Still at home, reading one book a day for as long as this quarantine lasts.

If it isn’t clear by now, I’m choosing my daily reading by color and mood (which appears as two sets of criteria, but so happens to be one and the same in my book). My little library is organized by category, then arranged by shade: it’s easy on the eyes, even easier to navigate. And somehow, this system always works out beautifully—proving there is substance to color theory.

DAY 44: DEACON KING KONG

I’m embarrassed to admit that James McBride, the award-winning, best-selling author, was not on my radar until I saw Deacon King Kong on SJP’s Instagram feed. The novel reads just as if you were watching some television epic—shot like Motherless Brooklyn, starring the most charming cast of characters. It’s gripping, timely, and full of heart.

DAY 45: WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?

I’m no art connoisseur, just a civilian who pored over art books as a kid and as an adult plans most of her trips anywhere around the local art museums. How the Art World views Will Gompertz’s What Are You Looking At? is unknown to me—but as an interested bystander (proud member of most tri-state museums on a rotating basis), I found this especially helpful in better understanding the progression of modern art through the years. Fun, quippy, and informational is just what I needed.

DAY 46: CHINA POP

I found this near-fine edition of China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture marked-down to $1.00 sitting on a clearance trolley outside of Book-Off. (I was trying to kill time before doors opened the first time I saw Moulin Rouge: The Broadway Musical and stumbled upon this used video game and bookstore. Never one to resist a good browsing, I ended up with a stack of books that, luckily, I didn’t have to relinquish to coat check at the theatre.) Of course the cover piqued my interest: my Taiwanese parents believed in the importance of complete, American assimilation, and my own shame at Otherness kept my culture at an arms-length distance, but as an adult, I’m ready to embrace it if just to understand my family more. (I did, however, have a short-lived fascination trying to understand how Mao could even rise to power, but my heart hurt too much at the horrors of destroying centuries of a culture.)

I’d like to think this book found me. I devoured it, and not because I felt an obligation to because of this one-book-a-day goal. There were familiar anecdotes. Tidbits I never knew but should have, had I been more accepting of myself. A wave of appreciation for insight into a world that I will never fully understand, but want to try—because life is more than just where we are.

For example:

• A resounding yes, a hundred eager nods in agreement with this idea that “Chinese culture…is an oral one: eating and talking are two essential things that the Chinese love to indulge in, and the two are best when they go together. Dinner parties and banquets are thus a central form of Chinese social communication. It’s hard to think of anything else comparable to communal dining…” because nothing else is.
• How could I have not known that my birthday (unless this is the lunar calendar the book references) is an annual memorial day when the Chinese sweep the graves of their ancestors and honor the dead?

DAY 46: MAO’S LAST DANCER

This just might be my favorite book so far. Any attempt at a synopsis or conveying my thoughts would be an injustice to Li Cunxin’s life story; just know that I was glued to the pages until I had to start my workday (after which I was halfway through the memoir). It’s emotional. Heart-wrenching. Humorous. So beautiful that though I know the author was involved in the movie’s production, I don’t want to mar my experience with the book if the movie is overproduced.

DAY 47: WHERE THE PAST BEGINS

I resisted reading The Joy Luck Club for the reasons I touched on above: I wanted little to do with anything Chinese because I didn’t want to be even more different than I already was (and I write this with so much shame in my heart)—as if reading something could change people’s perception of me, already distinctly different. When I finally gave in, I understood why my mother needed to own a copy (she never bought books unless she knew she would want to have them forever).

There was no hesitation when Amy Tan’s memoir was released. (Granted I’m much older, hopefully wiser now, too.) I flew through it, understanding and feeling understood, grateful for the insight into Tan’s mind. Her life was so different from mine—the product of a generational gap—and yet I could relate. How deeply I resonated with her relationship to being Chinese!

“… I am completely illiterate in Chinese. Yet I understand conversational Mandarin without doing the extra linguistic step I need with Spanish and English of translating in my head what the words mean and which conjugation is being used. […] I am stymied because of my child-level vocabulary but they know how to automatically adjust downward or give more context. […] I have numerous Cuacasian friends who speak far better Mandarin than I can. They studied it diligently. They can read Chinese menus and do elaborate ordering, conduct business meetings, and hold their own in just about any situation. But I have intuitions in Mandarin they will never have, and it is those aspects of language that would never be taught in language school. They have to do with expressions that come through the daily life of a child raised by Chinese parents.”

DAY 48: THE GOOD IMMIGRANT

Another book I couldn’t resist. With a title like The Good Immigrant—featuring an essay from one of my favorite writers, Jenny Zhang—how could I not pick it up, if just to show solidarity and prove a want for these voices? Of course the collection was great; of course I felt a special kinship with Zhang, but there were shared experiences with all the female voices (like Priya Minhas):

“I wrote—very matter-of-factly—that I would like to stop growing hair on my arms and legs… along my tummy. Which I wished were smaller too. I wished I was allowed to shave, to wear crop tops and lip gloss and platform jelly sandals, and to pierce my ears. For women like me, who are rarely considered beautiful or powerful, there is always a list. And as a young girl, I had enough conviction to write it all down, believing everything that separated me from acceptance could be condensed neatly into a page of bullet points.”

Oh! And that opening essay. A must-read for all.

DAY 49: MINOR FEELINGS

The relief, joy, sadness, gratitude, all-of-the-aboveness of being seen is indescribable. The emotions are twofold when you’re able to relate to the narrator or protagonists’ voice, thoughts, feelings; it explains this insatiable desire for more like me, about people like me, this week.

“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, ‘Things are so much better,’ while you think, Things are the same. You are told, ‘Asian Americans are so successful,’ while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria. […]

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, whe we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feeligns are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.”

I think how quick I was to avoid the small group of Taiwanese-American students protesting—I physically distanced myself and avoided all eye contact as I swerved around them, and to this day, I have no idea what they were protesting, except that it’s something that I should’ve cared about and acknowledged. Instead, I didn’t, for fear of above: what does it say about me that I’m still unraveling my thoughts? Unable to write my own words and instead, rely on the quotes of others?

I’m trying, so I’m reading—because feigning apathy is longer a viable way of being.

DAY 50: MY LIFE ON THE ROAD

Like most women of my generation, Gloria Steinem is a hero, living proof that you can be wholly feminine and still a feminist. I’m still and will always be a fan of hers—but because I read her at the tail end of the week, her memoir My Life on the Road it didn’t have the impact I expected. Perhaps this wasn’t fair—how could she compete when I just read voices I could actually relate to—or maybe, this order was meant to be. She will always be the face of a movement, an aspiration and inspiration: but my heroes are a little closer to home.

They’re starting to be the ones that look like me.

.   .   .

xx