AMBIENT PARKING LOT

Ambient Parking Lot by Pamela Lu | Kenning Editions 2011 | $14.95

Parked in a corner of Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, I turned up the volume on my headphones and listened long past the comfort level of both my bladder and my thirst, testing the limits of the quickly fading sunlight. I chuckled and tick-marked at record speed, drunk with the spot-on parody and ridiculous brilliance of her lines. What I love about Lu’s work is her sharp wit, subtle delivery and deadpan hilarity, which you have to slow down and listen for in order to fully appreciate. Thus, parked, I listened.

Lu’s characters, all of them, are also listening. This book is a mock-documentary novel that tracks the mid-highs and mid-lows of a band of ambient noise musicians, the Ambient Parkers, who record in parking lots and garages and sample car trunk thuds, gridlock traffic honks, revving engines and the like. Aspiring to capture the nature in the machine, their material is capitalism and its doomed, sublime ambience.

Reading this book is like watching an indie webisode spin-off of “Behind the Music” (“Behind the Noise”) run by a group of nerdy, over-enthusiastic volunteers and bored unpaid interns with MFA degrees. Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops. Parts of it read like an overly self-conscious, overly detailed fan blog with absolutely no web traffic, which is crafted with earnest, superb engineering and is as addictive as low-calorie reality TV. The band’s fits of self-induced melodrama and cheesy enlightenment register as mere blips and farts to The Alternative Mainstream—yet, anonymously, the band continues, and miraculously, they continue to be heard.

Our album was released in the spring to the deafening silence of the public. Urged on by our manager, we held anemic signings at record stores and granted interviews to lackluster radio personalities, who kept fidgeting in their seats and mispronouncing the titles of our songs. Bearing the cross of those who serve up reality over euphemistic fabrication, we braced ourselves for the onset of poverty that would surely follow our disappointing sales. Our one consolation was the darkness that descended upon our suite each night, relieving us from the sight of our manager combing the want ads and calling our attention to openings for local waitstaff. (125-6)

This book asks us to listen to the intonations between noise and silence, between constant movement and abrupt stillness, between entropy and paralysis, between the cars and the lot. The Ambient Parkers unknowingly stumble upon these spaces, accidentally bumping into other failures of capitalism, other awkward nerds and excessive outcasts. Together they sip weak tea and theorize in a co-op across the street, grappling with their ridiculous and “unspectacular existence[s].” Their refusals—their starts, deletions and restarts—fall like bulldozed trees in a future parking lot, which splinter and crack underneath the bureaucratic electric saw of free-market time. Their attempts beg the question: What does it mean to fail, as J. Halberstam asks in The Queer Art of Failure, if the hegemonic rubric of success is pre-designed?

* * *

Lu brings a boom mic up to the excessive amounts of noise that capitalism constructs and demands be meticulously maintained, from the white noise of gentrification to the mobile phone radiation of global communication systems to the pretentious hype of green trends and the academic elite. If we are often complacent and complicit in these structures, Lu plays back the thrilling complexity of their inaudible sounds and gestures so that we can no longer ignore them. The Ambient Parkers sample and record our sense of worthlessness, insignificance, loneliness and sheer absurdity as artists “superfluous to the discourse” and paralyzed by excess. The “always on” or “always on vibrate” cultural standard means that silence is not something we’re trained to hear.

To train our ears, Lu builds the Ambient Parkers’ profile from a variety of source materials—first in their own manifesto and then in the manifesto of a rival copycat band, the Ambient Barkers. This is followed by “The Salaryman Chronicles,” a hilariously detailed report compiled by a private investigator that documents the bored and empty minutes of a band member who has sold himself out to the corporate cubicle world. We stop to listen to extended tracks: a radio interview with a dancer on her previous collaboration with the band (complete with indications for [Pauses], [Shifts in her chair] and [Forty-five seconds of radio announcements]) and a 50-page email from the Station Master of a pirate radio station who they’ve been stalking (including the band’s ridiculous attempts to reply).

The Station Master, who refuses to play the band’s music on air, chronicles an epic saga from his youth, which includes his blind trek into the woods of “the Orient,” where he encounters a strange creature called Agatha and “hear[s] a new kind of music.” Much of the saga also centers on the rise and inevitable downfall of the Station Master’s lover, Annika, a Swedish opera singer. At a major turning point in her story, she says the following:

When I was singing, all I could hear between the measures was silence—that inhuman silence, the silence of eternity. I often think I must have married that silence before I was born, in some past life perhaps. It’s my one passion, the meaning of my existence. My singing is an attempt to move it and change it, make it turn around and speak to me. My fans mean the world to me and I’ve dedicated my career to them, but I’d give it all up for a single moment alone with that silence, a single moment of recognition. (86)

* * *

The Station Master’s email finally ends in a museum with “a towering animatronic model of a saber-toothed tiger and a giant sloth.” After narrating his journey of global insignificance, Lu focuses our attention here:

The action lasts all of twelve, maybe thirteen seconds. At the end of this time, the cat’s fangs are suspended in midair, less than an inch away from the sloth’s neck. No blood is drawn, no appetite is sated. The inevitability of nature is stalled through human mechanization. Then artifice takes over and the scene is duly reset. With motorized precision, the models slide back to their starting positions. This is perhaps the strangest and most heart-wrenching part of the program, and it is this industrious backsliding, complete with the creaking wheels of machinery concealed beneath the fur, that reminds me indelibly of your music. (119-120)

Caught up in the absurd mechanizations of their lives, the characters in Ambient Parking Lot strive for “a moment of recognition” with silence that is never quite attained or successfully replicated. In their extreme awkwardness, they share an “air of distraction…a restless shifting and quiet shuffling.” They stall; we idle. Our listening stretches out long past what’s comfortable; we listen to them systematically occupy all 116 parking spots in a corporate garage and busk in a park to pathetic results for 21 days.

This kind of prolonged, awkward endurance is embodied by the dancer, who performs an exhausting scene of “experimental torture” inside a wrecked car as part of a collaborative performance in response to events that can be inferred as the aftermath of 9/11. She stretches a 3.5-hour set choreography into a 12-hour improvisation and in effect stages her own death. In her interview with The Radio Host, we witness the traumatic and nearly debilitating effect the performance had on her body. At the end of her interview, she describes a moment of pain (while her friend works on a tattoo) in which she extends through the “miniature trauma site” of her shoulder:

And in that moment of freefall, I understood that I had never really left the car wreck at all. I was still wedged inside the twisted shell, my legs pinned together, a sharp splinter of metal digging into my shoulder. I was dancing, Jerrod’s needle was dancing; we were performing a duet. I was trying to communicate something through each one of my movements. I could feel the pressure of the audience gathered outside, the open-mouthed awe of the musicians as they pointed their microphones at the wreck. [...] The musicians are probably still congregated around the wreck, peering inside its jagged openings, documenting the freakish silence with their studious machines. They strain to hear what they can’t hear, to capture what they can’t possibly capture. (174-5)

Everyone in Ambient Parking Lot lingers anxiously in an awkward gear, shifts and shuffles, and conducts their own kind of endurance art. For the dancer to lift herself out of the wreckage, to break through the carapace, is an impossible yet simple act, filled with symphonies of micro-movements and the labor of stasis. In straining to hear what they can’t hear, to capture what they can’t capture, the band is hushed by their inability to replicate stillness’ echo. Lu asks us to open our ears to these auditoriums of absence. She gestures toward the potentiality buzzing in every pause, which waits to be given a voice, to make a move, to become transformed. These moments of emptiness, of realizing something is yet unfinished and missing, are the moments the Ambient Parkers begin to listen for.

The NY Times began the new year with a piece about the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and the cultural context in which it operates. And our most recent issue of the Lantern Review put a spotlight on HAWC in Community Voices. This is only the beginning of much-deserved attention for this unique generation of new writers.

How Do I Begin is an apt title for an anthology of writers whose ethnic identity is doubly marginalized: though the Hmong roots are in southwest China, most emigrated/fled to the US from places like Laos or Vietnam after the Vietnam-American War. Burlee Vang, in his introduction to the book, describes himself as “born into a people whose written language has long been substituted by an oral tradition.” The written language of the Hmong was lost after assimilation in Imperial China long ago; this is not to mention assimilation into Thai and Lao culture, where most Hmong are provided an education only in their host countries’ official languages. The Hmong language has remnants in traditional embroidery but they have become indecipherable. Writers identifying as Hmong American today, therefore, have the tremendous task not only of writing themselves into history and literature, but also of gathering their names and identities from the pieces available. English is their adopted language, and so these writers must weave a warp and woof through multiple traditions.

The writing of themselves is a doubly difficult task because of the relationship between art and identity politics. Almost worth the purchase of the book alone are the short statements beginning each author’s pieces: in them, the writers describe their relationship to the term “Hmong American writer.” Many of How Do I Begin’s contributors wonder whether the Hmong part or the writer part takes primacy, and many are skeptical of the “object of exoticism” and of ethnic identity as “artistic limitation.” They struggle with negotiating the universal (empathy) and the individual (alienation). These writings are like a hand opening and closing, pulsing, from palm to fist. The impulse to “transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries” is paired with the impulse to preserve those boundaries and distinctions. Vang writes, “We have overcome ourselves. Our writing attests to this. Legitimizes us.” That overcoming is a matter of ownership and self-creation; yet the question of legitimacy is raised, and one wonders, On whose terms? Mai Der Vang uses the word paradox in her statement: “Writing for me has become a roadmap to navigate the paradoxes of life.” Sandra McPherson writes in her advance praise that these writers “are new to themselves and yet they already have their elders.”

Because their chosen language is English, these writers’ elders must be equated across cultures. The two epigraphs of Vang’s introduction, for instance, are from Shakespeare and Hmong American poet Pos L. Moua. The Shakespeare quote comes from Hamlet V.ii, when Hamlet describes waking suddenly on his execution-bound ship: “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, / That would not let me sleep . . .” He finds the letter from Claudius commanding England to behead him, and he rewrites the letter, thus rewriting his fate. The scene’s metaphor echoes with two of the last lines of verse in this anthology, from a poem by Mai Der Vang: “When all along you think the only war / is the one inside you.” And the epigraph from Pos L. Moua is the voice of a different elder: “Then they rode in canoes secretly arranged for them . . . / straight toward the world where the torches are burning.”

All throughout the anthology are reconfigurations of cultural inheritance. Iconic images like picket fences are challenged in Soul Choj Vang’s poem “Here I Am,” while the Carveresque image of fishing in Americais written from a different perspective in V. Chachoua Xiong-Gnandt’s “Lake Red Rock, Iowa” and then in Ying Thao’s essay “The Art of Fishing.” Martha Vang’s poem “Still Life of a Fruit Bowl” paints for us not apples and oranges but

plaintains, lychees, longans, and mangoes.
Pomegranate seeds are sprinkled around the
spiky jack and durian.

Soul Choj Vang’s “Our Field” lines up a mythic history of place names and people’s names that begins in the East and ends in the West. The poem concludes with the exhortation: “Hold on to our new fields!” Bryan Thao Worra’s “The Spirit Catches You, and You Get Body Slammed” plays with exotic expectations by taking us to Missoula with thoughts of “an auspicious moon above ancient Qin” while a shaman speaks enthusiastically in Hmongabout “Randy Macho Man Savage!” The image of the wrestling ring is an apt one as we think about the way these writers grapple with themselves in the box of their spaces, and as we think of Anthony Cody’s words, a Mexican American writer contributing to this anthology in the “hope to connect to tangents of the universal human experience and tie us to one another.”

The experience of the alien is another theme. That now-indecipherable embroidery, the paj ntaub, graces the cover of this book in an artistic rendering. In Burlee Vang’s author statement, he claims as his goal “some universal experience or truth, despite how alien the world, situation, or characters . . .” Andre Yang’s poem “Cousins” gestures at a painful language of love and recognition even “amongst the chorus of insects / that must have been so familiar to you, that were so foreign to me.” Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Modern Life” ends with the speaker

Waiting for the cops in their fancy cruisers
To blink
So our race can begin

That is a blink of longed-for recognition from authorities, and it is a blink that quickens the gap between the alien and the invisible.

There is a self-estrangement involved in all writing, in the creation of all memories, and it is useful to consider Ka Vang’s formulation: “Being Hmong makes me a better writer and being a writer makes me a better Hmong.” This awareness of a split identity is one of upward lift, like two waves rising in their collision.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this anthology, or how exciting it is to read these new voices and see the stirring of a people in words. I believe that the work of this anthology is not merely one of extending history or of grafting on labels. “Hmong American literature” is not a name; it is a conversation, an evolution. Bryan Thao Worra writes:

There is often the implication that ethnicity can be separated or masked in writing. This cannot be done any more than we can disguise the time in which we write. [. . .] my work remains, and that is my true body.

NOT MERELY BECAUSE OF THE UNKNOWN THAT WAS STALKING TOWARD THEM

“Sewing,” “pockets” and “stories” being things that don’t quite exist in the Neverland, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them sews pockets in and around the mythos of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Cutting snippets of Barrie’s source text, including Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and events in Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys, Boully centralizes Wendy’s experience and sews up bits of her story, stitching the make-believe into the made-quite-real. In her pockets, open ends and open endings fit and hover.

“places in the earth are breaking”

Every page of not merely because is footnoted with a section called “The Home Under Ground,” while the rest of the text wraps itself around. Boully is famous for having written an entire book in footnotes, The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002 and Essay Press, 2007); these footnotes referenced empty pages—a nonexistent text. In notes 1 and 2 of The Body she writes, “…everything that is said is said underneath… / It is not the story I know or the story you tell me that matters; it is what I already know, what I don’t want to hear you say. Let it exist this way, concealed…”

That she chooses to reference the concealed, underground home where Peter Pan, Wendy and the lost boys lived in her footnotes to not merely because made me think of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003). Thammavongsa studies a variety of fruit and insects and reveals, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things in daily life.” Boully’s line “A mushroom head here, a celery stalk there, three new baby bird graves, a fiddlehead here; places in the earth are breaking” echoes Thammavongsa’s poem “The Ground”: “You will not leave / or keep from / this ground, a breaking.”

Boully’s footnotes also recall Padcha Tuntha-obas’ “a poem composed to call one’s self” in her book Trespasses (O Books, 2006), in which a gutter of text continues on its own track throughout the poem: “but even then silence speaks, quietly.” Boully, Thammavongsa and Tuntha-obas’ use of foot- and ground- noting causes breaks in the page and breaks in our encounter with the text. Like street ditches hauling off rain, language flows from page to page and spills out. Text run-off settles here at the bottom, “nicely crammed,” like a kind of sedimentation. *

“nicely crammed” / “a mere scrawling”

I could only approach not merely because in the hour before dusk; I wanted to get under wool blankets by a fire and eat pumpkin muffins fresh out of the oven in order to read this book. In Barrie’s text, the Neverland is a map that exists in all children’s minds, in all children’s dreams:

Of all the delectable islands the Neverland is the snugggest and most compact; not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are night-lights. (J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988, p. 13)

Boully’s book became “very nearly real” for me during these winter nights. The back cover blurb says, “…Boully reads between the lines of a text…and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at.” Having also read Barrie’s text, I find that the original story is already quite dark and awkwardly twisted. The Neverland is a world of recurring trauma and chronic amnesia, wrapped up in a child’s ignorance, which continues to circle itself. Sexuality is no stranger to Barrie’s story either, but Boully does unravel the hems a bit further, taking a peek at Tiger Lily’s pubes, Hook’s pubic-y beard, Wendy’s panties, poo, peepee and pooper holes.

The realness of make-believe washing, make-believe medicine, make-believe food and make-believe sex—stink, sickness, malnutrition and still-birth—peep through Boully’s stitches. Peter and Hook’s sexual interest in Tiger Lily, Tinker Bell and Wendy, and intimations of abuse, are written up from underneath.

“Wendy began to be scrawled all over with him. … Whether the he is the little Betwixt-and-Between or whether the Betwixt-and-Between is he: there is a male hand, and it is scrawling on a little girl. All over, that is. At what point is the girl no longer herself but a mere scrawling” (56).

Peter’s pubes all strung up with crustaceans and barnacles: what must be hiding deep within the lagoon, gathering itself in some fishy fallopian tube? … Such a little hole too; do you think the Peter bird will break through, break through? … The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon. Old little tin cup you drank from: look! They’ve taken to using it as. And your little still-birth, all like a tadpole, all a-gasping in your little kettle of water.
__________________
The Home Under Ground
… For example, [Peter] can put a little something inside of you, and you will carry that for the rest of your life; thimble all empty underneath in the inside. The molar pregnancy: lasting, lasting; placenta all set to bursting, all full of nothing, nothing. (60-62)

Could Tinker Bell, Tiger Lily or Wendy have gotten pregnant in the Neverland? In a place where nothing is planted, where it is forbidden to speak about mothers, where it is forbidden to grow up, where there are no babies, where so many things die—is anything conceived? Born? Grown? “Why, I think I should like to be a farmer, says he, right when we were sending you out to sea.”

“the end has been hovering”

“Don’t write down what actually happened; instead, write down what you wanted to believe.” In not merely because Boully animates the tension between the make-believe and the made quite real, but even more so, she opens up the dream in-between the story and the hand of the storyteller. Wendy transforms from “a mere scrawling” to the one in control of the end—instead of re-telling Barrie’s/Peter’s/Hook’s story, she sews new ones and writes them true. Boully’s hypnotic use of rhyme, addictive phrase repetition and clever end-of-sentence clips create unexpected echoes and stops, and loose ends to sew up.

What I wanted to give you was this here little tiny piece. Of me. If it heals; if it heals properly, it won’t leave. Such a scar. Where it’s red, it’s only red for just a little. While. Return soon. To normal it will. … Some night, in dream, when I will have climbed the look-out, it won’t be you who I see, but rather another more distant star, another darker molting of sky. And so you will lie. And I will not be there too—not in a hovel, not in a bottle, not in a happy-ending novel, not in a kitchen serving eggs for two, and certainly not in a parallel grave from you. (18)

Playing dead = growing up, growing up = forgetting, forgetting = the end. What intrigues me about not merely because is the exploration of Peter’s role as a grave digger, as a kind of ghost or angel that buries (i.e. plants) children in the earth so that they pop out new. This is hinted at in Barrie’s text: “There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened.” The Neverland is a make-believe dream and a real afterlife, and Peter Pan is made of earth and lives underground, both exceptionally old and exceptionally young.

What also strikes me about not merely because is Boully’s/Wendy’s insistence on planting things, on growing things, on bearing—not just in childbirth, but in what it means to “mother” and to sustain, outside the traditional gendered role, to sustain the effort it takes to remember. The final chapter of Barrie’s Peter and Wendy includes an additional scene written after his original play premiered, which suggests that just as Peter came for Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, he will also come for Wendy’s daughter Jane, and her daughter Margaret, on and on and so forth. Boully writes, threading in Barrie’s words: “Two is the beginning of the end. As in, you and me, Peter; we make two and the story, and the story takes on an and then.” Remembering, beyond vague recognition, to break the cycle, is behind Boully’s writing.

And so, Wendy hides things that will later be found. Her endings are pockets, and nesting inside are buried secrets. “Oh, Peter, you’re turning every pocket, every pocket: inside out, inside out! But I have the acorn button. The acorn button is something that, up until now, I’ve kept. Silent about.” Boully fits footnotes into these pockets, like the note Wendy slips into the pocket of her granddaughter’s nightgown, to remind us.

_______________________________
“What is a pocket but a hole? A home.”
* Coincidentally, Boully, Thammavongsa, Tuntha-obas and myself are all Thai writers. Something about our obsession with what is concealed, with what lies just below the surface, with what is between the lines, feels culturally resonant for me—what is never unearthed and never spoken maintains its own economy. For an exceptional essay by Boully on pad Thai, being mixed and the small places we argue and withhold in language, visit “A Short Essay on Being” at TriQuarterly.

I HOTEL by Karen Tei Yamashita | Coffeehouse Press 2010 | $19.95

Karen Tei Yamashita—writer, professor, and globetrotter—possesses an oeuvre that is anything but conventional. From her debut eco-fantasy novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest to her latest novel, the incredibly ambitious I Hotel, Yamashita has time and again demonstrated a preoccupation with offbeat human experiences.

At the center of I Hotel is the history of the titular inn, the International Hotel, a low-income housing complex located in San Francisco that became the source of much controversy and conflict when its residents, mostly elderly Filipino and Chinese bachelors, were threatened with eviction in the 70’s. Working with this historic centerpiece, Yamashita crafts a highly experimental novel comprised of prose, screenplay, quotes, analects, and even comics. And in an effort to give it a more comprehensible structure, the novel is divided into ten “novellas,” each corresponding to a year between 1968-1977. For research, Yamashita interviewed residents from the community, and their stories serve as seeds for the novel. Despite her efforts to shape the novel around fictionalized versions of these culled stories, the “fiction” elements end up coming across as secondary to the overwhelming amount of synopsized history and culture that fills the novel in the form of primary source-like documents. Thus, we have a “novel” in which the most compelling sections are the ones that feel least like a novel.

In each novella, we’re afforded glimpses into the lives of various protagonists. In an interview with Kandice Chuh for Discover Nikkei, Yamashita said she roughly structured the book so that each “novella” followed three central characters, with one typically serving the role of a mentor. Characters include the son of activists, a saxophonist, and a dancer, among others. But despite being modeled on actual people these colorful figures feel hastily formed, like participants in a dress rehearsal. The scenes they exist in feel ethereal and unanchored. There’s no sense of settling into moments and scenes and exploring characters and their connection to their settings. Instead, there is mostly dialogue, and not even very effective dialogue. The dialogue often is too heavy-handed or too inconsequential. Despite efforts to spotlight characters and how they negotiate trying circumstances, what takes precedence is an overriding narrative voice that attempts to bridge them all together.

More often than not, what hamstrings the conventional narrative threads is the intrusion of an overriding polemical voice that waxes and wanes about humanistic subjects such as philosophy, history, politics, film, art, and literature. The personal stories are undermined in part because when the novel does digress into the polemical mode, the most compelling writing actually arises. In several of these sections, the language is mesmerizing. There are passages that are so stylistically crisp and stirring that I initially reread them to deconstruct the source of their power:

“Do you command great armies and oversee great territories, or are you the fodder of stinking bodies sacrificed at the front? Do you rule by the will of God or the Mandate of Heaven, or do you grovel in the dirt for your subsistence and share your food with animals? Do you stand at the pinnacle of power, however precariously protecting, with the great umbrella of your powerful arms and silken sleeves, a hierarchy of hapless fools and ungrateful subjects, or are you a struggling peon of unfortunate birth? …The rise and fall of civilizations held in dusty monuments for thousands of years may suddenly be compressed in no doubt brilliant minds to explain the present moment.”

Yamashita is fluent in the language of so many disciplines and subcultures that no matter the subject being explored—whether it’s French poets, Marxist theory, or Imelda Marcos—the writing feels commanding.

The fluency and command Yamashita demonstrates, however, cannot mask the novel’s lack of narrative cohesion nor can it salvage characters that seem never to set themselves apart from the farrago of activity all around them.

But I suspect this lack of cohesion is due less to oversight and more to the progressive aspirations of the text. The novel (if it can even be called a novel) is so brimming with experimentation and historical substance that it ignores more traditional narrative preoccupations, like continuity, character development, and standard conflict resolution structure. But this doesn’t make it an inferior work; it just makes it different, in my opinion. That’s not to say the novel isn’t without it’s shortcomings, but with a certain mindset the shortcomings can be seen as consequences of a different kind of preoccupation, one geared less to achieving the typical objectives of a novel and more towards rendering a kind of spoken word historical epic that captures the zeitgeist of one of the most transformative periods in American history.

While reading I Hotel, I couldn’t help but call to mind Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Specifically, I thought of a statement Diaz made in an interview, in which he said he initally planned for Oscar Wao to be a multimedia extravaganza filled with comics, web site tie-ins, and other postmodern pyrotechnics. In the end, though, Diaz reigned in his ambitions in favor of a more formally conventional family saga that was distinguished by its unconventional voice. In I Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita seemingly aims to realize the mega-project Diaz abandoned by creating a novel that combines various formats and syncretizes diverse voices in order to capture the complexities of a community caught up in the turbulent currents of history’s unfolding.

Whether she has created something compelling and worthwhile depends on your expectations going into the book; if you’re expecting clearly rendered stories that will resonate and stick with you, then I Hotel may not be for you, but if you’re looking for a head rush from reading about a host of interesting subjects in a variety of unconventional formats, then you’re probably in the right place.

I Love Yous Are for White People: A Memoir by Lac Su | Harper Collins 2009 | $14.99

Let me begin with this disclaimer: I don’t usually read Asian immigrant memoirs. At least, not until very recently. This particular book came to my attention while I was randomly perusing some Asian American culture blogs, where it had received some attention, in part I’m assuming, because of its provocative title. The reason I wanted to put out this disclaimer up front is because, unlike a lot of other reviews for this book available on the web, this one is not written with an academic background in ethnic studies or extensive experience with the canon of the Asian American memoir. So, what can my review offer? Well, as the child of Asian immigrants who had never read Asian immigrant memoirs until very recently, I found the experience of reading this particular memoir and studying the blogosphere’s response to it to be interesting because of the questions it raised for me as an ethnic person in contemporary America who occasionally writes things for public consumption (Exhibit A: this blog post). So, in addition to sharing my thoughts on the book, I’m going to share some thoughts on the responses it has elicited, which I have found to be equally interesting.

First off, a quick rundown of the book and its author.  I Love Yous Are for White People is by Lac Su, a young Vietnamese immigrant who, as a child, escaped South Vietnam with his family in 1979 and immigrated to America. The memoir begins with a harrowing boat dock escape then explores Su’s experience of growing up in Los Angeles in a series of chapters that read like individual essays. As noted by many reviewers, the book touches upon themes of filial piety, identity negotiation, and the pains of cultural transition. Also noted by many reviewers: what carries the memoir is Su’s voice. Even though a lot of the anecdotes feel either far-fetched (at one point, he blows balloons out of discarded condoms found in the hallway of his family’s apartment building) or too familiar (there’s a scene in a restaurant where his father doesn’t understand how food stamps work), I remained engaged because Su narrated these moments with self-deprecation and earnestness. It is hard not to like a guy who constantly notes how his father calls him “Big Head”—evidently the translation of a Vietnamese “term of endearment.”

While there were a lot of interesting and amusing moments in the memoir, of particular interest to me was the prevalence of violence throughout. I got the impression that for Su and his family, violence was encoded in their family’s story from the get-go. From the boat-dock escape amidst machine gun fire at the beginning, to the brushes with street violence sprinkled throughout, Su’s family just couldn’t get a break. For me, the most riveting scene in the book was a scene of random violence in which street thugs attack Su’s father while he tries to bike to work; the ostensible leader of the gang pins Su’s father on the ground and attempts to shove a screwdriver into his throat (Su’s father avoids serious harm by turning his head to the side in the nick of time). In addition to depictions of random violence like this, there are countless scenes of domestic violence in which Su’s volatile and overbearing father punches, whips, slaps, or uppercuts everything and everyone in sight, including his wife and children. Then, in the latter half of the memoir, Su recounts incidents of gang violence in which he engages in hand-to-hand combat with other local street toughs.  Cumulatively, it comes across as one big olio of dominance rituals and tribalism.

So why did I find the violence so interesting? Well, a simple explanation is just that violence, when so frankly depicted, is often very compelling. Those of you who have read Blood Meridian (Vintage Books, 1985) by Cormac McCarthy and enjoyed it can probably speak to the dark poetry of violence. Then, there is Anne Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, 2002), which has returned to prominence recently because of Peter Jackson’s film adaption (for those who aren’t familiar, the book and movie are about a fourteen-year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered). Sebold has been quoted as saying she was motivated to write about violence because she doesn’t think violence is unusual; she feels it is just a part of life. Furthermore, she believes we get in trouble when we separate people who’ve experienced it from those who haven’t. And I would have to agree with her; to a lot of people, violence exists in the realm of “otherness,” a place distant and separate from the life they live. This is germane to Lac Su’s memoir because the palpable violence in Su’s stories resonated with me on a personal level, but I’m guessing it didn’t have that same effect with everyone. Perhaps its because I’m just another American who grew up inundated with images of violence via television and movies, or perhaps the specific depictions of violence in the memoir, which ranged from politically geared violence to not-so-random urban violence, conformed to a pattern that can be found in the experience of many Southeast Asian immigrants. Let’s face it, the wars of Indochina ended up encoding violence into the history of countless immigrant families. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I am an aficionado of politically geared violence or urban violence, but I would say that both are ineluctable aspects of my family’s history and reality. Why does this matter? Well, I think the depiction of violence in art, when done well, can be a double-edged sword: you harness the emotional force that images of violence are imbued with in order to elucidate some deeper truth, but you also cannot help but reduce that violence to an artistic substance, a kind of narrative ingredient.

So, here is where the other reviews of this book come in. Several of these blurbs noted that it covered familiar territory with its thematic combination of filial piety, cultural identity, and urban gang violence. While I can understand the resistance towards these worn-out tropes, I think it’s slightly shortsighted to consider this memoir solely as another entry into the slate of memoirs that deal with these tropes. But that isn’t to say that this memoir is unique. Perhaps it isn’t; perhaps if I surveyed the Asian immigrant memoir canon, I’d find several others that explore these same tropes with equal or better skill. What I’m trying to say is if urban violence and the Southeast Asian immigrant story have become such familiar bedfellows, then perhaps that’s the conversation we should be having around books like this one. Going back to Anne Sebold and her views on violence, I think it’s when we classify violence as an element of otherness, or reduce it to a narrative element, that we run the risk of sidestepping fruitful discussions that can potentially bring to the fore systemic issues underlying contemporary institutions and cultures. Perhaps there are geopolitical patterns and socioeconomic roadmaps in place that breed these heritages of violence. Not to get too macro, but I think this topic of discussion is particularly relevant to today’s international climate, considering the state of current U.S. foreign affairs: we have a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, and a war brewing in Iran. Islamic extremism has become a permanent fixture in news cycles, and the accepted liberal left-wing interpretation appears to be that terrorist organizations point to American political violence abroad when entreating young men to join up. While I admit that I have probably made some large mental leaps by going from this memoir by a Vietnamese American male to meditations on the current conditions of U.S. foreign affairs (see my previous blog post for a similar rant), when reading a memoir like this one (which opens with a historically and politically saturated scene and then explores an ethnic family’s roadmap through America), I don’t think it’s necessarily beyond the pale to consider how the geopolitical actions of today shape the cultures of tomorrow. If nothing else, I appreciated that Lac Su’s memoir prompted me to make these connections and consider these questions.

Furthermore, among contemporary critics, there is also some resistance brewing towards literary work by Asians that perpetuate the formula of people of color as victims. The sentiment appears to be that using the person of color/victim pairing in order to deploy emotional bombs or to fulfill sociopolitical agendas is a well-worn approach and should be eschewed for the sake of progress. While I do agree that recycling such a familiar formula can be tiresome and counterproductive, I think the danger in this shift is that it would potentially shift the discussion along a class axis, as opposed to merely shifting it on a thematic axis. I don’t have any hard figures or data, but I have the sense that many disadvantaged people of color in America today feel like victims in some way or another, and that manifests in the literature they produce. However, perhaps the critical resistance is more against the imposed images of victimization, i.e. those produced by a white person (see: David Brooks’ op-ed on Avatar and “The Messiah Complex“) that are then adopted and perpetuated by the artists of the culture upon which the images have been imposed. Perhaps the sentiment is that in order for people of color to resist the imposed role of “the victim,” they must produce art that does not self-identify them as victims. Tying this back to the memoir: I found I Love Yous Are for White People and the critical conversation around it to be interesting because I think Su, through this memoir, made real attempts to represent himself not just as a Vietnamese immigrant male operating according to an imposed or predetermined character sketch, but also as an individual with a distinct personality that can be discerned amidst the familiar tropes and role-plays of Asian American literature. And for that reason, I, as well as many other reviewers, appreciated Su and his efforts as a storyteller.

P.S. This memoir, for a variety of reasons, reminded me of Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny’s documentary A.K.A. Don Bonus,which is also about a young Southeast Asian immigrant teenager trying to navigate his way through school and family life. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in stories of this ilk.