July 21, 2010

Park Lit, Today

Tonight I’ll take a break from unpacking my boxes (I just moved) and read in New York City at Park Lit at 6:30PM, as a part of the series organized by Open City and on behalf of Guernica Magazine, with two writers I greatly admire, Terese Svoboda and Joshua Kors. I think I’m going to read from a new story, as of this writing. I can never decide, of late, until moments before a reading. I’ve started showing up with three selections and choosing in the last moments.

If it isn’t the new story, in other words, it’ll likely be from a novel in progress.

In case of rain, we’ll be reading indoors at Bar 82 instead. Free of charge. Hope to see you there either way.

July 21, 2010

“The System Is Broken”

The other night, in the company of Sonya Chung (author of LONG FOR THIS WORLD), my boyfriend Dustin and I went to see the opening feature presentation at the Asian American International Film Festival. There was a moderately full crowd in the theater, but I wondered where “everyone” was, as the Taiwanese delegation, celebrating the presence of many Taiwanese films in the US for the first time, finished their speeches.

I also felt I knew where “everyone” was. For some time now, major American cultural venues privilege the experiences of international writers, artists and film-makers over Americans of color in their quest for being diverse, and so a magazine or a festival or a news outlet looking for diversity will more often place an Asian or an African immigrant, 1st generation, before placing an Asian American or African American in the same spot. People of color, people of different ethnic backgrounds, are treated unconsciously, in the US, as minor regionalists of a kind, even perhaps “half-regionalists”, and so we find that Multiculturalism has oddly given us a world in which our cultural work is treated as being slightly less important than a regionalist—we end up belonging to a region that doesn’t quite exist in people’s minds, instead of to the world. I’ve addressed some of this over at the Asian American Literary Review’s forum in the last year, but what I admired in the festival’s name—Asian American International Film Festival—was that it openly embraced in both name and sensibility the way we are both of this place and not at the same time. Having said that, the crowd that was there was an exciting mix of people all the same—and there was a lot of support in the audience by way of young African American filmmakers and students, and people of mixed Asian and African heritage.

Meanwhile, the main event: Red’s film, Manila Skies, was a wrenching portrait of one man’s despair but also of a system within the Philipines that privileges 20% of the population at the expense of 80% of the population. It was hard not to see modern-day Manila as the future of America, as the parallels were constant, especially at a time when the gap between the richest and poorest here has become even worse than it was under Bush. The film begins with a young boy and his mom making baskets to sell for money for groceries, and the boy keeps asking her about when can he go to school? We then cut to the father, walking up a long road, who finds a briefcase full of money and jewelry, and stained in fresh blood. We cut back to the father joining his family, and with a haunted expression, watch as he promises to send the boy to school in Manila, but to promise in return that he won’t come back here. And we cut to the city, where a much older man, presumably the boy, is sad to learn that his father is ill, and unable to leave his job to return without being fired. He decides to apply for a job “overseas”, but we learn quickly this is a scam operation, run by local gangs who promise this help, take fees for it and then do nothing.

The film was inspired by the story of a Manila man who hijacked a plane to try to “go home” and lept to his death, having used a parachute he’d made himself. I won’t ruin the beauty of the ending for you, but it’s a bravura take on income inequality’s persistence in Manila, and I hope it will serve as a kind of warning to audiences everywhere as to the future, if governments continue to give in to corporations and policies that privilege the economy over human dignity and the environment continue unchecked.

July 5, 2010

The Double Rainbows of Found Lake

Hello from Wisconsin, where I am spending the week with my boyfriend and his family. Tonight after dinner as the sunset started we saw this out over the lake, and it perfectly banded the sky. I hope this all finds you well, and that you are with the people you love. Happy Fourth of July.

June 29, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here, Part 5

The conclusion to the Koreanish summer fiction serial. For those just arriving, for the rest of the story, here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

“And what was I going to do, marry the town gay? No.”

I laughed at that against my will. I was trying to be mad at her, for not telling me about my son. But I was too happy to see her. Katie still held her cigarette the same way. She looked at me with a smile. “No. It was never going to be like that.” She flicked her ash. “You’re high if you think otherwise.”

“You could have said something,” I said.

“You were never going to stay here,” she said. “And I wasn’t going to make you.”

*   *   *   *

Punching out her brother hadn’t been the best way to find out where she lived now, but after he understood he’d insulted me, he was surprisingly okay about it. “You got a mean swing for a faggot,” he said, and grinned.

You have no idea, I thought.

He understood, though. “He’s your son? Sure about that one?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Sure enough to ask her to her face.” Keep reading →

June 23, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here, Part 4

It is June summer fiction serial month at Koreanish. Here are parts 1, 2 and 3, for those just arriving. And yes, I’m writing this as the month goes along. Next week, the finale.

Katie’s boyfriend was soon sending his best friend to pick her up most of the time. At work the next day she was quiet and when I asked her about how her night was, she just shrugged. She never said much more about it than she did that first night, instead taking to it not only without complaint, but soon seeming to like it. Geoff didn’t drink much, while Derrick drank more and more. And the more Derrick drank, the more Geoff seemed to like being Derrick’s go-to guy. Katie, I think, felt special, like Derrick had sent a car for her. Even if it was Geoff’s pick-up. Soon it was nothing special to see Geoff’s truck in front of the CVS at closing time, waiting for her.

Later, when people thought it was maybe Geoff’s baby, she rolled her eyes when she heard. From me–we were at work. “They would,” Katie said. “They fucking would.” And then she looked at me for a minute. “Just because he let Geoff do the driving doesn’t mean he let him do the driving.” We laughed about that one pretty hard, until we hid behind the counter, as if that meant our laughter couldn’t be heard down the aisles.

I’d overheard this at school and decided to tell her. By then we were like old friends. I was four months into the job. My checks were tiny but I knew my mother felt better every time she watched me come in from work and put my blue and white CVS vest on the barstool in the kitchen, and I, I felt a different kind of pride for being on the inside of the biggest scandal at school, which was no longer me. Katie’s pregnancy was interesting to me, a scandal partly because she not only announced it, she had no apparent shame about it: “What,” she said, of her decision to share the news. “Like you weren’t gonna know?” And then she said, “I’m keeping it, too.” In her senior photo for yearbook, she fought for the right to show how far along she was. Derrick offered to marry her but she turned him down.

I thought it was wrong, I also thought it was beautiful.  This confused me but also made it seem important. I was young, and it was my first time having that experience.

* * * *

Her brother that day didn’t seem to know much about this at all. At the bar we found near Whole Foods, we sat and talked amid several awkward silences. I worried that his sister was dead at one point, that I would find out in some way I couldn’t bear. But instead he pulled out his wallet, and he showed me the picture she’d sent recently of her and her son. Who was the spitting image of my dad when he was that age. Something he wasn’t likely to know.

I smiled as I felt my heart burn. It was me, then. All this time it had been me.

“He’s cute,” I said.

“Yeah. He is. He looks like he’s got some Indian blood, right?”

“Cherokee maybe,” I said.

“That’s what I was thinking! But she won’t say and honestly, my sister is like the Olympics.”

I said nothing, because out of something like scientific curiosity, I wanted to hear what he would say next.

“Open to countries from around the world,” he said, and then laughed like a maniac, until I punched him and sent him flying down off his stool.  He shook is head, whipping blood from his nose around him, blinking in surprise.  He had thought he was talking about Bob, her ex from before Derrick. He hadn’t thought it was me. But then no one, including me, had ever thought it was me. Except maybe Katie. And she had said nothing.

June 14, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here, Part 3

Part 3 of the June summer fiction serial here at Koreanish, with apologies for lateness. For those just joining us, here’s Parts 1 & 2.

By the end of that first day at CVS, I had chalked Katie’s comment about me lasting until Friday to her being sarcastic. My duties were not strenuous to the eye. I had to ring people up, sweep the floors, restock items and price them. Count out a register at the beginning and end of a shift. I got a discount and would use it on a soda during my break. It was easy enough but it was incredibly boring, which was the hard part. The most strenuous part of the job was that you had to be there, in other words. That was what she meant. You had to withstand the killing boredom of it. She didn’t think I could take it.

And to be honest, I lacked stamina. She wasn’t wrong to see that in me. Before being at the CVS, I’d had a job for less than one day at Burger King. I’d filled out the application, the manager interviewed me, he left me to watch the BKU video (Burger King University, for the uninitiated), and then gave me my uniform to try on in the bathroom. There amid the thick scent of urinal cake, when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, in the brown and orange polyester, only then did I realize, with horror, not just what I looked like, but what my future looked like—yes, my hair, of which I was inordinately proud, with its sunstreaks and waves, was covered by the horrible brown polyester visor, the brown washing out my skin to a sallow, sick yellowy color, my freckles suddenly maybe my only distinguishing factor, except my eyes, wide with fear. But the collar, the short sleeves, the sad weight of the shirt and the pants—I had a vision of myself behind the counter, the air slick with hamburger and fry grease slowly mixing into the fabric.

I walked out of the bathroom that day, leaving the uniform hanging on the stall, and drove home. I never went back and they never called the house to find me. In my conversations with my mother, I never mentioned Burger King. When I got to the CVS and was handed the apron and pin, that seemed like very little to bear. The air conditioned air was a nice break from the damp summer, and the florescent light made it seem as if I’d died and woken up in an afterlife where I was forced to do things like count out drawers. Which was a little how it felt outside of the CVS as well. The TAG incident had made me the wrong kind of famous at school and the administration canceled all future games of it. I’d been considered an upstanding young citizen prior to that, good grades if antisocial, and it was as if I’d gotten caught drunk in the fields around the town, where we all went to drink at night from spring through till fall. Except worse.

That was, of course, the right kind of famous at the school. But if there was anyone who knew about the wrong kind of famous, it was Katie. Or, it would be. Keep reading →

June 14, 2010

Your Serial Will Be Served In the Morning

Hey gang. Thanks for checking back for the new installment in the summer serial. I’ll have it up in the late morning, around 11AM. Sorry for the delay.

June 7, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here, pt. 2

This is part 2 of my serialized short story feature this June, “You’re Not From Around Here”.

His sister and I were not the most likely of friends at our high school.  I was a pariah of a kind, a little too smart and unfriendly for my own good, and convinced that not only was I better than these people, I would always be better than them. And by “these people” I mean my whole town. It was not the sort of position you launched a successful high school social life from—it was not even the real position of anyone who was an intellectual superior. It was defense, the plan of someone with no intention of ever coming back, the plan of a quitter.  A friend of mine once described his now-ex-boyfriend during their breakup as building a wall between them while he was talking—you could see it going up, he said. I was like that, and I was definitely like it when I took my ill-fated job at the town CVS, where I worked as a cashier for a short two weeks, where I met his sister Katie.

At the time, Katie was well-liked, if not popular. She wasn’t trying to get the approval of anyone, or at least, that was how it seemed. When I walked in that first day of work, I thought of how when you weren’t looking at her, she seemed like a sweet baby-faced blond who still wore her brother’s boyjeans to school under pink knitted ponchos, jeans he’d long outgrown, but then she’d turn every so often, and her eyes let off a cool, like she was older than most of us somehow.  Not a hard cool, but a funny one, like she’d just seen the makings of a very good joke walk by.

That was the look she gave me. Because, well, it was funny, the idea I’d be working there.

“Stanley Gough,” she said, as I walked behind the counter, clocked in and pulled a nametag from my pocket. “Seriously.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re the one I’m training today.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

She bent over laughing, a sharp laugh that also somehow wasn’t completely humiliating. “You won’t last a week,” she said, as she stood up. “But we’ll see if we can get you to Friday.”

Keep reading →

May 31, 2010

Kitsune

Found this staring up at me today from my desk. I think he’s about to start talking to me.

May 31, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here

You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?

I didn’t answer right away. It was the sort of thing guys like him always said to me, always presuming I wasn’t from here. But I was from here, had always been from here, and always would be, no matter where I went, and what’s more, as I was tired of this place having a reputation of not producing guys like me, I was never going to lie.

He was like all the kids I’d gone to school with, sunburned, blond, tall, confident, or still capable of a good bluff. Things hadn’t turned out quite the way he’d wanted, that was clear, but he still believed they would eventually. And in that way, we were the closest we’d be to being like each other. Perhaps that was the gift of the place. When he said his name I knew right away who he was–he’d been arrested for being a coke dealer in high school and his sister had posed for her senior yearbook photo with her baby, which was more of a scandal for some reason than her actual pregnancy.  I’d left the town because I was so tired of living around people who couldn’t deal with things like this, who couldn’t just look at her and the baby and be happy they were happy and alive. But it seemed like maybe I’d have to leave this whole country to get away from that.

We stood in line at the Whole Foods Market, waiting to check out, wanting to get away from each other as we had nothing else to say to each other, and yet completely unable to leave until we were checked out.

“How’s your sister,” I asked.

He blinked. “You knew my sister?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know your sister.”

———

This is a fiction lit blog relay. Novaren Suma is up next. The order is below. We were to each begin with a first line from the last line of the most recent post, on the theme “A Stranger Comes to Town”, and use 250 words.

Updated 6/06/10: Due to the popularity of this, I’ve done it as a serial. Part 2 is here.

  1. Wah-Ming Chang: http://wmcisnowhere.wordpress.com
  2. Jamey Hatley http://jameyhatley.wordpress.com
  3. Stephanie Brown http://scififanatic.livejournal.com/
  4. Andrew Whitacre http://fungibleconvictions.com/
  5. Heather McDonald http://heathersalphabet.wordpress.com/
  6. Christine Lee Zilka http://czilka.wordpress.com/
  7. Jackson Bliss http://bluemosaicme.blogspot.com/
  8. Jennifer Derilo posted at http://czilka.wordpress.com/
  9. Alexander Chee http://koreanish.com/
  10. Nova Ren Suma http://novaren.wordpress.com/