Hi everyone,

I just wrote up a brief piece on Four Way Books and its attention to Asian American poets.

Here is the link:

http://lanternreview.com/blog/2009/12/07/on-the-small-press-and-asian-american-poetry-a-focus-on-four-way-books/

Am currently reading what pylduck already reviewed, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and supremely enjoying it!

Assigned for next quarter!

=)

A Review of Ha Jin’s A Good Fall (November, Pantheon 2009)



After two partly overly long novels (at least in my estimation), Ha Jin returns with a spritely and witty short story collection, his first collection of short stories since The Bridegroom in 2000. Like A Free Life, the majority of the short stories take place in the United States, perhaps a clear shift then in Ha Jin’s approach to textual representation. In this case, all the stories are set in Flushing, New York. The majority of the stories seem to revolve around the problematics related to assimilation. In this regard, the collection is not far in its thematics to his previous novel, but the improvement here is in the scope and the narrative arc. Whereas A Free Life required Jin to sustain a compelling narrative premise over more than 600 pages, each intricate and more contained short story finds its own intimate footing. Most of the stories are concerned with various domestic squabbles. I’ll focus on the couple that I found most compelling. “Children as Enemies” is narrated from the perspective of a grandfather who finds the Americanization of his children appalling. The tension first appears when his two grandchildren desire “American” sounding names. The plot thickens once one of the children demands the family name to be changed as well. What is very clear in this story is that the children are seen as vessels devoid of any ethnonational pride; that is, they do not see themselves in Chinese in any way. If such is the matter, their repudiation of their names becomes symbolic of the repudiation, at least the grandfather rationalizes, of him and his wife. While the children are I would think pretty fairly demonized, I can’t help but also find it interesting that the grandparents would think that the children would remain so prideful of their Chinese background. I wondered if the dichotomy here was too stark in its representation. Either way, the tension that is set up and one wonders far long after the pages have ended to this short story, whether or not the children would remain so resistant to their ethnic backgrounds. “Choice” depicts a very complicated love triangle that develops between a tutor, his student and his student’s mother. While both the student and the student’s lover find themselves attracted to the tutor, the tutor’s “choice” of one of the two will lead to complicated entanglements. The conclusion to this story seemed especially fitting, although still in its own way surprising. “In the Crossfire” explores the challenging relationship between a husband, his wife, and the “mother-in-law.” The tension of course appears between the “wife” character and her mother-in-law, where nothing the wife seems to do is enough to please the mother-in-law and the mother-in-law’s treatment of the wife results in the wife’s plea for support from her husband. In this regard, the husband character is placed firmly in the middle, attempting to navigate such perilous waters. One of the most strangest, but heartwarming stories is “A Composer and His Parakeets,” in which an actress leaves behind her pet parakeet to her boyfriend, who is a composer. At first the boyfriend-composer is really put off by having to take care of the pet parakeet, but the parakeet soon develops a very strong bond to the boyfriend-composer that culminates in a daring sequence in which the boyfriend-composer performs a kind of CPR on the bird. In any case, the short stories in “A Good Fall” are just right in terms of their length and tone. It is clear that Jin excels in this particular form because the quiet domesticities of the everyday can find firmer footing in a narrative space with more restricted “economy.” Perhaps, the one short story that was a disappointment was “An English Professor,” only because I had held out hope that the story might be something quite germane to the politics of Asian American literary critique, especially as one paragraph reveals that a character teaches Asian American literature:

“He went to Whitney Hall, where he was teaching his immigrant literature course this semester. Today the class was discussing America is In the Heart, by Carlos Bulosan. Rusheng spoke at length about the problems in choosing the form of fiction or that of nonfiction. Bulosan originally wrote his story as a novel, but the press persuaded him to publish it as a memoir. The same thing happened to other books by Asian American authors—for instance, The Woman Warrior. That was why the writer Frank Chin claimed: ‘The yellow autobiography is a white racist form’” (142).

It is clear though that Jin’s awareness of and references to an Asian American literary history is his avowal of a taxonomy that he himself will and is coming to be classified within and that such classification will indeed be of a political sort.

Buy the book Here:

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Fall-Stories-Ha-Jin/dp/0307378683/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249955525&sr=8-1

 A Review of Tania James’s Atlas of Unknowns (Knopf, 2009).

 

I should have probably included this novel in my review of Asian/American sisterhoods as Tania James’s Atlas of Unknowns is a poignant tale of two sisters.  In this case, there is the more academically gifted sister, Anju Vallara, and her sister, Linno, the more artistically gifted sister (she eventually comes to be renowned in the community for her painting and design skills), also the one who has had a hand amputated at a young age due to a freak accident with firecrackers.  The novel is first set in provincial town in Kerala, India.  The family comes from a working class background as Anju and Linno’s father, Melvin, works as a driver for a family friend, Abraham Saar; their mother, Gracie, died in a drowning incident in their childhood.  The extended family is completed by Ammachi, a spirited grandmother figure who continually reappears in the narrative at various points.  We begin immediately to see the strain that appears between Anju and Linno as Anju excels in school and Linno becomes increasingly anti-social as a result of her physical difference.  When Anju is selected to be one of the ten finalists for a very prestigious scholarship, the plot begins its upward movement.  Indeed, as a finalist, Anju must be interviewed first and during that moment she freezes up to the extent that it is only when she lies about her artistic talents that she fully recovers.  Yes, the readers discover that Anju has passed off a book of Linno’s artwork as her own.  Despite the fact that Melvin knows about Anju’s deception, he chalks it up to the opportunity the scholarship would not only offer Anju, but the entire family.  In this way, the novel explores the challenges of class transformation as Anju is allotted a year of abroad schooling in New York City, where she is set up with a wealthy host family, the Solankis and attends a prestigious school.  Once there, Anju embarks upon a high school romance with a fellow student, but finds it challenging to adjust to the new cultural, national, and urban milieu.  Back in Kerala, Linno does not accede to her father’s hope that she marry Kuku, a man who although legally blind, might be the best offer of marriage for Linno given her physical condition and the fact that Kuku is quite wealthy.  Instead, Linno ends up working for Kuku’s sister, Alice, using her artistic talents to help transform and uplift the design company that Alice has begun.  In this way, while Anju’s life begins to disintegrate in the United States, we begin to see Linno come into her own as a designer and as a person.  The relationship between Anju and Linno is perhaps the biggest plot element of James’s spritely first novel, but an important side plot involving Melvin and Gracie does begin to evolve as Anju comes to know Bird, a former actress who knew Gracie when Gracie was just a young woman and just prior to Gracie’s marriage to Melvin.  The readers do not understand Bird’s importance to the story and with a deft had, James weaves in this other plot, where we begin to see that Melvin and Gracie’s marriage had its own challenges to overcome. 

 

James’s novel is quite adept at exploring both the problematics of cultural assimilation for the immigrant in the United States and the difficulties of class transformation in India.  In some ways, the novel is the perfect embodiment of transnational Asian American literature as the narrative literally becomes bifurcated in its middle section, where we are continually moving from one country to another.  James never loses her footing and although the plot does not necessarily move quickly, the characterizations are spot on and we can’t help but wonder how it is that Anju’s more pressing predicament will be solved.  I especially found the representation of the Americanized family of South Asian descent that hosts Anju extremely funny and very nuanced in the differences that can appear between a family that has more readily assimilated to US culture and the individual that has not.  The desi son, Rohit, of the Solankis is perhaps one of the most telling characters of the novel and explores the increasingly problematic nature of political progressivism as Asian Americans find themselves in privileged settings. 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Unknowns-Tania-James/dp/030726890X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251936085&sr=8-1 

 A Review of Eugenia Kim’s The Calligrapher’s Daughter (Simon and Schuster, 2009).

 A Review of Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian 100% Hapa (Chronicle Books, 2006).

 

Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian 100% Hapa is really a visual treatise on the complication of being a mixed-race Asian American in the contemporary moment.  In the sprightly introduction, Fulbeck writes, “Our country is lazy.  And I’m not talking about obesity levels.  I’m talking ‘whatever.’  We’re uncomfortable with people who don’t fit neatly into boxes because when they don’t do so, it requires effort on our part.  It’s easier to keep things uncomplicated, trouble free.  We ask people how they’re doing when most of the time we don’t really want to know” (12).  This statement addresses the state of people’s tragically short-sided conceptions of race, where individuals who do not conform to a particular phenotype therefore become “problems” and difficult to approach.  In this regard, the mixed-race Asian American must face these daily challenges, often where fitting into a prescribed “culture” does not come so easily or automatically.  As Fulbeck continues on his autobiographical polemic, “What are you?  And we know we can’t answer it any more than we can choose one body part over another.  We love the question.  We hate the question.  And we know many times people aren’t satisfied with our answers” (13).  Fulbeck seems to suggest that such a schizophrenic existence is at the core of many hapas’ experiences.  In this regard, Fulbeck’s project to photograph individuals of varing racial and ethnic “mixtures” serves really as a way to embrace those that defy boundaries and expected “norms.” 

 

What is perhaps most fascinating about the book is how it plays out in some voyeurstic fashion.  As the introduction gives way to Sean Lennon’s forward and then to a gallery of many face shots, the experience is much connected to the preconceived notions of the viewers.  Fulbeck makes sure to include alongside each picture another page where the individual who was photographed has a chance to describe himself or herself in his/her own words.  Above these “self-identifying” statements, Fulbeck breaks down each individual’s racial/ethnic backgrounds.  By giving us these various informational blocks alongside the face portraits, one necessarily has to query the notion that there is any norm from which to situate the mixed-race Asian American “appearance.”  In this multiplicity, Fulbeck is undermining any inherent essence to the hapa phenotype and indeed exposing the readers’ desire to decode “race” or “ethnicity” in any particular way.  The photographs themselves are quite stunning in their unadornment.  Besides the strong lighting and direct countenances of all the subjects, they were also instructed to look as if they were not wearing any shirts or blouses (or tops), exposing as much skin surface as possible in the face portraits.  I am including some of the portraits that came with the publicity kit so you can get a sense of those photos, but recall again, that there is some typescript information that comes with the photos.  The sequencing is not made clear to the viewer, but one continues if only to continually observe the vast array of countenances offered here and we know then in this diverse assemblage that Fulbeck has demonstrated how there is “no right answer” to the question of “who are you,” only many, many complicated ones.  If there is one connecting element in all the photos, it is that very few are visibly smiling and most do not show any teeth at any point, so we know that this isn’t some sort of glamour photo shoot.  The production values of the book are first rate and it comes to mind that this book and Todd Shimoda’s Oh! do show us a very marked attention to aesthetic qualities that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around enough when thinking about the marketing and final presentation of “cultural productions.” 

 

As I have been thinking more and more about the importance of visual culture in the arena of Asian American literary production, I can’t help but think that this would of course be yet another indispensable addition to a course designed to explore how visuality and “text” intertwine. 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Part-Asian-100-Hapa-Fulbeck/dp/0811849597

This past weekend I read through Kristin Naca's newly published book of poems Bird Eating Bird (HarperPerennial 2009).



I met Kristin last fall--she teaches at the college down the street from me. I had found out about her through news media about how poet Yusef Komunyakaa had chosen her collection as one of the winners of the National Poetry Series in 2008. The series looks for new poets to be published by participating presses, and each year five winners get their books published after being chosen by established poets from open competition. This great honor is definitely deserved in Naca's poetry. Her lyrics are strongly enmeshed in explorations of English and Spanish language, gesturing often to her mixed-heritage background (Asian and Latino).

The opening poem, "Speaking English Is Like," begins with the words:

Brown and beige and blonde tiles set in panels of tile across the bathroom floor.

Wakes curled into the pavement by traffic, the asphalt a slow, gray tide.

A loose floorboard hiding the gouges chunked out of the floor.

This series of images function as similes for the act or practice of speaking English. The images are elliptical, though, forcing us to consider what it means for them to be likened to speaking English and what quality might be attributed to that practice. The second example is suggestive of a contradiction or tension with hardened pavement given the possibility of tidal movement in being likened to waves and wakes left in water. This image suggests that speaking English may be difficult or stilted, perhaps something that always yearns to be something that is not.

Another poem near the end of the collection is a companion piece titled "Speaking Spanish Is Like." It is organized similarly with a series of images that come at the idea of speaking Spanish from an angle, never quite pinning down what it is like but suggestively creating visual and auditory associations:

A bird in a tree sings to a parrot in a cage, next door.

As the needle skids it plays the grooves carved in the record vinyl.

In front of the butcher shop a man, the name of a woman tattooed on his chest.

The collection also includes a number of poems that incorporate Spanish words into the mainly English-language poem. Most of the Spanish words and phrases are translated in the margins or in the poem itself. There are a few poems in Spanish completely that are followed by English translations.

One poem I find especially fascinating with the exploration of English in collision with another language is "Language Poetry / Grandma's English." The poem begins with the stanza:

Dos / doze / those / toes shuffles through the head
when Grandma speaks, consonants blurred
from her mouth a flat tire. Unable to make out
each word I try reading lips, What / that / cat woman,
but end up lost. Her lips relaxed, bursts of sound
fretting through them. You muddy her, Grandma barks
at my father. You muddy her, she drives you grazy.

The opening sequence of words trundles through similar sounds, muffled attempts at grasping for the correct word while exhibiting a confusion of different languages.

I am planning on teaching this book next semester in the first-year poetry/drama class and will definitely be thinking about the poems more!

I wanted to post a quick note about seeing Kelly Tsai perform live at the Equilibrium Spoken Word series here in the Twin Cities last night. She was the final performer for the evening in this always-amazing series hosted by Bao Phi, following a local poet Brittany Delaney (who performed a wonderful piece about Caster Semenya, the South African athlete that the media has fallen over itself to declare as woman or not-woman) and Washington DC-based Poem-Cees (the dynamic duo of hip hop spoken word art!).

What I was surprised by was how funny Tsai's work is. In introducing each poem, she would already have the audience in peals of laughter, and as she launched into her poems, she brilliantly balanced the expected righteous anger of spoken word arts about activist issues with wry observations and self-deprecation. For example, she shared a poem about the presidential campaign discourse about race and appealing to a litany of demographic groups by juxtaposing racial categories used (and avoided) by particular candidates with groups that she would fit in such as "Asian women under five-feet-two" or "lovers of Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby." She also took apart the phrase, "black, white, whatever," used during the campaign as a way of suggesting that non-white peoples don't need to be campaigned to directly or differently because, after all, the President is supposed to represent EVERYONE and therefore does by virtue of not caring about difference. Her repetition of that smarmy phrase was funny in itself, but as she expanded on the "whatever" and reclaimed the differences that were constantly paved over by both Republicans and Democrats in this appeal to a post-racial world, she made everyone laugh with reminders of the ludicrous statements about any-colored people--whether black, white, blue, purple, or whatever--and reasserted the importance of brown, red, and yellow as actually politically-significant colors and groups.

Tsai was mentioned in an earlier post in the community, and you can find out more about her work on her website at yellowgurl.com.

Today I finished up Yoji Yamaguchi's novel Face of a Stranger (HarperCollins, 1995), a book I found tucked away on the suburban public library selves.



One thing that I've been thinking about lately is how many books don't really get taken up by scholars in Asian American literature and why that might be so. Yamaguchi's novel is one I haven't really heard about, for example, though its topic matter--early twentieth century Japanese immigrant community in California and the picture bride phenomenon--would put it squarely within the field's interest in sketching out particular instances of communities in the earlier decades of immigration (pre-1965).

The novel follows the lives of a range of characters in this small town--primarily centered around "China Alley," so named because it was where the earlier Chinese laborers lived in town before being displaced by the Japanese immigrants. This area is now occupied by prostitutes who were mainly brought over under the false pretense of being married to a lonely Japanese bachelor. Instead, they were indentured to Kato, a local gambling and prostitution ring leader. The primary characters are the prostitute Kikue and the hapless man Takashi. Upon seeing Takashi one night, Kikue believes she has found the man in the photograph that was used to lure her to America, and she proceeds to plot with her friend Shino a prank to exact their revenge on him (Shino also was given the same photograph).

What is fascinating about the novel is its portrayal of an insular yet internally-conflicted Japanese immigrant community--one which feels the pressure of US policies that restrict their movement and labor/business opportunities. Within this world where the only white characters are the crazy white twin sisters that Takashi works for as a houseboy, the various immigrants struggle to readjust the huge contrast between their expectations of America as the land of opportunity and the realities of their lives as prostitutes, farmers constantly at the brink of financial ruin, houseboys, and so on. One particular group of people that comes across poorly is that of the Christian Japanese missionaries, particularly with their attempts to save the prostitutes from their lives of sin.

The narrative itself wavers between a kind of farce where the prostitutes make their plan of revenge against Takashi and others who have wronged them in their community and a more tragic accounting of the characters' pasts. Each character seems to have been driven to this place by misfortune and unhappiness in their lives in Japan. The bumbling giant oaf Kogoro, a local farmer, for example, grows up as an outcast in his family and community because he is larger and calmer than others. When he beats up some neighborhood kids who try to jump him, he is thrown out of school, and his family is socially outcast as well, which in turn leads to his father's death (by suicide or accident is never fully determined).

This is the kind of book that I can't imagine teaching in order to relay "historical fact" or as a mimetic narrative of Asian American experiences in the real world, despite its references to such histories and experiences. I imagine that if I were to teach the novel, students would be hung up on the picture bride phenomenon and especially on whether or not lots of women and men were duped in various ways into paying for marriages that were never really available. Of that latter point, I especially have not enough historical knowledge to verify the extent of fraud in the practice. It might be great for a class that really was able to move beyond the expectation of such mimeticism, though, to consider other questions of narrative. The story is very deliberately plotted and ends particularly cleanly on a closing scene that serves to push on questions of photographs and identity that underlie the novel.

Back when the novel was first published, my friend wrote a review in Duke University's alumni magazine (Yamaguchi is an alum of that school, and the book sports a blurb from Reynolds Price, a creative writing faculty member there).

 A Review of Sabina Murray’s The Caprices, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Forgery (all published through Grove Press).

 

What this review unfortunately neglects is Sabina Murray’s first novel, Slow Burn, which I am in the process of reading currently.  Her short story collection, The Caprices, details the gruesome circumstances related to the Pacific Theater during World War 2, where the violence of Japanese colonialism is rendered in graphic form.  Various stories detail the Bataan death march, the domestic brutality of the everyday as the Japanese come to inhabit the Philippines, the gradual disintegration of a Dutch mixed race family in Indonesia, among other contexts appear.  The Caprices is unyielding and unflinching; the bodies pile up and characters often are killed in horrifying circumstances.  By the conclusion of this collection, I had trouble sleeping and it is a testament to Murray’s visionary power as a writer that the stories can evoke such a strong affectual response.  The last story is particularly chilling because the readers come to realize that the so-called Japanese aggressors are not the villains to the story, even though they seem to embody the most evil threats that appear throughout.  When the Americans appear at the conclusion in a story that tells us that Hiroshima is just about to be bombed, we begin to understand that the roots are in something else, the complicated historical continuum that continually enables war to resurface again and again as response, as reaction, as revenge.  This work also won the PEN award.

 

A Carnivore’s Inquiry follows the picaresque adventures of Katherine Shea.  The story begins with Katherine Shea returning to the United States after living in Europe for a number of years.  She ends up in a fateful encounter with Boris Naryshkin, a Russin immigrant writer, that results in a unique relationship, in which it is unclear at first who had seduced whom.  As Boris is considerably older than Katherine’s young 22 years old, there is the sense then that Boris should have had much more cautious before embarking on this long-term relationship, but as the novel continues, it becomes clear that Katherine is much more calculating than the readers realize.  Katherine begins a number of dalliances with other men, including a street musician, Arthur, who she meets after having eventually convinced Boris to get a rental property in Maine, where she can live much more independently from Boris.  Katherine will later travel to New Mexico as she discovers that her mother has left her a property that Katherine wishes to sell.  Interspersed in her various adventures, Katherine demonstrates a keen mind, exploring in particular those historical events in which cannibalism occurred, whether in the context of the Donner Party or in indigenous sacrificial rituals.  The novel is quite stunning as a work of “ideas” rather than of some sort of realist depiction and we begin to see all the symbolic levels in which cannibalism might be read, how the story itself is really an allegory.  In this regard, the elaborate “dressing” that Katherine seems to drape herself in and her imagination of the world around her seems to suggest a larger pall in which the postmodern subject deludes himself or herself.  I especially enjoyed the gothic ambience of the text, which unsettles the reader and we are not surprised when mysterious deaths start to arise.  This book is quite a departure from The Caprices and easily demonstrates the Murray's writerly range and spritely imagination.  

 

Forgery, like A Carnivore’s Inquiry, seems to function on an allegorical level.  The year is 1963 and the protagonist is Rupert Brigg, a 30 year old antiquities dealer, who travels to Greece in search of rare artifacts that he can bring home in order to sell.  He also unfortunately is suffering in the wake of a broken marriage and the loss of his young son.  Consequently, it is with much depression that he travels to Greece.  He soon links up with a number of family friends and a colorful cast of acquaintances that energizes his various adventures.  Murray is adept at making it clear how much of a foreigner that Rupert is and how much he stands apart from what is going on around him.  Early on, Murray pairs him up with Nikos Nikolaides, a man who has seen his fair share of debauchery while on the Island, gamely taking on youthful female tourists, who have come to find, like Rupert, the “real” Greece.  Rupert begins to tire of these antics, but a stay in a secluded Greek Island, Aspros, begins him on a journey of self-reflection, but a murder begins to change the tone and the nature of the plot.  Unlike Katherine Shea, Rupert is a much more reliable narrator, even though the question of authenticity and of originality make us wonder what sorts of illusions Rupert fancies of himself as he attempts to sort his life together.  Like A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Forgery does not provide us much in the way of Asian American experiences.  Nevertheless, there is much going on with the neocolonial relationship that existed between Greece and the United States during the sixties, as the Greek government had come under much observation for turning more “communist” in character.  In this regard, we can see the Cold War context as fueling much of the paranoia and suspicion that pervades the novel.  What is of course interesting to think about in relation to the author is whether we can extend the question of “forgery” directly to the nature of art forms in general?  What is more valuable, the original or the copy?  What is the copy in the world of postmodern simulacra?   Murray’s work is always provocative and does not necessarily leave us with clear answers; these ambiguities enrich rather than take away from her work.

 

Buy the Books Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Caprices-Sabina-Murray/dp/080214313X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249436151&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Forgery-Sabina-Murray/dp/0802143687/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249436151&sr=8-2

 

http://www.amazon.com/Carnivores-Inquiry-Novel-Sabina-Murray/dp/0802142001/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249436151&sr=8-3

 

 Another Review of Todd Shimoda’s OH! A Mystery of Mono no Aware (Chin Music Press, 2009).

The first review in this community of Todd Shimoda’s fascinating novel can be found here:

 

http://community.livejournal.com/asianamlitfans/62453.html

 

My immediate impression of the book is an appreciation for its highly interdisciplinary aesthetic.  The production values for Shimoda’s novel are first rate and it is very clear that much attention was paid to the visual experience of the narrative inasmuch as the written plot.  I agree very much with <lj user=pylduck>’s estimation of the book as being akin to some of the collaborative poetry collections of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.  I think more generally the issue of collaboration has been glossed over in critical estimations of Asian American literature. 

 

I won’t refer again to Shimoda’s career or the plotting of the novel as the previous reviewed has already completed an excellent summation of the main points.  I do very much appreciate though the narrative pull that leads the readers onward.  Zack Hara develops a really unique relationship with a professor while living in Japan, who provides Zack with a number of mini-adventures related to the exploration of “mono no aware,” the keen sense of loss that Zack does not seem to be able to relate to or understand.  In this regard, the novel seems to be very much invested in the ways that Zack seeks to move out of an emotional stuntedness that is emblematized most carefully by his brief and desultory relationships with women.  Shimoda sets the novel’s spatial trajectory vividly and we get a sense of the various cities and villages that Zack eventually travels to and explores.  Each location becomes a terrain upon which the protagonist can investigate various philosophical musings.  As the novel moves more firmly into its various mysteries, the pace picks up and we are left with a cliffhanger conclusion that is supposed to be unraveled through a careful consideration of the visuals that have been included.  The images that do appear in tandem with the text often are incorporated in the space between the short chapters; in this regard, the reader is forced to look back and try to make sense of them in a different way.   The “mystery” then unfolds in the artistic vision that Linda Shimoda provides.  The very careful and organic union of art and fiction adds much to the texture and the success of this work.  I am also reminded of the continuing transnational valences of Asian American fiction, having just reviewed Mary Yukari Waters’s The Favorites and having taught some fiction by the short story writer Shimon Tanaka.  In this regard, Shimoda’s novel continues to flesh out the contemporary Japanese terrain from a Japanese American perspective.   Zack is certainly interesting because as a Japanese American he possesses a complicated perspective of one who can sometimes “blend” in with others, but also finds himself strangely unmoored regardless of his relative linguistic proficiency.  At various times, we see him either get mistaken for a “native” Japanese and at other times, as a Japanese American.  This liminal space is key to enfiguring the complicated psychic terrain that Zack inhabits, one that is increasingly problematic to him as the novel moves forward.

 

I would highly recommend this book simply for its production value; Chin Music Press has made it a point to reconstruct the “novel” into a multifaceted experience.  Of course, I think it would add much to any Asian American literature course or for any American literature course more generally; I think for myself I could see it easily as a match to the experimental impulses that we have seen, especially with the inclusion of art into literature.  A course for instance could start with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, move to a strong poetic sequence with Mong-lan and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and conclude perhaps with Todd Shimoda’s Oh!  The course could also incorporate graphic novels, such as Mine Okubo’s work, David Kirk Kim, Gene Luen Yang, Lynda Barry, and Shaun Tan.  I think it would be really fun =)

 

Here some other reviews and interviews related to the Book:

 

http://www.redroom.com/blog/wendy-nelson-tokunaga/interview-todd-shimoda-author-oh-a-mystery-mono-no-aware

 

http://www.villagebooks.com/event/todd-shimoda-oh-mystery-mono-no-aware

 

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_books_blog/2009/06/review-and-signing-todd-shimodas-oh.html

 

Buy the book Here:

 

http://chinmusicpress.com/

The final book of my summer reading days as I dive into the fall semester was Daniyal Mueenuddin's debut collection of short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton, 2009).



This community has reviewed some recent books by Pakistani/American writers that productively hint at or directly address a post-9/11 world and the relations of Muslims, particularly Muslim men, to and in America. Before the turn of this new millennium, I would have said that much subcontinent literature with some connection to American perspectives seemed to focus primarily on Partition--the world-changing moment of decolonization in 1947 when India became India and Pakistan with the bowing out of the British Empire as rulers--and a diasporic perspective of South Asians looking back to the homeland. I haven't read enough of South Asian American literature to be able to assess if there has been a substantive shift in topical treatment of the subcontinent in this way, but it seems a possible one.

In contrast, Mueenuddin's work seems uninterested in either Partition or post-9/11 relations though it is very much a work about contemporary Pakistan of the last couple of decades. Mueenuddin's short stories in this collection center around characters within the orbit of the feudal landowning family of K. K. Harouni. Moving between the servant classes and the feudal aristocracy that has lost much of its wealth and status to the industry-business classes that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, the stories explore the relationship between the various people that inhabit the numerous houses and farms of the Harounis and their peers. In one of the stories, the title character Lily encapsulates this focus: "It's a little dying world, she reflected, this household, these servants, the old man at the center. She had seen this before among her own relatives, one of her great-aunts who lived on into her nineties, quarreling with her maidservants, absorbed in prayer, ill-tempered, reputedly with boxes full of cash and gold salted away, though none of it turned up after her death" (191-192). As such, the stories are wonderfully wrought with a sense of loss--the slow crumbling of a world based on hierarchies of families and their servants as modernization and globalization re-center wealth and power in different hands. The older generation wastes away, and the younger generation fumbles towards an uncertain future (some ineffectually trying to carry on as if their aristocratic status still gives them complete power in their world and others taking up business wealth more proactively). Even the servants must learn to navigate the fracturing hierarchy of this outside world as it is mirrored in the hierarchy of servants in a household. Some life-long servants extract money and land from their oblivious masters, thereby making the transition to the business-political world of modernized Pakistan.

A number of these stories had been published in magazines previously--including in The New Yorker and Granta--as well as in the Best American Short Stories anthology. Clearly, Mueenuddin is a master storyteller in the vein of delicately and devastatingly crafted prose, the kind that weaves tales of intimate relations with startling pathos and poetry. Because the stories work in this particular vein of the contemporary short story, though, they also tend towards universalizing of human relations rather than exploring differences (cultural, racial, class, religious, etc.).

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is also set entirely in Pakistan, and the few invocations of America and transnational connections come in reference to men who studied abroad in America and returned or in reference to "American women" (white women) whom such men date and marry. The wealthy classes in this Pakistani world clearly have a cosmopolitan life, jetting around the country as well as the world--primarily to places in the postindustrial Global North like Paris and New York.

I like this kind of short story collection in which the world sketched out is that delimited by a singular set of characters. Though some characters and stories are more peripheral to the world of K. K. Harouni, all of them help to illuminate a particular affective orientation to the passing of a generation and a system of wealth and politics in Pakistan. The fates of some characters are often left unstated, but then they surface briefly in other stories in ways that clarify what happens to them after the stories they are featured in. Unlike a more deliberate overarching narrative that you might find in a novel, though, the stories are often elliptical in their relations to each other, and such a multi-layered narrative structure makes for a different kind of reading experience that gestures more towards ambiguously-generative analogies and possible connections between characters than a clearly delineated storyline would allow.

 A Review of Thrity Umrigar’s The Weight of Heaven (HarperCollins, 2009).

 

Thrity Umrigar’s The Weight of Heaven is perhaps one of my favorite novels I have read in the past couple of years.  It’s a hefty book as the title suggests, especially as is routed through the ethics of globalization.  What makes this book a success is the absolute conviction with which we believe the bereavement of the main characters, Frank and Ellie Benton, who lose their son, Benny, to a tragic bout with meningitis.  When Frank has the opportunity to work at a different location in the multinational corporation known as HerbalSolutions, Ellie encourages him to take it so that they can make a fresh start somewhere else, without the ghost of Benny following them around.  Ellie, who was charged with taking care of Benny in the “housewife” role, suffers guilt over the loss, but living in India for a year and half changes her and she begins to see a way out of the depths of despair.  Frank, on the other hand, has taken to “replacement” therapy with the local married couple, Prakash and Edna, who are hired to help around the house, and whose son, Ramesh, becomes the object of Frank’s attention.  The plot is partially catalyzed by Frank’s growing obsession with mentoring and fathering Ramesh despite Prakash’s growing resentment of Frank’s presence.  Frank, in particular, wields a particular influence over Ramesh as he encourages the young boy to study hard so that one day Ramesh might be able to study in America.  Ellie, on the other hand, spends her time at the local clinic, offering what services she can with her expertise in psychology, having earned a doctorate in that area.  Ellie has also made friends with Nandita, a journalist, and finds that particular relationship fruitful for finding a renewed interest in her life.  However, all is not well at HerbalSolutions as Frank discovers a major player in a unionizing effort has been killed, leading factory workers to voice dismay and rumble for the potential to strike. 

 

The “weight” of the novel is held together by Umrigar’s very steady narrative style, which at one point jumps backward about ten years, providing the background to Frank and Ellie’s relationship.  We begin to see how important each of them are to the other and how their relationship changes in the midst of the birth of their son.  The clarity with which this connection is presented makes the novel move forward effortlessly even despite the fact that the plot does not cohere around major cataclysmic events.  Further, the subplot related to HerbalSolutions continually demonstrates the ways in which individual characters are not always aware of the extensive networks that make globalization so threatening and problematic.  Indeed, as local villagers find their supply of trees sold to HerbalSolutions, they are left without an important economic and health resource that was once available to them, irreparably changing lives in the process. 

 

As I was reading this book, I suppose I’m also reminded that I tend to like “naturalistic” narratives, moving inexorably toward some tragic conclusion and Umrigar’s novel does not disappoint in that regard.  With the set-up being provided so early on related to Frank’s incredible myopia regarding Ramesh and his own sense of loss, we know that no good can come of his constant desire to father the young boy.  And yet, even then, and even given the many, many flaws that Umrigar represents and codes into Frank, we can’t help also to paradoxically sympathize with him when everything seems to be lost.  In this difficult but nevertheless poignant space of ambivalence, the novel hits a perfect stride.  Despite it’s relatively longer length, it is something I will definitely teach in the future; this is the perfect book for courses on Asian American literature, and transnationalism. 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Weight-Heaven-Novel-Thrity-Umrigar/dp/0061472549/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248499369&sr=8-2

 

I kept seeing Ru Freeman's debut novel A Disobedient Girl (Atria, 2009) with its striking cover image of the back of a girl draped in blue fabric on bookstore shelves the last few months, and I finally picked up a copy last week from the public library.



There are already a number of reviews of this novel online that each make points I would like to echo. For starters, Debbie Lee Wesselman summarizes the novel:

Told in alternating chapters — one from the point-of-view of Latha and the other in the first-person narration of Biso – A Disobedient Girl unfolds piece-by-piece, guided by the thematic forces of karma and destiny, despite the best efforts of its characters.

Though the novel never explicitly flags the concept of karma, the story definitely reads as one that elucidates characters enmeshed in an understanding of morality (good and bad) that is karmic in quality and nature. Karma isn't simply cause-and-effect in the novel, though, and seems much more nuanced than popular (American) culture understandings of it. I'm not versed enough in the concept to see how much the novel is engaging with some of those thorny issues of fatalism, pre-destination, and behavior or perhaps how Buddhist versus Hindu versions of karma might be in tension. (Side note: Set in Sri Lanka, the novel focuses primarily on Sinhalese characters, the majority ethnic group of the island nation who in turn are mainly Buddhists. Throughout the novel, these Sinhalese-identified characters often disparagingly mention the Tamils, the next largest ethnic group of the country who are predominantly Hindu. More than ethnic and religious difference, though, the novel works through the characters' negotiations with class and caste. The marriages of various characters are described frequently in terms of how one partner marries "down" in terms of the social hierarchy.)

As noted in the quotation above, the novel consists of two alternating storylines. The first follows Latha, a servant girl of the Vithanage family, in third-person, past tense point of view. The second is in first-person, present tense point of view for Biso, a mother of three young children traveling from the southern coast to the northern hill country. Latha's story makes many temporal leaps, covering decades of her life from when she is about age six to age thirty. Biso's story, though often delving into her past through memories, takes place on a cross-country train ride that lasts just a brief two days. The structure, of course, creates a relationship between these two women and the two stories. The novel does a wonderful job of holding that relationship at arm's length while providing little hints of stronger connections throughout.

Latha's story deals primarily with the contradictions of the servant girl raised alongside the privileged daughter Thara of the wealthy family. Most interestingly, the novel traces how the friendship that forms between the girls is always in tension with the mistress-servant relationship. Latha's story is also about her coming of age and her coming to a sense of what it means to be a woman through sex and her body. The relationships between members of the family, particular between Mr. and Mrs. Vithanage, are wonderfully fraught--troubled ways of relating to intimate, loved ones that the novel shows us as resounding forward into the lives of everyone touched.

Biso is a woman with three young children who sneaks them all away from her husband in a coastal town towards her family who live in the hill up-country. This storyline cements the feminist leanings of the novel, examining especially how Biso pushes against the expectations of her society and neighbors that she be a dutiful wife to her abusive and unloving husband. LIke other well-known female protagonists in literature, she also reclaims a sense of agency and vitality through her affair with another man, and that relationship describes a different kind of relationship that she has to sex and her body.

The book blurb and other promotional material for the novel all mention that this novel is set "against the volatile events of the last forty years of Sri Lankan history," but the novel itself offers very little historical information. There are references to the JVP, young protestors of the establishment, politicians who give people hope for change, and politicians who have a pro-nativist stance (opposed primarily to colonialist/foreign presence), but these moments are often in passing and never explained or even rooted to a particular date and easily verifiable historical event. In general, I agree with S. Krishna who writes,

I also wish this novel had taught the reader more about Sri Lankan history. While there are some mentions of politics, it is clear that the reader has to already be familiar with the history of the country in order to understand what is going on. While it was an interesting social commentary, I don’t really feel like I followed what was going on in the background enough to learn anything new.

Which is to say, though the political context seems utterly crucial to circumscribing the lives of the main characters, very little is explained. Of course, this burden to teach the reader or to be a translator of experiences and cultures that might be foreign to the mainstream American audience is a difficult one for non-white writers to negotiate.

At the level of reading pleasure and identification with plot and characters, Ali notes,

This book isn't bursting with likeable characters. Latha's situation is understandably intolerable to her, but the things she does in response are cringe-worthy. This is an effective way of forcing readers to look at the larger issues, the societal factors that make this character who she is.

It is always tricky when major characters are unlikeable or consistently make the wrong choices, but I think Ali is right to note that in this novel, those "cringe-worthy" responses tend to gesture outwards away from Latha as simply a failed person and instead to mark out larger forces that constrain her life. I personally loved the story and the characters (though my pleasure might be of the sort of watching a train wreck).

The author's web site offers a list of other Sri Lankan writers as well as links to Freeman's journalistic writing.

 A Review of Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (Knopf, 2009).

 

In its dark atmosphere and even darker conclusion, The Wasted Vigil shares much in sentiment and tone with Yiyun Li’s previously reviewed, The Vagrants.  Here are a group of characters, so many harboring secrets or secret agendas; they betray one another, or at other points, advance tactical schemes that ultimately result in violent harm.  I was interested in reviewing this title precisely because it focuses on the ongoing conflicts and social contexts occurring in Afghanistan.  The writer, Aslam, apparently traveled to Afghanistan to witness first-hand its current and challenging conditions and seemingly routes such observation into his fictional novel.  In this respect, the line between history and the make-believe is certainly thin and in approaching the novel from this angle, we come to see what never happened might have been inspired by elements that actually did.  Knowing this possible fact makes the plot all the more chilling.  The central story involves a Russian woman, Lara, who has traveled to Afghanistan in search of any information of her long lost brother, who was fighting in the region during the Soviet invasion in 1979.  She ends up staying with en elderly British man, Marcus Caldwell, a man whose life has already been significantly altered by the continuing conflict in the region.  His daughter and wife have both been killed.  Marcus’s hand has been cut off for a reason that will be explored later on in the novel; the brutality placed on the bodies of all the characters is part and parcel of the atmosphere that Aslam creates and re-creates.  Amidst this complex representational landscape is a former American CIA agent, David Town, who has remained in the area for some time and is a friend of Marcus’s.  It is also David who earlier had fallen in love with Marcus’s daughter.   Her fate is the subject of another mystery that becomes entwined in the life of Lara’s brother.  These varied national heritages, Russian, English, and American, clash against the more regionally located individuals, including the various Pakistanis and Afghanis that come to populate the novel. 

 

In looking for other critical conversations to enter into based upon the novel, I am struck most particularly by a repeated sentiment appearing in most of the reviews, including the one offered by The New York Times, regarding the lyricism in Aslam’s novel.  There is so much detail and so much pain, but rendered through such exquisitely wrought metaphors and imagery that we are subject to another kind of difficulty.  It is perhaps the intent of Aslam to generate this dissonance so as to make a statement for the clear divide between representational brutality and the ongoing conflicts that subsume material bodies and inflict damage on actual lives.  In this respect, it seems almost a dubious opus to present such work into fiction, a sense that all must be totally lost when even beauty, in whatever monstrous form, can be found in the imagination of a location seemingly so lost in war.  Like The Vagrants, this is not a novel to be read as a simple pleasure read, but a very serious book with an extremely depressing conclusion.  A sobering book and a reminder of the importance of literature as a way to, if at least superficially, live a life beyond the self, to imagine other worlds, so as to even potentially become ever more engaged in a global perspective. 

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Wasted-Vigil-Nadeem-Aslam/dp/030726842X

I had a backlog of reviews that I just uploaded. :D What other Asian American books have people been reading this summer? Please post your thoughts or lists. Reviews can be informal and short. We like hearing about what people are reading.

I came across Edward Jae-Suk Lee's debut novel The Good Man (Bridge Works Publishing, 2004) at the St. Paul Public Library, and I am very happy to have stumbled across it so unexpectedly. I have never heard of the author or the novel, but the story traces out exactly the kinds of issues I am interested in with respect to language, region, and encounter.



While browsing the fiction shelves at the library, I saw many Korean American novels, and while I will likely get around to reading many of them someday, I was also hoping for different kinds of stories from the standard immigrant-child narrative of acculturation. Lee's novel really seemed to fit the bill, and I was not disappointed.

The narrative centers on a few characters in a rural valley in Montana. The novel begins with Gabriel Guttman, a mysterious, one-eyed white man with a faulty memory, as he returns to the familiar valley of his childhood. We find out quickly that Guttman is a veteran of the Korean War and has difficulty dealing with the trauma of the fighting and his own actions. The other major character is Yahng Yi, the sixteen-year-old mixed-race daughter of the "Chinawoman" who lives in the valley. Yahng's story sketches out the very limited, rural world in which she has grown up. Other important characters include Yahng Yi's mother (never named... always called by the narrative and other characters "Yahng Yi's mother") who was a Korean peasant from a fishing village; Emily Cottage, of a long-standing family in the valley who was Gabe's love before he went off to war; Jihn, Yahng Yi's older brother (a Vietnam vet); Hamm Finn, the landowner and cattle rancher of the valley with the most influence and wealth when Gabriel returns; Jude Finn, Hamm's drunkard, gambling grandson; and Val Rey, a Native American boy who is friends with Jude.

The narrative focuses often on the rural life of the valley, and like other fiction set in such areas of the West, it has some remarkable language about that world. The sheep ranch that Yahng Yi runs, during the time of the novel's present, has a number of pregnant ewes giving birth. This passage describes one such birth:

The lamb's shoulders were out, and the ewe went to the ground, its head reaching back toward her hindquarters to clean the membranes from the lamb's mouth. Yahng Yi went over to the ewe and it blatted softly and reached its head up to meet Yahng Yi's hand. Yahng Yi rubbed it behind the ears, and stroked the soft down around the neck. The lamb was halfway out and breathing normally. The ewe stood and the force of gravity dropped the lamb to the ground. It wobbled on little brown legs, the birth sac still covering its hindquarters, and searched for a teat while its mother licked it. The ewe walked off a little way, the lamb trailing it and rubbing its small black head along the top of the ewe's udder. (37)

This kind of prose might be described as spare, echoing the simplified quality of life that the characters experience and the way they speak as well--if not a more direct kind of speech at least a pared down form of communication.

One of the more provocative aspects of this novel is its focus on Gabriel, the white American veteran of the Korean War, rather than the mother's perspective (though the narrative does provide some of her backstory such as how she and her two sisters left behind the fishing village of their childhood for the mainland only to encounter the war). Gabe suffers from memory loss, linked to the loss of his eye, and the novel slowly unravels his past as he struggles to connect his present self to the snippets of the past that he remembers from the valley. He has lived away from the valley for forty years, having abandoned Yahng Yi's mother (whom he saved in Korea and brought to Montana with him) and Emily Cottage. The novel weaves this memory loss to some extent into a physiological condition--whatever accident that led to the loss of his eye also severed the connection between the right and left halves of his brain, and that severing of the two sides (creative versus analytical) characterizes his inability to make sense of his past and present. The novel traces how Gabe tries to make sense of this particular part of his past that he is able to remember as well as how he comes to grips with the parts that are not available to his conscious mind but plague his nightmares. The novel's focus on a white American veteran of a war in Asia puts it in good company many other novels about the veteran experience (and dealing with psychological trauma), and it would certainly be worth considering how a Korean American author's approach to writing such a character compares to a similar character created by a white veteran author.

Yahng Yi's story is the other central component of the novel, particularly how she deals with a burgeoning sexuality and the claustrophobic quality of her rural life with a mother tethered to a haunted past. Yahng Yi's mother has taken up the shaman tradition practiced by her own mother, and her forays into altered states (brought on by hallucinogenic teas) are a desperate attempt to make her world whole again after the war's dislocation and her abandonment by Gabe. Yahng Yi herself seems precocious in her independence and ability to keep the sheep ranch running on her own. The way she deals with Jude Hamm's bullying presence is also remarkable, and the tensions broughout out by her sexuality and her objectification by men in the valley are crucial components of her coming-of-age story.

In addition to the Montana setting, what caught my eye particularly was the presence of Val Rey, the Native figure of the story who lurks in the background, interested in Yahng Yi but too shy to express his feelings. Towards the end of the novel, Val tells Jude Hamm a coyote trickster story (172), cementing his cultural identity as a Native American (he also eats hallucinogenic mushrooms). The idea of encounter or recognition between Asian/Native characters emerges in the end when Val sees Yahng Yi in a particular way: "Her dark eyes, dark like his and glossy, and the eyelids folded at the inside corners, the epicanthic fold, a trait shared by their ancestors. She is like him in so many ways. Her face, her skin, her hair" (232). This kind of visual cross-identification happens in other works of Asian American and Native American literature (the most famous example perhaps being Tayo's recognition of his relatives' faces in dead Japanese soldiers in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony). Of course, it is the setting of the novel that most enables such encounters and recognitions--in this case, the rural West as spaces adjacent to reservations where contact between Indian and white people is the strongest basis of racial difference (rather than white-black). Such spaces incorporate or deal with the anomalous presence of Asian and mixed-race Asian peoples differently than the spaces of urban California or New York where heavy concentrations of Asian communities work to create different understandings of Asian Americans.

It would be interesting to teach or write about The Good Man in the context of Western Literature, war veteran literature, and rural life literature. I can't really think of other Asian American literature that has the same orientation towards these issues except perhaps something like Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation which is set in Idaho with a protagonist who is the mixed-race daughter of a white American veteran and a Japanese woman (though the tone of that novel is far more playful that that of Lee's novel).

I picked up Patti Kim's debut novel A Cab Called Reliable (St. Martin's Griffin, 1997) at the St. Paul Public Library. It's short length was a draw as I decided between a few different Korean American novels about growing up in an immigrant household.



I am tempted to classify Kim's as young adult fiction, but I don't know if it is marketed as such. The novel features the first-person narrator Ahn Joo, a young girl faced with some horrible circumstances. The narrative is told retrospectively, but the narrative voice tries to capture the perspective and feelings of Ahn Joo at the age being narrated. The effect seems to me a classic move on the part of young adult fiction--creating a greater sense of identification for the reader with the protagonist. This particular character also seems especially precocious in her ability to deal with some of the difficulties of her life, another quality of young adult fiction that tends to favor hardy protagonists who must face a heartless world without even the help of their parents. (Note: My reading of the novel as "young adult" fiction is not meant to denigrate it or to suggest it is not sophisticated enough to be called "regular adult" fiction. There are conventions that make particular narratives especially amenable to being marketed for a young adult audience, though, and this novel seems to fall into those conventions for me.)

There is somewhat of a lack of clarity, though, with how much that precocity is added by an older narrator's perspective. There are certainly many moments in which the young child notices things and describes them very astutely even though she doesn't understand the meaning of them, especially difficult moments like when her father persists in rubbing her belly long after she no longer has tummyaches and when she spies on her father having sex with a woman who works at the Korean market:

Heavy breathing came from my father's bedroom. His door had not been shut tight. I peeped through the crack. The blinds were pulled up. The moon nestled in the window's upper-left corner. The calendar was still in the month of May. My eyes moved toward the left of the drawer, half its mirror cut off by the frame of the door. I saw only half of Loo Lah's wave of a bare back growing out of the dresser top, her calf pasted to the back of her thigh. She sat like a frog about to jump off one lily pad onto another. I saw half of her permed head, which my father's hand seemed to clutch and sway. One of his legs hung over the dresser. His foot rested inside an opened drawer. The metal handles clinked.

As this example demonstrates, the narrator casts about to describe what she sees, some of it seemingly irrelevant to the moment which is seeing her father have sex with Loo Lah like mention of the moon and the calendar. Likewise, Ahn Joo does not call the scene one of sex because she is, at that moment, too young to know what sex is. These experiences, however, also lead the narrator to experiment with her body and that of a neighbor boy before she feels that desire that leads people to pleasurable bodily encounters.

At the beginning of the novel, Ahn Joo's mother leaves her behind with her abusive father, taking her younger brother with her. The eponymous cab called Reliable is the car that Ahn Joo sees her mother hurriedly jumping into as she returns from school that fateful day. This cab takes on associations of abandonment for Ahn Joo and foregrounds the theme of reliability (or lack thereof) for the remainder of the novel, functioning in that respect like the streetcar of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. The novel quickly follows Ahn Joo from elementary school into high school as she excels particularly in writing. She faces racist as well as well-meaning but exoticizing classmates and teachers at school, and her English teachers like her stories about Korean culture that highlight difference and inscrutability. Her father, meanwhile, shapes up a bit and stops treating her so badly. Their relationship takes on more qualities of the immigrant and child dynamic, with the father illiterate in English and reliant on Ahn Joo at times to broker exchanges with white Americans.

At the end of the novel, there are two chapters that break with the general narrative voice. One includes excerpts of letters written by Ahn Joo to her absent mother over the course of many years. The one-sided conversation is touching and helps to flesh out some of the things that the narrator doesn't say in the rest of the narrative explicitly. The final chapter then marks another shift in which the narrative voice addresses the father as "you," narrating both a shared past and a present-day encounter with the father in a way that shifts the attention of the narrative to the relationship between Ahn Joo and her father and away from her yearning relationship with the always absent mother:

You liked anchovy soup, so I stunk up my hair and the house to cook it for you. You wanted eel, I almost burned down the house smoking it for you. You liked live squid, so I fought with its tentacles to dump them in the kimchi for you. I cut them up, dumped them in the stinging red sauce, and they were still moving.

The chapter fills out a dynamic between Ahn Joo and her father that is much more explicit about her yearning to please him as well as how she pushes back against his expectations to be a certain kind of daughter, girl, and woman.

A Cab Called Reliable is a thoughtfully rendered coming-of-age story that blends the more typical immigrant narrative with that of the broken home. Rather than telling the story of a complete nuclear family (father-mother-siblings) struggling to acculturate, this novel strips away the mother who is often central to such narratives of inter-generational conflict (mother-daughter relationship). Of course, the mother's absence is a persistent force in the novel, but it is instead the story of Ahn Joo and her father as they muddle their way to some version of the American Dream and success without the full family

The kind folks at Apogee Press (Berkeley, California) sent me copies of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's two books of poetry as well as some of their other books a few months back. This post reviews the books by Dhompa, and I plan on reviewing the others later. I enjoyed reading these two books back to back, giving me the experience of moving through a span of her poetry in quick succession: Rules of the House (Apogee, 2002) and In the Absent Everyday (Apogee, 2005).



The biographical note at the back of the books states that Dhompa grew up in Tibetan communities in India and Nepal. She has an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and now lives in San Francisco where she works for a non-profit organization that provides humanitarian aid to the people of the Himalayas. These details offer some suggestions of experiences that might inform her perspective. A sense of exile and refugee-ness seems to inform her poetics, and some thoughts on the Tibetan diaspora in relation to other forces (Christian missionaries, China's claims on the region) seep through as well.

Dhompa's words exhibit a gnomic quality. The lines of her poems are carefully worded sentences that suggest larger truths extracted from observations of everyday habits and utterances. Her first book, Rules of the House creates a speaking persona enmeshed in a particular family and community (especially with reference to neighbors and elders). Though there are some characters named throughout, what is striking is the abstracting or universalizing of recurring characters, likely family members, via single-lettered names. As a couple of the poems in the book mention, "Without a name the story could be anyone's" (91). The characters given one-letter initials are F, M, and S, corresponding to Father, Mother, and Son, it seems, with the speaking persona taking the role of daughter. Throughout the book, these characters surface periodically and speak. M, especially, seems to be a figure of special significance for the speaker of the poems, one who passes on life lessons that are both profound and flawed. In this way, the relationship sketched out between M and the speaker could correspond to narratives of mother-daughter relationships, offering a sense of cultural and familial transmission that succeeds at times and fails at others because of the exiled quality of the family's life outside of their homeland.

The lines of most poems in this collection are long. In fact, one way to characterize these long lines is to think of the stanzas as prose poems, driven not by the length of the line but by the space necessary for words to create startling juxtapositions. Some stanzas run three or four lines while others are just a single line. "Sun storm" begins with these two stanzas:

Like brides behind veils, my people peep from drawn curtains and feel the air with their fingers. They do not see any use for heat and are not hospitable to it. Electric fans focus on bare shoulder blades and erect nipples.

Mosquitoes persist. Hands do not move fast enough.

Read together, the stanzas offer some commentary on each other--both draw out details of how people deal with hot days. The second stanza, however, also carries separately a more expansive quality, one that gestures away simply from a sense of exhaustion from dealing with heat and insects and that transfers the movement of the swatting hands into a more existential statement about impoverishment and the inability to do enough (to move fast enough).

The poem "How rules are made" begins with this stanza:

The silver lining, M said, would come, would come. Some things remained the same: the curtain in the neighbor's house, the one-eyed dog's bark, new hit songs on Sunday afternoon radio programs. (41)

The rest of the poem sketches out how "S was unfortunate" and connects these moments to proclamations that obliquely and directly comment on gender. For example, after examining S's throat, a doctor notes, "this is one fine esophagus your kid got there, madam." The poem ends with a couple of claims as well:

The boys wanted to be men. F was not available.

M kissed us on our lips and said she was good as any man.

In this way, there is a suggestion that the rules that govern their lives--the ones invoked by M in her lessons--are gendered as well as somewhat haphazardly cobbled together out of specific instances. The movement from particularity to universality (rules) is one that the poems try to trace.

Another aspect of this first book, Rules of the House, that I find fascinating is the sequencing of poems. Most of the poems are one or two pages long, but the collection is also comprised to some extent by interwoven series of poems. One series is structured as lessons--First lesson (14), Second lesson (20), Preparing for the third lesson (46), Third lesson (48), Fourth lesson (70), and Fifth lesson (92). Another series has parentical roman-numeraled titles from (i) to (ix). The effect of these dispersed series (rather than having the serial poems printed contiguously) is to tie together the observations into a fragmented narrative about the exilic life of the family.



The lines are different in this book. On the page, the poems look more like short lyrics. Some are also multi-paged, with a single stanza occupying each page. Others look like prose poems in evocative paragraphs.

One thing I noticed particularly about this collection is a more common occurrence and invocation of a "you" (different people). For example, "Error" reads:

You wish to be presented formally, preferably by a relative who has merely heard of you. Accept it to be equivocal. Two mentions of your adversity to flowers. I could point towards a childhood and you'd be clear of all blame. Not far from a view of your city, mimosa in frugal yellow wraps the edges of a driveway. I am writing around you. You have entered this kingdom. Give a little hope. (24)

The effect of addressing "you" directly is to create an intimacy of the poetic space that is not as pressing in the first collection that instead offers insight into a family and community of which the reader is not a part. In "Error," the "you" seems to be a member of the speaker's community, someone adhering to similar codes of conduct when strangers (potential suitors?) meet. The reader of the poem, then, is aligned with this person whose life is hinted at with references to intimate details such as "adversity to flowers" and "a childhood."

As with the first collection of poems, In the Absent Everyday is most powerful when its words evoke images that are dense in meaning that seems to lie just out of reach, rooted often in the everyday encounter. In the title poem, for example, the speaker notes, "I am always receiving messages from people / I haven't met. The understatement of her / heel" (11). Here, the idea of coded messages passed to the speaker from strangers emerges in a concrete gesture as a woman's heel. What that message is remains engimatic, but the force of its suggestiveness is in the mundane quality of a woman's heel--the idea of a bare foot in contrast with the highly-gendered high-heeled shoe--yoked to a sense of expressive nuance in its "understatement." Later in the same poem, the speaker notes, "Days, taciturn as a tattoo tucked / under a shirt, slip unseen, away" (18). This description of the quiet and inexorable passing of days is rich. The "taciturn" or understated quality of the tattoo, something that can't in fact speak, begs the question of what form that tattoo takes and whether it makes a difference for that sense of days passing by.

Dhompa is certainly a poet worth keeping in mind for Asian American literary studies. As the book blurbs mention, Dhompa is perhaps the most widely-distributed Tibetan American poet. As much as her poetry might be infused with a particular kind of Buddhist perspective, though, it is not the same as popular texts by Tibetan philosophers. Her poetry is strongly engaged with language as a medium through which she expresses and pushes against the ideals of a Tibetan refugee community. She certainly fits within the mold of other Asian American poets in exile or diaspora-oriented writers (I think to some extent of Agha Shahid Ali in this respect, especially because he writes about Kashmir as a contested region riven by ideological and religious difference).

A Review of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls (Random House, 2009) and Fan Wu’s Beautiful as Yesterday (Atria Books, 2009) and Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls (Viking Adult, 2009)

 

Three Tales of Asian American Sisterhoods

 I am reviewing Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, Fan Wu’s Beautiful as Yesterday, and Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls, together because they work quite well in terms of their content, essentially novels that focus on the relationship between two sister-characters.  The “girls” of See’s novel are Pearl and May, beautiful and rather well-situated young women in 1930s Shanghai.  Living in a family with more liberal values, they live a cosmopolitan lifestyle and are able even to earn money for their various escapades, which includes nights out on the town with foreigners.  In this respect, See’s work immediately places a modernist cast on these girls, but when misfortune befalls their family due to the financial improprieties of their father, Pearl and May are forced into challenging positions.  Of course, like Janice Y.K. Lee’s recent novel, The Piano Teacher, we know we are in dangerous territory if we are anywhere on the Chinese mainland area during the 1930s with Japanese imperial aggression just around the corner.  When Pearl and May must find a way to escape China, given all if its turmoil, and enter into arranged marriages they thought they had escaped.  The harrowing journey finally leaves them in a limbo space while at Angel Island, which has of course been the site of an Asian American Studies renaissance.  In this respect, the novel treads essential historical territory and the questions that both sisters endure are particularly instructive of the inane immigration policies that the United States engaged in the period of the “yellow peril.”  Since See’s first publication, she hasn’t really set much of her work in the United States, so Shanghai Girls is quite anomalous in that respect.  Once the women settle into their new lives with their “arranged” husbands, they make due with what they can, May, finding herself caught up in Hollywood glamour, while Pearl struggles to raise a family that she cannot claim wholly or even biologically her own.  The novel concludes with a cliffhanger and it wasn’t with much surprise that I discovered that See is working on a sequel.  The concluding arc of the novel contemplates questions of assimilation and alternative kinships that were quite refreshing to see and offer much to problematize the notion of Asian American nuclear families.  The focus though is always on Pearl and May and their unbreakable friendship.  While May seems to be the more vivacious and passionate of the pair, Pearl is more traditional and toned down.  In this regard, I find it interesting this move to explore horizontal kinship models rather than the mother-daughter trope that was more dominant in the 90s.  See is a gifted storyteller and it is clear there was much research done to recreate what the historical accuracies of the mid-century, so although the plot does not necessarily always rely upon earth-shattering developments, the readers are carried through in sure form.  

 

Fan Wu’s Beautiful as Yesterday is set in the contemporary moment, centering on the lives of two sisters, Mary and Ingrid, and their mother, Fenglan.  Mary and Ingrid both grew up in China, but Mary immigrates to the United States as a result of her interest in democracy and philosophy and later helps her sister Ingrid to immigrate as well.  Fenglan remains in China, working in a local factory.  The novel begins when Mary and Ingrid are both in their thirties.  Like the sisterly dynamics found in See’s novel, Mary might be the analog to pearl, while Ingrid might be the analog to May.  When the novel opens, Mary is living in Silicon Valley, married to a Chinese American technical specialist named Bob; they have one son, named Alex.  While everything might seem picture perfect, as they lived an upper middle class existence with a beautiful home, financial security and a growing family, all is not as it seems.  In this regard, much of the suburban ennui that say pervades a novel like Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft can be found here, with Mary still struggling to find her identity.  Ingrid, much to Mary’s dismay, doesn’t seem to have her life pinned down either, as evidenced by a constant string of boyfriends and odd jobs translating books to pay the bills.  Ingrid’s aspirations take her to New York City for a time, and it is clear from her interactions with others that she longs for a more liberating life as a creative rather than as a functionalist interpreter.  The predicament of Fenglan is that as the mother of both Mary and Ingrid, she is living along in China and has few others to call family, so when the opportunity presents itself to travel to the United States to see both of them, she takes it.  The complications increase because Mary had hoped that this visit would be more permanent as she had expected her mother to live with her and her husband and child eventually.  Bob seems to be much more resistant to this, demonstrating a culturally specific divide that Wu seems to be developing that places Chinese American and Chinese transnationals occasionally at odds with each other.  Wu complicates the plot by adding a couple of twists, which I will not reveal here, but much like See’s novel, the narrative is not compelled through its dynamism.  Where See’s book is clearly more historically invested, Wu’s work seems more in line as a domestically focused drama, where the problems of the everyday are encountered.  There is a clear feminist politic in both works.  For Wu, much of the contouring of the Chinese transnational experience is evidenced by the careful attention to the social conditions that have embroiled China within that last five decades.  As such, the cultural revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre both loom large as ordering events for many of the characters.  These seemingly more minor background details serve to illuminate Wu’s novel from a more complex frame. 

 

Of the three novels, Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls is perhaps the “black sheep” of the bunch in the sense that it is much more light-hearted and funny than the previous two, which for the most part, stick to a realist tradition.  There is something else at work in Nguyen’s novel, where two Vietnamese American sisters, Van and Linny, struggle to find their identities growing up in the suburban Midwest, that of Michigan.  What is interesting is that I know of no other Asian American novel that is set extensively in Michigan and so we are already on some original geographical terrain here.  The novel is full of quirky characters, my favorite of which is Van and Linny’s father Dinh Luong who believes himself to be an inventor of great talent.  Whether or not this is actually the case remains to be seen over the course of the narrative, but because the entire family has always been challenged by their slight stature, he has taken it upon himself to devise various contraptions that might improve their existence.  Exemplary of Nguyen’s wicked sense of humor is that Dinh names one such contraption the “Luong Arm,” able to get those hard to reach items like that top shelf book that you would have to otherwise use a stool to be able to retrieve.  Of course, the pun on “Luong Arm,” and the many other devices including the “Luong Eye,” make for an already hilarious narrative premise.  However, the central concern of the book is the tensions that exist between Van and Linny.  Like Wu’s Beautiful as Yesterday and See’s Shanghai Girls, there is the more headstrong, passionate sister (in this case Linny) and the more studious, dependable one (in this case Van).  The plot is mainly catalyzed around the “mystery” that opens the chapter, related to Van’s failing marriage with her fourth generation Chinese American husband, Miles.  What was wrong with Van and Miles’s relationship and how did the seemingly picture perfect life that Van had constructed for herself all go wrong?  For Linny, her life has just begun to achieve its sense of direction when an affair could jeopardize her most stable and most promising job.  Working for a prepared foods business, she ends up in an affair with the husband of one of the customers, Pren, who purchases for at the business run by Linny’s boss, Barbara.  While these two separate lives do not seem to intersect, we know fireworks are in store when Van and Linny’s dad announces that he’s having a party as he finally decided to claim full American citizenship, moving from beyond the refugee status he had held for so long.  With this basic recipe in play, Nguyen’s Short Girls is not short for entertainment.  The novel relies heavily on character studies to root readerly interest and fortunately Van and Linny and especially Dinh are such winning characters we can’t help but hope for their collective best. 

 

As a set of books, I can’t help but thinking about the long tradition of Asian American women’s writers and it is of course so wonderful to be in the midst of such a productive period for such a group.  What is interesting in terms these books is that collective understanding promoted by each author of a larger sense of cultural and racial history.  The ability to twine together these social contexts amidst these various plots continues to show the fecund landscape that is Asian American cultural production. 

 

Buy the Books Here:
www.amazon.com/Shanghai-Girls-Novel-Lisa-See/dp/1400067111/ref=sr_1_1

www.amazon.com/Beautiful-as-Yesterday-Fan-Wu/dp/1416598898/ref=sr_1_1

www.amazon.com/Short-Girls-Bich-Minh-Nguyen/dp/0670020818/ref=sr_1_1