Reading Asian American Literature 唐人寫書

Camy Tang’s Sushi Series

My Google Alert, not so intelligently searching simply for “Asian American literature”, recently linked me to a BlogHer blog entry “Finally! Characters in Romance Novels Who Look Like Me – and Maybe You, Too.”

I thought the entry title and photos said it all, but it doesn’t remotely. The east Asian author the blogger [...]

Currently reading Christine Yano’s Airborne Dreams

I really wanted to finish Christine Yano’s Airborne Dreams, reflect and assimilate new knowledge with plenty of time to spare before the September 25 premiere of Pan Am but… life got in the way and my Kindle Reader says I am only 38% or 1,122/2,927 of the way through. Mind you, the book is [...]

Currently Reading Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian

In between planning the rest of my year (going badly) and wrapping up a course (a little better), I have finally managed to finish reading Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian. I saw this title in some list of recommended reads in Asian Studies lists and with its unique title, I was intrigued.

The author, [...]

Currently reading Gene Yuen Yang’s American Born Chinese

Another comic! But Gene Yuen Yang’s American Born Chinese (ABC) has been on my radar for quite a while. When I was following Parry Shen’s blog posts about Secret Identities (SI), which he co-edited, 2006′s ABC is one comic they do recognize in the very empty field of comics that include Asian characters. Thus, the birth [...]

Currently Reading Mingmei Yip’s Song of the Silk Road

I saw this brilliant green book in the haphazard book bin outside Safeway, not a usual book destination for me. The Safeway price was hardly competitive so I remembered the name to order it online despite a few of my personal misgivings: (1) written by Chinese woman with no English name, (2) a depiction [...]

Currently reading: Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

While many Asian-American bloggers and writers cried foul after reading Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”, I cheered for the title and then sat down to read the WSJ article. I didn’t like the know-it-all tone to the excerpt and quickly realized that the “article” was only a calculated [...]

Preview: Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

I’m so behind. I still haven’t read the “Too Asian” article my own country’s weekly magazine published late last year and caused such a stir here and south of the border. But I read the most recent highly inflammatory article, Amy Chua’s WSJ piece, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

I read the article, linked from Angela Tung’s blog and even left a long comment–apparently I lurk or leave long comments–while also intending to address this article with my own blog post.

The WSJ article was posted two days ago, on January 8, has caused a stir on the Asian-American blogosphere, and garnered 2,501 comments to date. What a headache. I read the article, nodding, frowning, wincing, and noticed at the bottom of the article that it was an excerpt from Amy Chua’s forthcoming book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Huh. And if you read the cover, there is a long “subtitle” on the cover that reads: “This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” It’s kind of an awkward cover, and I wouldn’t do that for my memoir. (!)

With that, I wasn’t going to take the article that seriously. I’ve read enough memoirs to know exaggeration is the spice to take an author’s story from the story-next-door to being published.

The article starts with a list of what Chua’s daughters were not allowed to do/attend: sleepovers, playdates, star in a school play, watch TV/play computer games, choose their own extracurriculars, get less than an A and not be the top student, play anything but piano and violin.

Continue reading Preview: Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Currently Reading: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

As with a lot of the world, I learned about this novel when the 2010 movie got rave reviews and mentioned the origin of the screenplay. I heard it was a sci fi storyline with low/no tech, so of course it intrigued me to read the novel before watching the movie. A Japanese-British author behind it with Remains of the Day under his belt did not dissuade me at all, quite the contrary.

The story is told from the conversational narrative point-of-view of Kathy H. who is played by Carey Mulligan. I don’t know Mulligan’s work or appearance but I do know and admire Keira Knightley who costars and for a while I thought Keira played Kathy and I could hear Knightley’s voice every time I read “Hailsham”, the students’ special school, pronounced in my head.

(Spoilers ahead–I thought I would include an alert this time since this novel is also a movie with a wider total audience.)

The narrative meanders as Kathy talks about her past, as a young student at Hailsham, to being a senior student, the first year out of school at the Cottages, to the present day. Her best friends and hence the people who could hurt her the most were Ruth and Tommy but something has separated them over the years since Kathy speaks as if alone.

Continue reading Currently Reading: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Currently Reading: Maragaret Dilloway’s “How to be an American Housewife”

I learned about Margaret Dilloway’s How to Be an American Housewife from the June 2010 batch of LibraryThing.com’s Early Reviewer’s List. I peruse the list every month when I get the e-mail alert but I don’t know how to win the “lottery” and obtain a book hot off the presses to review it for the Library Thing site. So I immediately requested a copy from the library and waited (and waited and waited) for the library to get it after its August release date.

The bulk of my Asian-American lit reviews are about different kinds of Chinese-American/Canadian so reading a Japanese-American novel is refreshingly different. However, a sad thought struck me that my predilection in reading leads me to read an awful lot of debut novels but not get further into a particular author’s style. Is this a problem?

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Shortly after the second American nucear bomb was dropped, on the nearby city of Nagasaki, Shoko married an American serviceman as her only means to leave her small down and improve her situation in life. She leaves behind in Japan her American-hating brother, Taro, and her first love, Ronin.

Each of the chapters is preceded by an except from a fictitious handbook, “How to Be an American Housewife” that impartially and relatively diplomatically gives you an idea of the struggles of a Japanese army bride in the post-war era would face. This tip advises the woman how to balance between the Japanese customs with American ones:

“Americans are [also] insulted if you do not finish everything on your plate. They consider it wasteful, though overeating only leads to being fat. Your host may be openly hostile if you leave food, though in Japan, this is only politeness. Take small portions and try to finish it all to signal you are done.”

Shoko is in her 70s at the beginning of the book which spans a few weeks of the present-day. From her marriage to Charlie, she has two adult children and a granddaughter, Helena, by daughter Sue (Suiko). Shoko and Charlie are settled in their retired lives and suffering from middle-class American problems like declining health and trying to stretch his pension further. Although she did not love Charlie on their marriage day, she grew to love him while he loved her all along. Shoko is acting weird with single-minded determination to return to Japan before she dies and Charlie’s ability to understand his wife despite her strangeness and faulty English shows his quiet love.

Continue reading Currently Reading: Maragaret Dilloway’s “How to be an American Housewife”

Currently Reading: Lisa See’s “Shanghai Girls”

Earlier this summer, I read Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan because it will be a Hollywood movie in 2011. See’s current novel is Shanghai Girls, released last year in May.

Snow Flower is probably See’s masterpiece so I was willing to read another See novel, one still too new for us to know its ultimate impact. I caught a glimpse of a review on Amazon.com of Shanghai Girls (SH Girls) that was quite negative in terms that See tried, but failed, to recreate the bond between two women that was so real and convincing in Snow Flower. I got the impression the reviewer thought SH Girls was shallow.

I couldn’t get into the novel at the beginning. It felt horribly lightweight and not altogether believable that such superficial glamour girls and their society existed, even in Shanghai’s heyday between imperialism and Communism. It seemed to me that Lisa See’s modern senses crept into the characters and I felt the anachronism distasteful. However, if you don’t take the details literally, then the Chin girls are a pair of sisters with a saga of good and bad fortune ahead of them. That, on the other hand, is believable. It is entirely all-too-familiar the scenario of beautiful, modern women leaving cosmopolitan Shanghai in the 1930s (or Hong Kong in the 1970s, like my mother) and finding a far different Chinese society and life for them in so-called Gold Mountain (金山), America or Canada.

Continue reading Currently Reading: Lisa See’s “Shanghai Girls”