Best Books I Read in:
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Tag: Asian American Writers
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This section, about Chang’s miscarriage, is shattering.
My hospital wristband, the one that simply says baby boy, still sits inside my wallet like a tombstone. I imagine all the dead babies together somewhere on a large playground, swinging and sliding. And for the moment, I forget to grieve.
I had another doctor check just in case, hoping that it was a mistake. But the baby was still dead. Small black dots for eyes, paddles for hands. When the machine automatically printed out a picture of the baby, the doctor silently ripped it off and stuffed it in his pocket.
I paid a twenty-dollar copay to see a picture of my dead baby on a screen. On my way out, the doctor told me about his new Botox business and to come back soon. He would give me a discount.
— Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, p. 98 -
Sometimes writing can feel like digging holes, planting and replanting things that might never turn into anything. My eyes point down when I’m planting, but the breath of something else is always in my ears. Sometimes that breath is mortality. Other times, that breath is history. Sometimes memory. Sometimes the moon. Oftentimes, silence.
— Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, p. 77 -
from a letter addressed to “Dear Teacher”:
- Years later, I wrote you an email telling you that I became a writer because of you, because of your class. I wrote that you probably didn’t remember me. You wrote back saying that you did remember me, that you always knew there was something burning beneath. I didn’t even care if you were lying. You were right. Poets live between a fire and a great fire.
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Self adored the first three pieces in Strangers to Ourselves. She even adored the first half of the fourth piece, “Naomi.” But then Naomi started thinking she was God.
The next piece was about Laura, a debutante who was suicidal and diagnosed as bi-polar. Self skipped that as well. Rachel Aviv is a fantastic writer, but self has to care about the characters if she’s going to invest so much time reading their histories.
The last piece is Rachel Aviv interviewing the doctor who treated her for anorexia when she was six. What luck that she could do this, and parse that experience so expertly, as an adult. Self knows that only someone with much time, and perhaps a steady job, could do this. She skipped that. And then it was the end.
Self is now reading Dear Memory, by Victoria Chang. She listened to a panel on grief at the just-concluded AWP conference in Seattle. She loved the things Chang was saying about grief, and she was intrigued when Chang brought up her hybrid memoir, Dear Memory.
Self didn’t waste any time checking it out of her local library.
In a letter that begins “Dear D”:
We often speak of memory as something that lingers, that returns again and again. Maybe memory is more like a homicide, each time it returns, it’s a new memory, one that has murdered all the memories before.
— Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, by Victoria Chang -
Executive Producer/Rapist tells the narrator he was able to snag a place for her at his table during the Golden Globes. Narrator is so grateful, so giddy with excitement. Really? We’re just five pages till the end. Is this going to be one of those novels where the rapist gets away with . . . everything?
On the evening of, the narrator keeps craning her neck to see if she can spot the actress/rape victim, because she misses her.
Get this: the narrator is sitting at the rapist’s table, and she still hopes the actress will come up to her WHILE SHE IS SITTING AT THE RAPIST’S TABLE. Is she mental? (Subtext: rape, it’s no big deal, stop being such a crybaby etc etc)
Stay tuned.
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Our plucky heroine’s boss, Sylvia Zimmerman, is unexpectedly called back to New York because of a family emergency, leaving plucky heroine/ingenue Sarah to handle her very first movie set on her own. By the end of the first week, Sarah realizes she’s going to need help, especially since Hugo North, the Executive Producer, keeps piling on more grunt work for her to do:
Print out five copies of this contract for me.
— Complicity, p. 239
Get me a copy of this script.
Connect me with this agent.She hits on the idea of hiring a personal assistant for the executive producer. As she explains to her line producer (self is aware now that there are many types of producers, and the only one with any real clout is the Executive Producer), “It’s L.A. There’s dozens of film school students who would kill to intern for someone like Hugo.”
She emails the following job description to USC and UCLA:
Feature film production in need of intern to work closely with British executive producer during its six-week shoot. Director’s previous film has played in Cannes. Exec producer has extensive ties in the international entertainment and property industries.
Candidates must be hardworking, enthusiastic, a self-starter. Must have your own laptop and car. We will provide a cell phone. Position starts immediately.
By the following afternoon, we’d received twelve emails and I’d set up in-person interviews with five of the candidates that weekend.
— Complicit, p. 240The best candidate is a Vietnamese American student who’d completed his BA at Stanford. She nixes him in favor of a woman: “twenty-two, brunette, long-limbed and fetching. Perfect. She was just what I needed to keep Hugo happy.”
Now self understands the choice of title for this novel: Complicit.
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Narrator: Sarah is the Chinese American assistant film producer and unofficial ghost writer for Xander, a movie director.
Jason is a well-known actor.
I was also the person who knew the script backwards and forwards, when each character was needed in each scene, how each narrative twist led to the next one. So I sat there quietly, soaking in this vicarious praise.
“Amazing script, can’t wait to get started,” Jason shouted. He turned to me in a lowered voice. “Hey, can you get me a glass of sparkling water before we start?”
— Complicit, p. 214 -
Self is headed back to the Bay Area today. She spent four nights in Seattle, during two of which she slept. Last night she continued reading Wendy M. Li’s Complicit, which is told in a deceptively simple voice — its pleasures are cumulative.
It’s about a young (Chinese American) woman in an entry-level job in a film production company, who takes on more and more responsibility in order to prove how indispensable she is to the production company. Her boss is named Sylvia:
“Well,” Sylvia continued. “Stick around. I think you could really go far. And in a few years’ time, I could see you as head of development here.”
That simple statement, proferred out like a thin, dry Communion wafer, was enough to sustain me through the next few years of harried multitasking and inadequate income.
I didn’t think to ask for more. Nor did I ask for any kind of official credit for my work on Xander’s script. At the time, I just was grateful to be part of the team.
— Complicit, by Wendy M. Li
Kanlaon 