OK, now that I’m almost over the line with the proposal (improvised 2 sequels yesterday, lol), time to lift the blogging hiatus! First off, some shameless plugging links:
-Lovely story by Tori Truslow, “A Catalogue of Unreadable Things”. All I’m going to say is that it takes place in a library of sunken books and mixes sailors and librarians. Doesn’t get much cooler than this!
-You can find me over at the Founding Fields blogging on writing non-Western fantasy, cultural appropriation and the Obsidian and Blood books–many thanks to Abhinav Jain for the invitation (and for the rather awesome review).
-Also, I’m at Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog for “My Favourite Bit”, in which I talk about the monsters in Obsidian and Blood
-Reviews of “Immersion” at too many places to mention (and, hum, I haven’t been keeping track of all of them while I was fighting with my synopsis), but can I jump up and down at having been mentioned by io9 as worthy of Dangerous Visions? Also this one by Bogi Takács, basically thinking it award-worthy. Wow wow wow. Also, lively discussion on imperialism, cultural oppression and standards of beauty happening in the story comments if you’re so inclined.

Aka gà hấp rau răm. This started out as gà xé phay, a classic appetiser from the North/Centre. See, I had those rau răm leaves from the supermarket, so I thought I would make it from Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam. That was before I thought, “Hey, remember that cookbook you brought from Vietnam? See if you can find the recipe in there”. Fifteen minutes later, I was still seating at the table with the cookbook open at the page of the recipe, and the dictionary open on my knees–flipping through pages, muttering and cursing, and pausing only brief to google a tricky word that wasn’t in the dictionary or in my personal vocabulary. The variant in the book looked like an interesting recipe, except that a. I didn’t have most of the ingredients listed, and b. some things were plain odd, for instance the marinating of the onions followed by a complete omission of said onions from the subsequent bits of the recipe (or the surprise appearance of the rau răm about halfway through the recipe).

So I did what I usually do: went wild. Most of the stuff I didn’t have either got substituted or nixed; and the stuff I didn’t understand got fixed by referring to the Bach Ngo recipe. The end result is… pretty unconnected to either of the two recipes, but it tastes pretty good!

Do try to find rau răm if you can: it’s really one of those recipes that tastes quite different if you do the usual mint substitution.

For the nước chấm recipe, see here.

Yup, that’s right, you can buy Obsidian and Blood, the massive omnibus containing the series of Acatl’s adventures, plus all the short stories (they’re all in the ebook edition but not in the print one due to space constraints; if you buy the print edition, you’ll get a link to download the ebook supplement). Get your complete trilogy now!

More info, including buy links, here. I’ll be guest posting at various places over the Internet, though it’s going to be a very short blog tour…

Now if you excuse me, I have a synopsis to polish the heck out of…

So one of the things we’re (half-heartedly) trying in our house is to reduce the consumption of meat, and of red meat in particular. Both for health reasons, and for sustainability issues (it costs a lot more resources to grow produce to feed an animal than to harvest said produce directly!). One of the recent tries was this panzanella salad, a Florentine delicacy modified by way of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Veg: River Cottage Every Day (borrowed from Al Robertson and Heather Lindsey’s bookshelves while I was staying at their place). Recipe was basically memorised and liberally adapted. It’s probably as Florentine as me by now… But it’s quite good, and quite filling. 

(picture without basil leaves, but I *highly* recommend not skipping that ingredient, as it definitely gives a lot more flavour to the salad!)

Haven’t done this for a while, but here’s a rundown of the awesome stuff I’ve been reading lately:

-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Song of the Body Cartographer” is up at Philippine Genre Stories. Like all of Rochita’s stories, this combines lovely language with awesome characters–and a universe that just begs to be explored (the good news is that Rochita is writing longer stuff set in the same universe!). Fascinating handling of indigenous cultures vs. outsiders and the clashes that follow. Also, I get to be immortalised as a city of wise women–which doesn’t happen every day!

-“The House of Aunts” by Zen Cho. Malaysian vampires in high school, but nothing like Twilight! The vampires in question are the pontianak, women who died in children and feed on human flesh; and the youngest among them, Ah Lee, goes to school in human shape–and comes back in the evening, to eat her aunts’ cooking (of fried liver, innards, etc.–this is possibly the story that has the highest body count ever without showing a single murder…) All goes well, until Ah Lee meets a boy… I loved the relationship between her and Ridzual, and the way it was handled–sweet and heartbreaking without being cloying. And the big reveal at the end works so well. I was cheering by the end. That this got left off awards ballot is… a little saddening.

-The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho: OK, I’ll freely admit that romance isn’t my stuff, but this is so sweet and so sharp at the same time that it’s well worth a read. In the London of the Roaring Twenties, writer Jade Yeo struggles to make a living–until her path intersects that of noted writer Sebastian Hardie, with unexpected consequences. I loved seeing a well worn historical period from a non-English point of view (and having the subtle indictment of colonialism as well). Zen has a very sharp eye for detail, which makes the pages of this just fly by (loved that Jade snarkily comments on the quality of Chinese vases in London townhouses, and just loved her relationship with Ravi). Zen is posting one chapter a day on her website, or you can buy the book from amazon or smashwords if you want to support her (well recommended!)

-Night, Again, by Linh Dinh: all right, I’ll confess. One of my pet peeves about fiction set in Vietnam is the freaking high number of said fiction that’s set during the Vietnam War (and 90% of the time from an American or White POV). It’s as if the entire country was nothing more than a theatre for shooting Viet Congs and explore PTSD (but not from the Vietnamese point of view, or at least not from a convincing Vietnamese point of view [1]); and also as if the country itself didn’t exist before the war, and wasn’t worthy of mention after the war, which is… freaking annoying I guess? Therefore, it was a relief to find a book that was a. written by Vietnamese, and b. overwhelmingly not about the war.
The stories run a gamut of tones, though most are dark (satire, or just plain horrible). Among my favourites were Nguyen Huy Thiep’s “Without a King”, a mordant portrait of an extended family’s daily life (the title is a reference to the saying “money is king”, and money and lust form a large part of the family’s concerns); Tran Ngoc Tuan’s “The River’s Curse”, which has a strong fantastical element, and a truly horrible ending not because of any gore, but rather because of its realistic portrayal of cowardice mingled with the (ineffective) desire to do well; Pham Thi Hoai’s savage “Nine Down Makes Ten”, a woman’s portrayal of her successive lovers and their failures, and the concluding story, “A Ferry Stop in the Country” by Nguyen Minh Chau, an elegiac portrayal of an invalid watching his son cross the river he’s lived by all his life. The only caveat is that the book is a bit old (the inside cover says 1963, though it’s been re-edited), and that a bunch of the stories feel a bit old. But still, I’d definitely recommend it as a read. Meanwhile, I’m off to read my Tran-Nhut Mandarin Tân mysteries (which sadly, haven’t been translated into English yet).

So, I made up this recipe when I was left with 4 overripe bananas and a slightly old slab of butter. Original quantities were by hand (“au feeling”, as we say in French–aka the cooking motto that strikes fear into the H’s heart ). I outsourced my quest for suitable recipes onto Facebook: my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed (Karen Smith, Laura Anne Gilman, Steven Forstner, Myra Cakan, Ruth Long, Abhinav Jain, and Merrie Haskell). Extra dose of thanks to Jo Thomas, who gave me the recipe I used as a starting point!

And… here’s the unveiling ceremony of the project that’s been keeping a bunch of us busy, aka the Cultural Imperialism Bingo Card. With many thanks to everyone involved, who were quite willing to jump through a lot of hoops (some of them last minute!).

It’s time for this to stop. Time for the hoary, horrid misrepresentation clichés to be pointed out and examined; and for genuine, non-dismissive conversations to start.

Accordingly, here’s a handy bingo card for Western Cultural Imperialism–and we wish we could say we’ve made it all up, but unfortunately every single comment on this card was seen on the Internet.

Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho and Ekaterina Sedia in addition to above authors (and an army of willing signal boosters whom we wish to thank very much!)

Would very much appreciate signal boosting of any kinds (reposts, links, RTs, …). Thanks in advance!

Just a quick reminder I’ll be in London this weekend for the BSFA/SFF mini-con and AGM, as a guest of the Science Fiction Foundation (for which many many thanks to them!). Takes places from 10:00 to 16:30 at The Royal Astronomical Society, Burlington House, on Piccadilly, in London. W1J 0BQ. Halfway between Piccadilly Circus and Green Park stations, on the north side of the street. I’ll be there the entire time, and will participate in two features: one interview, and one panel on SF and Colonialism with Lavie Tidhar, Maureen Kincaid Speller and Sophia McDougall. The other guest of honour is astronomer Marek Kukula.

I, uh, don’t have much idea of what I’m up to, other than this engagement, having lunch on Sunday, and presumably wandering into Forbidden Planet at some point

ETA: I have the con schedule, thanks to Shana Worthen and Simon Bradshaw

10:00 am Welcome (SFF)
10:05 am BSFA Event
11 am Aliette de Bodard interview with Edward James
12 pm – 12:45 SFF AGM
12:45 pm – 1: 45 pm Lunch
1:45 pm – 2:30 pm BSFA AGM
2:30 pm – Marek Kukula talk
3:30 pm – SF & Colonialism panel with Aliette de Bodard, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Lavie Tidhar, and Sophia McDougall (moderator)
4:30 Concluding Remarks (BSFA)

I have a memory–I can’t place it exactly, but I’m at the school fair flipping through used books. You have to picture the scene: my school was in an upper class neighbourhood of Paris. I hadn’t been there long, and I had no liking for the place: the combination of being the only Asian/non-white person at school plus something of a geek pretty much guaranteed me a miserable time, making me the target of a number of unpleasant quips and jokes and other nice forms of exclusion (I did have a few very good friends, and the overall situation got better as the years went by–and I’m not complaining at all! Just setting the scene for what happens next).
The books on display were mostly of the boring “educational for children” variety, or non fiction books, which mostly didn’t really interest me at the time. So I was bored; and thinking of moving to another stall–until I found this book. It was a small tattered volume of short stories, and I flipped it open, and read the first one in a single sitting. It was… quite unlike anything I had read before–there was no happy ending, no triumph of technology, just the thoughtless cruelty children will cheerfully mete out between them. It spoke to me in a language I could appreciate and relate to–which fascinated and repelled me all at once. I bought the book and took it home.

The story was “All Summer in a Day”, and the book was an anthology of Bradbury’s stories–to this day I remember that first story, and the one that came just afterwards, “The Long Rain”. It was decades ago, so far ago that the past feels almost like another country; and I have forgotten the titles (which were in French anyway); but I have not forgotten the stories. They were threatening and witty and cruel all at once, and though there was little science to them, they nevertheless encompassed profound truths about the human condition and the savage irony of our lives.

Rest in peace, Ray Bradbury. Your words are in my heart.

(Thịt xốt chua ngọt và vải)

OK, first off, the cautionary note: this is a loooong recipe, and I really mean it. The sauce itself is fairly quick to make (and can be made in advance and kept in the fridge for days); but it’s the marinating plus frying of the pork that’s really slow, as you have to do it in batches and paying attention all the time….

The traditional recipe is twice-fried: a first time on lower heat to cook the meat through, and a second time to make the batter crispy. You can do this if you wish; I admit that after 2 hours of cooking and prepping, I wasn’t really in the mood for an extra batch of meat frying… I’m sure this isn’t authentic, but heck, it tastes good and it was nice, so…

(you can also omit the egg white; I put it in because I never what to do with a lonely egg white, but the recipe only called for an egg yolk)

This is one of the reasons I keep ketchup in my fridge (the other is xá xíu ). Otherwise, I actually hardly ever touch the thing!