In March, Myanmar was descending into near-daily violence under a junta about a month in after the military ousted democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi from power in a lightning-quick coup. Sixteen-hour days were common for our newsroom in Bangkok as we tried to navigate safety concerns for our reporting staff in Yangon, while dealing with a really intense news cycle. Any time off I had, I just couldn't do anything "serious" -- I stopped watching dramas and switched to only 20-minute comedies. I re-downloaded a silly cat-collecting game because I knew my addiction to doom-scrolling on the news had to be channelled to another mind-numbing screen suck. And I also found that I could no longer read for fun. Any titles in my "to be read" pile was just. too. serious.
So my colleague passed me A Flavia de Luce mystery, and it came at the perfect time for me to just clear my head of all the noise.
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is the first book of a mystery series following 11-year-old Flavia, a chemistry enthusiast living with her father and two sisters in the English countryside. Her primary passion is concocting poisons to bedevil her older sisters, who she sees as vapid. But one day, a dead bird is found in their manor, with its beak pierced into a stamp. When her father -- who is quite distant -- sees the stamp, he turns white and takes the stamp away.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot -- I myself went into knowing literally nothing about the book -- but there's murder, secrets buried in the past, and quite a bit of philately (which I had to look up while reading. It means postal history). Of course in true Nancy Drew fashion, Flavia decides to get answers in her own way, riding her bicycle around town in search of clues -- sometimes with the help of townspeople like the innkeeper's daughter and an elderly librarian (who hates her father).
The book was an easy read, thanks to Flavia's curiosity. She is headstrong, resourceful, and unstoppable in the way that pre-teens feel they are when they haven't encountered too many obstacles in their very short life. We see most things from her point of view -- from her annoyance at her sisters, to her unconcealed disgust at the housekeeper's pies. She's also jealous that her sisters remember her mother, who the book says died when she was a baby, but her father's persistently forlorn nature seems to imply there might be more in future books about that.
While Bradley had written her as rather precocious -- after all, she is a chemistry genius at 11 -- Flavia also has certain tendencies that indicate she may be on a spectrum. The detective tasked with solving the case says she's "remarkable", allowing her to answer his questions without interruption or belittling her. Perhaps that's the first clear sign that we're dealing with a fictional world; little girls in 1950s England likely did not get so much respect from grown men.
Flavia's no-nonsense way of approaching problems is also a mindset I perhaps had when I was younger, but have forgotten as I've grown older and more cynical. Though... I gotta wonder, was I ever really like that? Maybe I've never been the type that thinks, "I have a question, so let's find the steps to get the answer." without a hint of doubt creeping in or imagining obstacles every step of the way.
There's something comforting about that simplicity, and this Flavia de Luce mystery was not a bad way to remember that sense of invincibility I used to project on myself when reading young adult and mystery novels.
This will be a tough one to
review. Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings wasn't just good –
and it was unbelievably good. It was both recognizable – like a familiar friend
who I just nodded along to as they spoke – and a revelation. She skillfully put
into words a shade that has maybe always been super-imposed over my world view,
feelings I never knew was nagging at me before. Her seven essays also covered
so much ground that any review I write – and anything I've read by other
outlets – will fall short what it felt like to just experience her writing.
I am what I'd call a
biased reviewer. An unreliable narrator. My Asian-American-ness makes me
someone already aligned with "identity politics", so how could I be
counted on to give a full picture?
It was hard for me to shake
this feeling in the beginning as I started her first essay, "United".
I kept thinking to myself, Do I identify with this because I'm Asian, or
because it's so well-written? Both is the answer, but that nagging feeling could
also be a way I was diminishing the value of my own perspective – something
that Hong says Asians are well-acquainted with doing in the face of some classic American gas-lighting.
And "United" is a
doozy to start with. It covers a lot of ground, but it begins with a very frank
assessment about her state of mind – her depression and how a Korean American
therapist rejected taking her on as a patient. The therapist said they were not
right for each other, and Hong flipped out. She essentially kept harassing her
by phone, and attempted to leave her hateful reviews online.
There was a short prelude about
a young Vietnamese teenager doing her nails, who kept clipping harder and
harder on her toes despite her protests. She thought, "You should respect me like you're forced to respect those Iowan
blond moms who come in here." By the end of the session, Hong was
convinced that they were like "two negative ions repelling each other. He
treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated
myself."
But what evidence do I have
that he hated himself? Why did I think his shame skunked the salon? I am an
unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all
my own insecurities on him... I was so privileged I was acquiring the most
useless graduate degree imaginable. What did I know about being a Vietnamese
teenage boy who spent all his free hours working at a nail salon? I knew
nothing.
I marvel at Hong’s honesty, her
fearlessness at being seen as a terrible person. I don’t know how long it took to come to this point of self-awareness, where you’re willing to lay yourself
out, filleted with all your ugly bits out, just so that you may be understood.
Maybe part of that fearlessness comes from also no longer giving a fuck about
how you’re perceived. Whether if readers think she was awful to that therapist
or that Vietnamese teenager, the message it sent to me was this: Enough is enough.
We are more than all the labels and things that saddle Asian Americans – a too-broad
term but a rallying cry for unity nonetheless. And sometimes, what we are is
just not pretty.
There's a lot of amazing
literature about being Black in America, Hong said. But there really isn't that
much self-examination by Asian Americans. Her seven essays, in short, attempts
to tackle and parse out her feelings on being the model minority – or the
minority that gets forgotten, the minority that "has it so good," the minority that's basically white-adjacent so they should be grateful.
She's also reluctant to use the plural
"we". She is aware that the experiences of Asians in America are so
vast and varied that it would be difficult for everyone's lived reality to be
the same.
But the term “minor feelings” – which
she explains in the incredible second essay “Stand Up” (which is also largely
about Richard Pryor) – is very likely to feel familiar to any ethnic minority. Minor feelings come on when “American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your
own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.”
You are told, “Things are so much
better” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans
are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false
expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria…. Minor feelings are
also the emotions we are accused of having when we decided to be difficult
– in other words, when we decide to be honest.
There’s so many infuriating
encounters she has with white people, but I think the more poignant ones are when the
good encounters go awry. Like when a white woman came up to her after a reading
and said “I wish you’d read your poems… We need poems to heal.” Hong told her gently, "I'm not ready to heal."
I felt a tight
knot in my chest when I read that. I think a lot about race issues – such an odd, throwaway term to use when I feel so much of my life, my place in the world and in journalism has been so shaped by this. My anger and disappointment is almost like a flame that grows with any small indignity I see around me, and ebbs as I get weary.
But it also
warms me.
Forgive me for speaking abstractly, but I don’t know what "peace of mind" means when it comes to this. Reading Minor Feelings, I got the sense that this "peace” or “being healed” just does not exist. Maybe one "solution" is not to care so much, not to be “hypervigilant to the point of paranoid” – but then I don't know any other way to be, just as Hong has been shaped so much by her personal, family, and cultural history to be the type of writer that she is.
I have now written over a
thousand words on this – most of them are hers. But there are two more things I
would like to highlight.
The first is one of my favorite essays of hers, “Education”,
which was about her time in Oberlin. Her closest friends
were Helen and Erin, both art geniuses who reveled in being better than all of
their white classmates. The teachers loved them; their peers were terrified of
them – it was a period of naked ambition and boundless creativity that was later
stifled with the challenges of a Real World once they’ve left college. It’s
also a really cutting examination on tumultuous female friendships, and about
the necessary endings we sometimes need.
Her temperament was distinctly familial to me. She could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury.
An amazing line – and they're everywhere throughout Minor Feelings, showcasing Hong's training as a poet. I look forward to seeing “Education” as a big-screen movie one day.
The second is her final essay "The Indebted", which serves as a reminder for why she's here to do what she's doing in case you got lost in some
of the more academic writing. It deals with
the idea of how “they’re everywhere now” – Asians sneaking into communities
rich and poor, in political circles and in CEO boardrooms. Decades ago, Asian
Americans soldiers were among those in Vietnam, confusing the Vietnamese who shared
rice with them; and they were the ones held in internment camps after the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor.
Marrying history with the demand for “gratitude” often yelled by right-wing pundits – “If you don’t like it here, then go back to where you came from” – she highlights the absurdity that Americans fails to understand: the connection between “here” to “there.”
Or as activists used to say “I am
here because you were there”… I am here because you vivisected my ancestral
country in two… My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions
of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia,
Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador and many, many other
nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly
enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
But make no mistake, Minor Feelings wasn’t just born so that Asian Americans can hear themselves reverberated and acknowledged – though that too exists, of course. Writing this must have taken an enormous amount of self-awareness and emotional labor by Hong. She left me with a sense of admonishment. How have we become so willing to be recruited to be the "junior partners in genocidal wars"? How have we allowed whiteness to conscript us to be anti-black and colorist? To prosper in a system that hates us and demands for our invisibility is not a win.
Conscription is every day and
unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in
relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.
So here I am, sitting in Bangkok,
a Singaporean-American working as a foreign correspondent – a concept that is
very much steeped in colonialistic ideals – bathed with both that
rallying sense of indignation, and also feeling really called out. What have I
done recently, in any meaningful sense, to further the cause of anti-racism? I
used to say that my existence at the table is an act of revolution in and of
itself. My presence can serve as a challenge, a rebuke to those who otherwise
would say awful things outloud about Asians (and believe me, I’ve
heard a lot, even among liberal circles).
I do still very much believe in that. But it also means that what Hong says is true – my temporary seat at that table is not really one of belonging. “If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence,” she says.
I don’t know what this will look like for me, but I’m grateful to have a writer as amazing and exact as Hong to grab me by the shoulders. I needed a good shaking, a rattling to my senses.
Last year came and went with the stillness of a thrashing fish out of water -- I certainly don't need to recap what an astoundingly not-normal year 2020 was. We were all just doing our best, gasping for air while picking up new hobbies to distract ourselves from the pandemic, racial injustice, the world ending, etc.
And this is where I let you non-Asia readers in on a secret: While the US and Europe played cat-and-mouse with the virus (seriously, does anyone really know what the words "lockdown" mean anymore?) life in Thailand was a different reality. From January to November, we had less than 4,000 total cases and roughly 60 deaths. By July, Bangkok was pretty much back to normal -- and that was when a pro-democracy movement kicked off.
The capital saw near-daily protests from student activists demanding for the prime minister -- a former army chief who staged the last coup in 2014 -- to step down from power. By August, their demands shifted to more taboo topics; the students called for reforms to the kingdom's most powerful institution, the monarchy, demanding that it be held accountable, that its finances be transparent, and that a royal defamation law -- which has sent dozens (hundreds?) convicted of insulting or criticising the royals to prison -- be abolished.
(This video is now geo-blocked in Thailand. Nothing worse for an authoritarian-leaning government than a catchy earworm, honestly.)
It is in this environment that Sunisa Manning's book, "A Good True Thai", is published. How serendipitous that the Thai-American author's novel based on the student movement from 1973-1976 be thrust into the Thai public's eye right when the spectre of the massacre looms large in every activist's mind. It wasn't so long ago that the student massacre of October 6, 1976 -- one of the bloodiest stain in its country's continual agitation for democracy -- was whispered and talked obliquely about in public spaces. By August, student activists were referencing it on stage in protests that drew thousands. The fact that I couldn't find Manning's book anywhere in Bangkok because it was sold out by October should serve as a fair warning to any leaders flirting with authoritarianism: A hunger for the truth will persist even if a society attempts to paper over its problematic history.
The three protagonists of "A Good True Thai" however do not really tackle large, existential questions about Thailand's penchant for repeating history. Instead, the high school students -- Det, a high-born Thai who appears at ease in every room he walks in; Chang, his best friend who grew up in Bangkok's slums; and Lek, a brilliant and beautiful Thai-Chinese who grows enamoured with the writings of an intellectual considered persona non grata by the kingdom -- are more concerned with their personal place in the country's future.
The first half of the book follows the beginning of Det and Lek's romance, the events of 1973 as the students rouse a student-led democracy movement to successfully expel a hated general from power, and the shaky transition period in which all seems possible, especially for the idealistic youth hungering for change.
In reality, nothing is possible without the shadowy approval of the country's power pillars.
Det -- a descendant of King Chulalongkorn through his mother though his father is a commoner -- perhaps understood this best, repeatedly saying that the students' success in overthrowing the dictator was because the current king wished it so for the good of the people. This rankles the more radical students, including Lek and Chang who wish for true equality, whether or not it comes under the approval umbrella of a monarch.
As the trio espouse their ideals, it remains painfully clear how young they are. Never far from my mind are the student leaders today who fearlessly, and sometimes with great humor, demand for change. Me thinking them naive does not discount from their bravery -- do you know what has happened to dissidents in Thailand? I don't, not really or truly, because their disappearances aren't investigated.
I've been so steeped in writing, thinking, reporting on Thailand's past and current events these past few months that I wanted so dearly to like this book. The topic is compelling, especially as the plot barrels towards October 6, 1976. The details of Thais' strict adherence to hierarchy were interesting, especially as Det wrestles with his identity and his relationship with Lek -- it greatly enlightened some parts of Thai culture that I will never really fully get because I'm a foreigner, always outside of that social calculation.
But the writing leaves much to be desired. Manning's choice to use present tense throughout becomes clunkier as the protagonists relocate to the jungle in the book's second half, hindering the characters' clarity, their actions, and also the plot. The day of the massacre should have served an emotional wallop -- the images of naked students crawling on a university field, cowering from attacks from the army and ultra-royalists, of Thais bashing a student hanging from a tree still shock today. Instead it is muddied by some sparse writing -- a very different approach from the beginning, which felt a bit over-written -- so much so that I had to wonder if a newcomer to Thailand would even really understand what was happening.
How strange it is then for me to think about whether my likes and dislikes of a novel is because of the literary lens I've gotten used to, which has been fed to me by mostly white publishers choosing mostly white authors. To put it in an unkind, blunt manner: Does me liking "Bangkok Wakes to Rain" mean Sudbanthad is more successful at pandering to Western audiences? (And if your first rebuttal to this is "But you're not Western; you're Asian," then you can skedaddle and let the grown-ups talk.)
This question is important to me because as a journalist, I'm well aware of how our appetites for news has been reshaped due to the steady diet fed to readers -- whether if this menu is fuelled by dwindling budgets, encroaching conglomerates or a shift in priorities. The reason matters of course, but what we should be more concerned over is that a by-product of our media output is how we as a society read the news today, how it shapes the empathy we are willing to extend to the rest of the world.
And so here I am, wondering if my criticism of Manning's book and writing is because of how certain tropes or clichés I'm used to seeing in modern fiction have shaped what I consider "good". Of course it has -- how can it not be? Coincidentally, she actually tweeted back in November something Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese American author and poet, wrote that was somewhat about this -- "It is no surprise, then, that if you as a BIPOC artist, dare to come up with your own ideas, to say "no" to what they shove/have been shoving down your throat for so long, you will be infantilized, seen as foolish, moronic, stupid, disobedient, uneducated and untamed." (The full tweet is worth reading, and by the way, Ocean Vuong's "On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous" was one of the best things I read last year.)
It's an uncomfortable place then for me to examine myself in. I'm Singaporean-American, and my tastes -- and allegiances -- will always be tied to this identity, whether if its done by me or by others (I've been told that my reactions to certain news items is because I'm "too Asian" -- said in a matter-of-fact way in a perfunctorily liberal newsroom). Manning's Thai-American, and I was thrilled to see her book's publication and the praise for it the same way I was thrilled to see Sudbanthad's name in some of the "Best of 2019" book lists. We yearn for the narratives of our experiences to actually be written by us, not by white historians or authors, and for this work to be celebrated. "One of us! One of us!" is what I sometimes tribalistically chant in my head. But in being among the few, non-white creators also uncomfortably get relegated to the position of having to please all, to define all experiences, and to be judged as flawless.
(I'm well aware that in comparing this new "Thailand" book to last year's other "Thailand" book, I'm committing the same crime that so many have done. Their shared interest in the massacre is there, but "Good True Thai" and "Bangkok Wakes to Rain" really are so, so different in plot, tone and themes.)
I guess this is my very long-winded way of saying please read it. Please judge it for yourself. You may learn something about Thailand's history, about its people, and about how very present the past is for those who've lived long enough to see this spin-dry cycle of coups, protests and short-lived civilian governments.
But also (since it's clearly lodged in my craw) it's worth nothing that -- much like Manning's questioning of what makes a "true" citizen of Thailand -- our idea of what constitutes good writing is entirely contingent to our biases, our personal reading histories and our ability to keep our minds open for more. I can't say what "more" is but all I know is we still don't have enough.
