Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

On one end of the spectrum of stereotypes Asian American women must deal with, there’s Exotic. Subservient. Quiet. Model Minority. On the other, Manipulative. Overbearing. Dragon Lady (a reference to Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi of China). Missing from these common images are the voices of actual Asian women, who came to bear the brunt of these stereotypes through centuries of colonialism and racism.

Published in 1997, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire is a collection of essays and interviews from Asian American activists. Many express their frustrations with white feminism (the mainstream feminism most people are familiar with), and some reject the feminist label altogether. Several of the authors also express frustration at people’s reactions to the Asian American feminist movement: within their own cultures, claiming oneself as “feminist” can be seen as unfeminine and offensive. In society in general, some have trouble even wrapping their heads around the concept of “Asian American feminism;” the term just seems so incompatible with stereotypes of Asian women. However, as all of the authors prove, feminist activism has been around a long time in the Asian community, and the Asian American feminist movement continues to grow.

The book is split into four parts: Strategies and Visions; An Agenda for Change; Global Perspectives; and Awakening to Power. Regardless of the theme of each section, there is definite overlap in the essays. The Asian American feminism that all of these activists speak of has a global aspect; yes, these women are based in the U.S., but because so much of their work focuses on issues related to immigration and labor rights, an awareness of different cultures and issues is necessary.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Set in war-torn Chechnya, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena begins with terror. Russian soldiers burst into a house and abduct a man in the middle of the night, burning down his house and taking him somewhere no one ever returns from. His neighbor and longtime friend, Akhmed, watches helplessly until they leave, then races over to save what the soldiers left without: hiding in the snowy forest behind the house is his friend’s eight-year-old daughter, Havaa. Knowing that the soldiers will surely come back for her, Akhmed takes it upon himself to keep the girl safe.

Akhmed inadvertently makes a choice that will change everyone’s lives. His reasoning is initially unclear, but he decides that Havaa will be safe at the hospital in a nearby city. He knows of a skilled female surgeon there — unheard of in their culture — and he’s sure that if he can just get Havaa there, she’ll be safe. The reality of the situation is quite different. He does indeed encounter that female surgeon, Sonja, but she’s cold and arrogant. She’s the only doctor in the entire hospital; aside from her assistant and the security guard, everyone else fled years ago. The last thing she needs is a child running around. Still, by offering to help at the hospital, Akhmed manages to get her to agree.

Though the book technically only spans five days, it actually jumps back and forth from 1994 – 2004. Marra has created a complex web of relationships that extends far beyond their current situation; events that happened years ago set off numerous chain reactions that are finally manifesting themselves all these years later.  Even secondary characters who have never met are somehow connected: Sonja’s beautiful and traumatized younger sister, Natasha; Ramzan, the village informant whom everyone shuns; Ramzan’s lonely father, Khassan, who must also bear the stigma of his son’s actions; and Dokka, Havaa’s father. So much is shrouded by loss, violence, and mystery.

Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

“I stand in the sunny noon of life…what concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life.”

To say that Margaret Fuller was a woman ahead of her time would be an understatement. A born intellectual, she was educated in accordance with her father’s exacting standards; in a time when Harvard didn’t admit women, her father saw to it that she received the equivalent of a Harvard education anyway. Fuller grew up to be a quick-witted and worldly woman desperate to leave her mark. She was a talented conversationalist and considered herself an equal to — and in some cases, even smarter than — the well-educated men she encountered in her circles, encouraged women to speak their minds, was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited some of Henry David Thoreau’s early works, and wrote a book about women’s rights that far exceeded the reach of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Women.

Fuller would later work as a newspaper columnist under Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune. At a time when few women worked, Fuller was demanding pay equity, insisting she should be payed the same as her male counterparts. She advocated on behalf of prostitutes and the poor and eschewed the conventions of marriage. When she died in a shipwreck at the age of forty, the revelation that she had had a child with her Italian lover (both of whom also died in the shipwreck) caused a scandal.

In her introduction to Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall writes about how Nathaniel Hawthorne preferred to call his works “Romances,” quoting him saying that romances allowed the writer to, “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.” (Imagine the Nathaniel Hawthorne of today — whoever that is — saying such a thing!) In that vein, Marshall explains that she also chose to write this biography as a “romance,” explaining that doing so allowed her to focus on parts of Fuller’s life more than others, all while incorporating Fuller’s words into the narrative, in order to better convey the complexities of Fuller’s life.

Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders

What does it mean to be a father? A mother? As a transgender woman who was a father for ten years and has been a mother for eight years and counting, Jennifer Finney Boylan is in a unique position to examine these roles from both angles, as well as a “third gender,” a reference to the in-between period during her transition.

Stuck in the Middle with You is not the author’s first memoir about her experiences as a transgender woman; though this book does discuss some of the details of her transition, it mostly focuses on how her gender shaped her experiences as a parent and spouse. Split into three parts, one for each gender-related phase of her life, the book also breaks with traditional memoir format by including interviews about parenting and gender with the likes of Edward Albee, Richard Russo, Ann Beattie, and Augusten Burroughs.

This was the first time I’d ever read any of Boylan’s work, and I was quickly entranced by her lyrical prose and thoughtful reflections. As a white, middle class woman with stable employment and a supportive environment, she’ll be the first to admit that, though far from smooth, her transition was a best-case scenario:

We’d waited and waited for some terrible doom, but the days had passed and we all continued to thrive. It had seemed incomprehensible to us, that the world could be as forgiving as we had found it, especially since I’d heard stories firsthand from other trans people who, in nearly identical circumstances, had found only cruelty and rejection. Some had found violence. On the whole, it was hard to deny that our family has been very, very lucky.

On Why World Book Night Rules (and Other Things)

Well, hello there. Long time no see.

First off, I want to explain my semi-absence from blogging and tweeting (and, some weeks, even reading *sob*), and it can be summed up in one word: school. Between dealing with life stuff and being a student and being an instructor, I have had almost no life this month. This month has also brought the slow and painful death of the seventeen-year-old car I’ve had since my senior year of high school (holy shit I’m old!), and the complete annihilation of my savings account — goodbye, summer school…I’m still bitter — in order to buy a replacement car.

So, yeah. April.

But my bright spot in April = pretty much all of last week. April 23 was World Book Night 2013. I participated last year and gave away La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Óscar Wao to immigrants at the Port Isabel Detention Center; in doing so, I learned about the extremely high need for books in foreign languages (especially Spanish) at such detention centers. They usually get English book donations, but most of the population doesn’t speak English.

Strong Motion

Trigger Warning: This book is set in Boston and deals with disaster, so given the events of last week, I want to give people a heads up. I’m posting it today because it’s Earth Day, and the disaster in the book is related to environmentalism.

I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how wacky Jonathan Franzen can be until I read Strong Motion. We see a lot of it in The Corrections and a little of it in Freedom, but by then he had become Jonathan Franzen, Great American Novelist. That’ll do wonders for turning “wacky” into some other charming and witty adjective.

Strong Motion, Franzen’s second novel, is a different story. At that point in his career, he was still just Jonathan Franzen, Extremely Talented Writer. And you’d think that with so much on the line with your sophomore effort, you’d play it a little safer. But no, Strong Motion is anything but safe.

The book follows Louis Holland, a disaffected and assholish recent college grad who has returned to Boston just as the city is experiencing a series of mild earthquakes. His wealthy grandmother is the sole fatality of one of these earthquakes, though she only died because of a freak accident, not because of the strength of the earthquake. The tremors are a scientific curiosity since the area isn’t known to experience earthquakes. Enter Renee Seitchek, a thirty-something career-focused seismologist from Harvard, who’s in the area with coworkers to check things out. Through a series of unlikely events, she crosses paths with Louis and ends up staying in touch.

Literary Link Love

I first read this post on readers’ reactions to rape victims in literature at The Rejectionist, but it made the rounds again a couple of weeks ago when it was republished at The Rumpus. Must read: Trigger Warning.

Chicago Reader has a great profile of Howard Goldblatt, translator of Nobel-winning Chinese literature.

The L.A. Times has a cool interactive literary map of Los Angeles. Click on a location, and the related book passage pops up.

The Atlantic recently published an article about the history of feminist utopian literature.

The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France

I first encountered John Baxter’s writing a few years ago when I came across Immoveable Feast, about the planning and creation of a French Christmas feast. Baxter had me — a longtime vegetarian — craving all of the amazing meat-based and/or fat-enhanced courses he so elegantly described. Baxter, an Australian expat now married to a French woman, has written many books about France. When I found out that his latest book again returns to the subject French culinary treasures, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

The Perfect Meal tackles a subject close to Baxter’s heart: with the industrialization of food and the desire to find something quick and easy to eat, even France, with its legacy as the bastion of culinary arts, is rapidly ceding its culinary traditions to history. Go to a French restaurant, and you’re likely to find that at least some of your meal came from frozen or pre-packaged ingredients. Even the expensive French restaurants located in beautiful old buildings have lost their traditional French roots. The last straw for Baxter was going to a restaurant located in a magnificent Belle Epoque-era building; hoping against all odds that he’d be served an impressive, unmistakably French meal, he was instead served food that was “precious:” his soup, which was brought out as separate components and mixed before his eyes, was then topped with a pansy.

Where has all the traditional French food gone? A feast you’d have found even a hundred years ago must be impossible to create by today’s standards: the preparation would take ages, and the cost would be astronomical. But even if money was no object, are there even people still making the traditional food of yore? Does anyone really still roast an entire ox? Would it be possible today to compose a menu for a traditional French feast? Unfortunately, money was very much an issue, but Baxter was still intrigued. His actual feast would have to be a fantasy, but the menu planning could be real. With his fantasy feast in mind, he sets off to all parts of France to find the answers to his questions.

Quickies: I Want to Show You More & The Guy’s Guide to Feminism

I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro

Publisher/Year: Grove Press, 2013
Format: Ebook
Pages: 224
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

What it is: A collection short stories, many of which have elements of fantasy or center on the subject of infidelity.

Why I read it: In this case, my awesomely scientific method behind choosing this book amounted to,”I feel like reading short stories. What does Grove Press have? Ooooh, I like this cover! Oh, and I need a Q author for my A-Z reading challenge. Done!” For real. I don’t even remember reading the book’s description! (Why Grove Press? I trust them enough to go on these random reading journeys of mine because I have yet to read a book I hate that they’ve published.)

What I thought: This is a quirky little collection. I wasn’t expecting Amy Bender-ish weirdness, so running into that in this book was an interesting surprise. As a whole the collection was hit-or-miss for me, but Quatro really is an amazing writer. A lot of the stories are more atmospheric rather than plot-driven, and are instead propelled by the characters’ rich internal lives. Some of my favorites were “Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives,” about a woman whose infidelity manifests itself by the the sudden presence of her dead lover in her bed; “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement,” quite possibly the most disturbing story about running a marathon you will ever read; and “1.7 to Tennessee,” about an 89-year-old woman who decides to take an uncharacteristically long walk.

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The Guy’s Guide to Feminism by Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Kaufman

Publisher/Year: Seal Press, 2011
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Source: Publisher

What it is: An A-Z primer on feminism for guys.

Why I read it: I like reading Intro to Feminism-type books.

What I thought: Kimmel and Kaufman give a lot of presentations at schools, and I can see this book being useful in that context. The “chapters” are short and touch on dozens of feminist buzz words (H is for Honor Killings, M is for Macho/Machismo, N is for No, V is for Vaginas/Vulvas, etc.; many letters have multiple entries). I could see this book coming in handy in a classroom or in a small group setting; it only takes a minute or two to read most of the chapters, and that would serve as a good starting point for discussion. That said, the book is very, very basic. It’s good for people who have little to no knowledge of feminism, but people with a basic understanding of feminism might not get as much out of it. And personally, I found the style a little grating. Guy jokes are sprinkled in liberally, and I know the whole point is to cater to guys? But sometimes it felt like the equivalent of feminist primers that gear themselves toward teen girls by assuring them that they can still be feminist and wear pink, etc. There’s a market for that, and people do sometimes need those assurances, but it gets annoying after a while.

The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones

Tristan Hart is a wealthy and fiercely intelligent twenty-year-old who has been chosen to study medicine in London. Having been left to his own devices while growing up in the country, Tristan can’t wait to experience London and finally be challenged by one of the best minds in medicine. He won’t be completely left alone, though. Tristan has already experienced at least one violent episode that left his family fearing for his sanity. In London, he’ll be closely watched, lest he experience another “nervous” outburst. But Tristan harbors dark secrets about his personality that go much further than his mental stability. He’s obsessed with pain, especially inducing it. Studying medicine allows him to channel his interests productively, allowing him to cause pain (though surgery, etc.) in order to fix medical conditions. The problem is that as pressure on him increases, he has a harder time telling fantasy from reality, especially when the woman he loves is involved.

I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive going into this book. The premise sounded interesting, but there was a catch (for me): it’s written in the style of 18th century English. For example, this is the first sentence of the book:

One Morning in the Autumn of seventeen forty-one, when I was not yet eleven Yeares of Age, still round in Figure and innocent in Mind, Nathaniel Ravenscroft took me a-walking by the River.

That’s not a problem for a lot of people, but uh…I’m the kind of person who took Shakespeare in Film in undergrad in order to fulfill her Shakespeare literature requirement. Anything to get out of, like,actually reading old school English. (Yes. I was that student.) But here we are, many years later. I can take old school English (but still no Shakespeare).