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.

The comic here, by the amazing Adrian Tomine, accompanied a piece on stereotypes of Asian American men in media, also blogged by John over at the excellent 8Asians. And it does a good job of describing Tomine’s mixed feelings about the character.

But when I thought about it, I couldn’t, in the end, decide Dong was a stereotype.

Dong does have a relationship to Gene Yang’s brilliant Cousin Chin-Kee, from his graphic novel American Born Chinese. Chin-Kee is a character Yang created out of actual dialogue he found in nationally syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant’s political cartoons.

Here’s Cousin Chin-Kee:

I’ve taught this comic in my graphic novel class, and what’s so brilliant about Chin-Kee is that he’s the part of your life you have to deal with, no matter what you want to be true. He’s the world reminding you that you’re not white, i.e., “race-neutral”, he’s your family back home, he’s your relatives talking to you in what you think of as ‘their language’.

And in a way, so is Dong.

The experience I have of Sixteen Candles is a complicated one. The pleasure for me in the film is about being really in love with Jake Ryan right alongside Samantha’s character, her story as an allegory for my own awkwardness and desires as a gay teen. Being overlooked on your birthday because your pretty perfect sister is getting married—even if she’s marrying someone no one likes—is a metaphor for being gay in America in the 80s. There’s a reason Molly Ringwald became a gay icon for life after this film, in other words. I also came to believe, as an adult, that Anthony Michael Hall’s “The Geek” character is the proto-Bart Simpson, Bart before there was Bart—all of Bart’s characteristic dialogue comes from Hall’s dialogue in the film: “Don’t have a cow, man”, for example. And so I watch that happen in a kind of meta awe. And these, by now, are the most familiar feelings to me of watching the film – and the easiest.

But then there’s a feeling I get when Dong appears that is a hard feeling, a feeling that’s really easy to dismiss but that is complex, and I decided to really focus in on that and figure out what that was.

Part of how I feel about Dong has to do with POV. There’s a hilarious scene early on where it is his POV shot—all of these white people at the dinner table leaning in, asking him what he thinks of ‘quiche’. He’s adorable, his hair slicked down, eating happily, gradually uncomfortable from the attention. He realizes he’s being asked to perform some sort of experience beyond simply being happy eating but doesn’t know what they want from him. He makes an attempt, and soon everyone is laughing though he’s not completely sure why.

That dinner moment was also the only time in my life during the 80s that I’d ever seen anyone portray that experience. I remember thinking, Yes. That is exactly what it is like.

Part of my discomfort in watching his character comes from remembering things I don’t want to remember. I was born, yes, in Rhode Island, the child of a mom whose family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. Most of my cousins just built houses there, proudly. My father, a Korean immigrant, brought me to Korea shortly after I was born, and we lived around the Pacific rim for a while, until I was 6, when we moved back to Maine. And despite having been in Guam prior, an American territory, I arrived like an immigrant, with a house full of foreign objects and different food. I also had an earnest desire, quickly thrown in my face along with the word “chink”, to connect with my new classmates.

I’m not really sure why people peg Dong as a stereotype. Yes, his name is an ethnic joke, but under close examination, he is unlike the stereotypical East Asian men in films. He doesn’t know martial arts. He is not mystical. He utters no fortune cookie wisdom. He is neither a cruel, enemy alien nor an industrious, quiet, law-abiding citizen, as Wikipedia’s Stereotypes of East Asians puts it.

He IS a geek, though, lost in America, a place that seems to him at once ridiculously brutal and full of terrifying people who are hard to understand, and also… lots of fun. Who among us has not felt like this? What’s more, he is everything we’re not allowed to be in other films: tall, loud, drunk, profane, sexually successful with someone he desires who also desires him—even if the girl he hooks up with is made out to be something of a geek like him, and she’s beautiful to him, and we end up cheering them on. And as an Asian American whose dad really was a tae kwon do expert, I have to say, for all of this, I finally love him.

1.

Saturday, I drive to Vermont with my friend Tayari, to Bread Loaf. The mosquitoes are terrifying. At a cocktail reception, as we take turns outside spraying ourselves, Sigrid Nunez advances a theory that this is because the bats are dying and are not eating the mosquitoes anymore. All up and down the Eastern seaboard, the rise in temperatures has promoted a fungus that is killing the bats. Leaving their noses white.

I think of the stories of bald eagles driven to eat the young blue herons, because there are fewer fish, but say nothing.

2.

Sunday, Charles Baxter delivers a brilliant lecture to the crowd on lush styles, entitled “Lush Life”, and inspired partly by his hearing the Sarah Vaughn version he heard, while waiting in an airport lounge. He was taken by the lyrics, and points out the song was written when Strayhorn was 17. His thesis is that we have taken to a default ironic and stripped down mode as a way to survive the lies fed to us by advertising, the media, our government.

Later this will explain to me why Twitter exists.

Also, novels, stories, essays, in that light, seem suddenly like acts of resistance.

He describes a lush style as being born often when the writer tries to combine the past and the present, to mix times. I see it briefly as a slowly sifting Black and Tan. I have two realizations. The first is that this is what has been so hard with the second novel, the reader’s relationship to time. The second is that the first novel solved for this by using the present tense to describe events in the past, and openly so. And that this may be why I like it.

In the afternoon, he returns with Thomas Mallon and their editor, Dan Frank. There he says something about how with long fiction, so often the problem comes over time that for mulling it so much, you can’t recall what is on the page and what is not.

This is something I’ve also noticed but have not articulated. I want to hug him for reminding me this is true. Because we love writers for when they can stand in the face of a thought and not reject it, pulling it out of the fire.

3.

By the time Luis Urrea and Randall Kenan read, I feel as if I have been gone for several days, but it is just a day. But my mind keeps being blown, and that becomes some other way of keeping time, a sort of personal calendar of realizations with days that last for just an hour or 45 minutes.

Luis Urrea’s reading is like a lesson in how it matters to really love your audience. Not just for paying attention to you, but to love them because you just love them, out of your helpless and enormous heart.

4.

I convince Sigrid Nunez to enter the barn dance. This moment counts as a day lasting approximately 40 minutes.

5.

I keep thinking about the bats and the eagles. Another theory is put forward, that it is just a wet summer. This is quickly adopted. But is not any less upsetting, because the wet comes from the melted North Pole, as we are a closed system, and by ‘we’ I mean, ‘we on planet Earth’. The water had to go somewhere. All of this rain, this is the North Pole on the move, coming to us daily in storms.

6.

The Rob Cohen and Natasha Trethewey reading is like several of those days of short duration because of the mind blowing apart. And then the waiter reading afterwards is electrifying. I discover two favorite new writers, Reese Kwon and Vanessa Hua, and fall in love with Jennine Capó Crucet. By now we are in what you’d call Monday, approaching evening and the bonfire party in the woods as if on a train that will take us there.

It occurs to me that it is not just the mind blowing apart and settling back down, like leaves kicked in the yard. It is also that each of these readings is an experience of a writer playing with time, of insisting on the manipulation of it to describe the world. And so yes, I’m just walking across the campus, going to readings and having a beer or a coffee, but also an interdimensional traveler, with worlds invented and then disappearing around me.

7.

I check the news periodically. It is disappointing. In the rest of the world, 12 men with guns at a town hall for the president. How long do you think they would have been able to stand there during the Bush administration? That these men are not in Guantanamo already feels like an improvement they are immune to feeling.

As I also may be, but for different reasons.

I feel the default mode of ironic skepticism surround me and then let it drop. I will do as Charles Baxter recommends. And despite the horrible things, the excellent work and the friends here make the world seem more beautiful than I knew.

8.

Sigrid, it should be said, is a sprite. Also, that Tayari Jones had magnificent hair.

9.

At the bonfire, I stand with someone who tells me about the Perseid meteor showers the week before. He watched them here.  It was the first time he’d seen them.  He is a poet and it would be stealing a little from him to say more of what he said.  So, imagine you are listening to someone describe seeing a shooting star for the first time—someone who doesn’t feel the need to make a wish. You are listening as his delight, and the world feels new again.  It’s as if the night really could erase not just the day but all of the days, all of the wrongs, all of the things we have seen that hurt us or simply won’t conform to our will.  As if this night has some power all other nights did not. The stars above us, as we look at them and he talks, they are like the newest things, but they are always there, or, for our lifetimes. It is, of course, an illusion, born of lack of sleep, of having a beer in the woods like a bandit chieftain, of being an interdimensional traveler atop one mountain in Vermont. But it is beloved, and we’re not alone.

10.

In my apartment, as I make coffee for Tayari on what we know as Tuesday, she observes how it feels as if we’ve been gone some longer time. But the flowers I bought Saturday are still good, as is the basil, waiting beside each other on my counter.

Hunh, she says. And nods her head.

One of my favorites.

by the late David Wojnarowicz.

You might wonder how [Chris] Matthews could simultaneously argue that John McCain would be a big winner if he got 18 percent of the vote and that if Hillary Clinton finished with more than 30 percent, it would mean she had been “rejected here in Iowa by two-thirds of the Democratic Party.” Well, it might have a little something to do with the fact that Matthews thinks McCain “deserves to be president,” and has reportedly said of Hillary Clinton “I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for.”

From Jamison Foer’s weekly column, at Media Matters.

—from the Ron Paul campaign, based on a suggestion of his in a speech.

Thanks to Sue Pierce for sending it to me.

“I’m definitely a fan of juxtaposition,” he explains. “Using the most beautiful line to say the most horrific thing — I think one of the main things in songwriting is definitely friction between the words and the melody. It’s got to be done very delicately because both elements are somewhat explosive, and all of a sudden the song becomes like a crystal meth lab. You know, you don’t want to blow up your family.”

Rufus Wainwright, explaining his new album (and its apocalyptic vision of America) to Dana Vachon on Salon.

Tonight I’m searching for images of the Korean War. I don’t really know why, I’m just sort of following a feeling. Last week my friend Shauna sent me this link to an article about North Korea and South Korea allowing rail travel again between the two countries.

For some reason I thought of the comics my cousins showed me on my second trip to Korea, where North Koreans were pictured as demonic. I found this.

This one of Stalin Buddha is amazing.

The title to this one is, “Why Must Your Leaders Bow To Russian Masters?”

This next one was prescient. “North Korean Farmers! Hide Your Rice! Don’t Starve For Communism!” It’s dated 1952.

I keep thinking about who made them, and who saw them, and what happened to them. I try to imagine putting this on a wall and walking home.

All of these images are from this collection over at Kirkwood Community College’s website.