant the most to me.

the thing with illness, as i’ve learned, is that it brings out the great in people sometimes. i’m not trying to romanticize illness at all; as someone who lives with depression and diabetes, i am not someone who would ever sentimentalize or romanticize or put a stupid silver lining on illness. at the same time, i can’t deny that the reason i have survived this year is that the people around me have shown up and shown their goodness constantly, and i am so humbled and so grateful for all the generosity, love, and understanding i’ve received.

books are part of that, too, and i believe that writing, also, is an act of generosity, and i am grateful — always grateful — for all the writers out there who write and put their stories out there, so saps like me can read them and weep and feel known. because that’s how i felt when i was reading goodbye, vitamin, and it was the perfect first book to read in what would be a tumultuous, rocky 2017.

on my way home i stop at the grocery store and buy a head of garlic and a can of tomatoes. canned goods are forbidden, of course, but i am feeling defiant, and how is mom going to find out, anyway?
mom’s thrown everything out but a glass baking dish. she claims she’s shopping for safer cookware. i spread the tomatoes on the baking dish, with salt and oil, brown sugar, slices of garlic, and ancient dried oregano from a sticky plastic shaker.
while the tomatoes are roasting, i rinse the tomato can out and boil the water in the can itself. i cook the pasta in batches in the small can. i toast the almond from the pantry and blend them with the garlic and the tomatoes and the herbs. suddenly there is pasta and there is sauce and the semblance of a real meal. i set the table for two. i head upstairs and knock on his door and call “dad?” (khong, 60)

there is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless — my friend amy leach writes. a ladder is no longer what i am seeking. rather, i want one day to be able to say to myself: dear friend, we have waited this out. (li, 201)

2017 is the year i finally got professional help for depression and anxiety, and it’s the year i finally started seeing a therapist and taking meds.

i’ve known for years that i needed to do this, that depression was just something i was going to have to learn live with, part of which entails getting the proper help for it. i can’t quite say what it was that kept me from getting help, though, maybe a combination of insurance and shame and fear that, once i was diagnosed, that diagnosis would follow me around everywhere and i’d never find a job, never find a partner, never be more than my depression.

which is all bullshit — one of the things i’ve realized about myself when looking back at 2017 is that i’ve never let my depression stop me. even in the worst of it, i was still trying to write; i was creating content regularly for this blog; i started a full-time job and finished my book and have posted regularly and thoughtfully on instagram. there is no doubt about it; i am more than my depression.

and that’s not to make myself sound better than other people who live with depression and can’t get out of bed, can barely muster up the energy to eat something, take a shower, sit up straight. i’ve been there, too. i still have days when i’m so low-energy, i go straight home to bed and sleep ten hours. i have really shitty days when my brain fog is so bad, all i can do is have a cry in the bathroom and chug a stupid amount of coffee and chat with my coworkers until i’m powered enough to get through the rest of the day.

what meryl streep said at the 2017 golden globes has stuck with me all year, though — “take your broken heart and turn it into art.” and maybe that’s where my sense of purpose comes from, that, yes, i’ve been nursing a broken heart all year, and i’ve been worried and stressed about my broken brain, but, hey, i’m still here, and, somehow, i’ve made it through. if i can, so can you.

what does this have to do with yiyun li’s dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017)? dear friend is li’s memoir about her experience living with suicidal depression, and li herself has survived two suicide attempts. this book was published at such a timely moment for me, but i don’t really want to get into it all here again, but i wrote a post dedicated to it if you’d like to check that out. the link is here.

i took rebecca solnit’s the mother of all questions (haymarket, 2017) to the bay area as a talisman of sorts the weekend of my brother’s wedding. i’m an outlier in my family in that i don’t want kids, have never wanted kids, still don’t want kids, and i like that we’re finally at a point in time where women can say they don’t want children, and, no, it’s not selfishness, it’s not self-absorption, it’s not some kind of malfunctioning on our ends. it doesn’t mean we’re defective or faulty or not fully-formed or incomplete or whatever just because we choose not to spawn.

i love the way solnit writes about all this, partly because she does it with so much more generosity than i can. she writes about womanhood, about being a woman in this world, with such intelligence and poise, and i find myself blocking off passage after passage because i’m agreeing so hard, i feel like i’m nodding my head off.

such questions [why don’t you have children?] seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species. at their heart these questions are not questions but assertions that we who fancy ourselves individual, charting our own courses, are wrong. brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation. (4)

some people want kids but don’t have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don’t want kids, and that’s not anyone’s business either. just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked. the interviewer’s question to me was indecent because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. more fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live. (5)

our humanity is made out of stories or, in the absence of words and narratives, out of imagination: that which i did not literally feel, because it happened to you and not to me, i can imagine as though it were me, or care about it though it was not me. thus we are connected, thus we are not separate. those stories can be killed into silence, and the voices that might breed empathy silenced, discredited, censored, rendered unspeakable, unbearable. discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believe the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing. (36)

also, LOL, it’s only when i was collecting quotes for this post that i realized that i didn’t actually finish reading this. i got halfway through and apparently was emotionally wiped.

here’s something random: i read patty yumi cottrell’s sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney’s, 2017) because i saw a photo of her and was like, whaaat, she cute.

i’d been seeing the book around social media and had been intrigued by the title and cover, but i typically avoid books about people who have lost someone to suicide. theirs is not a narrative i’m interested in, much like i’m not interested in the narratives of adoptive parents — i’d rather hear from the suicidal and from those who were adopted, and that put me in a bit of a quandry because sorry to disrupt the peace is told by helen, a korean-american adoptee who learns about her adoptive brother’s death by suicide and returns to their adoptive parents’ home, assigning herself the mission to learn why he died.

and, so, it’s a book that sat in the back of my brain as something i’d pick up and flip through the next time i was in a bookstore, but, then, there was the photo thing, and, then, i was in mexico after my brother’s wedding, and, somewhere in between eating all the mangoes i could find and rereading the handmaid’s tale, i was like, omg must. find. the. cottrell. NOW.

so, once i was back stateside in SF, i visited two bookstores to find it.

and then i devoured it.

and abso-freaking-lutely loved it.

it isn’t often that i come across writers who make me think, holy shit, you’re doing something really cool with narrative and voice here, but that’s how i felt as i read sorry to disrupt the peace. helen’s narrative voice is unique and individual, and she’s a little weird (to put it one way) and kind of abrasive, though not intentionally, because she’s clueless and has no sense of self-awareness, occupying her own headspace without the ability to read other people and situations external to her.

some have read sorry to disrupt the peace and tried to diagnose helen, but i don’t know — when i read it, i didn’t get the sense that cottrell is trying to make any kind of statement about mental illness. i don’t think that was the point, which might ask the question, then what was the point? which in turn makes me ask, do books have to have a point?

because why do we read? what are we looking for when we read? do we look at authors to make statements, deliver commentary? and should we even be making armchair diagnoses, anyway, because i hate those because armchair diagnoses are often people making snap judgments about mental illness and staying within their misguided prejudices and gross stereotypes — and, omg, does it make a difference either way, whether helen is mentally ill or mentally stable? does it make her any less credible a narrator? does her experience become any less authentic and fully-lived?

and, wow, that was a tangent, but sometimes it peeves me when we get lost in these roundabout discussions about a character’s (usually a woman’s) likability or credibility or knowability, particularly when it comes to books like sorry to disrupt the peace because, holy shit, this book is phenomenal. it’s raw and dark and funny, and helen is earnest and kinda really messed up and sad and angry, and the novel will make you laugh and cry and think about what it means to be known, to know yourself, to exist in a world that is at odds with you, that doesn’t seem to have a place for you even though you try — oh, you try, but, sometimes, trying isn’t good enough.

you try, but, sometimes, the loss you carry is not just your own.

a lot of people kill themselves, i said, but it seems like most of them do it when they’re older, like after they’ve reached middle age. we try everything we can to preserve ourselves and yet eventually something catches up with us, something dreadful creeps up, and we just can’t do it anymore. then we throw our lives away, into the trash heap of suicides. (cottrell, 70)

do what you want is a zine from the UK that features writing about mental health and nothing else. i learned of it because esmé weijun wang (author of the fabulous the border of paradise [unnamed, 2016]) contributed an essay to it, and i’m glad i did — i’m all for more candid writing about mental health by people who live with mental illness.

the significant traumas in my life have passed, and yet my physiological and psychological responses to them have only begun to truly interfere with my life this year. i’m used to becoming isolated by my mental health, and by people’s reactions to it: the depression and psychosis that i live with carry a great deal of stigma. but when it comes to trauma, and discussing the symptoms and triggers of my post-traumatic responses, the isolation is unlike any i’ve ever felt. and that’s without even going into the details of the actual traumatic events that scarred me, which even the saintliest soul likely finds hard to stomach. trauma, and in particular sexual trauma, has profoundly isolating effects in western culture.
we find it difficult to talk about trauma. it is difficult to be a human and to learn about the brutality that other humans are forced to endure.
[…]
i try not to be angry when others turn away. one way of coping with this social blanket of silence is a sort of absurd humour in which i laugh and don’t expect anyone else to laugh. i did it when, in a group of writers who decided to go around the circle and share the hilarious stories of losing their virginity, i said, “i was raped.” i may have laughed, because i’d ruined the game — at least for that moment. i can’t say there wasn’t a bit of bitterness to my actions. i did it again when, in that hospital in new orleans, with my partner and a doctor leaning in to catch my every word, and pneumonia in my chest, i blurted it out — “rape” — and fell about laughing.
[…]
[…] sometimes the only way we can bear to react is by filling the silence with laughter, even if we’re laughing alone. (esmé weijun wang, “laughing about pneumonia,” 70-2)

however, just because medication which increases the levels of neurotransmitters in our brains can help relieve our symptoms, it doesn’t mean that all mental illness is necessarily caused by a lack of these chemicals in the first place. the onset of mental illness is more complex, and often involves an interaction of lifestyle, environmental and biological factors. to put it simply: taking paracetamol helps to relieve the symptoms of a headache, but that doesn’t mean the headache was caused by a lack of paracetamol! (becky appleton, “sweeten the pill,” 105)

“i feel” does not have to mean “i am.” (eleanor morgan, “plastic minds,” 145)

i have really strong emotional sentiments when it comes to bodies.

no one’s going to be surprised when i say hunger (harpers, 2017) is one doozy of a book. roxane gay writes candidly about her trauma and her body, about the ways people see her body and judge her by it. she writes about girlhood and the ways boys violently took it away, and she writes about the gang rape that led her to eat and eat and eat, to hide herself in a body no one could hurt again.

i think about bodies often; i’d say i think about bodies every day. i think about my body, about the bodies of people i see around me, and i think about how something so common to everyone is weaponized to destroy so many of us and shred any sense of self we may have. there’s little that angers me more than a woman putting a girl (or woman) down for her body, calling her fat, criticizing her looks, commenting on what she’s eating, and, all along, basically teaching her that her value and self-worth are directly tied to her body, that she is only as worthy a human as her dress size.

and don’t even get me started on men doing that shit to women.

i’m going to put this in caps because it should be: YOUR BODY DOES NOT DETERMINE YOUR SELF-WORTH. YOUR LOOKS DO NOT DETERMINE YOUR SELF-WORTH. PEOPLE WHO MAKE YOU FEEL OTHERWISE ARE SHITTY.

it doesn’t matter what has brought you to the body you inhabit. it could be trauma; it could be illness; it could be choice, the result of decisions you’ve made for whatever reason. it could be genetics, and it could be lifestyle, and it could be financial situations. it could be a whole lot of things, none of which gives anyone any right to shame you for your body.

one of the more valuable things i’ve learned over 2017 is that i can’t control how other people feel about me but i can control how i let them make me feel about myself. i can let someone make me feel like shit, like i’m stupid or ugly or unworthy to be seen because i’m not thin, or i can say, screw that. i’m fine the way i am, and i’m going to live my life. that’s power, i think, that’s where power lies, so don’t give that power to people who demean you and put you down and tear you to pieces (then have the audacity to turn around and wonder what your problem is, why you have no confidence or self-esteem or sense of identity). people will think what they do, and, yes, sometimes, they’ll think really ugly things, but you can’t control that, so don’t waste your life — the one life you have — trying to please people who will never be happy for you, for whom you will never be good enough because you’ll never be thin enough because, when people are stuck in that mentality, no size is small enough to be good enough.

celeste ng’s debut, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014), was my favorite book of 2014, and i’m almost annoyed that it only took her three years to publish her sophomore novel. it took me nine years to write one book and god knows how long it’ll take me to get that one published, and, already, celeste ng has published two stellar, phenomenal books.

because little fires everywhere (penguin press, 2017) is just as good as her debut. it’s hard for me to summarize because i’m shitty with book summaries, but the novel is set in shaker heights, ohio, which is an actual place, the city, actually, where ng grew up. there’s a suburban family with a nosy mother who writes for the local newspaper and fancies herself an investigative journalist; there’s a single mother who moves into town with her daughter and cleans house for said suburban family. the mother doesn’t disclose much (if anything at all) about her daughter’s father, and her presence goes against everything shaker heights stands for and turns things upside down.

i love how ng writes about suburban america, and i love the way she writes about race. she writes about it by not obsessing over it, by acknowledging that race is a thing, that we do not and cannot live in a colorblind world, that people of color are more than the color of their skin.

(i hate this notion of colorblindness; when someone claims, oh, i’m colorblind; i don’t see color; i see people, my brain interprets that as, oh, i see everything through the filter of whiteness, so i think all cultures should just be white and conform to white POVs and standards and expectations and wants and boringness. my brain also interprets that as, hi, i’m totally blind to my own privilege as a white or white-passing or i-think-i’m-white person.)

i love how she does all this by writing people because i think that’s what ng does so well — write people, people who are fleshed out and alive, who exist and want and hurt. she writes with empathy. she writes people i can’t help but care about, and she also writes people i totally loathe, but, basically, the point kind of is — you don’t passively read an ng book.

i’d say i have this massive giant soft spot for jenny zhang, but that sounds gentler than it actually is because, whenever i see her book or anything she’s written, my immediate impulse is to yell, HI JENNY ILU.

i’ve written about jenny before and how i came across her (and esmé’s) writing and how it was pretty damn formative for me. i’d grown up reading just dead white people, mostly dead white men, and i don’t think i’ll ever forget that first HOLY SHIT! moment when i came across their blog, fashion for writers, and realized that, hey, there are asian-americans out there writing things and they’re writing things that are humming with life and want and grossness and displacement and everything.

sour heart (random house, 2017) reflects all this.

i’ve read the criticism that all the stories in the collection read the same, like it’s the same narrator over and over again. i can see where that’s coming from, but, for me, i kind of liked that — i thought it kind of made the point that, yes, maybe, on the surface, we might seem the same — immigrant children with our immigrant parents and our immigrant lives. maybe we might all seem to have lived the same story, but, when people manage to look beneath that, they might find that we’re different, that, much like white people with whiteness, sometimes, the only thing we have in common with each other is our asianness, our Otherness.

i loved this about being in new york, realizing that there are so many different ways of being asian-american. growing up in the valley, near LA’s koreatown, i thought there were only a handful of different kinds of koreans — fobs, ktown koreans, valley azns, banana koreans, and people like me, second-generation korean-americans who were bilingual and bicultural.

getting out of this bubble and getting out of my loathed familiar zones, out of a city of life in cars and into a city of subways and walking and public transportation, i had to reassess asian-americanness. the best thing moving to new york did for me was open up my mind and make me at least a little less judgmental and more accepting. i don’t believe there is one way to be asian-american; i believe there are as many ways to be asian-american as there are asian-americans; and i don’t subscribe to the notion of a “good” asian-american or a “bad” one. i believe we all individually negotiate our relationships with our ethnic heritages.

part of me wishes i could say i believed this when i was younger, too, but the truth is i didn’t. i was kind of a snoot about my koreanness, the fact that i could speak, read, write korean, the discomfort i felt at not feeling korean enough or american enough. i held it as a sort of pride that i walked this line between cultures, like that was some kind of accomplishment of my own, and, now, years later, at least, the thing i can be grateful for is that, as humans, we are growing and changing creatures, and we can always come back from bad places. we can be better people. we can be kinder, more generous, more open-minded. we can be more loving.

we just have to try.

… my absolute favorite thing, starting around the age of five, was watching discovery channel’s great chefs of the world. seeing alain passard make cassoulet, raymond bland creating cakes and confectionaries, and takashi yagihashi working acrobatics (purpose, no wasted movement, efficiency) with his mind-bending noodles — though i didn’t know their names then, i was mesmerized by the mix of global chefs and of places i could only dream of visiting. a great calm washed over me while watching hands work so confidently with what seemed to me then to be innate skill. seeing the chefs’ agility in the kitchen, the buzz, whisk, stir, and pour, and the little pots was very soothing to me. it was the only time in the day i’d be completely focused. after dinner i would run into our yard to create my own kitchen from twigs, stones, and dirt. i’d collect dried leaves by the handful and sprinkle them onto my tennis racket — my pan. pretending i was in whites, a little great chef, i would shake the tennis racket like i watched the great sauciers do. i imagined the sizzles and the smells.
as i got older, i stayed indoors and traded my tennis racket for an actual sauté pan, and leaves for vegetables and chicken breasts. home alone, i would throw whatever i could find into the pan and cook the shit out of everything, until it was basically sawdust. i was going through the process of cooking long before i had a concept of what went together or how to properly execute it. (kish, 10-1)

hilariously (idk why it’s hilariously, but let’s run with it), it’s thanks to instagram that i found kristen kish last year. i don’t watch top chef or follow it at all, so i had no idea who she was until she started popping up on my instagram explore page and i was like, heeeeeeeey, yer hella cute.

i was excited to learn that she was doing a book, but i was also a little apprehensive because i really didn’t want her to go down the celebrity chef route because, as hypocritical as this might sound, personal brands make me uncomfortable. i don’t like personal brands. i don’t like the falsity they conjure up.

when clarkson potter released the title and cover to her book in january, i started to get more apprehensive because everything about it was too celebrity chef-y for me. to be honest, i still don’t like the title and rarely say it (if you haven’t noticed yet), referring to it as the kish cookbook, and i’m not the biggest fan of the cover as it went to press (the one initially released was more striking and interesting, at least compared to this) (i think they should have gone with what they put under the dust jacket, though — imagine that fish done in foil, the letters pressed into the board in white — can you picture it?! that’s a striking visual that would have stood the hell out).

that said — i do see where the title comes from. kristen kish cooking (clarkson potter, 2017) is a very personal book; it’s one that goes into her history, her inspirations, her food; but it does so in ways that aren’t cloying or overly sentimental or false. the biographical introduction is brief, the headnotes to the point, and her personality comes through, not only in the recipes but also in the photographs, the plating, the design. everything is very clean and polished and refined, and i really liked that kish didn’t shy away from plating her food the way she would in a restaurant. does it look “accessible” to the average home cook? no. but does it have to? no.

the pleasant surprise has been that i have cooked a fair amount from this book and will likely continue to do so, and i am not someone who cooks from cookbooks all that often. i read a whole lot of them, yes, but i can count on one hand the number of books i’ve cooked from. as i was reading her book, though, i kept tabbing recipes that sounded curious to me, things i might like to try, and i loved each thing i made, so i kept going and will keep on going. kish’s food takes time, and it’s not very simple, but it’s well worth the time and work.

if anything, the kish cookbook has made me venture out of my comfort zones and want to try out new things, and it’s taught me that i can trust my instincts. i know generally what i’m doing in a kitchen, and i don’t need to worry about being able to feed the people i love and to feed them well. it used to a point of insecurity for me almost, and i’d feel so embarrassed about my awkward knife skills and my difficulty with seasoning, but, once i started letting go of that and being comfortable in what i can do and branching off from there — that’s really when cooking opened up for me, and this book came at a fitting time when i needed that boost and emotional support.

i love the way carmen maria machado writes about womanhood and queerness like they’re just totally normal parts of life — BECAUSE THEY ARE.

her body and other parties (graywolf, 2017) was kind of a strange book for me because i started off loving it intensely. like, i loved it. i loved her writing; i loved the weirdnesses; i loved how nitty-gritty and disturbing the stories could be. halfway through, though, starting with the long SVU story that should have been half the length it was, the collection started faltering. the stories had interesting ideas but didn’t quite achieve their potential, and they started feeling rushed, not quite fully-developed. i started liking the collection less and less, but the thing is, i’d started off with such an intense love for her body and other parties that, in the end, overall, i still loved the book.

i ended the year with julie buntin’s marlena (henry holt, 2017), which i’m still reading, and this, too, is a novel i’d seen around and wondered about. i admit i wasn’t initially curious because of the cover; i thought it might be a coming-of-age story; and, maybe, it really kind of is — it’s just darker and grittier and less sentimental and sweet than the cover led me to believe.

(i do judge books by their covers. i do not apologize for this.)

i heard julie buntin as part of two panels, though — the first at the brooklyn book festival with jenny zhang and the second at wordstock in portland with rachel khong and edan lepucki — and i had to read her book. buntin is smart, well-spoken, put-together, and i love how she talked about girls, the complicatedness of girls, the pain caused by addiction. in portland, she also read the opening passage from her book, and it’s one hell of an opening passage, and it’s with this that i will finally leave you. thank you, as always, for reading.

tell me what you can’t forget, and i’ll tell you who you are. i switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark. the train’s eye widens in the tunnel and there she is on the tracks, blond hair swinging. one of our old songs starts playing and i lose myself right in the middle of the cereal aisle. sometimes, late at night, when i’m fumbling with the key outside my apartment door, my eyes meet my reflection in the hallway mirror and i see her, waiting. (buntin, 3)

in another world, we might be everything.

October 11, 2017

this weekend was all about onions.

i have a history of publicly documenting all my crushes, from tony (h.o.t) to keira knightley to freja beha, and my crush on kristen kish has fared no differently. i remember hearing about her when she won top chef back in 2013, but, back then, i was going through a terrible time, dangerously unhappy in law school and trying not to think about dying all the time (and failing), and i didn't have the headspace to think beyond, oh, she's korean? that's cool, as i was dissolving in the cesspool my depression had made of my brain.

when you're trying to stay alive, the only thing you can do is focus on saving yourself.

last year, i finally watched top chef season 10, and it's the only season of top chef i've seen, and i didn't even watch it in its entirely because i only watched the episodes she was on-screen. even then, i didn't watch all of that first episode either, because, one, there were way too many contestants to keep track of and, two, i'm totally one of those people who will watch something for one person and that person only and, thus, have no interest when that person is not present. (sorry, sheldon, i liked you and your food a lot, too, but what can i say? i'm wired this way.)

i watched much of that season of top chef over and over last summer because i couldn't read much, couldn't really focus on books — or on literature, to be precise; i read a lot (and i mean, a LOT) of lucky peach — so i did the odd thing and watched a lot of television. (that's not a diss against television; i'm just not a big TV-watcher.) that's not to say i picked up a lot of new shows; my TV-watching is pretty much relegated to rewatching things, like SVU (until i have nightmares about being assaulted in my own apartment) (this is a real fear) or the x-files (until i have dreams in which i am an FBI agent shadowing mulder and scully) or the first three seasons of the gilmore girls (until all i want is to eat a damn burger) or friends (until i've reached my limit of the fatphobic, homophobic, racist jokes) (friends is a highly problematic show).

top chef, though — i've had friends think out loud that it's weird i never did watch it (or the food network either, for that matter) given how much i love food. again, though, i'm not a big TV-watcher, and it didn't help that top chef started airing a few seasons into project runway, and, by that point, i'd fatigued of the competitive reality TV thing, sick of all the contrived drama, the pettiness that was either genuine or generated for ratings (i still can't decide which is worse), the insufficient focus on the designing and clothes-making, which was the most interesting part.

(i loved season two of project runway and was peeved when daniel vosovic didn't win when chloe's collection was the same shiny prom dress over and over again.)

so, anyway, this is one long-ass introduction to i cooked from the kish cookbook this weekend!, but, yeah, so, last summer, i watched season 10. there wasn't enough cooking. there thankfully also wasn't too much stupid drama (i hear the earlier seasons were worse in the drama department). it helped me get through last summer because it made me smile and got me excited about food and cooking when i thought everything inside me was dead. i don't know why i wrote all that down, but, like i said, i've a lifelong impulse of publicly documenting my crushes.

random fact: i still haven't watched the judges' table when kish was eliminated.

okay, maybe no one needs a series of photos of onions caramelizing over 1 1/2 hours ... or maybe you do. i mean, look how pretty!

to caramelize onions properly, heat oil and butter in a sauté pan on medium heat until foaming. turn down to low heat; add sliced white onions; and cook on low for 1 1/2 hours, stirring frequently to prevent burning. your onions will go from white and opaque to soft and translucent before taking on an amber tinge that will darken as your onions shrink and caramelize. they will smell heavenly.

“i love you,” i say.
“do you love every part of me?” (machado, “eight bites,” 164)

over the weekend, i deleted instagram from my phone. i normally don't check twitter or email on weekends, anyway, and i'm not on facebook, so it's easy enough to disconnect if i want. this wasn't an attempt to reconnect with the world at-large, though, because the truth is that california compounds all my lonelinesses, so what i have mostly when i disconnect from the internet is nothing but everything in my brain.

it's not california's fault; it's more the inevitable result of returning to the place you were raised after having failed miserably in the place you consider home — and, not only that, but returning a different person — or maybe who you really were all along; you've simply learned to fit into your skin; and this you is not one the people from your past recognize, and you’re unwilling and unable to go back to that role you played before.

loneliness has been a lifelong struggle, and that, too, is maybe something inevitable because that's what happens when you don't know how to live in your skin. when you hate yourself, when you want to disappear, you make a ghost of yourself, and you can never thrive. you can never live. you can never make connections in any meaningful way, not when you can never be known because who you are has been buried away under all the self-loathing, the self-hatred, the resentment, buried so deep underneath all that crap that you don’t even know yourself, can’t even look in the mirror without feeling repulsed, without being frightened by how your reflection seems to be so ghostly, not really there.

it’s not easy to learn to forgive yourself, to accept yourself as you are, as you look, as you feel and want and hurt.

it’s not easy to demand you be seen as you are, that you be loved in the way you deserve.

it’s not easy to hope you will ever exist in the world as a whole person, not someone damaged beyond repair.

honestly, though? i don’t like hope. i’ve mentioned before (whether here or elsewhere) how much i hate hope, how i expend a considerable amount of energy trying to diminish it, to reduce it because i feel like, the more i hope, the more disappointment hurts, the more it cuts me down.

at the same time, my active attempts to diminish hope are maybe countered by my reminders to myself to live in the present. enjoy current successes. allow myself the joys of possibilities. revel in the accomplishments, big and small, and let myself hope (stupidly) that all this work is leading somewhere.

and, yet, the reminder to stay in the present is also this: stay in present hope; don’t invest in the hope of possibilities. hope in things that have a concrete, knowable foundation. that doesn’t leave me with much.

truth be told, i don’t have a whole lot of hope. part of that is that i don’t allow myself to hope in that future someday anymore; too many disappointments have taught me to avoid that. i don’t hope in things that might happen, not until there is a degree of certainty that they will, indeed, happen. i don’t write or create in the hopes that anything will come from any of this; i do it because i don’t know how to do otherwise — i do it in attempts to find meaning amidst drudgery, to find connections in loneliness.

and maybe that’s bleak, maybe that’s sad, but that’s survival. you could argue that we need hope to survive, but the truth is that, sometimes, all we can do is survive, and there’s no energy or headspace or room in that to hope. hope requires energy. hope, in and of itself, requires hope. it requires faith in something, that there is something better out there, that none of this (whatever “this” is) is for nothing, and, when you’re in that darkest, most insidious place, when you’re trying to extricate yourself from that and just get to stable again, sometimes, there is no hope, there is no faith, and there is no energy to generate either. when you’re trying your damnedest just to stay alive, staying alive in the most basic, physical way is all that matters.

so, i get through my life one task, one book, one meal at a time. i read, and i write, and i cook on the weekends when i can. i look forward to the occasional dinner with friends. i stay active on social media. i try to hold onto all the parts inside me that are still beating, even if that means stupid shit like watching a television show or listening to a song over and over again, and i try. i apply for jobs. i try to write. i think about future travels that have already been booked, to san francisco this weekend, portland next month, baltimore for thanksgiving.

i think about the present things i have to look forward to, but maybe here’s the catch: i never look past the end of this year because the future to me still does not exist. i do not exist in that future there.

the only thing i miss about summer is all the amazing corn ice cream.

in the bedroom there is a queen-sized bed, a raft in the middle of a great stone ocean. on the dresser rolls a light bulb that, if held close to the ear and agitated, would reveal the broken filament rattling in the glass. necklaces rope old wine bottles like nooses, frosted stoppers silence glass decanters. a nightstand that, when opened, reveals — shut that, please. in the bathroom, a mirror flecked with mascara from when bad leans in close, the amoeba of her breath growing and shrinking. you never live with a woman, you live inside her, i overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes. (machado, “mothers,” 53)

last week, i started reading carmen maria machado’s her body and other parties (graywolf, 2017), her debut collection of short stories that was published to huge amounts of acclaim and was, last week, short-listed for the national book award. i finished reading it on saturday night, and i’m a little of two minds about it — on one hand, i loved it; machado’s story-telling is hypnotic and astute, her prose lovely and haunting, but, on the other, i felt like my intense, burning love for the stories diminished as i read on.

i wrote huh. idk at the end of the last three stories, and i think it’s accurate to say the turning point, for me, in this collection was the longest story, “especially heinous,” in the middle, a story that took episode titles from law and order: special victims unit, wrote short episode summaries for each, and strung together an overarching story. while i loved the way that story was framed, it felt too long, spread a little too thin; i wondered how much more powerful the story would have been had machado done ten seasons, not twelve.

moving on from “especially heinous” (and going past “real women have bodies” which i liked), i wanted to love “the resident,” in which the narrator is a writer who goes to an artists’ residency in the woods, near where she want to camp as a girl scout but, ultimately, felt it lacking. i wanted something more solid from “eight bites,” a story in which the narrator gets gastric bypass surgery and finds a creature in her home, a thing without eyes and bones that is, what i presume, something symbolic of what she casts off with her surgery … but what, i’m still unsure.

and i think that’s the thing that’s left me tilting my head, that machado gives us these things that feel like they’re supposed to be symbolic but leave us wondering in what ways. i was blown away by the first story, “the husband stitch,” but i was also confused — what the hell is that green ribbon supposed to mean? i know it’s taken from another story, and is it supposed to have the same meaning as it does there? what does it mean that it seems to be a thing that other girls also have but on different parts of their bodies?

stories like machado’s remind me of a note my writing professor gave me once: i apologize for not being sharp-witted enough to understand this — and i don’t say this in any kind of diminishing way because i write stories like machado’s, stories that turn on a concept, a conceit, and get lost in the boundaries, that maybe wind around more in the liminal spaces between what is, what was, and what might be — stories that make the reader ask a lot of questions but in a maddening, what the hell?!? kind of way. editing, to me, is always a game in bringing things down from the more complex to the knowable.

oddly, though, none of this is meant to dissuade anyone from reading her body and other parties because it is an incredible collection. machado’s mind is the kind of dark, magical, cerebral place i want to occupy, and her women are the kinds of women i want to meet, complicated, weird, and present with their desires and madnesses (in ways) and bodies. maddening questions or not, these are stories worth your time.

seriously. i shit you not. read machado. let those first three stories in particular blow your freaking mind.

i’ve been baking for years as a way to deal with depression and anxiety, and, this year, i finally started making pasta. i don’t know why it took me so long to get into that; it’s the perfect act, really, for getting a handle on my anxiety when it starts running wild because pasta-making is everything i love about working with any kind of dough — you work ingredients together to make a dough; you roll it; you cut it; you shape it.

the first time i had cavatelli, it was may of this year, and it was at republique, one of my favorite restaurants, and i fell in love. there’s a springy, dense chewiness to it that i love, and cavatelli sops up flavors and pairs well with heavier, creamy flavors. that’s not to say you need a complex sauce; i tossed this cavatelli in butter, freshly-grated parmesan, onion syrup, and a raw egg yolk; and it was divine.

sometimes, the best things really are the stupidly simple ones.

i’ve been running high levels of anxiety all year, and it’s sometimes a little scary, realizing how my sense of what is a normal level of anxiety has shifted in the last twelve, eighteen months. anxiety runs under every hour of my day, whether i’m awake or asleep, whether i’m at work or at home, and it’s something i’m no longer cognizant of all the time, this constant, faithful companion of mine. it’s always there in the ways i’m always uneasy, always restless, always on this brink of feeling numb and feeling nauseated. it’s there in the ways i pick ceaselessly at the skin around my nails until my fingers reverberate with pain with such intensity i can’t sleep. it’s there in the ways i can’t sleep anyway, in the nightmares that whirl through my brain, that wake me to panic and sadness and fear.

some days are better than others. the end of the week is usually the worst, especially when i also find out on friday that kish will be at hedley and bennett for an event the weekend i'm going to portland, and this has been a stupid running joke for the last 18 months, and not one i enjoy. (/end rant.)

anyway, so, over the weekend, i stayed home, took benadryl to sleep, and cooked from the kish cookbook. i read her book non-linearly, reading the introduction backwards, hopping from section to section until i’d read it all and tabbed recipes i wanted to try. this weekend, i made the onion broth, onion syrup, and cavatelli, and i enjoyed how non-simple and slow everything was. the onion broth takes a few hours (it would also take an extra day if you were to make the chicken broth from scratch, which i normally would have, had i the energy and chicken bones). it takes 1 1/2 hours to caramelize onions properly. you have to let pasta dough rest for 30 minutes to an hour so the gluten can do its work.

sometimes, what you need to do is take the time things take.

and that’s the damn lesson of the year, isn’t it? things take time. a book can take 9 freaking years to write. it takes time for things to be considered. it takes time to build an audience. it takes time to learn to live with the shit in your brain.

it takes time to learn to live in your skin.

i called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. when she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and i let her step inside. (machado, “mothers,” 48)

i believe in a world where impossible things happen. where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. where love can outdo nature. (machado, “mothers,” 56)

when it comes to humans in general, i’m principally drawn to one thing: a striving for excellence.

it encompasses so much, i think, and it demonstrates a lot about a person because it asks, what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want, where you want? some people have no qualms sacrificing relationships, love, stability all in that race to be the best, to accomplish what they want, to get to that point of success. some people give up their health, ruining their bodies by pushing them to their limits and beyond. some people sacrifice their integrity.

others manage to balance things better, and, yes, sometimes, that comes with a price. if you have less time, less energy to devote to pursuit of your craft, your success, then maybe you won’t perfect that skill or technique as quickly as someone else. maybe you won’t advance as quickly as someone. maybe you won’t scale that ladder as nimbly.

it’s all about priorities, though, isn’t it?

so what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want?

to end on something awesome: KAZUO ISHIGURO WON THE NOBEL PRIZE.

i shit on awards all the time because, sometimes, they make really weird decisions (remember that year the pulitzer didn’t even award a prize in fiction and gave some stupid, bullshit answer in defense? or last year when the nobel went to bob dylan?), and, yeah, awards don’t ultimately mean that much in the grander scheme of things, but, damn, it’s gratifying when a deserving author wins something.

and, hey, maybe i’m biased here, but ishiguro’s damn deserving of this.

ishiguro was one of the first contemporary authors i read, and i didn’t start reading contemporary literature until 2005-ish, which is around when never let me go was first published. at the time, i didn’t think that much about the fact that he was japanese-british, that he wrote in english and not in japanese, that he was an immigrant. i forget why i picked up the book at all, but i did, and i remember that punch in the gut, the oof that came with every new revelation, the tears that started with ruth’s death and continued until the end of the book.

i still start crying when ruth completes. i still cry all the way through the end.

i read this book every year at least once, and it never stops stop sucker-punching me every time.

but then again, when i think about it, there's a sense in which that picture of us on that first day, huddled together in front of the farmhouse, isn't so incongruous after all. because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and — no matter how much we despised ourselves for it — unable quite to let each other go. (ishiguro, never let me go, 120)

i’ve read all of ishiguro’s work except for the unconsoled now, and i haven’t read that yet because it’s really long and i have a decided aversion to long books. i tend to be loathe to name people as influences, and i don’t even know that i would call ishiguro an influence on me, except that he was the first POC author i read, one of the first authors who showed me that there were people out there writing now, in this present, and getting paid to do it.

and something i just really want to say is, being able to see yourself in the world matters.

in her memoir, blood, bones, and butter (penguin, 2011), gabrielle hamilton is forthcoming about her hesitance to be placed in the group of “female chef.” she doesn’t want that label; she just wants to be a chef; she doesn’t want her gender to matter. to an extent, i see her argument, and, ten years ago, i would have agreed with her. i would have argued it really shouldn’t matter, the color of our skin, our gender, our sexuality; it should just matter that we can do the work we do, whatever that work is, and do it well. we should be able to disappear into our work.

now, though, i see how naive that argument is, how wrapped up in privilege, whether its privilege that actually exists (as it might for hamilton as a white woman) or a privilege that is imagined but desired (as it was for me as a WOC).

and i can see the desire to escape from these labels, to be seen for the work we spend so many years striving to excel in, and yet, there is also this: it matters. it is important for us to own our labels, to be women, to be people of color, to be queer, to be trans, to be whatever the hell we are because it is important to be able to see ourselves out in the world, in media, in the arts. so much begins in looking out at the world and seeing someone and her/his/their work and thinking, that person looks like me, and that person is doing this. i can do that, too.

so i’m freaking thrilled that kazuo ishiguro won the nobel. he’s an incredible, astute, thoughtful writer, and few people write first-person narrators like he does. he writes books that are just his own, that go against the bullshit that the dominant white industry demands from its writers of color, that narrative that’s pushed on us, and obsessively explores the question of who we are in this world, of memory and its flaws, of what makes human. he does it all in these quiet stories that seem humdrum almost, prosaic, quiet lives lived by quiet characters, and he brings such poignant thoughtfulness to his stories that touch you in gentle but unnerving ways.

and that is important to recognize, that here is a writer of color who was born in one place but grew up in another who is doing good work, but, more than that, recognition is crucial for other aspiring writers of color out there, immigrant writers, writers who are children of immigrants, all of us, wherever we come from, whoever we are, because we carry multitudes within us, multitudes that go against the narratives the majority wants, and it means something to be able to look up and say, hey, i can do that, too.

that might be the kind of hope i do believe in.

(for the record, i love gabrielle hamilton and think everyone should read blood, bones, and butter. also, kristen kish cooking will be published on 2017 october 31 by clarkson potter. this book was not provided to me by the publisher. all thoughts and content and S:DKLFJ:KLDS;OMGILOVEYOU are my own.)