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• I haven't had time to read it yet, but the 3rd Asian Women's Carnival is up! The theme is intersections of race and gender.


• Submit to the 4th carnival here! The theme is "Storytelling, or reclaiming our selves through our words."


• Found via Racialicious, this post on Asian women, suicide, and depression hits a bit close to home for me.


• For Bay Area people, David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face is showing at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts this month.

And now for something completely different!

If you have a light box for SAD/mood disorders, what kind/brand do you have, how do you use it, and did you find it helpful?

Comment | Read Comments () | Link

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Steinberger is a geek girl: gamer, cosplayer, shoujo manga fan, Volks doll fan. Ever since she got into the Volks doll scene, she's been dying to visit the Volks store in Tokyo. One day, she writes to Volks and gets an enthusiastic reply; they actually know of her through her doll articles in the US! So she and two friends head off to Japan. Their plan: dress as geisha, go see Takarazuka performances, dress up in Tokyo, eat, and go see dolls!

This is more of a sketchbook rather than a comic; there's some sequential art involved, given that it's a trip, but most of the art is not in the form of panels. It's also incredibly fun to read. Steinberger's art is extremely friendly and round and happy, and she notices odd things that I enjoy. One of the slightly unfortunate things is that she can't read or write Japanese—I'm not sure if other people will care, but I really wanted to know what the Japanese on particular drawings was.

I am still not sure what to think of dressing up as a geisha. On the one hand, it is something I would love to do. Also, there's the factor that it's being done in Japan, probably making money for the Japanese people running the business, in a context in which people know a lot more about who and what geisha are. On the other hand, I do not know.

Some other parts of the book occasionally hit my "please do not make fun of Engrish" button, from the making fun of Engrish to Steinberger getting annoyed at being stared at. For the latter, I completely don't begrudge her getting annoyed at being stared at; it's probably annoying as hell. However, I still have a kneejerk reaction of "Yeah, welcome to my world!" inherited from homestay in Japan with two tall white guys who were all "We stick out! We miss American food!" after I had gone through a year of depression and lost a lot of weight thanks to a combination of culture shock, homesickness for Taiwan, and literally not being able to eat all the non-Chinese food. But I digress! Although I spend a lot of space here writing this reaction up, I didn't really hit it that often. Much of this is because you can tell Steinberger loves it there, and the overall feeling I got from her excitement wasn't "OMG this is so exotic and foreign!" but "OMG I have heard about this for forever and FINALLY I AM HERE!"

Instead, I had a lot of fun through most of the book. It made me remember being in Japan and exploring Harajuku and Shibuya and Akihabara, it made me miss the food and the public transportation, it made me wish I had had enough money when I was there to buy awesome clothes at Harajuku and the like. It also interestingly made me incredibly homesick for Taiwan. A lot of the things in Japan are different, of course, but a lot of things have either been imported to Taiwan or are shared characteristics, from the squatting toilets of DOOM and ladies on the street handing out advertisements on tissue packets to sock stores to the food. I miss the food so much!

Most of all, I loved all the geeking out, from cosplaying and Takarazuka and dolls (not my areas of geekdom) to assorted manga and anime references. I laughed so hard when they visited Tokyo Tower thanks to CLAMP, although they went because of Magic Knight Rayearth and my friends and I went because of X (sadly fortunately, when we went, no necrocuddling was involved). I am also extremely jealous that she got to see Takarazuka! Some day...

Also, if you read this, check out the omake as well! Actually, check out the omake even if you haven't read it; it's a pretty good preview of what the book itself is like. Cute and fun.

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/847898.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Joyce is dying to catch the eye of cute multiracial kid John Ford Kang, though he can't even tell her apart from her lab partner. Then Joyce's aunt sweeps into their family's life and offers to pay for eyelid surgery for her. Her older sister Helen disapproves, but what does she know? Helen's always been smarter and prettier and cooler. Her best friend Gina thinks she should totally go with it.

I read this right after I read Good Enough, which was an interesting comparison. Both stories about Korean-American girls, but Joyce's family owns a Korean restaurant and she's not much concerned with academic achievement. Clearly the theme here is about beauty, which I theoretically find more interesting than Yoo's book. However, Na's prose is extremely flat, and I felt her characters never came to life. Although she explains Joyce's dilemma, as well as problems going on with her family, they felt like explanations, not explorations.

I am also far more radical than Na when it comes to beauty myths. Na compares eyelid surgery with braces or dieting I think to kill the particular stigma eyelid surgery has in the eyes of well-meaning white people and to normalize it as a modifying-appearance thing, but she doesn't tackle the larger question of the beauty myth, societal pressure to be beautiful, and the ever-changing definitions of beauty, much less how that myth perpetrates racism and sexism for Asian women. I'd much rather have a more in-depth examination of the problems of eyelid surgery coupled with a takedown of the extremely problematic way white people use eyelid surgery as a means to reinforce their impression of the need to "save" Asian women from their patriarchal society, as well as proof of Asians being less politically forward.

So... the book tackles some interesting questions, and I especially liked what Na did with Joyce's sister Helen, but overall, not a very fun read.

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/845147.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Patti Yoon is trying to be the Perfect Korean Daughter by getting the concertmaster position for the All-State Orchestra, getting into HarvardYalePrinceton, scoring above 2300 on her SATs, and volunteering at her church. But she's still trying to figure out what parts of it she wants, and what parts of it she only wants because her parents do. And then there's the cute trumpet player in the orchestra, who is definitely not part of The Plan.

The story itself is not extraordinary, although Yoo throws in a few curves at the end that I hadn't been expecting. What makes the book more than your average "Asian kid faces academic pressure, must learn what she wants" is the writing, which is sprinkled with lists ("How to Make Your Korean Parents Happy, Part 1") and recipes for assorted Korean dishes with Spam.

It was extremely odd reading this book. In some ways, it's very close to my own experience (outside of the fact that I was in Taiwan). In others, it's very not. I wasn't a good daughter like Patti; I quit piano and refused to take AP Physics and pushed as hard as I could to not do "practical" stuff and hated being first, even as I did take the SATs and practice who knows how much. Because of that, I kept wanting to reach in and shake Patti and tell her not to just do whatever she wanted, as I understand parental pressure and the desire to make your parents' sacrifices worth something, but to... think more. To question. And she does in the end, but I think I wanted more. That said, I do like that even though her parents are a big part of the plot conflict, they do not drive the plot conflict.

My other problem is the way the book posits rebellion and freedom as a white male thing. Patti does come into her own later, but I very much resent that one of the big factors in her doing so is falling for a white guy and hanging out with him more. Even before that, one of the signs of her desire to not conform is her love of a white male pop band. The unintended message is then made worse when, influenced by a white guy, Patti brings the idea of rebellion back to her Korean church group and the group also begins to rebel in order to get her a date with the white guy. I do think Yoo complicates things further by having Patti later realize that the other church group members also wanted to do their own thing and that she was projecting conformity on to them, but it would have worked much better for me had most of the characterization been of the other church group members, as opposed to the hot white guy.

That said, one of my favorite parts of the book was Patti and her relationship with the violin and with music. It's a nice counterpoint to the joke "Violin or piano?" and you can just tell how Yoo loves music as well, from classical to informal jamming.

- rilina's review

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/844811.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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In response to these posts¹, colorblue wrote:

And another thing that I find very strange is that I know more of what certain Singaporeans (I would say certain Indian-Singaporeans, but that will just reveal my own backwards thinking, giving such undue importance to race in such a progressive and strangely tolerant country) go through than someone who has lived there all her life, except a part of me doesn't find that strange at all, because this is another thing that racism does.

On my more tolerant days I consider people who mouthpiece diversity and equality while viewing the world in such a strange way foolish and useless. On my less tolerant days, and this is one, I think such ignorant, willful blindness is just as destructive as the more outright forms of racism, for those forms of racism are built on excuses and niceness and strange tolerances such as this.

She also said the following to me about including those posts in the carnival:

And you are hosting and commenting on an Asian Women's Carnival focused on intra/inter/transnationalities and either you did not realize or you did not think or you did not care enough that people like me would read the posts you were linking to and expressing thanks for and find their experiences or the experiences of those they respect and care about, the injustices they've faced and continue to face, ignored and trivialized.

And this makes me wonder just who the audience for this Carnival was intended to be or pictured as being, what was considered important and what wasn't, and that is why right now I do not care about whatever you might have found in Karanguni's post that resonated with you and that is why right now your comment doesn't have much meaning for me.

First and foremost, I apologize for not only hurting people, especially people who are being oppressed and treated unjustly in Singapore, but also for taking what should have been a safe space for them and making it unsafe, painful, and a replica of the same power structures they face at home. My intentions in this do not matter; the result remains the same.

Second, on intentions. In my excitement over the Carnival, I included everything submitted. This is an illustration of how focusing on one identity (Asian women) can act as a means of excluding identities within that one (non-Chinese Asian women in Singapore), and how those excluded are almost always the people who have less power, particularly when the person directing the focus—me—has a privileged place within that identity. This is why my intentions do not matter: they were intentions that made it easy for me to focus on people like me to the detriment of people with less power than me, and therefore, they are the antithesis of good intentions.

I do not think I was the right person to compile this Carnival. To create a space that is safe we must first and always focus on those who are most at risk, and instead, I focused first on those on top, those like me. As such, I also apologize for the overall lack of South and Central Asian women, for the lack of transwomen, lesbians, women with disabilities, older women, non-English-writing women, and lower class women, as well as the lack of ethnic minority women in Asian nations. Just like the unmarked state reads as white middle-class male, cisgendered and heterosexual, an unmarked Asian woman is also able-bodied and -minded, young, middle class, cisgendered, heterosexual. Going top down by necessity reinforces these unmarked states and furthermore divides us into "default" and "default" with added widgets of oppression, none of which interact, all of which we tack on after the fact when they should be first and foremost.

No one single post in the Carnival created that type of space; my framing and compilation and editorial choices did.

To go back to colorblue's words: "[T]his makes me wonder just who the audience for this Carnival was intended to be or pictured as being, what was considered important and what wasn't[.]" I believe for less privileged voices to be heard, the first thing is to find those voices and support them in what they are already doing, to prioritize them and to listen to them and to not speak over them, and most of all, to not subsume their identities into your own.

And that is what I failed to do and what I apologize for.

---

Please do not comment saying I should not apologize, didn't do anything wrong, etc., or that colorblue is using the wrong tone or whatever. It is not true.

Also, do not comment in thanks for this; it is not something to be thanked for. What matters to me is going forward and not doing the same thing.

However, critique, privilege checks, etc. are very welcome.

---

1. As problematic as karanguni's posts are, she did not submit them to the Carnival; that they are in the Carnival is my fault. back

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/844038.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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ETA: please read this before reading the carnival

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I'm sorry this is so late. I wrote up a giant post, and my computer crashed and I lost it.



These are the posts I didn't write: golden lotuses and size 9 feet; mismatched eyelids and tape; broken palms and murdered husbands; lucky nose and skimpy ears.

These are the words I can't say; not because I don't have them, but because I have too many, because they overflow and I choke on them, unable to get them out.

But, oh, my sisters and friends write—not for me, but for themselves—and sometimes I find myself in their words, and sometimes I find who I need to be in them.

I've tried and tried to write entries for this carnival and for the first one, but there is too much, and I cannot. But I can respond somewhat to what others have written.

As noted in the call for submissions, the optional theme for this issue is "hyphenates and sourcelanders and diasporas and being a minority Asian in a majority Asian country and majority Asian countries and minority Asian countries and third culture kids and thoughts about being refugees, immigrants, expats, nth generation, FOBs*, about generational gaps and cultural expectations and growing up in one place and then another and speaking one language at home and one outside and and and..."

* I think of myself as a FOB in many ways and dislike any mockery of fobbishness. Also, if you aren't one, don't use it.

Also, white people, when you're reading, don't co-opt. Don't take these pieces and use them against us. We know about intra-POC and intra-Asian racism and bigotry; we know how frequently our words stripped from us to be used against each other. Forming identities among inter/intra/transnationalities is hard; it is harder still when it is never a purely personal process, when every move we make for ourselves is taken from us and used to tar and feather all of us.

( Nationality, ethnicity, and identity )

( Language )

( Gender and sex )

( Story and remyth )

Many thanks to everyone for posting and submitting, and especially to ciderpress for starting the Asian Women Blog Carnival. Please contact her if you would like to host a future issue!

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/842104.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Ai Ling has had a fairly good life: her father and mother love each other and her, her father has taught her to read and write, and it looks as though she will have some say in who she will marry. But then, her father goes to the capital, her mother's mood drops, and a skanky older guy tries to coerce her into marrying him. Ai Ling decides she has to find her father again, but at every turn, she's beset upon by strange creatures, from a three-breasted woman to a soul sucker to assorted other demons.

I am stubbornly annoyed that a publisher had told Cindy Pon that "Asian fantasy doesn't sell," and I sincerely hope the book's sales are phenomenal. Also, I've heard one of the big chains didn't order it... if someone tells me which one, I will go place an order at my local one. I have also gotten one of my public libraries to buy it and am going to suggest it to my other two.

The book itself is extremely fun, although it suffers a little from flat prose. Ai Ling didn't stand out for me as a heroine, but she's your fairly average YA heroine: spunky, can-do, and nursing a secret crush. What made the book for me was the sheer exuberance of it. Not a chapter goes by without another monster or a lovingly described meal, and I love that Ai Ling's appetite is as voracious as mine. Clearly she notices the important things in life! I particularly liked the climax, which has Ai Ling figuring out how to rescue herself.

My favorite parts are probably when Ai Ling and hot guy Chen Yong go beyond the Kingdom of Xia and encounter increasingly odd and interesting beings and lands. Well, that and the food descriptions, of course!

When I began reading this book, I could not get into it. I had thought it was the prose, but halfway through, I came to the horrified realization that I had been steeling myself for exoticism and foreignness, despite the fact that I very much knew that the book was written by a Chinese person who knew something about Chinese culture. There had been no exoticism that I could pick up on in the book, but the mere mention of Chinese names and ideas in English was enough to raise my guard, thanks to years and years of reading books by non-Chinese people that frequently rubbed me the wrong way, if not outright offended me.

It's never fun realizing that despite the massive effort you've spent decolonizing your reading practices, there are still (and may always be) parts of your brain that remain whitewashed.

Anyway. This is fun and frothy, and a welcome addition to the vampire- and faery-saturated landscape of YA fantasy. Also, although this book is standalone, Pon is working on a sequel/prequal. Also also, minor quibble, but every time the book used "Xian" to refer to denizens of the kingdom of Xia, I kept thinking it referred to the city of Xian/Xi'an.

Links:
- rachelmanija's review

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The completely optional theme for the 2nd Asian Women Blog Carnival is....

Inter/intra/transnationality

I particularly want to encourage Central and Near Asian women to post, and to also note that I'd love as many Asian women's voices as possible, for all definitions of "Asian" and of "women."

The theme came from some noodling here and here, and I really apologize for the title! I figure it is probably pithier than "hyphenates and sourcelanders and diasporas and being a minority Asian in a majority Asian country and majority Asian countries and minority Asian countries and third culture kids and thoughts about being refugees, immigrants, expats, nth generation, FOBs*, about generational gaps and cultural expectations and growing up in one place and then another and speaking one language at home and one outside and and and."

Submissions due 1 June your local time, and the issue will go up a few days after.

ETA: Future hosts still needed! Please contact ciderpress if you'd like to host.


* I use this as someone who is proud to be a FOB and dislikes any mockery of fobbishness. Also, if you aren't one, don't use it.

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/828184.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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This is the first book by the author of Roots and Wings, which I liked a lot.

As with her latter book, this is the story of a Cambodian-American girl and her relationship with her parent. Only this time, it's her father. Amy grew up in St. Petersburg, Floria, among a fairly substantial Cambodian community, but when her mother leaves Amy and her father, the two of them move to San Diego to make a new start.

This book wasn't quite as polished as Roots and Wings; the story feels less focused and more like an accumulation of many individual events. At times, I got a little tired of reading about Amy's dad going through another cycle of feeling bad then feeling good. Even though I know it works like that in life, it makes for repetitive reading. The characterization of Amy's friend Sopiep also felt a little haphazard as she moved from being the girl teased at school to the pretty girl with a crush and then back to Amy's best friend. I think I would have believed it more had I had more of a sense of Sopiep's personality, but I didn't.

Still, like Roots and Wings, this is a quiet, sad book, although it ultimately has hope in the end. On the other hand, it had many more descriptions of the San Diego Cambodian-American community, which I enjoyed. Amy and her father belong to the community, as opposed to the protagonist of Roots and Wings, and although the fairly long timeline (a year or over) felt slow at times, I appreciated being able to see San Diego through Amy's eyes throughout the entire year, not just a few weeks.

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Vidya is fifteen and dreams of going to college, but she's afraid she'll be married off. But soon, tragedy strikes as her father becomes more and more involved with the Indian independence movement, and she and her family are sent off to live with her paternal grandfather. There, the women are separated from the men, and Vidya's life is so limited that the only freedom she can find is in the library upstairs. And life gets even more complicated as Britain calls on Indian volunteers to help fight the Axis powers.

This reminds me a lot of Keeping Corner in how it deals with the ideas of Indian independence, feminism, and Hindu philosophy, although I think Keeping Corner did a better job in terms of execution. This book combines many interesting elements but is ultimately less nuanced than I would like.

First is that Vidya is the only woman with agency in the book. Her amma is fairly peripheral to the plot, as is her friend Rifka, and all the other women and girls are shown as evil (periamma, her cousin, her teacher, her other aunt) or ineffective (her third aunt). This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that many of the men in this book are the ones who end up helping Vidya—Raman, Kitta, and thatha. And they're the ones Vidya talks with the most about her future hopes and dreams; they're the ones she engages with on issuees of feminism and oppression.

My other issue is the portrayal of the US as a fellow British colony and possible ally. I have a very hard time accepting parallels between the US Revolution and the Indian independence movement. I don't know that much about the Indian independence movement, but I feel it is not particularly flattering to draw parallels between it and a revolution that started mostly for the purpose of financial benefit and the protection of rich white guys' profits and property. I am, of course, heavily influenced by Conquest and Octavian Nothing in this reading, but that is why I have a problem with the image of the US as a potentially safer space for Indians. I also hate that Vidya's protests that the US didn't treat American Indians well (understatement!) and kept slaves, and that they were countered in a sentence or two with "No country is perfect. And they emancipated the slaves!"

That said, I was glad that the book grounds Vidya's growing feminist consciousness in Hindi roots and in the Indian independence movement, and that even though her relatives are sexist, we also get to see a flip side in her father.

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Er, hello new people!

Most of the time I am very boring and blog about books, manga, books, manga, tv, books, manga, sakura of DOOM, manga, and the incomprehensible awesomeness of Yuki Kaori, which is so incomprehensiblly awesome that every time I talk about her stuff I think of new things I forgot! Like the flying whale.

... like I said. Welcome to my LJ! I hope you will pardon me as I go off on strange tangents involving whales, wings with eyes, and zombie angel embryos, and of course, if you get bored or just don't have time or hate me or anything, it is always defriending amnesty day here.

That said, some links:

• fight_derailing has info on fundraising to send POC to Wiscon (this started because several POC had mentioned they wanted to go to Wiscon and lacked funds/a place to stay/transportation/etc and is definitely not about pressuring people to go somewhere they will feel unsafe).
  
  Uh. This puts me in an awkward position, because while I completely do not want to pressure people to go anywhere they feel unsafe, I am also definitely going to be at Wiscon and would love to meet up with people there.


• verb_noire is already at its goal (way past its goal, awesomesauce!) for contributions, so I am super late to the party, as usual. But I am sure more could never hurt!
  
  


• You have until April 3 to submit to the Asian Women Blog Carnival!


• The Remyth Project is perpetually ongoing (I think).


• The POC in SF/F Carnival has a special edition coming out soon, on Interrogating the Text, De-Colonizing the Mind: An Intra-POC Dialogue. Submission open until March 27.


• ibarw is looking for newsletter moderators.

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This is a collection of essays by Asian-American feminists about Asian-American feminists (with the "American" indicating the US, although there is one that focuses on Canadian healthcare). From my recollection, the range seems fairly large—there were quite a few essays on lower-class women and I think the essays spanned a good range of ages, although I could be remembering wrong. I was especially pleased to see good representation of South and Southeast Asian women. I think there could have been more by and about queer women and differently-abled women, though I really loved the round-table with three punk queer Asian women.

I had read about half of this maybe half a year ago; I reread most of it and dashed through the rest to cope with some RL race-related unfunness. I find I don't read these kinds of collections of fairly personal essays by WOC very often, but when I do, they are so inspiring and so life-saving. Maybe that's why I can't read them often... I have to save them up so I have something to turn to when it feels like everything is working against me. I'm not going to be particularly academic in this write up because my reaction is so emotional. This book inspires me and makes me want to do more and to do better, to keep working at things, to try to give back some of the support that I've found within.

One piece that particularly stood out for me was "Bringing Up Baby: Raising a 'Third World' Daughter in the 'First World'" by the mother-daughter team of Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani Das Dasgupta and how jealous I was that Sayantani Das Dasgupta had her mother when she was growing up, how she had a personal role model for radical politics. I hate envying other people's positions, because I'm sure they have problems I do not, and because I am and will always be grateful to my parents for giving me Taiwan. But my family and almost everyone I grew up with were not particularly radical (or liberal even), and I wish I had had something outside of ink and paper, someone human and alive and breathing and talking to go to when I was growing up.

Other themes that struck me were all the mentions of grassroots organization and community outreach; several groups described in the book are grassroots organizations started by women of color to fight sexual violence in communities of color or lower-class women of color mobilizing to fight racism and classism and sexism. It reminds me of how Andrea Smith starts from Native women in Conquest and works out from there, and how by doing so she finds solutions that help those women and help many other communities as well. But I was thinking of activism and fighting oppression and how important it is to start from the ground up, especially because of how oppression works from top down. I am also not sure I am making sense here; I'm still working through what I can do and how I can do it.

One of the pieces was annoying, with the American woman author talking about a group of women in another country, and it just felt so condescending and "I am the outsider talking about these foreign people." I am pretty sure it was Deila D. Aguilar's "Western Feminism and Asian Women," but I am not entirely sure because I do not have my copy of the book next to me.

That said, overall I very much liked how international the book was, how so many of the pieces recognized that many of us might have been born in the US, but we still have families in other countries, still have stakes there that we cannot give up. I also liked how the book not only pointed out racism in the US, but also global structures that support racism, such as the piece on Canadian healthcare and how much of the cost of national healthcare has been offloaded onto immigrant Filipina nurses.

I found this book so personally necessary and so comforting that I have no idea how useful this write up will be to anyone who's not me. Still, recommended!

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I plan on posting about RaceFail 09, but I also want something positive out of this. Ergo, clearing my backlog of reviews of books by POC this week!

Nazia is a teenage girl in Karachi, Pakistan, and although she is engaged to her cousin, right now she just wants to stay in school. But an accident at work puts her working-class family in even deeper into financial hardship. Now, Nazia must stop school and help her mother clean houses, which further lowers her social status—maids are stigmatized, and her family does not want her fiance to find out.

This is a type of book that's difficult to write well; there are a fair number of badly-written, culturally appropriative, and colonialist books about young women of color asserting their independence via the intervention of white women, white feminism, or general Westernization. While I don't think this book is the absolute best of its kind, it also doesn't stumble into many of the standard pitfalls.

I am not sure how accurate the portrayal of Pakistan is; the author is Asian American but has both lived in Pakistan and visited.

In some parts, it felt like the book did push a little too hard for Nazia's independence, but on the other hand, I like that it is specifically about not Nazia alone, but about Nazia and her mother and the relationship between the two. I particularly like that Qamar looks at sex and class; some of the largest obstacles for Nazia and her mother are their male relatives. And yet, you cannot simply ditch family.

It was also important to me that Nazia found her role models in other Pakistani women; it reminded me a lot of how Kashmira Sheth centered her feminist message in Keeping Corner in the Indian Independence Movement and in Indian history. It is a taking back of history and culture, a way of grounding revolutions, personal and political, within, not positing change as something only given to the working class, women, people of color by people who have more structural power.

I didn't love the book, but I think the author has potential (this is her first novel), and I'll be interested in seeing what she writes next.

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Dear Joss,

While it's nice that you have an Actual Asian Person (TM) in your cast, it would be even better if you would stop using things like Asian teapots, hotels, clothes, and geisha (who seem to, like all the others, act as scenery in your world) while populating the surroundings with all white people.

No love,
Another Actual Asian Person (TM)

( Spoilers )

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Grace's grandmother Naree has died, and her mother Chandra decides that they must hold a Cambodian funeral, despite having cut all ties to the community Chandra grew up with in St. Petersburg, Florida. When they return to Florida, Grace seizes on the chance to find out more about her family history—why her grandmother's face was scarred, why her grandmother and mother moved away before she was born, and most importantly, who her father is.

This has almost all the elements of an Asian YA book: multi-generational conflict, trying to reconnect to your culture and history, and negotiating the differences between the United States and Asia. But what it lacks is the central narrative of a girl trying to find her place between two cultures. Instead, Grace has too much on her hands simply trying to untangle the story of her own family to begin with the issue of cultural identity, and I liked that.

Also, although Grace and her mother clash, her mother, like Grace, is Cambodian-American; her mother is the one with the experiences of feeling ashamed of her own mother's English, of having to grow up forever translating for her mother, of having to be the adult and pay the bills and talk to schools because of the many barriers to immigrants doing so, particularly immigrants escaping war and political turmoil. Grace has grown up connecting more with her grandmother than with her ultra-competent mother, and she most desires to earn her mother's emotional confidence even as her mother tries to keep the details of the past from her so Grace can have a normal childhood.

The book has flashbacks to Grace's memories of growing up with her mother and grandmother, and they're interspersed with the present-day narrative of returning to St. Pete, reconnecting with the Cambodian community there, and trying to lay Naree to rest.

The prose isn't flashy, but it's quietly graceful, and I was particularly impressed by the many layers in the story: the buried histories, the memories too painful to be retold, the spiraling cycle of cause and effect going back generations.

And as a bonus, it is very good seeing a Cambodian voice in YA; this is Ly's second book, and I hunted down her first on its strength. I wish I could say how accurate it was, but I don't know enough to. For what it's worth, I very much liked how Cambodian culture was ever-present, from Naree's history with the Khmer Rouge to Cambodian weddings and funerals and community, but I also liked how the main conflict in the book was not centrally about Cambodian culture as a whole.

I'd recommend this to people who like Sarah Dessen and some of Maureen Johnson's earlier books. It has the same delicate treatment of grief and loss and healing, and it's full of unspoken matters and weighted silences and the eventual unburdening of secrets.

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More from my Taiwan trip! This batch has a lot more food pictures, yay, and also, a very random zebra ass.

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Note: Woe, I am not in Taiwan right now =(. Currently there is less food and more scenery, but that will change in latter posts. Most of these are taken from a trip we made to Yilan, which is on the upper east side of Taiwan.

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I am so homesick right now! Not that I am not already grateful to be able to go back twice this year, but I left right as New Year celebrations were starting, and I miss the music and the noise and the red decorations everywhere and the food. It's just not the same here, and all Borders has, holiday-wise, is Valentine's Day stuff. Pah!

At least shopping at Ranch 99 today was extremely New Years-esque: hordes of people, lots of lines, cheesy music, and all the proper foods right there.

I was going to try to steam a fish, but I decided that was rather iffy and am going to make savory nian gao instead. And dumplings. And mi fen. And maybe souffle.

But really, there should be tons of noise and gambling games and firecrackers everywhere!

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I have been very bad about posting about race and anti-racism lately, and even worse with following discussions online.

But basically, my response would be what Deepa says. Yes and yes and yes. And that is precisely why I've found so much comfort in immersing myself in Asian mainstream pop culture, even though that pop culture has a lot that could be changed. It is just so good to find something that's focused on POC, to have other narratives and other stories, to have an entirely different default to draw upon.

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Yay! I met up with tatterpunk over the weekend and sicced many Taiwan food recs to her and then took her to Page One for English books.

For anyone interested, my 2008 picks for Chinese and Korean media is up at the Aqueduct Press blog.

Short write-ups of random Asian (mostly Chinese) movies I have watched while in Taiwan:

海角七號/Cape No. 7 - This is the little movie that apparently took Taiwan by a storm; currently, it's the second-highest grossing movie here ever, with only Titanic beating it. Aga left Taipei to go back to his rural hometown Hengchun in southern Taiwan after not being able to make it as a rock star. There, he works as a postman, and one day he gets a package from Japan addressed to a place that no longer exists.

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Fun and frothy.

梅蘭芳/Forever Enthralled - This is Chen Kaige's (of Farewell, My Concubine fame) latest film, about the Peking opera star Mei Lanfang, one of the most famous dan in opera. Mei lived through the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the establishment of the Republic of China, the Japanese invasion, and the Communist Revolution, although the film stops when WWII ends. My favorite parts of the film were the earlier bits, since I am a total sucker for costume drama, and the actor playing young Mei is fantastic, as is the guy playing his rival/mentor, 13 Yan.

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Still, a neat movie if you want to know more about Peking opera, with good performances.

花吃了那女孩/Candy Rain - A tiny indie movie with several segments, each concentrating on a young lesbian couple in Taipei. I, uh, half watched this while checking email because otherwise the slice-of-lifeness would have put me to sleep. Not that it was boring! I was just sleep deprived.

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Like the name, this isn't necessarily deep, but it's sweet and lovely.

ラブ＊コン/Lovely Complex - Why did no one tell me Love Com was a movie? (Also, so is Mushishi, though I am trying to see if I can rent the DVD before deciding if I want to buy it.) I have only read one volume of the manga, so I don't know how faithful or not the movie is. But it is so cute! And they managed to find actors with an actual height difference. It also helps that the guy playing Otani is very cute. I cannot actually say if this is a good movie or not, but if you like shoujo manga, I'm pretty sure you will like it. It has all the shoujo manga effects in movie format!

My absolute favorite part of the movie was when Risa goes on about her crush on Otani, which makes everything he does sparkle. He sparkles as he falls asleep in class! He sparkles when he plays basketball! He sparkles when he sneezes! Even his sneezes sparkle! (By this point, I was trying very hard not to fall out of my seat laughing.)

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So shoujo manga!

I am also going to watch Red Cliff II, which is coming out the day before I leave. I do not care if almost everyone dislikes Red Cliff I and nothing happens in it and really it's just name-checking the key scenes in Romance of the Three Kingdoms! It has Takeshi Kaneshiro as Zhu Geliang and Tony Leung as Zhou Yu and they bond over military strategies and trying to outsmart each other! And all the awesome Zhu Geliang stories I grew up on are in the second part (borrowing arrows, stealing the east wind, etc.).

Also, even though Lin Chiling gets all the fame for being a supermodel and playing the Love Interest (Xiao Chiao), I want more of Sun Shangxiang, who reminds me of Eowyn. She paralyzes pigeons and Liu Bei with some sort of qigong thing! She has an army of women attendants! And she secretly has some sort of relationship with Zhu Geliang in my head, as he is the only one (so far) who sees how awesome she is. I must remember to file this away as a possible Yuletide request.

I am also sad that part one of the 20th Century Boys movie seems to have come out in Taiwan, but is not out on DVD yet.

And I am SUPER SAD that the new Miyazaki movie is coming out after I leave! ARGH!