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juushikaA few weeks ago I finished the ... draft? let's call it the first version of Cai's story, a three-year effort totaling something like 3.6mil words over three PoVs, some unhinged Henry Darger bullshit spinning from self-insert RP to tragic saga, illegible to anyone but me unless you really like knowing what everyone had for breakfast every day for six years.
Then I turned it into an outline, then a list of research subjects; I've since been consumed by that research. Because I guess I want this to become A Book™ in some form legible to other people.
It's not fun research; it's all background information, so grotesquely tangential that it feels like a distraction from the Shit I Care About. (The fun part will be the medical research, yippee.) Anyway, the deuteragonist (he who co-oped 1mil of the wordcount) got himself named Yong Z. as a placeholder which, in the way of placeholders, a) stuck b) has mandated multiple books on Asian American experiences in "general," on possible multiracial Chinese-and-? ancestries, and on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, all to narrow "second-generation Asian experience" from vague to specific. It's not how I expected to spend my week. I bitch, but this subject has made for more coherent, narrativized research than most other background details thusfar, and I appreciate that a whim and a library card can unlock so much, so rapidly. I still need more, specifically on the Chinese-American experience, but this is a start.
Reading these as research makes me an ungracious reader, focused on utility over craft. So I'm shoving these together, with apologies. Recording names as they appear on covers, also with apologies.
Title: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Author: Cathy Park Hong
Narrator: Cathy Park Hong
Published: Random House Audio, 2020
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 210
Total Page Count: 567,855
Text Number: 2149
Read Because: as above; audiobook through the Multnomah County Library & listened while repainting the new (read: last year's remodeled) trim in the bathroom to match the rest of the trim in the bathroom (the remodel guys cut corners) (did the effort of paint patching and tediously doing the most finicky painting work imaginable to alter the trim by one (1) shade and level of gloss pay off? you bet your ass it did; bathroom looks great now)
Review: This starts broad, which isn't the same thing as generalized, and then moves local, to specific case studies from the author's personal life and otherwise; all circling themes of marginalized experience with specific conditional privileges and social expectations, "minor feelings" as a mirror to racist mircoaggressions. Compelling, selfish, pretentious, righteously ungrateful—I found this useful in its limited capacity; the narrowing perspective is indicative, the limitations and bias borne of one private life even when the intent is intersectional.
Title: The Best We Could Do
Author: Thi Bui
Published: Abrams ComicArts, 2017
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 568,185
Text Number: 2150
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Starting in the present, then cycling backwards: a generational memoir of a family of Taiwanese refugees. In the introduction, the author discusses turning this into a graphic novel in order to make the narrative more accessible; a good call. I like the faces but don't think this is doing anything especially interesting with the medium, and the panels fall apart in action sequences, particularly the boat journey; but accessible, that it is, human and emotive and less talky than it would be as straight text, effectively nesting narrations, allowing interview and first person account to exist immediately and in conversation, the graphic novel's brevity forcing the syntheses to be short and intense. "This—not any particular part of Vietnamese culture—is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when shit hits the fan."
(This is where I learned about the Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam, 1945–1946; the author's paternal grandmother immigrated from Vietnam to China when the Chinese withdrew, which is a detail I'm borrowing from the other side.)
Title: The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Niú péng zá yì, Memories of the Cowshed)
Author: Ji Xianlin
Translator: Chenxing Jiang
Published: New York Review Books, 2016 (1998)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 568,400
Text Number: 2151
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Minus the inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust*, I appreciate Zha Jianying's introduction: a little useful context, but, moreso, contextualizing the tone, which is sardonic and dismissive even when recounting intimate suffering and humiliation, a distinctive coping mechanism that I keep finding in survivor testimony of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Between the introductions and the afterword, this is a slight, repetitive text; I don't mind, as the repetition helps it sink in, a private horror of limited scope set within a cultural travesty so large it all but defies comprehension.
* big mad while simultaneously being slowly, deeply humbled by finally learning fuck-all about the CCR, which I'm sure has come up at some point in my education but which I functionally knew nothing about two weeks ago. See the Red Memory quote, below, "When the target was defined not by race or custom...": it matters that genocide is genocide without dismissing non-genocidal mass violence; it's a struggle and grief to try to hold both, to hold it all. But fuck alive if "imagine if no one believed the Holocaust was real/bad; if no one ever talked about it!" has not aged well since 2017.
Title: Red Scarf Girl
Author: Ji-li Jiang
Published: HarperTrophy, 2010 (1997)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 285
Total Page Count: 568,685
Text Number: 2152
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This achieves its aims of exploring the malleable, manipulated overlap of being a young girl at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; it's what I needed to read to internalize the social forces at play. Propaganda, conformity, and shame are a potent combination, and the resulting persistent anxiety sits alongside the quiet mundanity of daily life. The particularly limited scope and middle grade voice/audience is constraining, but I'm not reading this in isolation so I don't care.
Title: Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
Author: Tania Branigan
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 305
Total Page Count: 568,990
Text Number: 2153
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I came to this with specific questions raised by Chinese Cultural Revolution memoirs and Wikipedia, and one by one found all answered. Doubtless this isn't the only book on the subject that could do so, but I was particularly curious about the Revolution's long shadow, so appreciate that focus here. The balance of human interest to history and cultural trend is off, the history delivered piecemeal and the larger trends promised mostly on the basis of "just trust me." This invites a contrarian impulse to contest the author's personal judgments of each human interest story's authenticity and validity; a counterproductive impulse, when the Revolution was defined by destabilization and complicity, when victim and perpetrator so often shifted and overlapped. But the general thrust is towards that nuance, discomforted by answers which are authentic in their inadequacy:
"It existed in the most part as an absence, like its victims, making itself evident in what was not said, not seen, not recorded, not recognized."
"They would not indulge in the satisfying but inadequate business of blame. The killers were children; no one person led the way; adults had induced it all. This was true. But if you spent eight years investigating and didn't name names, what was left?"
In the chapter on generational trauma and psychotherapy, "When the target was defined not by race or custom but by what was purportedly in the hearts and minds; when what was right today was wrong tomorrow; when the means of destruction was mass participation—then certainty, like innocence, was an impossibility."
Then I turned it into an outline, then a list of research subjects; I've since been consumed by that research. Because I guess I want this to become A Book™ in some form legible to other people.
It's not fun research; it's all background information, so grotesquely tangential that it feels like a distraction from the Shit I Care About. (The fun part will be the medical research, yippee.) Anyway, the deuteragonist (he who co-oped 1mil of the wordcount) got himself named Yong Z. as a placeholder which, in the way of placeholders, a) stuck b) has mandated multiple books on Asian American experiences in "general," on possible multiracial Chinese-and-? ancestries, and on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, all to narrow "second-generation Asian experience" from vague to specific. It's not how I expected to spend my week. I bitch, but this subject has made for more coherent, narrativized research than most other background details thusfar, and I appreciate that a whim and a library card can unlock so much, so rapidly. I still need more, specifically on the Chinese-American experience, but this is a start.
Reading these as research makes me an ungracious reader, focused on utility over craft. So I'm shoving these together, with apologies. Recording names as they appear on covers, also with apologies.
Title: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Author: Cathy Park Hong
Narrator: Cathy Park Hong
Published: Random House Audio, 2020
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 210
Total Page Count: 567,855
Text Number: 2149
Read Because: as above; audiobook through the Multnomah County Library & listened while repainting the new (read: last year's remodeled) trim in the bathroom to match the rest of the trim in the bathroom (the remodel guys cut corners) (did the effort of paint patching and tediously doing the most finicky painting work imaginable to alter the trim by one (1) shade and level of gloss pay off? you bet your ass it did; bathroom looks great now)
Review: This starts broad, which isn't the same thing as generalized, and then moves local, to specific case studies from the author's personal life and otherwise; all circling themes of marginalized experience with specific conditional privileges and social expectations, "minor feelings" as a mirror to racist mircoaggressions. Compelling, selfish, pretentious, righteously ungrateful—I found this useful in its limited capacity; the narrowing perspective is indicative, the limitations and bias borne of one private life even when the intent is intersectional.
Title: The Best We Could Do
Author: Thi Bui
Published: Abrams ComicArts, 2017
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 568,185
Text Number: 2150
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Starting in the present, then cycling backwards: a generational memoir of a family of Taiwanese refugees. In the introduction, the author discusses turning this into a graphic novel in order to make the narrative more accessible; a good call. I like the faces but don't think this is doing anything especially interesting with the medium, and the panels fall apart in action sequences, particularly the boat journey; but accessible, that it is, human and emotive and less talky than it would be as straight text, effectively nesting narrations, allowing interview and first person account to exist immediately and in conversation, the graphic novel's brevity forcing the syntheses to be short and intense. "This—not any particular part of Vietnamese culture—is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when shit hits the fan."
(This is where I learned about the Chinese occupation of northern Vietnam, 1945–1946; the author's paternal grandmother immigrated from Vietnam to China when the Chinese withdrew, which is a detail I'm borrowing from the other side.)
Title: The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Niú péng zá yì, Memories of the Cowshed)
Author: Ji Xianlin
Translator: Chenxing Jiang
Published: New York Review Books, 2016 (1998)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 568,400
Text Number: 2151
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Minus the inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust*, I appreciate Zha Jianying's introduction: a little useful context, but, moreso, contextualizing the tone, which is sardonic and dismissive even when recounting intimate suffering and humiliation, a distinctive coping mechanism that I keep finding in survivor testimony of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Between the introductions and the afterword, this is a slight, repetitive text; I don't mind, as the repetition helps it sink in, a private horror of limited scope set within a cultural travesty so large it all but defies comprehension.
* big mad while simultaneously being slowly, deeply humbled by finally learning fuck-all about the CCR, which I'm sure has come up at some point in my education but which I functionally knew nothing about two weeks ago. See the Red Memory quote, below, "When the target was defined not by race or custom...": it matters that genocide is genocide without dismissing non-genocidal mass violence; it's a struggle and grief to try to hold both, to hold it all. But fuck alive if "imagine if no one believed the Holocaust was real/bad; if no one ever talked about it!" has not aged well since 2017.
Title: Red Scarf Girl
Author: Ji-li Jiang
Published: HarperTrophy, 2010 (1997)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 285
Total Page Count: 568,685
Text Number: 2152
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This achieves its aims of exploring the malleable, manipulated overlap of being a young girl at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; it's what I needed to read to internalize the social forces at play. Propaganda, conformity, and shame are a potent combination, and the resulting persistent anxiety sits alongside the quiet mundanity of daily life. The particularly limited scope and middle grade voice/audience is constraining, but I'm not reading this in isolation so I don't care.
Title: Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
Author: Tania Branigan
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 305
Total Page Count: 568,990
Text Number: 2153
Read Because: as above, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I came to this with specific questions raised by Chinese Cultural Revolution memoirs and Wikipedia, and one by one found all answered. Doubtless this isn't the only book on the subject that could do so, but I was particularly curious about the Revolution's long shadow, so appreciate that focus here. The balance of human interest to history and cultural trend is off, the history delivered piecemeal and the larger trends promised mostly on the basis of "just trust me." This invites a contrarian impulse to contest the author's personal judgments of each human interest story's authenticity and validity; a counterproductive impulse, when the Revolution was defined by destabilization and complicity, when victim and perpetrator so often shifted and overlapped. But the general thrust is towards that nuance, discomforted by answers which are authentic in their inadequacy:
"It existed in the most part as an absence, like its victims, making itself evident in what was not said, not seen, not recorded, not recognized."
"They would not indulge in the satisfying but inadequate business of blame. The killers were children; no one person led the way; adults had induced it all. This was true. But if you spent eight years investigating and didn't name names, what was left?"
In the chapter on generational trauma and psychotherapy, "When the target was defined not by race or custom but by what was purportedly in the hearts and minds; when what was right today was wrong tomorrow; when the means of destruction was mass participation—then certainty, like innocence, was an impossibility."
