“Recently there has been a lot of discussion about race and representation in young adult books. Justine’s blog has become one of the centers for that discussion, and because of that, when she asked me to guest blog I jumped at the chance to share one of my experiences of encountering race in the pages of a book.”

Fast-forward three years, and we’re still having that discussion on race and representation.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and over at Diversity in YA we’ve been highlighting various APA authors and books about Asian Pacific Americans. They reminded me of the post I wrote on Woman Warrior, so I looked it up and reread it, and it still seems relevant today, so I’m reposting it. Let’s continue:

Many of the posts about this subject have focused on the importance of putting people of color on the covers of books so that people of color can see themselves represented. Reading these posts made me remember my junior year in high school, when my favorite English teacher gave me a book to read because she thought I might identify with it. I am Chinese American; the book was The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, an autobiography subtitled “Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts.”

She meant well, but the book made me feel like a total foreigner. I hated it.

It made me wonder: Was this the way white Americans saw my family? Did they really think that I came from a family that believed in ghosts and treated their daughters like property?

I remember being distinctly disturbed by the book, and when I decided to write this blog post, I went back and re-read the first chapter. In retrospect, I’m stunned that my teacher gave it to me, because that chapter alone includes sex, rape, misogyny, and suicide.

I was probably 16 years old when I read it, and while I’d like to think that my teacher thought I might be mature enough to handle the content, I wonder if it was simply the only book she knew of that involved a female Chinese American main character. I have to give her points for attempting to find me a book that mirrored my life, but the fact is, The Woman Warrior made me cringe.

It’s not that the book is poorly written. Reading through it again, I find much to enjoy in Kingston’s prose. It’s that the book seemed to have nothing to do with me or my background, and the idea that my teacher thought it did shocked me. I thought: Was this what being Chinese American was supposed to be like?

(Notably, the book has been criticized as much as it has been praised, with some Asian American writers arguing that Kingston uses Orientalist stereotypes to present an exoticized vision of Chinese America for white readers. Kingston herself has asked why she should be required to represent anyone but herself.)

I was born in China, but I moved to the U.S. with my family in 1978 when I was 3 years old. I come from a long line of intellectuals, and some of my family were persecuted for their political backgrounds by the Communist Party. In addition, my paternal grandmother was white. She was one of the few Westerners to actually live in China during the Cultural Revolution, and when she returned to the U.S., she wrote a memoir about it (In the Eye of the Typhoon by Ruth Earnshaw Lo).

Because of all this, I grew up thinking my family was special. I’m pretty sure it made me (as a teen) a bit self-important and defensive about all things related to China.

On the other hand, I also grew up as one of only four Asian American kids in my high school class. The four of us knew each other and we had overlapping friends, but we did not group together out of any shared “Asian American” identity. There were too few of us. Instead, I think we all tried to blend in as much as possible. We didn’t advertise our different cultural traditions; we didn’t speak foreign languages at school even if we did at home; we did our best to be normal — to be white.

But Woman Warrior — and the fact that my teacher gave it to me specifically — forced me to acknowledge that I was not like everyone else, and it was an awful feeling.

In high school, we have a lot of chains on our feet. The way you dress; the street you live on; the group you belong to. I didn’t want another one. I was happier ignoring the fact that other people perceived me as different.

It took many years for me to accept that other people will see me through their own preconceptions, regardless of my wishes.

I joined (and left) Asian American student groups at college. I majored in Chinese Studies, then got a master’s in East Asian Studies. I went back to China. I dated Asian Americans. I attempted to become part of the Asian American community. But I never felt like I really fit in. The ghost of Woman Warrior, I admit, has been difficult to dodge.

In addition, I’m a lesbian. Being queer and Asian can be problematic, because many Asian American families are quite homophobic. There wasn’t much room for queerness in the Asian American community when I was coming out, and I felt as though I had to choose between identities.

Sometimes, it’s still a struggle, especially when meeting new people who only know what they see on my face. They see Asianness, but they don’t see my white ancestors. They see a feminine woman; they don’t understand how I could be gay. As recently as last fall, I’ve gotten the comment, “You speak English so well.”

For those of us who occupy the spaces between identities — because of our personalities or because we have a foot in more than one subgroup — finding representation anywhere, in any form of media, can be extremely rare. It can be tempting to hand a person a book and say, “This is where you fit in,” but in many, many cases, that won’t be true. It may end up alienating the person more than making them feel welcome.

Sometimes, we don’t find ourselves represented exactly in any books, TV shows, or movies. (Some of us will wind up writing those books ourselves.) I have always identified much more with Jo March or Anne Shirley than any of the people in Woman Warrior. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t appreciate — eventually — my teacher’s suggestion that I read the book.

After all, twenty years later, I’m still thinking about it.

Calling all LGBT Asian Pacific Americans — Add your voice to this survey from UCLA on coming out and mental health

Thinky

• So about the so-called lack of boy stuff in YA (YA Flash) — “So I have a lot of feelings every single time I hear that people are “angry” or “annoyed” or whatever that they can’t find ONE SINGLE YA BOOK IN THE ENTIRE YA SECTION FOR BOYS TO READ…” Me, too. Thankfully this post lays all those thoughts right out there, so I don’t have to.

• Author Mette Ivie Harrison on “What is YA?” — 10 great defining characteristics of young adult fiction, including my favorite, “There is no ennui.”

• “Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived from the the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places” (Smithsonian) (via Bin 42) — Yes, an artist actually has constructed portraits of individuals based on the DNA found in their gum or cigarette butts. Moral of the story: be careful where you leave your DNA.

Quotes of the Week

Lucy Liu, who is apparently also an incredible artist in addition to be an actor, to Hunger:

“I don’t read reviews about myself, even in film and in television, so I wouldn’t read reviews about my art. I think it taints the experience of it. When you do a movie or you are working in television, the people that you work with become your life; it is a very intimate experience that takes you somewhere emotionally. The experience of painting something has the same effect. Whether the painting is a success or a failure, the time that I was involved in it remains the same. To read a review about yourself, whether good or bad, can extinguish your experience and make you feel regretful, and I don’t want to regret time passing.”

Shonda Rhimes, “the most powerful African-American female show runner in television,” to the New York Times Magazine:

“When people who aren’t of color create a show and they have one character of color on their show, that character spends all their time talking about the world as ‘I’m a black man blah, blah, blah’ … That’s not how the world works. I’m a black woman every day, and I’m not confused about that. I’m not worried about that. I don’t need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don’t feel disempowered as a black woman.”

Erin Belieu, poet and co-founder of VIDA, in a wide-ranging and excellent interview over at Lambda Literary, which you should totally read, especially in light of the recent Coverflip situation:

“…VIDA isn’t calling for quotas. We don’t want quotas because that’s not how art works. But we do want people to be conscious of their gender bias and we want men particularly to be more open, and women who’ve been trained in a patriarchal system to be open to other voices, because they don’t always realize how parochial their tastes are, or they’re too afraid to like something on their own. Like, oh we all love Cormac McCarthy or, oh we all love Philip Roth. Well I like Cormac McCarthy but I don’t love him and I certainly don’t like Philip Roth, and I’m okay with that. We don’t all think one thing. We should think for ourselves and have a diverse and healthy and dynamic literary setting in this country that isn’t about worshiping a small group of white straight guys that a very small elite group of tastemakers have decided is the shit.”

Cool

J.K. Rowling’s plot chart for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (via Flavorwire)

UCLA QAPI Study // Patty’s Experience (Long Version) from audrey bagley on Vimeo.

Beyond the three researchers’ incredible adorableness, I wanted to share this with all my LGBTQ Asian American readers (and all my readers who know LGBTQ Asian Americans) because there is so little data out there about queer Asian Americans and mental health. As an Asian American lesbian who has been clinically depressed at least twice in my life, I know that Asian American families deal with coming out in specific ways that are sometimes not understood by non-Asian American mental health professionals. It’s really important that research like this be completed and that they get as wide a sample as possible.

Note: I don’t know these people at all beyond the fact that I read Racebending (you should, too!), and I’ve read the fine print about the survey. If you’re interested, please do check it out and add your voice to the results.

Diamond is not an anthropologist, but anthropologists have been studying Papua New Guinea for decades. The author of this article argues that Diamond sort of misses the point about Papua New Guinea’s traditional cultures because Diamond is a biologist, which means he wasn’t trained to see the cultural details an anthropologist would see. It’s a more nuanced argument than that, but what I really connected with was this paragraph:

Malinowski was convinced that anthropology could be both a natural science of society and the greatest adventure story ever told, and anthropologists have attempted to reconcile that vision ever since. For a hundred years we have been trying to answer the questions that Diamond asks in The World Until Yesterday: How can we write compellingly about human life without sliding into subjectivism and anecdote? How can we honor the details of individual lives even as we generalize about the fate of whole cultures? Can objectivity be a goal when our greatest advantage as observers is our empathy and understanding? Anthropologists have discovered that to achieve Diamond’s goal we must move beyond recording the behavior of humans in the way a biologist records the behavior of other animals. Instead, we must grasp the significance and meaning of these practices—not just because of a moral imperative to understand others, but out of methodological necessity.

I think that my writing is often heavily influenced by what I learned as an anthropology grad student — especially when it comes to world-building in secondary fantasy worlds. But also, that paragraph about the conflicts and goals of anthropology could apply almost directly to the conflicts and goals of writing novels.

A lot of times I hear people advising writers to observe strangers on a bus, or (since I write YA) to pay attention to the way teens act if you have the opportunity to hang out with them. But … to write something really true (and I’m including fantasy and science fiction in here, too, because truth isn’t limited to the real world), you have to go beyond external observation. You have to figure out why someone does something, and you must be both objective and empathetic to it.

So, maybe my four years as an anthro grad student didn’t go to waste. Maybe they were, in retrospect, quite valuable, because they did teach me to look deeper and to think harder about people, and people are what fiction is about.

UPDATED 5/15/13 9:02 PM: I just read a second article about anthropology that I bookmarked about the same time as the one on Jared Diamond’s book, but hadn’t gotten around to until now: an interview with Sarah Kendzior, anthro Ph.D. and Al Jazeera writer, at Savage Minds. This interview, read in parallel with the Jared Diamond piece, is particularly fascinating.

It reminded me, for one thing, of why I left that Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology — “a climate of conformity, timidity, and sycophantic emulation,” (as Sarah Kendzior says) among other things. Also: “The aversion to interdisciplinary work, to public engagement, to new subjects, to innovation in general, is wrapped up in the desire to affirm anthropology’s special relevance.” This, paradoxically, serves to make anthropology increasingly irrelevant to non-anthropologists (that is, pretty much everybody else).

And yet, Kendzior does a brilliant job of articulating why an anthropological lens can be particularly useful for understanding everyday life. For one thing, “Anthropologists tend to forget that tenets basic to our discipline – for example, that race is a social construct and not a biological determinant of behavior – come as revelations to a lot of people.” Also:

“Anthropology has a reputation for being exotic. But the point of anthropology is that exoticism fades when you get to know someone. Bigotry and prejudice fade too, which is why anthropologists used to be influential in reshaping ideas about race and ethnicity.

“Anthropologists are interested in why people believe lies. For example, a large percent of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. For an anthropologist, it would not be enough to note that this is factually incorrect. They want to know why so many people believe it is true.”

That’s the crux of it: why. These days, my attempt to answer the question why generally turns into novels. I think my fascination with conspiracy theories is pretty clearly rooted in an anthropological question: Why do believe want to believe in these things? And again: why do people do what they do, period? I’d say that’s the motivating question behind pretty much all fiction.

Ambre Saint-Clare, a professional mermaid performer!

I had no idea anyone could be a professional mermaid performer! But that sent me searching for more photography of the mythical, and wow, there are some talented photographers out there. Here’s some mid-week eye candy full of the surreal (photos link to the artists’ Flickr pages):

“Le Feu Follet” by Helen Warner

“Dream Logic” by Helen Warner

“The Meliae’s Dress” by Helen Warner

“Waiting on the wind” by Rachel Baran

Wonderland “The Distant Pull of Remembrance” by Kirsty Mitchell

“Legerdemain” by Miss Aniela

Some of the statistics are thankfully low (the reptilians!), and some are, to me at least, surprisingly high (the JFK conspiracy). What’s also interesting is something I chose to not show in the graphics for lack of space: a lot of Americans “are not sure” about these things.

So, while 29% believe that aliens exist, 24% are not sure. I think that’s fairly rational. I’m among the 24% who are not sure. (How would you know? Maybe the fact that 47% do not believe in aliens at all is a sign of hubris.)

What is a little disturbing is the fact that 28% believe in the New World Order, and an additional 25% are not sure. That’s belief that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government.” I came across a lot of this New World Order stuff when researching Adaptation and Inheritance, and it’s really fascinating. Belief in the New World Order is linked to all sorts of things, including distrust of the United Nations, but it also gives rise to right-wing militia movements and extremists who also believe that “the United States government knowingly allowed the attacks on September 11th, 2001″ (11% believe this; 11% are not sure).

Finally, probably the most disturbing statistic in this group (which I did not make a graphic of because it wasn’t in any way fun) was the fact that 37% of American voters believe that global warming is a hoax, and an additional 12% are not sure. Last week, “The ratio of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, the highest concentration of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas in millions of years” (Los Angeles Times). I hope that made some of those 37% (or at least those 12%) change their minds.

Overall, I think the entire poll shows a few interesting things. One, a lot of Americans lack basic science education. Two, many Americans do not know how to tell solid news apart from quackery (13% believe that President Obama is “the anti-Christ”). Three, most of us want to believe in something mysterious beyond our ordinary world. What about you? Check out the full survey results here.

Probably not.

More specifically:

Right now, no, I don’t have any plans to write more in that world. But never say never! Honestly, I know what happens after Huntress: a lot of stuff! But beyond the fact that I have different projects in the pipeline now, and I don’t have a lot of time to write about that stuff, I also have the problem that Huntress was published as YA, but the stuff that happens after Huntress is probably not YA. It’s hard for one book to be published as YA and the sequel to be published as regular adult fantasy. That might not be a problem if Huntress was a giant breakout success, but it wasn’t. (Which is why I especially treasure readers who loved Huntress!)

Also, in 2012, I wrote this:

With Huntress, I also started out planning to write a standalone. It was all plotted out and everything, with a clear arc for the characters and it came to the ending that I eventually wrote. But along the way, I did realize that the story could be bigger. And … yeah I have an idea for a sequel. BUT! It is not about Kaede or Taisin. They are in the story, but it’s not about them.

Yes, this is one of the things that I know could happen after the end of Huntress, but I’m not working on this book right now, or maybe ever. I get a lot of ideas, and some of them come to fruition and some of them don’t. This particular idea has sort of faded from my interests. I probably should never have posted about it, but hey, the Internet: it’s forever.

So for now…no sequels. But I hope that you might enjoy the other things I’m working on. The thing is, as a reader you always want more of something you enjoyed, which I totally get. But it’s the writer/creator’s job to figure out what else you might like that you never expected. You can’t know you’ll like it until you try it. It’s true that what I’m writing now is very different, but it still comes out of my brain. Hopefully that means there will be some similarities!

And there you have it. I’m not going to say no sequel ever absolutely not! because I can’t predict the future. But please don’t sit around waiting for a sequel. If it happens, it’s years away at minimum, and right now it’s very unlikely. I hope you will try some of the other stuff I’ve written in the meantime.

Bin 42, the (fake) website in Adaptation and Inheritance, launched last Monday! Check it out for all your conspiracy theory needs.

Thinky

• See The Fascinating Evolution of Cover Art From 12 Legendary Queer Books (Autostraddle) — Indeed. Very fascinating!
• “The Gender Coverup” by Maureen Johnson (HuffPost Books) — This is what YA Land (including me) was agog over last week. Still thinking through some responses, including:
• “In Which I Have an Unpopular Opinion” by author Justina Ireland — I share her opinion: “The problem here folks is the binary.”
• And even more food for thought on gender in YA from author E.M. Kokie, who draws attention to the fact that girls in YA novels rarely if ever get to describe their own bodies using anatomically correct words: “In Our Own Words”

Pretty

World War I lesbians

Uncovered: NASA’s Retro Drawings of Humans on Mars (Mashable)

My interests are diverse.

I’ve turned off all comments.

I’ve been struggling with managing comments for years, and for a while now I’ve been experimenting with leaving them on for some posts and turning them off for others. Recently I realized that the potential for any comments at all (even on a frivolous post about nothing important) has been filling me with dread. Because you know the internet — it’s full of killjoys who will pop by to say “I hate this, you suck” as soon as you say “I love this.” Also, I think that in a world where there’s a twitter feed called Avoid Comments, commenting is largely broken. There are some websites out there with intelligent, interesting comments (like Whatever), but I see how much effort it takes to manage and maintain that commenting community, and I don’t want to spend my time doing that. So: no comments.

I’ve been doing this no-comments experiment for a couple of weeks now, and I do feel much freer to blog about anything and everything. That’s really the main reason I wanted to turn them off — so that I could feel like my website is my website. If you come here, you’re going to get, well, me.

As some of you know, I’ve been posting on tumblr quite a bit, too. However, as much as I post on tumblr, I get ten times as many visits to my website proper. I don’t want to leave the vast majority of my readers out of the loop! I’m hoping now to post more often here on my official website, so that you won’t be missing much over on tumblr. I want my website to be the main place for my content, period.

A few weeks ago when I posted that brief update about changes to my website, I’d installed a tumblr widget in the sidebar. I found that I didn’t like it — it just was never formatted well, and I don’t know enough to reformat it. So I took it out. Instead, I’m just going to be posting more often, as I said above. In order to make sure you don’t miss anything important, I’ve added a sidebar box called “Featured Posts,” located in the right sidebar second from the top, so all my news is pulled out and highlighted.

Last but not least, I don’t want you to think that because I’ve turned off comments I don’t want to hear from you, my readers. That’s not true. My contact info is right here, and you can always post on my Facebook page, ask me a question on tumblr, or chat with me on twitter.

I guess during my last month or two of thinking about my web presence, I’ve realized that I’m not only a novelist. (Ha! The thought that I could think that blows my mind.) I’ve been blogging and writing critically about pop culture since 2003. That’s ten years. I can’t give it up. I love writing nonfiction, and I intend to continue doing it. Right here on my website.

El Cinco de Mayo is celebrated in the US more than in Mexico, where these celebrations are common only in the state of Puebla, about 100 miles east of Mexico City. Naval forces from England, Spain and France had traveled to Mexico to collect on various financial debts. While England and Spain quickly settled their conflicts and left, France—assuming an easy victory and the establishment of a French colony in Mexico—stayed to fight. On May 5, 1862, the poorly armed and greatly outnumbered Mexican army rousted the occupying French forces. Although there is limited recognition of this holiday throughout Mexico, the Battle of Puebla remains a source of pride.

During the 1960s, civil rights protests and other activities were strengthening cultural ties between Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Chicana/os. More than 100 years after the Battle of Puebla, El Cinco de Mayo was embraced as a new US-Mexican holiday.

The post goes on to offer suggestions for how the holiday, which has been largely commercialized in the U.S. and associated with drinking alcohol and eating Mexican food, can be rethought in schools with an anti-oppression curriculum.

I was fascinated by this piece because it made me think, instantly, of St. Patrick’s Day. From what I understand, St. Patrick’s Day used to be celebrated mostly in the United States, not Ireland, but in recent years Ireland has taken to celebrating it too. And of course any American will tell you that St. Patrick’s Day in the U.S. is about drinking beer, and maybe eating some corned beef and cabbage on the side.

While Chinese New Year¹ hasn’t yet become synonymous with drinking, I’m starting to wonder if it’s going to get there sooner or later. I grew up in as a Chinese American in a predominantly white community in Colorado, and my experience with Chinese New Year is sort of disjointed.

When I was really little — maybe six or seven or younger — I remember being transfixed by videos sent from China of the lengthy Chinese New Year television specials that air every year there. I loved them. I know I didn’t understand everything (a lot of those shows involve comedy for adults), but I loved the singing and the costumes and seeing Chinese people on TV. And then at home on Chinese New Year, I’d get a red envelope with some money in it, and I think my mom would cook some nian gao, these thick rice noodles that are traditionally eaten on Chinese New Year. That was it.

Nian gao (Photo by Gary Soup)

I remember being kind of startled the first few times a white person wished me a “happy new year” on Chinese New Year. It was … weird. Because I didn’t really celebrate it; it was kind of like a hat-tip situation at my family’s house. It’s only recently that Chinese New Year has become a bigger deal in the U.S., and every year now I’m guaranteed to have somebody who’s not Chinese wish me a “happy new year” and say “gong hay fat choy” to me either online or in person.²

How long will it be until some Chinese liquor company decides to brand Chinese New Year in the U.S. with some ads for Tsingtao beer and potstickers? Oh, wait:

Helpful tip: “Just say Ching-Dow”

So, yeah, I think this plan is already underway. And that little helpful tip at the bottom of the ad, “Just say Ching-Dow,” is already an attempt by the Chinese beer manufacturer to make this holiday more accessible to non-Chinese Americans. Ultimately, what that does is make the holiday less about its traditional Chinese meaning and more about being American.

Similarly, Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick’s Day, while they might be rooted in other nations’ histories and cultures, have been thoroughly Americanized. I totally get the desire to change that — to make those events less commercialized and more historically rooted. But I can also see that they are ways for Americans to celebrate Americanness: a hat-tip to where we used to be from (Ireland, Mexico), while celebrating where we are now (in a bar in America, eating immigrant food).

I also understand that celebrating those holidays by eating Americanized immigrant foods can feel problematic to people who are closer to their immigrant roots. I mean, I have to struggle against being offended anytime someone near me wants to eat sweet and sour pork. But simultaneously, I think that the Americanization of ethnic foods is a powerful way to say: you are one of us now.

It doesn’t always feel right, of course. I have mixed feelings. But it’s interesting to think about.

1. I know it’s often referred to in the U.S. as Lunar New Year and it’s celebrated throughout Asia, not just China, but in this case I’m talking about my experience with the Chinese version.
2. Of course, I don’t speak Cantonese. But they don’t know that. They probably don’t even know that’s Cantonese.