Some may be surprised to hear this position. After all, I harangued writers for over-relying on the small-talk topic of “What have you been reading?” Hopefully, this contradiction goes away by the end of my defense.
In Defense of Small Talk Read More »
When I was a kid, I used to trade secrets like baseball cards. We moved around a bit when I was younger, and I wasn’t good at making friends. I was better at observing the kids around me, and analyzing how they talked to each other, which explains why I’m a writer now. But back then, all I really knew was that friends told each other secrets. I told a secret, I got a secret. I got a secret, I told a secret. The exchange rate was a perfect 1:1. Who is your crush? Who is my crush? We walked away none richer, none poorer. Or that was the hope.
Snapchats and Secrets Read More »
All of this is to say what so many writers have already said: it’s hard to write a novel and act like a human being. You can’t have a foot in both worlds, half in and half out of your mind. So some writers go on a solo retreat, some writers drink, and some writers wake up to write while polite society is still sleeping—in any case, they find a marker, something that signals that they are no longer in the old world.
A Weekend and a Week: My Attempt at a Writing Retreat Read More »
My mother tells me that if I want the novel I’m writing to be a bestseller in America, I should put in a couple of ghosts. Americans love ghosts, especially Chinese ghosts. I stammer back that I’m not selling out, and that I will never write about ghosts, Chinese or otherwise. “Remember the fortune cookies you used to get all the time?” she says. “They said, ‘Listen to your mother.’” “I only got that fortune three times,” I reply. “Three times in one year,” she says, wrapping up the conversation.
The Love Hate, Joy Luck Club Read More »
As I’ve written before, my grandmother’s apartment holds a particular place in my head. I keep revisiting the floor plan, and the room that glows brightest in my memory is the kitchen. The kitchen, I think, is the quintessential center for grandmothers, mothers, and female authority in general. And while my grandmother was not maternal, not soft, rarely kind, she haunts the kitchen, vapors of past dinners clinging to her permed hair and her stained apron.
Sentimental Value, Pt. 2 Read More »
I do not remember the first time I tried on a pair of glasses. I know that it was the summer of third grade, and in pictures, the glasses are small and delicate. My bad eyesight was due to a penchant for reading books all the time, in bad lighting, usually because I should have been in bed. When I put on my glasses, there was no sudden burst of clarity. Maybe the words on the chalkboard became easier to read, but I certainly didn’t have any epiphanies. I did not, like Dr. Hahn on Grey’s Anatomy, go through the joy of finding out that the blotches of color on the trees were leaves. The glasses were simply slipped on and life continued as normal.
As evidenced by my previous blog posts, I have been drawn by the predicament of writing race, or writing difference. Without a doubt, I am still bothered by this question of how we, or really, I, want to go about training my work to resonate on numerous levels, without sacrificing honesty for clarity, without having to play the endless game of cultural catch-up for a mixed audience. Without a doubt, this stream of thought turns almost every thing that I read, watch, or otherwise consume into a potential craft lesson. The latest item to fall victim is a documentary that I consider one of my favorite movies: Jiro Dreams Of Sushi.
Found In Translation Read More »
Writerly small talk is no less terrible than all other kinds of small talk. I expect that the coffee table or cocktail conversations of botanists, estheticians, and Sunday school teachers all have their own fallback question, their own version of a polite follow-up after the “How are you’s” have been exchanged.
* Lillian Li *
After my grandmother died, my mother was given all of her possessions. There was a lifetime of sentimental trinkets, of furniture that had never gone a day without its dust-protecting plastic jacket, and of strange redundancies. My grandmother left her with four refrigerators, three televisions, and twelve swatches of fox fur. My mother complained to a friend that she had no idea what to give up, what to throw away, what to burn. There was no talk of keeping.
Going through my parents’ bookshelves, where all the books of my life end up, is a distinctly pleasurable activity. Like a song, the titles stacked along the shelves contain distilled memories, and the best books are not actually the ones I’ve read countless times, but the ones I picked up only once. The books I’ve read time and time again give me the sensation of greeting an old friend, and the feeling is comfortable and sweet. “Oh, you again,” I think, my finger slipping across the spine. But the books that belong solely to one time and place, these books give me a tiny jolt, like encountering the name of an old crush whom I haven’t thought of in years. My finger will pause, and then tug against the lip of the spine to take a peek at the cover, to see if memory has warped, or amplified, the book’s original charm.
Little Instructions Read More »
