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)

about last week.

August 1, 2017

this minion perfectly illustrates my mood as it is now, as it was last week, as it has been the last few weeks.

last week was a [insert-adjective-here] week, what with the republican zombie healthcare bill that just won't die (or has it finally?!? i'm not holding my breath) and what with the cheeto vomiting more crap on twitter, this time about banning trans people from serving in the military, never mind that trans people display more courage in their day-to-day than the cheeto has shown in the entirety of his life — and never mind that trans people are apparently such terrifyingly formidable people that they should be barred from public bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

last week was also a low week personally, and it continues to be a series of low weeks as my insomnia continues to take its toll. my mood has been low, my dreams/nightmares/whatevers gone haywire, and i'm tired, tired, tired.

i wish i could sleep for days and wake up well-rested for once.

i can't seem to get that, though, so here, let's talk nice things.

when i think about nice things, i think automatically about food, so here is this: republique makes my favorite breakfast in all the land.

if you’re ever in los angeles, go to republique and order the regular breakfast with soft scrambled eggs (because they can actually soft scramble eggs), an iced dirty matcha latte (it’s better iced than hot), and a chewy chocolate-chocolate chip cookie (it has nuts, though, so nix this if you’re allergic). add a slice of tres leeches cake if you’re feeling indulgent (it’s not too sweet, don’t worry) and/or a hand pie if you’re starving and need something to tide you over while you wait for your food (they’ll heat the hand pie up for you; ask for sri racha).

come back and thank me for the bombass recommendation.

i spend a lot of time on twitter during the week, and i have no shame admitting that it’s my major news source, like, in that, it’s the source that alerts me to the fresh new hells being launched on the world — that, and the new yorker, which i also read religiously during the week.

there was a nice thread on twitter last week, talking about work and creating art and why that matters today. it talked specifically about why writing books matters, books about made-up worlds and made-up people, books that don’t make overt political statements and/or take moral stances, and i understand that struggle, that conflict, that desire to create something of meaning, except what does that look like? what does it mean to create something that means something?

the twitterer (whom i unfortunately do not remember) made the point that it’s not about being an activist or about taking political stances or about delivering moral messages. it’s about the fact that the work itself is hope; whether we write fiction or memoirs or treatises, doing the work itself, the act of creating itself, is an example of a way to be. the work in its own, the act of doing the work, is to demonstrate a way to fight back.

and, so, we work, and we create, and that looks different to each person. i take photos of light and shadows, of minions from mcdonald’s happy meals, of everything i eat. i read. i write on this site, and i edit my short story collection, and i rewrite that essay on living with depression and suicide and falling in love last year. i take ages to reply to DMs on instagram, and i give up on ever catching up on comments, and i apologize for that, but that’s just the way things are.

i think about buying an actual camera, like a DSLR, instead of just using the camera on my iphone 7. i think of new projects, earmark restaurants to try, envision future collaborations and chart amorphous ways to making those ideas a reality.

i try.

i also spend a stupid amount of time during the week tracking my lunch deliveries. it’s kind of creepy, the fact that i can do this at all, stare at my browser and watch the little icon that signifies my drivers moving along the map. it gets funny when they near the office, the rounds they sometimes make around the block, and i’m just like, i put a note on there, saying you can call or text me, and i’ll come down to the street. parking’s an ass in LA. LA’s an ass of a city for deliveries, too sprawled out to allow for efficiency.

LA’s an ugly, weird city, and, yeah, it’s got its charms, but i feel the frustrations when i’m trying to get from point A to point B, for example when i’m trying to get from koreatown to west hollywood for a reading. i think, god, this place is hideous, and, ugh, it’s like someone just vomited flat ugliness onto hot land, and i think, okay, fine, maybe i shouldn’t be so uncharitable — LA’s not that bad, and it gets great light. you can’t deny the fabulous, kind of magical qualities of california light, but see how i can't even give LA that? i have to generalize to all of california to make any praiseworthy statement possible, though i don't mean to impart hostility here — it amuses me, this mess of a relationship i have with this place.

sometimes, i wonder if i've simply become so accustomed to hating on LA that it comes so naturally to me. other times, though, especially when i'm landing at LAX and looking down at the sprawl below me, i think, nah, it kinda deserves it.

and maybe part of me feels entitled to this, kind of like how i also feel entitled to hate on NYC for all its ills. in some way, LA is also my city after all, and it bears the baggage of my history and trauma, and i feel unbridled in expressing my distaste of this place because i’ve lived so much of my life here and it is a part of me.

in some way, this is my way of claiming this place as my own.

all i’ve been craving these days is something cold and sweet, and that’s all kinds of terrible when you’re type 2 like i am. i feel like i spend an incongruous amount of time making bargains with myself — like, okay, i can eat three pieces of watermelon, but only three. or, okay, i can eat some ice cream if i walk there and back. or, okay, yeah, i know this is all bullshit, i should just be abstaining, should be more afraid of the consequences of not eating well, of not getting my glucose levels down lower, of not taking care of myself because self-care, blah blah blah, i want something cold and sweet.

it doesn't help that i've finally tried jeni's and am obsessed. jeni's delivers everything i want in ice cream — it's creamy and not too sweet, and it tastes like the ingredients it uses, instead of like processed, sugary crap. like, the mango buttermilk frozen yogurt tastes like a creamy, frozen, pureed mango (i. love. mango), and the roasted strawberry buttermilk is one of the best ice creams i've eaten, and the brambleberry crisp is like pie in ice cream form, complete with crumble topping — and, omg, i can't get enough of jeni's. i went again on sunday, and i'm going again this weekend.

i know, i know, self-care, blah blah blah, but four and twenty blackbirds is also in town this weekend, and they're going to be at jeni's, and one of my favoritest people is back stateside, so pie and ice cream, there will be. i'll make up for it by eating cleaner meals.

in 45 days, i'll be back home in brooklyn.

here's some big, exciting news: jenny zhang’s sour heart comes out into the world today!!! go hie yourself to a bookstore and dive into this wonderful collection!

cue storytime?

i grew up reading exclusively (and i mean, exclusively) from “the classics,” aka the white canon, aka mostly dead white guys. i mean, sure, there were a few dead white women thrown into the mix, too, but they were mostly men, and i didn’t read contemporary fiction until i was well into college. the closest i got before then was in the twelfth grade, when my AP lit teacher (still one of my favorite teachers) spent the year having us read existentialists and absurdists.

one day, several years ago, i was browsing the internet for one reason or another when i came across a blog called fashion for writers. at the time, it was written by jenny zhang, but it had been founded by esmé weijun wang (whose debut novel, the border of paradise, was published last year and is incredible), and there were links to their respective websites, links i followed to obsession, basically. i read esmé’s site religiously, and i mildly stalked jenny in new york, going to all her readings and totally having mini-omg! moments when i passed her twice — once, in powerhouse arena (in its former space) on my way to the bathroom and, once, on my way into mcnally jackson to pick up my preordered copy of the border of paradise.

it was so weird and so cool to read their writing, and you have to remember that i was this asian-american kid who'd always loved literature and loved writing but had never stopped to think that writing was this thing that i could do. i had no freaking idea that you could get paid to write, that people were doing this all the time, and, no, i wasn't stupid — i knew that people wrote for a living — i didn't think people like me did. you know. asian-american kids. asian-american daughters.

because, as far as i knew, in the world in which i grew up, we didn't write — we went to med school or law school or business school. we got married to nice [christian] asian-american boys. we had kids and stayed home and home-schooled.

we didn't write, and, more than that, we didn't write about mental health or bodies or the grimy, sticky areas of life. we didn't write about ourselves, our asian-american backgrounds, our experiences with sexism and racism and bigotry. we didn't write about sex or death or violence. we didn't do these things; we didn't put words on or give voice to anything that ran counter to the accepted status quo.

one of the things i have come to love the most is coming across a writer who makes me imagine different ways of writing, of being. jenny and esmé's writing introduced me to that, to new ways of thinking about myself, my asian-american identity, my own writing, and it's been an incredible experience since, seeing how all you really need is a spark to shed new light on the world and make it open up. i think about the women i've come to read and love in the last few years and have helped shape me as a writer — alice sola kim, patty yumi cottrell, nicole chung, rachel khong, krys lee, susan choi, celeste ng, women who do different things with their writing, who tell stories that illuminate different facets of the human experience and bring a rich vibrance to the world of books.

and i think about women in general, women whom i admire who live their truths and excel at their craft — barbara lynch, kristen kish, gabrielle hamilton, ellen bennett — omg, help me name someone who's not related to food — molly young, molly yeh, julia turshen — i suppose it's unavoidable; i love food; what can i say?

and all this loops back to what that twitterer said in that thread last week and what sherman alexie said to buzzfeed and what i wrote at the end of my hunger post — that what matters is that we are out here, that we are trying and creating and working. sometimes, most times, i dare say, at least on the everyday, day-to-day level, it's not about activism, and it's not about overt politicism. sometimes, it's just about telling our own truths, whatever those truths are, and all fiction — all good fiction, all good art — stems from the writer's truth.

and maybe that's how we effect change, not [solely] by converting those who stand against us but by bolstering and supporting those like us, by living alternate ways to be, to see the world, to write and tell stories and exist. i think we kind of undermine the amount of hope and encouragement that alone provides because it never feels like bravery or courage or like anything significant, just getting through the day and doing the work given to us, but it means something — at least, it means a whole lot to me, to be able to look up and see women who are doing the work simply by doing their work, whether it's writing, cooking, bookkeeping, raising children, teaching, whatever it is, women who are out there, living their truths and trying to bring about a better, more equal world.

and, so, i'll repeat what i said before because this is something i'll keep repeating, over and over and over again: stay.

we're out here, and we're women of color, and we're straight and queer and religious and not religious and able-bodied and disabled and you name it, we are it, and we write and cook and live, so stay. stay curious, stay open-minded, stay alive.

stay.

i ate at bestia last week. :3

it was delicious and amazing and everything i hoped it would be.

i want to eat there again.

here’s a summer reading list, given in no particular order, if you’re looking for something good to read in these last few weeks of summer:

jenny zhang, sour heart (random house, 2017)
rachel khong, goodbye, vitamin (holt, 2017)
patty yumi cottrell, sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney’s, 2017)
celeste ng, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014)
yoojin grace wuertz, everything belongs to us (random house, 2017)
esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016)
ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin books, 2013)
alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harper, 2015)
julie otsuka, when the emperor was divine (knopf, 2002)
jung yun, shelter (picador, 2016)
susan choi, my education (viking, 2013)

2017 international women's day.

March 8, 2017

yiyun li, dear friend from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017)
julie otsuka, the buddha in the attic (anchor books, 2012)
annabelle kim, tiger pelt (leaf-land press, 2016)
rachel khong, goodbye, vitamin (henry holt, forthcoming, 2017)
catherine chung, forgotten country (riverhead, 2012)
susan choi, the foreign student (harper perennial, 2004)
min-jin lee, pachinko (grand central publishing, 2017)
esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016)
ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016)
celeste ng, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014)
jung yun, shelter (picador, 2016)
padma lakshmi, love, loss, and what we ate (ecco, 2016)
alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harper, 2015)
shawna yang ryan, green island (knopf, 2016)

it’s international women’s day, so here’s a stack that i am so fucking jazzed i can even make: i have no substantial data to back this up, but i do feel like, in the last few years, we've seen a greater rise of asian[-american] writers being published. who knows, though; maybe i've only noticed this because i've become much more intentional about who i'm reading in recent years, so maybe it’s more correct for me to say that i’m jazzed that i have a collection of books that allows me to curate such a fine stack.

(is that too self-congratulatory? but i do generally stand by my taste.)

it's international women's day, and you might be saying that this stack is so narrow in scope as to miss the point. however, i wanted to make a stack of asian-american women, so here is a stack of women writers who are either immigrants or the daughters of immigrants because the point i wanted to make is simple and universal: that we, under whichever broad ethnic umbrella people want to place and stereotype us, come from a myriad of different backgrounds, carrying so many different struggles and concerns and fears, and one of the things we, as immigrants and immigrant children, bring to this country are our stories.

to be asian-american, to be anything-american, is not to be one collective person from one collective culture. it is to be a myriad of people, to contain multitudes of women, and i wanted to create a stack that would reflect this, the international backgrounds we come from that influence, in so many different ways, the stories we are compelled to tell.

in a political climate under a toxic administration that is feeding and fostering hate against non-white, non-christian, non-straight immigrants, this is what i wanted to celebrate today — that this is a country that has welcomed people from so many places, and this, this stack here is a result of that. i want to point at this stack and say, look, look at this wealth. look at the worlds these pages contain. look at the humanity these books expose. look.

so, here is to us, all of us women, regardless of ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or the physical bodies we were born into. here is to the countries, the cultures, the peoples we come from. here is to the women we come from, women who have sacrificed much so we can be the women we are, women who have shown us strength and love and dedication. here is to the women who have failed us, to the women we will fail, to the women who are broken and fucked up and damaged because they are women, and to be a woman is to be human.

and here is to us. here is to the women we are and the women we are becoming and the women we will be. may we be strong and continue to tell our stories and refuse to be silenced.

2014 reading review!

January 18, 2015

huzzah! 2014! even though we're 18 days into the new year -- 18 days ain't that bad! all right, jumping right into it!

the one that was the overall favorite: everything i never told you, celeste ng (the penguin press, 2014)

how had it begun? like everything: with mothers and fathers. because of lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers. because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. because those things had been impossible. (25)

what an incredible debut. we start with the death of sixteen-year-old lydia in 1970s ohio, and ng gracefully pulls back the layers of both the aftermath of her death and also the life leading up to her death, answering the questions of what happened, how she died, and why. ng does a masterful job of diving into lydia and her family, exploring their relationships and dynamics, the ways that family fucks us up but holds onto us at the same time, and it’s wonderfully complex, this novel, a compact story that gets you in the heart and burrows under your skin.

ng also writes about being asian-american without explicitly writing about being asian american, weaving it into her narrative and characterization without calling blaring attention to it. she writes about the prejudices against asian men, against women in the hard sciences, against interracial marriage and interracial children, and she does it deftly and beautifully and fearlessly, navigating the complicated web of family and its disappointments and secrets and fears, the ways we sometimes try to run away and disown the places we come from, only to find ourselves coming back against our will.

maybe part of me loved this because it resounded so personally for me. i read a comment from someone who didn’t like how ng wrote the parents, but the parents were so real and human to me with their burdensome expectations and their disappointments and their narrow perceptions, their inability to see how they were inflicting damage and harm on their children. and this isn’t to say that parents are the only ones who do wrong because children do, too, because children are also living human beings with expectations and disappointments and narrow perceptions — and i loved this, too, about everything i never told you, that there’s a balance to this narrative, that ng isn’t out to demonize or condemn anyone but is simply telling a story, and it’s a beautiful, heart-breaking story, described pithily by the new york times as “a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind — a burden you do not always survive.”

the ones with the “theme:” on such a full sea, chang-rae lee (riverhead, 2014); california, edan lepucki (little, brown, 2014); station eleven, emily st. john mandel (knopf, 2014)

he was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. one person or thing can never comprise that, no matter ho much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. a tale, like the universe, they ell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now. (on such a full sea, 61)

even naïveté could have a purpose. it was a survival skill, the same one that made a woman forget the pain of childbirth soon after it happened, so that she’d be willing to do it again someday. the species had to continue, didn’t it? (california, 107)

“you were the one i wanted to call,” he said, “when i got the news.”
“but why me? we haven’t spoken since the last divorce hearing.”
“you know where i’m from,” he said, and she understood what he meant by this. once we lived on an island in the ocean. once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we’ve built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn’t for you. (station eleven, 207)

okay, yes, “technically,” on such a full sea is considered dystopian and california and station eleven are post-apocalyptic, but, whatever, are we quibbling about genres here? when i was reading california, i kept thinking about on such a full sea, and, when i was reading station eleven, i thought about on such a full sea and california and how survival really isn’t sufficient, how we’re naturally drawn to community and family, how the world could go to shit and take with it all the comforts and privileges we once knew and how we can live without all that and adapt but we still need other people.

but, then, there’s the other side of it, too: how the world going to shit brings out the ugliness in people, how the will to survive reinforces the us v. theme mentality, how we need something to believe in and how charismatic cult leaders will apparently always exist and prey on young, virginal women because … because idk, yey, patriarchy? (-__-)

i liked on such a full sea for its communities, whether on the large scale of the narrative “we” or in smaller, person-to-person depictions, like quig and fan or the girls in the room, and i liked its commentary on privilege and competition and the things we’re willing to sacrifice for privilege. i liked california for its portrait of a marriage, the secrets we keep from each other, and the compromises we’re willing to make for something better. i liked station eleven for unspooling the symphony’s theme (taken from star trek), that “survival is insufficient,” because it’s true — we can’t simply sit around and survive; we need to make human connections, live lives of purpose, have some kind of hope that lets us know that life is more than this, it’s more than just us, it has meaning beyond mere existence.

and i liked reading these three books over the course of the year (on such a full sea in january, california in july, station eleven in november) because there was a fun, unintended continuity to it.

the one that haunted me: drifting house, krys lee (viking, 2012)

another time, gilho came home and found wuseong asleep, curled up on the hardwood floor without a pillow or blanket, and no yo underneath him, and when gilho woke him up, the boy looked straight at him and said, “everywhere i go, a road,” before falling immediately back to sleep. the line reminded gilho that he had, finally, lacked the courage to trust the person he had wanted to be; he walked away to recover from vertigo. when he spoke of the boy’s strangeness to soonah on the phone, she said reasonably (she was always reasonable), “why don’t you find another tenant?”
gilho could only wonder. in a country where a university degree made you respectable, the boy had dropped out because he wasn’t being taught anything. he had thespian ambitions; he raised crippled animals for fun. his idealism couldn’t last. but what might have happened if gilho had not married and scrambled to provide soonah the life that she and her parents, that everyone, expected, if he had not been so susceptible to her fear or risk, of failure, of others’ eyes, all fears that were his own? (80-1)

drifting house is a compact, intense collection about koreans and kprean-americans and a lot of the struggles that modern koreans/korean-americans face, whether it’s domestic violence or fanatic religion or goose fathers (fathers who send their wives and children to the states while they stay behind in korea and send them money) or the IMF crisis — and i’m aware that issues like domestic violence or fanatic religion aren’t unique to modern koreans/korean-americans, but lee approaches them from the korea/korean-american angle, keeping one foot impressively in korea and another in korean america.

you don’t have to know much about postwar korea to read the stories, but i think the book makes for an interesting launching point into postwar and contemporary korea. korea’s changed so much and so rapidly since the war, and lee burrows into the impact that’s had on postwar society/culture with quiet intensity. she isn’t a loud, brash writer; her prose fits with how she speaks and carries herself; and there’s a lot of darkness lurking underneath the surface of her very polished prose.

i can’t wait for her novel to come out. i hope it’s published soon. like soon soon. please?

the one that was most impressive: a silent history, eli horiwitz, matthew derby, kevin moffett (FSG originals, 2014)

my daughter was who she was not because of anything i did or didn’t do but because she was part of me and part of mel. everything that could’ve been done had already been done. by the time our kids are born, the fire is already lit. all we are doing as parents is helping them find the kindling. (theodore greene, 507)

there are 27 narrators who carry this book. 27 first-person narrators giving their “testimonies.” and, yes, this was co-authored by (or created by? I’m not quite sure how it all breaks down) 3 people, but, even so, even if you were to divide 27 first-person narrators by 3 people, that’s still 9 narrators per co-author. the voices are generally distinct and individual (admittedly, some less so than others, but the book is an overall successful attempt at multiple voices), and, together, these testimonies come together to tell a cohesive, nuanced, forward-moving story, rich with very prescient commentary about how we treat people who are different from us, how we Other them and create these us v. them distinctions like anything in life is so black and white.

the one everyone should read: men explain things to me, rebecca solnit (haymarket books, 2014)

because:

most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. things have gotten better, but this war won’t end in my lifetime. i’m still fighting it, for myself certainly, but also for all those younger women who have something to say, in the hope that they will get to say it. (“men explain things to me,” 10-1)

we have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident. we have dots so close they’re splatters melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects them, or names that stain. in india they did. they said that this is a civil rights issue, it’s a human rights issue, it’s everyone’s problem, it’s not isolated, and it’s never going to be acceptable again. it has to change. it’s your job to change it, and mine, and ours. (“the longest war,” 38)

the new york times reported it this way: “as the impact of mr. strauss-kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called mr. strauss-kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”
in other words, he created an atmosphere that was uncomfortable or dangerous for women, which would be one thing if he were working in, say, a small office. but that a man who controls some part of the fate of the world apparently devoted his energies to generating fear, misery, and injustice around him says something about the shape of our world and the values of the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and that of men like him. (“worlds collide in a luxury suite,” 46-7)

and the casual sexism is always there to rein us in, too: a wall street journal editorial blaming fatherless children on mothers throws out the term “female careerism.” salon writer amanda marcotte notes, “incidentally, if you google ‘female careerism,’ you get a bunch of links, but if you google ‘male careerism,’ google asks if you really meant ‘male careers’ or even ‘male careers.’ ‘careerism’ — the pathological need to have paid employment — is an affliction that only affects women, apparently.”
then there are all the tabloids patrolling the bodies and private lives of celebrity women and finding constant fault with them for being too fat, too thin, too sexy, not sexy enough, too single, not yet breeding, missing the chance to breed, having bred but failing to nurture adequately — and always assuming that each one’s ambition is not to be a great actress or singer or voice for liberty or adventurer but a wife and mother. get back in the box, famous ladies. (the fashion and women’s magazines devote a lot of their space to telling you how to pursue those goals yourself, or how to appreciate your shortcomings in relation to them.) (“pandora’s box and the volunteer police force,” 118-9)

the one that was most beautiful: the southern reach trilogy, jeff vandermeer (FSG originals, 2014)

there’s a regret in you, a kind of day mark you’ve let become obscured. the expeditions are never told that people had lived here, worked here, got drunk here, and played music here. people who lived in mobile homes and bungalows and lighthouses. better not to think of people living here, of it being empty … and yet now you want someone to remember, to understand what was lost, even if it was little enough. (acceptance, 90)

if you want to talk about books as objects [of art], then you have to talk about the southern reach trilogy. or area x. i think i just titled it the southern reach trilogy because that’s how i think about it … but, anyway, hardcover, softcover, both are beautifully and thoughtfully designed, from the cover design to the illustrations to the layouts — and one thing i love about the paperbacks is how consistent they are. like, they even illustrated vandermeer’s author photo!

i appreciate well-designed books. i appreciate well-designed books that also have well-designed layouts even more because it’s a peeve of mine to come upon a beautiful jacket only to open the book and go, what the fuck??? i appreciate well-designed books that have managed to capture the essence of the book and convey some of its personality without being reductive or cliche or obscure. and i appreciate well-designed books all the more because i can imagine what a difficult task that must be, how much [implicit or explicit] pressure there is on the jacket because it usually is the first impression, that first look to seize a potential reader’s interest.

and i appreciate them even more in instances like this because it was the cover that made me first pick up annihilation.

(i also appreciate social media in this case, too; bravo, FSG’s twitter.)

the paperback covers for annihilation, authority, and acceptance are incredible. they capture the wildness of area x, conveying the weirdness contained in these books, but they’re also beautiful and alluring and shiny (literally). there’s an aggressive quality to the covers, too, a boldness conveyed in the lettering, and the way the illustrations wrap around the letters show how the wildness encroaches and takes over — and, okay, yes, maybe i’m sitting here over-analyzing covers, but, holy crap, these are beautifully designed books, and, no, i’m still not over them.

the one that was the non-fiction … something: without you, there is no us, suki kim (crown, 2014)

was this really conscionable? awakening my students to what was not in the regime’s program could mean death for them and those they loved. if they were to wake up and realize that the outside world was in fact not crumbling, that it was their country that was in danger of collapse, and that everything they had been taught about the great leader was bogus, would that make them happier? how would they live from that point on? awakening was a luxury available only to those in the free world. (70)

suki kim spent six months as a writer disguised as a christian disguised as a professor at PUST, pyongyang university of science and technology, and this is the book that recounts her experience there. i think it’s important (and crucial) to keep in mind that these are her experiences and her observations; this book is a memoir of her time as a professor at PUST; and, as such, it does make for an interesting read.

at the same time, though, i find the book a little shallow, maybe especially when i start thinking about it as a book about north korea. kim does succeed in “humanizing” (as the word goes) her north korean students, and there is a fair amount of affection there, but, sometimes, it feels too pitying. she pokes at her colleagues’ faith but does so without any sort of depth, with only the derisive dismissal of someone who doesn’t share that faith and looks down on it. she references a lover back home in new york, but there’s also nothing more there, almost like she just wants us to know that she has a lover, he’s back home, and, for some reason, that’s something we need to know.

kim’s been criticized for her memoir, for supposedly breaking promises with PUST by writing her book, and she’s written in response to said criticism. i don’t disagree with the heart of what she’s saying, that there is a need to humanize north koreans, that silence is what is unacceptable, that there is so much wrong going on in north korea that needs to be talked about openly and — i’d even go so far as to say — that there’s a lot of terrible representation of north koreans that’s stereotypical and/or reductive and/or lacking in empathy and understanding. and i can even understand her suspicion of the evangelical christians who funded the building of PUST and are sending in teachers and professors who could essentially be missionaries, but, to be honest, i think i’d be more convinced of her argument had she fleshed out any criticisms in her memoir. instead, she makes a few jabs at her believing colleagues, tries to draw parallels between their faith and juche ideology, but, in the end, she doesn’t say much more than that — and this, particularly, frustrated me because there’s so much there to mine, and she starts to head in that direction at one point but drops it.

in the end, i do recommend without you and find it worth a read, but do keep in mind that it’s a memoir and supplement your reading with other books like barbara demick’s incredible nothing to envy or jang jin-sung’s dear leader.

the one i enjoyed most: mr. penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore, robin sloan (FSG, 2012)

you know, i’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules. (253)

there is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. all the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. it takes forty=one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. it’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. we have new capabilities now — strange powers we’re still getting used to. the mountains are a message from aldrag the wyrm-father. your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in. (288)

mr. penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore was so much fun. the narrator (clay) finds work at a mysterious bookstore with mysterious clientele who come in to check out giant tomes written in code, and he gets drawn into a quest when the owner of the bookstore (mr. penumbra) vanishes one day. and, yes, i’m a really shitty summary writer, so don’t let that put you off — penumbra is well worth the adventure; you’ll laugh; you’ll aww; you’ll tear up; you’ll marvel at the ease with which sloan situates his novel in the world and integrates google almost as a character of its own.

and, if you (for some reason) need more incentive to read penumbra, the cover glows in the dark.

the one i didn’t finish: nobody is ever missing, catherine lacey (FSG originals, 2014)

i rarely drop books. i don’t like dropping books. i tried really hard not to drop this, especially because i’d been looking forward to it, but i just could not stand the narrator. i found her so wholly unsympathetic, and i hated being inside her head. i also couldn’t get past the prose — lacey tends toward very long, rambly paragraph-sentences, and, while i love my long, rambly paragraph-sentences, there are just too many of them in nobody is ever missing that my writing brain kept growling, edit, for fuck’s sake, EDIT.

the one i listened to: the discomfort zone, jonathan franzen (FSG [hardcover], 2006; highbridge [audio], 2006)

“but kafka’s about your life!” avery said. “not to take anything away from your admiration of rilke, but i’ll tell you right now, kafka’s a lot more about your life than rilke is. kafka was like us. all of these writers, they were human beings trying to make sense of their lives. but kafka above all! kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. and he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out. that’s what this book is about. that’s what all of these books are about. actual living human being trying to make sense of death and the modern world and the mess of their lives.” (“the foreign language,” 139-40)

audiobooks, i’ve discovered, are perfect for planes. i can put on my headphones and disappear into a book without the headache that comes from reading on planes in that terrible lighting and through occasional turbulence.

the discomfort zone was fun to listen to because i’ve read it previously (twice). the material, therefore, was all familiar to me, and there were no surprises as far as content was concerned, so it was the tone, really, that made it a different experience, especially because franzen narrated it himself. it felt like a way of “reading” the book as he’d written it to be read, with the emphases in the right places and the proper tone and moods in the right places, and it was fun because it was like being read to, and i enjoy being read to. being on plane helped, too, because i couldn’t do my usual thing of doing something with my hands (i can’t just watch tv or see movies or talk on the phone; i have to be doing something else at the same time), so i could just put on my headphones and close my eyes and focus on franzen’s narration.

which wasn’t a hard thing to do. i could listen to franzen read anything, even the phone book. he has a lovely deep and throaty voice, and he’s one of those authors who reads well (not all authors read well), so i wish he’d narrate more of his work.

the one with my favorite passage: without you, there is no us, suki kim (crown, 2014)

this passage gets me in the heart every time. i’d even go so far as to say that it predisposed me kindly to the rest of the memoir:

the korean war lasted three years, with millions either dead or separated. it never really ended but instead paused in the 1953 armistice exactly where it began, with koreas on both sides of the 38th parallel. historians often refer to it as the “forgotten war,” but no korean considers it forgotten. theirs is not a culture of forgetting. the war is everywhere in today’s koreas.
there is, for example, the story of my father’s young female cousins, nursing students aged seventeen and eighteen, who disappeared during the war. decades later, in the 1970s, their mother, my father’s aunt, received a letter from north korea via japan, the only contact her daughters ever made with her, and from that moment on, she was summoned to the korean central intelligence agency every few months on suspicion of espionage until she finally left south korea for good and died in st. antonio, texas. the girls were never heard from again. and there was my uncle, my mother’s brother, who was just seventeen when he was abducted by north korean soldiers at the start of the war, in june 1950. he was never seen again. he might or might not have been taken to pyongyang, and it was this suspended state of not knowing that drove my mother’s mother nearly crazy, and my mother, and to some degree me, who inherited their sorrow.
stories such as these abound in south korea, and probably north korea, if its people were allowed to tell them. separation haunts the affected long after the actual incident. it is a perpetual act of violation. you know that the missing are there, just a few hours away, but you cannot see them or write to them or call them. it could be your mother trapped on the other side of the border. it could be your lover whom you will long for the rest of your life. it could be your child whom you cannot get to, although he calls out your name and cries himself to sleep every night. from seoul, pyongyang looms like a shadow, about 120 miles away, so close but impossible to touch. decades of such longing sicken a nation. the loss is remembered, and remember, like an illness, a heartbreak from which there is no healing, and you are left to wonder what happened to the life you were supposed to have together. for those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering. (11-2)

the one that impacted me as a writer: lila, marilynne robinson (FSG, 2014)

if you think about a human face, it can be something you don’t want to look at, so sad or so hard or so kind. it can be something you want to hide, because it pretty well shows where you’ve been and what you can expect. and anybody at all can see it, but you can’t. it just floats there in front of you. it might as well be your soul, for all you can do to protect it. what isn’t strange, when you think about it. (82)

sometimes, authors teach you things through their books, and, sometimes, it’s not really anything factual but simply a way to be. marilynne robinson was one of those authors for me this year, and, if i were to sum it up pithily, i’d put it so: marilynne robinson taught me about writing with boldness.

over the last year, i rewrote a manuscript of short stories, and i feel like robinson came along at a good time for me. i’ve been afraid to tackle specific issues in my stories, issues i wanted to write about but was afraid to for various reasons, but there’s something i found very emboldening about robinson’s books. she writes about faith and doubt and the spaces between, and she writes with generosity and graciousness and tenderness. and thoughtfulness. there’s nothing careless about her books, nothing that feels loose or arbitrary, but there’s also an ease and naturalness to her writing, something about her prose that breathes easy — and i keep saying “books” because i read her gilead books all in a row and loved the experience of immersing myself in that world with those people for a few weeks.

lila, though. LILA. every time i try to talk about this book, i end up falling silent because my thoughts turn to goo. lila, to me, at the heart of it, is a love story and not a mushy gushy one and also not one that’s only about two people falling in love but also a woman, in ways, learning to love and to be. lila spent her life on the road, always ready to run, but then she comes to gilead and meets john ames and tries to leave but finds herself staying — and there’s something so sweet and heart-aching about lila and john ames, how they fit each other but seem to have together so late in life.

there’s more to lila than a love story, but that was my strongest takeaway from it, which is kind of remarkable because love stories and i don’t tend to mesh or hew strongly. this one, though, stuck with me, maybe because there’s nothing saccharine sweet or stupidly sentimental about it. it’s a very serious love because both lila and john ames are serious people, not ones to take such a thing as courtship or marriage lightly, but there’s a sweetness there, too, especially against the backdrop of lila’s backstory, which robinson also paints with tender integrity, avoiding melodramatic or overly pitying tones — and i love that about her writing, that she doesn’t give in or give sway to sentimentality or try to manipulate her readers’ emotions — robinson writes with integrity and with boldness, and that is a gift i’m incredibly grateful for.

by numbers:

the first book: the surrendered, chang-rae lee (riverhead, 2010)

i was just going to leave my first, 52nd, and last books here in list form, but this passage from the surrendered is one of my favorites:

“you’ve taken pity on all of us, haven’t you?” he said, tugging her closer. “i’m talking to you now! i want you to listen to me now! before you came this place was no matter or worse than any other orphanage in this damned country. which was just fine for the kids and the aunties, and even for me. there’s enough food and a roof and no more killing, and so what else is there to want? but you’re leaving, and what do we have now? you know what i found one of your girls doing after your husband announced you were leaving?”
“just let me go —“
“it was mee-sun. she was at the well pump, drinking water straight from it like she was dying of thirst. i passed her twice before i noticed she wasn’t stopping. she was just drinking and drinking, getting her sweater soaked, and i had to pull her off it. i thought she was going to drown herself. i asked her what the hell she was doing, and she said she felt funny inside, because you weren’t going to be here anymore. for some reason she felt like she was hungry again. she said she used to do it during the war, so she wouldn’t feel so empty inside.”
“what would you have me do? don’t you think i want to take every one of them?”
“then take them!” he said, grabbing her other wrist. she resisted him and he pushed her against the shed wall without enough force that for a moment she thought he might hurt her. and if he did she wouldn’t care. she wouldn’t fight. “did you think you could come and go so easily? is this what happens in that precious brook of yours? i want to know. i thought it was about showing mercy to the helpless, to the innocent. but i think that book of yours is worthless. in fact, it’s worse than that. it’s a lie. it’s changed nothing and never will.” (429-30)

the 52nd book: the fall, albert camus (vintage, reissued 1991)

the last book: you are one of them, elliott holt (the penguin press, 2013)

the author of the year: jonathan franzen

like a wife who had died or a house that had burned, the clarity to think and the power to act were still vivd in his memory. through a window that gave onto the next work, he could still see the clarity and see the power, just out of reach, beyond the window’s thermal panes. he could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a great height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he’d lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.
he wept at the injustice of his sentence. “for God’s sake, chip,” he said loudly, because he sensed that this might be his last chance to liberate himself before he lost all contact with that clarity and pose rand it was therefore crucial that chip understand exactly what he wanted. “i’m asking for your help! you’ve got to get me out of this! you have to put an end to it!”
even red-eyed, even tear-streaked, chip’s face was full of power and clarity. here was a son whom he could trust to understand him as he understood himself; and so chip’s answer, when it came, was absolute. chip’s answer told him that this was where the story ended. it ended with chip shaking his head, it ended with him saying: “i can’t, dad. i can’t.” (the corrections, 556-7)

franzen’s fun. he’s complicated, kind of contradictory in ways, incendiary in discussions oftentimes, but fully human in all his contradictions and complexity, and his writing can be polarizing, bringing out strong opinions in people, usually about the likability of his characters or how he seems to loathe them, too, or about the way he writes about women. he’s also wicked smart and well-informed and prone to oversharing, and he’s got a finger on the pulse of things, and, when i think of him, sometimes, i think of how everyone knows (or “knows”) what to think about him without actually having read him. and, then, they go into his writing already with opinions about his writing, and that just complicates things more, and sometimes that’s good but other times it’s annoying because, if i have to sit and listen to people complaining about how unlikable his characters are, i might kick something because the whole likability/unlikability thing (in general) is so goddamn overdone and annoying.

i read (or reread) all of his novels this year, though i didn’t do so in order, starting with the corrections then freedom and picking up strong motion and finally the twenty-seventh city. i also reread the discomfort zone and the essays i liked in farther away, which makes him my author of 2014, if only by the sheer amount of his work i read.

thoughts in semi-stream of conscious jumble: i liked strong motion a whole lot, loved the way he wrote about cultish religion. the ending was admittedly a little lukewarm for me but not so much that it put me off the book. the twenty-seventh city was my least favorite: the short, clipped sentences drove me a little mad; i couldn’t get behind jammu or singh or their whole conspiratorial takeover of st. louis; and i hated — h a t e d — the ending. i actually pretty much stopped reading with ten-twenty pages to go, skimming the last few pages because i was so angry at the gratuitous (it felt very gratuitous and out of fucking nowhere) turn of events. there are some really great essays in farther away, but i still think the collection tapers off at the end (i’m torn about franzen’s book reviews; his essays on other things, like the depressing plight of birds in the mediterranean, are incredible, though). (also, franzen himself narrates the first two essays in farther away, yey!) i’m not as annoyed by the first-person “autobiography” in freedom as people tend to be (i found myself more forgiving of it the second time around), and i tend to like his female characters (at least from strong motion on), like denise and renee and connie (i like connie; she deserves better than joey) — in many ways, i find them more compelling and sympathetic, while i’d like to kick the men in the ass. the corrections, i think, is his funniest book and the one for which i have the most sentimental attachment (it was the first franzen i read).

do i think he’s a perfect writer? no. but i think he tries — he tries to write thoughtful books (in this, he succeeds), and he tries to write real, full people (he generally succeeds here, too, at least with his central cast of characters; his side characters tend to suffer), and he tries to place them in real, full worlds (in this, he succeeds; i’m always astounded by how well he knows his world). and, as an author, he tries to be aware of his privilege as a white male writer, and he tries to support and help out other writers and pushes for women writers. does he always succeed? no, but i appreciate and acknowledge that he tries, that he’s aware of his position in the industry and of the clout of his name, but that he’s also aware that the best thing he can do is write the best books he can. and i appreciate that the dialogue around him is pretty multi-faceted, that he raises strong opinions in people (though i wish more of said strong opinions would be better-informed), that even the sheer amount of attention paid to him points to how male (and white) publishing is.

anyway. i’m a fan. clearly. and i’m so very excited (and also kind of wary because, erm, fabulism?) for his next novel. even if the title makes my face go :| … freedom i was okay with, but purity? :|

the publisher of the year: FSG (specifically FSG originals)

i read a lot from FSG this year (ok, FSG/picador because picador publishes much of [all of?] the paperbacks for FSG). because i’m a sucker for this kind of thing, i actually tallied it up a few weeks ago, and i think (because idk where the paper went) it broke down into something like 18 of 61 books from FSG. (knopf was second with 11.)

but we’re specifically talking about FSG originals here.

FSG originals describes itself as being “driven by voices that insist on being heard, stories that demand to be told, writers who are compelled to show us something new. they defy categorization and expectation. they are, in a word, original.” and, considering that FSG originals has brought us titles like the silent history and area x, i’d consider that an apt description.

it’s been fun to dive into the titles published through FSG originals. i’ve had a mixed bag of reactions to the titles i’ve read thus far, but i find the books to be thoughtfully designed and presented, and i appreciate a [traditional] publisher trying different ways of publishing work that might be sidelined for being “different” or “weird” or “unconventional.” FSG originals also just feels like a natural offshoot of FSG, hewing to the same qualities (good storytelling, strong writing, unique voices), so it doesn’t feel contrived, like something trying to be something else — so, all in all, i’m excited to see what new things they come out with this year and in the years to come!

2015

the ones i’m taking into 2015:

alex ross, the rest is noise
marisha pessl, special topics in calamity physics

the ones i’m looking forward to in 2015:

kazuo ishiguro, the buried giant
rachel kushner, the strange case of rachel k
meghan daum (ed.): selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed
jonathan galassi, muse
shin kyung-sook, the girl who wrote loneliness
jonathan franzen, purity (!!!)

goals for 2015:

read 75 books
read/finish one book in korean every month
blog consistently.

july reads!

August 6, 2014

july reads! the common thing about all my july reads? (they’re all written by women, but also) i read each book from cover-to-cover in one sitting.

twenty-eight. the hen who believed she could fly, hwang sun-mi.

just because you’re the same kind doesn’t mean you’re all one happy family. the important thing is to understand each other. that’s love! sprout ran on, elated, bursting into song. (106)

this is one beautifully made book — seriously, it’s beautiful, and the illustrations are fantastic.

… y’know, i’ve been sitting on this july reading recap because i’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this book. it’s an allegory, and it’s great, and there’s a whole lot in it to talk about, and yet i can’t come up with words. i think i need to read it again, chew on it some more, and actually write things down after i’ve read it because it’s a slim little book but there’s so much packed into it. i definitely recommend it, but i think i’ll have to come back to this later after i’ve read it again.

on a related aside, i’ve kind of hit a point in my reading of korean literature where i’ve tired of reading in-translation. it’s not that the translations are bad or poorly done because they’re not, but i think there are limits in translation because there are things that inevitably get lost in that scramble between languages. and, as someone who can read korean and wants to get better at it, there’s also a sort of kick-in-the-ass motivation there, too. which is why i did buy the english translation of gong ji-young’s our happy time but set it aside to read it in korean … it takes me much longer, but there is no better way of improving my korean, soooo …!

twenty-nine. my salinger year, joanna rakoff.

regardless, there was something about that modest advance, that initial rejection, that soothed me. salinger had not always been salinger. salinger had once sat at his desk, trying to figure out what made a story, how to structure a novel, how to be a writer, how to be. (222)

read this on the fourth of july whilst sprawled out on my sofa with a delightful breeze coming in through the windows — i have to admit that, while i enjoyed it tremendously while reading it, this isn’t a book that really stuck with me. it made for a great read in the moment, though, very engrossing, though i honestly didn’t care much for her coyness (i can’t think of a better word for it) — it’s not like you can’t google salinger’s agent/agency, so all the masking of identities seemed a little coy to me.

thirty. everything i never told you, celeste ng.

and then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. everything that she had wanted for lydia, which lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. a dull chill creeps over her. perhaps — and this thought chokes her — that had dragged lydia underwater at last. (247)

this was incredible. SO incredible. i knew nothing about this when i purchased it, but i was browsing at greenlight when i picked it up and was intrigued by the title and started flipping through it. and, then, when i got home and started reading it, i couldn’t stop until i was done.

it’s amazing. it’s a beautiful, heart-breaking portrait of grief and loss and how our expectations of the people we love can become burdens and how no one really means to fuck anyone up but it just happens and how it’s out of our control. it’s a beautiful look into family and lost dreams and the ways we try to reclaim our dreams through other means, and i actually very rarely say this, but it’s also a wonderful depiction of being asian-american because ng isn’t obvious about it or draws attention to it in a fingerpointing “this is crucial” way. the characters’ asianness is simply part of who they are; it’s not what defines them.

there was a lot that resonated with me personally, too, so that didn’t hurt. i highly, highly, highly recommend this.

thirty-one. california, edan lepucki.

she would have understood, too, that all the talking in the world couldn’t give everything away, that a person was always capable of keeping secrets. it might have saved her from feeling betrayed by her husband here at the end of the world. (110)

if i were to point out a specific thing i’d say made me love calfiornia, it’d be how prescient it felt. it’s a dystopian novel, yes, but it feels very present-day, and i think it’s because lepucki presents a world that seems very real, like this world could very much naturally head into the direction of the world presented in the novel. like, this is a dystopian novel that doesn’t feel like a reach or like it’s set in some distant future but one that could feasibly be the world of tomorrow, and, on that level, it was also really fun to read as someone who has lived for a very long time just outside los angeles and is familiar with the specific locations she references in the novel.

the other thing i loved about california is its portrait of a marriage because i found it to be refreshingly honest. i can’t say i necessarily liked either frida or cal, but, at the same time, even as i type out those words, i wonder why that’s so important to note (i’m not keen on all this whole “likability” thing that keeps being talked about; characters should feel like real, fleshed-out people; and real, fleshed-out people aren’t always solely likable or unlikable). the important thing (i think) is that both frida and cal feel like real people in a real marriage — not everything about it is perfect, and they both fall privy to the mistake of keeping secrets and assuming things about the other. their marriage suffers from this lack of communication, even if some of this withholding is done with the intention of somehow protecting or helping each other through it, and, all throughout, i was rooting for the both of them and mentally groaning whenever they would decide not to communicate when they really needed to be talking to each other.

i also had the privilege of hearing lepucki twice (in one week, no less!) when she was in nyc for her book tour, and she’s also super fun and awesome in-person. :D

(haha, also, at mcnally, lepucki was asked what she was reading next, and she said she’d just gotten everything i never told you, and, in my head, i was all, OMG you’re going to love it; it’s SO AMAZING.)

—

currently finishing up another read of never let me go (ishiguro is doing an event at the 92y next march, and i have tickets, and i am SO FRIGGIN’ EXCITED) and just read/examined peter mendelsund’s cover and am reading euny hong’s the birth of korean cool. which, meh title, but i’m interested in the content, and, at the same time, i’m so personally close to k-pop because it was my adolescence that i’m weirdly very protective of it and get very bristly when reading analyses about it. even when the person writing about it is korean. haha interesting, the things you learn about yourself, eh?