!!!

Orson Scott Card is coming here!! Well, here as in the San Jose Barnes and Noble on the 13th! And I can actually make it and hopefully get my copy of Ender's Game signed and listen to him and meet an author! I am quite excited ^_^. I've never been able to go to one of these signings before as most authors I read don't tour in Taiwan. Or in Princeton it seems. I'm kind of scared to go because I've read some of his essays on his site and an interview with him in Salon, and I feel I'm not sure I actually want to hear what was going on in his mind when he wrote the books because it seems to very much disagree with what I see in them. So I don't want to have that impression in my head forever when reading the books, unlike Neil Gaiman, who seems from his blog to be quite personable and as quirky and as interesting as his writing suggests. But I'm going anyway because I really want a signed book, hee. And I've never gotten to do the fannish thing before.

Loot from Barnes and Noble: Anne Bishop's The House of Gaian, which hopefully will be better than the middle book of the trilogy; Teresa Medeiros' Once an Angel; the last fairy tale anthology edited by Datlow and Windling. Black something Ivory something? I always get the titles confused. Splurged and got it even though it was in trade because I love the anthology series very much.

Drooled over: Robin McKinley's Sunshine, which I very desperately want to read, but will wait patiently until a) the library copy is up for grabs b) the bookstore gets one or c) it comes out in paper. Generally this all happens at the same time, go fig. Also, saw the new Bujold book Paladin of Souls and really really really wanted to get it. The description looked interesting, the cover is quite gorgeous, then there was the added factor of a blurb from DWJ and several friends already talking about Bujold... didn't get it though, am still waiting. I'm pretty stingy with books (at least the non-mass-market ones) because I would be so broke if I weren't. If I don't see it soon in my bookstore with the employee discount, I'm probably going to end up splurging...

I haven't been on LJ lately because I've been buried in Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel's Avatar, which I finally got from the library. ( More here )

And now, onto the beginning of The Crystal City: ( here )

( Alias up to Phase One )

Even more...

I also saw a book of essays by Amy Tan in the bookstore... digression: I find it funny that I'm buying books at Barnes and Noble, despite the fact that I work in a used bookstore, which is right next to an independent bookstore, and in general I like to support my independent bookstore. But what can I do when the independent bookstore or my bookstore don't carry the books I want to buy?

Anyway, back to Amy Tan. Apparently she's giving a speech in San Francisco sometime, and the boy had a chance at getting free tickets but didn't. He asked me if I liked her and this all sparked thoughts.

I liked Joy Luck Club and the Kitchen God's Wife, which are the only books by her I've read. And yet, I feel a bit leery of liking them, because I don't really agree with her. It's strange, because I cannot manage to divorce my feelings about her books with the race issue and the issue of mixed identity Asian-Americanness (if that makes sense). I can do it for other books that comment on race and etc. like Toni Morrison, but not with the Asian-American writers, probably because I am too close to the source and I can't make the mental separation that it's fiction, because it's supposed to be my literature, written for me. Except it's not. From what I've gathered, Amy Tan's mother, who has great influence on the books I've read by her, is from the same generation as my grandparents, come out of China during the war years in the mid-thirties. But her mother fled to America and started a life there, while my grandparents fled to Taiwan and raised my parents, essentially Chinese, a little expat, but not as much as Tan. And my parents moved to America for a grad school education, and that was where I was born and lived for eight years, until we moved back to Taiwan. I still consider Taiwan home. I think that's the key difference.

Amy Tan is American. To me, from her books, she seems very conflicted about being Chinese, about having Chinese parents, and in general, I have a problem with this. I think I would have been the conflicted Asian-American had I grown up here, because I was a very Americanized kid who wanted to eat hot dogs and chicken pot pies. But I think after a year or two in Taiwan, I didn't want to move back. I disliked it when kids in my school, who were mostly like me, raised in America, mocked Taiwan and kept saying America was better, because we lived in Taiwan, and it just seemed self-defeating. I've never wanted to be white, and I've never been embarrassed about being Chinese when I've been in America. I'm also from a different generation than Amy Tan, and I've noticed that Asia and Asian (or Azn or who knows what else) things are getting very "cool" here. I've seen a lot of kids who I know who stayed in America get in touch with their roots. And the whole Asian Pride thing, Chinese-American Associations everywhere in college, Asians hanging out with only Asians, etc... (which I also think is kind of funny because most of them have only been to Taiwan or China a few times, but then, ethnicity is a pretty fuzzy issue. I mean, I'm not sure if I'm Chinese, or Taiwanese, or Asian-American, or Asian, or who knows what, and I'm putting no such claim on ethnic authenticity). So I feel weird reading these books in which China is portrayed as mythical and mystical and superstitious and "weird." I also feel kind of strange reading about "embarrassing" banquets in which characters' American husbands are served things like fish cooked whole (with head) and eating fish heads, or taking the heads off of shrimps, or eating jellyfish or shark fin soup or even dumplings, because to me, this is good food. I don't have that shock of disassociation or of strangeness because this is what I eat (well, in restaurants at least). And I don't like seeing the moms in Joy Luck Club looking so tradition bound or silly to their daughters.

Things that do work for me are the feelings of pressure, of wanting to be the right daughter for my mother and fearing that I've failed her. And yet, I don't think that's an Asian thing at all. I mean, it may be concentrated in the form of academics for many Asians, but that wasn't what I quibbled about. I've never not wanted to succeed academically or felt I was being pressured to do better than I did. I've felt pressured because my mom and dad probably wanted me to do something more profitable like business or engineering or who knows what else and I've felt weird because they really aren't as screamingly liberal as me, but there isn't this giant spectre of my parents/mother in front of me screaming. Usually I like my mom. Sometimes she really pisses me off and I feel she doesn't understand me. I guess I'm just trying to say that I don't have these giant mother issues to work through. Ok, maybe I do, but it's in a complete other direction (read: career and potential waste of talent).

I guess in general I don't really get the conflicts that seem to drive Tan to write, and I don't enjoy seeing what I often think of as my culture (even though technically mine is of 1990's Taiwan and not 1930's China) made out to look so weird and so full of things like feng shui and the whole stereotype of the exotic, superstitious Oriental.