2018 international women's day.

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  1. hye-young pyun, the hole (skyhorse, 2017)
  2. han yujoo, the impossible fairy tale (graywolf, 2017)
  3. patty yumi cottrell, sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney's, 2017)
  4. samhita mukhopadhyay & kate harding, eds, nasty women (picador, 2017)
  5. shobha rao, girls burn brighter (flatiron, 2018)
  6. carmen maria machado, her body and other parties (graywolf, 2017)
  7. kim fu, for today i am a boy (HMH, 2014)
  8. jessica b. harris, my soul looks back (scribner, 2016)
  9. rowan hisayo buchanan, harmless like you (sceptre, 2017)
  10. ayobami adebayo, stay with me (knopf, 2017)
  11. jenny zhang, sour heart (lenny imprint, 2017)
  12. julie buntin, marlena (henry holt, 2017)
  13. molly yeh, molly on the range (rodale, 2016)
  14. yoojin grace wuertz, everything belongs to you (random house, 2017)
  15. kamila shamsie, home fire (riverhead, 2017)
  16. kristen kish, kristen kish cooking (clarkson potter, 2017)
  17. kim thuy, mãn (PRH canada, 2014)
  18. chinelo okparanta, under the udala trees (HMH, 2015)
  19. julia turshen, small victories (chronicle, 2016)
  20. sylvia plath, the letters of sylvia plath, vol i: 1940 - 1956 (harpers, 2017)

here's my annual stack for 2018 international women's day, and i love making these stacks so much. i love that i can populate them with predominantly women of color, that finding queer women (and, more importantly, queer WOC!!!) is not like hunting for that needle in a haystack, that i'm left thinking, ah! i should have added this title and this title and that one, too!

diversity makes my cold, little heart warm and swell, and i'm not interested in any celebration of womanhood that celebrates only white women or straight women or mainstream women. in relation, i'm not interested in feminism that excludes certain economic classes, feminism that says that we can be a part of their community only if we have the means to gain admittance into their playground. i'm not interested in feminism that only pays attention to the marginalized when they fulfill a specific need, more often than not a PR one.

and i know that i have to do better, too; i'm not trying to claim that i'm perfect or so much better off than anyone. i know i need to widen my geographic scope and read more from women all over the world. i know i need to read more from trans women. i know i need to read more from women who are not able-bodied.

that said, if you want to start reading more from women who aren't white and/or straight, here's a place to start. for full disclosure, i haven't finished every single book in this stack, and i didn't love them all equal amounts, but i stand by them. there are definitely a few books i've been pushing harder than others — like, oh my god, if you haven't read patty yumi cottrell's sorry to disrupt the peace or julie buntin's marlena or jenny zhang's sour heart yet, i highly, highly recommend you hurry up and do so. if you want to get your heart wrecked, read shobha rao's girls burn brighter and kim fu's for today i am a boy. and, if you're wanting to get into the kitchen more but are kind of intimidated, julia turshen's small victories is so freaking fabulous — and julia's so worth following on instagram and twitter because she actively boosts other women, especially WOC, using her platform to bring attention to issues and pressing concerns and needs.

should i not be spotlighting a few books over all the others? but, wow, i shamelessly admit that i'm stealing time between tasks at work to get this post up sooner than later.

so, hey, to keep this short and sweet: to all my women out there, WOC or not, queer or not, keep telling your bombass stories. keep putting your voices out there and sharing your strength. keep being the heroes of your stories.

and keep listening to the stories of your fellow women and keep supporting your communities and keep lifting up the voices of your fellow women, especially those marginalized among you.

together, may we continue to thrive.


find my stack for 2017 here and 2016 here.

2017 in books and 4500-ish words.

today, when i told you to behave, you roared angrily: I’M BEING HAVE.

today, after i took my socks off, you touched my ankles — the impressions that had been left.

today you put my hand on the impression left by your sock. my hand could circle your whole miniature ankle.

today, after you lost a tooth, you cried that you looked like a pumpkin.

today i had to stop by the post office, and you looked around and said, aghast, “this is errands?”

today, while i was changing your brother’s diaper, and putting baby powder on him, you burst into tears and begged me not to put too much salt on him.

today you were so readily impressed by me. (khong, 101-2)

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let's talk 2017 and books.

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i started off 2017 with rachel khong’s goodbye, vitamin (henry holt, 2017), which i read mostly while i was on the road and trying to ignore the way my heart was breaking. i drove from brooklyn to los angeles in january, leaving behind my home city to return to the city in which i was raised, the city i’d been trying for so much of my life to flee, and i left brooklyn in disappointment, my tail between my legs. new york city is a tough city, even for those who love her and find solace in her streets.

goodbye, vitamin is a novel that sneaks up on you. it’s not a book that hooks you and keeps you reading maniacally; it’s a book that crawls onto you and sinks into your skin and settles in your heart. khong’s writing is warm and funny and wise, and the premise is so totally human — 30-year-old ruth returns to her parents’ home because her father has alzheimer’s. she’s recently broken up with her fiancé. she’s in this in-between.

i tend to believe that, sometimes, books find us when we need them, and goodbye, vitamin was one such book. january kicked off 2017 brutally, and i was in a horrible place, grappling with heartache, insomnia, anxiety, the worst and most prolonged bout of suicidal depression i’ve had yet. i didn’t know what the hell i was doing with my life. i felt like i’d failed at everything, unable to find a full-time job, to make enough to make ends meet, to finish my book and find an agent and sell it. needless to say, i didn’t much feel like reading.

when i drove across the country, i had a van full of books, but goodbye, vitamin was the one i carried with me. i read it during solitary meals at momofuku ccdc (DC), xiao bao biscuit (charleston), surrey’s (new orleans), solid grindz (tucson), king’s highway (palm springs), and i read it in snatches because i couldn’t focus long enough on words, on story — everything still hurt too much. it was comforting, though, tapping into bittersweet nostalgia because goodbye, vitamin, at least to me, is steeped in nostalgia. ruth, too, is returning to los angeles, to her parents’, and, at the time i was reading the novel, i was as well.

there was a lot that i personally identified with, too — my paternal grandmother passed away from alzheimer’s the summer of 2012. i didn’t live at my parents’ at the time, but i was in school an hour away, and i’d come over on the weekends to stay with her so my parents could go to church. she’s the grandmother who raised me, who doted on me, who loved me most of all her grandchildren, and she’s the reason i’m bilingual, bicultural. maybe it’s wrong to pick favorites, but she’s the grandparent who meant the most to me.

the thing with illness, as i’ve learned, is that it brings out the great in people sometimes. i’m not trying to romanticize illness at all; as someone who lives with depression and diabetes, i am not someone who would ever sentimentalize or romanticize or put a stupid silver lining on illness. at the same time, i can’t deny that the reason i have survived this year is that the people around me have shown up and shown their goodness constantly, and i am so humbled and so grateful for all the generosity, love, and understanding i’ve received.

books are part of that, too, and i believe that writing, also, is an act of generosity, and i am grateful — always grateful — for all the writers out there who write and put their stories out there, so saps like me can read them and weep and feel known. because that’s how i felt when i was reading goodbye, vitamin, and it was the perfect first book to read in what would be a tumultuous, rocky 2017.


on my way home i stop at the grocery store and buy a head of garlic and a can of tomatoes. canned goods are forbidden, of course, but i am feeling defiant, and how is mom going to find out, anyway?

mom’s thrown everything out but a glass baking dish. she claims she’s shopping for safer cookware. i spread the tomatoes on the baking dish, with salt and oil, brown sugar, slices of garlic, and ancient dried oregano from a sticky plastic shaker.

while the tomatoes are roasting, i rinse the tomato can out and boil the water in the can itself. i cook the pasta in batches in the small can. i toast the almond from the pantry and blend them with the garlic and the tomatoes and the herbs. suddenly there is pasta and there is sauce and the semblance of a real meal. i set the table for two. i head upstairs and knock on his door and call “dad?” (khong, 60)

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there is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless — my friend amy leach writes. a ladder is no longer what i am seeking. rather, i want one day to be able to say to myself: dear friend, we have waited this out. (li, 201)

2017 is the year i finally got professional help for depression and anxiety, and it’s the year i finally started seeing a therapist and taking meds.

i’ve known for years that i needed to do this, that depression was just something i was going to have to learn live with, part of which entails getting the proper help for it. i can’t quite say what it was that kept me from getting help, though, maybe a combination of insurance and shame and fear that, once i was diagnosed, that diagnosis would follow me around everywhere and i’d never find a job, never find a partner, never be more than my depression.

which is all bullshit — one of the things i’ve realized about myself when looking back at 2017 is that i’ve never let my depression stop me. even in the worst of it, i was still trying to write; i was creating content regularly for this blog; i started a full-time job and finished my book and have posted regularly and thoughtfully on instagram. there is no doubt about it; i am more than my depression.

and that’s not to make myself sound better than other people who live with depression and can’t get out of bed, can barely muster up the energy to eat something, take a shower, sit up straight. i’ve been there, too. i still have days when i’m so low-energy, i go straight home to bed and sleep ten hours. i have really shitty days when my brain fog is so bad, all i can do is have a cry in the bathroom and chug a stupid amount of coffee and chat with my coworkers until i’m powered enough to get through the rest of the day.

what meryl streep said at the 2017 golden globes has stuck with me all year, though — “take your broken heart and turn it into art.” and maybe that’s where my sense of purpose comes from, that, yes, i’ve been nursing a broken heart all year, and i’ve been worried and stressed about my broken brain, but, hey, i’m still here, and, somehow, i’ve made it through. if i can, so can you.

what does this have to do with yiyun li’s dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017)? dear friend is li’s memoir about her experience living with suicidal depression, and li herself has survived two suicide attempts. this book was published at such a timely moment for me, but i don’t really want to get into it all here again, but i wrote a post dedicated to it if you’d like to check that out. the link is here.


i took rebecca solnit’s the mother of all questions (haymarket, 2017) to the bay area as a talisman of sorts the weekend of my brother’s wedding. i’m an outlier in my family in that i don’t want kids, have never wanted kids, still don’t want kids, and i like that we’re finally at a point in time where women can say they don’t want children, and, no, it’s not selfishness, it’s not self-absorption, it’s not some kind of malfunctioning on our ends. it doesn’t mean we’re defective or faulty or not fully-formed or incomplete or whatever just because we choose not to spawn.

i love the way solnit writes about all this, partly because she does it with so much more generosity than i can. she writes about womanhood, about being a woman in this world, with such intelligence and poise, and i find myself blocking off passage after passage because i’m agreeing so hard, i feel like i’m nodding my head off.

such questions [why don’t you have children?] seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species. at their heart these questions are not questions but assertions that we who fancy ourselves individual, charting our own courses, are wrong. brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation. (4)

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some people want kids but don’t have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don’t want kids, and that’s not anyone’s business either. just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked. the interviewer’s question to me was indecent because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. more fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live. (5)

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our humanity is made out of stories or, in the absence of words and narratives, out of imagination: that which i did not literally feel, because it happened to you and not to me, i can imagine as though it were me, or care about it though it was not me. thus we are connected, thus we are not separate. those stories can be killed into silence, and the voices that might breed empathy silenced, discredited, censored, rendered unspeakable, unbearable. discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believe the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing. (36)

also, LOL, it’s only when i was collecting quotes for this post that i realized that i didn’t actually finish reading this. i got halfway through and apparently was emotionally wiped.


here’s something random: i read patty yumi cottrell’s sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney’s, 2017) because i saw a photo of her and was like, whaaat, she cute.

i’d been seeing the book around social media and had been intrigued by the title and cover, but i typically avoid books about people who have lost someone to suicide. theirs is not a narrative i’m interested in, much like i’m not interested in the narratives of adoptive parents — i’d rather hear from the suicidal and from those who were adopted, and that put me in a bit of a quandry because sorry to disrupt the peace is told by helen, a korean-american adoptee who learns about her adoptive brother’s death by suicide and returns to their adoptive parents’ home, assigning herself the mission to learn why he died.

and, so, it’s a book that sat in the back of my brain as something i’d pick up and flip through the next time i was in a bookstore, but, then, there was the photo thing, and, then, i was in mexico after my brother’s wedding, and, somewhere in between eating all the mangoes i could find and rereading the handmaid’s tale, i was like, omg must. find. the. cottrell. NOW.

so, once i was back stateside in SF, i visited two bookstores to find it.

and then i devoured it.

and abso-freaking-lutely loved it.

it isn’t often that i come across writers who make me think, holy shit, you’re doing something really cool with narrative and voice here, but that’s how i felt as i read sorry to disrupt the peace. helen’s narrative voice is unique and individual, and she’s a little weird (to put it one way) and kind of abrasive, though not intentionally, because she’s clueless and has no sense of self-awareness, occupying her own headspace without the ability to read other people and situations external to her.

some have read sorry to disrupt the peace and tried to diagnose helen, but i don’t know — when i read it, i didn’t get the sense that cottrell is trying to make any kind of statement about mental illness. i don’t think that was the point, which might ask the question, then what was the point? which in turn makes me ask, do books have to have a point?

because why do we read? what are we looking for when we read? do we look at authors to make statements, deliver commentary? and should we even be making armchair diagnoses, anyway, because i hate those because armchair diagnoses are often people making snap judgments about mental illness and staying within their misguided prejudices and gross stereotypes — and, omg, does it make a difference either way, whether helen is mentally ill or mentally stable? does it make her any less credible a narrator? does her experience become any less authentic and fully-lived?

and, wow, that was a tangent, but sometimes it peeves me when we get lost in these roundabout discussions about a character’s (usually a woman’s) likability or credibility or knowability, particularly when it comes to books like sorry to disrupt the peace because, holy shit, this book is phenomenal. it’s raw and dark and funny, and helen is earnest and kinda really messed up and sad and angry, and the novel will make you laugh and cry and think about what it means to be known, to know yourself, to exist in a world that is at odds with you, that doesn’t seem to have a place for you even though you try — oh, you try, but, sometimes, trying isn’t good enough.

you try, but, sometimes, the loss you carry is not just your own.


a lot of people kill themselves, i said, but it seems like most of them do it when they’re older, like after they’ve reached middle age. we try everything we can to preserve ourselves and yet eventually something catches up with us, something dreadful creeps up, and we just can’t do it anymore. then we throw our lives away, into the trash heap of suicides. (cottrell, 70)
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do what you want is a zine from the UK that features writing about mental health and nothing else. i learned of it because esmé weijun wang (author of the fabulous the border of paradise [unnamed, 2016]) contributed an essay to it, and i’m glad i did — i’m all for more candid writing about mental health by people who live with mental illness.

the significant traumas in my life have passed, and yet my physiological and psychological responses to them have only begun to truly interfere with my life this year. i’m used to becoming isolated by my mental health, and by people’s reactions to it: the depression and psychosis that i live with carry a great deal of stigma. but when it comes to trauma, and discussing the symptoms and triggers of my post-traumatic responses, the isolation is unlike any i’ve ever felt. and that’s without even going into the details of the actual traumatic events that scarred me, which even the saintliest soul likely finds hard to stomach. trauma, and in particular sexual trauma, has profoundly isolating effects in western culture.

we find it difficult to talk about trauma. it is difficult to be a human and to learn about the brutality that other humans are forced to endure.

[…]

i try not to be angry when others turn away. one way of coping with this social blanket of silence is a sort of absurd humour in which i laugh and don’t expect anyone else to laugh. i did it when, in a group of writers who decided to go around the circle and share the hilarious stories of losing their virginity, i said, “i was raped.” i may have laughed, because i’d ruined the game — at least for that moment. i can’t say there wasn’t a bit of bitterness to my actions. i did it again when, in that hospital in new orleans, with my partner and a doctor leaning in to catch my every word, and pneumonia in my chest, i blurted it out — “rape” — and fell about laughing.

[…]

[…] sometimes the only way we can bear to react is by filling the silence with laughter, even if we’re laughing alone. (esmé weijun wang, “laughing about pneumonia,” 70-2)

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however, just because medication which increases the levels of neurotransmitters in our brains can help relieve our symptoms, it doesn’t mean that all mental illness is necessarily caused by a lack of these chemicals in the first place. the onset of mental illness is more complex, and often involves an interaction of lifestyle, environmental and biological factors. to put it simply: taking paracetamol helps to relieve the symptoms of a headache, but that doesn’t mean the headache was caused by a lack of paracetamol! (becky appleton, “sweeten the pill,” 105)

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“i feel” does not have to mean “i am.” (eleanor morgan, “plastic minds,” 145)

i have really strong emotional sentiments when it comes to bodies.

no one’s going to be surprised when i say hunger (harpers, 2017) is one doozy of a book. roxane gay writes candidly about her trauma and her body, about the ways people see her body and judge her by it. she writes about girlhood and the ways boys violently took it away, and she writes about the gang rape that led her to eat and eat and eat, to hide herself in a body no one could hurt again.

i think about bodies often; i’d say i think about bodies every day. i think about my body, about the bodies of people i see around me, and i think about how something so common to everyone is weaponized to destroy so many of us and shred any sense of self we may have. there’s little that angers me more than a woman putting a girl (or woman) down for her body, calling her fat, criticizing her looks, commenting on what she’s eating, and, all along, basically teaching her that her value and self-worth are directly tied to her body, that she is only as worthy a human as her dress size.

and don’t even get me started on men doing that shit to women.

i’m going to put this in caps because it should be: YOUR BODY DOES NOT DETERMINE YOUR SELF-WORTH. YOUR LOOKS DO NOT DETERMINE YOUR SELF-WORTH. PEOPLE WHO MAKE YOU FEEL OTHERWISE ARE SHITTY.

it doesn’t matter what has brought you to the body you inhabit. it could be trauma; it could be illness; it could be choice, the result of decisions you’ve made for whatever reason. it could be genetics, and it could be lifestyle, and it could be financial situations. it could be a whole lot of things, none of which gives anyone any right to shame you for your body.

one of the more valuable things i’ve learned over 2017 is that i can’t control how other people feel about me but i can control how i let them make me feel about myself. i can let someone make me feel like shit, like i’m stupid or ugly or unworthy to be seen because i’m not thin, or i can say, screw that. i’m fine the way i am, and i’m going to live my life. that’s power, i think, that’s where power lies, so don’t give that power to people who demean you and put you down and tear you to pieces (then have the audacity to turn around and wonder what your problem is, why you have no confidence or self-esteem or sense of identity). people will think what they do, and, yes, sometimes, they’ll think really ugly things, but you can’t control that, so don’t waste your life — the one life you have — trying to please people who will never be happy for you, for whom you will never be good enough because you’ll never be thin enough because, when people are stuck in that mentality, no size is small enough to be good enough.


celeste ng’s debut, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014), was my favorite book of 2014, and i’m almost annoyed that it only took her three years to publish her sophomore novel. it took me nine years to write one book and god knows how long it’ll take me to get that one published, and, already, celeste ng has published two stellar, phenomenal books.

because little fires everywhere (penguin press, 2017) is just as good as her debut. it’s hard for me to summarize because i’m shitty with book summaries, but the novel is set in shaker heights, ohio, which is an actual place, the city, actually, where ng grew up. there’s a suburban family with a nosy mother who writes for the local newspaper and fancies herself an investigative journalist; there’s a single mother who moves into town with her daughter and cleans house for said suburban family. the mother doesn’t disclose much (if anything at all) about her daughter’s father, and her presence goes against everything shaker heights stands for and turns things upside down.

i love how ng writes about suburban america, and i love the way she writes about race. she writes about it by not obsessing over it, by acknowledging that race is a thing, that we do not and cannot live in a colorblind world, that people of color are more than the color of their skin.

(i hate this notion of colorblindness; when someone claims, oh, i’m colorblind; i don’t see color; i see people, my brain interprets that as, oh, i see everything through the filter of whiteness, so i think all cultures should just be white and conform to white POVs and standards and expectations and wants and boringness. my brain also interprets that as, hi, i’m totally blind to my own privilege as a white or white-passing or i-think-i’m-white person.)

i love how she does all this by writing people because i think that’s what ng does so well — write people, people who are fleshed out and alive, who exist and want and hurt. she writes with empathy. she writes people i can’t help but care about, and she also writes people i totally loathe, but, basically, the point kind of is — you don’t passively read an ng book.

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i’d say i have this massive giant soft spot for jenny zhang, but that sounds gentler than it actually is because, whenever i see her book or anything she’s written, my immediate impulse is to yell, HI JENNY ILU.

i’ve written about jenny before and how i came across her (and esmé’s) writing and how it was pretty damn formative for me. i’d grown up reading just dead white people, mostly dead white men, and i don’t think i’ll ever forget that first HOLY SHIT! moment when i came across their blog, fashion for writers, and realized that, hey, there are asian-americans out there writing things and they’re writing things that are humming with life and want and grossness and displacement and everything.

sour heart (random house, 2017) reflects all this.

i’ve read the criticism that all the stories in the collection read the same, like it’s the same narrator over and over again. i can see where that’s coming from, but, for me, i kind of liked that — i thought it kind of made the point that, yes, maybe, on the surface, we might seem the same — immigrant children with our immigrant parents and our immigrant lives. maybe we might all seem to have lived the same story, but, when people manage to look beneath that, they might find that we’re different, that, much like white people with whiteness, sometimes, the only thing we have in common with each other is our asianness, our Otherness.

i loved this about being in new york, realizing that there are so many different ways of being asian-american. growing up in the valley, near LA’s koreatown, i thought there were only a handful of different kinds of koreans — fobs, ktown koreans, valley azns, banana koreans, and people like me, second-generation korean-americans who were bilingual and bicultural.

getting out of this bubble and getting out of my loathed familiar zones, out of a city of life in cars and into a city of subways and walking and public transportation, i had to reassess asian-americanness. the best thing moving to new york did for me was open up my mind and make me at least a little less judgmental and more accepting. i don’t believe there is one way to be asian-american; i believe there are as many ways to be asian-american as there are asian-americans; and i don’t subscribe to the notion of a “good” asian-american or a “bad” one. i believe we all individually negotiate our relationships with our ethnic heritages.

part of me wishes i could say i believed this when i was younger, too, but the truth is i didn’t. i was kind of a snoot about my koreanness, the fact that i could speak, read, write korean, the discomfort i felt at not feeling korean enough or american enough. i held it as a sort of pride that i walked this line between cultures, like that was some kind of accomplishment of my own, and, now, years later, at least, the thing i can be grateful for is that, as humans, we are growing and changing creatures, and we can always come back from bad places. we can be better people. we can be kinder, more generous, more open-minded. we can be more loving.

we just have to try.


… my absolute favorite thing, starting around the age of five, was watching discovery channel’s great chefs of the world. seeing alain passard make cassoulet, raymond bland creating cakes and confectionaries, and takashi yagihashi working acrobatics (purpose, no wasted movement, efficiency) with his mind-bending noodles — though i didn’t know their names then, i was mesmerized by the mix of global chefs and of places i could only dream of visiting. a great calm washed over me while watching hands work so confidently with what seemed to me then to be innate skill. seeing the chefs’ agility in the kitchen, the buzz, whisk, stir, and pour, and the little pots was very soothing to me. it was the only time in the day i’d be completely focused. after dinner i would run into our yard to create my own kitchen from twigs, stones, and dirt. i’d collect dried leaves by the handful and sprinkle them onto my tennis racket — my pan. pretending i was in whites, a little great chef, i would shake the tennis racket like i watched the great sauciers do. i imagined the sizzles and the smells.

as i got older, i stayed indoors and traded my tennis racket for an actual sauté pan, and leaves for vegetables and chicken breasts. home alone, i would throw whatever i could find into the pan and cook the shit out of everything, until it was basically sawdust. i was going through the process of cooking long before i had a concept of what went together or how to properly execute it. (kish, 10-1)


hilariously (idk why it’s hilariously, but let’s run with it), it’s thanks to instagram that i found kristen kish last year. i don’t watch top chef or follow it at all, so i had no idea who she was until she started popping up on my instagram explore page and i was like, heeeeeeeey, yer hella cute.

i was excited to learn that she was doing a book, but i was also a little apprehensive because i really didn’t want her to go down the celebrity chef route because, as hypocritical as this might sound, personal brands make me uncomfortable. i don’t like personal brands. i don’t like the falsity they conjure up.

when clarkson potter released the title and cover to her book in january, i started to get more apprehensive because everything about it was too celebrity chef-y for me. to be honest, i still don’t like the title and rarely say it (if you haven’t noticed yet), referring to it as the kish cookbook, and i’m not the biggest fan of the cover as it went to press (the one initially released was more striking and interesting, at least compared to this) (i think they should have gone with what they put under the dust jacket, though — imagine that fish done in foil, the letters pressed into the board in white — can you picture it?! that’s a striking visual that would have stood the hell out).

that said — i do see where the title comes from. kristen kish cooking (clarkson potter, 2017) is a very personal book; it’s one that goes into her history, her inspirations, her food; but it does so in ways that aren’t cloying or overly sentimental or false. the biographical introduction is brief, the headnotes to the point, and her personality comes through, not only in the recipes but also in the photographs, the plating, the design. everything is very clean and polished and refined, and i really liked that kish didn’t shy away from plating her food the way she would in a restaurant. does it look “accessible” to the average home cook? no. but does it have to? no.

the pleasant surprise has been that i have cooked a fair amount from this book and will likely continue to do so, and i am not someone who cooks from cookbooks all that often. i read a whole lot of them, yes, but i can count on one hand the number of books i’ve cooked from. as i was reading her book, though, i kept tabbing recipes that sounded curious to me, things i might like to try, and i loved each thing i made, so i kept going and will keep on going. kish’s food takes time, and it’s not very simple, but it’s well worth the time and work.

if anything, the kish cookbook has made me venture out of my comfort zones and want to try out new things, and it’s taught me that i can trust my instincts. i know generally what i’m doing in a kitchen, and i don’t need to worry about being able to feed the people i love and to feed them well. it used to a point of insecurity for me almost, and i’d feel so embarrassed about my awkward knife skills and my difficulty with seasoning, but, once i started letting go of that and being comfortable in what i can do and branching off from there — that’s really when cooking opened up for me, and this book came at a fitting time when i needed that boost and emotional support.


i love the way carmen maria machado writes about womanhood and queerness like they’re just totally normal parts of life — BECAUSE THEY ARE.

her body and other parties (graywolf, 2017) was kind of a strange book for me because i started off loving it intensely. like, i loved it. i loved her writing; i loved the weirdnesses; i loved how nitty-gritty and disturbing the stories could be. halfway through, though, starting with the long SVU story that should have been half the length it was, the collection started faltering. the stories had interesting ideas but didn’t quite achieve their potential, and they started feeling rushed, not quite fully-developed. i started liking the collection less and less, but the thing is, i’d started off with such an intense love for her body and other parties that, in the end, overall, i still loved the book.

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i ended the year with julie buntin’s marlena (henry holt, 2017), which i’m still reading, and this, too, is a novel i’d seen around and wondered about. i admit i wasn’t initially curious because of the cover; i thought it might be a coming-of-age story; and, maybe, it really kind of is — it’s just darker and grittier and less sentimental and sweet than the cover led me to believe.

(i do judge books by their covers. i do not apologize for this.)

i heard julie buntin as part of two panels, though — the first at the brooklyn book festival with jenny zhang and the second at wordstock in portland with rachel khong and edan lepucki — and i had to read her book. buntin is smart, well-spoken, put-together, and i love how she talked about girls, the complicatedness of girls, the pain caused by addiction. in portland, she also read the opening passage from her book, and it’s one hell of an opening passage, and it’s with this that i will finally leave you. thank you, as always, for reading.

tell me what you can’t forget, and i’ll tell you who you are. i switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark. the train’s eye widens in the tunnel and there she is on the tracks, blond hair swinging. one of our old songs starts playing and i lose myself right in the middle of the cereal aisle. sometimes, late at night, when i’m fumbling with the key outside my apartment door, my eyes meet my reflection in the hallway mirror and i see her, waiting. (buntin, 3)

looking back, looking here. (10 books i loved in 2016)

‘kizzy, i am scared of everything, all the time. i’m scared of my ship getting shot down when i have to land planetoid. i’m scared of the armour in my vest cracking during a fight. i’m scared that the next time i have to pull out my gun, the other guy will be faster. i’m scared of making mistakes that could hurt my crew. i’m scared of leaky biosuits. i’m scared of vegetables that haven’t been washed properly. i’m scared of fish.’

[…]

‘i never thought of fear as something that can go away. it just is. it reminds me that i want to stay alive. that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.’ (chambers, pei, 243)

january 2017 is almost at an end, and i’m a week into being back in california, and i feel like a ghost, just floating here, going through the motions of living but severed from everything — from home, from purpose, from hope. as the bleakness and homesickness set into my bones, here are attempts to anchor myself to something, to food, to books.

of the 60-odd books i read last year, these are the 10 i loved, that stuck with me over the months. they’re listed in the order i read them, starting with kleeman in january and ending with lee in december, and, if i were to sum up 2016 in reading, i’d say that 2016 was a year of bodies, and it was a year of silence. all ten of these books have to do with bodies in some way, whether it’s the value placed on bodies, the diminishing of people to only their bodies, the utility of bodies, the killing of bodies, the domination of bodies, and there’s a lot of silence thrown in there, too, silence in secrets, silence from god, silence as survival.

it was a year of asking myself how it is we define ourselves, how societies define us in accordance with the role they need us to play. it was also a year of asking myself who i was, what i believed, who i desired. like i wrote in my previous end-of-year post, 2016 is the year i walked away from faith and outed myself, and, in many ways, these are the books that carried me through much of that heartache and fear and anxiety.

and, so, without further ado:

  1. alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harpers, 2015) [review]
  2. park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess (dalkey archive press, 2014) [review]
  3. becky chambers, the long way to a small angry planet (hodder & stoughton, 2015) [review]
  4. esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016) [review]
  5. endo shusaku, silence (picador, 2016) [review]
  6. krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016) [review]
  7. sarah waters, tipping the velvet (riverhead, 2000) [review]
  8. garrard conley, boy erased (riverhead, 2016) [review]
  9. sady doyle, trainwreck (melville house, 2016) [review]
  10. corey lee, benu (phaidon, 2015) [review]

i kind of don't know where to start with this.


“humans can be so foolish. they don’t realize the light comes from themselves. they think the whole world is lit by a single lightbulb, but in fact a myriad of small lightbulbs must be lit for the world to become a brighter place. they keep themselves buried in darkness while continuing to envy the ones with light. seeing the darkness in everyone else around them, they give all their votes to the ones who are lit. this explains why poor people give their votes to dictators and why average people love the actors on screen. they don’t believe in their own light. they don’t believe

in each other’s light. they don’t hope; they don’t attempt to discover. and that is where the source of the world’s darkness lies.” (park min-gyu, yohan, 128-9)


i suppose, then, here is this: my favorite book of the year was park min-gyu’s pavane for a dead princess. park gives us three twenty-somethings who work in a department store and become friends, and they’re three young people who exist on the fringes of capitalist korean society, outside the desired standards of beauty and wealth. park essentially takes korea to task for its materialism and its singular standard of beauty, and, maybe, there’s a little too much politicizing, too much blatant criticizing, too much theorizing, but there’s also a lot of empathy and humanity in this novel.

korea is a funny topic for me, and my parents ask often if i hate being korean because i seem to hate korean society so. i counter that, no, i actually love being korean, and i take a lot of pride in korea’s history and the strength of her people and the vibrancy of her food and food culture. however, at the same time, korean society is one that is tremendously flawed and heavily patriarchal, toxic and narrow-minded and causing a great deal of harm to its people, to its children and youth. as i keep telling my parents about my relationship with korea and about everything else, the existence of one does not negate the truth of the other, and my heart aches for korea because i do love her, and, in many ways, for reasons both obvious and not, i will always be drawn to her.

corey lee’s benu, titled after his san francisco restaurant by the same name, reminded me of this. lee brings korean flavors and traditions into his food in thoughtful, creative ways, and i was blown away by the care he exhibits for food overall and korean food and culture particularly. he draws inspiration from other foods and cuisines as well, so it’s not like his cooking is solely korean-inspired, but there’s something about the way he’s negotiated his relationship with his korean ethnicity that i found so relatable.

one thing i love about asian america is the sheer breadth of it, how we all have different ways of being asian-american, of identifying with (or not identifying with) our asian heritages, and one effect of that is that i appreciate when i come across people with whom i can relate. i am not trying to say that my way of being asian-american is the “right” or “good” way to be; i don’t believe at all that there is a “right” or “good” way to be asian-american, just that is right and good for us individually; and i’m honestly not one to place that much importance in having to relate to someone. i often think it’s given more weight than necessary and, when applied the wrong way, used to justify a kind of narrow-mindedness, and i rarely ever seek it out, but i do admit that there is a comfort there sometimes — there is something nice about familiarity, after all, and i am not one to deny that.

anyway, benu is this lovely blend of personal history, korean history, and northern californian sensibility, and it is one stunning book. i’d expect no less of phaidon.


my mouth hurt from speaking english. the muscles around my lips and my cheeks ached. in my dreams, voices stretched into long, silly words that meant nothing, and i woke up saying “milk” or “glass” before tumbling back into the sleep of nonsense dreamers. soon i vomited over and over at the side of the road while david reached over and rubbed my damp neck, and then i craved all kinds of things: hot buns filled with pork, cold and briny seaweed, red bean popsicles. the sudden craving was monstrous, like a thing already in my mouth that could not be tasted or swallowed and just between my frozen teeth with a jaw stuck open, and my longing for these foods was not a longing in my stomach but something jammed deep in my throat. (wang, daisy, 58)

while we’re talking northern california: there’s esmé weijun wang’s the border of paradise, which delivers so gloriously on the “holy shit, what?!” side of the spectrum. i love a book that serves a good mindfuck because it doesn’t happen as often as i’d like, and i love it even more when the author does so in beautiful prose.

i also just personally love how i even knew of the border of paradise, so here’s a story, that i somehow stumbled upon esmé and jenny zhang at the same time a few years ago, somewhere on the internets, and i’ve been following them both since. i remember reading esmé’s journal entries about finishing her novel, signing with an agent, trying to sell the novel, etcetera, etcetera, so i was excited when her novel was published last year, preordering it at mcnally jackson and scuttling over once i got the email that it had arrived and was waiting for me behind the desk.

this is the thing that makes the internet a cool place to me, and there’s something really awesome about seeing something through its journey, especially when it’s a book, especially when you’re a writer yourself and this is a dream and ambition of yours as well. it’s also more the case when the writer is someone as vibrant and generous as esmé; she has a book of essays, the collected schizophrenias, that will be published by graywolf in 2018 after winning the publisher’s nonfiction prize.

(none of this has any bearing on my thoughts re: border or its inclusion on this list. i was actually a little nervous going into it because i didn’t actually know what the book was about — there’s a reason i’m not trying to write a summary; it’s kind of awesome to go into it blind — and there’s always the chance that a book will disappoint. luckily, i genuinely loved it.)

(also, if you’ve never heard of or read jenny zhang, please, please, please do; you will be the better for it. she’s written for rookiehere is a favorite piece; here is another — and she also wrote this fabulous piece for buzzfeed after the michael derrick hudson scandal. she has a book of short stories coming out from random house this spring, and i am so fucking stoked.)

so, there are authors you follow for years who write lyrical prose, and then there are authors who are able to create these wonderful lethargic, sticky moods — and i’ve yet to find another writer who does that as deftly as alexandra kleeman. i love the weird places kleeman takes us, and i love her voices and moods — and i say “voices and moods” plural because i also read her short story collection, intimations (harpers, 2016), last year, and i’m telling you: kleeman’s knack for atmosphere is exquisite. her stories are just as interesting and moody as her tones, and i like her as a human a lot, too. there are some authors you just want to be friends with, and kleeman happens to be one of mine.

and now to switch gears a little.

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the world, to me, seemed utterly transformed since kitty butler had stepped into it. it had been ordinary before she came; now it was full of queer electric spaces, that she left ringing with music or glowing with light. (waters, 60-ish)

park’s pavane may have been my favorite book of the year, but garrard conley’s boy erased and sarah waters’ tipping the velvet may have had the biggest personal impact.

boy erased is conley’s memoir of his time in conversion therapy after he was outed to his parents (by the boy who raped him, no less). conley grew up southern baptist to a very religious family (his father is a pastor), and he writes poignantly about being gay and christian, about not only the fears and anxieties that come of being gay in a christian community but also about the personal clashes that occur within you when you’ve grown up with god woven into your life and, suddenly, he’s not there anymore.

unlike conley's, my faith is fully dead, and, when i read endo shusaku’s silence, i thought that here was a novel that explained to me why. silence tells the story of portuguese priests who sneak into japan in search of a fellow priest, and this is during a time when japan was brutally suppressing and excising christianity from itself, torturing people into renouncing god and killing them when they didn’t. the narrator struggles with god’s silence to the suffering of japanese christians, to the brutality they must endure in god’s name while god sits silent and does nothing and allows such violence and pain to continue, and, in the end, the narrator, too, must decide whether he will renounce god or not.
 

no, no! i shook my head. if god does not exist, how can man endure the monotony of the sea and its cruel lack of emotion? (but supposing … of course, supposing, i mean.) from the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. supposing god does not exist …

this was a frightening fancy. if he does not exist, how absurd the whole thing becomes. (endo, 72)


when i think about silence, i think there is a cost for everything, and there is a cost for silence. silence breeds doubt, and it locks you inside your head, with your own fears and anxieties and insecurities. silence leads to brokenness, too, to broken relationships, to loss of faith, and silence is what cost me my faith, years of crying out to god and hearing nothing.

eventually, you start to feel like you must be mad, yelling at the skies and expecting an answer — and, even if there is a god, what’s the point if he won’t deign to engage with you? a world without god, then, is better than a world with a silent, cruel god.

in the end, in 2016, i did have to confront the frightening reality of a world without god — and it is a frightening reality, especially when you’ve grown up with god, when he was built into the foundations of your worldview. god is the basis of hope; it is his existence that allows you to see beyond this life, to “store your treasures in heaven”; and it sounds absurd to those outside faith, outside religion, but, when you grow up in that, when you believe it, live it, practice it for three decades of your life, the sudden absence of that leaves you bereft.

this is what i loved so much about boy erased, that conley gets this. and here is my favorite passage from everything i read this year:
 

“how do you feel?” my mother said. her hands were firmly fixed at ten and two at the wheel. this vigilance, this never taking a risk when you didn’t have to.

“i’m fine.” we’re all faking it.

“we can stop again if you need.”

“that’s okay.” it’s just that some of us are more aware of it.

silence. my big toe toggling the vent open and closed. with mark’s number in my pocket, i suddenly knew that what i was thinking was true. keeping a secret, telling a lie by omission, made it much easier to see all of the other lies around me. an expert liar was’ merely an expert on his own lies, but those of others as well. was this why LIA’s counselors were so good at challenging their patients, at calling them out? was this why smid and the blond-haired boy didn’t fully rust me?

“are you hungry?”

“no.” i can tell all of this to you later, after the ceremony. i just have to wait for the right moment.

“are you sure?”

“are you hungry?” but i’m afraid you’d be disgusted with me. i’m afraid you’d vomit again, right here in the car.

“a little.” the car turned a sharp curve, a stray pen tumbling out of the cup holder and rolling across the floorboard, a ping as it hit the metal bar beneath my feet. i could have picked it up, uncapped its top, and written my confession right then and there, had LIA’s rules permitted it.

“let’s stop, then.” i realize this now, that all of it might come down to me being afraid. that all of this supposed change is just to please him, to please you.

“i’ll pull into sonic. what do you want?”

“just some fries.” but i’m afraid of losing you. i’m afraid of what i’ll become if i lose you. i’m afraid because i think i’ve already lost god. god’s stopped speaking to me, and what am i supposed to do without him? after nineteen years with god’s voice buzzing around in my head twenty-four hours a day, how am i supposed to walk around without his constant assurance?

“an order of fries, please, and a coke.” beneath the speaker’s static, the clanging of metal in an invisible sink. “and a sonic burger.”

“can i get tater tots instead?” i don’t even know what i would look like to be gay. i can’t even imagine a life where my friends and family would want to talk to me if i was openly gay.

“make that tater tots instead of fries.”

“i’m not really that hungry.” i can do this. i just have to fake my way through until i can take my big risk, whatever that will be. (conley, 222-3)


and then there was tipping the velvet. (oh, tipping the velvet!) i’m slowly rereading it now, and it’s still tugging at my heartstrings in such aching ways. i wrote a giant post about sarah waters in august, though, so i’ll just link to that here.

i also did a compilation of quotes from sady doyle’s trainwreck a few months ago, so i’ll link to that here as well.

i also wrote about krys lee’s how i became a north korean, so i’ll link to that here, too. and i never really wrote about becky chambers’ the long way to a small angry planet, so i can’t link to that, but i loved it and keep recommending it, and i hardly ever read science fiction, so …!

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you needed a vision of the future in order to get anywhere; you couldn’t live life thinking you were always about to fall off a cliff. i didn’t want to tell him i would never go back with him to the church: i would be going forward, forward by way of getting back to the kind of life i used to have, only this time i’d live it better. (kleeman, 281)

making pasta is something i’ve wanted to do for a while now, and one of the definite pros of being back at my parents’ in LA is counter space. marble(?) counter space. lots of marble(?) counter space.

i’ve always loved working with dough; it’s one of the most relaxing things i can think to do; and i love the physicality of it. i’m not one who likes using gadgets in the kitchen (i won’t even use a crock pot or a hand mixer), so i do everything by hand, kneading, rolling, cutting, and it has been my saving grace this past week. cooking, after all, has always been the best therapy.

like i said above, i feel like a ghost, and this is how i’m getting through these days. i cook. i think about what i’m cooking, how to get better, what to try next. i think about how i can challenge myself in the kitchen because, for some reason, i don’t doubt that i can try new things, new techniques, more complicated doughs and succeed (or, at least, not fail totally). i believe i’m capable of this, of learning, of practicing, of improving, in ways that i cannot yet believe that i will write fiction again, that i will feel whole again, that i will learn to live with my suicidal depression — that i can be loved, despite all the ways in which i am broken. i don’t have that faith, but, at least, i have a kitchen to turn to, hands to work with, hunger and curiosity to feed — and, above all, i have food.

this is all we've got.

the snow stopped, i murmured to myself. it felt as if a long time had passed. snow erases everything. sometimes, it covers up things that can rot and disappear. for a little while, snow helps us to remember the memories we keep scattered in our hearts. and now the snow had stopped. (park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess, 10)
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2016 was a year of heartache; i didn’t know my heart could hurt like it did.

i didn’t know it could hurt so much from fear, anxiety, and disappointment. i didn’t know it could hurt so much just being who i am in a conservative setting, to look into the future and see the continued aggression and rejection, and i didn’t know it could hurt so much on account of my country.

i didn’t know my heart could hurt so much from sheer longing, not even for anything impossible but for things that seem so basic, so human.

i didn’t know my heart could hurt so much, to want so much to love someone, to want only happiness for her.

i didn’t know the human heart could be so easy to decimate, so difficult to kill.


if my heart feels destroyed, my brain feels so muddled these days. i’ve been trying to write this post since december 17, when we had snow in new york, and, now, it’s december 30, and i’m trapped in california because 2016 is the year the idea of rock bottom lost all meaning. i have things i want to say, but i’m not sure where to start, and all the anxiety from being stuck here is bleeding into everything.

all i want right now is to go back home.

i suppose, though, here’s a brief summation, that 2016 was the year of instability, of looking for and failing to find a full-time job and gain, with it, a measure of stability and assurance that i haven’t totally fucked up. it’s the year i finally met the challenge of semi-regularly producing content and trying to find a voice of my own, and it’s also the year i stopped caring about trying to fit into a specific niche or satisfy the implied requirements of what makes a good social media presence of a particular ilk.

2016 is the year i was constantly surprised by people’s capacity to love and reach out, and this means a tremendous amount to me because 2016 is the year i learned to carry anxiety with me everywhere, the year when spaces that were once familiar became treacherous. it’s the year i looked my sexuality in the eye, recognized it for what it was, and outed myself on social media, which wasn’t something i planned to do, ended up doing the night of the election because of terror, fear, and rage. 2016 is also the year i excised god from my life and walked away from faith — and the two combined means that 2016 was a year of constant tension and strain and worry.

it’s liberating to be out, but it comes packaged with a whole lot of uncertainty and fear. i also have the added baggage of having grown up in a conservative christian community, and being out means that i honestly don’t know where i stand with many people, if and which relationships are dead, what consequences my conservative christian family might face from their community because of my orientation. it might be a stupid thing for me to be worrying about, but it is there, and it is a thing that has kept me silent or talking in what feels like code, hoping people (allies) read between the lines or (non-allies) miss the hidden language altogether.


it’s been a lot to carry, trying to rebuild my world without faith and to navigate life outside the heteronormative mainstream. i feel almost like i’ve been reborn, and it has been exciting to claim this part of myself that i’d neglected and dismissed for so long — but that makes me angry, too, the narrowness of the world of my youth, the ways religion continues to repress and shame and harm with ugly violence fueled by blind hatred.

and, so, 2016 is the year i learned that silence is not an option. i ended up outing myself in a pique of rage and panic because this country had basically made it very clear on november 9 that it didn’t matter whether i was in the closet or not — it was going to come after me and my rights, anyway, so i might as well speak up, and i might as well fight.

which goes to say that we might be looking right at 2017, and i might be feeling completely muddled and broken these days, but we’ll find the words to talk about all this shit in the months to come.

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my goal for 2016 was to read 75 books, and i did not meet that goal, coming in at 65 (i think). i feel like i fell short of all my reading goals this year — didn’t read 75 books, didn’t read anything in completion in korean — though i did blog more, so i did write more about what i was reading.

it’s not to say that 2016 was a bad reading year. i don’t think any year in which i read and attempt to read diversely, intelligently, and thoughtfully can be a bad reading year, but it is true that 2016 was largely an uninspired reading year. i struggled considerably with staying engaged, staying interested, not with specific books per se but with fiction in general. for the most part, though, as unpleasant as it is to be uninspired, that was still okay because i diverted a lot of my focus into reading more food writing and more cookbooks, into exploring what that intersection of literary writing and/or journalism and food looks like.

this is not a comment on the books that were published in 2016 — or that i read this year because i read some amazing books that moved me and challenged me and helped me find hope amidst the shit (my next post will be about 10 specific books). i’ve struggled with some very real fatigue this year, though, and it’s a fatigue that has almost entirely to do with whiteness and straightness, despite 2016 having been a pretty good year for writers of color. it’s encouraging to see the industry being better, trying to look beyond its white straightness, and yet …?

maybe this fatigue is an inevitable by-product of both this election cycle and this election, all the ugliness it exposed to be alive and well in this country. maybe it’s an inevitable by-product of the disappointments in my own life, of not finding a job, of struggling so much to survive, to pay the bills, to write. maybe it’s also an inevitable by-product of all my interpersonal and social anxiety.

maybe it’s all of it.


in his year in reading essay for the millions, kevin nguyen writes:

if you believe that books have the power to do good, you also have to believe that they can do just as much harm. after the election, there was no soul searching on book twitter. no one questioned the power structures of publishing. can we talk about how one of the big five publishers is owned by news corp? often the publishing of things like bill o’really’s twisted histories is justified as a means to support literary fiction. but does anyone asks if that trade-off is worth it?

it’s easy to romanticize books and to make them out to be great cultural pillars, and that’s not to say that they aren’t. it’s crucial to recognize literature’s place in the world and its ability to shape thought and, yes, do good (and to stop trying to kill humanities programs), but it’s easy to lose ourselves in this idea that, because we read, we are good, we are somehow superior to other consumers of other modes of culture.

we make a thing out of a flawed industry, even going so far as to make the big 5 out to be these great underdogs in the world of amazon and internet media, when big publishing is exactly that — big — and just as guilty of making bad decisions, of failing to adapt and make changes, of sitting around and talking about a topic (aka diversity) instead of trying to do something about it. just because publishing’s business is books doesn’t mean it’s an industry that’s not guilty of indulging and overexposing celebrity, of selling out, of making questionable compromises in the name of what — money? reputation? power?

which is not to dismiss the agents and editors and publicists and marketers and designers and the army of assistants and HR people who try to acquire great work by writers of different colors and backgrounds and orientations and bring beautiful, thoughtful writing into the world. i know that there are great people working in publishing today, and i love the work that they do, the dedication they have to literature and literary culture. as a reader, i am indebted to them, and, as a writer, i hope one day to be published by them, to place my book in their hands, to have them on my side.

and yet there is something about always having to make this kind of statement that feels odd — like, how we must always go out of our ways to say that, yes, we know that not all white people are racists and we know that not all men are misogynists or assholes who commit violence against women, not all christians are homophobic bigots. to have to make that concession is simply another way that power exhibits itself, this seeming need to protect the power-holder’s fragility and indulge its self-defensiveness, all just to be able to say that shit is bad and shit needs to change.

making a criticism is not making a blanket statement that everything in that setting or grouping is bad. things are not so clearly either/or, and contradictions exist within everything — and, as such, 2016 was a good year for writers of color, but 2017 needs to be a better one. we need more writers of minority groups telling their stories, whether through journalism, fiction, or personal essays. we need to be asking ourselves if the trade-offs are worth it, and we need to admit that books can do as much damage as good. we need to question why we read what we read, why we write what we write, why we publish what we publish, and we need to look at where voices are being cut off and shut out.

we need to ask how we can do better, whether as people who work in the industry or as writers or as readers because it will take all of us to create change and move the world to a better, more open place.

i don’t mean this to sound condescending or like a lecture, but i do want to throw the challenge out there because, again, silence is not an option, and, similarly, indifference is not an option. we don’t get to not care anymore, and, as such, i hope to see more in 2017 from publishing and the literary world. like i said, there are people out there doing great work, so i don’t think this is a vain hope.

ultimately, 2016 is the year that being able to recognize myself in literature started to mean a whole fucking lot, and i will do as much as i can in my own limited ways to bring more attention and awareness to great writing by minority writers. it is the least that i can do.

if 2016 was a year of heartache, 2017 is the year we lose each other.

early next year, i’m looking at a move to the bay area, back across the country to california, that fucking state that just won’t let her goddamn claws out of me. it’s a mess of a situation where no one wins, not me, not my family, not anyone involved, and it’s not something i’m really thinking about in any substantive way yet because to do so would be to descend into rage and desperation.

i know exactly what a move back to california means; it means a return to rootlessness and restlessness and continued self-loathing. it means not letting myself settle down because my singular goal will be to leave as soon as i can because the longer i stay, the greater the damage, and i’m already in pieces.

to some, it might sound strange and irrational because a state is a state, it’s just place, somewhere to be, who bloody cares? a cage, however, is place, too, and place is a weapon, a trap, a hell, and, as a queer woman of color, place matters a lot because place is directly attached to safety, and safety is something i don’t take for granted.

there’s that saying that a wounded animal is the most dangerous, but i wonder to whom the danger lies. is it the wounded animal that is in danger from herself? or is it the person or thing cornering her that is in danger? when you trap a wounded animal, who will she harm — you? or herself?


if there’s something to remember, it’s that things do not exist simply in clear binaries. it is possible to love someone and be disappointed in that same person, to acknowledge someone’s goodness and generosity as well as that person’s narrow-mindedness and flaws. it is possible to love someone who harms you, not in a stockholm syndrome sort of way, but in a genuine way that recognizes that we all fuck up and we are all capable of causing great harm but we can also admit that and work to heal wounds and rebuild trust. 

it is possible to be so completely, humbly grateful for what someone does for you and find yourself suffocating from that same gratitude, and it is possible to care for someone and love that person deeply and trigger that person in all the worst possible ways. it is possible to believe that you are doing the best for someone and wreak so much damage that that person will flee from you just to have even the smallest chance to heal.

it is possible for things to be okay even while they’ve fractured beyond repair.

it is possible not to want to live and also not to want to die.
it is possible to listen to someone speak and not hear what that person is actually saying.
it is possible to have an open heart and draw lines and conditions that close up that same heart.

it is possible to be, to commit acts that so completely oppose each other at the same time, and to believe in a world of perfect consistency is to be naive.


when i think about 2017, i see nothing. i have no hopes, no expectations, just silence and darkness, a low thrum of hopelessness underneath it all. 2017 already looks like regression, ten steps backwards, and i can already chart it out in loss. 2016, in many ways, is ending with lines drawn in the sand indicating the limits to certain relationships, and 2017 is starting not with calm and anticipation but with my anxiety and depression keyed up as high as they can go. 2016 might have tracked the decline of my mental state, but 2017 is already tearing at the shreds, causing more damage before the year has even begun.

i have one goal for 2017, and it is to move back out east, whether to new york or boston, by the end of it because i will not live and die in california, a state that i despise and that has never been kind to me. i know where home is, and, by the end of 2017, i will be back home.