“Chở củi về rừng”: “carrying wood into the forest/jungle”. Doing useless things (like “carrying coal to Newcastle”, an English proverb I learnt at the same time as the Vietnamese one). Hahaha, that one is hilarious.
In other news, I have 3k words on the novel. One of my fave characters just showed up (great cook, good sense of humour, major temper. What’s not to love). Just one more scene, and I’ll be done with chapter 1!
OK, so I’ve given it a try, but it’s not working out. Clearly the novel thing needs a little more of my focused attention, and I can’t do this while managing a blog and a twitter and a facebook. Accordingly, I’m having a mini-darkness notice: I’ll still post about the important stuff, and do a few things, but I’m cutting back on my internet consumption.
Very pleased to announce my essay on Doctor Who, “Invisible Women, Bikinis and Yellowface: Minorities in the Fourteenth Season of Doctor Who”, will appear in the anthology Chicks Unravel Time, alongside luminaries like Diana Galbadon, Martha Wells and Seanan McGuire. Many thanks to Deborah Stanish and L.M. Myles for the invite, and for the fact-checking. The anthology is now up for preorder on Amazon, if you’re so inclined.
The sister book to the 2011 Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords…
In Chicks Unravel Time, editors Deborah Stanish (Whedonistas) and L.M. Myles bring together a host of award-winning female writers, media professionals and scientists to examine each season of new and classicDoctor Who from their unique perspectives.
Diana Gabaldon discusses how Jamie McCrimmon inspired her best-selling Outlander series, and Barbara Hambly (Benjamin January Mysteries) examines the delicate balance of rebooting a TV show. Seanan McGuire (Toby Daye series) reveals the power and pain of waiting in Series 5, and Una McCormack (The King’s Dragon) argues that Sylvester McCoy’s final year of Doctor Who is the show’s best season ever.
Other contributors include Juliet E. McKenna (Einarrin series), Tansy Rayner Roberts (Power and Majesty), Sarah Lotz (The Mall), Martha Wells (The Cloud Roads), Joan Frances Turner (Dust), Rachel Swirsky (“Fields of Gold”) and Aliette de Bodard (Obsidian and Blood series).
In case you have doubts: yes, this isn’t an entirely nice essay. Some of the eps were a good load of fun (particularly the one on Gallifrey, which had a nice plot in addition to awesome costumes), but Season 14 unfortunately included the infamous “Talons of Weng Chiang”, aka OMG. I’d been warned was full of fail, but hadn’t expected to be quite *that* bad. Watching it was pretty much like watching a train wreck in progress. Guess we can say it’s a product of its time (considering TV shows of the time on British TV, you can actually argue it’s more advanced, which is kind of scary), but I’m really glad we don’t live in those times anymore…
So, I thought I’d report a bit on the Bucharest event, aka how I was made to feel like a rock star… The original plan was for me to get to the event at 17:00, read a bit from “Immersion”, and then answer some interview questions. Cristian Tamas, who had kindly set up the entire thing (originally, I asked him if he was game for a coffee…), offered to meet for the (original) coffee at 14:00 and have a little tour of Bucharest. I had no idea the “little tour” would involve being whisked around all the major tourist sights of the entire city while having fascinating commentary on the history of Romania and SFF in Romania. Wow. Neither did I expect a crowd of 10-15 people to actually show up to see me at the actual event; and even less the positively dithyrambic introduction of me and my works by Cristian (I had this strong urge to hide under a chair, lol).
Me, reading. Yes, I really made some funny faces while reading. Blame my theatre experience.
Things I learnt when reading: don’t start a 6000-word reading without a bottle of water nearby, it’s a mistake you’ll soon rue. Also, “Rồng” when pronounced English-style really is undistinguishable from “wrong”, which is a little problematic for actual comprehension… And, finally, it’s really hard to mix Vietnamese and English when talking, unless it’s for safe words like “phở” that I know very well… But it went well overall; at least no one ran away screaming 😀
Among the attendees were Cristian Tamas, Eugen Lenghel, Marian Truta, Alexandru Mironov, Sorin Repanovici, and Jack Feinberg (sorry, didn’t get everyone’s names!). You can see the Romanian report on the meeting here.
Afterwards, we repaired to a nearby restaurant, where we ate nice Romanian cuisine (I’d been in Bucharest for two days but only managed to eat Italian, go figure), and continued to talk about anything from movies to video games. And Cristian very kindly got us back to our hotel afterwards. Overall, it was a really great experience, and it was really nice to talk to a science fiction community outside of the usual US/UK/French suspects (and I really felt embarrassed about all the fuss made around me, lol)
Also, it was really funny to see the H’s face when Cristian introduced him to everyone as “Monsieur de Bodard”. That was really priceless 🙂 🙂
(thanks to Eugen Lenghel for the pictures)
“Tèo cao, té nặng”: “the higher you climb, the greater you fall” (“climb high, fall heavy”). As lapidary as usual 🙂
Not much progress those past two weeks, other than listen to tapes (parents away on holiday). I can confirm my written comprehension is fairly good as long as we’re talking basics (asking people’s names, ordering in a restaurant, managing train tickets, etc.). However, oral comprehension still sucks (mostly, people are talking too fast for me to parse). Continuing my drills with the FSI tapes, and hoping that something clicks at some point.
In other sort-of-related language news, I finished Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, and his translation of Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều), one of the major works of Vietnamese literature. Kiều was particularly interesting, because it’s a bilingual edition that’s heavily annotated, and it was really interesting to see the notes and compare with the text (not, you know, that I understood more than a few words here and there, but I could see some of how it was all pieced together). Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s scholarship is fairly impressive, and it’s full of fascinating tidbits (also very fascinating to see how the novel echoes the original Chinese work while clearly forging its own specific identity). Also, even though it’s a metaphor for scholars (the woman who doesn’t know who to entrust her fate to represents the scholars unsure of where their allegiances should lie), it’s really nice to have a woman main character in a tale. In many ways, it reminded me of Dream of Red Mansions;: the content is very different, but it’s also ostensibly focused on domesticity and the upheavals in daily lives in a way that the more martial novels aren’t.
Also, at some point I will post a report of the Bucharest event, once I have actually sat down and written it…
-Tricia Sullivan on “SFF and reality checks”, aka how “making stuff up” can be actively harmful. Well worth a look; and Cécile Cristofari is also awesome in the comments about Barthes and how we make up stories to interpret “reality”.
–“Tiger Stripes” by Nghi Vo, over at Strange Horizons is a fantasy set in Vietnam, which is rare enough to mention. Also pretty impressed that the diacritics were left in, though really, the only word affected is “Huế” (I imagine that if the main character had been called something other than Thanh, which has no accent and no non-Latin vowel, it might have been harder to leave everything in). The story itself is lovely and poignant without being sappy (and it’s got all those lovely details like the chopstick in the mouth of the dead, the references to two of the great rivers of Vietnam, etc.)
-The Million Writers Awards longlist is now up (many thanks to Jason Sanford and the tireless judges). It includes “Exodus Tides”, published in IGMS (and, by a happy coincidence, collected in my forthcoming ebook sampler Scattered Among Strange Worlds); and many other familiar names from Ken Liu to Mari Ness. Also includes “Ghostweight” by Yoon Ha Lee, one of my absolute favorite stories of the last year, one I think was really slighted in the awards season nominations.
A few cool news: first, I’ve put together an ebook sampler for my fiction. The idea isn’t to do a short story collection (or even to make money!), but simply to allow people to discover my stuff by browsing through their Kindles and other reading devices. The thing is called Scattered Among Strange Worlds, and regroups my Clarkesworld Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora in space story “Scattered Across the River of Heaven” and my IGMS apocalyptic mermaid tale “Exodus Tides”. Due to exclusivities, etc., it will be available end of July (or possibly a bit later if I have to fight to upload a book on amazon…). Price should be the lowest I’m allowed to set, so 99 cents?
The cover and ebook design is by the ultra amazing Patrick Samphire, who recently launched his own ebook cover and ebook design business over at 50secondsnorth. He blogs about the design and the choices he had to make here, on his blog.
Isn’t it fabulous? Many thanks to Patrick, who’s got a very sharp eye for what works for books covers, and does absolutely freaking gorgeous stuff (and his rates are pretty darn affordable, too). You know you want an ebook this summer 😀
Also, my Chinese-y story “Under Heaven” will be available in Electric Velocipede issue 24, in which I share a TOC with Ken Liu (then again, who doesn’t share a TOC with the ever-prolific Ken? 🙂 ) and Ann Leckie. You can find the full list of stories here, and their publication date should be available soon.
Finally, I’ve sold my short story “Ship’s Brother”, set in the Xuya continuity, to Interzone for their next or after-next issue. Featuring a ship named after a fairytale character (Mị Nương, aka The Fisherman’s Song. If you’re read the fairytale, you’ll know why). Many thanks to Chris Kastensmidt and the ever-awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for reading it and offering very cogent suggestions!
Snippet:
You never liked your sister.
I know you tried your best; that you would stay awake at night thinking on filial piety and family duty; praying to your ancestors and the bodhisattva Quan Am to find strength; but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart.
I know, of course, where it started. I took you to the ship–because I had no choice, because Khi Phach was away on some merchant trip to the Twenty-Third Planet–because you were a quiet and well-behaved son, and the birth-master would have attendants to take care of you. You had just turned eight–had stayed up all night for Tet, and shaken your head at your uncles’ red envelopes, telling me you were no longer a child and didn’t need money for toys and sweets.
In other news, packing for Romania in a bit of a panic. More later, but a small reminder you can find me in Bucharest Friday 17:00, at the Calderon Cultural Center, 39, Jean-Louis Calderon Street, sector 2, for the Society of Romanian Science Fiction’s ProspectArt meeting. I’ll be interviewed by the tireless Cristian Tamas, and will read from “Immersion”, a full two weeks before it’s published in Clarkesworld!
-International Science Fiction reprints my Xuya novelette “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn”. Check out the rest of their fiction, too: they focus on non-Western-Anglophone authors, and they’ve got pretty cool stuff up already, including nice non-fiction articles.
–@requireshate, Joyce Chng, Rachel Swirsky, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Ekaterina Sedia and I engage in a discussion on non-Western SF. We tackle writing other cultures, exoticism, non-Western narratives: part 1, and part 2. Many thanks to Fabio Fernandes, Lavie Tidhar and Charles Tan for making this possible.
requireshate: I want to respond to a few things Joyce brought up–the expectations for people like us to be exotic. I’m often questioned as to the authenticity of my identity, because to westerners I appear to be writing “just like them,” steeped in “North American culture” (when in truth I know almost nothing about North America!). This assumption comes about because the hegemony is so huge and pervasive that it becomes, itself, an invisible mass and the default assumption. Mostly, if you write in English and aren’t breaking into malapropisms or broken syntax constantly, you’re immediately assumed to be “one of them,” part of the western paradigm.
(also, because I know this is going to come up at some point, and it’d be hypocritical of me not to mention it: I’m well aware that I’m committing outsider narrative in Obsidian and Blood. I’m doing it for what I believe are good motives–out of interest for the Mexica, to rehabilitate a culture that got the really short end of the stick, and show a mindset that is radically different without descending into Barbaric cliché; I’m doing it in reasonably good conscience of the issues involved in cultural appropriation [1] [2]; but it doesn’t change the fact that my books are not insider depictions of 15th-Century Tenochtitlan. It doesn’t make them worthless or bad; but yes, you can totally argue that, as an outsider writing about that culture, in both time and space, I’m to some extent perpetuating an exoticism problem, and I won’t disagree! I did try my best, but I most probably stumbled in places.
Also, I most certainly do not advocate people should stop writing about other cultures. Just pointing out it’s a fraught subject)
[1] Complicated by the fact that this is a historical culture and not a present-day one–makes some issues simpler, makes other issues harder…
[2] To be fair, my conscience of those issues kind of improved over the trilogy, so I can see the cringy bits in Servant of the Underworld that I tried to smooth out by Master of the House of Darts
-Chimadanda Adchie on “The Danger of a Single Story”. I’d been linked to this before, but never actually read it. It’s ultra-interesting, fascinatingly argued; and touches on subjects like the vulnerability of people (esp. children) to the stories they consume, and the skewed balance of power in the depiction of cultures.
-Charles Stross on “DRM and ebooks”. Lots of stuff to chew on.
-Michael Moorcock’s “Starship Stormtroopers” on Reactionary SF. I don’t agree with everything, and I, uh, admit to never reading Heinlein, but it’s still food for thought. Somewhat depressing that it dates back from the late 70ies, though… (among things I am ambivalent on: the simplistic equation of being for or against the Vietnam War with being for or against US imperialism. US imperialism in Vietnam dates *way* back before the war, and the question of their involvement was a freaking tangle by the time it all blew up. Then again, I suspect a lot of people in the US at the time had no idea what was going on or why).
-The always wonderful Rochita Loenen-Ruiz has an essay on “Decolonizing as an SF Writer” over at Kate Elliott’s blog (and also at The Future Fire):
During the American occupation, the passing on of the oral tradition was suppressed as the native priests and their rituals were demonized not only by the white colonizer but also by the white missionaries who followed in their wake. This meant that the true traditions and the original culture were slowly overlaid with the glaze of white culture and white belief.
Add all this up and it is no wonder that the psyche and the culture of the Filipino is so scarred and wounded to the point where we see the white and the west as being superior to us in all things.
Reading the history of conquest and colonization is a traumatic experience for the colonized. The Philippines went through not one, but two colonizers. I wonder how many colonizers other countries had to endure.
From reading these histories, it becomes clear to me that the erasure and subjugation of existing indigenous narratives were prioritized as these were viewed as being rival to the colonizing power.
Well worth reading, discussing and sharing.
Didn’t post much this week because I’ve been fairly busy with RL stuff. Not least of which was that my writing laptop had the good taste to crash with the only copy of my Paris UF fantasy on its hard disk (I do have Dropbox; however, since the computer wouldn’t boot, it wouldn’t actually upload the file where I could recover). A tense night was spent poking at it to see if it would stop being grumpy; fortunately, my husband worked miracles yesterday night, while I was interviewing with Ben Love and Guillermo Velez for the First Million Words (really fun interview, btw, look for it in July–it’ll coincide with the release of the Obsidian and Blood omnibus). So now the laptop is… sort of working, I guess, and my fingers are crossed it doesn’t fail me again. And I have found my synopsis and my first chapter, so I’m ready to roll!
I obsessively proofread the upcoming “Immersion” in Clarkesworld; I think I’ve got everything, but probably I haven’t 🙂 Kind of worried how it’ll come across: I seem to have moved in a new phase where I attempt very ambitious and very personal things, and end up always worried I’ll get something wrong or get howled at by everyone (OK. Not that very different from the Impostor Syndrome. Just turned up to max, for no reason I can see).
Cooking wise, this was very much a week for not trying out anything new–bought some coconut milk to make a bánh chuối nướng in order to consume leftover bread; of course ended up with leftover coconut milk, so made cà ri tôm (sort of a merge of this recipe and this recipe with half the ingredients substituted for something else). Next week, however, I have some crab to use up, and I’m going to be more adventurous (might even open the VN cookbook and check out promising stuff, ever-so-slowly and with the help of my trusty dictionary 🙂 ).
Now I’m off to buy some running shoes and celebrate a birthday–and eat the last of the chả lụa Grandma brought back from Saigon (which is going to make me regret Vietnam all over again…).
