[dec 5] here's somewhere to be.

rooms. every room a world. to be god: to be every life before we die: a dream to drive men mad. but to be one person, one woman — to live, suffer, bear children & learn others lives & make them into print worlds spinning like planets in the minds of other men. (306)

some days, i run out of words, and today is one of those. (i also spent a fair chunk of time today working on an essay i’d like to pitch, which mostly explains the inability to pull together words tonight.) some days, the loss of words comes with a lack of inspiration, and, during such times, i find myself reaching for sylvia plath’s unabridged journals — so here are a few quotes, along with a few images of the new york public library.

in bed, bathed, and the good rain coming down again — liquidly slopping down the shingled roof outside my window. all today it has come down, in its enclosing wetness, and at last i am in bed, propped up comfortably by pillows — listening to it spurting and drenching — and all the different timbers of tone — and syncopation. the rapping on the resonant gutters — hard, metallic. the rush of a stream down the drain pipe splattering flat on the earth, wearing away a small gully — the musical falling of itself, tinkling faintly on the tin garbage pails in a high pitched tattoo. and it seems that always in august i am more aware of the rain. (123)

&

the dialogue between my Writing and my Life is always in danger of becoming a slithering shifting of responsibility, of evasive rationalizing: in other words: i justified the mess i made of life by saying i’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it; i justified my writing by saying it would be published, give me life (and prestige to life). now, you have to begin somewhere, and it might as well be with life; a belief in me, with my limitations, and a strong punchy determination to fight to overcome one by one: like languages, to learn french, ignore italian (asloppy knowledge of 3 languages is dilettantism) and revive german again, to build each solid. to build all solid. (208-9)

&

simply the fact that i write in here able to hold a pen, proves, i suppose, the ability to go on living. (334)

&

very few people do this any more. it’s too risky. first of all, it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. it’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all. or to give your soul to god like st. therese and say: the one thing i fear is doing my own will. do it for me, god. (435)

&

it is raining. steady straight streams of rain falling, falling, slicking the green tarpaper roofflats, the pink and blue and lavender slates of the slant roof, looping down in runnels, taking the color of the slates and tiles like a chameleon water. falling in little white rings in the puddles on my porch. dropping a scrim of pale lines between me and the pines, filling the distance with a watery luminous grey. (512)

what if our work isn’t good enough? we get rejections. isn’t this the world’s telling us we shouldn’t bother to be writers? how can we know if we work now hard and develop ourselves we will be more than mediocre? isn’t this the world’s revenge on us for sticking our neck out? we can never know until we’ve worked, written. we have no guarantee we’ll get a writer’s degree. weren’t the mothers and businessmen right after all? shouldn’t we have avoided these disquieting questions and taken steady jobs and secured a good future for the kiddies?

not unless we want to be bitter all our lives. not unless we want to feel wistfully: what a writer i might have been, if only. if only i’d had to guts to try and work and shoulder the insecurity all that trial and work implied.

writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and removing of people and the world as they are and as they might be. a shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. the writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. people read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. it helps them, or it does not. it feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. you do it for itself first. if it brings in money, how nice. you do not do it first for money. money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter. not that you don’t want it. it is only too lovely when a profession pays for your bread and butter. with writing, it is maybe, maybe-not. how to live with such insecurity? with what is worst, the occasional lack or loss of faith in the writing itself? how to live with these things?

the worst thing, worse than all of them, would be to live with not writing. so how to live with the lesser devils and keep them lesser? (436-7)

[dec 5] here's a way to dress up leftovers: put an egg on it.

it was more than just missing the smell of the desert grass or being able to fall back into reskitkish. it was that people there understood. as dear as her crewmates were, constantly having to explain cultural differences, to bite back a friendly remark that might offend alien ears, to hold her hands still when she wanted to touch someone — it all grew tiring. (the long way to a small and angry planet, 271)

&

… out here, where she was hyper-aware of everything she was and wasn’t, truth left her vulnerable. (a closed and common orbit, 24)

last december, i went to hear naomi williams (landfalls, FSG, 2015) read in brooklyn, and she made an interesting distinction between being imaginative and being creative. she said the former is to create entirely from scratch, to imagine worlds into existence, while the latter is to take what is already existent and build from there. she wasn’t saying that one is better than the other, that one requires more and thus is more impressive; the point she was making was simply that here are two ways that creative minds work.

(i don’t think they’re mutually exclusive [and i think she’d agree that they’re not, either], and i think that we might each be inclined more dominantly to one or the other, but creating ultimately takes from both columns.)

on the rare occasion i read science fiction/fantasy, i’m reminded of this because i’m astounded (truly, seriously) by how people can create entire worlds and beings and cultures in their brains and then put those creations on paper (or on screen) for us to read and experience. seriously. mind. blown.

---

a few months ago, i came across becky chambers’ the long way to a small angry planet (hodder and stoughton, 2015) as it made its rounds on instagram. the cover caught my eye (i mean, look at it), so i had to have it — luckily, the story sounded interesting and like something i would love, and the book was highly praised. i promptly ordered it and loved it, then waited impatiently for the sequel, a closed and common circuit, which was published this october.

(i’m shit at synopses, so please google.)

what i liked so much about both books is that chambers shows us what it looks like to live in community with people and beings who are vastly different from us. her world is populated by humans and a number of different species of aliens, each with its own culture, its own language, its own society, and she shows us how they exist together, not always in peace and without conflict but, generally, harmoniously.

chambers also shows us about prejudice, about species-ism, which stands in for racism in her books, and she shows us that it requires work to dismantle prejudice. it requires us to come face-to-face with the ugliness in ourselves, and it requires us to step past that, to make ourselves uncomfortable, to do the work it takes to open our minds and learn to see past our judgments and -isms.

one of my favorite scenes from a closed and common circuit is this exchange between sidra and tak, an aeluon. sidra is an AI in a “human” body made of circuits and wires (called a “kit”), and she’s illegal because AIs are meant to be helpful mechanisms installed into things, not installed in forms that resemble humans. she befriends tak, an alien tattoo artist, at a party, and they become friends, sidra eventually going to tak to get a tattoo of her own — except, when she’s there to get inked, her kit freaks out and glitches because it can’t handle the nanobots being inked onto it.

tak, unsurprisingly, freaks out to find out that sidra is an AI, and they part on bad terms.

in this scene, tak comes to see sidra weeks later.

’and here, AIs are just … tools. they’re the things that make travel pods go. they’re what answer your questions at the library. they’re what greet you at hotels and shuttle ports when you’re travelling. i’ve never thought of them as anything but that.

‘okay,’ sidra said. none of that was an out-of-the-ordinary sentiment, but it itched all the same.

‘but then you … you came into my shop. you wanted ink.i’ve thought about what you said before you left. you came to me, you said, because you didn’t fit within your body. and that … that is something more than a tool would say. and when you said it, you looked … angry. upset. i hurt you, didn’t i?’

‘yes,’ sidra said.

tak rocked her head in guilty acknowledgement. ‘you get hurt. you read essays and watch vids. i’m sure there are huge differences between you and me, but i mean … there are huge differences between me and a harmagian. we’re all different. i’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left, and a lot of reading, and —‘ she exhaled again, short and frustrated. ‘what i’m trying to say is i — i think maybe i underestimated you. i misunderstood, at least.’

[…]

sidra processed, processed, processed. […] ‘this … re-evaluation of yours. does it extend to other AIs? or do you merely see me differently because i’m in a body?’

tak exhaled. ‘we’re being honest here, right?’

‘i can’t be anything but.’

‘okay, well — wait, seriously?’

‘seriously.’

‘right. okay. i guess i have to be honest too, then, if we’re gonna keep this fair.’ tak knitted her long silver fingers together and stared at them. ‘i’m not sure i would’ve gone down this road if you weren’t in a body, no. i … don’t think it would’ve occurred to me to think differently.’

sidra nodded. ‘i understand. it bothers me, but i do understand.’

‘yeah. it kind of bothers me, too. i’m not sure i like what any of this says about me.’ (189-90)

i particularly like that last line because it’s an understandably big block when it comes to trying to overcome prejudice of any kind. no one wants to learn that s/he has that kind of ugliness within. no one wants to see that reflected at him/her. no one wants to admit that s/he is racist, sexist, prejudiced in any way. we all want to see ourselves as above all that.

the thing, though, is that, unless we’re willing to go there and see the prejudice we carry, we will never change. unless we ourselves are willing to look in the mirror and look that internal ugliness in the eye, we will never change, just like we will never change unless we’re willing to open ourselves up and have the bloody difficult conversations.

and we will never change as long as we stay in our bubbles and echo chambers. we will never learn to see the world through another lens, to see people who are different from us as dimensional, living human beings, as long as we refuse to step out of our comfort zones and try.

that goes for everyone, for all of us, myself included, liberal or conservative, male or female, straight or LGBTQ+. we all have some measure of internalized misogyny and/or racism and/or classism and/or name your -ism, and, unless we try to change, we never will, and neither will the world.

chambers gets at this point in her books, and she does it without getting on a soapbox, weaving these conflicts into her stories and showing us through narrative how difficult it is to recognize prejudice and to work to overcome it. she shows us the consequences of staying locked in a closed, self-serving mindset, just as she also shows us the fruits that come of confronting that ugliness and becoming more open, understanding people. it’s not easy, but it is worth it and makes for a better society — and that, i believe, is why we ought to try, even though the process is neither painless nor pretty.

[dec 5] here's to the good days.

this, too,
will i get used to it all?
even the way i am now,
after it’s all passed,
will it be a memory?
- nell, “habitual irony”

이것도 언젠가
모두 익숙해질까 그렇게 될까
지금 이러는 것도
모두 지나고 나면 추억인 걸까
- 넬, “습관적 아이러니”

today was one of the good days.

i didn’t wake up with a pit of nausea in my stomach, wanting to vomit and willing my heart to stop racing. i didn’t have an anxiety attack. i didn’t spend hours mired in depressed despair, my mind churning over stress and unease. it wasn’t a perfect day, and i still had anxiety constantly gnawing away at the peripheries of my brain, but, regardless, it was a good day.

one of the reasons i’m trying to post every day this week is that i want to get better at talking about these things. anxiety and depression are so difficult to talk about, partly because to do so is to get intensely personal, to make myself vulnerable in ways that scare me. it’s also difficult because it requires that i maybe lay out more details of my life than i may be willing — or maybe it’s that i’m not quite ready for that yet, am still unsure where to draw the lines between where to be transparent and where to maintain my privacy.

i’m still trying to negotiate these lines.

i do this, however, because i think it’s essential. there are topics i want to write about, and they include depression, suicidal thinking, body shaming. sometimes, i wonder if there’s a way to write about these topics without writing about myself, but i think that it’s necessary, in many ways, to talk about myself, about the ways that i’ve wrestled with these issues, with the damage that has shaped me and the path of my life — and this isn’t because i think i’m special but because i think i’m not.

there are so many people out in the world who also struggle with depression and suicidal thinking and also carry the scars from body shaming, and i think we need to break down the stigma around these issues and work towards healing, whether as wounded individuals or as a culture-at-large that perpetuates this damage. i think the first step we can take is for us to start talking about it because talking about it is a way to start creating connections that help us know we’re not alone, that we need not live in pain, with pain alone.

so i’m trying. and i will keep trying.

one of the reasons i like to cook/bake is that it helps me work things out of my system, whether they be stress or anxiety or just general restlessness. (it also helps me procrastinate.) i’m not a particularly good cook — i can bake fairly well, and i have a general, basic understanding of how to make food, but that’s kind of it.

(though maybe that’s all anyone really needs on a day-to-day basis. i just wish i knew more, but i always wish i knew more of everything.)

i’ve been trying to get better at cooking, though, and to challenge myself more in terms of what i cook. i can be really lazy and eat nothing but hot dogs and eggs over rice for days, maybe throwing in some roasted brussel sprouts when my body starts revolting, so i’ve been trying to think more consciously about what i’m eating and, in connection, what i’m buying at trader joe’s and why.

i’ve also been trying to cook more because, again, it gets me out of my head — and, see, this is where daily/regular posting feels weird, especially because it’s not like i’m coming into this space with a specific book or theme i’m tackling in an essay-ish form of greater length. i feel like i’m writing a journal, and i don’t have anything against journaling — it’s just weird for me, especially here. i don’t know why.

moving away from my discomfort, though: i used instagram stories for the first time tonight, honestly because i needed to let my chicken brown and that meant letting it sit there and brown for eight or so minutes on each side. i also had to do it in two batches because my dutch oven is only so big, which meant a fair bit of downtime, even after i’d chopped up my leeks and green beans and done the dishes and made coffee and swiffered the floor.

i like social media, especially instagram, and i appreciate it, too. i’m super grateful for the community on instagram, for everyone who follows me there and/or visits this space and takes the time to read or comment or even just like — i promise that none of it goes unnoticed, even if i am stupidly slow at relying to comments.

for some, this might sound absurd because social media (and even blogging) might seem like a superfluous, kind of self-centered thing, but, if you know anything of loneliness and isolation because of who you are, if you have a brain that retreats into itself because of anxiety or depression or any other condition, if you have a body that leaves you in constant pain and exhausts you with the smallest of tasks, social media and the community on the internet really mean a lot.

like many things, social media is an easy thing to dismiss when you function “normally,” but, sometimes, to some of us, on our worst days, it’s kind of all we’ve got — that and books and, for me, food.

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this is dad’s chicken + leeks from julia turshen’s small victories. she mentions that her dad sometimes throws in carrots and creamer potatoes, so i threw in some green beans because i felt like i should eat something green. i used leftover homemade chicken broth from the last time i made my bastardization of hainanese chicken rice, and i ate this over rice with a side of kkak-du-gi, and it was a very simple but very satisfying meal.

(this post was partly in commemoration of my first instagram stories — heh, not really, but this is not a form i’ll be adopting for this space. follow on instagram for more of this? idk.)

[dec 5] here's a challenge.

ash twisted up all the courage inside herself and said, “i was waiting for you.” when the words came out of her they seemed to hang in a cloud of desire, and the texture of them surprised even ash. (lo, ch. xiii)

here’s a week’s challenge:  to read and write and post every day. five days, five posts, it’d be nice if it could be five books, but, ha, that’s funny.

at some point in these five days, we’ll get into why this challenge comes here and now.

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“it may not be your dream, stepsister, but do not scoff at those who do dream of it.” (clara, lo, ch. xiii)

---

last night, i read ash (little brown, 2009) by malinda lo, a YA retelling of the cinderella story, except it’s set in a more fantastic realm where the boundary between the human world and the fairy world is blurred. it’s also different in that the cinderella figure (ash) neither falls in love with a prince nor is rescued by one; she falls in love with the king’s huntress instead and seeks her own freedom to choose and pursue her love.

i am not one who is enthralled by retellings, and i find the cinderella story to be a tired one, one that wastes unnecessary pages in the same set-up of girl losing mother, girl’s father remarrying, girl losing father, stepmother forcing girl to become a servant to pay off her father’s debts.

we know what happens in the cinderella story, and writers know that and yet (or thus) slog through establishing this tired background like it’s essential for the reader to slog through it as well. it’s not like i’ve read a lot of cinderella retellings, but i do wish we’d just get dropped into the story, forget starting from childhood, like how i don’t understand why korean dramas must invest episodes with child actors instead of just starting with the main characters as adults and weaving their backstories into the story.

ash, though — lo luckily doesn’t spend more pages than necessary on the set-up, and she also uses the pages to establish her world and to situate us within it, to make us familiar with the role fairy tales play in ash’s life. the book is well-paced and zips along nicely, integrating its own mythology with the cinderella story, such as with the fairy who takes the role of fairy godmother, except, in ash, he’s male and sinister and not quite so genial.

the novel really hits it stride when ash meets the huntress, kaisa, and ash starts falling in love. lo doesn’t make a big deal of this, though; ash doesn’t worry over her developing feelings for kaisa, except in the ways we wonder if our feelings are reciprocated; and, in lo’s world, there is no agonizing over sexuality or attraction — it is what it is, and it is love.

maybe it goes without saying that it’s refreshing to read a love story like this, to read about two women who fall in love and that’s that. it’s not to say that we don’t need narratives that show the struggle to recognize and accept one’s sexuality and orientation — as long as we live in the world we do, we need to hear those stories, and we need to listen to and recognize and work to heal that pain — but we need narratives like this, too, narratives that show this love to be normal, that postulate a world in which it is simply accepted and allow us the hope to continue working towards making that our reality.

… but what about the two books that are actually photographed in this post?

---

i read cookbooks like i read books, cover to cover, and i’ve recently been developing a taste for a certain kind of cookbook, one that’s more like a hybrid of cookbook and memoir, that’s there less to be cooked from and more to derive inspiration from. i like cookbooks that challenge us to look at food a different way, to look at food culture a different way, to look at its history and examine its place in the world and explore where else it can go. taking it a step further, in general, this is the food writing i love.

which isn’t surprising because what i’m drawn to in creatives is a unique way of looking at things. i’m interested in the ways that we bring our backgrounds and histories and tastes and preferences to something like a story or food or music and create something that is individual and vibrant and alive. i’m interested in how we each individually negotiate our relationships with our ethnic, gender, sexual identities because we all do so in different ways and that, in turn, shapes what we say through our work.

and i’ve found that those are the discussions about craft i’m interested in and those are the cookbooks i’m drawn to — and all this is to say that this is why i’ve been looking forward to reading corey lee's benu (phaidon, 2015) so much. i mean, lee says it himself:

there are recipes, but this is not a book intended to be cooked from. it is meant to archive and share with you something that our team works so tirelessly to execute every day. food is an ephemeral form of expression, and i want to document some of our hard work.

at its most ambitious level, i hope this book will spur chefs to make new and delicious creations with some of the ingredients that we use. and for diners, to seek out some new food adventures. i hope you enjoy it. (lee, 23)

so there’s an introduction of sorts. i’ve been reading benu slowly (for now; i could go into devouring mode tomorrow), so there’ll be more on benu as i read it over the next few days, and on o chonghui’s river of fire (columbia university press, 2012). i started reading the first story in the collection today, and it is delightfully strange. i’m looking forward to these five days.

i had lunch at danji today. it was good, not great, and a tad overpriced. truthfully, i wanted to like it more than i actually did, and the price was a contributing factor in my impression of the restaurant. to be honest, it's hard for me to find korean food (and tacos) i love in NYC when i grew up in LA, where korean food is excellent in flavor, quality of ingredients, and price. my expectations are unfortunately high indeed.

as she walked, she touched the trees one by one as if she were marking the path, as if her handprints left glowing traces on the bark. she felt a little guilty because she had lied to the huntress, and she wondered if the huntress had known, for ash had not been lost that day. (lo, ch. xi)

what about those things we see.

but did he understand that she would have felt the same way if carol had never touched her? yes, and if carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a doll’s valise in the store. if carol, in fact, had never spoken to her at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. it was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found carol — (132)

over the weekend, i read patricia highsmith’s the price of salt (dover, 1952), which i liked, and saw carol, which i didn’t love. part of it was that i didn’t think cate blanchett and rooney mara had any chemistry together, despite the film’s best efforts to contrive some (cinematography can only do so much). another part was that i found mara to be so lifeless and flat that therese lost all dimensions and came across as robotic and feelingless, with none of the naïveté and complexity and emotional angst she has in the novel.

it was also that i had issues with the narrative as it was adapted, and maybe this is why i shouldn’t chase a novel immediately with its adaptation. the film takes the romance for granted and is eager to rush into it, throwing aside all the emotional tension and uncertainty that runs through the novel. it does address the social crap around being queer in the mid-1900s (and i talk more about this later), but all that seems to exist outside the romance, instead of those fears manifesting in carol and therese’s relationship, which is something the novel does pretty well.

that wasn’t my biggest problem with the film, though. i’ll use carol to refer to the film, the price of salt to the novel.

---

the price of salt isn’t necessarily a book peopled with characters you like. therese’s naivete sometimes makes you want to roll your eyes, and there’s a selfishness, a distance, to carol that makes her almost unlikable. she keeps things to herself and doesn’t really allow therese in, especially when it comes to her impending divorce with her husband, harge, and the custody battle they’re in over their young daughter.

as readers, we’re made to understand that there’s a fear underlying all of carol’s distance, that carol might reciprocate therese’s feelings but is aware of the real consequences of pursuing said feelings. it’s what i liked about the price of salt, this contrast between a woman who’s been hurt by the world because of who she desires and a younger woman who’s just discovering that she is capable of love and desire, that sex is not something that should leave you questioning, “is this right?” — and, maybe most importantly, that there is love that exists outside the expected man-woman relationship.

(it should be noted that the price of salt is written in very limited third-person, and we’re with therese the whole time. we see carol and interpret her words and actions through therese’s eyes.)

my main problem with carol was how it made people and things nicer than they maybe should be, than the price of salt portrays them to be.

carol herself is made nicer, her more brittle edges sanded down and made soft, and she’s more genial, kinder, less selfish. we see more directly what she’s going through, so she’s more accessible to us and, thus, more understandable, but her interactions with therese are absent that hesitation and caution that come from carol’s fears and, consequently, trap therese in her emotional vacillations. in some ways, carol actually demonstrates less fear in being found out in the film, though her fear of losing her child is still present.

seeing more of carol means we also see more of her husband, harge, and it’s this that bothers me most.

i think the film frankly gives us too much of him, and it’s as though we’re to feel sympathy for him, the sad privileged white heterosexual man whose wife would rather be with another woman than with him. maybe that wasn’t the film’s intention; maybe the film just wanted to bring a semblance of balance to the story; but that still bothers me immensely, just this idea that the only way we can bring queer stories to the center is by giving straight people space, like we cannot exist without being fair to them, though we shouldn’t dare to expect the same fairness from them. it’s about power, pure and simple, and it puts a bad taste in my mouth.

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what the film does do is portray heteronormative life. it shows us what was (what is) expected of people and gives us visual depictions of social mores and behaviors. it takes us into parties, into homes, into carol’s attorney’s office, and, by taking us out of the narrow third-person of therese’s POV in the price of salt, carol shows us what carol’s reality actually is, and it’s here where the film’s value lies.

we’re there when carol is told that her husband is attaching a “morality clause” to their divorce to keep her child from her. we’re there as she’s made to see a psychotherapist, and we’re there to hear her attorney say the psychotherapist will give testimony that she has “recovered” from her affair with therese. we’re there to know that she’s been barred from seeing therese again. we’re there to see that carol has to make these concessions so that she can even be given the chance to negotiate a fairer custody agreement with her soon-to-be ex-husband, and we’re there to see the toll it takes.

in the end, she can’t take it and gives up custody of her child and settles for supervised visits. some might say this makes her a bad mother, but can you imagine what it’s like, to have to sit there and essentially have your humanity challenged, to have your love used as a weapon against you? to be made to live in a cage, against your nature, your identity? to suppress such vital parts of you that others simply take for granted?

and this is what i appreciated about carol — that we see what carol is put through, how she’s broken down and has to make a huge sacrifice simply for a chance at her own happiness — and, no less importantly, that she has a chance for happiness. she has a chance to thrive, to love and be loved, to live her own life. 

it’s a narrative we need to see more, that being queer doesn’t mean ending in death and tragedy. at the same time, though, i think it’s worth noting that carol at least has the freedom and financial ability to be able to walk away from her husband, from that suburban life, but how many people don’t? how many of us still live in fear of being cut off, exiled, cast out? because the reality also is that it might be 2016, but we’re not much safer now than carol was then.

while we’re talking media, let’s also talk this gilmore girls revival.

i love seasons 1-3 of the gilmore girls, and i do have a fairly deep fondness for the show, so i was excited for this revival. i hadn’t read any reviews or much commentary about it before i sat down to watch it, so i went into it wanting to love it, fully expecting to enjoy being back in stars hollow with lorelai, rory, and emily.

alas, it was not meant to be.

i’ve always known the gilmore girls was a white show (it doesn’t actually win points for lane and michel), but it’s like the revival took any criticism it might have received about its straight whiteness and decided to fuck the critics, dismiss them as being hyper-critical and sensitive, and placate them by hiring more people of color to sit in as extras. i almost want to hope the creators were trying to be offensive because i’d rather have the deliberate racism and homophobia than this, whatever the hell this revival was.

i knew we were off to a bad start in the first episode (“winter”), with lorelai’s sulking over sooki’s absence at the dragonfly and her inexplicably flipping out at roy choi (plus a david chang diss) — and i actually did make myself step back and ask whether i was being oversensitive because choi and chang are both korean-americans and i do admire both greatly. but, then, there was the international cuisine festival (or whatever it was called) when mrs. kim trotted out her choir of koreans “fresh off the boat,” and i started squinting my eyes and shaking my head because i still want to know from which ass the gilmore girls is pulling its korean stereotypes.

(yes, i know palladino’s bff is korean-american. that actually explains and excuses nothing.)

and then there was berta, emily’s new live-in maid who becomes a running gag because emily doesn’t even know what language she speaks and berta’s family members keep showing up to fix things in emily’s house. (because that’s what immigrants are here for, to fix shit.)

and then there was that town council meeting in “spring,” where taylor announces that they’ve had to scrap plans for stars hollow’s first pride parade because there aren’t enough gay people living in stars hollow. this elicits shocked reactions like “why aren’t there more gays here?! we’re such a cute town! blah blah blah,” before the show uses literal minutes for the townspeople to remonstrate their offense that neighboring towns won’t “lend us their gays.”

at which point i said, “fuck you,” and stopped watching. which was apparently a good move because there’s fat shaming in the third episode, plus more racism all throughout.

if you want to think i’m being oversensitive, fine. (i don’t know why you’re reading me, anyway.) it’s sad that it still needs stating that people of color are not props. LGBTQ people are not props. diversity is not simply adding people of color to the background. it is not presenting them as caricatures and stereotypes, as foreign figures whose accents are to be made fun of, whose languages are to be mocked, whose sexual orientations are to render them as objects.

and here’s the thing:  i don’t necessarily give a rat’s ass how white a show, a book, a film is. i’d rather have that because there’s at least some measure of integrity there, instead of this pathetic, lazy, disrespectful attempt at diversity. if you want to diversify your show, do the work, and do it properly. do your research. talk to people of minority groups, and note that that’s plural — people, not one person. show some respect, and do your due diligence because simply adding people of color to your background and having one or two token diverse characters are not enough.

and, if it is that impossible for you to look past the bubble of your own white heterosexual privilege and see all people as dimensional human beings, then, well, what can i say.