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.

looking back, looking here. (10 books i loved in 2016)

January 24, 2017

‘kizzy, i am scared of everything, all the time. i’m scared of my ship getting shot down when i have to land planetoid. i’m scared of the armour in my vest cracking during a fight. i’m scared that the next time i have to pull out my gun, the other guy will be faster. i’m scared of making mistakes that could hurt my crew. i’m scared of leaky biosuits. i’m scared of vegetables that haven’t been washed properly. i’m scared of fish.’
[…]
‘i never thought of fear as something that can go away. it just is. it reminds me that i want to stay alive. that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.’ (chambers, pei, 243)

january 2017 is almost at an end, and i’m a week into being back in california, and i feel like a ghost, just floating here, going through the motions of living but severed from everything — from home, from purpose, from hope. as the bleakness and homesickness set into my bones, here are attempts to anchor myself to something, to food, to books.

of the 60-odd books i read last year, these are the 10 i loved, that stuck with me over the months. they’re listed in the order i read them, starting with kleeman in january and ending with lee in december, and, if i were to sum up 2016 in reading, i’d say that 2016 was a year of bodies, and it was a year of silence. all ten of these books have to do with bodies in some way, whether it’s the value placed on bodies, the diminishing of people to only their bodies, the utility of bodies, the killing of bodies, the domination of bodies, and there’s a lot of silence thrown in there, too, silence in secrets, silence from god, silence as survival.

it was a year of asking myself how it is we define ourselves, how societies define us in accordance with the role they need us to play. it was also a year of asking myself who i was, what i believed, who i desired. like i wrote in my previous end-of-year post, 2016 is the year i walked away from faith and outed myself, and, in many ways, these are the books that carried me through much of that heartache and fear and anxiety.

and, so, without further ado:

alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harpers, 2015) [review]
park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess (dalkey archive press, 2014) [review]
becky chambers, the long way to a small angry planet (hodder & stoughton, 2015) [review]
esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016) [review]
endo shusaku, silence (picador, 2016) [review]
krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016) [review]
sarah waters, tipping the velvet (riverhead, 2000) [review]
garrard conley, boy erased (riverhead, 2016) [review]
sady doyle, trainwreck (melville house, 2016) [review]
corey lee, benu (phaidon, 2015) [review]

i kind of don't know where to start with this.

“humans can be so foolish. they don’t realize the light comes from themselves. they think the whole world is lit by a single lightbulb, but in fact a myriad of small lightbulbs must be lit for the world to become a brighter place. they keep themselves buried in darkness while continuing to envy the ones with light. seeing the darkness in everyone else around them, they give all their votes to the ones who are lit. this explains why poor people give their votes to dictators and why average people love the actors on screen. they don’t believe in their own light. they don’t believe
in each other’s light. they don’t hope; they don’t attempt to discover. and that is where the source of the world’s darkness lies.” (park min-gyu, yohan, 128-9)

i suppose, then, here is this: my favorite book of the year was park min-gyu’s pavane for a dead princess. park gives us three twenty-somethings who work in a department store and become friends, and they’re three young people who exist on the fringes of capitalist korean society, outside the desired standards of beauty and wealth. park essentially takes korea to task for its materialism and its singular standard of beauty, and, maybe, there’s a little too much politicizing, too much blatant criticizing, too much theorizing, but there’s also a lot of empathy and humanity in this novel.

korea is a funny topic for me, and my parents ask often if i hate being korean because i seem to hate korean society so. i counter that, no, i actually love being korean, and i take a lot of pride in korea’s history and the strength of her people and the vibrancy of her food and food culture. however, at the same time, korean society is one that is tremendously flawed and heavily patriarchal, toxic and narrow-minded and causing a great deal of harm to its people, to its children and youth. as i keep telling my parents about my relationship with korea and about everything else, the existence of one does not negate the truth of the other, and my heart aches for korea because i do love her, and, in many ways, for reasons both obvious and not, i will always be drawn to her.

corey lee’s benu, titled after his san francisco restaurant by the same name, reminded me of this. lee brings korean flavors and traditions into his food in thoughtful, creative ways, and i was blown away by the care he exhibits for food overall and korean food and culture particularly. he draws inspiration from other foods and cuisines as well, so it’s not like his cooking is solely korean-inspired, but there’s something about the way he’s negotiated his relationship with his korean ethnicity that i found so relatable.

one thing i love about asian america is the sheer breadth of it, how we all have different ways of being asian-american, of identifying with (or not identifying with) our asian heritages, and one effect of that is that i appreciate when i come across people with whom i can relate. i am not trying to say that my way of being asian-american is the “right” or “good” way to be; i don’t believe at all that there is a “right” or “good” way to be asian-american, just that is right and good for us individually; and i’m honestly not one to place that much importance in having to relate to someone. i often think it’s given more weight than necessary and, when applied the wrong way, used to justify a kind of narrow-mindedness, and i rarely ever seek it out, but i do admit that there is a comfort there sometimes — there is something nice about familiarity, after all, and i am not one to deny that.

anyway, benu is this lovely blend of personal history, korean history, and northern californian sensibility, and it is one stunning book. i’d expect no less of phaidon.

my mouth hurt from speaking english. the muscles around my lips and my cheeks ached. in my dreams, voices stretched into long, silly words that meant nothing, and i woke up saying “milk” or “glass” before tumbling back into the sleep of nonsense dreamers. soon i vomited over and over at the side of the road while david reached over and rubbed my damp neck, and then i craved all kinds of things: hot buns filled with pork, cold and briny seaweed, red bean popsicles. the sudden craving was monstrous, like a thing already in my mouth that could not be tasted or swallowed and just between my frozen teeth with a jaw stuck open, and my longing for these foods was not a longing in my stomach but something jammed deep in my throat. (wang, daisy, 58)

while we’re talking northern california: there’s esmé weijun wang’s the border of paradise, which delivers so gloriously on the “holy shit, what?!” side of the spectrum. i love a book that serves a good mindfuck because it doesn’t happen as often as i’d like, and i love it even more when the author does so in beautiful prose.

i also just personally love how i even knew of the border of paradise, so here’s a story, that i somehow stumbled upon esmé and jenny zhang at the same time a few years ago, somewhere on the internets, and i’ve been following them both since. i remember reading esmé’s journal entries about finishing her novel, signing with an agent, trying to sell the novel, etcetera, etcetera, so i was excited when her novel was published last year, preordering it at mcnally jackson and scuttling over once i got the email that it had arrived and was waiting for me behind the desk.

this is the thing that makes the internet a cool place to me, and there’s something really awesome about seeing something through its journey, especially when it’s a book, especially when you’re a writer yourself and this is a dream and ambition of yours as well. it’s also more the case when the writer is someone as vibrant and generous as esmé; she has a book of essays, the collected schizophrenias, that will be published by graywolf in 2018 after winning the publisher’s nonfiction prize.

(none of this has any bearing on my thoughts re: border or its inclusion on this list. i was actually a little nervous going into it because i didn’t actually know what the book was about — there’s a reason i’m not trying to write a summary; it’s kind of awesome to go into it blind — and there’s always the chance that a book will disappoint. luckily, i genuinely loved it.)

(also, if you’ve never heard of or read jenny zhang, please, please, please do; you will be the better for it. she’s written for rookie — here is a favorite piece; here is another — and she also wrote this fabulous piece for buzzfeed after the michael derrick hudson scandal. she has a book of short stories coming out from random house this spring, and i am so fucking stoked.)

so, there are authors you follow for years who write lyrical prose, and then there are authors who are able to create these wonderful lethargic, sticky moods — and i’ve yet to find another writer who does that as deftly as alexandra kleeman. i love the weird places kleeman takes us, and i love her voices and moods — and i say “voices and moods” plural because i also read her short story collection, intimations (harpers, 2016), last year, and i’m telling you: kleeman’s knack for atmosphere is exquisite. her stories are just as interesting and moody as her tones, and i like her as a human a lot, too. there are some authors you just want to be friends with, and kleeman happens to be one of mine.

and now to switch gears a little.

the world, to me, seemed utterly transformed since kitty butler had stepped into it. it had been ordinary before she came; now it was full of queer electric spaces, that she left ringing with music or glowing with light. (waters, 60-ish)

park’s pavane may have been my favorite book of the year, but garrard conley’s boy erased and sarah waters’ tipping the velvet may have had the biggest personal impact.

boy erased is conley’s memoir of his time in conversion therapy after he was outed to his parents (by the boy who raped him, no less). conley grew up southern baptist to a very religious family (his father is a pastor), and he writes poignantly about being gay and christian, about not only the fears and anxieties that come of being gay in a christian community but also about the personal clashes that occur within you when you’ve grown up with god woven into your life and, suddenly, he’s not there anymore.

unlike conley's, my faith is fully dead, and, when i read endo shusaku’s silence, i thought that here was a novel that explained to me why. silence tells the story of portuguese priests who sneak into japan in search of a fellow priest, and this is during a time when japan was brutally suppressing and excising christianity from itself, torturing people into renouncing god and killing them when they didn’t. the narrator struggles with god’s silence to the suffering of japanese christians, to the brutality they must endure in god’s name while god sits silent and does nothing and allows such violence and pain to continue, and, in the end, the narrator, too, must decide whether he will renounce god or not.

no, no! i shook my head. if god does not exist, how can man endure the monotony of the sea and its cruel lack of emotion? (but supposing … of course, supposing, i mean.) from the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. supposing god does not exist …
this was a frightening fancy. if he does not exist, how absurd the whole thing becomes. (endo, 72)

when i think about silence, i think there is a cost for everything, and there is a cost for silence. silence breeds doubt, and it locks you inside your head, with your own fears and anxieties and insecurities. silence leads to brokenness, too, to broken relationships, to loss of faith, and silence is what cost me my faith, years of crying out to god and hearing nothing.

eventually, you start to feel like you must be mad, yelling at the skies and expecting an answer — and, even if there is a god, what’s the point if he won’t deign to engage with you? a world without god, then, is better than a world with a silent, cruel god.

in the end, in 2016, i did have to confront the frightening reality of a world without god — and it is a frightening reality, especially when you’ve grown up with god, when he was built into the foundations of your worldview. god is the basis of hope; it is his existence that allows you to see beyond this life, to “store your treasures in heaven”; and it sounds absurd to those outside faith, outside religion, but, when you grow up in that, when you believe it, live it, practice it for three decades of your life, the sudden absence of that leaves you bereft.

this is what i loved so much about boy erased, that conley gets this. and here is my favorite passage from everything i read this year:

“how do you feel?” my mother said. her hands were firmly fixed at ten and two at the wheel. this vigilance, this never taking a risk when you didn’t have to.
“i’m fine.” we’re all faking it.
“we can stop again if you need.”
“that’s okay.” it’s just that some of us are more aware of it.
silence. my big toe toggling the vent open and closed. with mark’s number in my pocket, i suddenly knew that what i was thinking was true. keeping a secret, telling a lie by omission, made it much easier to see all of the other lies around me. an expert liar was’ merely an expert on his own lies, but those of others as well. was this why LIA’s counselors were so good at challenging their patients, at calling them out? was this why smid and the blond-haired boy didn’t fully rust me?
“are you hungry?”
“no.” i can tell all of this to you later, after the ceremony. i just have to wait for the right moment.
“are you sure?”
“are you hungry?” but i’m afraid you’d be disgusted with me. i’m afraid you’d vomit again, right here in the car.
“a little.” the car turned a sharp curve, a stray pen tumbling out of the cup holder and rolling across the floorboard, a ping as it hit the metal bar beneath my feet. i could have picked it up, uncapped its top, and written my confession right then and there, had LIA’s rules permitted it.
“let’s stop, then.” i realize this now, that all of it might come down to me being afraid. that all of this supposed change is just to please him, to please you.
“i’ll pull into sonic. what do you want?”
“just some fries.” but i’m afraid of losing you. i’m afraid of what i’ll become if i lose you. i’m afraid because i think i’ve already lost god. god’s stopped speaking to me, and what am i supposed to do without him? after nineteen years with god’s voice buzzing around in my head twenty-four hours a day, how am i supposed to walk around without his constant assurance?
“an order of fries, please, and a coke.” beneath the speaker’s static, the clanging of metal in an invisible sink. “and a sonic burger.”
“can i get tater tots instead?” i don’t even know what i would look like to be gay. i can’t even imagine a life where my friends and family would want to talk to me if i was openly gay.
“make that tater tots instead of fries.”
“i’m not really that hungry.” i can do this. i just have to fake my way through until i can take my big risk, whatever that will be. (conley, 222-3)

and then there was tipping the velvet. (oh, tipping the velvet!) i’m slowly rereading it now, and it’s still tugging at my heartstrings in such aching ways. i wrote a giant post about sarah waters in august, though, so i’ll just link to that here.

i also did a compilation of quotes from sady doyle’s trainwreck a few months ago, so i’ll link to that here as well.

i also wrote about krys lee’s how i became a north korean, so i’ll link to that here, too. and i never really wrote about becky chambers’ the long way to a small angry planet, so i can’t link to that, but i loved it and keep recommending it, and i hardly ever read science fiction, so …!

you needed a vision of the future in order to get anywhere; you couldn’t live life thinking you were always about to fall off a cliff. i didn’t want to tell him i would never go back with him to the church: i would be going forward, forward by way of getting back to the kind of life i used to have, only this time i’d live it better. (kleeman, 281)

making pasta is something i’ve wanted to do for a while now, and one of the definite pros of being back at my parents’ in LA is counter space. marble(?) counter space. lots of marble(?) counter space.

i’ve always loved working with dough; it’s one of the most relaxing things i can think to do; and i love the physicality of it. i’m not one who likes using gadgets in the kitchen (i won’t even use a crock pot or a hand mixer), so i do everything by hand, kneading, rolling, cutting, and it has been my saving grace this past week. cooking, after all, has always been the best therapy.

like i said above, i feel like a ghost, and this is how i’m getting through these days. i cook. i think about what i’m cooking, how to get better, what to try next. i think about how i can challenge myself in the kitchen because, for some reason, i don’t doubt that i can try new things, new techniques, more complicated doughs and succeed (or, at least, not fail totally). i believe i’m capable of this, of learning, of practicing, of improving, in ways that i cannot yet believe that i will write fiction again, that i will feel whole again, that i will learn to live with my suicidal depression — that i can be loved, despite all the ways in which i am broken. i don’t have that faith, but, at least, i have a kitchen to turn to, hands to work with, hunger and curiosity to feed — and, above all, i have food.

3 books.

August 2, 2016

there are books, and then there are books, and that isn’t meant to imply that one is better than or superior to the other. when i say books vs. books, i mean that there are books we read and move on from and there are books that impact us in one way or another. there are books we finish and shelve, and there are books we keep coming back to, carry around with us, return to time and time again. there are books that stick with us, that leave us with a sense of urgency, maybe a deeper awareness of something in the world. there are books that make our hearts race, that we immediately run into the world waving in the air and telling everyone about.

maybe to add to that, i find it disingenuous to pretend that books — that art in general — doesn’t exist within the world, that they can be (and, sometimes, ought to be) more than entertainment or escapism. books are oftentimes vehicles through which we, whether as writers or readers, try to make sense of the world, and the books that succeed in this are those that don’t moralize or directly take on a message. they’re the books that don’t forget that they are books, this is fiction, and they are here to tell stories about people and that these stories, these people, in turn, tell a greater story about the state of the world.

so, here are three books i found hugely impactful, that i would recommend. trigger warning for depression/suicide, homophobia/religion, and rape.

miriam toews, all my puny sorrows (mcsweeney's, 2015)

you can’t flagrantly march around the fronts of churches waving your arms in the air and scaring people with threats and accusations just because your family was slaughtered in russia and you were forced to run and hide in a pile of manure when you were little. what you do at the pulpit would be considered lunatic behavior on the street. you can’t go around terrorizing people and making them feel small and shitty and then call them evil when they destroy themselves. you will never walk down a street and feel a lightness come over you. you will never fly. (toews, 178)

all my puny sorrows only came into my possession because i subscribed to a month of my book hunter, an online book community where subscribers are mailed an unknown book a month. this happened to be the title chosen the month i subscribed, and i started reading it completely blind because, apparently, synopses on book flaps or on the backs of books are not things i read and retain. (i don’t know why that is; the same thing happened with janice y.k. lee’s the expatriates, though to significantly less successful results. if i’d actually paid attention to the book flap, i likely wouldn’t have picked it up — so maybe my inability to read and retain works to books’ advantage.)

i was so drawn to yoli’s voice in all my puny sorrows, though, that i kept reading even after i figured out that this was a book about two sisters — the narrator, yoli, is an “ordinary” woman, her sister, elf, a brilliant pianist who is severely depressed and suicidal. maybe it’s important to note that this is not a book i would normally read — depression and suicide are intensely personal topics to me, so much so that one of my rules is that i actively avoid books about depression and suicide, specifically those written by people who have lost people to depression/suicide. this actually has little to do with triggers and mostly to do with stigma, shame, and power, and i’ve touched on it briefly on instagram.

there was something about yoli’s voice that just kept me reading, even if i were reading with a whole lot of wariness, ready to set the book down and walk away at any moment. there was something about her, about elf, about them together, that i felt so intensely connected to, something so genuine and real and alive. toews doesn’t romanticize or glorify depression/suicide, and neither does she judge, condemn, or dismiss it but rather tackles it head-on in all its complexity and brokenness and pain. she’s not here to make nice with this novel, whether about mental illness or about the health care system or about people’s right to make end-of-life decisions, and, most importantly, she’s not here to bullshit anyone about the realities of what it’s like to love someone who’s depressed and suicidal.

maybe it’s worth explaining (if it isn’t clear already) that i have struggled with severe depression. it’s the obvious reason why i’m so invested in starting open, frank, safe dialogues about depression/suicide specifically and mental health generally, and it’s why i’m on my eighth year of working on a collection of interrelated short stories about suicide. it’s why writing this is so fucking terrifying but why i’m doing it anyway.

it’s also why i loved all my puny sorrows so intensely.

i heard our mother speaking in her calm but lethal voice outside elf’s door. she was telling the nurse that elf hadn’t seen a doctor in days. the nurse told my mom the doctor was very busy. my mom told the nurse what she had told me the night before, that elf was a human being. the nurse wasn’t janice. my mom was asking where janice was. the nurse who was not janice was telling my mom that she agreed with her, elf was a human being, but that she was also a patient in the hospital and was expected to cooperate. why? asked my mother. what does cooperation have to do with her getting well? is cooperation even a symptom of mental health or just something you need from the patients to be able to control every last damn person here with medication and browbeating? she’ll eat when she feels like eating. like you, like me, not when we’re told to eat. and if she doesn’t want to talk, so what? (toews, 208-9)

there is no answer to the question “why?”

maybe it’s more accurate to say that there is no answer that can satisfy the asker, and there is no answer that can encompass the depth of pain and fear and conviction that delivers someone to the point of suicide.

all there can be is an attempt at understanding, an attempt at sympathy where empathy cannot be accessed, an attempt at generosity of spirit. all there can be are love and acceptance, even in grief and anger and confusion. it’s a shitty answer, but that’s the best there is — that this person you loved suffered from such pain and anguish that the best thing s/he thought s/he could do is die. to that person, there is simply no other way out, no hope in sight — and, when i read all my puny sorrows, i thought, “goddamn. here is someone who gets that.”

we sat in a café called saving grace on dundas and ordered eggs. she told me that she’s been worrying about me so much, it must be awful, everything i’ve been going through, and that in her opinion ‘to die by one’s own hand’ is always a sin. always. because of the suffering it causes the survivors. i asked her what about all the people who suffer because of assholes who are alive? is it a sin for the assholes to keep on living?
okay, she said, but we’re here on this earth, and even if we didn’t choose to be, we inherit all kinds of duties, to the people who raise us and to the people who love us. i mean, everyone has personal agonies, sure, but to die by one’s own hand, ironically enough, even though it’s an act of self-annihilation, seems to me the ultimate act of vanity. it’s just so incredibly selfish.
can you please stop saying to die by one’s own hand? i asked. well, what should i say? she said.
suicide! when someone’s murdered, do you explain it as, oh, he died by the hand of another? this isn’t the freaking count of monte cristo.
i just thought it was more delicate, she said.
and also, i said, selfish? how could it be selfish? unless you’ve seen the agony first-hand you can’t really pass judgment.
okay, she said, but if your sister had been thinking of how it would affect you when she —
AFFECT ME? i said. i’m sorry. people were looking at me. listen, i said, i don’t think you understand. i don’t want to be presumptuous, but really how could you understand what another person’s suicide means? (toews, 273)

this is ending up a lot more personal than i anticipated.

chinelo okparanta, under the udala trees (hmh, 2015)

i was raised religious (conservative christian, specifically non-denominational/presbyterian), and, until last year when i had a major break with faith, religion was a huge part of my life. for years, though, over a decade now, i struggled with how to reconcile what i believed (or what i was supposed to believe) with two specific issues: abortion and same-sex marriage. was it possible to believe in god and subscribe to these religious tenets while also upholding a belief in the firm separation of church and state? was it discrimination, or was it religious conviction? what did it mean to “hate the sin but love the sinner,” and was that even possible when “acceptance” meant demanding that queer people repress or deny an essential part of themselves and cloak it in shame?

(for the record, i do believe in the firm separation of church and state, in equal rights regardless of sexuality/sexual orientation, in women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies. i do believe it’s discrimination and bigotry. i also stand by planned parenthood. and i have zero — and i mean zero — tolerance for shaming.)

my break with faith actually had nothing to do with sexuality (that would come later), but, when i read under the udala trees, i found quite a lot of it very familiar — the homophobia, the religious shaming, the idea of “we must pray the devil out of you.” that last one in particular drives me crazy because it’s also a common church response to depression/suicidal thinking — pray harder; spend more time in the word; you feel like this because your faith is weak. it’s total fucking bullshit.

okparanta knows her religion, and she knows how it operates, how that mentality works. the novel follows ijeoma as she comes of age in civil-war nigeria, and, when she’s sent away from home to work as a servant for a schoolteacher and his wife, she falls for a girl. they’re caught by the schoolteacher, and ijeoma is taken back home where her mother begins to work on her soul. that means hours spent praying and reading the bible, which leads to a gem like this:

the father and the levite went on to bargain over a price for the damsel, and the damsel was forced to return with the levite. on their way back to his home, they passed the town of gibeah, where most of the citizens were up to no good. one of the noble townspeople, in order to protect the travelers, offered them shelter at his home. but before the night was over, the other men of the city showed up at the kind man’s door and demanded to rape the levite. the kind man pleaded with his fellow townspeople, even offering up his own daughter to be raped instead.
rather than offer up himself to the townsmen, the levite offered up the damsel to be raped. the men of the town defiled her all throughout he night before finally letting her go. when they were done, she collapsed in front of the door. in the morning the levite came out, prodding her to get up so that they could be on their way. she did not respond. annoyed, he threw her over his donkey and took her with him that way. back at home he cut her into pieces, limb by limb, which he then sent out to all the territories of israel.
[…]
“what is there not to understand?” [mama] said. “do you not see why the men offered up the women instead of the man?”
i said, “no, i don’t see why.”
after a moment i realized that i did know why. the reason was suddenly obvious to me. i said, “actually, mama, yes, i do see why. the men offered up the women because they were cowards and the worst kind of men possible. what kind of men offer up their daughters and wives to be raped in place of themselves?” (okparanta, 79-80)

the point here is not whether this is biblically accurate or not; that’s not relevant. the point here is the way people use and manipulate religion to enforce shame — and misogyny. (the two so often seem to come hand-in-hand.)

because then there’s this:

why was it that i could not love chibundu the way that i loved amina and ndidi? why was it that i could not love a man? these days, i’ve heard it said that the gender of your first love determines the gender of all your future loves. perhaps this was true for me. but back then, it was not a thing i ever heard. all i knew is that moment was that there was a real possibility of god punishing me for the nature of my love. my mind went back to the bible. because if people like mama and the grammar school teacher were right, then the bible was all the proof i needed to know that god would surely punish me. (okparanta, 228-9)

which is put in place by years of being told this:

“marriage has a shape. its shape is that of a bicycle. doesn’t matter the size or color of the bicycle. all that matters is that the bicycle is complete, that the bicycle has two wheels.
“the man is one wheel,” [mama] continued, “the woman the other. one wheel must come before the other, and the other wheel has no choice but to follow. what is certain, though, is that neither wheel is able to function fully without the other. and what use is it to exist in the world as a partially functioning human being?”
under her breath, she said, “a woman without a man is hardly a woman at all.” (okparanta, 182)

do i need to explain why this is problematic?

a few weeks ago, i was in california with family. we were driving down from oregon back to the bay area when the topic of same-sex marriage came up, and, at one point, someone said that i likely identify with the queer community because i grew up feeling so intensely Othered myself because of my weight.

body dysmorphia and body shaming (and korean-ness and rage) are things that i will explore in the future, and, in my head, i couldn’t disagree — that is one contributing factor, reductive and dismissive though the comment was. i have always been sympathetic to the Other, which, sometimes, i think is unavoidable, being a woman of color, but the thing is that the Other, that Othering, is not just a theory or an academic point of interest. it’s a very real-life thing that affects real-life people, oftentimes in very violent, very tragic ways. people are persecuted for it; people lose their lives because of it; people take their lives because of it.

that’s why i resist such [hetero]normative views like those quoted above. i can’t help but see the danger in such pervasive, rigid normativity, especially when it’s enforced by religion, especially because it leads to fear — name your phobia, your -ism — to hatred and intolerance, to repression and shame and self-loathing. because, yes, i have been there, i am there, i carry those scars, that damage — i know what normativity does, so i don’t know where else to be, if not with the Other.

under the udala trees did leave me with a sense of hope — or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a hopeless hopefulness — because ijeoma does find her way out. then, in the note at the end, okparanta writes that the president of nigeria passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relationships … in 2014. and we’re only a month away from the horrific shooting at a gay club in orlando.

and yet we have books like this by a woman of color being published by one of the big 5. we have trans actresses on big television shows with prominent presence in the media. we have sulu in star trek in a same-sex relationship. maybe they’re small things in the big picture, but they’re not nothing.

in this world we live in, they can’t be nothing.

krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016)

i confess to being peeved by general media reportage or the general [western] mass attitude regarding north korea. i tend to find a lot of it sensationalistic, reductive, and dismissive — insensitive, even, forgetting that there are real human lives involved. we like to impose our “enlightened,” western perspectives on north korea, and that’s something that peeves me about how the west views the east in general, this egocentric inability to see outside the western model and this tendency to act like all cultures exist according to the same worldview — and that, if they don’t, they should. globalization does not, should not equal westernization.

what does that have to do with this novel? nothing, really.

around four years ago, i started reading about north korea. i read everything from memoirs by refugees, historical books, political studies, etcetera etcetera etcetera, and I’ve attended talks and readings by refugees, by people on the UN human rights council, journalists — i’m very invested in learning as much as i can about this country, this other half of my ethnic origin, and i’ve wondered about this curiosity about mine. is it because i’m korean? is it because i’m korean-american; is it because i’m distanced from korea that i find the narrative of a divided korea so compelling?

i don’t know what it is, but i still love the way suki kim put it in her book, without you, there is no us (crown, 2014):

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. (kim, 11-2)

maybe that explains it, maybe it doesn’t. whatever it is, if anyone’s interested, my favorite non-fiction book about north korea is still barbara demick’s nothing to envy (spiegel & grau, 2010).

i first read krys lee in 2014, and i was blown away by her short story collection, drifting house (viking, 2012). (i wrote about it here and here.) there’s this delicious thread of unease that runs through her stories, and she’s one of few korean-american writers who is able to have one foot in korea and one foot in america, straddling that divide between korean culture and korean-american culture with ease, which isn’t an easy thing to do, mind you. i’ve been looking forward to her novel ever since and am so, so excited that it’s out.

how i became a north korean follows three narrators — two north korean refugees (yongju and jangmi) and one korean-american kid (danny). danny is sent to china to meet his mother, who is there to do missionary work, but he runs away to a border city where he meets yongju, and the three characters ultimately come together in a “home” operated by a missionary group. the missionary promises to smuggle them out of china but holds onto them until danny takes matters into his own hands — and maybe it all sounds preposterous and unrealistic, but it doesn’t either, given what we know about what north korean refugees go through, how dependent they are on strangers, how they’re exploited, held in constant fear of repatriation, treated like they aren’t even human because they lack status.

i think it’s worth noting that lee actually works with refugees, so this isn’t a novel that comes out of nowhere. it doesn’t come out of mere fascination or interest or curiosity, and it’s not one of those heavily-researched novels that read like heavily-researched novels. lee brings depth and respect and understanding to these characters and their stories, and i’m not saying that people have to have first-hand experience interacting with the people or cultures they write about — but then again, you know, maybe they should. the angry asian-american in me is sick of white people writing about asia in half-assed manners and winning prizes for it.

i often think about borders. it's hard not to. there were the guatemalans and mexicans i read about in the paper who died of dehydration while trying to cross into america. or later, the syrians fleeing war and flooding into turkey. arizona had the nerve to ban books by latino writers when only a few hundred years ago arizona was actually mexico. or the sheer existence of passports, twentieth-century creations that decide who gets to stay and leave. (lee, 60)

i’ve said this before, but how i became a north korean is a brilliant indictment of everyone — and i mean everyone — in the exploitation, abuse, and mistreatment of north koreans. it doesn’t matter whether it’s a missionary, a broker, china, a magazine, a journalist, a random citizen like you and me — we’re all guilty. we’re all guilty of simply consuming sensationalist stories, of trying to profit off the lives of refugees, of trying to profit off their stories, of using them for spiritual self-elevation, of thinking we have any right to satirize so thoughtlessly a regime that abuses its own people. we’re all complicit, and we’re all guilty.

lee delivers this indictment without moralizing, without standing on a soapbox and getting preachy. all she does is tell a story — or stories, i suppose — stories full of heart and life, stories of desperation, rage, and helplessness, and she brings you into these people’s fears and vulnerabilities and hardnesses, into all the hurt and pain they’ve learned to live with, have had to insulate themselves against. i think it’s absolutely brilliant, what she’s done, and she does it powerfully in blank, naked prose. she doesn’t judge her characters, just as she doesn’t try to make them “perfect” — she simply brings them to life on the page and asks you, please, to pay attention.

and i’m not trying to get preachy about it, either. i know it’s impossible for us to care about every single issue and human rights violation out there; i would never expect that of anyone when surviving on a day-to-day basis is struggle enough. however, like i said about art existing in the world, the truth is that we also exist in the world. our actions, our inactions, our complacencies, our conveniences, our limitations — they don’t occur in vacuums. i don’t think we should walk around carrying the burden of all the world’s ailments on our shoulders; they’re certainly not all ours to bear; but i do think it’s worth acknowledging that sometimes shit happens, shit continues to happen because, whether intentionally or not, we let it.

this is how it happened. we fled in the brokers' footsteps. we scattered into small dark spaces in the backs of buildings, trains, and buses, through the great mouth of china. our feet made fresh tracks as we weaved through mountains and made unreliable allies of the moon and the night and the stars. every shadow a soldier, a border guard, an opportunist. each body of water reminded us of the first river, the river of dreams and death, where we saw the faces of people we knew and would never know frozen beneath it. the children who had run and been caught and sent back. the pregnant women repatriated to our country and thrown in jail, forced to run a hundred laps until they aborted. the women who gave birth in the same jail and saw soldiers bash their new infants against a wall to save bullets. the countless others whose peaceful lives ended when an enemy informed on them -- ours was one small story in all the other stories. we stumbled across the jungles and deserts of southern asia, seeking safety and freedom. we would look and look. a few of us would find it. (lee, 224)

a few weeks ago, jord watches contacted me about a collaboration. they sent me this watch (from their fieldcrest line), and i’ve worn it around for almost two months now. i’m someone who wears a watch everyday and feels naked without one, and i’ve been enjoying this wood watch — it’s a unique piece that’s very light and doesn’t start feeling wet or bulkyeven in heat and humidity. find more images here, here, and here, and check them out [link here] if you’re interested!

(tl;dr disclaimer: watch was provided; review is my own.)

other miscellaneous info: the coffee is my attempt at a mint mojito iced coffee, a la philz; it’s cold brew using beans (philtered soul) from philz (purchased myself in santa monica), brewed in a hario mizudashi cold brew pot (also purchased myself two years ago, used maybe twice, and stored in a cupboard until last week when i was like, wait, i have a cold brew pot; MAYBE I SHOULD USE IT), with half-and-half and mint, muddled in my glass with the end of a rolling pin. the blue straw was stolen from blue bottle (^^), and the roll cake was baked myself because, like i mentioned in my previous post, i’m obsessed with baking asian sponge cake rolls. i’ll probably bake another one tomorrow.

i purchased the books and wrote the above wall of words and took the photos myself.

thanks for reading!

Wooden Watches Men

korean/korean-american literature i recommend!

July 26, 2016

when i say “korean/korean-american literature,” i don’t mean literature written by koreans/korean-americans strictly about koreans/korean-americans or about the korean/korean-american experience. one of the things about life (and art) is that we aren’t restricted to “what we know,” that we are more than our ethnic or lingual identities, and this has been the really cool part of reading more from korean/korean-americans (“kor-/kor-am” from hereon out), that we write across a wide variety of topics in a wide variety of styles and voices and perspectives.

that might sound like an obvious thing, but [mainstream] publishing is not one that has been friendly to diversity — and, taking it further, to diversity within diversity. it’s still the case that certain narratives are desired, that certain expectations and burdens are placed upon the shoulders of writers of color, that we’re expected to play within these lines and deliver stories that fit within the narratives shoved onto us, oftentimes immigrant narratives, narratives of hardship and racism and prejudice.

* also, if you haven’t read this fabulous essay by jenny zhang, you should.

it’s fun to see what writers of color are doing, the stories they’re telling, their obsessions and interests, the weird things that make them tick. it’s also a relief to find a general understanding of intersectionality amongst writers of color, that we are not one thing but many things, that we are not only people of color but that we are also, i.e., queer people of color, that we are the sum of our parts. it’s also fun to see how we don’t restrict ourselves only to narratives that involve “our experience;” like, i love that alexander chee wrote a massive novel about a french opera singer in the nineteenth-century. all these things might sound like nothing but aren’t.

it’s also fun to see what’s making it into english translation from korea. i’m thrilled that the korean government is finally investing in its literature and actively trying to get more korean literature into translation and to make it more visible throughout the world. i was also so, so happy that the vegetarian recently won the man booker international prize, not only because it was written by a korean woman but also because it’s this weird, dark, korean novel that i’m also impressed and thrilled has picked up a lot of attention, even before the man booker win, in the book community.

and, so, here’s some book talk.

mise en place is french for “everything in its place,” and i fully blame top chef for my current obsession with it. (and for my current obsession with baking asian sponge cakes, no electric mixer involved.)

a big part of it is my love and appreciation for the aesthetics of order; there’s something so visually satisfying about having “everything in its place.” another part is that it makes cooking a lot easier once everything has been chopped, measured, separated because all the mechanical labor is out of the way. what any of this has to do with kor/kor-am literature is anyone’s guess.

i do sometimes question my strong interest in kor/kor-am literature (i think it’s worth examining our obsessions and gravitations from time-to-time). i acknowledge that a significant part of it is informed by the fact that i am korean-american, that i am bilingual and bicultural, that i am consequently very interested in the gap and disconnect that often occurs between my korean and american sides. naturally, i turn to literature to see how we, as this tangle of thinly-related groups, wrestle with and negotiate identity, and i’m interested in exploring that tension, seeing how others struggle with it, the various results of that struggle.

that, partly, is why i started making more deliberate attempts to read from kor/kor-am authors, though, to be honest, another incentive was guilt. i’d always followed korean pop and cinema and television (and still do), but, a few years ago, i knew almost nothing about korean literature, which would give me twinges of shame because i have always loved books and yet had nothing to say when it came to korean literature because of my own ignorance. once i started reading, though, from both korean and korean-american authors, i fell in love, enchanted by how richly and differently these authors saw the world and expressed themselves, and it’s what’s brought me here and keeps me diving deeper and wanting more and wanting to put these incredible books out there into the world as much as i can.

i might live and breathe books, but i also think a lot about food.

it’s a mystery to my family where my love for food comes from, and they find it simultaneously amusing and distressing that i love it so and think about it constantly, what i want to eat for my next meal, what i want to cook, what i want to try baking. (right now, i’m playing with the idea of breaking down a whole chicken, brining and searing the breasts, freezing the wings, frying the legs, and roasting the carcass to make broth. i’ve roasted whole chickens before, but i haven’t broken one down yet, and i find the prospect so exciting, especially when the result is homemade broth.)

food is the thing i loved most about han kang’s the vegetarian — that all that unravelling begins to exhibit in yeong-hye’s sudden refusal to eat animals. while meat isn’t a huge part of korean cuisine, korean food is not one i’ve necessarily thought of as vegetarian-friendly, despite people (usually not korean) trying to herald it as such; we use anchovy broth for our stews, beef broth for our soups, shrimp paste in our kimchi; and i don’t mean this to say that korean food can’t be made vegetarian, simply that, in its current form best known to me, it is not one that is inherently accessible to vegetarians, at least not in the ways people seem to assume.

which is a total tangent because the vegetarian is not a novel about vegetarianism — or even, food. instead, han uses korean food culture to get to issues in korean culture overall, whether it be the patriarchy, conformity, the unit over the individual, and this is what i love so much about food culture in general, how much it absorbs so much of culture and reflects it back or subverts it and makes it into something else.

in this case, though, it’s the former, and han delivers a wallop of a criticism against patriarchal korean society. (i should probably say i’m focusing mostly on the first part of the novel.) not only is it narrated by yeong-hye’s husband (except for dream segments), thus placing her in position to someone else, but the fall-out from yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is defined entirely in how it affects the men in her life, specifically her husband and her father.

her husband is angry because his wife is no longer performing her wifely duties by preparing him meals with meat and declining to have sex, and he’s shamed because her vegetarianism (really, veganism) sets her apart from everyone else. when he takes her to dinner with his boss and coworkers and their wives, yeong-hye refuses to eat meat and sits there, silent and not eating, marking herself as willfully different and outside social norms as she refuses to bend even to social etiquette and social niceties. that isolates her husband as well because his wife isn’t like other wives, which means that he’s also no longer welcome, because social norms and etiquette and niceties are the glue that holds korean society together. it’s a conformist world, one driven by trends and sameness, the group over the individual, and yeong-hye’s refusal to participate in food culture places her outside that world.

her father is enraged, too, because he’s the patriarchal head of the family and should be obeyed. if he tells his daughter to eat meat, she should eat meat, and he shouldn’t be shamed by the actions of a contrary daughter. her failures to perform her wifely duties shame him as well; the best thing a daughter can be is a good wife; so yeong-hye is an embarrassment, ungrateful and rude — yeong-hye’s rejection of the oysters and food and black goat her family offers her is gravely rude and offensive; in korea, when someone senior to you offers you something, you take it, no questions asked.

it’s funny because what i love so much about korean food culture is everything that maybe runs against korean culture. i love how the 밥상 can often represent a safe space for strangers and outsiders, for people to find refuge and forge and solidify new connections, to create family where blood does not flow. i love the emotional significance of being invited to someone’s 밥상, of being given a place of your own, a rice bowl of your own, an invitation to share a meal (and very literally share a meal — korean food is communal, doesn’t come neatly plated) — and maybe this sounds romanticized and idealized, but, as someone who has taken part of this very culture, who has shared 밥상s with people and created them for people, it’s a very real, very precious thing to me.

that’s likely why the first part of the vegetarian had the strongest impact on me (and why it’s the only part i’m really discussing here). like i said, han uses korean food culture to point at ugly aspects of korean culture overall, namely the intense patriarchy, the casual acceptance of violence, the extent to which any kind of individualism or any kind of deviation from the norm is shunned. korea is still a xenophobic, homophobic country, obsessed with academic excellence, a single standard of beauty, and, sometimes, i wonder at the kind of fear that keeps koreans so compliant to this social conformity, that keeps them working themselves to death since childhood to get into SKY, get that job at samsung, get that face, that apartment, that family, that lifestyle.

and so, underneath it all, underneath the extreme reactions to yeong-hye’s vegetarianism lies that fear. it’s a fear of the unknown, of the different, of someone’s rejection of the norm and the accepted and expected. it still boggles my mind that people fear (and hate) difference so much, to the point that they will ruthlessly, deliberately murder people because of it, because they so fear any disruption of the so-called norm, of the status quo — i will simply never understand this insane fear. like, what makes you, the [hetero]normative majority so great that you feel everyone must fit into your single goddamn mold?

here are 13 recommendations for books by korean/korean-american authors in alphabetical order by last name (korean names are formatted the korean way, family name first):

choe yun, there a petal silently falls (columbia university press, 2008) [link]
susan choi, my education (viking, 2014) [link]
catherine chung, forgotten country (riverhead, 2012) [link] [2]
han kang, human acts (portobello, 2015) [link] [2]
jung eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013) [link] [2]
lady hyegyong, the memoirs of lady hyegyong (university of california press, 2013)
chang-rae lee, a gesture life (riverhead, 2000) [link]
krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016) [link]
park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess (dalkey archive press, 2014) [link]
patricia park, re jane (pamela dorman books, 2015) [link]
shin kyung-sook, i’ll be right there (unnamed press, 2014) [link]
unknown, the story of hong gildong (penguin classics, 2016) [link]
jung yun, shelter (picador, 2015) [link]

why these thirteen? what were the criteria? how did i select them? is it terrible if i admit that i chose them a little arbitrarily? and that there’s also kind of a cheat in there because i haven’t actually finished reading the memoirs of lady hyegyong yet?

reading is an intellectual act, but it’s also a visceral and emotional act. (it’s also, partly, a visual experience.) we respond to different things, connect with different characters, identify with different conflicts and struggles, and these are simply books that have resonated with me for one reason or another. some of them also have what i call staying power, books that have stayed with me since i read them, even if i might not have felt super strongly or positively about them after i’d initially read them.

the one rule i did follow is that i only allowed one title per author*, and i did try to provide titles by an equal number of korean authors and korean-american authors. if i reviewed or wrote about a title, whether via instagram or on this site, i linked them as well because i’m not going to go into in-depth reviews here.

this is not a comprehensive list by any means, and it is entirely 100% subjective. however, i can assure you that they are all well-written, smart, thoughtful books, and i think they each add to the general dialogue of literature, of korean/korean-american literature, of translated literature. some of them (there a petal silently falls, human acts, a gesture life, i’ll be right there) consider human brutality within history; others (forgotten country, re jane, shelter) consider korean-americanism, what that means and how that fits into and impacts people’s lives in different ways; and even others (no one writes back, pavane for a dead princess) look at contemporary korean society and its ailments. and then there’s how i became a north korean, which is currently by far my book of the year, a brilliant, heart-breaking story of north korean refugees, as well as a searing indictment of everyone (and i mean everyone) in the exploitation, abuse, and mistreatment of north korean refugees.

* if i hadn’t given myself that rule, i would have also included krys lee’s drifting house (viking, 2012), han kang’s the vegetarian (hogarth, 2016), susan choi’s the foreign student (harper perennial, 2004), and shin kyung-sook’s please look after mom (vintage, 2012).

so there we have it! thanks for reading, and please do feel free to share any thoughts, especially if you do pick up or have read any of the books mentioned/listed!

international women's day!

March 8, 2016

it's international women's day, and i'm not that big on hashtags (despite sporadic participation), but i'm all about opportunities to share asian-american and [east] asian books-in-translation (i admit/acknowledge that my geographic focus is narrow). here are ten books by international women i love.

banana yoshimoto, lizard (washington square press, 1995)
marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
krys lee, drifting house (viking, 2012)
ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
mary shelly, frankenstein (penguin clothbound classics, 2013)
han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
helen macdonald, h is for hawk (grove press, 2015)
charlotte brontë, jane eyre (penguin clothbound classics, 2009)
jang eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013)
shin kyung-sook, i'll be right there (other press, 2014)

also, one of my favorite book quotes comes from yoshimoto's "helix," a story which can be found in her collection, lizard:

"even when i have crushes on other men, i always see you in the curve of their eyebrows." (64)

happy international reading!