furyofvissarion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
furyofvissarion) wrote2007-12-19 07:24 pm
furyofvissarion) wrote2007-12-19 07:24 pm
(no subject)
Holidays Are Hell - Kim Harrison, Lynsay Sands, Marjorie M. Liu, and Vicki Petersson. Why yes, I'm rocking the paranormal themed anthologies lately. Two of these I liked: Kim Harrison's, about younger witch Rachel, & Lynsay Sands', about people who become shapeshifters after being zapped with a molecular destabilizer. Marjorie M. Liu's story felt too cheesy/stereotypical in its portrayal of hot sexy asskicking women in China. And Vicki Petersson's story? Her whole Zodiac thing doesn't really appeal to me. Eh, two out of four is all right, particularly when the book belongs to the library.
The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In - Paisley Rekdal. Paisley Rekdal is half-Chinese and half-Norwegian, and this collection of essays deals with her trying to figure out what, if anything, this means. Her Norwegian father is a shadowy figure; he doesn't really show up much & at first I thought her parents must be divorced, or he must be dead, because his first mention takes so long in coming. Also, the book jacket says Rekdal's mother is "Chinese-American" and her father simply "Norwegian," but it seemed to me like her father's family had lived in the US for a couple of generations too. Weird.
Anyway, two things that were disappointing: that we didn't learn more about her dad's side of the family, because as a daughter of immigrants that are Asian & Scandinavian too, I know that the Scandinavian side of the family potentially has more issues, as immigrants & as the first to come to the US, & as people who still have strong cultural ties to their background, than the sort of generic "white" families of many of my peers growing up. I was interested in reading more about this. The second disappointing thing was Rekdal's own exotification & stereotyping of other Asians. For example, in coming to Korea as a Fulbright scholar to teach English, she "envisioned Korean girls in floor-length skirts with heads bowed and eyes downcast, clad in dumpy black and blue uniforms. In Seoul, however, Korean women passed me on the streets in tight shorts that barely skimmed the line demarcating thigh from ass, clad in high-cropped tops and open-toed heels." Sigh.
Ask Me No Questions - Marina Budhos. This is a wrenching YA novel about the impact of the post-9/11 special registration on one family in Queens. Nadira, a ninth-grader, & her family came from Bangladesh 8 years ago & overstayed their tourist visas. They tried to become residents but were stymied in part by crooked lawyers. When things heat up after 9/11, the family decides to go to Canada & request asylum, but are stopped at the border, where Nadira's father is detained.
Nadira and her sister, Aisha, have been living their whole lives in the US under the rule of silence: never tell anyone, including your closest friends, that you're undocumented. When their friends talk about their summer plans--going to visit family in India--or their college plans, Nadira and Aisha are left out; they've never been able to return to Bangladesh to visit relatives, & even though Aisha is slated to be valedictorian, her future is uncertain (in part because of restrictions that the DREAM Act would remedy).
As the stress of having a father in detention & the continuing uncertainty of the whole family's future continues, the family begins to slowly fall apart. The toll of not knowing is echoed in the friends & family around them, who are paid late-night visits by immigration officials, & who sometimes disappear suddenly. This novel does a great job at bringing home the effects of post-9/11 paranoia on families and communities. I do think that the reader may be led a little bit into favoring Nadira's family, because Nadira & Aisha are "good kids." What about the ones who aren't valedictorians? Would they have been as sympathetic? The ending of the book was satisfying to read, but probably not too realistic, sadly.
I See Red in a Circle - Ceres S. C. Alabado. This was mentioned in Rebolusyon! as a memoir of someone involved in the student protests against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. It was published in 1972, which I guess explains why it lacks any reflection on events from a future vantage point: things were still going on, & possibly the book was published right before martial law was declared that year.
Alabado was a privileged college student who, along with her friends & her mother, began attending protests. The tone of the book is a little embarrassing at times: her & her friends hang out w/stoners, muse about love, & get a little too naively earnest about politics. Other signs of the times: the sexism ("girls, let's leave the march, it's too dangerous," that sort of thing) & homophobia (several instances of "fag" in a non-reclamatory manner). There's a bit of the disturbing fetishization of the poor that I've seen more recently in Filipino American activists that I've worked with.
I really wish Alabado had waited longer to write this book, because I wanted to hear more reflections on what happened from the perspective of someone older who had seen Marcos fall. Did she still despise the older generations (the book is dedicated to the "militant and progressive youth who would rather die than live and become like their elders")? Did she & her fellow activists become less condescending towards workers? At some point, she wonders why, in a big student-led march focused on poverty that went through a very poor area of Manila, more of the workers & poor don't come out to join the march. She thinks it's because they need to be enlightened (by the students, of course) as to what they need to do. This book felt like Alabado wrote it down immediately upon returning home from a march, which has some value, in its immediacy & honesty, but I wanted something w/a little more distance, I think.
Dogs I Have Met: And the People They Found - Ken Foster. Awww, more dog stories from Foster! Like his previous book, this one focuses on dogs in trouble: the ones that have trouble finding homes or keeping them. There's a hemophiliac pup who gets trained to be a therapy dog; a pit bull who becomes best friends w/a piglet (a friendship that continues through the pig's adulthood); & the many dogs lost or abandoned in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some of these stories have heartwarming endings; others are more ambiguous or depressing, of course.
A running theme through this book, as w/Foster's last, is how pit bulls are wrongly stereotyped as vicious, & how many pit bulls end up dead because of this (he skewers PETA's Ingrid Newkirk, who has said that all pit bulls should be killed so they won't be abused by humans. What? Should we kill all children b/c some of them get abused too?). And there are lots of stories about his own dogs, including the pit bull/Great Dane mix Brando (how freakin' adorable is he?).
Of special interest to me was the chapter "The Vegans in New York," where Foster does a reading at Bluestockings, followed by a reception at MooShoes. I did notice, reading his last book, that there was a disconnect between his enormous compassion for dogs in need, & the lack of compassion in eating other animals. He talks about this, & admits that, on hearing the story of the pit bull & the pig's lifelong friendship, this contradiction became more painful to bear. He admits that if he had to kill an animal himself for food, or watch an animal being slaughtered, he probably couldn't eat it. I wonder what happened after that: did he just stuff down his feelings the next time he was offered a burger?
The Professor's Daughter - Emily Raboteau. College student Emma, whose mother is white & father is black, has always relied on her older brother Bernie to puzzle out their identity. Bernie's always been the favored child in the family, as well; Emma grew up feeling invisible, & so when Bernie has a tragic accident & ends up in a coma, she feels completely lost. This was a difficult read, because there's just so much pain in the book. Also, on a technical note, I found the switching between first-person (Emma's voice) & third-person omniscient points of view to be jarring.
The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood - Kien Nguyen. Kien Nguyen is the son of a Vietnamese mother & a white American soldier, born during the Vietnam War. This memoir tells of what Nguyen & his family (excluding his father, who vanished back to the States) endured in first trying to escape Vietnam (Nguyen, at age 8, witnessed the last helicopters leaving the U.S. Embassy without them) & then somehow surviving, with two strikes against them: they were members of a reviled capitalist class, & Nguyen & his brother were clearly mixed-race (it becomes obvious later on that they are not the bottom of the pecking order, when they encounter the children of Vietnamese mothers & black American soldiers). Their mother is hard to sympathize with initially, because she is portrayed as a vapid rich woman who spends hours doing her makeup & nails. But what she & her family went through (made worse by the venom of her sister, who revels in the downfall of her rich sibling) is harrowing & horrifying, & Nguyen describes it all too vividly.
The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In - Paisley Rekdal. Paisley Rekdal is half-Chinese and half-Norwegian, and this collection of essays deals with her trying to figure out what, if anything, this means. Her Norwegian father is a shadowy figure; he doesn't really show up much & at first I thought her parents must be divorced, or he must be dead, because his first mention takes so long in coming. Also, the book jacket says Rekdal's mother is "Chinese-American" and her father simply "Norwegian," but it seemed to me like her father's family had lived in the US for a couple of generations too. Weird.
Anyway, two things that were disappointing: that we didn't learn more about her dad's side of the family, because as a daughter of immigrants that are Asian & Scandinavian too, I know that the Scandinavian side of the family potentially has more issues, as immigrants & as the first to come to the US, & as people who still have strong cultural ties to their background, than the sort of generic "white" families of many of my peers growing up. I was interested in reading more about this. The second disappointing thing was Rekdal's own exotification & stereotyping of other Asians. For example, in coming to Korea as a Fulbright scholar to teach English, she "envisioned Korean girls in floor-length skirts with heads bowed and eyes downcast, clad in dumpy black and blue uniforms. In Seoul, however, Korean women passed me on the streets in tight shorts that barely skimmed the line demarcating thigh from ass, clad in high-cropped tops and open-toed heels." Sigh.
Ask Me No Questions - Marina Budhos. This is a wrenching YA novel about the impact of the post-9/11 special registration on one family in Queens. Nadira, a ninth-grader, & her family came from Bangladesh 8 years ago & overstayed their tourist visas. They tried to become residents but were stymied in part by crooked lawyers. When things heat up after 9/11, the family decides to go to Canada & request asylum, but are stopped at the border, where Nadira's father is detained.
Nadira and her sister, Aisha, have been living their whole lives in the US under the rule of silence: never tell anyone, including your closest friends, that you're undocumented. When their friends talk about their summer plans--going to visit family in India--or their college plans, Nadira and Aisha are left out; they've never been able to return to Bangladesh to visit relatives, & even though Aisha is slated to be valedictorian, her future is uncertain (in part because of restrictions that the DREAM Act would remedy).
As the stress of having a father in detention & the continuing uncertainty of the whole family's future continues, the family begins to slowly fall apart. The toll of not knowing is echoed in the friends & family around them, who are paid late-night visits by immigration officials, & who sometimes disappear suddenly. This novel does a great job at bringing home the effects of post-9/11 paranoia on families and communities. I do think that the reader may be led a little bit into favoring Nadira's family, because Nadira & Aisha are "good kids." What about the ones who aren't valedictorians? Would they have been as sympathetic? The ending of the book was satisfying to read, but probably not too realistic, sadly.
I See Red in a Circle - Ceres S. C. Alabado. This was mentioned in Rebolusyon! as a memoir of someone involved in the student protests against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. It was published in 1972, which I guess explains why it lacks any reflection on events from a future vantage point: things were still going on, & possibly the book was published right before martial law was declared that year.
Alabado was a privileged college student who, along with her friends & her mother, began attending protests. The tone of the book is a little embarrassing at times: her & her friends hang out w/stoners, muse about love, & get a little too naively earnest about politics. Other signs of the times: the sexism ("girls, let's leave the march, it's too dangerous," that sort of thing) & homophobia (several instances of "fag" in a non-reclamatory manner). There's a bit of the disturbing fetishization of the poor that I've seen more recently in Filipino American activists that I've worked with.
I really wish Alabado had waited longer to write this book, because I wanted to hear more reflections on what happened from the perspective of someone older who had seen Marcos fall. Did she still despise the older generations (the book is dedicated to the "militant and progressive youth who would rather die than live and become like their elders")? Did she & her fellow activists become less condescending towards workers? At some point, she wonders why, in a big student-led march focused on poverty that went through a very poor area of Manila, more of the workers & poor don't come out to join the march. She thinks it's because they need to be enlightened (by the students, of course) as to what they need to do. This book felt like Alabado wrote it down immediately upon returning home from a march, which has some value, in its immediacy & honesty, but I wanted something w/a little more distance, I think.
Dogs I Have Met: And the People They Found - Ken Foster. Awww, more dog stories from Foster! Like his previous book, this one focuses on dogs in trouble: the ones that have trouble finding homes or keeping them. There's a hemophiliac pup who gets trained to be a therapy dog; a pit bull who becomes best friends w/a piglet (a friendship that continues through the pig's adulthood); & the many dogs lost or abandoned in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some of these stories have heartwarming endings; others are more ambiguous or depressing, of course.
A running theme through this book, as w/Foster's last, is how pit bulls are wrongly stereotyped as vicious, & how many pit bulls end up dead because of this (he skewers PETA's Ingrid Newkirk, who has said that all pit bulls should be killed so they won't be abused by humans. What? Should we kill all children b/c some of them get abused too?). And there are lots of stories about his own dogs, including the pit bull/Great Dane mix Brando (how freakin' adorable is he?).
Of special interest to me was the chapter "The Vegans in New York," where Foster does a reading at Bluestockings, followed by a reception at MooShoes. I did notice, reading his last book, that there was a disconnect between his enormous compassion for dogs in need, & the lack of compassion in eating other animals. He talks about this, & admits that, on hearing the story of the pit bull & the pig's lifelong friendship, this contradiction became more painful to bear. He admits that if he had to kill an animal himself for food, or watch an animal being slaughtered, he probably couldn't eat it. I wonder what happened after that: did he just stuff down his feelings the next time he was offered a burger?
The Professor's Daughter - Emily Raboteau. College student Emma, whose mother is white & father is black, has always relied on her older brother Bernie to puzzle out their identity. Bernie's always been the favored child in the family, as well; Emma grew up feeling invisible, & so when Bernie has a tragic accident & ends up in a coma, she feels completely lost. This was a difficult read, because there's just so much pain in the book. Also, on a technical note, I found the switching between first-person (Emma's voice) & third-person omniscient points of view to be jarring.
The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood - Kien Nguyen. Kien Nguyen is the son of a Vietnamese mother & a white American soldier, born during the Vietnam War. This memoir tells of what Nguyen & his family (excluding his father, who vanished back to the States) endured in first trying to escape Vietnam (Nguyen, at age 8, witnessed the last helicopters leaving the U.S. Embassy without them) & then somehow surviving, with two strikes against them: they were members of a reviled capitalist class, & Nguyen & his brother were clearly mixed-race (it becomes obvious later on that they are not the bottom of the pecking order, when they encounter the children of Vietnamese mothers & black American soldiers). Their mother is hard to sympathize with initially, because she is portrayed as a vapid rich woman who spends hours doing her makeup & nails. But what she & her family went through (made worse by the venom of her sister, who revels in the downfall of her rich sibling) is harrowing & horrifying, & Nguyen describes it all too vividly.