disparate entities.

May 28, 2017

who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts i had in my mind as i typed them? we are different, you and i, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.
and yet, whatever has been lost int translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, i think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. our minds managed to tough, if but briefly and imperfectly.
does the thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?
we live for some miracles. (liu, preface, viii)

there was supposed to be an introduction here, but i scrapped it. the point was really that, sometimes, i get ahead of myself and want to write about a book when i’m halfway through it, so i’ll start planning the post, take the photographs, and come up with a partial draft … and, then, the draft will sit there for any number of reasons.

and, so, this is a post of disparate parts, kind of, at least disparate in that these are two books i wanted to write about but took longer to get to than i’d like. one book i’m still reading; the other i plowed through and loved, my brain shooting off in a million directions because there were so many things i wanted to talk about; but i suppose that is the problem with blog posts and reviews and etcetera, that there is only so much space we have, only so many things we can tackle.

so here are a few things.

a mama omelette is two eggs; a baby omelette is one. if i’m making an omelette on a weekday, i make a baby omelette, and, if it’s a sunday, i make a mama one because it’s the weekend, and weekends should contain acts of indulgence and self-care.

i wrote about how i make my omelettes before, but here are images that i was going to pair with ken liu’s the paper menagerie and other stories (saga press, 2016). the problem with that plan, though, is that i read short story collections much slower than i read novels because someone once said that you shouldn’t rush through a short story collection — you should read one and pause and let it sink in before moving onto the next.

given that (and the fact that i have, like, seven books going at any given time), who knows when i’ll actually finish the paper menagerie, so i figured i might as well say this here: liu’s collection is fucking fantastic. it’s so good and smart and aware, and it’s beautifully written and nuanced and so freaking creative, but in these wonderfully subtle ways that weave together realism with fantasy and sci-fi elements and present these alternate worlds and scenarios that make you think, what if, what if, what if.

i appreciate fiction like this, fiction that challenges boundaries and preconceptions of what can be done within genre, within subgroups, within kind-of-not-significant-not-in-the-ways-we-make-them-to-be classifications like ethnic backgrounds, social backgrounds, whatever backgrounds. you could go into the paper menagerie thinking, oh, sci-fi, or, oh, fantasy, or, oh, asian writer, and you’d be thrown off with every story, forced to reassess these definitions you’re taught to impose on certain people and things as ways of being.

also, that titular story, “the paper menagerie,” will just crush your heart into oblivion.

six years i lived like this. one day, an old woman who sold fish to me in the morning market pulled me aside.
“i know girls like you. how old are you now, sixteen? one day, the man who owns you will get drunk, and he’ll look at you and pull you to him and you can’t stop him. the wife will find out, and then you will think you really have gone to hell. you have to get out of this life. i know someone who can help.”
she told me about american men who wanted asian wives. if i can cook, clean, and take care of my american husband, he’ll give me a good life. it was the only hope i had. and that was how i got into the catalog with all those lies and met your father. it is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.
in the suburbs of connecticut, i was lonely. your father was kind and gentle with me, and i was very grateful to him. but no one understood me, and i understood nothing.
but then you were born! i was so happy when i looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself. i had lost my entire family, all of sigula, everything i ever knew and loved. but there you were, and your face was proof that they were real. i hadn’t made them up. (liu, “the paper menagerie,” 192)

i make a damn good omelette.

september 30th, the day i received the news of my adoptive brother’s death, i also received a brand-new couch from ikea. to clarify, i was the only one who happened to be physically present the day my roommate julie’s brand-new couch arrived at our shared studio apartment in manhattan. (cottrell, 7)

two weeks ago, i read patty yumi cottrell’s sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney's, 2017), which i bought from the booksmith in san francisco. when i was in mexico, i was overwhelmed by this need to read her book and to read it now, so, once i landed in san francisco, i was on a quest to get to a bookstore and find it.

in the morning, i walked to tartine, picked up four croissants (yup) and a loaf of country bread, then walked over to dog eared books in the mission, but they didn’t have the cottrell, despite having a shelf dedicated to mcsweeney’s. the nice lady told me i should try 826 down the street; maybe they would have it; but it was too early in the morning and 826 was closed and i had to get on the road to LA sooner than later.

instead, i drove over to booksmith, up and down hills, which is something i loathe doing, driving on hills, while yelling demands at SF to tell me why it was so goddamn hilly. i’d wanted to go to the booksmith, anyway, though, because the booksmith took a stand against s&s during the milo what’s-his-face debacle, so i figured it’d be a good opportunity to go throw some money at them — and, no, of course, i didn’t call and ask if they had the cottrell in stock because i’m wild like that.

luckily, they had it, just one copy on the shelves. so i bought it. along with two cookbooks.

and i have no idea why i shared that whole story. i was damn proud of myself for driving in SF, though. i hate driving on hills; it gives me major anxiety.

it never occurred to me to intervene. i could be described as many things, but i was not an intervener, especially not when it came to my adoptive brother and his life, and perhaps the truth was i was afraid of intervening, because to intervene would mean to communicate with and confront my adoptive parents, people i hadn’t looked at in the face for years, perhaps because i was afraid of their faces and always had been. (cottrell, 155-6)

anyway, so, i got the cottrell, and then i read the cottrell, and i loved the cottrell.

sorry to disrupt the peace is narrated by helen, a woman in her 30s who goes back to her adoptive parents’ house in wisconsin after she learns that her adoptive brother has died by suicide. she seems kind of off, lost in her own way of thinking, not quite anchored to reality, and she goes back to her adoptive parents’ house, determined to investigate her adoptive brother’s death and learn why he killed himself.

her adoptive parents are surprised (not quite pleasantly) when she shows up, and she goes about doing her own thing while they plan the funeral, try to process their grief, receive visitors and guests and etcetera. in her head, helen thinks that she is contributing and helping out; she receives a cake and accepts flower deliveries; and, in an attempt to be thoughtful and make sure the flowers don’t die, she puts them in a bucket — except, later, of course, her parents discover the flowers, dead, in a bucket of bleach.

you could go about wondering whether helen is an unreliable narrator or not, and i have no idea if reviewers have hopped onto this debate with sorry to disrupt the peace because, truth be told, i don’t often read reviews. maybe it says more about me that, sometimes, i’ll read a book, and i’ll think, oh, i bet people are going to harp on this-and-this-and-this, and, often, that will usually have to do with unlikable female protagonists or unreliable female narrators or just things written by women because, yes, i do believe gender makes the difference here.

what do we expect from narrators, though? what makes a reliable narrator, anyway? narrators naturally only have their own truth to tell, and, when i say truth in this sense, i don’t mean truth in an “objective,” absolute sort of way; the point of the question is not to dredge up a debate on absolute versus relative truth. what we have as people, as individuals, is our own truth, and, as writers, that’s what we offer our readers in our characters — their authentic truth, whatever that looks like, how ever they define it.

that means truth in messy, complicated ways, truth that is sometimes so distorted by personal interpretation as to be considered madness or deceitfulness. maybe that translates into unreliable because we have this need to know things and to know true things, and it can be maddening to invest time and energy into a book told by a character who doesn’t seem to uphold her/his/their end of the unspoken bargain made between readers and narrators — that they are trustworthy, that they are taking you somewhere, that they aren’t just weird, random, unmoored beings spinning words on a page.

and helen is pretty weird, to put in one way. she has these ideas of what she can accomplish (deciphering the reason behind her adoptive brother’s suicide) and of who she is (sister reliability), and anyone might look at her and think that her grasp on reality is tenuous at best. it’s a testament, really, to cottrell’s writing that helen is so vibrant and alive, her voice popping off the page and drawing you in and pulling at your heart. in another writer’s hands, a narrator like helen might fall apart and ring so totally contrived as to be laughable. in cottrell’s hands, you get a narrator who’s vibrant and present and earnest, darkly funny, too, as she returns to her adoptive parents’ house and goes about doing her own thing, in her own head, as the people around her try to mourn.

thing number two! in an interview with the paris review, cottrell said:

a few years ago, i said i was writing an antimemoir. i was thinking of it as a response to people who suggested that i write a memoir, which i was never interested in doing. the further along i went, the less it became a preoccupation, though. the autobiographical details that overlap with the book — they're very emotional, i was writing from a place of emotion. but i wasn't hoping to create confusion between me and helen. if people want to read the details of my life into the events in helen's, that choice has nothing to do with me. that's the reader's response, which is private and subjective.

the question i kept asking myself was, why do people expect fiction to be autobiographical?

or, i suppose, more specifically, why do people except fiction written by certain people to be autobiographical?

if you go through a particular experience, if you’re a woman, if you identify as some “subset” of people, there’s this expectation almost that that one characteristic of yours is the thing that will define the entirety of you, the entire body of your work. everything you create is seen through this lens, like everything you create is some attempt to answer that question of who you are and why you are.

it’s like with suicide — if you die by suicide, then you and your life’s work will always be studied through the lens of your suicide. everything in your life will be rearranged to answer the question why.

while the question annoys me (how much of this is autobiographical?), it’s the underlying notion that irritates the hell out of me, these enforced narratives that are shoved upon us, that we’re expected to embody, narratives that are connected to the roles we’re expected to fill — and it’s irritating as hell because these enforced narratives, these ridiculous, stereotypical, privilege-laden expectations, are tied directly to silence and suppression.

for example, kids who are adopted are expected to be docile and grateful creatures, content if only for having been “rescued” and “blessed” with a “better” life, never mind that adoption is an act of trauma, of loss, of removal. similarly, they’re expected to stay silent and allow adoptive parents to speak for them and their experience and the “goodnesses” of adoption (all of which is amplified when you talk about transnational, transracial adoption) (and, oh god, we’re not getting into christians using children for self-aggrandizement).

rape victims are expected to be spotless, blameless, virginal, like a sexual history or clothing choices or alcohol consumed negates the violence they’ve endured. they’re expected to take it quietly, the act itself, the trauma, like rape is something you go through and move on from unscathed, like it’s nothing, just an act, just sex, just another night. women are told they “liked it,” that they, on some level, “asked for it,” and they’re blamed for trying to ruin the lives of men, men who have such potential, who will go on to illustrious futures and contribute wonderful things, so they shouldn’t be held back, not for something like this — such good men wouldn’t be rapists; what ugliness with which to smear them. in a bizarre twist, rape victims, too, are expected to be grateful, to be flattered that a man paid attention to them at all because what a privilege, so why can’t they just shut up when they liked it — they came, didn’t they?

anyone who’s marginalized is expected to stay quiet, to smile and speak nicely and educate the privileged in gentle, patient tones, while suffering discrimination, stereotyping, violence. we’re expected to be the tolerant ones, the accepting ones, like speaking up and saying, no, this is fucked up; this is wrong, make us hypocrites for rejecting the niceties and refusing to play by the stupid rules that continue to exploit us and appropriate us while pretending that we don’t exist.

and we all know this because, when we deviate, when we speak up, we are met with violence.

when [my adoptive father] played mozart or schubert the house filled up with white male european culture. we were expected to worship it, which we did for a while, but once i went to college, i stopped. there is a world and history of nonwhite culture, i wrote to them once in a furious letter. and you kept us in the dark our entire childhood! the two white people raised their asian children to think asian art was decorative: oriental rugs and vases! jade elephants! enamel chopsticks! (cottrell, 99)

to get from A to be B in more logical, clear terms, though, maybe it should be said that you wouldn’t expect a story to be autobiographical unless, on some level, that’s what you believe a person to be. maybe it’s a jump to go from a question that seems so innocuous (is this autobiographical?), but maybe sometimes writers are people, too, and we come from complex backgrounds that make us recognize the systemic -ism that allows the privilege of the pretense of innocence.

it’s why people of color get so pissed off when they get asked the where-are-you-from? question. on the surface, it seems like a harmless question, and maybe (who knows) the asker of the question does come from a place of genuine curiosity.

however, there’s so much [internalized] racism that lies beneath, so much prejudice and stereotyping, like the kind that might make someone speak in slower, exaggerated, louder english to an asian person, and it’s the kind that enforces the Other. it’s the kind that says that "you are from over there, and i am from here, and we should be placed apart from each other because we’re different.” it’s the kind that fetishizes an entire group of women by rendering them exotic and, thus, reducing them to the erotic, refusing to see them as people with brains and feelings and ambitions and histories and individual personalities. it’s the kind that makes violence against women so easy because it’s easy to justify, dismiss, ignore violence against a “lower” group of people.

and it’s easy to forget: violence begins from something as small as a seemingly innocuous question. the cycle of harm begins with something supposedly innocent.

all it takes is seeing someone as Other than you.

i cook the most basic things, but i’m all right with that — i like basic shit, especially when it’s done well, though was that me complimenting myself and patting myself on the back?

bacon fried rice is stupid easy. chop up some bacon (my favorite bacon is the applewood smoked bacon from trader joe’s), and fry it up. add some rice, and mix it up. pour a little sesame oil to the side, and crack an egg in it. mix the egg into the rice + bacon mixture. season with some soy sauce. garnish with a whole lot of toasted sesame seeds. add some chopped scallions if you’re feeling fancy.

eat. don’t forget the sri racha.

matters of the heart.

April 10, 2017

we are all migrants through time. (hamid, 209)

when i think about scrambling eggs, i think about the first girl group i loved, k-pop trio, s.e.s.

s.e.s was managed by sm entertainment, arguably korea’s largest talent management company, and, for a very brief time in the 90s, sm’s thing was to create albums with narrative tracks interspersed between the songs. most of the narrations were forgettable (and it’s a form sm never tried again), but one of the narratives on s.e.s’ third studio album, love, was titled “scramble.”

it was, surprise surprise, about scrambling eggs. the only thing i remember from it is to whisk your eggs in a clear glass bowl.

in a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. for many days. his name was saeed and her name was nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.
it might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class — in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding — but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are puttering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. (hamid, 3-4)

last week brought two disparate books. one was moshin hamid’s much-lauded exit west (riverhead, 2017), and the other chef barbara lynch’s out of line (atria, 2017), one of my personally most anticipated books of the year. i read them mostly at the same time, during the same week, so i decided i’d talk about them both here, despite the fact that they share little commonality..

starting with the hamid — exit west is an Important Book, capital-I, capital-B, and it reads like one. i don’t mean that hamid seems to have set out to write an Important Book, but the prescience of the novel and its clear connection to current events inevitably have made it so, maybe more than hamid intended — or, also, exactly to the extent that he did.

we follow saeed and nadia, a couple who meet in an evening class and start to get to know each other. they aren’t quite dating, not quite an item, when militarized violence begins to take over their city, bringing an end to everything normal and ultimately causing them to flee their home for the west. there’s an element of magic realism to exit west, as transit is done through doors — if you can find the right door (and there is an entire industry set up around these doors), you can walk through and find yourself in another part of the world.

ultimately, exit west reminds us that refugees are human beings. it reminds us that refugees are people who often led lives similar to those we live here in the west; they went to school, went to work, used social media, hung out in cafes, fell in love, smoked pot, got in trouble for staying out all night. refugees are people whose lives were disrupted by conflict, by violence, by war, and they are people who have fled their homes, risking their lives to cross borders and bodies of water with nothing, for nothing but safety and the ability to live their own lives.

i appreciated that hamid doesn’t simply try to inspire sympathy for refugees by presenting them only in the most positive light. instead, he takes us into their conflicts, into ways that refugees, too, flock amongst their own and draw lines between themselves and others, and he shows us the brazenness that is often required for survival — the ability to lay claim to a space that is not yours, to intrude, to demand the right to exist. he shows us that that is human. he shows us that, fundamentally, we are not all that different.

my method of scrambling eggs has gotten lazier over time. in the beginning, years ago when i started cooking eggs, i’d take greater care, whisking my eggs in a nice [clear glass] bowl, adding some cream or water, and making a little show of scrambling them up.

that was then, this is now, and, today, i start with a small saucepan — the higher walls trap steam, which produces fluffier eggs. i add a pat of butter to my cold saucepan, then set that on the lowest possible heat, leaving the butter to melt as slowly as possible so it doesn’t lose all its water content. when the butter is all melted and starting to make noises at me, i turn the heat up to medium-high and crack my eggs directly into my saucepan and add a pinch of salt.

yeah, fuck those clear glass bowls.

for fifty-plus years, i lived within seven minutes of southie, the place where i was born: where i learned to lie, steal and fight; to take any dare and to tell anyone to fuck off; to rise above cement, piercing sharps, and newspapers damp with vinegar; to throw off the terror of hissing pipes, clammy darkness, and the stench of piss; to be staunch in friendship and values and ferocious in effort; to cook, awakening my senses, and then to create; to be open to all the possibilities of life, since, when you come from nothing, you have everything to gain.
so now my radius has expanded, beyond seven minutes, to maybe an hour, depending on traffic. i’m living proof that you don’t have to go far, or ever lose sight of where you come from, to discover and embrace the whole wide world. (lynch, 271)

one of the things i love about chef memoirs and cookbooks is that they can’t help but be full of heart — they are, by nature, love stories.

they’re testimonies to passion, too, not the frou frou romanticized bullshit version of passion touted by modern culture, but the deep-in-your-bones, take-over-your-life kind of obsessive, driven passion that leads someone to spend a ridiculous number of hours a day on the line for shit pay, to cobble together all her savings only to spend it on traveling and eating, to miss weddings and holidays and big personal life events because she has to work.

there’s a part of me that viscerally responds to this because i fucking love it, reading about, talking to, being around people who have that thing they love and are driven by and work their asses off for, especially when it’s to do with food. i can’t get enough of it.

and then there is also this — that my takeaway from chef memoirs is that these people, these chefs who have gone on to illustrious careers, didn’t make it there simply on their brilliance and hard work. they got there because of people.

this isn’t to diminish doggedness and perseverance and intuition in any way, but, in any creative field, hard work is a given, as is a certain measure of natural talent. ultimately, it’s the people who get you places, people who see a special something in you and take a chance on you, people who invest — financially and/or emotionally — in you, people who encourage you and believe in you and give you the feedback and criticism you need to keep being the best version of yourself you can be.

barbara lynch’s story gets right at this. today, she’s a big-name, james beard-award-winning chef and restauranteur, 7 restaurants and a catering company to her name, but she came from nothing. born and raised in south boston, she built herself from the ground up, working her ass off and clawing her way into her dreams, but she didn’t do it alone. there was the home ec teacher who insisted on letting her repeat the class so she’d stay in school. there were the chefs who hired her despite her inexperience; there were the investors who backed her financially; and there were her friends, the ones who might have thought she was reaching for the stars but stood by her and have been there for her through the years.

what i particularly love is that lynch doesn’t take any of that for granted and is dedicated to returning all that support back into the culinary scene in boston. she’s committed to education, not interested in simply running kitchens that cooks move through but in creating spaces where chefs can be nurtured, can grow into their skills, and can learn to fly. she’s committed, too, to boston, to maintaining a food industry and culture that encourages innovation and helps homegrown talent and gives them space to expand, so boston, as a city, can grow.

basically, my takeaway from out of line is that barbara lynch is one fucking badass.

i love that, seeing young chefs really shine. sometimes, they’ve been learning and then there’s a sudden breakthrough moment, when they crush it. in others, like kristen [kish], there’s a certain magic or inborn skill, which they just need a chance to express. either way, these are the times when it’s thrilling to be a mentor. (lynch, 196)

this is what i envy — i don’t envy people their careers. i don’t envy people their successes, and i don’t envy people their books or writing styles or voices. i can grow my own career; i can find my own success; and i have my own voice, my own style, my own stories to tell.

what i envy people are people.

i envy people their partners, their support systems, their people with whom to do life. i envy people their mentors. i envy them their guiding lights, their packs. i envy people, people.

this isn’t to dismiss the people in my life who are and have been and continue to be amazing and supportive because i’m lucky to have incredible, generous people who support me and care for me. it doesn’t negate the fact that i do wish i had more community, though, that, sometimes, i wonder if my social group might look different, might be stronger in certain ways had i gone for that MFA (which, to be honest, i didn’t — and still don’t — want). it doesn’t negate the fact that i wish i had more people in my life with whom to share the things i love.

and here’s this, too — i know that this envy stems a lot from insecurity and fear. like, i can go around saying that i’m a writer, i’m working on a book, but i carry my fair share of imposter’s syndrome, that i’m not really a writer until i’ve been published, until i have an agent, until i have a book deal. i’m not really a writer until someone says i am, until someone in publishing is sitting squarely in my corner and vouching for me. it’s stupid, and it’s bullshit, but it’s there.

and, then, there is the personal fear, that belief that i am too broken to be loved or wanted or known in that “until death do us part, in sickness and in health” sort of way. it’s hard to believe that anyone would look at me with my suicidal depression and anxiety and ADHD and type 2 and think that i am someone worth taking a risk on, worth investing a future in — and, because i do not see myself as someone worth that risk, i look at other relationships in want and envy and feel that emptiness in my own life and wonder if i will feel like this forever.

this envy is not something i’m proud of, and it’s something i actively work constantly to quell. i remind myself that this is stupid, it’s bullshit, there’s no rationale for this. i remind myself that, if someone were to use my mental health as a reason not to work with me or be with me, then that professional or personal partnership is likely one i didn't want, anyway. i remind myself that i have great people in my life, people who may not be physically in los angeles but spread across the continent and around the world, but people who care for me and want for me and love me.

sometimes, though, a book like out of line comes around at a time when i’m feeling particularly vulnerable and alone, stranded in a city i hate, where i know very few people, have no close friends, and have no community, and it simultaneously inspires me and hits me where it hurts. i actually had to put out of line down for a few days because, one, lynch has this way of describing food that made me so annoyingly hungry and, two, it was compounding all my loneliness and homesickness and reminding me of the things i want and would love to have — a mentor, a guiding force of some kind, someone to take my hand and say, “hey, you’re doing okay; you haven’t fucked everything up.”

because, despite fully believing that we need to rely on ourselves first instead of seeking external affirmation, i have to admit — sometimes, we all need that kind of validation in our lives. we all need to know we belong somewhere.

what i appreciated most about out of line is lynch's lack of self-consciousness. lynch isn’t concerned with making a defense of her life or the decisions she’s made along the way, and she’s not writing these things down to impart some deep, moral wisdom — she’s not here to judge you for your shitty life decisions. she’s telling stories from her life, and they’re oftentimes hilarious, always full of heart and life and vigor. there’s a gleefulness running through the book, too, a happy, contented nostalgia tinged with the sober awareness that maybe things weren’t all madcap hilarity, that maybe things could have been, should have been different — there shouldn’t have been so much reckless drinking and drugging; there shouldn’t have been sexual violence and abandonment; there shouldn’t have been so much loss.

lynch isn’t one to linger, though, isn’t one to prettify shit or dramatize them, and what she offers in her memoir is the matter-of-fact kind of wisdom that comes from retrospect, from having lived through the years, fighting her way through every step of the way. things didn’t come easy to her, and she had a fair number of limitations to overcome — ADD, dyslexia, depression amongst them — but she never took “no” for an answer and found her own way through.

and i loved this so much about out of line — that lynch has delivered us a book full of frank honesty, hilarious bluntness, a tendency just to say what she wants to say, no bullshit, no pretenses, no apologies. it’s refreshing to see, a woman who is who she is, who is proud of who she is and where she comes from and who she is still becoming. she isn’t perfect, but no one is, and that’s okay because she’s trying and fighting. most of all, she is a woman who models what she believes and is giving back what she has received, trying to be to others who others have been for her, and she is a helluva woman, indeed.

amazingly, there were investors willing to gamble on my dream. i remember meeting the first one face-to-face. i was so anxious that i practically dissociated from my body, circling it like a soul in a near-death experience. hard as i tried, i couldn’t work up my usual fuck it, i’ll figure it out attitude. this wasn’t like bullshitting a cruise-ship captain to get a job. it was much more intimate, exposing my heart — my deepest, most private vision of my own future — to a judge who would decide it it was worthy.
[…]
my whole life i’d had to fight — to teach myself, to achieve, to prove what i could do, to overcome a million doubts and fears, including my own. now, someone had given my skills and accomplishments a definite value, in dollars. that degree of respect stunned me, touching me at level deeper than any glowing review or award. it granted me a professional stature that i had hardly dared to envision for myself. (lynch, 148-9)

when it comes to scrambling eggs, i find that a rice scooper works best. i keep the heat on medium-high and get scrambling with my rice scooper, not frantically or hurriedly but gently, giving the eggs a few turns, flipping them onto themselves. i like my eggs soft-scrambled, so i turn the heat off when they’re just set and no longer runny but still look wet and shiny, which doesn’t take long at all, a few minutes at most. i give them one more turn with the rice scooper off the heat before piling the eggs on a slice of buttered toast and eat them immediately with a cup of strong, hot coffee.

that’s my lazy version.

if you’re feeling more ambitious and want heavenly eggs, here’s the 45-minute version from out of line. i haven’t tried it yet, but i will this weekend. as it goes, the only thing i’ve been cooking since my type 2 diagnosis are eggs.

one of the dishes [marchesa] mastered was scrambled eggs a l’escoffier, which is a forty-five minute process. you melt butter in a pan over low heat, then just perfume it with a clove of garlic speared on the tines of a fork. after whisking the eggs lightly in a bowl, you very gently pour them into the pan and let them set. every ten or fifteen minutes, you walk by and give them a tiny nudge with a rubber spatula until they’re done, more heavenly and creamy than any scrambled eggs you’ve ever eaten. (lynch, 218)

a life lived to forget, to remember.

March 15, 2017

there are many ways to answer the question. not everyone would ask, but some would if true curiosity — a genuine desire to understand — were allowed in place of good manners. i would, too. in fact, i still do ask myself: what made you think suicide was an appropriate, even the only, option? (195)

i start with a 2:1 ratio of milk to water. i have no idea if i wrote that sentence correctly because math is not my strong suit, but, basically, start with 2 cups milk and 1 cup water. heat the milk/water on medium-high until it comes to a boil, by which i mean when the milk starts to foam and tries to overflow (and it will if you aren’t watching your pot). when the milk/water boils, lower the heat, removing the pot temporarily from it if necessary (to prevent the overflowing), and pour in a cup of grits and add a pinch or two of salt.

these days, i use fast-cooking grits because they're, well, fast, but, when i started making grits a few years ago, i used corn meal. i'd stand at my stove for 45 minutes to an hour, book in one hand, whisk in the other, stirring my grits on low heat and adding milk or water as necessary, until they were soft and cooked through. fast-cooking grits take about 5-10 minutes, though that doesn't mean you can just dump in your grits and walk away. you still have to whisk frequently to break apart lumps and prevent burning because they will burn if you just let them sit.

and don't worry if they appear too watery at first. grits will thicken as they cook.

over the last two weeks, i read yiyun li’s dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017). it’s a memoir of her suicide attempts, of living with (and trying to understand) suicidal depression, and it's also a love letter to literature, to the authors she read in the years around her breakdown, suicide attempts, and subsequent hospitalization.

li doesn’t go into details about her attempts, doesn’t talk about suicide so much as a physical act, and she also doesn’t make a defense or argument for suicide. maybe that’s consistent with, as she writes, her desire not to be a political writer (is the social not tied up with the political?), but i think there's also this — that she recognizes that there is neither a way nor a need to try to explain suicide or suicidal impulses in clearly explicable terms. there is no cause and effect; there is no answer to the question why; and that is all okay.

as i type these words, though, i recognize that they are my interpretations of what she has written, that i walked into this book with my own baggage and needs and anxieties. i went into dear friend with a measure of carefulness because there is a part of me that tenses up when suicide enters public discourse, because i am still sensitive to snap judgments and condescending dismissals toward the suicidally depressed, towards people like me.

somehow, that also manifests in an anxiety towards writing by people like me, authors like me, maybe because there is a part of me that is still constantly undercutting myself, telling myself that my suicidal depression isn’t really suicidal depression, i’m just being selfish, i’m being moody, i’m being whiny and emotional and immature. i haven’t been hospitalized; i haven’t made an attempt on my life serious enough for anyone to notice; and i’m not yet on medication. what if i read this and realize what real suicidal depression looks like? what if this, what if that, never mind that that’s all bullshit, and i know that.

i have recently taken moves to get help for this, and i have recently gotten an “official” diagnosis, which is good only insofar as it helps me get the help i need. my mother marvels over all this, that i’m taking the initiative to make my doctors’ appointments, to go to my therapy sessions, to get on medication, and she says that she might not have been able to do this had she been in my shoes because it all seems so cumbersome. she marvels, too, because these are all actions outside my usual personality — i hate sitting on the phone; i hate living on a tight schedule; and, above all, i hate asking for help.

the thing she doesn’t — that she thankfully can’t — understand is that i am terrified of my brain. a few weeks ago, before i left brooklyn to drive across the country to los angeles, my brother asked what i was most afraid of in moving back to california, a state i viscerally despise. at the moment, i couldn’t voice this to him, but my greatest fear has been and continues to be that i will die in california, not in the sense that i will get stuck in this state that i loathe and grow old and eventually die, but in the sense that i will finally hit that point where everything is so totally unbearable that i will succeed in taking my own life.

to some, that might sound dramatic, but, to others, to me, this is a genuine fear, abstract though it may be. it isn’t that i’m constantly, actively suicidal; i actually haven’t thought about it since december; but i am constantly aware that there is always the possibility that i will be again.

somehow, even though li never explicitly talks about this, i feel like she knows all this, that she understands it, maybe not in these exact terms but at the heart of it. she doesn’t need to express it in clear, explicit words; it’s there in the graciousness, the matter-of-factness of her prose, in the evenness of her tone, in her refusal to make her suicidal depression either less than or more than what it is. she doesn’t diminish the seriousness of it, but neither does she cloak it in dramatics or try to pander to a depiction of suicidal depression that might be more palatable to the non-suicidal, the non-depressed.

and, for all that and for this book, i am grateful.

you have to understand, she said, a suicide attempt is selfish. yes, i know what you mean, i said to each of them. understanding cannot be willed into existence. without understanding one should not talk about feeling. one does not have the capacity to feel another person’s feelings fully — a fact of life, democratic to all, except when someone takes advantage of this fact to form a judgment. one never kills oneself from knowledge or understanding, but always out of feelings. (54)

remember to add salt when you add your grits to the milk/water. i had a flatmate once who was a chef, and she told me that you shouldn’t wait until the very end to add salt. if you do, then you’ll just taste the salt.

unless you’re cooking beans. then wait until near the end because, otherwise, the salt will impact how the beans absorb water and cook — but grits are not beans.

and, so, add the salt when you add your grits.

what do we gain from wanting to know a stranger’s life? but when we read someone’s private words, when we experience her most vulnerable moments with her, and when her words speak more eloquently of our feelings than we are able to, can we still call her a stranger? (75)

i believe that it is impossible to write anything, whether fiction or non-fiction, that is not autobiographical. writing, by nature, is autobiographical, in that we betray ourselves when we write, whether we do it intentionally or not. an attempt to hide, too, is still disclosure.

that said, if you told me a year ago that i would write so openly, so blatantly autobiographically about my mental health, i would have stared at you like you had two heads. i would have said that i was too afraid for that, too scared of any possible repercussions to put so much personal out there, too hesitant of how it might affect my family. i would have added that i would leave that kind of personal writing for other writers, writers braver than i, more generous of spirit than i.

while i still think that intensely personal writing requires generosity of spirit, i've recently been rethinking the idea of bravery and courage. i mean, even still, even as i type these words and put them out there, i don't consider myself brave or courageous at all, and, as i was reading dear friend, i don't know that i thought that it was courage that allowed li the ability to write so openly, so unashamedly about the personal — her history with suicide, her mother, her childhood and youth in china.

it’s not that i’m downplaying the role that bravery or courage plays in all this; i do agree that there is a base measure of such sentiment required to start shouting into the void; but i also tend to think that we all have that, we just don’t know it until something somehow tips the scale and makes speaking out loud unavoidable.

as human beings, we are relational creatures, and we like to recognize ourselves in the world around us. that desire manifests itself in different ways, but, fundamentally, we possess a desire to be known. it’s oftentimes why we surround ourselves with the people do, why we read the books we do, why we consume the media we do, and it also oftentimes reveals itself in what we share on social media, how we present ourselves, the stories we tell.

it is also, unsurprisingly, why we oftentimes write the things we do.

when your grits start to thicken, start tasting to see if they're cooked and if they've enough salt, keeping in mind that you will be adding cheese. if they're thicker than you prefer, add more milk or water. continue to whisk frequently until they're soft, like porridge, being careful because grits like to gurgle and spit when they're hot and cooking, even with the heat turned down to medium.

when the texture is soft and the grits are almost ready to eat, dump in whole fistfuls (plural!) of grated cheese. it doesn't really matter which cheese, i dare say, though i've only ever used hard cheeses, so i can't speak for soft ones. i usually go for cheddar (tillamook!) or parmesan or gouda, depending entirely on what i have in my fridge — and always make sure to grate your cheese yourself; this is one cooking rule i do not compromise.

reserve some grated cheese for later. whisk the cheese into your grits. taste.

how could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? how could you have forgotten those who love you? these questions were asked, again and again. but love is the wrong thing to question. one does not will oneself to love. the difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves. (115)

when i think about whatever thing it is that drives me to share so much, i think it’s desperation. i consider it an extension of that desperate will to survive that still lives on underneath the despair, the feelings of futility, the hopelessness. i need to write in order to live, to maintain some semblance of stability, and i need to write in order to process, to learn to live with all these things i still perceive as brokenness, whether it be my depression, my anxiety, or my type 2 diabetes.

for some reason, i also need to do all this publicly; i've never been much interested in maintaining a personal journal of my own; and, sometimes, i wonder about all this sharing, whether it’s an ego thing or a something-else-i-don’t-know-what thing. i wonder constantly what good any of this writing does anyone, including myself, and i know that it sometimes hurts my family. no parent should have to come face-to-face with the brutal truth that his/her child hurts so badly, she wants do die, but, unfortunately, thinking that doesn’t negate the reality of this. thinking that doesn’t make it possible for me to sit in silence, not when i know that i am not the only one who lives with this and especially not when i know what silence does, that silence takes lives.

and i always seem to come back to this — that i shout my struggles and pains and hurts out into the void in the hopes that someone will hear me and recognize me and that, together, we can feel a little less alone. it is not that i think that i am this stellar, shining beacon of a human being, but because one of the most frightening things about suicidal depression is how it corrals you in your brokenness and makes you feel so helpless and so alone. it makes you feel unknowable, unrecognizable, and, when you cannot recognize yourself, when you cannot see yourself in the world around you, you start to wonder if you’re even really here at all.

while your grits are cooking, chop up your bacon and toss them onto a frying pan. heat the pan on medium-high heat; starting your bacon cold helps the fat render out, though i suppose that's kind of moot, health-wise, because i'm going to tell you to fry your egg in the bacon fat. remove the cooked bacon pieces to a plate or bowl covered in a paper towel so as to drain the fat.

if your bacon has cooked faster than your grits, turn the heat off the frying pan, so you can fry your egg and eat it right away. you want to get your pan (and the bacon fat) hot before you crack your egg on it because that's the secret to a great crispy egg — start the pan hot, smoking hot, crack the egg (careful not to break that yolk), and step back because the egg, as it hits the pan, should spit at you. basically, everything in this will spit at you — the grits, the bacon, the egg.

when the egg is fried, the white just set, yolk still wobbly, bottom nice and crispy (it won't take long), spoon the grits onto a plate, top with your crispy egg, sprinkle with bacon and leftover grated cheese, and eat immediately.

for those in crisis, in the US, the national suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. in NYC, the samaritans are 212-673-3000. in the UK and ireland, the samaritans are 116 123. all lines are confidential and available 24/7.

what about those things we see.

December 4, 2016

but did he understand that she would have felt the same way if carol had never touched her? yes, and if carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a doll’s valise in the store. if carol, in fact, had never spoken to her at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. it was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found carol — (132)

over the weekend, i read patricia highsmith’s the price of salt (dover, 1952), which i liked, and saw carol, which i didn’t love. part of it was that i didn’t think cate blanchett and rooney mara had any chemistry together, despite the film’s best efforts to contrive some (cinematography can only do so much). another part was that i found mara to be so lifeless and flat that therese lost all dimensions and came across as robotic and feelingless, with none of the naïveté and complexity and emotional angst she has in the novel.

it was also that i had issues with the narrative as it was adapted, and maybe this is why i shouldn’t chase a novel immediately with its adaptation. the film takes the romance for granted and is eager to rush into it, throwing aside all the emotional tension and uncertainty that runs through the novel. it does address the social crap around being queer in the mid-1900s (and i talk more about this later), but all that seems to exist outside the romance, instead of those fears manifesting in carol and therese’s relationship, which is something the novel does pretty well.

that wasn’t my biggest problem with the film, though. i’ll use carol to refer to the film, the price of salt to the novel.

the price of salt isn’t necessarily a book peopled with characters you like. therese’s naivete sometimes makes you want to roll your eyes, and there’s a selfishness, a distance, to carol that makes her almost unlikable. she keeps things to herself and doesn’t really allow therese in, especially when it comes to her impending divorce with her husband, harge, and the custody battle they’re in over their young daughter.

as readers, we’re made to understand that there’s a fear underlying all of carol’s distance, that carol might reciprocate therese’s feelings but is aware of the real consequences of pursuing said feelings. it’s what i liked about the price of salt, this contrast between a woman who’s been hurt by the world because of who she desires and a younger woman who’s just discovering that she is capable of love and desire, that sex is not something that should leave you questioning, “is this right?” — and, maybe most importantly, that there is love that exists outside the expected man-woman relationship.

(it should be noted that the price of salt is written in very limited third-person, and we’re with therese the whole time. we see carol and interpret her words and actions through therese’s eyes.)

my main problem with carol was how it made people and things nicer than they maybe should be, than the price of salt portrays them to be.

carol herself is made nicer, her more brittle edges sanded down and made soft, and she’s more genial, kinder, less selfish. we see more directly what she’s going through, so she’s more accessible to us and, thus, more understandable, but her interactions with therese are absent that hesitation and caution that come from carol’s fears and, consequently, trap therese in her emotional vacillations. in some ways, carol actually demonstrates less fear in being found out in the film, though her fear of losing her child is still present.

seeing more of carol means we also see more of her husband, harge, and it’s this that bothers me most.

i think the film frankly gives us too much of him, and it’s as though we’re to feel sympathy for him, the sad privileged white heterosexual man whose wife would rather be with another woman than with him. maybe that wasn’t the film’s intention; maybe the film just wanted to bring a semblance of balance to the story; but that still bothers me immensely, just this idea that the only way we can bring queer stories to the center is by giving straight people space, like we cannot exist without being fair to them, though we shouldn’t dare to expect the same fairness from them. it’s about power, pure and simple, and it puts a bad taste in my mouth.

what the film does do is portray heteronormative life. it shows us what was (what is) expected of people and gives us visual depictions of social mores and behaviors. it takes us into parties, into homes, into carol’s attorney’s office, and, by taking us out of the narrow third-person of therese’s POV in the price of salt, carol shows us what carol’s reality actually is, and it’s here where the film’s value lies.

we’re there when carol is told that her husband is attaching a “morality clause” to their divorce to keep her child from her. we’re there as she’s made to see a psychotherapist, and we’re there to hear her attorney say the psychotherapist will give testimony that she has “recovered” from her affair with therese. we’re there to know that she’s been barred from seeing therese again. we’re there to see that carol has to make these concessions so that she can even be given the chance to negotiate a fairer custody agreement with her soon-to-be ex-husband, and we’re there to see the toll it takes.

in the end, she can’t take it and gives up custody of her child and settles for supervised visits. some might say this makes her a bad mother, but can you imagine what it’s like, to have to sit there and essentially have your humanity challenged, to have your love used as a weapon against you? to be made to live in a cage, against your nature, your identity? to suppress such vital parts of you that others simply take for granted?

and this is what i appreciated about carol — that we see what carol is put through, how she’s broken down and has to make a huge sacrifice simply for a chance at her own happiness — and, no less importantly, that she has a chance for happiness. she has a chance to thrive, to love and be loved, to live her own life.

it’s a narrative we need to see more, that being queer doesn’t mean ending in death and tragedy. at the same time, though, i think it’s worth noting that carol at least has the freedom and financial ability to be able to walk away from her husband, from that suburban life, but how many people don’t? how many of us still live in fear of being cut off, exiled, cast out? because the reality also is that it might be 2016, but we’re not much safer now than carol was then.

while we’re talking media, let’s also talk this gilmore girls revival.

i love seasons 1-3 of the gilmore girls, and i do have a fairly deep fondness for the show, so i was excited for this revival. i hadn’t read any reviews or much commentary about it before i sat down to watch it, so i went into it wanting to love it, fully expecting to enjoy being back in stars hollow with lorelai, rory, and emily.

alas, it was not meant to be.

i’ve always known the gilmore girls was a white show (it doesn’t actually win points for lane and michel), but it’s like the revival took any criticism it might have received about its straight whiteness and decided to fuck the critics, dismiss them as being hyper-critical and sensitive, and placate them by hiring more people of color to sit in as extras. i almost want to hope the creators were trying to be offensive because i’d rather have the deliberate racism and homophobia than this, whatever the hell this revival was.

i knew we were off to a bad start in the first episode (“winter”), with lorelai’s sulking over sooki’s absence at the dragonfly and her inexplicably flipping out at roy choi (plus a david chang diss) — and i actually did make myself step back and ask whether i was being oversensitive because choi and chang are both korean-americans and i do admire both greatly. but, then, there was the international cuisine festival (or whatever it was called) when mrs. kim trotted out her choir of koreans “fresh off the boat,” and i started squinting my eyes and shaking my head because i still want to know from which ass the gilmore girls is pulling its korean stereotypes.

(yes, i know palladino’s bff is korean-american. that actually explains and excuses nothing.)

and then there was berta, emily’s new live-in maid who becomes a running gag because emily doesn’t even know what language she speaks and berta’s family members keep showing up to fix things in emily’s house. (because that’s what immigrants are here for, to fix shit.)

and then there was that town council meeting in “spring,” where taylor announces that they’ve had to scrap plans for stars hollow’s first pride parade because there aren’t enough gay people living in stars hollow. this elicits shocked reactions like “why aren’t there more gays here?! we’re such a cute town! blah blah blah,” before the show uses literal minutes for the townspeople to remonstrate their offense that neighboring towns won’t “lend us their gays.”

at which point i said, “fuck you,” and stopped watching. which was apparently a good move because there’s fat shaming in the third episode, plus more racism all throughout.

if you want to think i’m being oversensitive, fine. (i don’t know why you’re reading me, anyway.) it’s sad that it still needs stating that people of color are not props. LGBTQ people are not props. diversity is not simply adding people of color to the background. it is not presenting them as caricatures and stereotypes, as foreign figures whose accents are to be made fun of, whose languages are to be mocked, whose sexual orientations are to render them as objects.

and here’s the thing: i don’t necessarily give a rat’s ass how white a show, a book, a film is. i’d rather have that because there’s at least some measure of integrity there, instead of this pathetic, lazy, disrespectful attempt at diversity. if you want to diversify your show, do the work, and do it properly. do your research. talk to people of minority groups, and note that that’s plural — people, not one person. show some respect, and do your due diligence because simply adding people of color to your background and having one or two token diverse characters are not enough.

and, if it is that impossible for you to look past the bubble of your own white heterosexual privilege and see all people as dimensional human beings, then, well, what can i say.

the southern reach trilogy.

September 9, 2014

jeff vandermeer’s the southern reach trilogy: i’m sad this is over because now i won’t be able to experience area x and its mysteries for the first time again. however, i’m sure there are lots of details and connections i missed and that there’s still a lot to discover, so i’m excited to reread these books, now that all three have been published!

this trilogy was loads of fun to read — fun and c r e e p y in all the right ways. the easy comparison is to say that it reminds me of lost, just … done well all the way through to the end, with a concept that didn’t run away with vandermeer or stifle the narrative or the characters. vandermeer had an excellent handle on the story from the beginning all the way through, but not in a way that felt overworked or too controlling — the effort isn’t on the page in the trilogy, and that, i think, says a lot.

one of the things i loved about the trilogy is how there isn’t really a hero, at least not in any traditional i-will-save-the-world-and-solve-these-mysteries way. there’s also no sense of a required salvation or redemption — vandermeer isn’t interested in “saving” anyone, which i appreciated, much like i appreciated that vandermeer isn’t obsessed with the “why” behind things, more just observing and presenting things as they are. all the characters are flawed and isolated in their own ways, some (like the biologist) seeking actual physical isolation, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t somehow connected, that their actions don’t impact the greater world around them. i also loved the obscuring of names and identities (“control,” “ghost bird”) and even the reducing characters to their functions (“the biologist,” “the psychologist,” “the director”), how these reductions become obfuscations and secrets and masks that reinforce isolation and loneliness but don’t lessen the reverberations of individual actions on other’s lives.

throughout the trilogy, vandermeer also does a fantastic job of giving just enough information and being just oblique enough, of striking that balance and supporting it with this wonderful tension that isn’t gimmicky or try-hard or artificial. the entire trilogy is infused in this mood of unease and creepiness that makes the southern reach such a fun, engrossing read that’s also frustrating because there’s so much we don’t know.

vandermeer isn’t stingy with answers or narrative/emotional payoffs, though, peeling layers away gradually (sometimes, while raising more questions). we might not know everything by the end of acceptance, but we know enough with room to continue wondering and pondering, and the characters are delivered to the ends of their arcs in very satisfying ways. i can honestly say that i loved the ending — the last ten pages or so of acceptance are fantastically done — and i closed the book with a sigh, sad to leave this world and these characters behind, to have no more of the southern reach to look forward to, but very satisfied with the adventure and its close.

(also: i read a review that said that it was gimmicky of FSG to release this as a trilogy over a year, but, honestly, i thought that was fantastic. the trilogy is a cohesive narrative, yes, but i think the southern reach is very much a trilogy that should have been told in three books, not only because of the different narrative voices [another thing i loved], but also because of the way vandermeer reveals the story. he was ingenious in the way he used the structure of the trilogy, and FSG did a great job with it, what with the beautiful cover art and design and with the staggered releases in the same calendar year.)

(also: i wrote this up at 2 am while listening to the soundtrack to the village [haven’t seen the movie but the soundtrack is fantastic], and now i am totally creeped out.)