(no subject)
Fri, Dec. 19th, 2003 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterFeeling much better now and much less homesick. We didn't have anything in the fridge to make dinner out of, except pasta, which I'm kind of sick of, so I made the boy take me to Cupertino Village, this little Chinese supermarket type place with lots of restaurants. So we ate at one of the little almost-hole-in-the-wall places. It made me quite happy. It was loud and noisy and crowded and the service sucked, and it totally reminded me of home ^_^. People talking in Chinese (like home) and Cantonese (not like home but close enough), smell of soy sauce, and we got preserved egg and pork in rice porridge, which is very comfort food for me (although my mom's tastes better), cha shao/BBQ pork, and crispy skin duck seriously dripping with fat. Yummmy. Those two not so much home cooking, but it was so non-fancy and Chinese and reminded me of the little hole-in-the-wall places back at home. It was that and the atmosphere, and suddenly, high school and family and Taiwan didn't feel so far away anymore. It's strange how these things trigger memory -- when I was sitting in the bookstore doing software, it was hard to think of concrete memories of high school, but there, eating (like a barbarian, I might add... it's hard to eat Chinese food politely), I remembered random things, like people in our class ordering pearl milk tea every break, going out for beef noodles, hanging around Seven Eleven and eating tea eggs and onigiri, running around downtown and buying street food.
I think just being in Cupertino, as opposed to Mountain View, helped too -- five years or so of accumulated summer vacations there make it feel much more like home, and I can associate, how my mom and I ate there, how me and Ning would go eat snails at Wolfe Cafe when we didn't want to go to the Joy Luck Palace the eighteenth time in a row with my mom. Stuff like that. Plus, food. Food in general makes me happy, and Chinese food reeeeally makes me happy. I was asking the boy about this, did he associate food and home? He says no, but I wonder. Is it a cultural thing? I know my friend Sarah gets very, very happy with spaghetti and mac and cheese, which seems a lot like me and Chinese food (real Chinese food, not General Tso's chicken, which tastes fine, but is not "home" to me). When I first came here for college, I was so depressed and so homesick that I couldn't eat. It was too weird, too much cheese and hamburgers and chicken breasts, nothing stir-fried, nothing soy, no rice, no noodles in soup, just pasta. I felt like throwing up after each bite of burger. I lost fifteen pounds in the first two months at school because I couldn't eat. The funny thing is, I used to hate Chinese food, hated coming to America and then eating at Chinese restaurants! Made no sense to me back then -- I wanted hot dogs and chicken pot pie and mac and cheese. But then, in the summer between ninth and tenth grade, I went to summer school for three weeks. Three weeks of cafeteria food and of feeling lonely. The first time I had gone to summer school was three years before, and I was there, rooming with a friend from Taiwan, so it was a sort of adventure we had together. That time, even though my sister was there, she wasn't in the same class as me, so I didn't see her very often. I got so sick of watery pasta and marinara sauce. I spent hours on the phone with my mom telling her all the different foods I missed and everything I wanted to eat when I got out. After that, I got why my parents could go to America or Europe or Canada and look for a Chinese restaurant instead of experiencing local food. When we were in London, around the third or fourth day there, my entire family fled to Chinatown for Chinese food. I think we were all a little homesick and lost. And for me, food is never a bad memory of home, it's not something that makes me feel worse for missing it. If I eat it here in California, I feel closer to home somehow, which is nice, because of that giant freaking Pacific Ocean between me and home.
Then I dragged the boy to Barnes and Noble, which made me even happier ^_^. I bought a lot of books today -- got stuff from the bookstore after work too (only forty-six dollars left in my trade account!).
Loot from work:
- Mary K. Greer's Tarot For Yourself workbook, in miraculously good condition. Most of the ones we see have been written all over in, which is what I plan to do with this one.
- Live, Throwing Copper CD
- Buffy and Philosophy
- origami books, which is my find of the day/week/month. They're three little origami books, Chinese, and I can't believe we had them in our bookstore. Published in Taiwan. They're the exact same ones me and my sister used to have back in Colorado. I can't believe they turned up here. I've been wanting to find them for a long time now, but I had just written it off as impossible! Strong memories associated with them -- when we first moved to Taiwan, we didn't get our stuff for a long time, so we only had the stuffed animals we brought in our suitcases to play with. No books, except what I could borrow from the next-door neighbor, who had more children's classics than fairy tales and Greek myths, which was what I was mainly reading back then. But we had plenty of scrap paper my dad brought home from work, printouts he didn't want anymore. So we used the origami books and made giant families of paper animals, each with their own tile square as a house, since we didn't have carpet back then either. We played with those for quite some time -- had at least ten different animal families, each with about five members each, of varying sizes, names and everything all written down. Me and Ning played make believe a lot. So I'm very happy I found the books with all the animals in them!
Loot from B&N:
- Jennifer Crusie's Fast Women and Getting Rid of Bradley. I've read very few category/series romance before (mostly Nora Roberts' earlier stuff), so this'll be interesting to compare.
- Jo Beverley's Forbidden, which just came back into print, which I've been looking for after reading a summary in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
melymbrosia's LJ.
- Francesca Lia Block's Rose and the Beast. Never heard of her, but just the other day, we got a stack of Horn Book Magazines, with reviews of YA and kidlit. When I was looking up the prices online, I flipped open the first to immediately come upon an essay on Tolkien written by Susan Cooper. Borrowed them immediately and read them all in one sitting... this book was reviewed in there. She's apparently another author influenced by fairy tales, yay! I hope it's good.
Stayed quite a while in the YA section, absolutely intrigued by all the new books there. It's grown about three full shelves (and I mean the big long ones, not just individial ones, does that make sense? err... basically there are now two short aisles of YA instead of one) and a good deal of them look like fantasy. This makes me very happy -- I find it harder and harder to dig out stuff in the adult SF/F section because big name people like Lackey and McCaffrey and Jordan etc. dominate. I keep looking for non-questy stuff, but they can be hard to find. And the stuff I'm mostly interested, vaguely fairy-taleish, mostly written by female authors (I wonder why?) are there by the dozens! Someday I will sit myself down there and just page through them. Things that looked interesting:
- East, by an Edith Pattou. Retelling of East of the Sun, very pretty cover. Never heard of this author before.
- Pamela Dean's Hidden Country series. I've read her Tam Lin a long time ago and was slightly overwhelmed by all the academia, so I haven't read her again, but I didn't know she had written a YA series! And I read the back, about stories coming to life, stories influencing childhood, and oooo, very interesting! Has anyone read this? Is it good? May hunt down in library before buying.
- Patricia C. Wrede's Sorcery and Cecilia. Actually, not a new find, but something I keep meaning to read and never quite remember to look for in the library.
I also paged through Crusie's essay in Seven Seasons of Buffy, which I want to buy, but it's in trade paper... generally I stick to mass market because it's cheaper. Unfortunately, didn't like the essay that much -- it wasn't bad, but after having lurked on AtPO for some time, not much new was said that I haven't heard before (Buffy and love, death and sex). It looks very tempting though.
I am telling myself I'm not horrid for buying all these books at SuperBookstore instead of small indy or my bookstore -- I know my bookstore has lousy romance selection (Crusie sells before I can get my hands on her, have been looking for the Beverley for forever), and the YA fantasy section is veeeerrry badly organized, which made me sad. And local indy bookstore is snobby and doesn't carry much romance at all. Wanted to get Bujold's Curse of Chalion to read before I read Paladin of Souls, but I figured Bujold is popular scifi, and we have lots of scifi PB, so I will check the store first. I have very complicated methods for finding books -- I cross reference about three or four different bookstores, the internet, and about three public libraries to track down OOP books or newer books. I'll journey out to new bookstores to graze and remember titles and authors for the library, check out stuff that I'll eventually decide to buy, etc.
Wow, this turned out to be a giant post.
I think just being in Cupertino, as opposed to Mountain View, helped too -- five years or so of accumulated summer vacations there make it feel much more like home, and I can associate, how my mom and I ate there, how me and Ning would go eat snails at Wolfe Cafe when we didn't want to go to the Joy Luck Palace the eighteenth time in a row with my mom. Stuff like that. Plus, food. Food in general makes me happy, and Chinese food reeeeally makes me happy. I was asking the boy about this, did he associate food and home? He says no, but I wonder. Is it a cultural thing? I know my friend Sarah gets very, very happy with spaghetti and mac and cheese, which seems a lot like me and Chinese food (real Chinese food, not General Tso's chicken, which tastes fine, but is not "home" to me). When I first came here for college, I was so depressed and so homesick that I couldn't eat. It was too weird, too much cheese and hamburgers and chicken breasts, nothing stir-fried, nothing soy, no rice, no noodles in soup, just pasta. I felt like throwing up after each bite of burger. I lost fifteen pounds in the first two months at school because I couldn't eat. The funny thing is, I used to hate Chinese food, hated coming to America and then eating at Chinese restaurants! Made no sense to me back then -- I wanted hot dogs and chicken pot pie and mac and cheese. But then, in the summer between ninth and tenth grade, I went to summer school for three weeks. Three weeks of cafeteria food and of feeling lonely. The first time I had gone to summer school was three years before, and I was there, rooming with a friend from Taiwan, so it was a sort of adventure we had together. That time, even though my sister was there, she wasn't in the same class as me, so I didn't see her very often. I got so sick of watery pasta and marinara sauce. I spent hours on the phone with my mom telling her all the different foods I missed and everything I wanted to eat when I got out. After that, I got why my parents could go to America or Europe or Canada and look for a Chinese restaurant instead of experiencing local food. When we were in London, around the third or fourth day there, my entire family fled to Chinatown for Chinese food. I think we were all a little homesick and lost. And for me, food is never a bad memory of home, it's not something that makes me feel worse for missing it. If I eat it here in California, I feel closer to home somehow, which is nice, because of that giant freaking Pacific Ocean between me and home.
Then I dragged the boy to Barnes and Noble, which made me even happier ^_^. I bought a lot of books today -- got stuff from the bookstore after work too (only forty-six dollars left in my trade account!).
Loot from work:
- Mary K. Greer's Tarot For Yourself workbook, in miraculously good condition. Most of the ones we see have been written all over in, which is what I plan to do with this one.
- Live, Throwing Copper CD
- Buffy and Philosophy
- origami books, which is my find of the day/week/month. They're three little origami books, Chinese, and I can't believe we had them in our bookstore. Published in Taiwan. They're the exact same ones me and my sister used to have back in Colorado. I can't believe they turned up here. I've been wanting to find them for a long time now, but I had just written it off as impossible! Strong memories associated with them -- when we first moved to Taiwan, we didn't get our stuff for a long time, so we only had the stuffed animals we brought in our suitcases to play with. No books, except what I could borrow from the next-door neighbor, who had more children's classics than fairy tales and Greek myths, which was what I was mainly reading back then. But we had plenty of scrap paper my dad brought home from work, printouts he didn't want anymore. So we used the origami books and made giant families of paper animals, each with their own tile square as a house, since we didn't have carpet back then either. We played with those for quite some time -- had at least ten different animal families, each with about five members each, of varying sizes, names and everything all written down. Me and Ning played make believe a lot. So I'm very happy I found the books with all the animals in them!
Loot from B&N:
- Jennifer Crusie's Fast Women and Getting Rid of Bradley. I've read very few category/series romance before (mostly Nora Roberts' earlier stuff), so this'll be interesting to compare.
- Jo Beverley's Forbidden, which just came back into print, which I've been looking for after reading a summary in
melymbrosia's LJ.- Francesca Lia Block's Rose and the Beast. Never heard of her, but just the other day, we got a stack of Horn Book Magazines, with reviews of YA and kidlit. When I was looking up the prices online, I flipped open the first to immediately come upon an essay on Tolkien written by Susan Cooper. Borrowed them immediately and read them all in one sitting... this book was reviewed in there. She's apparently another author influenced by fairy tales, yay! I hope it's good.
Stayed quite a while in the YA section, absolutely intrigued by all the new books there. It's grown about three full shelves (and I mean the big long ones, not just individial ones, does that make sense? err... basically there are now two short aisles of YA instead of one) and a good deal of them look like fantasy. This makes me very happy -- I find it harder and harder to dig out stuff in the adult SF/F section because big name people like Lackey and McCaffrey and Jordan etc. dominate. I keep looking for non-questy stuff, but they can be hard to find. And the stuff I'm mostly interested, vaguely fairy-taleish, mostly written by female authors (I wonder why?) are there by the dozens! Someday I will sit myself down there and just page through them. Things that looked interesting:
- East, by an Edith Pattou. Retelling of East of the Sun, very pretty cover. Never heard of this author before.
- Pamela Dean's Hidden Country series. I've read her Tam Lin a long time ago and was slightly overwhelmed by all the academia, so I haven't read her again, but I didn't know she had written a YA series! And I read the back, about stories coming to life, stories influencing childhood, and oooo, very interesting! Has anyone read this? Is it good? May hunt down in library before buying.
- Patricia C. Wrede's Sorcery and Cecilia. Actually, not a new find, but something I keep meaning to read and never quite remember to look for in the library.
I also paged through Crusie's essay in Seven Seasons of Buffy, which I want to buy, but it's in trade paper... generally I stick to mass market because it's cheaper. Unfortunately, didn't like the essay that much -- it wasn't bad, but after having lurked on AtPO for some time, not much new was said that I haven't heard before (Buffy and love, death and sex). It looks very tempting though.
I am telling myself I'm not horrid for buying all these books at SuperBookstore instead of small indy or my bookstore -- I know my bookstore has lousy romance selection (Crusie sells before I can get my hands on her, have been looking for the Beverley for forever), and the YA fantasy section is veeeerrry badly organized, which made me sad. And local indy bookstore is snobby and doesn't carry much romance at all. Wanted to get Bujold's Curse of Chalion to read before I read Paladin of Souls, but I figured Bujold is popular scifi, and we have lots of scifi PB, so I will check the store first. I have very complicated methods for finding books -- I cross reference about three or four different bookstores, the internet, and about three public libraries to track down OOP books or newer books. I'll journey out to new bookstores to graze and remember titles and authors for the library, check out stuff that I'll eventually decide to buy, etc.
Wow, this turned out to be a giant post.
My Take on Block:
Sat, Dec. 20th, 2003 08:34 am (UTC)In case you haven't tracked down much else in the YA vein: I also would recommend checking out works by Donna Jo Napoli and Jan Siegal.
Re: My Take on Block:
Sat, Dec. 20th, 2003 08:55 am (UTC)Haven't heard of Jan Siegal, thanks for the tip!
So far in YA I've been hunting down Meredith Ann Pierce, Napoli, some Sheryl Jordan (i need to find a copy of the Juniper Game), some Patrice Kindl, and Adele Geras. Diana Wynne Jones I have become quite addicted to.
(no subject)
Sat, Dec. 20th, 2003 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Sun, Dec. 21st, 2003 08:49 am (UTC)I found a great fantasy bookstore in San Francisco today, Borderlands, and although they didn't have Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons (they just sold theirs that morning!) or Windling's Armless Maiden, the lady at the counter recommended Firebirds to me, edited by Sheryl November. Apparently she's starting a new label at Penguin called Firebird dedicated to SF/F YA. I was quite excited ^_^.
(no subject)
Mon, Dec. 22nd, 2003 04:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Tue, Dec. 23rd, 2003 05:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Dec. 24th, 2003 04:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Wed, Dec. 31st, 2003 03:48 pm (UTC)So hi!
(no subject)
Thu, Jan. 1st, 2004 04:46 am (UTC)NJ was not really the center of Asianness in American ;).
*hugs* Homesickness sucks.
(no subject)
Thu, Jan. 1st, 2004 05:16 pm (UTC)Yes, South Bay, I went to high school in Cupertino.
It's not Taiwan indeed, but I did have a friend from Hong Kong who was in Mountain View for the summer and was very impressed with the "Asianness" of the area. Ah Castro Street...and the Ranch 99 on Wolf? The longer I'm away, the more streets I forget.
I actually really love the mix and variety we get in the South Bay, so much good food in one place! Now I'm craving some pearl milk tea and Chinese food, simple stuff like hotpot or fried chicken with pickles or noodle soup. Mmm...
(no subject)
Fri, Jan. 2nd, 2004 04:27 am (UTC)I'm so glad I have access to Chinese food! And Pocky and stuff like that!