This is an autobiographical piece written like poetry, which Vuong frames as a letter to his illiterate mother. The writing is gorgeous and heartbreaking; Vuong’s mother is shown lashing out at her young son in one moment, and then her own generational trauma as a war refugee is explored in the next. It’s not an excuse, but an exploration of root causes. Nothing needs to be explained if it’s all out there for you to see. Vuong peppers his experiences with those of his mother’s and grandmother’s, letting us see the impact of racism, class tension, and trauma across generations. He approaches his own experience with love similarly, letting us see his boyfriend in moments of both sweetness and toxic masculinity, showing us just enough of his background to help us recognize him as a product of his surroundings. Vuong has a beautiful deftness with words, and uses them to show how the people in his story manage to communicate love without using words at all.
Tag: genre-social commentary
VenCo, by Cherie Dimaline
I wanted to like this more than I actually did; the concept was great but the execution was heavy-handed and the plot essentially went nowhere. Six out of seven witches in a coven have come together, and a two-dimensional evil witchhunter (thinly veiled symbol of the patriarchy) has ramped up his efforts to hunt down the last witch before she can join them and bring about some nebulous prophesied change. The witches, who have all escaped some form or other of sexist sadness, don’t seem to have gained any particular magic from their having done so; the ones with magic seem to have had it already. Basically this was super girls-against-the-man! women have ancient and mysterious powers! which I would ordinarily be down with but there should really have been a lot more thinking going into plotting, worldbuilding, and character arcs. I stubbornly made it to the end and the payoff was… less than worth it.
Hotline, by Dimitri Nasrallah
This book was tearing up the review scene in Canada so I gave it a shot. The pace is slow and patient, mostly moving through mundane details and only hinting at the broader picture, but builds on itself until the smallest actions carry huge emotional weight. Muna is a Lebanese immigrant teacher whose French skills are not as useful as she had hoped they would be in Montreal; to support herself and her son Omar, she takes a job at a call center selling a weight loss program. It’s hard scrabbling out a living as a single mom in the Montreal winter, but in Muna’s life, the small victories and occasional moments of grace balance out the casual racism and institutional disregard. The gradual unfolding of the events in Lebanon that drove her to Montreal are illuminating as well. Really well done storytelling.
How Decent Folk Behave, by Maxine Beneba Clarke
An incredibly powerful collection of poetry from Clarke, who is an Australian poet of Afro-Caribbean descent. The poems center the reader in Clarke’s world and viewpoint, a place where women and people of color have it hard; even as she paints that world in heartbreaking detail, she colors it with her fierce resolve to fight back, to stand together, to grow strong. The title is actually a line from the poem “something sure,” in which a Black mother sits her son down and tells him to pay attention: she is raising him to be a good man, one who knows “how decent folk behave,” but he needs to know: there are times when other men can be a danger to women, and when those times arise, she needs her son to be the kind of man who will step in, to intervene as only a fellow man can. It’s chilling, heartbreaking, and beautiful.
Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Oh man if you thought Yellowface was a vicious takedown of racism in publishing, wait until you read Disorientation, which does the same thing to academics but multiplies it by ten. The main character, Ingrid Yang, is in the middle of a dissertation she hates, a deep dive into the works of famous poet Xiao-Wen Chou. One day, a chance find in the archives sends her into a deep dive into Chou’s history and a bombshell of a discovery that upends everything Ingrid thinks she knows, including about her own conception of herself, her race, and her relationships. Neurotic, self-doubting Ingrid is contrasted against her confident best friend Eunice Kim, as well as her rage-filled rival Vivian Vo; the way the three women choose to conceive of, and express, their Asian-Americanness provides an undercurrent of identity exploration to the race-related ripples caused in the larger society around them by Ingrid’s discovery. The satire in this book is incredibly heavy-handed but the zingers keep landing, so you keep reading.
Equal Partners, by Kate Mangino
The subtitle for this book is “Improving Gender Equality at Home,” and addresses the imbalance in household gender roles created by harmful social norms. The book doesn’t just lay out examples and statistics, but gently points out familiar social behaviors that can actually perpetuate the problem. Each chapter also offers guided discussion topics and thought exercises to help readers become aware of their own stances and provide avenues for improvement, if it is desired. The book is carefully written to address as wide a spectrum of the modern family as possible, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, generation, and family structure. Even though I consider myself fairly educated and aware of these issues, I still found myself taking many notes on how to be a more equal parent and a more equality-focused person in conversation. Gender norms are deep-seated and addressing them is difficult, but this book provides an informative and understanding base from which to make a start.
The Good Immigrants, by Madeline Y. Hsu
Note: this is a textbook, not an entertaining nonfiction piece; each chapter lays out its thesis and then proceeds to buttress it with a straightforward recitation of facts and sources. Occasionally a person of historical interest appears whose story falls in line with the theme of the chapter, but no effort is made to carry any particular character through the narrative. That said, I found the book direct and focused, and the topic was of particular interest to me as I feel I have likely benefited greatly from the privilege of being seen as a “model minority,” and my own parents’ entry to the US on student visas fell perfectly in line with the path created to admit only the most useful, productive, and assimible immigrants. As Hsu demonstrates, the model minority stereotype was generated purposely by both Chinese governments and their American allies to sell a favorable impression of a certain type of immigrant (read: open to Western-education, non-“coolie”). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was popular for quite some time, reflecting the “yellow peril” fear that gripped much of America; however, a loose coalition of missionaries, academics, and diplomats banded together to open narrow avenues were opened to the the “right” kind of Chinese immigrant. The avenues had to be narrow, so that quotas and other limitations could remain in place to reassure the racist majority that Chinese would never be admitted in large numbers. Gradually, over decades, the determined PR of the coalition of American allies, as well as shifting political landscapes, successfully sold the favorable stereotype of the hardworking, nonthreatening Chinese immigrant. On the one hand it’s a remarkable success story of the power of patient, relentless PR over reflexive racism; on the other hand it’s enraging to see the knots in which people had to twist themselves in order to appear the right mixture of harmless and desirable, in order to be so grudgingly accepted.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez
The author is incredibly (and rightfully) angry about the many ways (and there are oh so many) in which women are disadvantaged in our data-driven world, data which was gleaned from centuries in which men were considered the default data set and women were atypical. Her chapters overflow with examples of how discrimination compounds on discrimination (men, who controlled the historical narrative, left out or covered up the accomplishments of women, thereby creating a biased record used by modern-day men to claim that women historically did little and were therefore not worthy of study, thereby continuing a trend of bias, etc etc). This data bias means that women’s health is neglected when it comes to research, drugs, and treatment; that women’s physiology is overlooked when it comes to designing for things like automobiles and buildings; that AIs trained on male-based datasets will invisibly prioritize men over women during job searches, etc. Unfortunately, the laser focus of this book is also its weakness; Criado Perez’s single-minded effort to blame sexism for every negative aspect of society overlooks or ignores other contributing factors, and her extreme gender binary view of the world feels uncomfortably dated. Still, a pretty decent (and very enraging) compilation of sexism overall.
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin
I was expecting a somewhat more academic treatment of the role of gay bars in society and in history; instead, this is author Atherton Lin exploring his own personal journey through the succession of gay bars that he visited along the way. His perspective, that of an Asian-American navigating London and San Francisco, means that racism occasionally adds an additional layer of alienation onto his experience. He mixes everything together until none of it can be teased apart, from musings about identity and expression in social spheres, to analysis of society’s changing relationship with homosexuality, to detailed descriptions of smells and sensations of bodies in close contact, sometimes all within the same paragraph. He also illustrates ambience by rapidly listing off a succession of musicians, or brands, which I’m sure would have served as anchors for people who recognized them, but for me merely placed his already-foreign (to me) experiences into a landscape which I… didn’t recognize either. Still, it was definitely both educational and entertaining to journey along with Atherton Lin through his past, from adventurous naïf to jaded elder, interrogating society along the way. He doesn’t hesitate to turn the analysis on himself either: “I went out to bars to be literary. I drank to create content. If I earned a reputation for making trouble, it was so that I could write about it the following morning… There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.”
Girl in Translation, by Jean Kwok
Kimberly and her mother immigrate to NYC from Hong Kong, but immediately find themselves working in a garment factory owned by Kimberly’s aunt, who has meticulously detailed every cent that they owe her for paying their medical bills, travel expenses, and housing. They “rent” an unheated, barely-furnished space from the aunt and Kimberly must find time to focus on school while not helping out her mother at the factory. She has a ferocious academic talent but little knowledge of English, particularly slurred words or slang. I like how the English that she hears is rendered in the closest word approximations she can manage; for instance, when her public school teacher gives the class a map and says to “fill in allde captal see T’s;” understandably, Kimberly is lost. I also love how Cantonese is rendered word-for-word into English in her conversations with other immigrants, not just the slang terms or idioms but simple, common phrases like “come eat rice!” which is the literal translation of “dinnertime!” Kimberly’s rags-to-riches journey stretches the boundaries of belief, but her experience of being caught between languages and cultures is captured beautifully.