Is this the year we finally finish Lolita?
Author: John Steinbeck
Published: 1947
Read: November 30th, 2021
The Pearl tells the story of a family that falls into good fortune and whose good fortune brings doom and destruction. It is a short story with simple themes. But what a oridinary story lacks in novelty, it must make up for in substance. Characters, pacing, conflict - these are the pillars that hold up all stories. The music that rings in Kino’s ears and the quiet support offered by Juana instantly establish characters with individual wills. The nearly constant influx of challenges posed by the doctor, the thieves, the pearl buyers, the trackers keep the story tense and moving. The painful, substantial conclusion sounds a final note in this chapter of lives to which we have just witnessed the climax. Writing something novel can be done by writing something known brilliantly.
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: 1993
Read: October 24, 2021
Perhaps it was the combination of having just finished Civilwarland in Bad Decline, but for the first time, I wondered whether reading was harming my psyche. Dystopian fiction justifies my anxieties. Validates it. Every character introduced causes me to grit my teeth anticipating their inevitable death or, worse, betrayal. Every offscreen death is simply a surprise in waiting. Every lull, every break, every good event foretells an equal or greater disaster. Every event, every person, every word is a Chekhov’s gun getting cleaned, lubricated, and loaded. Expecting the worst at all times is warranted when the world is actually collapsing all around you. But perhaps less so when one’s most serious concern should be their inability to find love. But Parable of the Sower surprised me in that the shoe never dropped. Or rather, it never dropped quite as hard as it could have.
There is death and horror in Parable of the Sower. There’s classic failed state atrocity - child trafficking, cannibalism, slavery. But the personal tragedies are someh/ow not as heart wrenching as I had anticipated. Backstabbery, betrayal, abuse of trust are kept to a minimum. Notable deaths happen, for the most part, offscreen. And uniquely, the first person narration combined with Lauren’s hyperempathy syndrome causes the narration to fade right as the pain of the situation grows beyond a certain threshold.
Lauren’s hyperempathy syndrome, or her mirroring of others’ pain as if it were her own, has its positive and negative ramifications. As discussed in the story by the characters, people with it tend to be easy to manipulate and control, as it is a weakness with easily exploitable characteristics. From a societal perspective, it could be beneficial to have more empathetic people who can truly feel others’ pain and pleasure. From a narrative perspective, I thought hyperempathy was a brilliant device. It acts as a narrative limitation for our character, something that gives our narrator a handicap. It also serves as a way of exploring pain and emotion beyond the first person, removing a limitation of the journal framing of the story. I think it also, in some ways, reflects back onto the reader the sense of empathy that Butler may have wanted to instill.
In some ways, hyperempathy was the standout quality that helps separate Parable of the Sower from McCarthy’s The Road. Despite there being a significant number of differences, page after page, I could not help drawing comparisons to The Road. The Road is a lonelier experience, despite the connection between man and son being the strongest conveyed relationship. The loneliness reinforced the helplessness and the hopelessness. And perhaps, the oppressiveness of the world that The Road brought me into so exemplified my anxieties that I did not notice them being intensified. Parable of the Sower lightly nudged me and reminded me that perhaps, even in a horrific fictional dystopia, some of my fears may be surmountable or unrealized. Why not in the real world as well?
Author: George Saunders
Published: 1996
Read: October 3rd, 2021
I have always told people that I’ve wanted more stories that end a bit darker. The kind of endings that don’t inspire triumphant music to play over the credits. Clearly, Brave New World and 1984 are lodged deep in my psyche. But I’ve perhaps met my match with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. In the author’s note, written many years after the publication of the book, Saunders writes,
Wait a minute, I thought once she’d hung up: I’m happy. I’m one of the happiest people I know. My book is not unhappy. My book is funny. My book tells, uh, dark truths. I’m a hopeful person. Writing this book was a happy, hopeful act.
…
That’s a nice idea, but rereading the book, I’m not sure it’s true. The stories are, I think, more cruel, more misshapen then they’d need to be, if that was the book’s simple intention. The stories are mean, in places. They’ve occasionally nasty. They are abrupt and telegraphic and odd. Sometimes the author seems to be rooting for the cruel world to go ahead and kick his characters’ asses.
Ah well.
He isn’t wrong. The stories in this collection are brutal, filled with powerful people leveraging their power over people with less power. I’m conscious that often, Saunders’s characters are not purely evil or purely good. No, the settings prevent such a clear characterization. The characters are merely behaving within their means and circumstances for their own goods and desires. The hopeful moments come when someone does something beyond that. Unfortunately, they are few and far between.
I think on some level, the warped, caricaturistic settings were supposed to inject some humor into the dark settings. In Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror, one of the featured exhibits at the children’s museum are the Pickled Babies, which are so disgusting that guests regularly throw up near the exhibit. Another exhibit is the see through cows, cows with plexiglass installed so that people can see their digestive systems. In Bounty, the characters are raised in a medieval themed amusement park as indentured servants who serve wealthy guests. Saunders says of the prevalence of theme parks,
But also, while working on “The Wavemaker Falters,” I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved, the faux-Hemingway element having been disallowed by the setting. Placing a story in a theme park became a way of ensuring that the story would lurch over into the realm of the comic, which meant I would be able to finish it, and it would not collapse under the conceptual/thematic weight I tended to put on a so-called realist story.
I’m not so sure that Saunders meant funny when he wrote “comic”. Perhaps he meant exaggerated or distorted. Consider the circumstances in The 400-Pound CEO. It begins,
At noon another load of raccoons comes in and Claude takes them out back of the office and executes them with a tire iron.
The company that Jeffrey works at is a company that specializes in racoon pest control by lying about the humane methods they use to eliminate racoons so that their customers feel ethically just. It is an absolute ridiculous premise–one that does not happen to take the edge off all of the sad-making that goes on in the story. In one of his father’s last notes to him, he writes
“Son,” he wrote, “are you fat too? It came upon me suddenly and now I am big as a house. Beware, perhaps it’s in our genes. I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead. Adieu. In my mind you are a waify-looking little fellow who never answered when I asked you a direct question. But I loved you as best I could.”
Would I feel better or worse if instead of using a company that murders racoons with a tire iron as the setting, Saunders had used a technology company routinely accused of destroying democracy and giving children suicidal tendencies? I’m not sure. All I know is that I was simply sad through it all.
Of course, it speaks volumes that despite the distressing nature of the stories, I found myself finishing story after story (though not all at once–that might have been too much). They are long enough to be unique and short enough not to overstay their welcome. They are filled with captivating settings and situations. And they, in part because they reflect something about the world we live in, will stick my psyche along the other stories with somber endings. I recommend The 400-Pound CEO for its brutality and Isabelle for its hopefulness and I recommend the author’s note for inspiration.
I expect that my younger self–the self who wrote this book–would have hated the idea of an author’s note. No explanations necessary, he would have said; all meanings are contained in the stories themselves. Explanation is reductive, reading visceral. The stories are either doing the work or they’re not. Don’t yap it up. And I agree with all of that. But I’m older now and feeling nostalgic and–
I just wrote and deleted this phrase: I really miss those days.
Author: E. M. Forster
Published: 1908
Read: September 21, 2021
A Room with a View contains perhaps the most brutal pieces of dialogue I’ve ever borne witness to. In discussing the breaking off of their engagement, Lucy and Cecil have the following exchange.
“You don’t love me, evidently. I dare say you are right not to. But it would hurt a little less if I knew why.” [Cecil]
“Because”–a phrase came to her, and she accepted it–”you’re the sort who can’t know any one intimately.”
If such a phrase were uttered to me, it would haunt me until my death. But placed in context, this exchange works triple duty, knitting together separate threads of the story into a crushing crochet. Intimacy between the two was previously explicitly highlighted. According to the narrator, the most intimate moment that the two shared in their whole relationship was an insignificant conversation after an incredibly awkward, failed first kiss.
They left the pool in silence, after this one salutation. He waited for her to make some remark which should show him her inmost thoughts. At last she spoke, and with fitting gravity.
“Emerson was the name, not Harris.”
“What name?”
“The old man’s.”
“What old man?”
“That old man I told you about. The one Mr. Eager was so unkind to.”
He could not know that this was the most intimate conversation they had ever had.
This stated fact demonstrates the veracity of Lucy’s statement and the truth makes the statement even more devastating. But to add insult to injury, Lucy does not come to this conclusion on her own. The exact wording Lucy uses was actually the wording George uses when attempting to woo Lucy away from Cecil. Lucy uses Cecil’s rival’s words to end their relationship. When we next encounter Cecil, he is a broken man. It is not hard to see why.
This dialogue, bringing together these three threads, is a potent, highly concentrated concoction. Having these multifaceted lines and sentences is part of what I consider makes literature meaty and substantial, which are both good things, in case it was ambiguous. One method of working to achieve this that I have encountered somewhere along the way is the “Show, don’t tell” principle. It is the principle that Ernest Hemingway spoke of as
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.
Hemingway’s approach almost feels like compression; opt to convey the same amount of information using fewer words and sentences. Or, paraphrasing Anton Chekhov, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Whereby, the reader can decompress or infer all of the information necessary using the more limited information given. In order to convey the same amount of information, words and sentences would need to start carrying more weight, doing double duty.
One method of compression that E. M. Forster uses is relatively thin. Often, rather than the narrator describing a character to the reader, one of the characters will describe the character to a listener in dialogue. The simple act of wrapping a phrase with quotation marks can help. One could say that Mr. Emerson is blunt and direct in speech, or one could say,
“He has the merit–if it is one–of saying exactly what he means. He has rooms he does not value, and he thinks you would value them. He no more thought of putting you under an obligation than he thought of being polite. It is so difficult–at least, I find it difficult–to understand people who speak the truth.”
This way, not only does the reader learn this information, the reader also learns something about the speaker and the listener and their relationships to the subject. Characters can also describe themselves and the manner in which they do so can convey more than the actual content they say.
“I have no profession,” said Cecil. “It is another example of my decadence. My attitude quite an indefensible one–is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don’t care a straw about, but somehow, I’ve not been able to begin.”
Here, the reader learns that Cecil has no profession as a result of his family’s wealth. And the reader learns that Cecil somehow sees working as exploitative or boring. But more importantly, the reader comes away with the strong sense of the haughty, scornful personality Cecil is.
But, there are plenty of times when an expert author chooses to tell rather than show. And given that the principle commonly studied is the opposite, I took particular note of some times when Forster chooses to tell rather than show.
In his book, Exceptions to the Rule, James Scott Bell argues that “show, don’t tell” should not be applied to all incidents in a story. “Sometimes a writer tells as a shortcut, to move quickly to the meaty part of the story or scene. Showing is essentially about making scenes vivid. If you try to do it constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won’t, and your readers will get exhausted.”
Consider this literary shortcut where Forster addresses the reader directly.
It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, “She loves young Emerson.” A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome “nerves” or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.”
Or consider the last sentence in the passage previously quoted,
He could not know that this was the most intimate conversation they had ever had.
It is direct. It is not easy to convey this by means of showing. And it closes out this conversation beautifully. It calls attention to the juxtaposition between the intimate moment between the two betrothed and the fact that one is still distracted by the Emersons. It highlights the severe mismatch and gives a finality to the conversation to end the chapter. By being a succinct sentence that tells, rather than a long winded show, the distinction stands out via contrast to emphasize important moments and help set the pace of the story.
Despite being a line that is telling, rather than showing, the line is still doing double or triple duty. Which I think is ultimately the guiding principle behind “show, don’t tell”. We want depth and layers to writing. What Forster shows is that there are many ways of achieving that depth.
Author: Lenora Chu
Date published: September 19, 2017
Date read: August 30, 2021
I must have highlighted more passages in this book than any other in recent memory. There are passages on competition, corruption, speaking volume, food temperature and more marked in yellow. Some passages are noted down for amusement - perhaps some tidbit strangely relevant to my own life. The passage on speaking volume, for instance, speaks in particular to me, as my friends do not share my deafening default volume.
The Chinese generally have the loudest voices of anyone I’ve ever met (my own father’s voice could, it seemed, project from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other). … “Speaking loudly is tradition in China,” he said. “China is an agricultural society, and in rural areas speaking loudly makes people feel happy and lively.”
Or this passage about Amanda’s recollection of 静夜思, a poem that I myself once learned with my mother but had since forgotten everything by the first half line.
In that instant, sitting across from Amanda as she lost herself in the luminescent moon of “Jing Ye Si,” I thought: “What a pity that I can’t.”
But the reason for all of the little highlights of lines that capture my attention can be identified in
Meanwhile, my own heritage made the Chinese and their behaviors immediately familiar; it was as if I looked into Teacher Chen’s eyes–no matter how harsh and authoritarian their glint–and immediately recognized my father’s intentions (sometimes misguided but always well-meaning).
So much of the book confirms my own experiences and understandings of Chinese education. Combined with my interest in education research, my belief in many of the Chinese education beliefs (almost everyone can be “good” at math), and my feelings towards global competition, and I found myself nodding along with each line. Chu does a good job of introducing many items I had taken for granted to an, I assume, audience unfamiliar with Chinese education.
Alternating between her personal experience and emotions sending her child through the Chinese education system and some observations about the Chinese education system as a whole, Little Soldiers feels like an inverted Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother combined with an introduction into China’s education system. It made me rethink some opinions I had held about teaching, about child rearing, and about my own childhood. It also reinforced my opinion that teaching is hard.
Over time, I landed upon a simpler truth, one less judgmental and more reflective of the reality of China today: The rules are so rigid and hierarchical, and the game is zero-sum with incredibly high stakes, so that to survive, the Chinese had become accustomed to seeking a work-around.
Author: Jason Schreier
Published: May 11, 2021
Read: August 19, 2021
When I interned at Infinity Ward, I got a sense of the employment dynamics in the video game industry. I knew that it was difficult to get into - my manager told me that Infinity Ward only hired experienced industry hires. I knew that it was not the best paid career - I was in the position to compare Infinity Ward’s offer to those of more traditional software companies like Microsoft.
Plus, thanks to titanic tech companies like Facebook and Google, the San Francisco Bay Area was becoming an increasingly untenable place to work. Engineers were hard to keep, rents were astronomical, and by one former Visceral employee’s estimate, the company’s costs hovered around $16,000 a person per month, a number that included salary and other expenses. At that estimate, a staff of one hundred people would cost more than 19$ million a year. … Of course, as Visceral’s staff were well aware, the salaries of just two or three of those bosses could fund the entire studio. (In 2012, EA chief executive officer John Riccitiello made $9.5 million while Frank Gibeau made $9.8 million, according to SEC filings.)
I knew that it was a demanding job - even if I did not experience crunch during my time there, my coworkers told me that a competing studio had a habit of offering employees cocaine during crunch. And I knew that the industry benefited from the passion of its employees - I was told that one of my coworkers loved the fact that one of the weapons in the zombies mode was named after him and found joy telling people he worked on games they enjoyed.
When he met new people and they asked what he did for a living, Mumbach had a hard time answering that he worked in architecture. “It’s shocking how it strings, how it hurts my ego,” he said. “It’s a pride thing. I worked so hard to be an AAA video game maker. That was my dream since I was fourteen years old. It’s really hard on the ego to say, ‘Oh, I’m not a game maker anymore.’”
What I did not understand, given Infinity Ward’s relative stability, was the sheer amount of turnover in the industry. Certainly, the stories in Schreier’s book are skewed, handpicked stories of studio closures, but the studio closures that Schreier covers include those that created iconic games: Irrational Games’s Bioshock series, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Visceral Games’s Dead Space series. In the abstract, knowing that games are an expensive medium, filled with passionate people with clashing visions, and that many series cannot continue to remain relevant forever, it makes total sense that working in the industry would lead to a tumultuous, chaotic career, but in that moment in time at Infinity Ward, I felt drawn to the culture of the place. Person after person would attest the same feeling of camaraderie and symbiosis to Schreier.
Notably, Schreier covers more than just the stories of studio collapses. By tracing the studio collapses through individuals, Press Reset presents emerging ideas that are changing the industry. Indie Studios, paired with new distribution systems, are finding increased success (as outlined by the story of Dodge Roll). Of course, this model does not work for everyone. It’s an extremely large risk (sometimes resulting in games that do not make a suitable return) and it requires a rather large prerequisite.
That was the secret sauce–financial support from elsewhere meant a level of freedom that many of the people who were impacted by the 2K Marin catastrophe didn’t have.
But for the industry itself, models that involve subcontracting speciality consultant teams, unionization, and continuous free to play updates are poised to alter the industry. Of course, these possibilities, like the games they’ll produce, may end up having no impact, but only time will tell. The people I worked with, even in their more stable circumstances, recognize the toils that come associated with the industry. During the short summer I was there, no small number of key engineers decided to leave the studio in favor of greener pastures and developers certainly recognized that young engineers had many choices outside the industry. While I loved my time there, and I hope that my colleagues are thriving, the more I learn about the industry I once strongly considered joining, the more I am happy simply playing the games they produce.
Author: Neil Gaiman
Published: June 19, 2001
Read: August 17, 2021
Perhaps the most memorable subplot from American Gods for me concerns the town of Lakeside, a small idyllic Wisconsin town where the protagonist spends some of his time. There, the book brings together the tension of an ex-criminal befriending the local policeman with the mystery of disappearing children. In addition, several recurring characters reemerge in the town. All of these connected threads are finally addressed in the epilogue, once the main plot has been resolved, and the resolution is satisfying, if not a bit sinister.
But the whole town of Lakeside has seemingly no relationship to the driving plot of the novel. Lakeside simply serves as a temporary waiting area where Shadow stays in between being whisked from encounter to encounter. The characters we meet in Lakeside do not factor heavily into the rest of the plot, nor does any crucial plotpoint happen here. Lakeside is not a key destination, nor does it affect the protagonist’s character development. However, if you excised Lakeside from American Gods, while the overall plot of the book would go unchanged, much of the rhythm and expansiveness of the story gets lost.
Gaiman’s story operates on scale - gods battling gods. In order to set up the final conflict, the reader must feel as though the stakes are incredibly high. In order to do this, Gaiman must build a world crawling with gods of all shapes and sizes and he accomplishes this by having Wednesday take Shadow from place to place meeting Gods from all cultures. Certainly, Gaiman could simply do this without Lakeside serving as an intermediary rest stop. But the time Shadow spends in Lakeside both helps the pacing from feeling too rushed, giving Wednesday an appropriate amount of plot sanctioned time to crisscross the states and scheme, but it also helps ground the gods themselves. One of the main conceits of the book is exploring the interaction between gods and humans and Lakeside allows Gaiman to introduce more humans and explore their interactions with gods. The town of Lakeside is a microcosm of the interactions of one minor god that does not participate in the grand battle and a town of people. It establishes the sheer quantity of gods in the world, the range of their powers, and demonstrates their connectedness to regular people. With Lakeside in mind, the reader can extrapolate these world building aspects and project them onto the many other characters and gods that we meet in the world and beyond. In essence, Lakeside ties the world together and could be used as a study in fantasy world building.
As I read through American Gods, I couldn’t help but think about Murakami’s 1Q84. With Shadow reminiscent of Aomame, a physically skilled combatant that makes no active decisions, it was hard not to feel as though the two metaphysical worlds were similar in nature. I found both to be dreamlike, with each containing their own twisted form of logicality; yet, the desire not to inspect either too closely in fear that they would fall apart in the face of scrutiny. Lakeside helps ground American Gods in a way that I did not find in 1Q84 and I think the story is better off as a result. While there are aspects of American Gods that feel a bit unexplored or unexplained, it feels remarkably well connected, I believe, in no small part thanks to Lakeside.
Author: Jerry Seinfield
Published: October 6, 2020
Listened: July 19, 2021
I thought that this would be a perfect audiobook. A book of immaculately polished jokes read by the legendary Seinfield himself. It would be a private show, just for me. But with each of the subtitles narrated by a different, monotonic voice interrupting Seinfeld’s routine and Seinfeld himself without his audience-powered, charismatic delivery, I found myself thinking that these jokes were unfunny, even mistakenly believing that these jokes were the rejected table scraps of his efforts and not, as I later found out, the carefully curated selection from his actual routines and works. But, wanting to learn something and thinking that the jokes in the latter part of the book were funnier than the former, I went back to the text version, trying to see whether there was a change in the craftsmanship of the jokes over the years. To my surprise, I found the jokes hilarious. Even the jokes from the 70s, even though I had just heard all of them, even though I had previously thought them unfunny.
Perhaps it is because I had to focus on the reading bit - translating those ink splatterings into thoughts - that I didn’t see the punchline coming, even though it is right there on the page. The words don’t move, I don’t move, yet they still surprise me. It’s like seeing a spider while taking a shower. I’m too busy lathering up, singing along with my Disney shower playlist. I’m not moving; it’s not moving; but still scares me nonetheless. I’m not even annoyed by the parenthesized stage cues written down. Having the text in front of you also makes it much easier to think about what is going on in a joke. I still can’t tell what makes a joke good. In fact, this exercise of listening to, and then reading the same joke has really proven that I cannot tell what makes a joke good. But nonetheless, take the following bit, which I love
To me, the ultimate would be to live the Parakeet Lifestyle
It’s the most efficient apartment possible.
A well-ventilated room overlooking the paper.
Don’t even have to walk to the bathroom.
Toilet and newspaper are already combined.
Food and water mounted on the wall.
You want to go to sleep,
turn your head around, put it in your back.
Morning you don’t even have to get up,
you’re already standing.
Double-check the cage door lock.
See what the cat’s up to.
Take the rest of the day off.
I love this joke, the punchline, and especially the bit about the cat. But having the text in front of me gives me time to think about the construction of the joke. Would it make it funnier to flip the third to last and second to last lines? Is it funnier that the Parakeet first checks the lock and then checks on the cat? Or is it potentially funnier that the Parakeet first checks on the cat and then the lock, as if I, the Parakeet, would make a silly mistake and be reminded to double check?
Author: John Carreyrou
Published: May 21, 2018
Listened: June 11, 2021
Bad Blood features a cast of outliers. Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, lost in lust for riches, sacrifice the well being and health of their patients. David Boies, willing to ignore truth for wealth, leverages bureaucracy and power to silence and intimidate plaintiffs. Richard Fuisz, ever the opportunist, abuses a broken patent system to funnel yet more money into his pocket. And it is reflexive, to look at this list of characters and their stories, and think that I would not have done the things they did. Of course not, these characters are outliers, and it is more than likely that I am not such an outlier. Similarly, I would likely not be an Erika Cheung or a Tyler Shultz or John Carreyrou, as much as I wish I would be. They, too, are outliers.
Instead, it is more likely that I would be a Ana Arriola, the designer who quits, or a Michael Brille, the lawyer who seeks Tyler to sign a nondisclosure. People who, by chance, are connected to these outliers and whose actions are informed by them. It is not an unlikely position. I often see people, commenting under another article about the negative ramifications that X company has on the world, saying that its employees should quit. And I have known some people, who I respect, quit for the very reason that they cannot work at their company and support the work their company does. So this line of thinking brings to mind a certain scale of values (money and convenience vs other values) where everything has a price. And I think it is interesting to think about what my own price is.
Author: Yiyun Li
Date published: September 20, 2005
Date read: May 22, 2021
Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.
Ian Maclaren (1897)
We were assigned the title story amongst the readings in my Asian American literature course and while I vaguely recognized the introduction in my rereading, I had forgotten the many key details that make the story. It may have been difficult for me to appreciate the craft that went into the piece because the various pieces of the story felt like they could only be placed in that formation. The irony of something difficult being done well not appearing very difficult. However, this time around, A Thousand Years was nestled with Li’s other works, which shared enough similarities to emphasize the pieces of the puzzle.
The common tension of these stories revolve around the backstories of the characters and how knowledge of those backstories change the way we, the readers, as well as other characters feel about the characters in question. In Love in the Marketplace, Sansan has a secret arrangement with her childhood romance, Tu. The resulting fallout from his betrayal is hidden from her community and family. The resulting ignorance causes extreme turmoil for the entire family. Everyone from her mother to her students treat her as a heartbroken, doleful girl. But as the reader, knowing the true backstory, Sansan is a more complicated figure. Her actions are those of a hurt soul, but her actions are better understood as a person deeply invested in integrity. Even though this is not a significant change of perspective, the difference is enough to help begin to understand Sansan’s actions.
Somewhat similarly, in A Thousand Years, knowing Mr. Shi’s true work history gives a different perspective about all the behaviors that transpired prior to the reveal. It changes the way we think about his relationship with Madam or his relationship with his daughter. His backstory changes him from the bumbling, out of touch, culturally foreign, overprotective parent to an embarrassed yet prideful flawed individual. It also matters that despite his best effort in hiding his past, his daughter is well aware of the truth.
These twists feel like the plot twists at the end of detective novels or thrillers. The sudden realization that we have been misled, maliciously or otherwise, can be jarring and exciting. Fiction presents a wonderful, harmless place, to have our assumptions challenged. I only recently, and far too late, learned the backstory of someone close to me. Doing so changed the fundamental way I understood their actions and life - my previous assumptions about them being shattered. I feel the way that I feel about the other people in Sansan’s life - oblivious, unaware, incognizant. I had not even considered a different perspective. I think it is good for me to realize that despite this realization, the words of Maclaren are still hard to practice.
Author: Charles Yu
Published: January 28, 2020
Read: February 9, 2021
Interior Chinatown does something I rarely see in Asian American fiction–be blunt. In my experience, it is more common for Asian American fiction to be stories in which the Asian American experience is embedded within, to be extracted in retrospect. Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie, which has stuck with me for years, is a wonderfully sad story about the magical origami animals a mother makes for her son. No-No Boy by John Okada details the communal ostracism Ichiro faces for refusing the draft after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Third and Final Continent by Lahiri is about the events that lead the narrator to fall in love with his wife. It is certainly easy to draw one’s conclusions about particular shared aspects of the Asian American experience from these stories. The Paper Menagerie does capture some aspect of connecting with one’s parents through cultural and language barriers. The Third and Final Continent does reflect something of the nature of arranged marriage. But the works themselves convey these ideas, as one might expect of most fiction, through story. Interior Chinatown takes the leap of actually stating its opinions directly.
It’s not clear if he can dunk (no one’s ever seen him try) but he can definitely grab the rim and that alone is pretty impressive given that he’s five eleven and three-quarters. Which, for the record, is the perfect height for an Asian dude. Tall enough for women to notice (even in heels! Even White women!), tall enough to not get ignored by the bartender, but not so tall to get called Yao Ming and considered some kind of Mongolian freak.
And the narrator does so frequently.
It makes complete sense for fiction to stay stylistically far away from the directness found in nonfiction writing about race. For one, it can come off as heavy handed and preachy. After all fiction is fiction for a reason. For another, making direct statements about race and racial experiences may not capture the wide diversity of experience, even if it talks about a widely, but not completely, shared experience. Finally, making direct statements about the less than desirable aspects of being Asian American can come off as whiny, especially given the much worse treatment of other minorities in America. So it is not surprising that there is a gulf between Coates’s Between the World and Me and No-No Boy.
Once that gets going, doors start opening until they’re all open, the whole building buzzing until sunrise, as if nothing matters because nothing does matter because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.
The brilliant element that allows Interior Chinatown to straddle the two halves of racial commentary and fictional storytelling is Yu’s decision to write the novel as a screenplay about actors. Written as a screenplay, the “you” of the story refers to both the protagonist but also to you, the reader, if you were to play the part of the protagonist. Those sections give you, the reader, the motivation, the background, the character perspective to play the part of the protagonist. So even if you do not believe that Asian Americans are typecast in their roles, you can let this pass as it is the particular motivation behind the protagonist’s actions. But Yu manages to take this conceit further still. By making the characters in the screenplay also actors in the story itself, Yu manages to make every single faceted character multidimensional in one fell swoop through this meta-structure. Effectively, thanks to this story within a story structure, all of the characters in the story take on many roles, both literary and literally.
Everyone admired his level of comfort, moving in and out of language and subculture, from backroom poker game to dudes on the corner looking for trouble to the octogenarians playing Go or mahjong at the Benevolent Family Association. Older Brother’s reach and influence was not limited to the Middle Kingdom and its ethnic diaspora, but extended into other neighboring domains: he sing karaoke with the Japanese salarymen, could polish two plates of ddukbokki slathered in a tangy, blood-red gochujang, wash it down with a bottle of milky soju, all while beating the pants odd the K-town regulars at their own drinking games, dropping some of his passable Korean (mostly curse words) in the process.
With such explicit signposting of roles and discussion of race, giving every character multiple parts that clash and meld allows the novel to feel fresh and interesting without feeling as though one is on the receiving end of a lecture (although the book does devolve into one at the end).
While the story itself is, well, generic, the writing, in addition to the unique structure and conceit, certainly buoys the experience. It’s full of honesty and authenticity. With brief windows into three generations of Asian Americans, I can say for certain that I recognized my story within those lines. Especially ones like,
The great shame of your life that you can’t speak his language, not really, not fluently.
There’s heart in this story,
because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-sever-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.
And there’s meta-commentary,
But at the same, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people.
And there’s just the right mix of everything to make this short book excellent.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Published: 1935-1936
Date read: January 24, 2021
I often, in moments of contemplative self-reflection, find myself to be lacking empathy. It is hard for me to understand, to feel, viscerally, a circumstance I have not experienced myself. But I found Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading at the time in my life when I did not need it to tell me what it is to experience someone waiting for their imminent death. It’s the exact wrong amount of time–too short and fraught with troubles to not consider and too far away to do anything but to boil in anxiety. The experience is brutal, full of regrets, and mood swings. I did not need Nabokov to tell me. Instead, what I found in Nabokov was simply a far too poetic, elocutionary retelling of the circumstance.
“It is not out of curiosity that I ask,” said Cincinnatus. “It is true that cowards are always inquisitive. But I assure you … Even if I can’t control my chills and so forth–that does not mean anything. A rider is not responsible for the shivering of his horse. I want to know why for this reason: The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned. However, I am being left in that ignorance which is tolerable only to those living at liberty. And furthermore, I have in my head many projects that were begun and interrupted at various times … I simply shall not pursue them if the time remaining before my execution is not sufficient for their orderly conclusion. This is why …”
But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the tortue comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’–and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday …’
In such circumstances, the only thing keeping you going is hope. Hope is a different beast. Hope is the capricious beast of last resort. It may lumber and carry you along, but it may also rebel and destroy you in a turn. I would not choose hope, but sometimes you are given no choices. Hope is sauerkraut probiotics, hope is salt crystal detoxes, hope is dog deworming medicine. And when hope chooses to, it can be crushing.
Cincinnatus did not ask him anything, but when Rodion had left, and time dragged on at its customary trot, he realized that once again he had been duped, that he had streamlined his soul to no purpose, and that everything had remained just as uncertain, viscous and senseless as before.
When waiting, time crushes in different ways. One of time’s weapons is its relentless, unstoppable flow. There is a moment, from which point on, others continue to be pushed forward by time without you. Knowing this means thinking about this face. Thinking about the various potential lives that will be lived without you. Fuzzy, faint, uncertain, and most of all, painful.
Another vestige of the previous day was the alligator album with its massive dark silver monogram that he had taken along in a fit of meek abstraction: the singular photohoroscope put together by the resourceful M’sieur Pierre, that is, a series of photographs depicting the natural progression of a given person’s entire life. How was this done? Thus: extensively retouched snapshots of Emmie’s present face were supplemented by shots of other people–for the sake of costume, furniture and surroundings–so as to create the entire decor and stage properties of her future life.
Nabokov is thorough and extensive and captures the whole spectrum of situational emotions and there is much more to say about his work, but I do not have the energy to bear doing so. Thankfully, Nabokov speaks for himself.
“What will you say to me? In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you–on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and streaming my goose neck–even then. And afterwards–perhaps most of all afterwards–I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B … without looking, or, without lifting the pencil … or in some other way … we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”
“When you go out,” said Cincinnatus, “note the clock in the corridor. The dial is blank; however, every hour the watchman washes off the old hand and daubs on a new one–and that’s how we live, by tarbrush time, and the ringing is the work of the watchman, which is why he is called a ‘watch’ man.”
Involuntarily yielding to the temptation of logical development, involuntarily (be careful, Cincinnatus!) forging into a chain all the things that were quite harmless as long as they remained unlinked, he inspired the meaningless with meaning, and the lifeless with life.
The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express it, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before. It is hard to imagine that this very morning, in an hour or two…
“Measure me while I live–after it will be too late.”