44-51

[littlebutfierce]

Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post-1965 Filipino Americans - Leny Mendoza Strobel. This is the result of a project Strobel did, in which she put together a group of Filipino American volunteers who committed to a year of meeting, discussing, & journaling about decolonization. Unsurprisingly, a lot of what her participants, & Strobel herself, say is upsetting: how they were raised to think of being Filipino as something to overcome (to become more like white people), how immigrant parents deliberately chose not to teach their children Tagalog (or other Filipino languages) because they believed it would only hinder them in the US, & the many ways in which mainstream American society devalues Filipino culture & heritage. There are some good snippets in here defining exactly what decolonization means. I do feel like the book, in defining what "being Filipino" means, gets a bit essentialist (while the book also asserts that culture is fluid). I guess it has to by definition, really, but still a bit annoying.

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction - Edited by Nalo Hopkinson. I'm so bad at describing short story anthologies, but I mostly liked this one (hey, there are always a few pieces in anthologies that leave you cold). I liked how storytelling was prominent in a lot of the works, & I liked how the book takes a broader view of what is fantastic fiction; Hopkinson says in the introduction:

Northern science fiction and fantasy come out of a rational and skeptical approach to the world: That which cannot be explained must be proven to exist, either through scientific method or independent corroboration. But the Caribbean, much like the rest of the world, tends to have a different worldview: The irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by side each with the daily events of life.

Stories I particularly liked: Hopkinson's Bluebeard-esque "The Glass Bottle Trick," Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar's "Soma" (in which people become identified by some prominent body part: referred to as Feet, Hands, Ear, S/Orgs), and Opal Palmer Adisa's "Widows' Walk" (in which a woman battles the goddess Yemoja for the life of her fisherman husband).

Of Love and Other Monsters - Vandana Singh. Arun is 17 & newly rescued from a fire; his recollection about his life prior is nil. He discovers fairly quickly that he's able to reach out to other minds & influence them; he mostly does this w/good intentions, & it doesn't occur to him that his power could be used cruelly until he learns more about Rahul Moghe, perhaps the only other person on earth that has his powers, & one who uses them to dominate & destroy humans. I liked how Singh described Arun's joyful & curious awareness of other minds. The plot thickens, of course, as Arun tries to figure out what happened to him pre-fire & just what Rahul Moghe's deal is. Um, I'm blanking on other suitably pleased things to say, but I did enjoy this novella quite a bit.

Filipino Women in Detroit: 1945-1955: Oral Histories from the Filipino American Oral History Project of Michigan - Joseph A. Galura & Emily P. Lawsin. This slender book features the oral histories of 3 Filipinas who immigrated to the Detroit area from the Philippines during the 1940s & 1950s. I picked it up because I was lucky enough to see Emily Lawsin doing an oral history workshop last year at the Allied Media Conference (which, sadly, I won't be attending this year). I admit that I, too, was one of the people who never would've thought about Detroit as an area having a Filipino community, so this book was very enlightening, even if the women's stories contain a lot of themes common to immigrant narratives (that's not a criticism!). I appreciated very much that the interviewers (Galura, Lawsin, & a student of theirs), like any good oral historians, took pains to maintain the language that their interviewees used. Two poems that Lawsin wrote based on the interviews are included in the back; she performed one of them at her workshop & I was glad to encounter it again, even if it's not nearly as awesome without Lawsin performing it. I wish that they didn't organize the book topically, though (thus dividing up each interview into separate chapters).

Filter House - Nisi Shawl. Great collection of science fiction short stories, most dealing with topics like racism, colonization, & gender. If you've read some of the other well-known POC science fiction anthologies (ie. either volume of Dark Matter or So Long Been Dreaming), you'll have encountered some of these stories before, as I had, but I enjoyed reading them again, particularly "Deep End," in which prisoners whose minds have been uploaded & transported for years to a new colonizable planet are now being downloaded into new physical bodies. Stories new to me that became favorites were "Wallamelon," (young girl uses magic seeds from Yemaya to protect her neighborhood from racial violence) and "The Pragmatical Princess" (a twist on the twist-now-becoming-almost-a-cliche of a princess saving her own ass from a stereotypically helpless princess-y fate).

Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women - Edited by Asian Women United of California. From 1989, & feeling more dated than I would've expected, it took some effort to get through this one. Divided into sections loosely based on themes, fiction & poetry mingle with nonfiction narrative & academic pieces… only the latter two usually seemed to be so short as to be really unsatisfying. My favorite pieces were the ones that talked about Asian women labor & tenant leaders. Also, Esther Ngan-Ling Chow's "The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?" is still very timely in its analysis of why mainstream feminism fails, & alienates, women of color (specifically Asians in this case).

Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage: The First Quarter Storm and Related Events - Jose F. Lacaba. This is a collection of newspaper articles Lacaba wrote during the 1960s and 1970s, when he was reporting on the anti-Marcos protests bubbling up in the Philippines during that time. While I've already read several other eyewitness accounts of these events, Lacaba didn't bore me; his writing is lively & I was impressed w/how tenaciously he participated in demonstrations. The occasional phrase or line in untranslated Tagalog usually threw me, unfortunately, but midway I noticed there were notes in the back that included translations.

Reading the articles, I was struck by how fierce the student protesters were, & how central they seemed to be for a while--they did make efforts (some seeming clumsier than others) to link up w/labor & the poor, but for some time it seemed that the students were the vanguard of anti-Marcos sentiment. I don't mean to fall into the trap of sentimentalizing any sort of "good ol' days" as far as protest--it just seemed quite different from what I'm used to hearing about.

Topography of War: Asian American Essays - Edited by Andrea Louie & Johnny Lew. The subject matter made this a difficult & emotional read for me. Some of the essays explore war as something personally experienced. But overall the book seems more tilted towards those of us who maybe never lived through a war ourselves, but for whom war looms large in our personal & familial history regardless (as Dora Wang writes in her piece, "I have never seen war, but I have always known the taste of it."), & I think this is what I found most gut-wrenching & also validating about it.

The essays that most touched me were the ones by people who grew up with sporadic & confusing hints of what their families might have endured during war, & whose parents tried desperately to protect their children from ever realizing this pain existed. Like many of the contributors to this anthology, I'm still trying to figure out what war means to my family, piecing together narratives from half-remembered hints during my childhood (wartime anecdotes as way-inappropriate bedtime stories from my grandfather, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, for example) & trying to get the courage to solicit more of this history from my relatives. The task is made harder by the collective amnesia imposed by the American myth-makers--for example, the invisibility of the Philippine-American War, which Luis Francia explores here, saying, "I write not only about the memory of a war, but also about the war of and on memory, the struggle to replace a history I barely recognize with one I do..."

Also very interesting to me was Maya Lin talking about the process of designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, & also Christopher Lee discussing his uncle, who was the first Chinese officer in the Merchant Marine.

x-posted to my reading journal, furyofvissarion