July 11th, the Asian American Writers Workshop will be hosting a day of events and speakers on Asian American comics. This is going to be a major event, groundbreaking and
This is at the new Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, from 10AM to 5PM. This is a must for any comics geek, and I’d be there if I could (I’m in Greece). Tickets are 25.00 for the day, 75.00 for VIP passes. Get it while it’s hot.
Meanwhile, more on Ford Madox Ford and Jean Rhys shortly.
My correspondence with Maud Newton on the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair is up over at Granta. For more, check out several of Maud’s posts on Rhys leading up to this, here, here and here. I’m especially a fan of that last post of Maud’s, on the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea.
Some outtakes:
Later this week I’ll be posting about what I think of as the impact Ford Madox Ford on contemporary fiction, why he matters to me, and how I teach using his ideas. Keep reading →
I’m spending some time at lunch today reading Christina Nehring’s excellent essay over at truthdig.com on what is wrong with the American Essay, and she’s making some excellent points:
The emphasis there was mine.
That last point in particular hits on for me what has become so uncomfortable about the current nonfiction book boom and about blogs. When I was studying literary nonfiction writing in the late 80s with Annie Dillard, she was very clear, we were engaged in a moral exercise. “You will never be this alive again,” she was saying, again and again, “and neither will your reader.” She wanted us to respect the fact that wasting people’s time was like delivering a blow. Which is in fact what it feels like to me, when I read something through to the end and think…it was all for that? Or, as Nehring puts it:
In reading for my upcoming exchange at Granta with Maud Newton over the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote about each other after their affair, I came across an anecdote about her I couldn’t use in what I was describing, but it stayed with me, from The Worlding of Jean Rhys, by Sue Thomas. She described how Jean, after hearing her mother say she preferred dark babies, would look in the mirror each morning, hoping to see she’d darkened and wishing she would.
I remembered being in something like the third grade, standing on a chair in my mom’s bathroom, staring at my face, reimagining it as either all Korean or all white. And feeling doomed by being neither.
Like Rhys, I had moved from a warm island full of brown people to a cold land full of white ones, descended from the English who had surrounded her there. In Voyage In The Dark, when she writes, “I got used to everything except the cold…” I thought, Yes. It was like finding I had an older sister a long time ago. And so Wide Sargasso Sea was then one of the novels I turned to when I sought to find a tone for the novel I’m finishing now, The Queen of the Night.
In college I developed the intense attachment I have for Jean Rhys, discovering her at a time when I was tired of what I was. I was tired of trying to be accepted by either Korean Americans or white ones, and tired of being misunderstood by just about anyone I met of any ethnicity— tired of being asked how my parents met, of being questioned on “what I was”. Worse, as I considered being a writer back in the early 80s, I felt like literature was a giant mall of ethnic restaurants, and that I wasn’t going to be able to work in either the American one or the Korean one. I began reading the stories of mixed race people in order to understand how they survived. The answer was, by being either beautiful, strong or smart, or all three, for best results.
Rhys was two for three, never as strong as she wanted to be. Never able to be, as she put it in Quartet, the novel she wrote about her affair with Ford, “sporting”. But even so, the force of her work is unmistakable. Her legacy accomplishing what she perhaps could not.
I’ve just been staring at these for a few minutes now. From Bob Cesca’s blog, the salaries of the highest paid health insurance CEOs:
* Ron Williams – Aetna – Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
* H. Edward Hanway – CIGNA – Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
* Angela Braly – WellPoint – Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
* Dale Wolf – Coventry Health Care – Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
* Michael Neidorff – Centene – Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
* James Carlson – AMERIGROUP – Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
* Michael McCallister – Humana – Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
* Jay Gellert – Health Net – Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
* Richard Barasch – Universal American – Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
* Stephen Hemsley – UnitedHealth Group – Total Compensation: $3,241,042.
For the rest, click through to Galactica Sitrep.
Some Korean news I’m thinking about:
My friend Tayari Jones is featuring 8 Debut Novelists over at her blog, and this week’s writer is Marie Mutsuki Mockett, whose novel, Picking Bones From Ash, I blurbed. Tayari posted an essay of Marie’s struggle to publish. This quote leaped out at me for being both new and familiar:
An editor rejected me because she “already had a half-Asian writer.” I was devastated. Much as I loved this other writer’s work, I knew that our material was different. Would anyone else notice?
I immediately thought, is there an editor or agent who would say, Oh sorry, I have my white writer?
On my Facebook, where I posted this as well, a former student mentioned he was having the same struggle as an Italian American author. This is perhaps the most destructive outcome of identity politics I can imagine, albeit a byproduct—the treatment of writers as senators of a kind from a particular community, with space made only when death comes or when sales “vote” you out of office, as it were. My fear is that this incredibly reductive approach to the selling of literature is reverse engineering the work people write. It reduces us as writers to mere performances of ethnography, forced to write from inside a particular boundary, which is the least interesting idea of literature I can imagine. And for a “half-Asian” writer like myself or Marie, it becomes bewildering—where, exactly, is the country we are “from”? Put another way, which parent do I reject, and which one do I pretend I am the most like, and then perform that, waiting to be exposed as “inauthentic”?
I say “new and familiar” because during the submission of my first novel I went through an early 21st Century version of this, with editors asking “Is it a ‘gay novel?’” or “Is it an ‘Asian American novel?’” I was infuriated. “Tell them it’s a novel,” I said to my agent at the time. “I wrote a novel.” But there weren’t enough half-Asian writers back then for anyone to tell me what they told Marie—and now she and I, despite being from different ethnographic backgrounds, are a niche. There is no way our work would possibly cross over in terms of content or sensibility, and yet people are saying things like this to her.
When Picador brought out the paperback of my novel, and it was in the front of Virgin Megastores and sold as general literature, with a cover that lacked both a muscled naked male torso as well as chopsticks and dragons, an older, more established lesbian writer asked me “what I had done”.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “They did it.”
My first novel is neither a coming out story, which is what is typically meant by a ‘gay novel’—the central character, while gay, never is depicted coming out because it wasn’t part of the story—nor is it “about” being gay, nor is it “about” being an Asian American, per se. The character IS Asian American, half Asian, and so by these standards, it was not, despite my long-standing relationship to the Asian American Writers Workshop, an “Asian American” novel.
When I look at the Picador cover, I see a cover that reflects the books themes beautifully. They understood that it was a novel first.
Picador, to whom I’m eternally grateful, got me and this book at every level—not just my editor, but the publisher, the sales force, the publicity and marketing teams.
Terms that began as descriptors became an orthodoxy that we must now run from, and while identifications matter certainly, just as histories matter, and communities matter, I remain sad about the place this has all ended up. In conversations with a scholar who writes on my work last year, I told him about the role commerce plays in the creation of Asian American lit, a factor he hadn’t quite considered. I described for him the possibility that there was work he was looking for that had never made it past this kind of gate American publishers work with now. This kind of treatment reduces us all to the level of romance novel writers, producing something allegedly new along a formulaic series of lines that gives people people back to them an idea of themselves that is the real fiction in all of this. And in the meantime, a sort of shadow literature, of the rejected, books that don’t meet this ethnographic ideal of publishers, litter the desks of the country, unpublished.
This was never the point, to my mind. I just wanted to write stories as complicated as the people I knew, who were pretty complicated. I wanted, when I started all of this, to write books like the ones I found in the library when I was a child in Maine who was made to feel out of place everywhere he went for being neither of one culture nor the other. That is the only thing I ever wanted to do. I didn’t want to be a senator from the state of Half Asian or Korean American. Back then I fell in love with what Davenport defines as Ezra Pound’s American imagination: an imagination alive with the cultures that make up this country, the cultures of the world. We’re not quite there. But perhaps soon.
On the flight back from Los Angeles last week, it is all about the men who sit next to me.
On the flight from LA to DC, my seatmate to my left is a man is headed back from Australia. He’s older, a little tan and weathered and grey-haired. He is reading a thick mystery novel, well-thumbed, and I decide it is probably a re-read. He smells faintly of alcohol sweats, and has clearly sustained himself by drinking beer the entire way. He scoffs at the idea that they take only cards, no cash, and mutters to me about how he could sue them. He pulls the money in his wallet flat and shows me the line about how it is legal tender for all transactions. I’m thinking about how just a few months ago, the last time I flew to California, I didn’t know I’d need cash only for the food inflight, and starved the whole way.
It’s not right, he mutters. If you were not well-off, you couldn’t eat or drink anything on this flight. I like him as soon as he says this. I start talking to him, first about his ideal lawsuit for bothering the airline—small claims court, he says, so that an officer of the company would be forced to appear—and then about what I do for a living—sounds wonderful to him—and then how he lives in Australia but is American.
Our conversation is peppered with him saying, “Stop me if you’re bored.” I realize he’s not used to people of my generation, as I flit my eyes between the computer open in front of me and him and the television. I close my screen.
He’s a systems analyst who used to be an acupuncturist. I wonder if his beer drinking is strategic. He does plan ahead, ordering a few beers as the cart passes, so he doesn’t have to wait for them to bring him another. We talk about a lot of things in the flight, and near the end he tells me his theory that the US is becoming more tribal.
No, I say. You’re wrong, I think.
He raises an eyebrow.
Everyone is giving up their hyphens, I say.
Really, he says.
Really, I say. My students are less interested in that kind of politics. I tell him about how my sister lives in a mixed race community, how most of the children her son plays with are mixed like him, and that people still respect their ethnicity but are less likely to identify so intensely with it that they don’t marry someone different from them. It has come out that he lives mostly in Australia, that his wife is Chinese, that his children are mixed, like I am, like the people I speak of, and he even interjects that he feels my parents were not so very distinguished for what they did, because after all my father immigrated at a time when people were urged to assimilate more than they are now. But I push back, suppressing the urge to be angry, as, after all, I am offended by what he says about my father, even if it is right, which I question—anti-miscegenation laws had just been struck down when they married —and so I continue, and at last he sets down his beer can and says, Well, that is good to hear. Keep reading →
People say I'm never home but I always feel at home when I'm traveling.
This is the blog of author Alexander Chee. My first novel, Edinburgh, is in paperback from Picador. 
My second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton. I am currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College.
