API Recs

Looking for a moderator for api_recs for 2010!

magnetic_pole — Sat, 15 May 2010 20:23:07 GMT

If you see this post appear on your flist, it's because you signed up to watch api_recs last year. Want to see it again? Have time to help out? I'm going to be out of town and perhaps not online for the duration of the recs week this year, and I'd love to find someone to take the helm for 2010.

* What this would involve: publicizing the recs week (books! movies! all media dealing with the experiences of Asians outside Asia!), posting a sign-up form, assigning days to reccers, and creating master list at the end of the week, not much more.

* How else can you help? Boost the signal on your own journal, or contact someone you think might be interested in organizing!

Thanks, all!

api_recs master list, May 2009

magnetic_pole — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:53:03 GMT

Thanks so much for participating in this year's api_recs, everyone! It was so much fun to hear about things you've enjoyed reading/watching/listening to!

Master list, May 2009

Alec Mapa in Wisecrack (stand-up comedy)
Recced by magnetic_pole

Monkeypuzzle by Rita Wong (poetry)
Recced by woldy

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang (non-fiction)
Recced by sophinisba

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (non-fiction)
Recced by onehundredmoons

A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki (non-fiction)
Recced by magnetic_pole

Various British Asian musicians
Recced by buckle_berry

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (fiction)
Recced by lyras

Delhi 2 Dublin (music)
Recced by woldy

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee (fiction)
Recced by liseuse

The Grace Lee Project (documentary)
Recced by magnetic_pole

Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee (children's book)
Recced by magnetic_pole

Nina's Heavenly Delights (movie)
Recced by woldy

Asian American Recs Week, May 2008
On magnetic_pole

Day 1: Yellow Rage, spoken word
So what you try dim sum and then some on the menu? So what you a fan of Lucy Liu? So what you read the Joy Luck Club, too? That makes you an expert on how I should look? Fuck you. What the fuck do you know about being Asian?
Not much, I hear you. I love these two women so much.

Day 2: Saving Face, movie
What if, while struggling to balance your desires with your family's expectations, you discovered your mother was doing the exact same thing? My favorite lesbian movie.

Day 3: Yum Yum Dim Sum children's board book
Who can help loving a book with the winning passage: Why, oh why, my little siu mai, why do I love you so?

Day 4: Angel Island, an actual place to visit, but also some links to Angel Island poetry and information about Asian immigration though San Francisco

Day 5: Shopping for Fangs, movie
One Filipino werewolf, one Vietnamese immigrant suffering from mysterious blackouts, and one crime-fighting lesbian waitress. Forget polite Asian boys and shy Asian girls! I love this bizarre take on the LA APA experience.

Day 6: Birth of a nASIAN, character sketches/music performance
Rice Rice Baby! This duo is so funny.

Day 7: Angry Little Asian Girl, comic
Shortest temper on earth! Angry since birth! The angry little Asian girl doesn't do laundry! You've gotta love the acid-tongued Kim.

Day 7: Nina’s Heavenly Delights (film)

woldy — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:17:08 GMT

Nina’s Heavenly Delights is a bit like Bend It Like Beckham (I mean this as a compliment, since Bend It Like Beckham is a fantastic film) but it’s set in Glasgow, there is curry instead of football and in this case the female-bonding develops into a lesbian romance. This is the first feature film by the Indian British Director Pratibha Parmar, who is known for her writing and documentaries about issues of diversity.

The plotline is that Nina returns to the family restaurant in Glasgow after her father’s death and decides to solve their financial problems by winning a curry competition. The story traces Nina’s difficult relationship with her family, the awkwardness between herself and Sanjay (whom Nina was supposed to marry several years ago) and the developing romance between Nina and her childhood friend & co-chef Lisa. Although the film is probably best known as a lesbian romance, it has a wonderful cast of supporting characters including Nina's extended family, her competitors in the Best of the West Curry Competition and the fabulously flamboyant Bobbi.

The ending is a little predictable, but the film is fun and light-hearted with a clear Bollywood influence. One of my favourite things about this movie was the food, which looks incredible in all the scenes and prompted the friend I watched the film with to describe it as ‘cooking porn’! For added inspiration there is a recipe for one of Nina’s signature curry dishes, Chicken Shakuti, on the film’s website.

Day 7: Millicent Min, Girl Genius (children's book)

magnetic_pole — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:36:53 GMT

Millicent Min, Girl Genius, by Lisa Yee
Probably intended for children ages 9-12, but enjoyable by all

How can you not love a children's book that begins with a one-page resume for Millicent Min, 11-year-old prodigy and a rising high school senior, impatient for college and "real life" and tired of the childish exploits of fellow pre-teens who just want to hang out and play with their friends? A resume that includes both her "short term objectives" ("to become JFK High School valedictorian...and earn a scholarship to an Ivy League university of my choice") and the long-term ("To be awarded the Fields Medal, a MacArthur Grant, and other prestigious honors, and embark on several careers, including psychometrician, journalist, judge, and acclaimed pastry chef"), as well as a section for television appearances (appearing on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno at the age of two, she was asked to recite the presidents of the United States. "In what order would you like to hear them" she asked. "Alphabetical or by year in office?").

But despite the fact that Millicent is smarter than her parents, her beloved grandmother Maddie, and that stupid jerk Stanford Wong--a family friend, budding jock, and failure in sixth grade English she's been hired to tutor over the summer--she hasn't yet learned how to make friends her own age. Her classmates hate her for her effortless academic success, Maddie's about to depart on a trip, and Millie's been bitterly disappointed to discover that her fellow students in her first college class, a summer poetry course, aren't that much more intellectually stimulating than Stanford himself. Enter Emily, an enthusiastic new 11-year-old arrival in town who hasn't yet heard that Millicent is a genius. Millicent hatches an clever plan: befriend Emily on Emily's terms, with no talk of her early departure for college, her IQ scores, or her multiple appearances on television talk shows. You can probably imagine where this plot goes--or, if you're like me and a bit slow at plot, I'm not going to ruin it for you. Suffice it to say that the book is a 250-page romp--pre-teen fluff, with a happy, educational ending in which even the genius Millicent learns something.

What I adore about this book is the way is completely casts aside stereotypes about Asian Americans: Millicent is an academic wunderkind, but Stanford certainly isn't, and Millie herself is third generation, with quirky parents and a grandmother who's considering learning Chinese to better promote her new-age fung shui business. Even more importantly, it reverses some of the things we think we know about academic achievers: Millicent's academic victories are almost effortless (she is a genius, after all), and all the older Asians in her life are telling her to slow down and enjoy herself, rather than pushing her to go further. The better half and I have discussed this book at length, trying to figure out just how calculated is it--did the author realize she was fighting stereotypes by exaggerating and embracing them, at least in Millicent's character? Or was this just a happy coincidence? In the end we decided it didn't really matter--it's a fun book, and we love a spunky, hard-working, know-it-all heroine who fits some of the expectations we have for her but not others.

You can take a peek at the book on Amazon and buy it at your local bookstore or borrow it from the library, where you can probably also find sequels Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time and So Totally Emily Ebers.

Day 6: The Grace Lee Project (documentary)

magnetic_pole — Sun, 31 May 2009 04:54:21 GMT

Don't scroll past when you see the word documentary! This is an engaging and highly personal documentary by a Korean American women who is fascinated by the fact that so many people share her name. Raised in the American midwest, she'd never thought much about being an Asian American women, but as an adult she keeps running into people who knew another Grace Lee. Who are all those other Grace Lees, she wonders, and why are they so often described as "quiet" or "smart" or "nice?" This film documents her attempt to find out.

It's a wonderful concept for a documentary, very straightforward and concrete on one level--it's organized as a series of profiles of the various Grace Lees she encounters--but there's more to it than meets the eye. Lee herself is young enough that she's still trying to formulate her response to the various ways society stereotypes the "model minority" and Asian women in particular--were all Grace Lees successful in school? Were they all good daughters? Did they all play the piano? Along the way she encounters an arsonist and a long-time activist in the African American community, as well as a television reporter, a Korean adoptee now caring for a family of her own, a pastor's wife, and, yes, an overachieving high school student. A more mature filmmaker might have pulled these vignettes together more adeptly and would have had more to say about gender roles, class, and immigration histories, but I enjoyed the slightly undercooked quality this documentary had--Lee allows all these women to speak for themselves, and there's something wonderful about seeing ordinary Asian American women on screen, talking about their lives.

I loved the fact that Lee confronts the issue of evangelical Christianity head-on--it plays such an important role in the Asian American community, and yet we rarely seem to discuss it. (A bias, perhaps, of intellectual culture?) Several women talk about the ways in which their faith shapes their life, and Lee respects that. She also talks with a lesbian activist who ultimately decides she can't allow her name or face to appear in this documentary--a reminder of the difficulty many queer Asians have had expressing their sexuality with family and community. And Asian activists! You should watch this documentary for a glimpse of the fiery 88-year-old Grace Lee Boggs alone.

I had a difficult time finding this movie--I got my copy through interlibrary loan--but apparently it can be purchased on iTunes. Lee has also set up a website for the film, www.gracelee.net, that includes a quick, fun trailer. (1:20)

Day 6: Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

liseuse — Sat, 30 May 2009 11:34:38 GMT

Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker is one of those wonderful hybrid novels. It's a detective story, a love story and an exploration of what it means to be Korean-American. The Guardian reviewed it with these words:

"As in a Saul Bellow, only about three things happen (or a thousand, depending on how you look at it). And, like a Bellow novels, it is also very, very good."

Now, I've never read anything by Saul Bellow so I can't comment upon the comparison, but the review does hit the nail on the head with regards to how the novel works. Nothing really happens. Not on a major scale, anyway, until the last few pages, and even then it's understated and only important and shattering where the past events of the novel are considered. But that is part of the point. Henry Park, our protagonist, works hard at being unnoticeable. Both because he is visibly 'un-American' and knows what that means, and also because his job demands it. His wife is WASPness personified, but her job is teaching people to speak English. And her students are mostly immigrants, who want to learn how to sound American, to become American.

I can't really go into any more detail about how this all plays out because I'll ruin the larger narrative of the novel, but all the personal political problems and quarrels that Henry is part of become exemplified and exaggerated by a larger political narrative that he then has to play a part in.

This novel is a quiet one. Nothing, as I've said above, really happens, but at the same time everything happens. It's concerned with sound and noise and visibility and being part of something. And it succeeds because it is a very hard novel to stop thinking about. This novel stuck in my head for days and days and days. I spent them rolling the events around and trying to make sense of them for myself. I hope it does the same for you.

Day Five: Delhi 2 Dublin (music)

woldy — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:32:51 GMT

My rec for today relates to buckle_berry’s post yesterday about British-Asian musicians, because it’s for the Canadian group Delhi 2 Dublin.

This is a five piece band from Vancouver, BC, whose combine bhangra, dub and celtic influences by weaving together dhol, tabla, electric sitar, fiddle and bass. The energy of their music makes Delhi 2 Dublin one of my favourite live bands and their songs are what I play for an instant uplift. The vocals are mostly in Punjabi (which I don’t speak) so I’m afraid that I can’t provide a commentary about the lyrics, but the popularity of the band amongst non-Punjabi speakers in Vancouver testifies to the fact that one can love the music without understanding all the words.

Their whole album is available with live streaming from their website, so I recommend having a listen to see if it’s your sort of thing. I was addicted from the first time I heard them, & I’ll be surprised if you don’t find yourself bouncing and dancing along :-)

Day 5: Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

lyras — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:35:50 GMT

I'm terrible at summarising books, so this first paragraph/summary is borrowed from Publishers Weekly via Amazon.com:

"14-year-old Rumika Vasi struggles to fulfill her mathematical gifts and her family's demands on them, while also finding friendship and romance. Rumi, labeled gifted in kindergarten, becomes subject to the grim home teaching of her father, Mahesh, a professor of mathematics at the University of Swansea in Wales. The goal: to be accepted to Oxford by age 14. Shreene, Rumi's mother, resentfully accepts the household dominance of Rumi's studies while worrying about how to raise her to be a proper young Indian woman. Rumi longs to be in India, where lots of girls are good at math and where she feels at home among her extended family. The pull of romance is also soon part of Rumi's equation."

I was unsurprised to discover that Nikita Lalwani is my age, because in Gifted she captures how it felt to grow up in small-town 1980s Britain in excruciating detail. However, Rumi has more on her plate than the average teenager: not only is she the child of Indian immigrants in an almost entirely white school*, but her "gift" for mathematics has become the subject of her parents' fierce ambitions for success, thus pushing her even farther out of the mainstream.

It's very clear that Rumi's parents are living their own thwarted ambitions (ambitions that are thwarted both by British racism and their own refusal/inability to integrate with British society) through their daughter, and the pressure on her is often heartbreaking. While other kids are playing out on the street, she goes to the library to work until her father collects her - at least, until she works out a way around this. Her rebellions are both novel and moving.

I don't want to spoil things, so I'll just say that Lalwani inexorably builds up the pressure well past the point where you think that the characters can't take any more.

The book is at times poignant, at times hilarious; sometimes both at the same time. Lalwani's light touch ensures that characters are often frustrating but never wholly unlikeable.

*Not entirely random aside: I remember how excited we all were as fourteen-year-olds when a Sikh girl joined our year. One non-white child out of a hundred and forty in the year - and she was the only person of colour in the entire school at that time. *sigh* I point this out just to emphasise the fact that Rumi's situation is perfectly likely for the time, and as an indication of just how "exotic" people of colour were seen as in many parts of the UK until very recently.

Day 4: A handful of recs for British Asian musicians

buckle_berry — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:16:06 GMT

I must preface these recs by saying that the British Asian music scene is huge and sprawling, and I am no expert in any part of it! The recs are nothing but a jump off point really for anyone who might want to explore a bit further.

To generalise hugely, when the term British Asian music is used, what you might expect to hear is a fusion of traditional bhangra/desi sounds with western music, mostly dance, rap and hip hop although there are folkier influences out there too. The scene is dominated by first and second generation Southern Asian immigrants (primarily Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) with lyrics in a mixture of languages including English, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu.

British Asian music is in a really vibrant period currently, especially in London where huge events like the Notting Hill Carnival and the London Mela offer a natural home for bands and artists. The BBC offers pretty good coverage of the scene overall through the Asian Network. I find it sometimes frustrating that Asian music is such a niche category in the UK: you hear a huge amount of music of black origin on mainstream radio here - soul, hip hop, the category they weirdly define as "urban" - but very rarely do you hear anything with that British Asian sound. That's presumably because soul, hip hop etc are popular in the States, whereas bhangra/desi is as much of a niche concern there as here, but USians should correct me if I'm wrong with that assumption!

Asian Dub Foundation
I don’t where else I could start other than with ADF, a highly politicised group of musicians and rappers who have been hugely influential on the scene as well as more or less introducing me to it with the album Community Music in 1995. They operate as something of a loose collective, like the Wu Tang Clan, and their music is a mixture of everything including the kitchen sink. They have a commitment to activism in British Asian causes, from the campaign to free Satpal Ram to the establishment of their educational wing to the newly announced Beat Back the BNP tour. (The BNP is an extreme right wing racist political party who seem to be gaining a horrifying amount of ground here at the moment.)

Bags more info available at their website, which also streams their music - having a surf around whilst listening to whatever happens to stream while you're there is probably the best way to get a taste for all the different things they do.

MIA
I got brown skin but I'm a west Londoner, educated but a refugee still.

If you've heard of anyone this list before it will be MIA, thanks to the music she wrote for the film Slumdog Millionaire. (Paper Planes might sound familiar even if you didn’t know her name.) Born in Sri Lanka and brought up in India and then England, Mathangi Arulpragasam is one British Asian artist who probably has crossed into the mainstream at least here, with two full albums both (quite rightly) adored by the music press and her singles played on BBC Radio One (the "youth" music channel, which I probably should not still be listening to.) She has spoken often and eloquently about the difficulty of being a Tamil in the UK (and the West more generally) when that word is immediately associated with the Tamil Tigers and terrorism and she has repeatedly denounced the violence in her home country. She's also an artist and has made some short films. I might be a bit sort of in love with her.

More info plus music again at her website.

Tigerstyle
I wanted to include Tigerstyle partly because they're constantly tipped as the next Asian act destined to break through into the mainstream, and partly because they're from my home town! They are two Scottish Punjabi brothers who started out in music with the specific remit of trying to re-energise the Asian music scene in Glasgow which was considerably less alive than in London. They organised a series of club nights (which were regarded as painfully hip, as I recall - naturally I was not cool enough to actually be at any of them) before going on to record music of their own and remix tracks for huge rap artists like Busta Rhymes and Eminem. Their latest album - Mystics, Martyrs and Maharajas - came out last year.

You can hear a bunch of their most recent stuff on their youtube channel: Son of a Sardar is a good example of their politics, and Balle! Shava! is probably the biggest hit they've had to date. More info is available on their myspace or on their official website (although it's a bit out of date.)

Niraj Chag
Niraj is a new artist to me. I wanted to include him because he is at the more melodic end of the musical spectrum I'm discussing, and his music is really beautiful. However, I don't know much more about him that. Google tells me he was born in Southampton and lives in London. The songs are all sung in Punjabi, which I don't speak, so I can't even tell you what they're about. I think all I can do is let the music speak for itself as an explanation of the experience of an Asian man outside of Asia. More info on his website.

(The links are all to youtube.)

Bangles
Ur Jaa
The Offering

Sushil K Dade
To finish with something a wee bit different, here's another Glasgow artist. Of Indian descent, Sushil Dade records mostly under the name of Future Pilot AKA. He is particularly interesting to me as a Scottish person since he puts Asian sounds together with Celtic folk instruments and ideas to come up with something really unique and really gorgeous. The Glasgow music scene in general has a very DIY aesthetic with people collaborating all over the place and setting up their own labels/clubs/collectives, and you can usually tell when Sushil has been involved in something because his sound is so distinctive. He curated the first (and maybe only) Burns Mela last year.

I can't seem to find anywhere online you can hear his music so I've uploaded one of his albums from a few years back, Salute Your Soul (sendspace link to a zipped mp3 file.) All his stuff can be downloaded pretty cheaply from www.bleep.com.

I've tried to include a mixture of stuff so hopefully there might be something in there everyone can enjoy. There's so much more music out there - if you find anything that you love, please do rec it to me!

Day 3: A Different Mirror and the scholarship of Ronald Takaki (non-fiction)

magnetic_pole — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:21:21 GMT

An unanticipated rec this evening: the scholarship of Ronald Takaki, longtime UC Berkeley professor and scholar of a multicultural US, who died yesterday at the age of 70.

Takaki was a charismatic teacher and a prolific and persuasive writer who helped shape multicultural and Asian American history in the US. Using graceful language and a storyteller's voice, he made a case for a US that has been multicultural since its origin and shaped profoundly by racism in A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, which has become a standard textbook for history and ethnic studies in the fifteen years since its publication. (It was my first introduction to multi-cultural history back when I was in college--a history I encountered while shelving in a bookstore, not sitting in a classroom--and all I could think as I read it was "why didn't I learn this when I was in school?") The chapters on Asian American have introduced thousands of students to paper sons and picture brides and inserted Asian Americans into the history of the centuries-long struggle for civil rights and social justice that too often we see in black and white. He also wrote Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans...which I have to admit is still sitting on the shelf, unread. But he's a wonderful social historian with a talent for making the past come alive, and someone who helped me think about the world differently.

If nonfiction isn't high on your summer reading list--fair enough!--you can watch Takaki talk about his experiences as a rising first-generation college student in this charming Youtube clip (roughly 6:00 min.) and see him discuss the central role that African American soldiers played in the Civil War here (scroll down until you reach "One Fact You Should Know About American History," roughly 3:00 min). I hope you're as taken with him as I am! Back tomorrow with the rec I'd originally intended to write.

Day 3: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

onehundredmoons — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:06:33 GMT

Greetings, everyone!

I see our last post was on Hmong culture too. I come tonight with a recommendation for the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. I haven’t done a rec LJ-style in quite some time, so in my rustiness, I think I’d just like to talk about the book for a little bit. :)

I came upon this book in 2007 during a session at my La Leche League area conference. The topic of the talk was on underserved populations and how we can facilitate communication across cultures. The midwife giving the session read a few passages from the book and I was hooked.

Embarrassing though this is to admit, I wasn’t familiar with the Hmong culture before then. This was pre-Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino and like many folks, I suppose I’ve always just been a little more invested in learning about my own cultural roots than those of others. So reading this book, if nothing else, opened my eyes to a culture I had been completely ignorant of previously.

Anne Fadiman chronicles the life of a Hmong family living in California whose daughter Lia has epilepsy. Lia’s parents believe that she has been struck with this affliction by spirits. The doctors caring for her in Merced county attempt to manage her condition with medications. A cascade of interventions ensues, and I have to warn you that this true story is unbearably sad. Lia’s parents find themselves unable to communicate with the doctors (for more reasons than just the obvious language barrier), and the doctors are well-meaning but also ethically bound to report the Lees for their non-compliance to Lia’s medical regimen.

Amazingly enough, Ms. Fadiman writes in a tone that I found to be completely non-judgmental. There are no villains – the Lee family is treated with narrative dignity and her doctors aren’t turned into caricatures. Unfortunately it leaves the reader with a lot of anger and sadness and no where to really point it.

So who is to blame for how things turned out for Lia? “Yes” seems to be the answer. Her case is just one of many stories I’m sure of when families and the medical establishment aren’t able to work together; just recently a boy has been in the news because his parents wish to decline chemotherapy. It’s very likely that Lia would have died in toddlerhood were she still living Laos without the benefit of a hospital ER. The death of a child, while completely tragic, would have been something that her parents could assimilate and understand after they grieved. But instead she was in the US where doctors had the tools to keep her alive but lacked a way to communicate with her parents to keep her healthy and well.

From the NEJM review of the book:

Nao Kao and Foua Lee and their children came to the United States because they felt they had no other option. They could not return to their home in Laos because there they faced persecution, yet they had to leave their refugee camp in Thailand because it had been scheduled to close. They settled in a Hmong community in California, where their daughter Lia was born. The treatment of Lia's seizure disorder in the United States, both by her parents and by her health care providers, is the theme of this story. Fadiman takes the reader through the details of the treatment to paint a full picture of Lia's experience as a chronically ill Hmong child in America.

We learn, for example, that long before the Lees even considered coming to the United States they had heard rumors about American doctors: doctors casually take blood from people, including children (the Hmong believe that the body contains a finite amount of blood that is not replaceable); doctors remove organs from their patients to eat or sell for food; doctors anesthetize patients and in so doing put their patients' souls at large, leading to illness or death; and when Hmong are admitted to the hospital, doctors cut the "spirit-strings" from their wrists, thus disturbing their "life-souls." American doctors, in turn, often consider the Hmong to be ignorant, backward, and too reliant on animal sacrifices and other unacceptable practices. During Lia's treatment, the assumptions and beliefs that both parties brought to the patient-doctor interaction were never adequately explored. Doctors often took advantage of their powerful position, and along the way there was a lack of trust and respect between the family and the doctors. Much of Fadiman's book explores how each party blamed the other for the tragic outcome -- Lia's severe mental and physical disabilities.

Other bits I’d like to mention are:

• It was interesting for me to read about some of the Hmong religious rites – offerings of small animal sacrifice, etc. The txiv neeb (Hmong shaman) was called in by the Lees to intercede on Lia’s behalf (by the way – the transliterations were really difficult for me; I have no idea how to pronounce that last title). As a non-religious person, I found myself tolerating some of these “foreign” practices more than I might the dominant religious practices in the US. Funny little bias, eh?

This story inspired me to completely rethink my conception of the immigrant experience. How did the Lees get here, and why did they come? What services are they “entitled” to? Where is the line between holding on to your own culture and adopting a new one?

You can find a good-length excerpt from the beginning of the book on its website, here. I encourage you to go read it and just soak in the start of this very rich story. Women who have given birth in the US might find the opening passages extra interesting, as it contrasts a medically-managed Western birth with a traditional unassisted childbirth in the East.

Thanks for the opportunity to revisit this book. Looking forward to the rest of the week’s recs!

Day 3: The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang

sophinisba — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:27:44 GMT

This book just came out last year and it's one of those situations where you're excited that something exists in the first place, and then once you actually start reading and find out it's really well written and moving and has a lot to teach you, it's just a real treat. Kao Kalia Yang is the first Hmong American author to publish an autobiography. I have local pride because she's from my city, Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I love the sense of Hmong pride that's so strong throughout the book. This is a very personal story about her own experiences and those of her family but she's also telling about her people's culture and history and taking that responsibility very seriously.

She starts out the story before she was born, writing about how her parents met and fell in love while both of their families were in hiding in the jungles of Laos. Hmong people were being killed by Pathet Lao and Vietnamese soldiers because many of them, including members of Yang's family, had helped the US Army in the Secret War in Laos. She tells how her parents and grandmother escaped to Thailand by swimming across the Mekong river while carrying her older sister Dawb and all their belongings and while being shot at.

And it's then, in my opinion, that the book gets really interesting, because I like it best when she's writing about her own memories. Kao Kalia was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1980 and lived there until age six. I really love the way she writes about her day-to-day life in the camp and how she was happy there, despite the fences and the lack of trees and the extreme poverty, because her family was together and because she didn't have any idea that things could be different.

When they're able to come to the United States as refugees, she and her immediate family go to Minnesota where they join with some of her aunts and uncles and cousins, but she's separated from other aunts and uncles and from her beloved grandmother. She writes about adjusting to life in the US, her parents' struggle to find jobs and her own struggle to learn English – she barely spoke for her first years in US schools because she hated the way her voice sounded in English, so when she started writing stories in wonderful English her teachers were shocked. She also writes about the Hmong community in the Twin Cities and their struggle to preserve their culture.

The last chapters are about her grandmother, who's finally able to see her family together again in Minnesota for the last years of her life. She writes about the Hmong as a people who've never had a home and are still working to make one for themselves here and now.

Even though I live in the city with the biggest Hmong population in the US I'd known very little about their history before I read this book, so I'd especially recommend this for anyone like me who knows Hmong people are part of your community (geographically or otherwise) but wants to know more about who they are and where they come from. Apart from that, it's just a wonderful and wonderfully told story of a loving family and a very smart girl overcoming the odds.

Day Two: Rita Wong's 'Monkeypuzzle' (poetry)

woldy — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:00:57 GMT

I first encountered Rita Wong’s poetry when a brief excerpt from one of her poems was shown in our local transit system, and even then her words were stark and powerful. The book I’m recommending is her first collection of poetry, which explores her experiences as a Chinese-Canadian woman and the tangles of race, class, culture and language. From the very first poem entitled ‘sunset grocery,’ Rita takes on Orientalist stereotypes through the eyes of her childhood self:

“by grade four
i learn the word ‘inscrutable’ & practice being so
behind the cash register. however, i soon realise that i
am read as inscrutable by many customers with absolutely
no effort on my part, so i don’t bother trying any more.”

Rita Wong’s poems tell us how it felt to hear her high school crush make a racist comment, about the hidden meanings in the periodic table, and about travelling through China with a fellow Chinese-Canadian where they are foreigners who “only blend in when people are unobservant, exhausted or just plain innocent.” She finds parallels between herself and nineteenth century Chinese immigrants to BC during the era of the Head Tax (applied to all and only Chinese immigrants), concluding with the searing words:

“now head taxes apply
to all immigrants
not just
us.”

In my view, the most powerful poems in the collection are about the struggle of expressing herself in “the steamroller of the english language” which regiments, twists and assimilates one’s meaning. Her poem ‘write around the absence‘ concludes with a call for rebellion that never fails to send a chill down my spine:

“grammar is the dust on the streets
waiting to be washed off by immigrant cleaners or blown into your eyes
by the wind. grammar is the invisible net in the air, holding your
words in place. grammar, like wealth, belongs in the hands of
the people who produce it.”

More information links to a couple of interviews with Rita Wong can be found here.

Day 1: Alec Mapa in Wisecrack (Stand-up comedy)

magnetic_pole — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:59:52 GMT

A light-hearted (if somewhat qualified) rec at the end of a holiday weekend to start us off!

Alec Mapa's stand-up routine on Wisecrack, a 2005 LOGO comedy series, is all about his life as a gay Filipino-American man. Raised in San Francisco in a strict Filipino-Catholic family, he has some wonderful lines about religion, family and parental expectations, and the way his family dealt--and didn't deal--with his sexuality.

That said, there are a couple parts that made me cringe: skip the bits about his performance at New York Pride (sign language jokes are not funny) and about the Vietnamese immigrant who rang up his orders at MacDonald's when he was a teenager. (Guess what? Making fun of people learning English is not funny, either. Come on, Alec. You know better than that.)

Apparently he's also had a number of roles in tv shows like Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty, and if you've seen him in other contexts, I'd be curious to hear about the kinds of characters he plays. From what I've read, it seems like he's been pegged as a type--the most recent iteration of the funny ethnic sidekick, the flamboyant (Asian) gay friend ("America's Gaysian Sweetheart!")--and is struggling to make a career of the roles that are being offered to him.

Mapa's Wisecrack routine (42:00) is available on Netflix and iTunes. You can also watch about five minutes of his routine, as performed on Ellen, on Youtube.

Posting schedule

magnetic_pole — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:54:07 GMT

Just a bit of administration, folks--scroll on by!

Though if anyone's still interested in reccing, there are still slots open--just let me know!

*

Monday, May 25: magnetic_pole

Tuesday, May 26: woldy, magnetic_pole

Wednesday, May 27: sophinisba, onehundredmoons

Thursday, May 28: buckle_berry, magnetic_pole

Friday, May 29: lyras, woldy

Saturday, May 30: liseuse, glass_icarus

Sunday, May 31: woldy

Reccers: let me know if this schedule doesn't work for any of you! Thanks for reccing!

Posting begins tomorrow!

magnetic_pole — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:08:21 GMT

Want to rec something yourself? Sign up today!

Welcome to api_recs!

magnetic_pole — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:52:41 GMT

Welcome to api_recs! During the last week of May--APA Heritage Month in the US--we're going to be reccing books and movies about the experience of Asians outside of Asia.

Both readers and reccers welcome!

Want to rec? Here's what you'll do:
* Sign up to this post.
* Post your rec to this comm (and to your journal, if you'd like) on the days you're assigned.

What do I rec?
* Anything works--books, movies, music, websites, fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult's books, academic articles, non-academic articles, television shows, you name it. If it has to do with the Asian or Pacific Islander experience and you think other folks would enjoy it, you can rec it.
* Don't feel pressure to write a lengthy essay--any rec is welcome. Links to more information about your rec are always helpful.
* No duplicates--if someone before you nabs something, please make another choice.

Sign up by commenting to this post with the following information:
1. The number of recs you'd like to make.
2. The days you can post.
3. Special claims (any special recs you already know you'd like to do).

Next steps:
* Please promote this on your journals--I'd love to see these recs reaching a large audience.
* I'll keep an eye on sign-ups and reply to you when we get a schedule worked out--probably Sunday.

Thanks for your interest, everyone! API Recs week begins Monday!