It's Okay I'm Asian (Too)

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
By Yiyun Li
Paperback,  205 pages

Why is it that award-winning books by non-American authors are often about patronizing America? Or even stories about non-Americans in America are always patronizing (Recently read – Dave Egger’s “What is the What?”) And it's easy to see in movies, too easy to see in films that win the Academy Award's foreign-language category.

An author, it appears, will have a fatter chance of getting published if they are biased towards American culture by nurturing an anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-middle east, pro-American agenda.

Yiyun Li is undeniably a gifted writer who wrote a charming collection of short stories for her first book, regardless of her agenda. She has the ability to comfortably and swiftly glide the reader through one generation to another, crossing the gaps, telling in a wonderful clarity instead of preaching or judging. She can swing you from one perception to another. We relate to her stories in the way we are renounced, and then redeemed. In the way we all thought that our parents did stupid things until we do these stupid things ourselves.

Outside the school gate, Sansan finds her mother leaning onto the wooden wheelbarrow she pushes to the marketplace every day. Stacked in a it are a coal stove, a big aluminium pot, packs of eggs, bottles of spices, and a small wooden stool. For forty years, Sansan’s mother has been selling hard-boiled eggs in the marketplace by the train station, mostly to travelers. 

There were a lot of sacrifices told in her stories. Stories about families, uncles, husbands and wives, our parents and their seemingly inscrutable reasoning.

This writer is most remarkable in the stories that heartfully explores and precisely describes the sibling-parent relationship. Even if we choose to fall far from the tree, forces find a balanced way to mend.

No matter how non-American authors appear to patronize America, the more insightful and forward-thinking of us will see through it. We will see beyond what many in the West sees as happiness. We will do right by those who came before us, of how self-centered happiness is not the only life-affirming legacy.

Patronizing America is a writer’s sacrifice.

We Glimmer

We were excited for July because of a shallow, artful reason. Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" was coming up on the calendar. Whenever I show I. the the picture, I tell him that this is what happens when we embrace and love, we glimmer bright as gold, we burn like fire revealing the truth.

The real one is Vienna and our poster-calendar by the door is an aid to our playful imagination in bridging the problem of proximity and the problem of fare money. Activated and powered by freshly-ground, pressed barako coffee in a rainy Sunday spent with family, my memory jogs back to February. The association game is on. The sky's gray but it didn't rain. We had a nice drive to Tagaytay. At the restaurant's reception, we stand before a Klimt-looking painting. I recall the feeling that while we will never be rich as Croesus, or rich at all, once in a while we allow ourselves to feel all golden. Here we glow and glimmer as in a Klimt painting.

I had one of the most delicious meals of my life that day. We started with a mushroom cappuccino, along with salads, farm-to-table, with foie gras. For mains, we had medium-rare mayura steak and rack of lamb, fruit sorbets in between, panna cotta and souffle for dessert. And for all of it, we had each other, celebrating six years of marriage with a honeymoon that persists.

We stayed the night in Tagaytay, in a bed and breakfast about 20 minutes away from the restaurant. There was a swing in the playground, where we spent the afternoon pushing against the cool wind.. Right before sunset, I had a chance to run around the Tagaytay-Mendez area. I was, after all, training for an upcoming 32k long run. Some of the roads were uphill, some of them nice and quiet, and I tried to avoid the busy main roads. The altitude was relatively higher, and my lungs enjoyed the rich oxygen from trees and late-afternoon mountain air. On the way back, I hit a road on a residential area with a stray dogs and I got a lot of heavy barking. I got chased by one too. I kept thinking how dogs can smell fear. I kept running along with a thankfulness in my mind, and that our fears, the loneliness that will constantly haunt us, evaporates little by little in beads of sweat, the salt in my skin masking the smell of fear, if not diluting it all. That evening, we diluted it some more with Russian Standard Vodka and apple juice before sleeping in a king-size bed.

When we woke up in the morning, we swam in the cold pool. I.'s lips were turning purple from the cold, so we let him warm up a little, as he insisted on swimming some more. The Tagaytay breeze was still powerful against the sun. It felt all good, because we probably really glowed, our truths burning us up inside.