Dedicating yourself to “The Great Passage”

Have you ever thought about dictionaries? How they’re made, who writes them, the process to update them? I certainly hadn’t before reading this.

Last year I ended up in a reading slump and couldn’t get my head around any sort of entertainment longer than a Tik Tok video. I decided to go through my old e-books and came across the novel The Great Passage by Shion Miura and translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. I got this book years ago, admittedly from my Kindle days as a part of a one-free-book-a-month deal they had. But I was interested in the premise so I hung on to it for many years telling myself I’d get to it someday. December 2022 turned out to be that someday, and of course— I wish I had read this sooner. Even if it means supporting Am*zon’s publisher, I recommend going to Bookshop and ordering it.

“The Brightest Star” unfortunately disappoints

Anna May Wong’s life is wonderful and incredible, but unfortunately this book is… not either of those things.

I hate to do bad reviews. In my opinion it’s easier to just never talk about the book instead of contributing to its bad press. Unless the book (or author) is well known and causing harm with its fame— It Ends With Us— bad reviews from book bloggers just yell into the void, and for what? So, to be honest with you, I don’t even know why I’m writing this, even as I’m typing it. Dedicating a whole blog post— that no one will even read anyways— to this book feels like taking a cheap shot before it even gets a chance in the world.

But I cannot stop thinking about how sad and disappointed The Brightest Star by Gail Tsukiyama left me. I just want so badly to love it— I was prepared to write a staff recommendation for it at work, call it an end-of-year favorite, yell about it to anyone who would listen. I kept reading it, skipping ahead to see if it got better, skimming chapters to see if the style eventually made narrative sense. But in the end, tragically, The Brightest Star was… bad. And I hate that it has to be this way.

Reading romance books

I’m the last person to break the news about the exploding popularity of romance in the book world. But working in my bookstore I’ve watched its rise first hand and seen its physical impact on our shelves: our romance and erotica section used to be a slim six shelves tucked into the back of our fiction section, and now it’s in a book case nearly five times as large and full of a diverse array of romance genres. Before I started working in the store I avoided romance books for the usual stereotypical reasons: they were badly written, every story was porn with a plot, and it objectified women. I’m also a sex-repulsed asexual, so nothing about the genre held any interest for me. Until I read the note one of our the store’s buyers hand-wrote and put next to the romance section.

Cracking open the angst of reclaiming culture, history, and identity in “Portrait of a Thief”

Chinese American students plotting an art heist made me think of the Beijing 2022 Olympic diaspora geopolitics.

I should start off with an apology to Grace D. Li, the author of Portrait of a Thief. Her upcoming debut novel, out this April, didn’t ask to be over-analyzed by a book blogger with too many thoughts and too little education, but that’s what the internet is for. Portrait of a Thief is one of the new books from Tiny Reparations Books, the publishing imprint under Penguin Random House founded by comedian Phoebe Robinson. Pitched as a modern and flashy art heist, “Ocean’s Eleven meets The Farewell,” and it already has a bit of buzz, including a Netflix deal. I really enjoyed reading it; I’m excited to recommend it to anyone who walks in the store and I already have thoughts on who Netflix should cast (Mark Tuan as Will Chen, please!) That said, I read it throughout the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and kept noticing similar themes, intentional or not, that complicated both representations of what it means to be Chinese.

Understanding the “Minor Feelings” of “Interior Chinatown”

Each book on its own tells a part of the Asian American experience and together shed light on the complexities of the roles we play.

After spending seven years immersing myself in the creative Asian American community––think YouTubers, Crazy Rich Asians, even subtle asian traits––I’m pretty familiar with how the conversation about representation in media goes. It boils down to the lack of roles, the lack of opportunities to tell our own stories, and the stereotypes Asians in entertainment get pigeon holed into. Half a decade of listening to and discussing all that got tiring, so I initially avoided reading Charles Yu’s latest book. Turns out Interior Chinatown is less in conversation with Hollywood, and more alined with Cathy Park Hong’s book, Minor Feelings. Reading each tells different perspectives of the Asian American identity, and together unlock a sharp commentary of how that experience shapes us.

An intricate, complex exploration of history in “Delayed Rays of a Star”

I can’t quite describe this book, but I also can’t stop thinking about it.

I will take any chance to read about Anna May Wong, the Chinese American silent film actress, which was the immediate draw for me towards Amanda Lee Koe’s Delayed Rays of a Star. I excepted Koe’s debut to be the usual historical fiction novel: a linear, mostly true account of the lives and adventures of 1940s icons Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich, and Leni Riefenstahl. It was those things, but Delayed Rays of a Star really ended up feeling like more than that; it was a series of character studies and reflections on human nature, a book that I find myself thinking about months after I read it. 

Finding representation in Vanessa Hua’s books

About a year ago, journalist and author Vanessa Hua reached out and asked me to write a review of her two books, the short story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities and then-newly published novel A River of Stars. Now nearly twelve months later, her novel just came out in paperback, my review got turned down by a number of outlets, and here I am. But I enjoyed her books, and after hearing her at a reading in Boston I wanted to make sure some form of a review made it into the world somewhere.

Apparently 2017 was the year of the Chinese adoption books

Looking at Little Fires Everywhere, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, and The Leavers.

I always thought I had an understanding about adoption. Never questioned much, just accepted everything I was grateful for. After reading Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See, and The Leavers by Lisa Ko, I’ve started thinking about it again.

It hasn’t been easy, or particularly fun (I should probably talk to a professional about this, but blogging will suffice in the meantime.) I set out with the goal to compare the three, and while reading them back-to-back-to-back started to weigh on me, it’s been enlightening too. Reading them together put into words a lot of the feelings I didn’t realize I even felt. By the end, finishing with Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, I had a new clarity on the topic. But I never felt like any one of them told a complete story of adoption. Here, let me explain each one a little better.
(Warning, spoilers ahead.)