Duplicity and the Power of Fan

A common theme in this story seems to be that nothing is what it seems. Idyllic hotel? Nah son, have some homicidal maniacs. Nice vegetarian family? Nah, they steal kids and get their dogs to eat people. Caring wife? She's got 7 chicks with anime-surgeried eyes locked up. Those 7 chicks? Perfectly fine having their lives like that. B-mor, a perfectly organized village?

Well, that certainly has it's problems.

Fan has layers as well, but her character is compelling in that she has no intentional facade. She doesn't correct people who think she's younger than she actually is, but never intentionally acts young or tries to mislead people. She doesn't steal, she doesn't abandon Quig and Loreen or the Girls, and she, in some level, tries to help people.

Somehow, her presence also peels back the layers of others. Quig spontaneously tells his past to Fan, Mr. Leo reveals his sleaziness extremely quickly, Ms. Cathy reveals more and more of herself, and the book is this collaboration of characters and their pasts.

However, I think that the character of Reg is extremely important here, because Reg is the epitome of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. From the little description we have, he seems easy-going and lacking deep motivations or a complicated character, which sounds bad but isn't necessarily a bad thing? (I'm not sure exactly how to explain it, but he seems very upfront compared to the rest of the book.)

In connection to the age-old question of "what is asian-american literature?", I'd suggest a connection in these layers of character, in the background and current personality, and the idea of heritage or an old story in a new world.

Dad

So I read ahead and I’m terrible at not giving spoilers (really shouldn’t have read ahead, sorry guys), so I’m going to write a bit about my father instead.

There was a boy in China who walked three miles to a schoolhouse with a stool and sat outside the door for three days, hoping to be let inside a year early. On the fourth day, the teacher threw a book at him and it landed in a puddle, and he watched the water seep in and turn the pages translucent.

My father was a peasant boy, in the most fantastical romance that sounds like it should have leaps and bounds, flourishes and fantastical twirls, but reads more like a hard-earned life.

He doesn't speak of his childhood often, but when he does, he pauses. Thinks. Imparts each word with careful weight. We ask him about his family back then, and he tells us anything from a word to a story, but sis and I are always hoping for the latter. He doesn’t bring it up much himself, but not out of any deliberate intent. My mother actively avoids her childhood, but my father treats it like any other experience- irrelevant to the moment, but existing and as much a part of him as anything.

“My mother told me two things. I didn’t understand them at first, but now, I think I might.” He pauses, thinks, and continues. “One of them was a chinese saying- you can be poor to others, but not to yourself.”

“I didn’t understand that- I don’t think many kids really can? And you know how we couldn’t afford meat that often. But when families would come over- we lived in a small neighborhood, and if something big happened, we would get together- my mother would send one of us out to buy meat. A very small bit, the most we could afford. And we would cook it into a stew, because we always ate stew those days.”

To this day, my father harbors a penchant for rice, which they couldn’t afford often, and a hatred of carrots and sweet potatoes, the primary ingredient for their stews. (They couldn’t afford meat or eggs either, but as they could only have them once a year at new year’s if they were lucky, they don’t qualify as a comfort food.) Some of my father’s friends were treated to meat during harvest but starved during the winter because meat was too expensive and they hadn’t rationed well, but my father’s only been grateful for having food on the table.

Ironically, my father’s family produced enough food for an entire village, and raised enough cattle to eat meat daily. My father was a part of the Communist youth party, but looks at it only with bemused laughter at an ill-spent childhood.

“And then when people came over, we’d give some meat to the guest of honor, then give the rest to families who had children, and we’d never have any left for ourselves.

Mom laughs, the harsh sound a contrast to the soft lines of her face. “That’s not some great teaching, that’s because you had to. Small communities are always like that.”

This is common. My mother enjoys downplaying my father’s childhood, for reasons my sister and I have discussed and come to separate conclusions about.

She’s a city girl. She grew up with her grandmother and a largely absent military father as an only child, and she doesn’t talk about her childhood much. She dislikes her mother and aspires to be nothing like her, a trait my sister and I seem to have inherited.

“And I didn’t understand that. Especially because in those days, we would have to report the number hours we’d worked in the fields for the government to give us rations. And people were so, so insistent and angry about that- no! I’d worked 5 hours that day, and you took a break! well, I remember your son-. And they would argue over rations that they might give to a friend in need, or meat that they would not eat themselves, and I never understood that. Until now. I think it was about pride and community, even then. Everyone had to prove they contributed. Everyone argued that they cared, I guess? It’s hard to explain.”

My father is a genius, and sometimes I think about this school and every brilliant, spectacularly intelligent and intuitive and breathtaking mind it has and know that my father is smarter and more hardworking than every last one. He was the youngest of four (and it’s always hilarious to see him visit China and slip from a boisterous yet passive man to a somewhat mischievous, vulnerable little brother), and carried his brothers’ tradition of studying incredibly hard to improve their lot in life. He tested into the top school in China, and more than that, tested into the “genius class”, the 1% of the school that could double major. He originally majored in ocean engineering and electrical engineering, but switched the latter to computer science due to his color-blindness. (Ocean engineering was chosen not out of some particular interest, but because that major was the school’s particular speciality. EE was simply what he heard was the hardest major. That does seem to be my father’s life- an amalgamation of careful study and selection and important decisions made on a whim.)

This apparently proved too easy for him, and he was known in his dorm for playing staggering amounts of poker. My mother often tells me I should work as hard as him. I don’t think she is yet aware of this fact.

He participated in the Shanghai student protests, but was filmed on television and came to America at the insistence of his older brother, who was living in America at the time and had seen the footage that my father was actually unaware of. (Apparently this led to a brilliant conversation, when the phone lines could be tapped and my uncle knew that the Chinese government would be tracking down the student protesters, and had to convince Dad to leave China without saying anything of the sort.) It was too late to go to apply for an Ivy League graduate school, so he finished his Master’s at University of Florida with $5 to his name, floundered in boredom for a short while, and went to Harvard for his PhD. He met my mother, a student at Boston College, then. After a lightning 6 month courtship that I don’t think anyone really understands, least of all the two of them, they were married. They moved to Detroit after my father received a job offer from Ford and started a family there.

This story is the barebones, and I could probably write for a day and not even come close to what I would like to say about him. I hope you enjoyed the story, though, because that’s what we are in the end. We live and die with the cadence of voice and flourish of a pen, and touch other stories in a name, a punchline, a act of extreme emotion. My father is the kind of person to write stories about, but if you can spin a tale well enough, so is every one of us.

Whiplash: my aesthetic

It seems to be standard dystopia fare to have people try and eat other people. And sexually assault them. And a number of other pretty disturbing behaviors that just become expected in this sort of thing. I've yet to encounter a post-apocalyptic video game that doesn't merrily redefine my boundaries of sweet baby jesus that's disturbing.  (Amusingly enough, the worst offender is probably Day Z, where the players themselves do some creatively horrifying things. That probably says something about the human psyche that someone much smarter than me could analyze. Completely off topic: there was a accidental plague in World of Warcraft that some epidemiologist studied for how people react to things like that. It's pretty cool.)

I'm really interested in the world itself. Actual money seems to still be worth something, even in the open counties- Dale and Landon's inn takes the physical (paper?) Charter money that Quig has, so there's definitely some sort of unified system there. But if everywhere's developed enough to mostly speak the same language and use money that doesn't have inherent value, what's keeping things bad? Are the counties being prevented from rebuilding, or are they just rebuilding really slowly? From what I could tell, pollution or something has destroyed the water and soil so growing crops became really difficult, but why isn't fresh water a valuable resource (in fact, it seems as abundant as it is today)?

Also, it's funny that the better a story gets, the less metaphysical/introspective I get about the story (WHAT DOES IT REPRESENT? IS THE CROW REALLY A CROW, OR A SYMBOL FOR THE DUALITY OF MANKIND AND THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS). Probably because I actually care about the story, now. Fan's pretty cool. I hope she doesn't die. (Inb4 her luck runs out and she dies in either some spectacular tragedy or an anticlimactic charter euthanasia or something, you heard it here first.)

I feel like we were supposed to upload the maps? Idk lol

On such a full sea 1

Happy new year!

I guess I wasn't the only one getting serious Hunger Games vibes. Although it is interesting that a. the Charter people aren't guaranteed a spot, and b. their place relies on their jobs, which tend to be the sort of jobs Asian-American parents are fond of. The doctors in particular are the stereotypical jobs that Asian parents push their kids toward, although real-estate broker and the rest aren't uncommon either. Perhaps this is commentary on upper-class or educated Asian-Americans and assimilation?

I don't think the 'we' makes the story unreliable- in fact, I feel like it makes it more honest. The word contributes to the world-building, as the character really feels that he/she is part of a collective. The passage on page 8 I found particularly interesting: I can’t think of a dystopia novel where individuality isn’t stomped out, but this book acknowledges inherent individuality and doesn’t portray it as harmful to society. Also, I’m interested as to what the author intended the area to look like. Sci-fi dystopias typically have a grey, bland, industrial aesthetic and uniform clothing, but the treatment of individualism and existence of underground malls makes me wonder what everything looks like.

Who is Loreen? Is she a slave, bought by Quig’s medical services? Why are the open counties exactly so bad to live in? Also, does anyone else find her extremely disturbing? I keep getting sexually predatory vibes from Quig, which is weird, but on the other hand, he seems to be the one that genuinely cares about Fan’s life.