50books_poc | Entries tagged with memoir

I just read Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein, thanks to this recommendation.

I enjoy chef memoirs -- The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin is a favorite and I've read it multiple times -- and this one definitely hit the spot. I appreciated getting the behind-the-scenes glimpses at different restaurants, including ones where I've eaten, and I appreciated the specifics of how different self-presentations, and sometimes lying, were instrumental to Onwuachi's steps on his career ladder.

Onwuachi is significantly younger than I am, and I found it edifying to get glimpses of how cell phones, social media, and related technologies have played different kinds of roles in his education than in mine.

Also, I rarely cook, and this book spurred me to get back in front of the stove!

opusculasedfera

The Ink-Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani
I'm deeply unqualified to judge classical Japanese poetry, but this seems like a pretty decent translation. I happened to read this one because it's the one the library had, which did make me wonder rather about why these particular poems and why these two authors were put in one volume and that sort of thing, but the translation sounds good and I assume these are the major poems of these two authors, though again, there's almost no context provided except a brief biography of the two poets. I don't really know what other translations are out there and I wouldn't not recommend this one, except that I kept wanting context, though I suppose it's a sign of a good poet-style (as opposed to academic-style) translation that I didn't need it for the individual poems which are largely unfootnoted and don't need said footnotes to be understandable as poems.

Suki by Suniti Namjoshi
This is half a memoir of the author's late cat and half discussion of meditation and I have to say that I found the bits about the cat more interesting. It's slight and charming, but might be a bit twee if you find people talking to their cats and having the cats answer back in English to be twee. Her insights into meditation/the personal insights she derives from meditation do feel like genuine insights, and yet I feel like I know so little about Namjoshi/the narrator that I don't actually care very much about her meditations on the origins of her personality. Cute cat anecdotes though.

Intimate Apparel/Fabulation: Two Plays by Lynn Nottage
These are two plays that deal in different ways with African-American women and the ways in which men take advantage of their achievements. The first is about a early 20th century seamstress in New York who corresponds with a labourer in Panama and ends up marrying him, and the second is about a successful businesswoman whose life is falling down around her after her husband steals all her money and fucks off, and how she returns to her family of origin in her distress. I don't really know how to talk about them because I found them both (they are, in a sense, time-separated mirrors of each other and that's why they're published as a single volume) excellent and yet they're both awfully depressing. I don't know that I'd want to go to see either of them played, and yet they both struck me as powerful and portraying their subject in a very clean, important way.

China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr
The blurb claims that this book explains China through the lens of ten culturally important words. It doesn't. But what it is is memoir-essays with single word titles, and those are excellent. Yu Hua lived through the Cultural Revolution and served as a barefoot dentist (his term) for a while before beginning to write novels. He does a fantastic job of showing the degree to which children can be both unknowing about and culpable in societal brutality: in his case, during the Revolution. He also writes about how China has changed since then. An interesting perspective.

opusculasedfera

If I Could Write This in Fire by Michelle Cliff
A series of essays and some poetry. Cliff talks about being queer and Jamaican and light-skinned and a writer and living outside and inside of Jamaica as all of those things, and it's all lovely and furious and important.

nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon
A memoir in essays of the author's experience growing up queer, non-binary, and First Nations (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux) in the Canadian Prairies. Nixon is open about the messiness of life, about being punk and fucking up and the various complexities of their family situation (adopted by a white couple as a baby, now with a complicated relationship with their birth family as well and a furious relationship with the Canadian system that keeps allowing this to happen).

Special Lecture on Korean Paintings by Oh Ju-seok
This is clearly the book I should have read before I read these books on Korean art, but alas that was not the order in which my library holds arrived. This is about how to read Korean paintings on their own terms: the direction in which your eyes are intended to move, various ideals the artist might have been aiming at, that kind of thing. Lots of color plates make the points very clear and it's very engaging. The author is proud of Korean art to the point of being unintentionally humorous (for example, he insists that a particular picture of a tiger is not merely a world-class picture of a tiger but the best tiger picture in the world), but by the end his insistence that his audience recognize Korean art on its own terms becomes endearing and understandable. Highly recommended.

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz
As the title suggests, this is in part a response to Reading Lolita in Tehran. Keshavarz writes a clear and lucid critique of RLiT's central premise and approach, but also waxes lyrical about her experiences with literature that she feels are part and parcel of her Iran, from her whole high-school class breaking down over the death of a favorite poet, to discussing literature earnestly with her devout uncle. Her recollections of her family members are rose-tinted and loving, but she isn't interested in painting a picture of a perfect Iran, merely a more complicated one that contains a literature of its own and a reading public to go with it, as well as an interest in international writing. Her writing is eminently readable and this is an excellent source of further readings in Iranian literature, if that sort of thing interests you.

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Dates by Nawal Nasrallah
This is a short book about the date palm, covering both the biological side of what exactly it is and the cultural side of why it's so very, very important in the Middle East. Slight, but not without interest: one of the things that really made me understand how foundational to many cultures the date palm is was the poetry that's quoted throughout. It's not just that many cultures wrote poetry that refers to the date palm, it's that it becomes clear that there's so much date palm vocabulary that is normal and poetic in Arabic and in English has to be translated with scientific terminology that looks wildly out of place in this type of e.g. love poetry. A good resource on date palms, but you have to really want to read about dates.

Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple by Najmieh Batmanglij
A perfectly good Persian cookbook featuring a good variety of types of dishes, all selected with the intent of being cookable by the average non-Persian cook in North America without sacrificing taste. I will probably make some of these dishes, though as a readable cookbook, I preferred her Food of Life (reviewed here) which not only lists recipes, but then elaborates on several different possible variants for each one and gives a much bigger picture of the scope of the cuisine.

Passage by Gwen Benaway
I should have read this before I read Benaway's second book of poetry (reviewed here) because she has definitely grown since this book, but the poems are still excellent and heart-rending.

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour has Lyme disease, which is both hugely debilitating and sufficiently vague that she has a hard time getting doctors to believe her. She's not sure when she contracted the disease, only that she seems to have always been sick, and the memoir is about both her life as someone coping with a debilitating and mysterious condition and the process of finding adequate medical care for something that some doctors don't even believe in. Khakpour is very honest about the ways in which she is and is not coping well with her disease; even a diagnosis is not necessarily the consolation you might expect it would be, and her resentment at having to have her life restricted is very refreshing.

Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
I'm not even sure how to review this except to say that if you're interested in race or history or gender, you should read this book. Perry describes how the liberal project (in the European sense of liberal, not just meaning vaguely leftist) keeps changing, but always maintains categories of non-persons that do not count in the new liberal order, but actually hold it up. She takes the reader through various historical examples to illuminate her argument, alway allowing for the complexity of the many different ways her subjects were oppressed, though I think she does an excellent job of tying them all back to the same strands of Western thought. Again, I am describing this complicated book very badly, but it doesn't feel complicated to read, only very deeply considered, and I recommend it highly.

even this page is white by Vivek Shraya
I have a terrible bias against the sort of poetry chapbook where poetry is confined to one tiny corner of the page, even when this means that a short poem must be split up over three pages for no particular reason and there are acres of blank white space. I suppose it might be a deliberate point in a collection about race and whiteness, but it wasn't to my taste. The poems themselves are somewhat uneven, though I may just be the wrong audience. When they were good, they were quite good; when they were otherwise, they were banal or plodding. On the other hand, I may be missing something: I'm not much of a poetry reader, and I don't have the POC or immigrant experiences that Shraya is exploring here. It did win some awards in Canada. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts if anyone else here has read it, and I am looking forward to reading Shraya's recent book of essays.

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Evidence of Being: The Black, Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence by Darius Bost
An account of Black, gay artistic communities in the 80s and 90s and their activism and art. Introduced me to several writers I hadn't heard of before and made me see the ones I had heard of in their community context. A great counter to often white-specific narratives of AIDS, plus some excellent discussion of how AIDS wasn't the only thing these communities were facing at the time.

Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez
Essays on a variety of subjects including race, family, language, writing, etc. An interesting autobiographical perspective on a writer I've heard about, but whose fiction I haven't actually read. Most of the immigration narratives I've read have been either from earlier or later, whereas Alvarez' family immigrated from the Dominican to the States in 1960, so that was very interesting to me.

Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop by Imani Perry
In depth music criticism of various hip-hop artists. Excellently argued. I don't personally know a lot about music, let alone hip-hop, but she definitely makes the case that hip-hop is as sprawling as any other genre and deserves the same level of critical analysis. I think needing to make that point is slightly dated, but it wasn't as much in 2004, and it's useful to know where to look for a concise expression of her argument.

My Soul Looks Back by Jessica B. Harris
A memoir of (mostly) the author's time on the fringes of the Black artistic circle in NYC that included Baldwin, Angelou, Morrison, etc. in the 70s. A slightly awkward book because the author's primary connection to this circle was as the much younger girlfriend of Samuel Floyd, so her perspective is at once overwhelmed by how cool and famous all these people are, and curiously detached from the actual things going on within that circle except for the surface interactions (i.e. X and Y were besties, Y and Z were frenemies level stuff). It's odd because Harris is a moderately famous food writer in her own right, but the entire arc of her career is narratively subsumed by how excited she is to tell you about the people she knew in the 70s. She appears to go from being a girl with a BA working on the edges of publishing to a writer with many books under her belt without doing much other than hanging around these famous people and I know that's not true, it's just that she elides so much in this book. She does write great descriptions of food, and some of the best parts of the book are about her various culinary triumphs and disasters as she tries to entertain her new friends to the degree she thinks they deserve, but I'm not sure it's worth reading just for that. Also, Floyd may have been artistically and politically important in his own right, but he also sounds like a fucking terrible boyfriend and I'm so over reading about bad heterosexual relationships, especially ones with a significant age gap that the older person seems to have done little to mitigate.

Everything's Trash, But It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson
Humorous essays on every topic that pops into Robinson's head. Whether or not you enjoy this one depends on whether or not you enjoy Robinson's super casual tone and the awkward amount of personal detail she likes to give you. I think she's very funny, but sometimes it was a little too much information about exactly which actors she'd like to bone.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Essays on writing, being Korean-American, trauma, and a bunch of other things. Beautiful lyrical writing that lulls you in and then smacks you in the face with something heavy. On the strength of this collection, I suspect his novels of being amazing and also too dark for me, but I would happily read any further essays he'd like to write.

brainwane

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017, The New Press) is simply excellent.

Here's an excerpt, here's Dr. McMillan Cottom's page about the book, here's her Twitter.

It's a book that makes scholarship accessible to a non-academic reader. It's a book that uses the author's experiences -- as a student, as an admissions sales rep, as a teacher, as a researcher, as a black woman, as a friend and daughter -- to vividly illustrate and bring the reader into theoretical understandings of systems, policy, and economic forces. It's sociology, it's investigative journalism, it's memoir, it's a lens on something I see every day (those subway/bus ads for education). It's witty and no-nonsense.

I thought I already knew that a lot of for-profit colleges were pretty bad. McMillan Cottom shows why they exist, why they are as they are, and what it'd take to change those forces. I understand the labor market better and I am now even more against mandatory degree requirements for job candidates. I understand the US student debt crisis better and understand why it's connected to the same forces that are making healthcare and retirement worse and worse in the US. Just to quote from the first few chapters (I captured many quotes because she makes so many great points):

As it turns out, there is such a thing as "bad" education. It is an educational option that, by design, cannot increase students' odds of beating the circumstances of their birth....

...the way we work shapes what kind of credentials we produce. If we have a shitty credentialing system, in the case of for-profit colleges, then it is likely because we have a shitty labor market. To be more precise, we have a labor market where the social contract between workers and the work on which college has previously relied has fundamentally changed and makes workers vulnerable.

While there is a lot of academic debate about the extent of that change and whether it signals progress or decline, there is substantial evidence that suggests all of those changes shift new risks to workers....

Whether you are a kindergarten teacher, an admissions counselor, or a college professor, working in education is a lot like being a priest. You shepherd people's collective faith in themselves and their trust in social institutions....

Despite our shift to understanding higher education as a personal good, we have held on to the narrative of all education being inherently good and moral. Economists E. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson call this the education gospel: our faith in education as moral, personally edifying, collectively beneficial, and a worthwhile investment no matter the cost, either individual or societal....The contradiction is that we don't like to talk about higher education in terms of jobs, but rather in terms of citizenship and the public good, even when that isn't the basis of our faith....

Cross-posted review to my blog with another para or so about code schools and experimental programming retreats like the Recurse Center.

I read this book in February and it's on track to be the best book I read this year.

yatima

An exquisitely beautiful graphic memoir by a Vietnamese woman who came to the USA as a child refugee. Bui weaves together the present-day birth of her son with the reckoning with her family of origin that childbirth so often provokes. Her parents' stories are told with imaginative insight, and the class barriers that divided them are sensitively drawn.

In black ink with a blood-red color wash, the art is gorgeous and many-layered. The map of Vietnam appears and reappears, and its sinuous curves are echoed by smoke, clouds, and ocean waves as Bui's family flees the aftermath of the war. Family and news photographs are incorporated and contextualized. The effect is to complicate and give a human face to a war we know both too much and too little about.

yatima

"Welcome to the Middle-Aged Orphans Club," writes Sherman Alexie, and as a middle-aged orphan myself, I did feel welcome, and seen, and understood. In July, Alexie cancelled part of his book tour because of complicated grief and being haunted by his late mother: "I don’t believe in ghosts," he writes. "But I see them all the time." Me too, brother.

Like Bad Indians, this is an intricate quilt of a book, part memoir, part poem, part dream. It's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. The loss of a parent is a loss of meaning. For indigenous people, this is doubly true. Lillian Alexie was one of the last fluent speakers of Salish. Her death robs her son, and the world, of an entire universe.

This book, like Hawking radiation, is an almost-undetectable glow of meaning escaping from a black hole. If you haven't lost a parent yet it might be too much to bear, but if you have, it might feel like joining a group of survivors around a campfire after a catastrophe.

IN AUGUST 2015, as a huge forest fire burned on my reservation, as it burned within feet of the abandoned uranium mine, the United States government sent a representative to conduct a town hall to address the growing concerns and fears. My sister texted me the play-by-play of the meeting. “OMG!” she texted. “The government guy just said the USA doesn’t believe the forest fire presents a serious danger to the Spokane Indian community, even if the fire burns right through the uranium mine.”

...“Is the air okay?” I texted. “It hurts a little to breathe,” my sister texted back. “But we’re okay.” Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we’re okay?

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

Maya Angelou is best known for her first autobiography, the groundbreaking I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which chronicles her early childhood before breaking off abruptly when she's seventeen. Gather Together in My Name picks up a short while after her last book broke off and chronicles Maya's early forays into adulthood.

I enjoyed Gather Together in My Name a great deal more than its predecessor. The work has received criticism for its looser structure; Marguerite stumbles in and out of jobs with regularity and falls in and out of love with men at the drop of the hat. This doesn't provide for a great, over-arching narrative, but then life seldom does, and this chaotic period of Maya Angelou's life (from about 17 to 19) seems to demand a less formal structure.

Angelou was purportedly hesitant to write about this period in her life and after reading the book it's easy to see why. Already a young mother at this point in her life, Angelou also spent this time period making forays into prostitution, both as prostitute and pimp, while remaining stunningly naive about the world around her and her own actions. Some of the most powerful moments of the book can be found in these passages; Angelou is at her best when she is speaking from the voice of teenage Marguerite, outlining her own beliefs and showing the reader how a headstrong girl who believed she was jaded and world-weary was repeatedly fooled by her own naiveté. However, Angelou was writing this at a point in her life where she was no longer a naive spirited girl, but a savvy woman and the voice of that woman occasionally emerges, to the book's detriment. In an early scene Marguerite goes to the home of a lesbian couple simply to show how laissez-faire and grown up she is. As the two begin to kiss in front of her Marguerite is overcome with revulsion and disgust, which Angelou promptly excuses as the bias and hatred of an ignorant girl repeating the prejudices of the world around her. The authorial intrusion is a rare mis-step in a work that is fearless in its refusal to apologize for its narrator.

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(Full book title doesn't fit in the subject; it is The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male.)

Note: Max Valerio is the same person as Anita Valerio, as published in This Bridge Called My Back, which I know has been reviewed here. It would be nice if we could easily find all his works together through the tagging system, but I can't think of a way to do that without misgendering him. Any thoughts?

Max Valerio is a trans man (like me) who spent many years living in San Francisco (where I'm from). You might think there'd be a lot in his memoir that I could relate to, but for the most part you'd be wrong.

Oh, there is some. His portrait of the life and atmosphere of San Francisco in the 90s is pitch-perfect and often quite funny. (He should write a novel about the lesbian punk scene then.) I was nodding along to his struggles with deciding to transition and sifting out the right from the wrong information about trans people, and his worries about whether he would lose all his gay and lesbian friends if he became "straight". (He lost some -- so did I.)

( What I did not nod along to (warning: discusses problematic views of rape) )

Anyway, goes without saying I can't recommend the book. I did enjoy the parts of the memoir that weren't bogged down in sexist and transphobic nonsense, but that's about all I can say. It's a damn shame.

a: Valerio Max Wolf, genre: memoir, subject: transgender, au ethnicity: Native American (Blackfoot), Latino

seekingferret.livejournal.com

11) Monster by A. Lee Martinez

At this point, I could probably copy/paste the review I've written of the past three Martinez novels I've read here. Martinez's fantasies are lightweight, fun, irreverent, and formulaic. I enjoy his formula a good deal, and I enjoy the way I can just have that pleasure without thinking too hard. I'll keep reading his stories.

This one specifically is about a monster-hunter working for the equivalent of animal control in a city with frequent infestations of fantasy monsters. If you think that concept sounds like fun, you'll enjoy the story.

12)Black, White, and Jewish by Rebecca Walker

Walker is the daughter of (black) author Alice Walker and (white and Jewish) civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal. She was born in Mississippi at the height of her parents' civil rights struggle. She describes herself as a "Movement Child", whose interracial makeup was a deliberate and direct challenge to the racism that surrounded her parents. In many ways this memoir tells the coming of age of a girl who was born as a social experiment. I feel queasy making this comparison, but it reminded me of Ishiguro's dystopic novel Never Let Me Go. At the minimum, it's being narrated by a woman who always seems unsure and a little afraid that the reason she's writing this story is because it was the story she was born (and maybe designed) to write.

Her parents divorced when she was still a child. Her father moved to New York and her mother to San Francisco and she split her childhood between coasts, between parents, between lives. It's reasonably stress inducing, but again, her parents were intellectuals affiliated with the Civil Rights movement and they knew they were fating their daughter to this kind of split existence (though they thought they would be together to give her more stable guidance). The thing I found most fascinating about Walker's narrative is the way she seems to be pushing up against the 'expected' narrative of an interracial childhood, seeing if she can fit into it or if she needs to invent new narratives.

Walker's prose is gaudy and overwritten and not helped by artsy section headers that grab random lines from the chapters that follow and turn them into incomprehensible pull quotes. I think this added to my sense that the novel compared to Ishiguro. It felt like a novel more than a memoir, and Walker's life is interesting enough that a straight recitation of the facts and her impressions of them would have held my attention. I didn't know what I was supposed to do with her schmaltzy, vaguely spiritual musings on memory as an abstract concept. Those parts of the story held no value for me and were generally skipped or skimmed.

But as I said, the story and her impressions of it are enough of a story to hold my interest. Walker writes of experiencing an incredible range of growing up experiences and how much context shaped her experience. When she was among black people, the specific ways she felt part of their community and the specific ways she felt isolated are sharply detailed, and the same thing comes in her vivid descriptions of her experiences in white communities. And many of her stories are interesting and compelling even without the frame of reference of race, stories of growing up, learning about sex and sexuality, learning about family history, learning how to learn.

tags: mexican-american, biracial, african-american, jewish, fantasy, memoir, a: martinez a lee, a: walker rebecca

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Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's family has been racially mixed almost as far back as her genealogy can be traced. In her family tree one can find black slaves, American Indians, Irish immigrants, and Martha Washington.

It was on her mother's side of the family that something happened which is probably more common than most people know. Her mother's father took his light-skinned daughters, and they became "white", while their slightly darker-skinned sister was put in foster care and remained "black".

A good part of the book is about Haizlip's search for her family members who chose to pass as white, and what happens when they are reunited. She also tells the fascinating stories, pieced together from records and passed-down memories, of several generations of her relatives, of their experiences as multiracial Americans in different times and places.

The issue of passing is one that I can deeply relate to, as a transgender person, just from a slightly different angle. Haizlip identifies as black, but is sometimes read as white. She has to wonder whether she and her darker-skinned husband will be read as a black couple or an interracial couple, in a world where being read as the latter may put them in physical danger. Again, this is something one may be tempted to think is uncommon, but really isn't! Many of us have to wonder whether the rest of the world will see us as who we know we are, even in such seemingly basic characteristics as our race and gender. Many of us have to wonder on a daily basis whether we'll be read as a member of a privileged group or not, and to decide whether it is desirable -- or safe -- to correct any misconceptions.

Haizlip does not have cut-and-dried answers about race and passing, because there aren't any. What she has are stories, her family's stories. The range of experiences are both eye-opening and familiar. Some of her ancestors were listed as one race on one census form, and a different race on another (without asking them what they preferred, of course, or questioning whether the available options even made sense). Things like this are still happening. People need to know that not everyone is easy to categorize, and what it means for our social and emotional lives when someone else does the categorizing for us.

This is an awesome book. I strongly recommend it.

tags: a: Haizlip Shirlee Taylor, African-American, mixed race, memoir

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Content warning: The book depicts rape, beatings, and female genital cutting, but they're not discussed in this post.

This is the story of Mende Nazer, who was abducted from her home in Sudan in 1993 and sold into slavery. Throughout her teenage years she was forced to do domestic work for a wealthy family, before being sent to work for her "master"'s sister, the wife of a Sudanese diplomat living in London. While in London she was finally able to make her escape and successfully seek political asylum. This was a big news story a few years back, some of you may remember hearing about it. Since the book's publication, she has become a British citizen.

The book is well-written and engaging, and tells a story the world needs to hear, a story that is not extraordinary, but rather all too common. The only extraordinary thing about it is that Nazer escaped, whereas most people in her situation never do.

But here's my problem: The co-author, Damien Lewis, who is white. At the time of writing, Nazer had only been studying English for a year, maybe less. She spoke two other languages fluently, but instead of using a translator, Lewis had her talk to him in English, and he interpreted and wrote down what she said in his own style. That it is his own style is obvious from reading his afterword that explains the writing process -- it's the same voice. He says it was done this way because her story was far too "personal" for a translator to come between them. He, and only he, could achieve the "closeness" with her to help her express her thoughts. Hmm. This is my skeptical face.

But it's okay, because Lewis is an "expert" on Sudan, according to his bio blurb. I notice it doesn't mention his age, while Nazer's bio eagerly and irrelevantly informs us yet again (it's mentioned multiple times in the text) that her tribe -- gasp! -- doesn't record exact birthdates. How exotic! It is obvious why she needed this White Expert to render HER story into HIS own words.

Okay, sarcasm off. Sorry. To be fair, several years have passed and Nazer speaks good English now (yay Youtube) and has not, to my knowledge, disowned the book or Lewis. It's up to her how her story is put forth. I just have to be honest about my personal reaction to reading it, which is that I really wanted Mende Nazer's voice, and was frustrated by the feeling of having to dig through layers of Damien Lewis's voice to get to it.

[eta: Note that author Damien Lewis is not the same person as actor Damian Lewis, as Wikipedia believes. Someone oughta fix that.]

tags: a: Nazer Mende, w-a: Lewis Damien, African (Sudanese), Muslim, genre: memoir, subject: slavery, setting: Sudan

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This is the memoir of Jin Xing, a child of Korean immigrants to China, who was blessed with extraordinary talent as a dancer. Her gift was noticed at a young age, and she trained with the People's Liberation Army dance troupe. As an adult, she took the opportunity to study and perform in other nations around the world, and during her travels she realized that she was not a gay man, but was in fact a straight woman, and that she wanted to medically transition. She became one of the first people to have an officially recognized legal gender change in China, in 1996(!).

In the book, events and memories pass by quickly, painting a not very detailed but more impressionistic picture of her life. This happened, and another time this happened, and here's another thing... It's not one of those memoirs that could just as easily be a novel. She's just describing memories that stand out to her, with not a lot of "story" in between.

Let me just say, I am not Asian, but I am trans, so I approached this book as both an insider and an outsider, and I found that hard to reconcile at times. Jin Xing grew up in a world I know very little about, and part of me wanted to be accepting of her thoughts on her identity because it's framed by a culture that is foreign to me, while the rest of me balked at views she put forth that felt very antiquated and not at all trans-positive.

( Read more... )

tags: a: Jin Xing, w-a: Texier Catherine, Korean-Chinese, genre: memoir, subject: transgender

veleda-k.livejournal.com

I swore I wouldn't get behind this year, and look at this. I'm already lagging. I suck at New Years resolutions.

#2: The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander)

( The Devotion of Suspect X )

#3: Villain by Shuichi Yoshida (translated by Philip Gabriel)

( Villain )

#4: The Other Side of Paradise: a Memoir by Staceyann Chin

( The Other Side of Paradise )

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Born in Liberia and descended from the nation's founders, Helene Cooper lived there for 14 years as a member of the wealthy elite. She knew her homeland -- its unique history as a colony populated by former U.S. slaves, its sights, its tastes, its scents, its joys and its dangers. When Liberia's bloody coup d'etat finally came, Cooper had to leave a home she knew well.

But as she would come to realize, she did not know it nearly so well as she thought she did.

( Read more... )

tags: a: cooper helene, genre: memoir, author: black (Liberian), setting: Liberia & United States

mizchalmers.livejournal.com

41. Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, The Four Immigrants Manga

This book is so freakin' awesome I can't even tell you. I love 20th-century memoir, I love San Francisco local history and I love graphic novels: The Four Immigrants Manga is a standout in all three categories. Even the tale of its rediscovery is freakin' awesome. Frederik L. Schodt was researching a book on Japanese manga in 1980 (how avant is THAT?) when he stumbled across this in a Berkeley library. It took another EIGHTEEN YEARS before his translation was published. Seriously, you should just go and read it right now. Schodt's translation is very clever and sensitive, with English and translated-Japanese rendered in different styles, so you always know where you are.

And the story itself, holy cow! It's the tale of the author, who came to San Francisco to study, and three friends he met on the boat. They land in 1904 and the book follows their lives for twenty years, so yes, there's a huge earthquake right up front, but in fact what happens after that is often even awesomer and stranger. (Hint: farm work is much harder than you think.) And it's funnier than hell. Can you tell that I liked it? The Four Immigrants Manga is one of those texts that reaches across a language barrier and a hundred years and shakes the teeth out of your head. It brings my beloved San Francisco to life in new ways. It should be required reading in California schools, and if it were, the kids would love it. BECAUSE IT'S GREAT.

42-3. Sanjay Patel, The Little Book of Hindu Deities and Ramayana: Divine Loophole

Actually all five of the books I'm reviewing today have strong links to the Bay Area, and that's because San Francisco is my adopted home and I love it like food. Go Giants! Patel is an animator at Pixar, across the Bay. I first encountered his Hindu-deity-art at his Web site, Ghee Happy, and I was one of many nagging him to just go publish a book already. Little Book is a useful reference, if you're like me and can't always keep your Gods straight, but Ramayana is an honest-to-God masterpiece. My husband read it to my daughters, aged 7 and 4, and they were spellbound by it every night. The illustrations are really beyond beautiful, and Chronicle Books has done a nice job with the binding: it's an object with heft and sheen, a desirable thing. Highly recommended, if only as a counterbalance to the Greek revival of the Percy Jackson series.

44. Jen Wang, Koko Be Good

Wang is another local graphic artist and Koko is not only set in San Francisco, like the great Wyatt Cenac film Medicine for Melancholy it's set in my San Francisco, south of Market Street, the San Francisco of beer at Zeitgeist and Al's Comics and the fog rolling in under Sutro Tower. It's intensely evocative and very good on random encounters and the strength of the relationships they can drag in their wake, especially for people in transition. If I found the ending both telegraphed and a bit unsatisfying, it's because I'm an extremely fussy old lady with brutally high standards in graphic novels. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and if you like it you will love Paul Madonna's sublime All Over Coffee.

45. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking

I've only just started reading this and it's going to take a while, because I will only read it during daylight, not while I am trying to go to sleep. Not since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood have I read anything that is quite so high-octane nightmare fuel, and for very much the same reasons: the killings it describes are real, random and purposeless, and the prose itself is beautiful, clear, organized and relentless.

One of the oldest cities of China, [Suchow] was prized for its delicate silk embroidery, palaces, and temples. Its canals and ancient bridges had earned the city its Western nickname as "the Venice of China." On November 19, on a morning of pouring rain, a Japanese advance guard marched through the gates of Suchow, wearing hoods that prevented the Chinese sentries from recognizing them. Once inside, the Japanese murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery. The invasion, according to the China Weekly Review, caused the population of the city to drop from 350,000 to less than 500.

It's a controversial book - Wikipedia has some useful starting-points for a discussion of factual inaccuracies and disputed interpretations - and on the whole you'd probably rather not have it be the famous plagiarist Stephen Ambrose who declares you "one of the best of our young historians." But it is an important book, that helped revive the memory of Nanking in the West.

Chang took her own life in 2004, and I am sorry for the books of hers we will not get to read.

pauraque

This was a book I picked at random off the Asian History shelf at the library, and as soon as I started reading I felt like I had waded in over my head. I had to stop and do some background reading to figure out exactly what the Cultural Revolution *was*. If you don't know, this book won't tell you -- it was written in Chinese for a Chinese audience, and it assumes that you know what the political situation was and who the major government players were. I did not, and I doubt a read-through of a few Wikipedia articles gave me the knowledge that a person should have to fully understand and assess this book.

That said, I read the book anyway. It was a disturbing and puzzling experience on several levels.

( Read more... )

To sum up, I don't think I can really recommend this. It has a few strong points and memorable scenes, and it may read better to someone more familiar with Chinese politics, but by the end I felt the author had painted himself as a cold-hearted bastard who never learns anything from his terrible experiences. I hope that isn't the truth, but it's what I got from his book.

(eta tags: a: ma bo, chinese, china, cultural revolution, memoir)

pauraque

I went to the library looking for something by bell hooks, because I read Killing Rage a long time ago and got a lot out of it. My library only had two of her books, of which I picked Bone Black. I sat down to see if it was something I wanted to read, and didn't get up until I realized hours had passed and I had to get home. I finished reading later the same day. I loved this book.

( Read more... )

coffeeandink.livejournal.com

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Hungry Tide, and Sea of Poppies
It's hard to know how to summarize the work of Amitav Ghosh; he never does the same thing twice. I can't even give you an idea of the scope of his work with the notes below, because it's just the novels I've read so far; I'm missing a novel, a memoir/historical investigation, and a book of essays, and that's just what's been published in the U.S. I could, I guess, say that all of his work that I've read so far deals with one or a dozen of the cultures contributing to modern India, but that's so capacious a subject I might as well just say, "Well, he writes about people," and have done with it. (Except then I'd be leaving out the dolphins, swamps, fruit flies, and sailing ships.) He's remarkable not just in the range of his content but the range of styles: he has written a Modernist literary novel, a science fiction thriller, a magic realist novel without magic, a contemporary literary novel, and an historical adventure.

Full review at my journal.

Karin Lowachee, Warchild, Burndive, and Cagebird
Set of loosely connected space operas; each has a different protagonist and the plots occasionally overlap, but what unites them is a common background and similar thematic concerns about the effects of growing up in wartime on adolescents. (All adolescent boys, in this case, but she depicts enough male sexual abuse and prostitution that the only thing that would seem to distinguish male experience from female is the lack of unwanted pregnancy or fears thereof.) It's not necessary to read the books in any particular order or to read one to understand any of the others.

Lowachee is gifted at creating distinctive narrative voices for and empathetic connections with her different and sometimes unlikable protagonists: Jos Musey of Warchild has been so traumatized he can barely feel his own emotions or recall his own memories, Ryan Azarcon of Burndrive is a spoiled rich boy drug addict, Yuri Kirov of Cagebird is a pirate whose use, abuse, and murder of others isn't glossed over. And all of them are compelling and comprehensible and sometimes surprisingly likable. Jos is probably the most conventionally appealing character, but I have to admit to a weakness for bratty Ryan Azarcon; on her Website Lowachee mentions her admiration for Maureen McHugh, and Burndrive in general reminds me of McHugh's Half the Day Is Night, a book split between the perspectives of a rich and privileged businesswomen and her reserved bodyguard who pays prices for survival that the privileged don't see. No one else seems to like this book -- it gets by far the least notice of McHugh's novels -- but I am extraordinarily fond of it. It's hard to be that clear-sighted about privilege and not have the reader end up hating the privileged. That clear sight -- about prices paid, limited choices, and complicity in abusive regimes -- is also displayed by Lowachee.

Full review at my journal.

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the few known autobiography written by a black female slave; most other accounts of black women's lives under slavery were dictated to other people, frequently white or male or both.

Full review at my journal. NB: It's intermixed with comments on Jean Fagan Yellin's biography of Jacobs; Yellin is white.