toastykitten

Almost forgot.

Day 3 - Favorite series

Anne of Green Gables. I've read every single book to pieces, and practically know them all by heart now.

Day 4 - Favorite book of your favorite series

As I get older I appreciate Rilla of Ingleside more and more. It's the most realistic one, I guess, and the only one (aside from Anne's House of Dreams) where the characters have real problems to deal with.

I just finished reading Matilda to my daughter. She's just at that age where she can start paying attention to chapter books, and Matilda's the first one I picked because it's one of my favorites, and also it's about a really smart little girl. My daughter loved the different pranks Matilda played on her parents, and her mouth dropped open when she found out Ms. Honey's aunt was really Ms. Trunchbull.

I love Roald Dahl in general, even though I know a lot of it is pretty problematic with the racism and everything. I forgot how much of it is really about how terrible adults are, and that's probably why so many kids relate to it, plus it's pretty outrageous in a cartoony way. Not to mention all the British-isms; all those witty phrases really passed me by when I was a kid. I just wanted the "eye power"!

So there are a lot of deep important books I wanted to read but the news has been so depressing lately that I'd rather not. Anyway, once I read that they cast Michelle Yeoh and Constance Wu for Crazy Rich Asians, I was like, dammit now I have to read this. If you like light, breezy, fast-paced chatty chicklit about the rich Asian elite diaspora that make the American rich elite look like rank amateurs when it comes to opulence and overspending, you'll like this book. There's so much name-dropping and so much designer worship but also so many arguments about where to get the best Singaporean food that it'll make you really hungry. There doesn't seem to be that much in LA, but here's some to check out.

Anyway, at its core, the book is about Rachel Chu and Nick Young, who are both professors seeking tenure in the US. Nick invites Rachel to Singapore to meet his family, without informing her that he's pretty ridiculously rich and is dumb enough that he thinks his mom and grandma would think that he could just marry whoever he wants without any social consequences. It's a fish out of water story for Rachel, and we're basically seeing the Singapore elite world through her eyes. There's also a parallel story with Astrid, Nick's cousin, who is super-rich on her own and has the most expensive taste for couture, but somehow managed to settle down with a guy who insists on earning his own living instead of taking her father's money and gifts.

For the most part the book is rich people porn. Also Singapore porn, as the country and its food are lovingly detailed to the hilt.

So, it's also been a long time since I read actual Asian American lit, and in that light, this book was refreshing in more than a few ways. The most important being that it's not another goddamn narrative about how miserable it is to grow up Asian American and how they're trying to figure out their identity. Maybe it's because these characters are older, but they're comfortable in their skin, even as they have a bit of unease about their own identity (Rachel hasn't dated Asian men in a while for specific reasons until Nick), and it's just part of their life and not all-consuming. Kevin Kwan talks in this interview about he "began writing the book, because I wanted to introduce the West to the concept of the real Asia and contemporary Asia, where people are empowered and their lives don’t revolve around the West at all."

Apparently it's been 26 years since Joy Luck Club. I wonder how I would feel re-reading it.

I'm really excited about the release of Mark Twain's autobiography. Apparently the entire thing's never been released before. And here's a link to audio versions of "Chapters from my Autobiography", which are parts that Twain published before his death. Includes mp3 and ogg formats.

Other book-ish news:

There will be a new "Autobiography of Malcolm X", that will include the "lost chapters" that deepen our understanding of Malcolm X. According to the article, they were not originally published because "they showed a broader view of humanity and freedom that was out of sync with the separatist tone of the rest of the work". Via 50books_poc.

storySouth is on online literary magazine dedicated to showing off the best writing from the "new South", especially new writers. They're opened votes to the public for the MillionWriters award for the top 10 stories of 2009, all of which can be read online. Via Alas, a Blog.

I'm loving the T-shirts at Out-of-Print Clothing. They're T-shirts of classic book covers. Though I'm not sure why there are fewer women's shirts. It doesn't seem like it's that hard to make a transfer to a women's shirt, does it? And what? Is no guy going to wear a shirt for I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings? Via Ethical Style. If that's the case, I want more Jane Austen and Jane Eyre shirts.

The one I truly don't get is the "you can't take a book into the bathtub" argument.

Despite my deep love of books, I have never taken a book into the bathtub. I generally shower, so the whole bathtub thing is moot. Is this something a lot of people do? I'd be afraid of messing up my book with soapy water.

I am really excited because I picked up The Big Aiiieeeee! at the Brand Bookshop today. I almost got Snow by Orhan Pamuk, but I stopped in my tracks once I saw this anthology of Chinese and Japanese American literature.

I have a tortured relationship with Asian American literature, because most of it pisses me off too much. Yet it's an itch I can't stop scratching, to the point where I took a couple of Asian Am lit classes in college. Boy were those fun! Anyway, they always went back to the Frank Chin/Maxine Hong Kingston split, where Chin basically accuses Kingston and those like her (or at least as successful as her) of selling out, of being traitors to their own people. (For the record, as writers, I like Kingston, am mostly indifferent to Chin.) So this anthology is pretty legendary, but I've never seen it anywhere, until today.

I have barely started, but the intro is full of gold:

We begin another year angry! Another decade, and another Chinese American ventriloquizing the same old white Christian fantasy of little Chinese victims of "the original sin of being born to a brutish, sadomasochistic culture of cruelty and victimization" fleeing to America in search of freedom from everything Chinese and seeking white acceptance, and of being victimized by stupid white racists and then being reborn in acculturation and honorary whiteness.


It is an article of whilte liberal American faith today that Chinese men, at their best, are effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan, and at their worst, are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu. No wonder David Henry Hwang's derivative M. Butterfly won the Tony for best new play of 1988. The good Chinese man, at his best, is the fulfillment of white male homosexual fantasy, literally kissing white ass. Now Hwang and the stereotype are inextricably one.

More to come! 

ETA: This may take longer than expected. I tried to get through "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and of the Fake", and while certain parts were compelling, most of it feels like a relentless history lesson with no point and the other part feels like a diatribe against writers who are more successful than him. For all Chin's claims that David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan are irresponsible writers who've been sucked in by white liberal Christian stereotyping, it's kind of hard for me to swallow that he thinks that all Chinese people live and are educated a certain way, and that he's the authority on authenticity.

I checked the publication dates, and looks like the copy I have was a reprint published in 1991. That makes me wonder two things: in all of the twenty or so years that had passed since the original publication, they couldn't find more than one woman who's "of the real"? (Well, maybe a few names are ambiguous so I'll have to double-check that.) And after twenty or so years, shouldn't Asian America encompass more than Chinese and Japanese Americans?

We went to go see Jennifer 8. Lee at Vroman's in Pasadena talk about her new book, the Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which traces the lineage of various Chinese American food items such as fortune cookies and chop suey and General Tso's chicken. It was fascinating and very humorous discussion that brought up all sorts of huge, relevant issues - food, masculinity, racism, immigration, and of course, "what it means to be American". I think what she said was "if our standard of what it means to be American is 'as American as apple pie', then how often do Americans eat apple pie, and how often do they eat Chinese food?"

Her presentation was pretty organized, and we saw a bunch of different images and videos, from Chinese people in China trying fortune cookies for the first time, to the video of a sad little five year old girl in China explaining that she was born in America and was being raised in her village in China while her parents were working in America, and America was "at the airport, far away".

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, mostly having to do with computer technology.

Hackers by Steven Levy is basically a history of the computing world and its peculiar offspring - hackers and their hacker-ish philosophy. It took me a while to get into the book because the minute details of the hardships of early computing didn't really interest me, until the focus was more on the people involved. Then it became more like reading about Mark and his friends, but 30 years ago! (Although I'd find it a stretch to call them heroes.) The computer world moves fast - this edition was reprinted in 1994, so it barely even touches on stuff like the Internet, if at all, so to me, it seemed really outdated, and I had to keep remembering that one gigabyte was actually a lot back in those days. And I also learned about where the philosophy of open-source came from and discovered that Bill Gates was a jackass about it even in his teenage days. Unsurprisingly, the book's focus is mainly on the white nerdy males - the only major female that is talked about in any length is Roberta Williams, one of the founders of Sierra Online, who basically got addicted to games. It's fascinating learning about how the industry evolves from an idealistic movement to one that has to concern itself with business deals, stock options, and the newcomers' inability to deal with ever-changing markets. The other thing that fascinated me was how much leeway was given to star hackers - if a hacker proved his ability, then all sorts of concessions were made. That's something that's still very much part of the culture - many of the people I know who work in tech insist on doing a bulk of their work at night; when they do come into work, t-shirts and jeans are their uniforms, and the free sodas keep them fueled throughout the day. Of course they also work round the clock, so the companies don't really complain. Google, in addition to feeding their people, providing transportation, and health care, also provides free laundry services.

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling is basically about the birth of the EFF. It shares some overlap with Hackers, but the people Sterling focuses on are basically screwing around with phone systems instead of computers. It's a great look at how law enforcement, in their eagerness to capture so-called criminals, don't actually realize that the so-called criminals are smart and resourceful enough to band together and use the law back against them. Again, the focus of this book is on white nerdy males who don't seem to realize that the world outside computers can and will intrude upon them, even if they think they're not doing anything wrong. I find this naivety completely fascinating, as it's a sort of luxurious assumption that only the most sheltered, privileged people can make. For example, many of the hackers were actually in communication with law enforcement, whose resources are stretched to the max, but they didn't get suspicious of this at all. They assumed that the law enforcement would warn them if they were about to get in trouble, and would tell them to knock it off for a bit, and then they could safely get back to whatever it is they were doing. My mind boggled at this revelation. Like Hackers, this book is kind of outdated at this point (a hacker stole over 200 megabytes of information!), but it's still an interesting look at the culture and how it's shaped the current one.

Other book I just finished: Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century - an anthology of short stories and criticism edited by Justine Larbalestier.

I am so sick of the iPhone. Yes, it'll change everything forever, with the nifty rotating browser! But how does it work, as a PHONE? Is the reception good? Do your calls get dropped?

I just finished reading this Wired article on Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer who's accused of murdering his wife. The whole thing is really strange. Three items I thought were odd, in a really bizarre article: The author describes the Oakland hills as "quiet and idyllic". Uh, quiet, maybe. Idyllic, no. He also mentions that Reiser first met his wife in Russia, where he had been several times previously using the Russian bride service. Okaaay. Three: Reiser has this obsession with manhood, and thought that teaching his son to play violent video games (which his wife objected to) would help prepare him to be "a man", because he otherwise wouldn't get that kind of education living in Oakland. (That is so funny I don't even know where to begin.)

Oh my god you know how I was bitching about our government and their stupid "English-is-the-official-national-language" thing? Apparently England has this thing where they offer free English classes to migrants, although they are considering limiting access. *sigh* And then I read that people are getting pissed off about having to "press 1 for English". Are you kidding me? Are you really that frickin lazy? And dumb?

We recently watched Sid and Nancy, which was a movie about Sid Vicious and his turbulent relationship with his groupie girlfriend. Neither of us know anything about the Sex Pistols, so we were both sort of befuddled when they cut to him not singing or actually playing any instruments while on stage. Maybe the movie itself is technically good, but I found it really hard to care about the title characters, because to me they both seemed like really unlikeable people who just screamed everything they thought. (And also mentally ill with no one to give them proper medication.) I thought Nancy seemed like a low-rent Courtney Love, and then I found out via Wikipedia that she did want to play the role, claiming that she "is Nancy Spungen". I mean, do you you really want to admit that you are a drug-addled groupie?

I'm almost done reading Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods That People Eat, by Jerry Hopkins. The foreword, of course, is written by Anthony Bourdain. There's some interesting stuff in here, but I doubt I will ever come up with the willpower to make myself eat ant salad, even if some varieties of ants "taste like honey".

I thought about the arguments that vegans make about how eating meat is immoral. I am not going to make any moral judgments about that, but I'm wondering about how vegans would suggest managing overpopulation of certain species? For example, crocodile and alligator meat were once banned, but once they started regaining their population, they had to be managed, and crocodile farms were born - for leather, meat, etc.

Hopkins makes a lot of arguments for adding other species to our diet as a "protein source", but I'm wondering why we even need to add another protein source. From all I've heard and read, most Americans consume too much protein anyway.

Amusing to me is the fact that the most befuddling items of consumption were started by the Chinese. Who the hell thinks up shit like bird's nest and thousand-year eggs (not actually a thousand years old)? Apparently, we do. (But I'm still American enough that I always turn that shit down.)