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).

[1] Here’s a handy guide about how NOT to write about the Vietnamese/American war. Please please don’t make the only Vietnamese characters women who have relationships with American soldiers, who exist to be raped/impregnated/killed… (hello, Watchmen, I’m looking at you…). Also, please please look up the history of Vietnam BEFORE 1968?

“Immersion”, like many stories, grew out of conversations–specifically with Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and several other Asian bloggers/writers.
I wanted to write a story about cultural domination; about how the cultural norms from the dominant culture also infect the non-dominant ones; about how globalisation and its products don’t necessarily make the world smaller and communications between cultures easier, but tend to foster a harmful atmosphere in which one culture or subset of cultures (US/Europe, to be specific) takes over the existing ones and remakes everything in its image. That the takeover is subtle, not done by guns but rather through commerce and the diffusion of media, doesn’t make it less visible or excusable: not all wars are waged with weapons and violence; and the more subtle and insidious version of cultural colonisation that’s currently going on in the world is a phenomenon with obvious and damaging impact (and also includes Western tourism in developing countries, which is often intensely problematic and fraught with coloniser attitudes).

The story is also very obviously based on our trip in Vietnam and my rants at the guidebooks which distill a culture in an outsider, monolithic (and many times wildly inaccurate) version: the immersers from Galactic to Rong are guidebooks V2.0. I also imagined their counterpart from Rong to Galactic, something that would make it clear that unbalanced cultural exchanges could lead to severe cultural distortion, as well as rejection of one’s home culture–a phenomenon that’s not always harmful, but is taken to its extreme in Agnes. I also tried to tackle how damaging the imposition of languages and standards of beauty could become, though through lack of space I had to go for a fairly caricatural version of it.

(mild spoilers, plus somewhat long rambles)
Continue reading →

“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!

“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…

-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

“Tiền nào của nấy”: “you get what you pay for” (lit. “such money, such merchandise”). With thanks to Grandma for that one 🙂

Two plus sides: I’m slowly starting to make myself understood by other people; and as a related issue, I’m also reading much faster (obviously, since Mom doesn’t scream every two words that I got the pronunciation wrong). Not really perfect yet, but he, I’ll take what I can get.

Funny stuff: I used to have an awful lot of trouble with the descending accent (the one in “nào”) because I confused it with the neutral; now I *still* have a lot of trouble with it, but I confuse it with the *other* descending accent (the one in “mẹ”, which has a longer duration and goes to a lower pitch). Can we take that as a sign that I know how to descend tones on a word? (rather than a sign of regression 😉 ).

Was trying to tranlate Tấm and Cam as a language learning exercise, but I think I’ll turn to Trương Chi and Mỵ Nương–they’re both fairytales I know very well, but Trương Chi is like, ten times shorter? I think I need an easy one before tackling the longest fairytale in the book…

And the much-delayed pictures (the H still holds the pictures hostage on his computer. I filched a few that looked pretty).

The first two are of the Ngũ Hành Sơn (mountains of the Five Elements), better known in English as Marble Mountain: it’s a major Buddhist temple complex near Đà Nẵng (centre of Vietnam), which has a slew of pagodas and shrines on moutaintops, as well as temples carved within caves that are truly impressive. Easily my favourite place (though not very favoured by Western tourists; the crowd was mostly local) of the trip: serene and unearthly, and with fabulous views over the surrounding countryside. Easy to see why they built the temples here.

And this is the tomb of Khải Định, the second-to-last emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty: Huế is surrounded by the mausoleums of all the emperors–they’re all in very different styles, and this one is a striking fusion of Eastern and Western (see the octogonal pavillion vs the crosses that line the terraces). Inside, it looks a lot like a Vietnamese Versailles, with lots of ornate ceramics on the walls, and it has a golden likeness of the Emperor (the actual body is somewhere under the palace) and a shrine to honour his memory.

That’s all from me–tommorrow it’s back to novel brainstorming and cooking 🙂

So, just switched my language tapes from the course Mom and I are reading from, to the older Foreign Service Institute ones–which have the huge advantage of actually having a (60ies pre-war) Southern accent. And I finally figured out why I had so much problems with terminal consonants (which always have Mom shake her head at me). I’d worked out a while ago that terminal consonants in the Southern accent were not pronounced as you’d expect, ie by analogy with the same consonants in non-terminal positions (which is the case in Northern accent, incidentally). However, every time I opened my mouth, I seemed to come up with a different version of fail.

So, the good point: there’s a logic. The bad point: most pronunciations appear to have very little to do with what I expect as a French/English speaker. And they depend on the vowel immediately preceding the consonant, which explains why I could never work out a consistent system (I naively expected that one consonant=>one pronunciation).

To give you a couple of examples:
-“-p” (like in “tập”: volume, tome, episode): mostly sensible, pronounced like a “p”
-“-ch” (like in “thích”: love, like): always pronounced “t”
-“-t” (like “tết”: New Year, “một”: one, “cắt”: cut) much less intuitive. If after “i” or “ê”, pronounced “t” (except for the very particular diphtong “iết”, which is pronounced sort of like “beerc”). If after “ô” or “u”, pronounced sort of halfway between “p” and “k”. If after any vowel not previously mentioned (or after the aforementioned “iế”), then pronounce it like a throaty “k”.

And then you wonder why I could never work out terminal consonants… (and I have a suspicion this is an simplification to help language learners get it more or less right…)

*headdesk*

-A rather lovely review of Servant of the Underworld by Keith Harvey, discussing its relation to the cozy mystery (anything that compares Brother Cadfael with Acatl is awesome, check it out!)

-The evolution of Vietnamese clothing, via lilsuika and Jhameia (amazing to see all the different styles together like this).

–China Miéville on racism and the Belgian decision to publish Tintin in Congo without acknowledging its racist clichés. For the record, Tintin was also a part of my childhood. I have very fond memories of some of the BDs in the series (mainly the later ones), but I don’t think they’re books I could enjoy today, and I’m not really sure they’re books I’d hand to my children. Every single nationality around the globe basically got skewered in a racist fashion (including but not limited to Africans, Arabs, Asians, Gypsies–you name it, he skewered it), and it’s very much boys’ adventures–wimmen need not apply. There are other BDs from my childhood that are far, far better than those.
Also, this quote?

there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say

Smartest quote about freedom of speech, ever.

–The New York Times on Explaining Londoners. Definitely worth a laugh. I would like to point out that although the French do greet each other by kissing cheeks, we only do the one-on-each-cheek in Paris (every area of France basically has its own idea of how many kisses you should give)

-Fellow VDer Stephen Gaskell has started a new blog, Creepy Treehouse, aimed at educating the young-ish crowd better than dry school lectures. He’s running a series of posts on how to survive the apocalypse that are rather fab.

(last part. Apologies, this is the one where I complain a lot)

6. Guidebooks: I will not repeat the numerous curses I aimed at guidebooks over the course of the stay. We had two, the Lonely Planet and the Guide du Routard, and we mostly used them as bare indications of what to see (Grandma, in the fashion of long-time dwellers of cities, mostly directed us towards shops and restaurants rather than museums; plus Vietnamese can have very different ideas of tourism than Westerners). For all the rest, they sucked. I have never yet opened up a guidebook while knowing something about the country they described, and having now done it, I think I will never ever trust those %%%%ers again. The Lonely Planet thought it was smart to transcribe everything in the English UTF-8 alphabet (ie, no tonal marks, no accents, no additional letters such as “đ”). OK, here’s a hint: with that system, “dao” can mean anything from peach (đào) to religion (đạo) to knife (dao). And when you’re in a taxi trying to convince the guy that you want to go to the Museum of Vietnamese History (a destination, alas, not often used by tourists, which meant the taxi didn’t recognise it), that you don’t know how to say museum or history from memory and you’re pointing to a name and an address, neither of them properly written down, and the driver looks blank… %%%% is all I’m going to say. Also: next time, I will write down the name of the place in proper Vietnamese.
Le Guide du Routard, meanwhile, was a monument of colonialist fail. And I don’t use the word lightly. It repeatedly insisted on using the “old” names of bridges and streets over their new names (all the bridges and streets were named after French luminaries, a naming system which, as you can imagine, didn’t last long past independence) [1]. It warned people away from places like the Museum of War Remnants on the pretext that the coverage was spurious and fake, and that it would “make you hate the war”. Well, duh. The war isn’t fun, isn’t nice, isn’t something you can be thrilled around and buy souvenir T-shirts of, for God’s sake. People died. People starved. People did horrible things on both sides. And yes, the coverage of the Museum is a bit one-sided, focusing on the war crimes of the US and the French rather than on the other side. But if you think it’s not an important thing to see in the context of the war [2], then there is something seriously wrong with you.
(and I won’t even get into all the odd stuff they both said about Vietnamese culture–I’m not an expert, but even I could see that some things were completely off, and other things were hopeless generalisations of something specific to a particular region)

7. Dubious standards of beauty: the H and I remain deeply horrified by the ads we saw, which all featured varieties of Western models, or Vietnamese models touched up to have clearer skin. It was like some kind of freak show: it’s obvious that no one there is ever going to have that complexion, but it’s still the norm of beauty. I don’t know to what extent it’s White domination playing out, and to what extent it’s something that was already there and accentuated by the West (Mom and Grandma have always told me that clearer skin has been valued in Vietnam since ancient times, because having white skin showed that you weren’t a sun-tanned peasant), but the way it plays out today is… scary. Equally scary is leafing through beauty magazines, which advertise whitening cream with the same fervour we advertise anti-wrinkle cream in France. It reminds me of a picture on Requires_hate‘s blog. You’re shown a mall in Thailand, but it’s so generic it could be anywhere in the West: the brands and the models are all European and/or White (and/or blonde or brunette), and everything is labelled in English. And, in the midst of this, a crowd of Thai shoppers. They’re petite and swarthy, and nothing like those pallid, vapid stretched-out stick insects, and they will never ever be beautiful on those terms. Yup. Scary scary.
That’s all I had. Next: pictures, and I’ll stop complaining, promise.

[1] I’ll grant them one charitable intent, which is that they might be aiming this at French people who were in Indochina while it was still a colony. However, you have to realise that Vietnam became nominally independent from France in 1954, and that I don’t know when the renaming of stuff took place (offhand, juding from my bare-bones knowledge of history, I’d say post-1954 in the North, post-1975 in the South). Either way, we’re talking about names that have been unused for more than 30 years, if not more–and it’s the least of courtesies to call things by the name the country has given them.
[2] I am personally deeply uninterested in visiting places like these, but that’s another problem.