Review: The Fire Horse Girl

Photo courtesy of Goodreads

Anyone familiar with American history has likely learned something about the immigration inspection station at Ellis Island, a rite of passage for millions of immigrants to the United States from 1892 to 1954. Lesser known is San Francisco’s Angel Island, which served as a gateway for mostly Chinese immigrants. Kay Honeyman explores the troubling legacy of Chinese immigration to the U.S. in her young adult novel, The Fire Horse Girl. Recently, I critiqued her literary debut at the Asian Review of Books:

In a market currently dominated by otherworldly and futuristic dystopia, historical young adult fiction—when done right—is an agreeable, if less trendy, alternative for teenage bookworms. In Kay Honeyman’s debut novel, The Fire Horse Girl, young readers gain exposure to a woefully neglected chapter of U.S. history: Chinese immigration to the United States during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Honeyman’s protagonist, Jade Moon, is a bold, hot-tempered, and sharp-witted sixteen-year-old girl, but in 1923, her future appears to be drab and unpromising. Stifled by her father’s deeply entrenched sense of patriarchy and the confines of country life, the most Jade Moon can hope for is an advantageous match with the village brickmaker. Yet opportunity arises when Sterling Promise, an adopted cousin, hatches a plan for him, Jade Moon, and Jade Moon’s father to go to America. As Jade Moon quickly realizes, the “American Dream” remains more accessible in her imagination than on Angel Island, where she and other Chinese immigrants find themselves detained for months (and in some cases, years). When she finally makes it to shore—after several months of setbacks and snafus—Jade Moon confronts an entirely new set of challenges in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Historically fascinating, The Fire Horse Girl ensures a deeper look at an American immigrant experience that diverges from the well-documented Ellis Island narrative. Throughout the story, Honeyman references the history of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and white Americans’ mounting xenophobia, a fact made obvious by Jade Moon’s tacit choice to stay within the borders of Chinatown (well aware of the boundaries, both visible and invisible, not once does she leave for greener pastures). As Honeyman explains in her author’s note, Chinese immigrants looked for any way to cross borders. A common method was to purchase and use the papers of those who died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. In fact, posing as a “paper family” is Sterling Promise’s grand scheme to gain admittance to North American shores.

As a young female protagonist, Jade Moon alternatively captivates and frustrates the reader but never bores, and although she finds time to kindle a fickle romance with Sterling Promise, the relationship remains secondary to more pressing matters. For the most part, Honeyman is careful not to romanticize the American Dream or designate any white saviors. Certain threads of the story could be tighter; for instance, the somewhat abrupt disappearance of Jade Moon’s father—who remains fairly two-dimensional in contrast to other, more vibrant characters—seems like an unresolved plot point. Even so, The Fire Horse Girl ultimately succeeds where it counts. A quick yet engrossing tale, Jade Moon’s journey beckons a range of emotions, and while her legacy may be fictional, it exposes a forgotten portion of American history in a compelling and entertaining way.

A Conversation with S

Photo courtesy of S

Last year, I interviewed a good friend. She and I have been friends since high school. I’m a big fan of the Studs Terkel approach, so we sat down together at a coffee shop and talked about her life. Here’s part of what came out of that conversation, all in her words (note: names have been changed).

I’m profoundly deaf in both ears, meaning I can’t hear for shit. In July or August of the year I was born there was this huge thunderstorm. My mom hunkered down with me in a hallway because there were no windows there. And she figured I would be screaming and crying. I fell asleep. I just fell asleep, so they figured something was probably wrong. And then they started checking. You know, they would say something and see if I would turn, and I didn’t.

I got my hearing aid when I was 11 months old. Started talking, haven’t shut up since. I got this one when I was in third grade. The mold part, that’s the part they switch out. I have to get a new one made soon because this one keeps squealing. Basically what it does is it amplifies the sound. That’s all it really does.

Until about fourth grade I had to wear this battery pack. I had to wear a cable that snaked up to my hearing aid. And then they came out with wireless technology when I was in fourth grade, and I switched to this one. I’ve actually had this one since then. I’ve got to take good care of it. I kind of…depend on it.

When I was in preschool and kindergarten, my parents taught my teachers how to help me take it off. And then I figured out how to take it off in first or second grade. Now I don’t have to because I don’t have the cable and the pack.

*

I learned to ski when I was three. In this god-awful one-piece pink snowsuit with a matching pink helmet. And at one point, my parents just signed me up with a ski team and said, ‘You’re going to go race.’

So I started, loved it, raced competitively all through high school, went to two years of Junior Olympics, one in Michigan, one in Utah. Did okay. And then…my goddamn jaw surgery messed up my ski season. I was supposed to have the surgery so I didn’t plan on racing and then it turned out that I wasn’t going to have the surgery and it was too late.

I raced semi-competitively my first year at college, and then I decided that I wanted to focus on school and work and now I coach. Third-graders, fourth-graders, fifth-graders, sixth-graders. They’re adorable. It’s really fun. They’re great kids—if you have jellybeans, they will do anything you want them to do. But we mostly ski, mess around, play games. It’s a great job for a college kid.

*

I think I kind of always knew. I kind of always knew, but I figured it out in middle school, for sure. I kind of just put a name on it, a label on it. I’ve been kind of thinking about it the last couple months. And then my mother seems to have this weird fascination that I don’t date anybody. Oh, little does she know. Anyway, I just can’t talk to her about anything. She just gets so upset. She just gets stressed out and wants to discuss everything. I don’t want to discuss. I’d like to say, ‘Hey Mom, I’m seeing this girl I really like. End of story. End of discussion.’ But she’ll want to discuss. And I do not want to discuss.

I think my parents will be fine with it. I think they’ll be fine with it, but I just want to tell them and be done and move on, you know. I love talking, but I don’t want to talk to my mother. My mom’s always dropping little lines, like, ‘I bought you a full-sized mattress in case you find a friend.’ And then she says, ‘Why don’t you date anybody—a guy, a girl, I don’t care, why don’t you just date anybody?’ But the problem is also that my mother doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut. So she would tell her mother, and then my dad’s parents. She would just tell the entire family, and I don’t want the entire family to know. I just don’t want to deal with it. If you’re straight, you don’t have to tell anybody.

I have a pretty good group of friends now. Everybody’s up in everybody’s business like none other. And everybody sleeps with everybody because the dating pool’s so small.

Over the summer, at the night of the drag show, my friend Lucy came with her boyfriend. Everybody comes to these shows—drag shows are fun. Gay, straight, whatever. Lucy said, ‘We’re going to find you a girl.’ And I said, ‘All right.’ She said, ‘What about the one in the black sports bra?’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And then we went and danced for a while. I asked her to dinner. We went to dinner. But she works so much and we could never coordinate anything really. We went to the 3oh!3 and Plain White Ts concert a couple weeks ago. Had a really good time. And then we were supposed to go get dinner or lunch and then her transmission boiled. She was stuck. But I think we’re going to try again. She’s so cute, oh my God. So cute.

Usually the way it works is that you’re dating somebody and you usually have one or two on the side. But for me, if I was in a relationship, I wouldn’t cheat. I just wouldn’t do that to somebody. Women are more involved. That’s how I see it. If you look at what happens between guys and girls, I don’t know. Women seem to be more stable. Just more emotionally stable, for whatever reason.

Review: Facing the Wave

Photo courtesy of Gretel Ehrlich

Read my review of Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing the Wave below or at the Asian Review of Books:

The collision of mass destruction and immense human loss is a difficult experience to encapsulate in narrative form, perhaps even more so for an outsider. One method is to employ long-form journalism, as John Hersey did in his 1946 book Hiroshima, which focused on the stories of six survivors of the atom bomb. Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami is perhaps a less stylistically conventional telling but is equally striking in scope.

In the six months following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster, Ehrlich returns to Japan to chronicle the devastation she encounters in coastal areas. Employing a mixed-genre approach, she reproduces word-for-word accounts of survivors and accentuates these reports with interjections of her own arresting, lyrical prose:

…I see aqueous corruption: the ruined, broken, bloated; the sickening to-and-fro of corpse-thickened water, and ghost-thickened air. An odd smell pervades—one that is hard to pin down. It is decomposing plants, fish, and flesh, and the mineral smell of bodies being burned; but the radiation that moves through flesh has no scent at all.

A thorough and meticulous researcher, Ehrlich draws from human and paper sources alike. In particular, her careful records of the spread of radiation caused by leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant punctuate her gorgeous prose like thorny and chilling reminders of the everlasting nuclear threat that humankind has imposed on itself.

Throughout the book, certain characters appear and re-appear—from the superstitious photographer Masumi to the tenacious outlier Abyss—to guide both writer and reader through the process of documenting a catastrophe that devastated an entire coast of Japan beyond recognition, leaving more than 15,000 dead and, to date, more than 2,000 missing.

Among the most compelling human accounts of the tsunami is the writing of Hirayama Masayuki, whose “Idle Blog of a Fisherman” recounts the events of March 11th (the day of the wave) moment-by-moment. Masayuki’s short, brisk sentences lend a sense of urgency and immediacy to the circumstances of that fateful day, yet his lengthier ruminations, posted in the months after the tsunami, describe the collective strain on those most affected:

My kids and I took a walk from the house to look at Kuwagasaki, our part of town. Nothing has changed. Time has stopped and the wounds of our heart have not healed. We will be victims for a much longer time. The houses and debris have been cleaned up, but nothing else since then. The ground-works are still left behind. A bridge can be seen still broken in half.

Faced with the prospect of reassembling their entire lives—from non-existent jobs to decimated homes to overwhelming human casualties—and burdened by the lingering fear that another tsunami could strike at any time, survivor accounts like Masayuki’s help to make sense of the most daunting aspect of such a wide-scale disaster: its long and all-consuming aftermath.

Captured by the masterful language in this book, readers will likely feel at ease with the knowledge that Ehrlich’s perspective is well informed and her execution skillful and adept. Yet they may also wonder—as this reviewer did—about the details behind an American writer’s seemingly abrupt decision to return to Japan, decades after studying there, to collect these heart-wrenching tales of desolation, survival, and resilience. What plans did Ehrlich make to return to Japan, and what—if anything—did she sacrifice to get there? It would have been useful to have gained a fuller understanding of Ehrlich’s motivations and the reasons behind her dogged dedication in chronicling the stories of the survivors she meets. These questions arise when she inserts herself somewhat frequently—and occasionally awkwardly—into the narrative to ponder the meaning of all the chaos she encounters.

Even so, Facing the Wave accomplishes a weighty goal by successfully educating outsiders on what the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami truly meant—and continues to mean—for the Japanese, whose efforts to restore their past falters, at times, in the face of such vast challenges.

Female Empowerment in “Wild” and “Enlightened”

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

In 2006, the release of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love yielded a highly divided reaction within literary circles. Some, like Jennifer Egan, praised Gilbert’s elegant prose and compelling journey of self-discovery. Others bashed her self-absorption and seemingly inflated sense of privilege.

I don’t have authority to speak on the matter because I haven’t read the book, but after seeing the movie adaptation, I can only hope that Gilbert’s journey was more interesting in print. After two hours of a visual voyage across Italy, India, and Bali that resembled the aesthetic of a Pinterest board more than any sort of sincere spiritual development, I’ve never felt keener to abandon Julia Roberts mid-plot.

Last month, I read Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir Wild, which chronicles the writer’s 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail on the West Coast of the United States. Since the release of Wild, Critics have hailed Strayed’s tough, tenacious narrative voice as the antidote to the self-indulgent, navel-gazing Gilbert. In an article entitled “Eat, Pray, Love Like a Badass,” Elizabeth Greenwood of The Atlantic points out a careful distinction between the two works:

Strayed’s path…is one in which any reader, regardless of income bracket, can find purchase. Eat, Pray, Love’s undertone is that you deserve to be happy…Wild’s is that you have to earn it.

Photo courtesy of The Hairpin

Like Greenwood and others, I was blown away by Wild. Strayed pulled me in with her steady yet arresting language and kept me fully immersed in her world. In addition to penning such an engaging story, Strayed never suggests that her hike is a remedy for her many struggles (the loss of her mother, the dissolution of her marriage, and even a brief heroin addiction). It’s simply something she feels she has to undertake. Her journey unfolds in a far-from-perfect manner, and it resembles a true life experience in that it fundamentally remains a mixed bag. Indeed, by the time she reaches the state of Oregon, Strayed has learned a few things and lost a few things.

Around the same time I was devouring Wild, I began watching the HBO series Enlightened, which was sadly abandoned by the cable network after just two seasons. In the show, a woman named Amy Jellicoe (played by Laura Dern) experiences a spiritual “awakening” after a major meltdown. Again, things don’t just fall back into place after Amy’s short, idyllic stint in rehab. Instead, her newfound idealism is constantly questioned, dismantled, and reaffirmed in the course of her attempts to put her life back together.

Photo courtesy of IMDB

All of the previous examples–Eat, Pray, Love, Wild, and Enlightened–share a similar trajectory in terms of their their female protagonists: these women are all trying to attain some plateau of understanding. They’re trying to clear their heads, to empower themselves in various ways. But this idea–of self-understanding, enlightenment, spiritual awakening, journey of self-discovery, or whatever else you want to call it–can be tricky to pull off for creators.

One of the keys to creating a compelling character is to endow her with flaws as well as strengths. However, I’ve noticed that artistic portrayals of female empowerment have overwhelmingly centered on a woman’s flaws–and, in particular, her relationships with men–much more so than her innate resilience or sense of independence.

Eat, Pray, Love doesn’t seem like the biggest culprit in this regard, but consider a slightly older example: Bridget Jones’s Diary. Full disclosure: I love this movie, but it’s worth noting that the majority of Bridget’s insecurities and hang-ups hinge on her successes and failures with the two men in her life: Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy.

Photo courtesy of Movie Poster

The movie primarily focuses on Bridget’s relationships with men, and even her emotional state seems to depend on her status as either a self-pitying “singleton” or a fulfilled girlfriend with a boyfriend. Now, I’m not going to bash Bridget Jones’s Diary completely because I do think Fielding’s protagonist is genuine and complex in a way that has endured. There is a reason why both the book and movie have enjoyed so much commercial success. Clearly, something about Bridget Jones appeals to people–and particularly, to women.

Even so, this emphasis on men–along with the supposition that women’s problems must always, somehow, involve a man–seems to characterize far too many Hollywood narratives (for confirmation of this claim, watch nearly every romantic comedy ever written). At times, queer women also fall into this category (see The Kids Are All Right, a film in which a lesbian couple’s biggest problem is, implausibly, a man).

This is nothing new in terms of Hollywood representations. In 1985, the brilliant Alison Bechdel brought attention to this phenomenon with a comic she penned for Dykes to Watch Out For:

Photo courtesy of Molding Minds

Bechdel’s “rule” has since become known as the Bechdel Test. You can see which movies have passed the test at the Bechdel Test Movie List website, as well as a helpful explanation of the Test itself:

The Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule, is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man.

I’m pleased to report that both Wild and Enlightened pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. But that’s not to say that men don’t exist at all in these worlds. Strayed’s younger self and Amy Jellicoe are straight women with sexual histories and identities. It’s not as if their creators have depicted them as nuns in the interest of avoiding gender bias; in fact, both women’s ex-husbands make several appearances, and other romantic entanglements surface every now and then. However, at the core of these stories, readers become invested in these women as independent entities–ultimately, their trials, their mistakes, their successes, their failures are what truly matter.

As a reader and a viewer, I have rarely encountered such memorable, realistic, affecting characters–male or female–in the literature or film I’ve consumed, and it’s thrilling to add both of these creations to my list of all-time favorites.

Reading Recommendations, Anyone?

Photo courtesy of World Atlas

¡Hola tod@s!

I have good news to share with the blogosphere: Last month, I found out I was selected to be a U.S. Fulbright scholar to Peru, 2013-2014! The news was exciting and unexpected, and it means I’ll be heading to Lima around September of this year to begin nine months of independent research on the Japanese Peruvian community.

You may be thinking, “Japanese Peruvians!? Random!” Well, I can assure you I knew virtually nothing about Japanese Peruvians until I encountered some media coverage of the Fujimori presidency a few years ago. To my astonishment, I discovered that Peru boasts a considerable Japanese population (in Latin America, second only to Brazil). Here’s a bit of my proposal for context:

In the 1890s, due to an agricultural surplus in Japan, Japanese farmers began immigrating to Peru, the first Latin American country to open its borders to their home country. By the 1940s, Japanese Peruvians had become shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, and in the 21st century, they occupy a substantial economic position in Peru, whose racial demographics have been largely determined by the legacy of Spanish colonization. Though mestizos (those of European and Amerindian descent) account for the majority of the population, Japanese Peruvians entered into the nation’s collective consciousness when from 1990-2000, Alberto Fujimori–and ethnically Japanese man born in Lima–served two consecutive terms as president.

My research specifically concerns mixed-race Japanese Peruvians (people who claim both mestizo and Japanese heritage). Meanwhile, my project is a weird hybrid of genre: I’m going to be interviewing Japanese Peruvians about their romantic relationships. Altogether, it’ll be part creative nonfiction, part journalism, part radio documentary, part sociology, part ethnic studies.

As you might know from my previous posts, race is something that fascinates and perplexes me, and I’m thrilled to spend an academic year immersed in the study of it. In fact, I’m excited enough to start compiling a reading list. In true nerd fashion, I’d like to familiarize myself with as many texts as I can before embarking on this project.

Now the cool thing about my topic is that as far as I can tell, there’s virtually no literature on the mixed-race Japanese Peruvian experience, which means my own research will be filling a hole of sorts. But the less-cool thing about that is that I’ve been having a bit of trouble finding any literature related to this topic (I’ve browsed Amazon as well as the shelves of the Hong Kong public library, neither of which yielded many results).

So I thought I’d ask: Does anyone have any reading recommendations on mixed race that may somehow pertain to my topic of study? It could even vaguely resemble what I’m talking about. And apart from the academic side of things, are any Japanese Peruvians out there interested in talking to me about their experiences? Si te interesa, mándame un email.

Tuesday Sketch: Doc Brown from “Back to the Future”

“The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe: women!”

 

Apparently, I’m “Seeking [An] Asian Female”

As an expat, catching up on American TV can be a complicated process. To stream weekly episodes of my favorite shows, I visit sites with endless pop-ups, dead-end links, and–increasingly–advertisements for “dating” Asian women that are absurd, troubling, and often nonsensical.

Here’s the first one that popped up on my sidebar:

When I initially posted a screenshot of this ad on Facebook, a friend jokingly commented, “What else would you be doing in Hong Kong?” Indeed, why else would I have relocated to East Asia?

But when I saw this for the first time, my most immediate thoughts were: Who is actively “looking” for an Asian wife? And–more confusingly–why does my computer think I’m a (presumably Caucasian) guy with an Asian fetish?

Well, I don’t think I can answer that second question, but as it turns out, there’s actually a huge historical context for this “Asian wife” trope. The notion of an Asian woman as an “ideal wife” (submissive, obedient, dutiful) has a storied past in the U.S. and abroad. The first mixed-race (white + Asian) children in Asia were most likely to be the illegitimate offspring of American soldiers, and even today, mixed-race kids still experience second-class treatment in societies that severely ostracize them.

But I’m getting off-topic. As it turns out, the docile Asian wife trope extends to the present, too. In her documentary “Seeking Asian Female,” filmmaker Debbie Lum chronicles the marriage of Steven and Sandy, “an aging white man with ‘yellow fever’ who is obsessed with marrying any Asian woman, and the young Chinese bride he finds online.” I haven’t yet seen the documentary, but its trailer is enough to make me alternatively laugh and cringe (for more details, check out the latest episode of This American Life, which features Lum and SAF). It’s hard to identify the strangest aspect of this “romance,” but for me, it very well may be Steven’s conflation of his “ideal” Asian woman with every Asian woman. To him, these women are interchangeable–that is, until he’s forced to confront the reality of an actual woman in his life, a human woman complete with personality traits, expectations, and needs.

In college, I audited an Asian American studies class, and the curriculum’s week-long focus on interracial dating provoked some of the most lively and thought-provoking discussions I experienced as an undergrad. Over the course of the semester, we tackled terms like “yellow fever” and “Asian fetish” and tried to unpack how and why the objectification of Asian women has taken place over time.

I also happen to be the product of an interracial marriage. My dad is white American and my mom is Korean (she immigrated to the U.S. when she was exactly my age: 23). Initially, my mom came over to earn her PhD in biochemistry and ended up staying for 30+ years, eventually gaining her American citizenship.

To this day, people still make assumptions about how my mom got to the U.S. These speculations vary and rarely arrive at the truth. For those who aren’t too shy to openly guess, a common consensus is that my dad was an American G.I. who met my mom during his service overseas. For me, the funniest part of this fiction is probably that my dad wasn’t even born until after the Korean War ended.

Personal anecdotes aside, my understanding of “yellow fever” mostly stems from an academic context. Therefore, my weekly TV binge in Hong Kong has prompted me to wonder, in a pretty analysis-driven way, how an “Asian fetish” surfaces and operates in non-U.S. contexts.

Here’s the next ad that popped up:

Featuring an Asian woman posing provocatively with side boob on display, this ad’s language is even more candid than that of its predecessor. Not even questioning the possibility that I wouldn’t be looking for an Asian girlfriend (and never considering that I might even be an Asian woman), the ad instead presents four “attributes” that every Asian woman ought to possess.

Her need to be both “exotic & cute” reinforces age-old stereotypes of Asian women as fetishized objects, emphasizing the conflation of Asian female sexuality as “cute” (infantilized, vulnerable, childlike, submissive) yet “exotic” (unconventional, dangerous, foreign, Other).

These messages are nothing new in terms of media representations (check out this preview for the documentary “Slaying the Dragon” to get an idea of how Hollywood has perpetuated these images for years), yet an update to the ideal Asian girlfriend template is her “fun & outgoing” side, a seemingly modern twist that suggests she’s down for a good time. But be careful not to attach this newfound freedom to the wild notion that she can control or harness her sexuality in any way that might be productive for her. No indeed, as we’re reminded by the fourth and final bullet point, which reminds us that she ultimately exists to “worship men.” There are no qualms about it: she is there for one purpose and one purpose alone.

Yet the true comedy of this ad resides in the third bullet point’s lack of parallel construction (another Facebook friend drew attention to this by joking, “I really love a girl who is video games”). In terms of underlying significance, I can only assume that the association of Asian women with “video games” ties in with relatively more modern stereotypes of Asians as emblems of technophile/nerd culture.

These ads also intrigue me for their uncanny ability to clump all Asian women into a pretty restricted category: the hyper-sexualized Asian girl who exists to please a Western man, a gross simplification that seems all the more ludicrous popping up on my computer screen in Hong Kong, a cosmopolitan city whose diverse racial/ethnic population encompasses Asian and non-Asian peoples from across the world. Hong Kong is a model of pan-Asia, a home to men and women from Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Japan, Thailand, Korea, and more. On a daily basis, I bear witness to Hong Kong’s diversity. It’s evident on a single-ride journey on the MTR (the subway system), where people of all shapes, sizes, and colors crop up.

In the end, I guess nothing really surprises me about these ads. Ultimately, the main takeaway here is their not-so-subtle emphasis on the sexual gratification of Western men. And although these ads are couched in the seemingly refined language of dating sites (which presumably highlight the goal of Western men finding Asian wives), clicking on the ChinaWomen.com link just takes you a vast array of porn sites.

But again, none of this should come as a surprise. As author Sheridan Prasso points out in the video below, “Asian women fetishes by far exceed any other fetishes available on the Internet.”