tatterpunk

#2

In the midst of a waste of an evening, after waiting in a nightmare of a club's coat check for fifteen minutes, at least I got this:

DUDE: *jumps ahead of at least twelve people waiting to be serviced*

DUDE IN CHARGE OF COAT CHECK: "No."

DUDE: *pathetic attempt at puppy eyes* "Please."

DUDE IN CHARGE OF COAT CHECK: "This is a British establishment." *jerks his thumb back* "Form a queue."

#1

The legitimacy of bacon sandwiches.

Is that a weird thing? Or is it somehow common and I missed hearing about it?

You'd think I'd like, learn from my experiences or something, but no. The same happened when I arrived in Taiwan -- I was a complete basket case for days, moping around my apartment and staring dully at the walls until I went to IKEA for some freaking lamps. I arrived in England, looked at my (sweet) en suite and thought, hmmm, overhead lighting... do I have the money to spend on lamps? Nah, maybe that was a fluke.

IT WAS NOT A FLUKE. IF I HAVE TO SPEND ONE MORE NIGHT UNDER THIS GAWDAWFUL LIGHTING I WILL KILL SOMEONE.

... sooooo, IKEA it is.

GOOD: Am in London!

BAD: London hit me over the head and stole all my money. (shewhohashope may protest this is all my own doing, but that was Wednesday. Wednesday was before Thursday, when I sat down and calculated what it will take to furbish my entire room (pillows blanket towels pots pans dishes cutlery MATTRESS).)

GOOD: I like my room! It is tiny and makes me think of the Japanese school of architecture where everything is very small, compact, and designed for maximum storage. And the kitchen is HUGE.

BAD: Not sold on my flatmates, yet. They are all between 19 and 22, so there's also that. (Tho we're all postgrad.)

GOOD: So, this happened:

me -- "Can I put this book on reserve? Only I am a student and would like the discount, but I don't get a card until next week."

her -- "Oh, don't worry. I believe you're a student, I'll take ten percent off."

... um, wow. Did not get the impression that Brits were so terribly trusting. Or maybe she didn't think anyone besides a student would want to buy Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary. (I don't know why not! So far it's amazing!)

BAD: Flatmates want to go clubbing. I, in all honesty, do not want, instead wish to spend evening on my rock-hard box spring reading my book on mainstreamed homoeroticism, but I have lived long enough to recognize the need for forgo Pleasure for Bonding Experiences. Ugh.

MOM: I wish you hadn't bought yourself a separate jar of peanut butter. I have one upstairs, you know.

ME: Yeah, but you hate it when I eat out of that.

MOM: ... what?

ME: You do, you watch me like a hawk every time I take it down from the cupboard.

MOM: What are you even saying? What is this nonsense?

ME: Last time you rationed me.

MOM: You are completely over-reacting. I never did.

ME: You had to make it clear what portion of the peanut butter was yours. You showed me on the outside of the jar with your finger.

MOM: Oh, you are just making this up, now!

ME: Plus you give me hell over the way I scoop it out of the jar.

MOM: ... well, yeah, but that's totally different.

So here's the thing about shoujo anime: there's shoujo and then there's shoujo, you know? The former might be, oh, Revolutionary Girl Utena or Kare-Kano -- girl-oriented, sure, but completely awesome and genuinely appealing to all audiences, because they tackle meaningful ideas about life, love, what have you. They embrace the label without being ruled by it, you know?

( ... )

JUST RECEIVED A LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE FROM THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES FOR A ONE-YEAR TAUGHT MASTERS PROGRAM

I FEEL LIKE SUCH A ROCKSTAR

shewhohashope ARE YOU REEEEAAADDYYYYYYYYYYYY?

So, I've been preoccupied and just now getting around to watching this season of Doctor Who.

I just finished episode 11, "The Lodger."

( Rage under the cut. )

Moon grew up, lost weight and became a famous singer, which proves that there is no justice in the universe, or that indeed, there is justice. Your interpretation of the denouement mostly depends on your race, creed, hair color, social and economic class and political proclivities -- whether or not you are a revisionist feminist and have a habit of cheering for the underdog. What is the moral of the story? Well, it's a tale of revenge, obviously written from the Chinese American girl's perspective. My intentions are to veer you away from teasing and humiliating little chubby Chinese girls like myself. And that one wanton act of humiliation you perpetrated on the fore or aft of that boat on my arrival may be one humiliating act too many.

For although we are friendly neighbors, you don't really know me. You don't know the depth of my humiliation. And you don't know what I can do. You don't know what is beneath my doing.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales,
Marilyn Chin


Lately, I have been bemused. I am an unabashed lover of genre, and nothing gets my engine revving like an adrenaline shot of fantasy into the reality I recognize around me. So even when I talk litfic, my love is reserved for the surrealists and magical realists, those who play fast and loose with the weird. I collect them like baseball cards: Sweden's Nyblom, Spain's Lorca, Mexico's Fuentes; building my fantasy draft of writers.

Japan seems to have a lovely stable of magical realists, which delights me. But I am fickle, and selfish, and self-absorbed, and you know what? I wanted Chinese writers. Where were they? Where were the acid-trip fairy tales and dreamtime narratives of the Middle Kingdom? Because, as I said, I don't know why the world doesn't cater to the things I love.

Also, being an only child means always believing you'll get what you want, so I'm going to take Marilyn Chin as my due.

Marilyn Chin was born Chin Mei-ling in Hong Kong, only to later immigrate with her family to the US. (And renamed for Marilyn Monroe.) She is an acclaimed poet with four Pushcart Prizes to her name, but Revenge is her first novel.

And it is awesome.

Revenge has many voices and many stories (forty-one, naturally), but its beating heart is the Double Happiness twins, Mei Ling and Moon, and their Grandma Wong. Their father dead of a heart attack, their mother escaped back to Hong Kong, the twins gained their neighborhood nickname from the restaurant their grandmother runs in Rose River, Oregon, a city so industrialized the very rain is toxic.

Moon is reserved, deconstructive, dry-humored, and a "latent homo." Mei Ling is defiant, hedonistic, irreverent, and rapaciously heterosexual. ("A yin and a yang!" declares the delivery doctor, to which the newborn Moon replies: "Thanks for showing your Oriental knowledge, asshole," before peeing on him.)

Granny is everything you would want your Great Matriarch to be: cleaver-wielding and fly-kicking, full of ancient fables and family stories. With Moon and Mei Ling, Chin perhaps strives to present differing ways to deal with assimilation and immigrant lifestyle -- but Granny is pure wish fulfillment, the righteous embodiment of filial obligation and general badassery. She kills gangsters and tends to neighborhood unfortunates, even haunting her granddaughters' dreams from beyond the grave. She reminds her charges of the past they have inherited, but knows the cultural entropy of their lives. When Mei Ling wakes up with Caucasoid eyes, Granny laments the loss of beauty but soothes her distress. "Deep in her heart," Chin writes, "she knew that each step backward would only mean regret -- the vector only goes in one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the ten thousand diasporas will never coagulate -- there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom."

I'm quoting freely from the text because, honestly, that's the only real way to get a taste of the book as a whole. There is no overarching narrative thread -- in 200 pages the twins are born, grow older, and become successful women (though not necessarily in that order). Sometimes the stories are written from Mei Ling's perspective, sometimes Moon's, sometimes Granny's, sometimes from the viewpoint of minor characters. Chin regurgitates fairy tales, Buddhist koans, Daoist stories, Zhuangzi, Confucius, ghost lore -- clothing them anew in the philosophy and experiences of the Wongs. (She includes a handy notes section for many of the allusions, but I read that last and loved the stories as standalone as well.)

As if that weren't enough to compel you, Chin's language is amazing. Let me say that again: Ah. May. ZING. Beguiling and abrasive by turns, her characters fuck and fight and feel with graphic, attention-grabbing imagery. Sometimes lyrical and sometimes crude -- and sometimes downright bizarre -- Chin exercises the poet's prerogative to make her sense out of nonsense, writing in cheerful contradictions and open ended (if not triple-ended) anecdotes.

A lot, if not all, of the reviews I've read for Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen have used the term "immigrant literature." I dislike this attempt at pigeonholing. Thoroughly. My own review is long enough without detailing exactly why, but suffice to say I think it downplays a book's appeal in a misguided attempt to find its "market."

And I say: fuck market. The Wongs are immigrants, yeah, and their lives deal with those conundrums and complications which inevitably arise from growing up immersed in the dominant white, Western culture when your family, your history, and you are something else. But while the questions plaguing the Double Happiness twins -- Where are my people? How can I be happy? What should I love? How should I love? -- are often brought sharply into focus when one is caught between two (or three or four or sixteen) sets of answers, no one lives entirely free of them.

No one should.

Brave, snarky, troubling, serene, conflicted, and uncompromising: this is a beautiful book.

"Just look at yourself, crammed into that box, no longer master of your fate, and doomed to repeat forever and ever the mistake you yourself made, when you asked for immortality and didn't specify the conditions."

"I didn't make any mistake at all. And I'm very happy whenever I can grant someone their heart's desire."

"And that desire is filled with poison, the twisting agony of regret, and grief unending."

"I told you it made me happy," said the thing, and fell silent.

"Just plain malicious," said Auntie

~~Judith Merkle Riley's The Master of All Desires~~

Sibille Artaud de la Roque is in trouble. At a the dried-up age of twenty-two, she has been plucked from the convent and her dream of a life devoted to Art in order to be forge an alliance with a powerful neighbor. But several months, and an entirely forgivable misunderstanding later, has found her fleeing towards her rich aunt in Orléans to escape the scandal of shooting her would-be paramour in the face.

France, in 1556, is at the mercy of its own internal upheavals. As the Church is threatened by the struggle to return England to the true faith, the Bourbons and and Guises struggle for dominance and the promise of uniting three kingdoms under French rule. Henri II openly scorns his wife, Catherine de Medici, for his mistress Diane de Poitiers, causing the two women to become locked in an unending power play, with all the noblewomen as pawns in their own quest for influence over the royal monarch.

These two worlds, an ex-convent girl living with an eccentric widow in Orléans and the glittering court of Paris, could not be more removed from one another. But the gap is about to be bridged: for into the unwitting hands of Sibille Artaud de la Roque has fallen a very special silver casket. In this box lies the Undying Head of Menander, who now exists only to tempt others and eat away at souls as he grants impossible wishes, but only to further misery. Otherwise known -- to the schemers and sorcerers and power-mad of France -- as the Master of All Desires.



There's a fantastic 16-century ballad, "Mary Hamilton," in which a lady in waiting is accused of murdering the child she's had by the king. I used to listen to Joan Baez's version incessantly, curled up with my ear almost pressed to the stereo speaker. Mary Hamilton rides into Glasgow, sent to the gallows, in white gown as if for a wedding. The crowds weep as she passes and she refuses it, telling them it's fit punishment for the crime. And she muses aloud at the changes in her fate: from Queen's favorite to convict in a night. As she's standing there in her petticoat and blindfolded, the king himself rides up and grants she may be pardoned and come down, as long as she comes to him.

To which she replies (if you'll forgive some paraphrasing): fuck you. Fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on. Fuck your pity. Fuck your fucked-up court, its fucked morals and how the powerful bend everything and everyone in it to their slightest whim. I would rather put my newborn child in a boat on the river and set him adrift to Fate than have him live in it. If you cared about my life, you never would have touched me.

Then she dies.

I kept hearing this song in my head as I read though The Master of All Desires. It's a nice bookend to The Oracle Glass, in which the power struggles are touched upon but the real role of the aristocracy is to oppress those beneath them. In Master we get up close and personal with Henri II's court -- and it's like turning over a rock to find a slew of worms frantically copulating in the dirt.

This isn't a romance. There is a romance, but it develops over something like two pages, and the book is better for it -- Master is reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, half comedy of manners and half historical tragedy. All the comedy and romance is played out amongst the lesser nobility, and they engage in the kind of romps which makes Oracle so fabulous: love potions, poisonings, vengeful ghosts, fencing societies, helpful Spirits of History, poetry readings, etc. Riley ups the ante by playing what I can only call the literary equivalent of button-button-who's-got-the-button with a variety of objects pertinent to the plot. Now Nicholas has the poisoned love potion! Now Sibelle! Now so-and-so has intercepted Nostradamus' letter! It's marvelous, the amount of fun she (and hopefully her reader) is having.

And then we have the second cast: the movers and shakers of the French court. They enact the tragic portion of the story. And let me tell you, anytime you're thinking, gee, I wish I lived in the time of chivalry as a powerful and moneyed aristocrat? Pick up this book. It will deliver a much-needed dose of Wow, So Not Worth It.

It's dark stuff, this part of history. Riley has a lot to slog through, and although she adds it to the main narrative with her customary light touch it can still feel like a history pop quiz unless you're already familiar with the French Wars of Religion and events leading up to it. I admit to my eyes glazing at certain passages. But I would argue that as long as you know about the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, Riley's got your back.

She tempers all of this with the comedic plotline -- Sibille and her aunt, and Nostradamus (!! I forgot to work him in! He's in here, puttering about.) and all their families and friends. Sibille is utterly unlike Genevieve -- moony, a trifle self-important -- but still sympathetic and worthwhile, and like with Genevieve this book is very much about her evolution as a person. Anyone who likes Pratchett's Nanny Ogg should really meet Aunt Pauline. (Whom I love much better.) She is filthy rich and haunted by ghosts and knows how to shop. This whole plotline is dominated by a much-needed levity which lovingly mocks the younger characters and their dramatic inner monologues. Any scene where Auntie and her ancient friends discuss Sibille's love life is absolutely worth the price of admission.

And while the darkness inherent in the historical plotline encroaches here, as well, part of Sibille's growth is about learning to live with darkness as well as light. If there is any real message to be gained from The Master of All Desires, it might be that throughout the trials and tribulations of history, despite the sorrows and setbacks we suffer in our small lives, there is one constant. Life? Goes on.