asian america

Thoughts:

• The Asian American Canon Breakers, by Hua Hsu - an essay exploring the "Four Horsemen of Asian-American literature", as nicknamed by Ishmael Reed. Of course Maxine Hong Kingston is mentioned in here.
• One Way That Crazy Rich Asians is a Step Backward - It's really weird that everyone watched Crazy Rich Asians at the time and were so enamored of all the wealth and glamour that there was very little critique of the weird-ass class dynamics. Like, how would it play if Crazy Rich Asians was published this year, in the time of "billionaire tears"? Would we be more critical, or would we still be desperate to actually just be seen by Americans? 
• Bust's review of Dear Girls had a good point about Ali Wong never mentioning their nanny in the entire book. Her husband just mentions her as their "magical Ukranian nanny Sofiya". Just seems to be one more thing about successful Asian American pop culture exhibiting a weird sort of class blindness, no matter how underprivileged and terrible our parents' histories were. Once you ascend to a certain class, a lot of things become either invisible or easier to ignore. 
• That just reminded me of this Atlantic story, My Family's Slave, published after the writer's death. 
• Anyway, I was just thinking of what today's Asian American lit syllabus would look like; I did a cursory glance on Google, and Maxine Hong Kingston still dominates. In a few years, will college freshmen be reading Dear Girls for critique? 

i apologize

The Hong Kong government just put out a "rap song" lamenting the recent protests. HKFreePress has embedded it on their Twitter. The HK govt has helpfully translated it into English for us, giving us such great lines as:

So-called peaceful demands
changed to violence on the streets
So-called strike on three fronts
But the trains can't move
Roads are blocked
Stopping people getting to work...

Just watch the rest.