[thursday recs] can't we make the world a bigger place?

January 26, 2017

i came from méxico, but there’s a lot of people here who, when they hear that, they think i crawled out of hell. they hear “méxico,” and they think: bad, devil, i don’t know. they got some crazy ideas. any of them ever been to méxico? and if they say, yeah, i went to acapulco back in the day or i been to cancún, papi, then that shit don’t count. you went to a resort? congratulations. but you didn’t go to méxico. and that’s the problem, you know? (236)

hi! ok, so, we’re a week into this presidency, and our cheeto president is already doing some truly heinous, insidious shit, continuing on his track of xenophobia and racism, of lying and fear-mongering, of thin-skinned egomaniacal tweeting.

i’m sure i’m not the only one waking up to nausea, dealing with anxiety and fear on a daily (or, dare i say, hourly) basis, and, like i said last week on instagram, i’ve been thinking a lot about the different forms of activism and resistance take as well as what it is i can do. i can’t march; i’m not someone who feels comfortable putting myself out there; and i struggle with suicidal depression that often saps me of everything. in many ways, i feel like i am not “qualified” to be an activist, that i do not check off the “right” boxes, even though i know that’s bullshit. there are many ways to resist.

what i do have are books — books and words and stories — so here’s a little something: every thursday, i will post a book by an author who is an immigrant and/or a POC and/or LGBTQ and/or a woman. sometimes, it will be a book by a non-american author, someone who’s been translated who writes about another culture, another people. sometimes, it might be a book by someone else who falls into completely different categories altogether. the point is simply that i will share a book that hopefully opens up the world a little more and reminds us that humanity is a universal thing, and there is no need to fear and discriminate against entire swaths of people simply because they appear different from us.

maybe i’m preaching to the choir here, but i think most of us, myself included, can stand to challenge ourselves more. for example, for myself, i know i’d like to start reading outside asian-americans, outside east asians more. and i hope this will produce a good archive that’s easily sharable with anyone who might be curious, who might want to read more diverse books but feel unsure about where to start. i’ve been there before, and i know it’s sometimes intimidating to try to find what’s worthwhile amidst all the books out there.

ultimately, i do believe in books. i believe in stories. and i believe in the greater importance for stories over the next four years — and i’m going to repeat myself here (from instagram) — we are going to need stories that affirm and reaffirm and reaffirm again and again and again the difference faces of humanity, that say/shout/scream to a hostile administration that we are here, we are alive, we will outlast you, and you will not silence us.

so let’s get started.

these people are listening to the media, and the media, let me tell you, has some fucked-up ideas about us. about all the brown-skinned people, but especially about the mexicans. you listen to the media, you’ll learn that we’re all gangbangers, we’re all drug dealers, we’re tossing bodies in vats of acid, we want to destroy america, we still think texas belongs to us, we all have swine flu, we carry machine guns under our coats, we don’t pay any taxes, we’re lazy, we’re stupid, we’re all wetbacks who crossed the border illegally. i swear to god, i’m so tired of being called a spic, a nethead, a cholo, all this stuff. happens to me all the time. i walk into a store and the employees either ignore me or they’re hovering over every move i make because they think i’m going to steal something. i understand i might not look like much. i work as a photographer, so i’m not in a business suit or nothing, but i have enough money to be in a store and even if i didn’t, i have the right to be in any store. i feel like telling them sometimes, you don’t know me, man. i’m a citizen here! but i shouldn’t have to tell anyone that. i want to be given the benefit of the doubt. when i walk down the street, i don’t want people to look at me and see a criminal or someone that they can spit on or beat up. i want them to see a guy who has just as much right to be here as they do, or a guy who works hard, or a guy who loves his family, or a guy who’s just trying to do the right thing. (236-7)

maybe cristina henríquez’s the book of unknown americans (knopf, 2014) is the obvious first choice, but i really couldn’t recommend this book more, especially given this week with trump’s ordering of the border wall and the muslim travel ban.

in an interview with the LA review of books, henríquez summarizes her book thusly:

it’s really a story about two parents, devastated after their only daughter suffers a brain injury. they bring her to the united states [from mexico] so that she can attend that specialized school to help her recover. they end up in delaware, in an apartment building with residents from all over latin america, neighbors that become something like a family. and while they’re there, one of those neighbors — this 16-year-old boy from panama — improbably falls in love with their daughter. it’s a story about tragedy and guilt, but also about hope and about what it means to belong somewhere, to find a place to call your home.

the book of unknown americans is told in multiple narrators, each telling his/her story. henríquez deftly handles each voice, giving each its own character and distinctness, and it’s a testament to her writing that the voices don’t become muddled, carry their own individual strengths instead.

i won’t go into each character here, but, overall, henríquez doesn’t obviously try to speak against the stereotypes that latin americans face, that they’re rapists, criminals, drug dealers, here to terrorize our women and corrupt our societies and steal our jobs. she simply lets them tell their own stories, and, by doing so, she allows them their humanity in all their three-dimensional ways. it’s not that she ignores the political or the social; she recognizes that everything is political, that even having the last name she has is political; but she isn’t bashing anyone on the head with her novel or slamming her fist on the table and shouting, “you’re racist; you’re horrible.”

instead, she simply asks that you sit down and consider these stories, these people.

she asks that you see them as who they are: human.

i wish just one of those people, just one, would actually talk to me, talk to my friends, man. and yes, you can talk to us in english. i know english better than you, i bet. but none them even want to try. we’re the unknown americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. and who would they hate then? (237)

i think this is the thing with fear: we fear what is unknown, but, most of the time, when we actually encounter our fears, we learn that they are not what we expected — they are not actually that unknown. we learn that our fears say more about us than about the people, the decision, the place we’ve been fearing, and, sometimes, that’s what makes it so hard for us to “conquer” our fears because then we’d have to give ourselves a long, hard look in the mirror, and a lot of us would not like what we see.

and the thing with people is this, that no one is unknowable, that all it takes is to sit down and listen to someone’s story to realize that, hey, s/he’s not that different from me. s/he isn’t someone for me to fear and hate.

this is why i believe in stories, because stories show us that, at heart, we are not all that unique. regardless of the color of our skin, our sexual orientation, the god we worship, the condition of our bodies, we all essentially want the same things. we want to love and be loved. we want to be safe. we want to have families and raise them in open, loving communities. we want to live good, meaningful lives.

and the unfortunate truth is that, sometimes, some of us have to leave our countries to find safety and opportunity elsewhere. some of us have to flee because of unrest, instability, and/or war. some of us have to leave home in the hopes that our children will lead better lives, receive better educations, live without fear.

and that doesn’t make them people to be hated, to be feared. that simply makes them people, people who have suffered, people who have gone through all kinds of hell and survived, people who have lost their homes and loved ones and countries. they are people who don’t come here empty-handed either, bringing with them their skills, their cultures, their stories, and, if this administration thinks that those are things to be feared and not welcomed, then all i can say is this: do not forget how this country was founded. do not forget that this is land you came in and took, land you built on the backs of slaves, land you developed with the contributions of immigrants. do not forget what makes this country great.

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

January 24, 2017

‘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:

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

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 …!

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.

[travelogue] eat eat eat eat eat.

January 19, 2017

i do regret leaving the south without eating fried chicken. and i also regret not eating more grits.

back in los angeles, at my parents’, and here’s a last travel post, a few other things i ate, a few things i’ve been thinking about since i left new york ten days ago.

01. we carry heartbreak in our bodies. i feel it literally in my heart, the way it feels like my heart is physically trying to squeeze itself out of my body. i feel it in my stomach, too, the way it churns with anxiety, wakes me in the morning with nausea, reminds me of loss by making me want to vomit all the time. heartbreak is not simply a matter of emotion; i think we forget that we feel with our bodies.

02. as i was driving, i thought a lot about borders, about spaces. i thought about how things started to feel different once i crossed the virginia border into north carolina, even though maybe that was more in my head than anything else. i thought about wanting to drive through north carolina without stopping because HB2 has yet to be repealed. (i similarly thought about wishing i could avoid texas because of SB242 and a similar bathroom bill and restrictive abortion laws.) i thought about being in charleston and feeling my asianness, my queerness, and i thought about being in the south and experiencing that southern geniality and hospitality but constantly having that fear underneath my skin, wondering, what do you really think of me? i know i pass as very straight, so what would you think if you knew who i was, what i was?

03. here’s a truth: that i know that we can’t make sweeping generalized statements about any region, any group of people, anything, really. that i know that there are open-minded, loving people to be found everywhere, that there are allies in hidden spaces, that we speak in code that’s there to be deciphered by those of us who speak the language.

04. and here’s another truth: that we must learn to speak these languages, that they are languages we carry, too, in our bodies.

05. and here’s yet another truth: that i know i can’t make sweeping generalized statements about the south but that my uneasiness was, is still a real thing. maybe it’s more easily explained in the context of religion because religion makes me very uneasy, and all the churches and the billboards blasting bible verses and the trucks done up in declarations of god’s existence made me queasy. it started once i crossed that virginia border into north carolina, and it’s something i wasn’t able to shake all the way into california. i don’t know why it surprises me how religious this country is.

06. like, when i was driving through mississippi, en route to new orleans, i exited the 10 west once because the sign promised a sonic. i ended up going 2.3 miles off the freeway and passed no less than six churches, no promised sonic in sight.

07. i am not, do not want to be the type of person who gets limited by my fears, who is afraid to head into spaces that make me uncomfortable, that make me look at the people around me and wonder, what do you think of me? do i make you as uneasy as you make me? if you could, would you throw the first stone?

08. i thought a lot about safe spaces, too. i thought about the criticism we sometimes face, that we live in these liberal spaces on the coasts (or on some body of water) and fail to see the rest of the world. i thought about the criticisms voiced after the election that went the wrong way, that we would have, should have, seen this result coming, had we only thought to look outside our liberal bubbles. i thought about the smugness that sometimes comes laced with these criticisms, the sort of, ha! all you liberals are getting what you deserved!, except that makes me sad, and then it makes me angry because, yes, maybe we congregate in our liberal bubbles, but do you understand this fear of walking around with a target on your back because of the color of your skin, the non-christian religion you practice, the orientation with which you identify?

09. that made me wonder, though, as to what makes a safe space. because, like everything else, spaces are complicated, too. a city can be liberal; it can be open and committed to protecting the diversity of its citizens; but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be safe for you, for me, for everyone. we all have baggage, and spaces that should otherwise be safe become fraught with other things. it’s like me and california — this should be a safe space for me, but it’s not. i’m still afraid i’m going to die here.

a. before i came back out to california, i kept reminding my parents: don’t take it personally. this is not about you. my depression is a real thing, and it’s something that i have to live with — and it’s also unfortunately something you have to learn to live with.

b. and how do they learn to live with it? how does anyone learn to love and live with someone who struggles with suicidal depression? a few tips: remember that it’s not about you. it’s not in you or up to you to save us; you can’t. remember that we will have good days and we will have bad days. we will have days when we seem “normal” and “okay,” and we will have days when we’re catatonic, when every tiny little task seems like a giant, impossible thing. we will have days we do nothing but cry. we will have days we laugh without sadness tugging at our eyes. all you can do is take it in stride, treat us with patience and tenderness, and be present. just be present. always be present.

c. and how do we live with it? how do i? i eat; i cook; and, when i can, i read, and i write. i carry books with me like habit in the hopes that i will want to pick them up and lose myself in them. i think about what i’m craving. i think about what i want to cook. i keep my eyes open to the beauty all around me because the fact that i can see beauty at all is an indiction that there is a part of me that is holding on. therapy is good and all, but habits and routines are what get us through the day-to-day, and i cling to what i know has worked in the past and continues to work. i eat; i cook; and, when i can, i read, and i write.

01. the only novel i took with me cross-country (at least in easy access) was rachel khong’s goodbye, vitamin (henry holt, forthcoming, 2017). i read it in pieces while on the road, a few pages here and there when i had the energy and needed words to refill my brain. i loved it, loved the prose, loved the way it seeped into my heart, loved the comfort it surprisingly delivered, loved the warmth and tenderness it fairly oozes.

02. in the novel, the narrator’s father has been diagnosed with alzheimer’s, and, so, she returns to her parents’ house in southern california for a year. she’s avoided visiting as much as she could, not wanting to encounter the realities of her parents’ problems, realities that her younger brother was privy to because he was still a teenager at home to witness them while she was away in college, in the bay area, in her own life.

03. the novel is told in short sections over a year, and the narrator is thoughtful and honest with a wry sense of humor (and offering many mentions of food). at first, i thought i might not like the short sections because, sometimes, that style drives me a little crazy, not being able to dwell in moments and being whisked into next scenes too quickly, but goodbye, vitamin thankfully works its rhythm deftly. the pace works; it takes a story that could be heavy and bleak and excessively dark; and it gives the novel a lightness, space to breathe.

04. there was a lot familiar in this novel, too. in 2012, my paternal grandmother passed away from alzheimer’s. we cared for her at home, and the novel brought all those memories to the surface — the ups and downs, the unpredictable sway of my grandmother’s emotions and actions, the struggles and pains and heart-wrenching sadnesses of watching someone you love deteriorate. also, like the narrator, i have just returned to my parents’ house in southern california under not-so-positive circumstances. in a way, all the familiarity was comforting, especially during that 3,400-mile drive across the country. i don’t know if maybe that’s a strange way of putting it, given the topic matter, but i miss my grandmother intensely at times, and i was glad to remember her while reading this novel.

05. in the novel, there are little bits taken from the father’s journal when the narrator was a child, and those may have been my favorite parts, even if they left me ugly-crying in public spaces. i’ve been thinking a lot these days about how much hope parents must have for their children, how sometimes all that hope is for nothing and how we disappoint the people who have loved us and cared for us and wished so much for us.

06. writing about books again feels really fucking good. and it also makes me laugh because all this reminds me how disappointing it is when questionable book decisions happen to good people. like the cover of jonathan franzen’s purity — i’ll never let FSG off the hook for that bizarre cover, especially given that the designer was the fabulous rodrigo corral (what the hell happened there?!). and, now, the title to kristen kish’s forthcoming cookbook because, come on, clarkson potter, the cover is beautiful, yes, though i was hoping she would not be on it, but, god damn, you can do so much better than that title.

07. next, we’ll be reading naomi pomeroy’s taste & technique (ten speed press, 2016) and ronni lundy’s victuals (clarkson potter, 2016). and hwang jung-eum’s one hundred shadows (tilted axis, 2016). look out for khong’s goodbye, vitamin this summer; holt is publishing it in july.

x. do i need to mention that rachel sent me the ARC to her book? that has no bearing on my thoughts, though, except for gratitude that she sent it to me to read. i’m always grateful when people send me books; it surprises me that they would want to do that at all.

x. the grits on the top are from callie’s hot little biscuit (atlanta); the shrimp and grits in the middle are from surrey’s (new orleans) (and easily one of my top three favorite things i ate; seriously, it was so fucking good); and, below, we’ve got hawaiian food (or hawaiian-inspired?) from solid grindz (tucson) followed by breakfast from king’s highway (palm springs).

x. eating my way across the country was great, and i’d do it again in a heartbeat. hopefully, i will get to do it again soon, just the other way, back home.

[travelogue] austin.

January 15, 2017

austin was a city in which to catch a breath between two long legs of driving — from new orleans to austin (511 miles) and austin to el paso (577 miles). i spent two nights and one day there, spent my day eating and catching up on some writing and getting some rest in-between meals, and it was nice not to have to hit the road right away — i just wish i’d been able to stay and linger in another city, say charleston or new orleans, instead.

(sorry, austin.)

austin was more suburban than i thought it’d be; it didn’t really feel like a city to me, even when i was downtown. i mean, granted, i didn’t venture very far, but here are two facts about me: i like old cities*, and i’m not very fond of cities that require cars.

it was a good stay, though, and i was glad for it. i ate great food, got to chat with some people, browsed books, bought books, did some writing, got some rest, took things easy, and grabbed a really fabulous cup of coffee on my way out of town. i was able to pull my head and heart together a little, which counts for a lot really, and i do want to go back one day, explore the city more, and eat some barbecue.

* heh, austin’s probably an old city. it just doesn’t feel that way.

you’d think i’d get to texas and run to the first bbq place, but i left austin without having had texas bbq once. i had a pretty mediocre dinner my first night in austin — the queso at torchy’s is fabulous, but i wasn’t that keen on the tacos. then again, when it comes to tacos, it’s street tacos or fish tacos for me — but, you know, even then, the tacos at torchy’s were grotesquely large, so much so that the fried chicken was too dry, the pork too … i don’t even remember what i didn’t like about the pork, simply that i couldn’t finish eating it.

it’s almost like the goal at torchy’s is to load up as many things as possible in the biggest ways, so there’s no balance. there’s no subtlety. i wish i’d liked it more.

a mediocre dinner was apparently the last straw after a long day of driving, of going from a place as flavorful and beautiful as new orleans and arriving in suburban austin in the evening (again, i hate arriving in new places after dark; it sucks for me; and it isn’t fair to the city as far as first impressions go). i took to google after a crying spell in my hotel, looked up restaurants because i wanted something nice, not too expensive, and, above all, interesting because the pretentious way of putting this might be to say that i wanted to eat at a restaurant where the chef was doing interesting things.

(i also honestly just was not feeling like a whole lot of meat.)

i decided on odd duck and sat myself at the bar my second night in austin, had a strong drink, and ordered more food than i probably should have. it was fabulous, though, and exactly what i was looking for — and here is where you might expect an actual review on the food, but here is where your expectation will not be met. i had a great night, though, and would recommend odd duck if you’re in austin.

i get asked, often enough that i think it’s funny, if i’ve just taken a photo of my empty plate. the answer is yes, and the thing is that i find the mess we leave behind just as beautiful as plated food. i like detritus; i like the indications that someone was here, someone ate this, someone left this mess; and, sometimes, i find it even more visually interesting than the visuals of the food that arrived because a cleared plate is the result of someone taking and consuming and, hopefully, appreciating something the chef has created.

i also get asked why i take photos of all my food, and my answer to that is that i do it to remember.

when i think of food, when i think of what i ate, i think of places. i think of people and gatherings and events; i am able to recall memories. when i think about maguro-dons, i think of ishigaki, of a small, quiet restaurant on a small, quiet street on this tiny island with the bluest waters, and i think of spending the afternoon cycling around taketomi, sweating so much i dehydrated, wading in the warm, clear ocean and feeling my heart expand from the beauty of it all.

when i think about dahk-do-ri-tang, i think about a tiny, grungy place in hong-dae, watching a friend sweat buckets while eating, soju poured liberally. when i think about hotel room service, i think about my best friend, about dancing along to suju trot’s rokuggo until a bug flew into our room and stung her on the eyelid, so she had to sit on the counter and hold ice to her face.

and, when i think about momofuku, hainanese chicken rice, bagels, pizza loves emily, pizza in general, grilled squid over arugula, when i think about blue bottle and gourmet ice cream and pie, i will always, always think of home.

[travelogue] new orleans.

January 14, 2017

driving across the country in roughly a week means that i don’t get a whole lot of time in cities. i usually arrive in the early evening, after it’s already dark (which is something i hate), and i’m pretty spent from driving, so there isn’t all that much exploring i get to do.

i saw roughly half-a-mile of new orleans — and all of it in the very touristy part of the french quarter because i wanted beignets, and apparently that was priority number one. it’s an interesting city — beautiful, as these old cities go — and my two main thoughts my time there were: my parents would hate it here, and, god damn, i wish i were here with a partner.

i don’t know what it was specifically about new orleans that brought that wish to the forefront, though it’s a thought that’s been on my mind this whole drive because a cross-country road trip was something i wanted to do with a partner. a cross-country road trip wasn’t supposed to be me on my own, hauling my life in a minivan, traveling from the city that will always be home back to the place i’d fled as soon as i could. this trip was supposed to be something else altogether — i’d laughed about it once with my best friend, how, if i were in a relationship, once things started getting really serious, i’d go on an extended cross-country road trip with my partner as a test. twenty-four hours a day, x-number of days in close quarters — i felt like, if we could survive that, we could survive a lot.

instead, i’m on the road alone, just me and my solitude.

i’m no stranger to traveling alone; in 2012, i set off for five weeks in east asia by myself, three weeks backpacking through japan, ten days hanging out in seoul. when i was planning the trip, i didn’t think about solitude, about how difficult it might be to be by myself in a foreign country — and, to take it further, to be by myself in a foreign country whose language i didn’t speak. japan is not the most english-friendly country, though it is accessible and very easy to travel, despite not knowing japanese. i knew this about the country, the lack of english, but i never stopped to think of what it might feel like not to be able to communicate at all.

it meant no small talk, no brief interactions with strangers, no casual chatting. sure, i’d meet some people in the common areas of hostels, but i don’t have that knack of just striking up conversations with people. i didn’t think about the silence of traveling alone, of being inside my head with my own thoughts for so long, because, having traveled around the states alone plenty, i didn’t stop to think about how much of a difference daily casual interactions with strangers make. being able to say hi, hello, how are you, i’m good, the weather’s shit today, isn’t it — it’s not deep human connection, but it’s still something. and i’m glad to have at least that while on the road this time, that i can chat with the bartender/waiter during dinner, have a brief conversation with the barista while getting coffee, ask people, what should i see, where should i go?

i’m not making deep lifelong relationships here, but they’re still something. being able to communicate is still something.

these days, driving seven, eight hours a day, i fill the space with music. i think it’s a damn good thing that i have a hyperactive imagination because i don’t get bored. i take photos of the sky because the sky is stunning, changes by region. i record voice memos on my iphone for essays i’m working on, essays i want to pitch. i try to think about my book, but i’m still too broken, too much in pieces to think about fiction right now.

i don’t think about what’s going to happen once i get to california. i don’t think about having to grapple with my grief and trying to piece my life back together. i don’t think about what scares me about going back to a space that is so treacherous for me.

and i hope — i try to hope — that things will be okay, even if i still don’t actually believe that.

i’m a huge supporter of traveling alone; i think everyone should do it at least once because you learn a lot about yourself. i think i’ve hit my limits on traveling alone, though.

driving in and out of new orleans on the 10 W has thus far been my favorite part of this drive. i love crossing water, and, y’know, louisiana (or that area of louisiana) is pretty stunning country.