Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binaries of this blog, I present to you the dichotomy of my literary interests: The Guest List by Lucy Foley AND Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. Sometimes I want to read about a wedding-based murder, and sometimes I want to educate myself on the complexities of identity formation within the United States. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a book that does both! I started the week with Minor Feelings because Asian Americans are facing a surge in hate crimes that began last year when D_____ T____ weaponized race as a means of implicating blame for the covid-19 pandemic. Piece of shit. Anyway, the underlying violence and racism of this country did not go away when we (seemingly) took out the trash on November 3rd, and the vitriol towards Asian Americans is a constant reminder that this country is rotting from the inside out. We need to do something. We need to be allies and protestors and safe-havens and agitators and dismantlers. We need to say "fuck you" to an institution that is inherently racist, an institution that continues to insist there is nothing wrong precisely because it, no we, are unable to face the shame of the past. We need to do better, period.
CUT TO: Tuesday, March 30th. I'm sitting on the couch, watching 13 Going on 30 when I get a news alert that a district about 2.5 hours away from where I live is offering mass vaccinations to anyone 16 and up. And I, famously, am 16 and up, so I pause the movie (right before Judy Greer goes rogue, steals Jennifer Garner's spread, and defects to a rival teen magazine), download The Guest List on Audible, and get in my car. And I'm off, speeding through the suburban hellscapes of Maryland, listening to a collection of English and Irish actors as they do their best to make The Guest List as camp as possible.
CUT TO: Tuesday, March 30th. Later in the day. I'm sitting in the Starbucks drive-thru, officially a Pfizer girl. My left arm is a little sore and I'm feeling weirdly blase about the whole thing, like I've just driven 2.5 hours for something as innocuous as a physical. I've paused The Guest List so I can order a grande peach green tea. I'm about halfway through the book and there's no body,only the suggestion of violence. I want a body, and I want it NOW.
CUT TO: Tuesday, March 30th. Back home. I'm nearly done with The Guest List, and guess what? STILL NO BODY. Alexa, play "No Body, No Crimes" by Taylor Swift ft. HAIM. Alexa, please send a direct message to the estate of Agatha Christie, apologizing for any and all comparisons made between The Guest List and And Then There Were None. I get it, there are a lot of similarities between the two books: a secluded setting, a collection of shady characters, all of them possessing motive to kill, a bad storm, bubbling tension among guests, etc. But Agatha Christie's novel has one thing that Lucy Foley's does not— a body count. The Guest List is a whodunnit with an added layer of being a "whodunwhat", as in who did it and also WHAT did they do? There's literally not a dead body until about 260 pages into the novel, and that just doesn't cut it for me. If I'm reading a thriller I want to be thrilled, not mildly amused by a collection of straight people making fools out of themselves at a chic wedding off the Irish coast. Okay, maybe I was thrilled by a collection of straight people making fools out of themselves at a chic wedding off the Irish Coast, but seriously NO BODY, NO CRIME, NO GOOD REVIEW.
CUT TO: Wednesday, March 31st. I'm returning from the bookstore with a physical copy of The Guest List because I have a disease, and that disease is needing a physical copy of any book I've consumed. I finish the book and immediately call 911 to request emergency transport to the nearest hospital. I am experiencing literary whiplash. I just spent the last 50 pages of the book being thrown from one POV to the other, some lasting only a few paragraphs, all the while completely losing interest in who killed who and why because, let's be honest, they were all kind of annoying. The dispatcher denies my request for helicopter transport, so instead, I nurse my wounds by drafting a witty, bone-cutting review of a book that I managed to finish in two days. Okay, so maybe The Guest List isn't all that bad...
After finishing The Guest List, diving back into Minor Feelings felt hard, like training for a marathon by running in place for a few seconds before you get bored. Hong's collection of essays, which isn't really a collection of essays but a hybridized memoir/cultural criticism that takes the form of many smaller, more compact narratives, addresses complicated issues of identity and intersectionality, often drawing from both personal and theoretical frameworks to crack open the Asian American consciousness as wide as possible. At times I did not understand what I was reading, so I'd go back and read and re-read again until the ideas within the prose began to take shape in my mind. Other times, I would finish an essay, "Portrait of an Artist", for example, and feel like the point was more nebulous, something I gained simply from reading her work and acknowledging the complexities of thought. Hong is a trained poet, so it's not surprising that her writing is constantly flawless and occasionally impenetrable. But again, it is not always the point to penetrate beyond the words, but to appreciate the beauty of her syntax and find meaning where you can, humanity where you cannot. I will think about this book for a very long time.
If you're interested, New York Magazine has a great article that lists 68 different ways you can show support towards Asian American communities in the US. Link: https://nymag.com/strategist/article/where-to-donate-to-help-asian-communities-2021.html.
xoxoxoxo,
swiftie out!
#StopAsianHate
No comments:
Post a Comment