It’s a little surprising how well this book worked for me, given how, well, gimmicky I would normally find it. It’s written in two parts, one about an adolescent English girl who is dealing with the loss of her mother, the other about the talents and secrets of an up-and-coming painter during the Italian Renaissance. Both parts are written in a dense, oddly punctuated, stream-of-consciousness style. What’s more, the book was released in two different versions, in which the order of the two parts is switched. Normally, I would find all of that off-putting, and, honestly, it wasn’t easy for me to access the story at first. What drew me in, though, was lines like this: “It is also like H is trying to find a language that will make personal sense to George’s ears. No one has ever done this before for George. She has spent her whole life speaking other people’s languages. It is new to her. The newness of it has a sort of power that can make the old things—as old as those old songs, even as ancient as Latin itself—a kind of new, but a kind that doesn’t dismiss their, what would you call it?” Can you remember what it felt like to be a teenager in love for the first time? The feeling of being given a song and having it speak straight to your soul? How to Be Both is full of richly observed descriptions of the emotions of life. The relationships between a mother and daughter, a father and daughter, a brother and sister, between lovers, between friends. It was really quite breathtaking, and I’m not sure it could have done all it did with a more straightforward style and structure. So, on top of just being a great, emotionally resonant read, How to Be Both also made me re-evaluate some of my positions on what does and doesn’t constitute literary gimmickry. So that’s something.

Started: 2015-09-24 | Finished: 2015-10-01

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Last January I set myself a series of goals for the year. So, how did I end up doing on those? Let’s take a look.

Goal: Read 25 books in any genre.
Result: I finished the year having read 39 books, so, not too shabby.

Goal: Run 600 miles.
Result: I ran only 295 miles in 2015. This was partially due to taking six weeks off after hurting my knee, and partially due to working late too often, and therefore being too tired to wake up early to exercise.

Goal: Write 24 non-review, non-photo blog posts of at least 1000 words.
Result: I wrote three essays in 2015 that met these criteria. If I relax the restrictions a bit and include a couple of particularly long, essay-like reviews, I can get the number up to five.

Goal: Post 52 photos to this blog.
Result: 28. I was doing pretty well until June and then nothing.

Goal: Get accepted into at least 2 juried exhibitions or competitions.
Result: I got into 2 juried group shows this year. I also had my first solo show, so, not bad.

Goal: Spend at least 1 day shooting for my “It Forgets You” project.
Result: I just got this in under the wire, having spent Wednesday taking a bunch of terrible photos.

Goal: Finish writing the text for the “It Forgets You” book.
Result: I did not do this. Not even close.

Goal: Shoot at least 500 frames for my Mira Mesa project.
Result: I’m not actually sure how many frames I shot for this project. Currently there are 50 images in my Lightroom catalog which were shot in 2015 and have been tagged “Mira Mesa.” But I also have three months of untagged photos, not to mention that I didn’t keep track of any images I may have deleted. My “keep” rate is somewhere around one in five, so let’s be generous and say I shot around 250 frames.

Goal: Complete a rough draft of a photo book for my “All Good Things” series.
Result: I did not even start a rough draft of a book for “All Good Things.” The closest I got was a new edit and sequence for my portfolio reviews in October.

Goal: Shoot at least 12 self-portraits for the new series I’m working on.
Result: I shot one of these and then put this on the back burner while I re-evaluate the direction I want to take with the series.

So, out of ten goals, I accomplished three. And you know what? I’m calling that a pretty successful year. On to 2016!

As before, these are not resolutions. These are goals. Resolutions are commitments. Goals are something to reach for. Here we go:

• Read 24 books in any genre. Of those, at least 12 must be written by women, and at least 12 must be written by a person of color.
• Submit at least 5 proposals for solo exhibitions.
• Spend at least 1 day shooting for my “It Forgets You” project.
• Run 400 miles.
• Write at least 12 essays on any topic for this blog.
• Design and make a self-published version of my “Sheets” book.
• Conduct 12 recorded interviews with other artists.
• Design and make at least 1 new handmade artist’s book.

There’s more, but this seems like a good start. Hold me to it, people.

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from this book. I’m not sure exactly what I got from it, either. This was my first time reading anything by Murakami, though I have been aware for a while of his enormous popularity in Japan and the high regard in which critics around the world hold him. In the first few sentences of Colorless Tsukuru we are dropped right into the depths of the title character’s depression, a depression brought on by his rejection and ostracization from his group of friends. The reasons for that rejection are not made clear at first, but the effects are: cut off from the closest people in his life, Tsukuru Tazaki is left adrift, feeling no reason to continue existing. It’s a pretty bleak way to start a book, enough so that I put it down after the first page twice before finally getting through it. Was it worth it to put in the effort? Well, I’m not sure. A lot of the dialogue felt very clunky to me, though that could just have been due to the translation. More than that, Tsukuru himself is mostly unappealing, self-deprecating to the point of disappearing, despite the fact that he appears to be held in high regard by just about everyone else in the book—at a certain point, his repeated insistence that he is without color, that he has no special or even noticeable qualities, just comes off as whiny. On top of all of that, I also found the book’s portrayal of women to be uncomfortable, sometimes downright creepy. Still, despite all of that, there were moments—and more than a few—where it felt like the story was right on the verge of something profound. There was a lyrical, haunting quality to it that hinted at some insight which was never quite expressed.

Started: 2015-10-04 | Finished: 2015-10-15

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Reading Cloud Atlas, I was struck by how structurally and thematically ambitious it was, but mostly what I kept coming back to was that I just can’t believe that anyone ever thought it would make a good movie. I’m not sure what to say about it, really. To be honest, I’m not even really sure I can explain what it was about. Each chapter not only introduces a new cast of characters, but also switches style and even genre. One chapter is an Age of Sail travelogue while another is a 70’s thriller, and still another is a dystopian science fiction. The connections between each are not immediately obvious, and the transitions from one to the next are quite jarring—indeed, the first chapter ends in the middle of a sentence! By the midpoint of the book, though, the complexity comes together and the structure becomes apparent. At the end of it all, I found myself impressed but still somewhat perplexed. Mitchell’s craft certainly can’t be denied, and I’d say I enjoyed the book, but I couldn’t really say what the point of it all was. Sprinkled throughout the book, various characters comment about or ponder the nature of experience, time, and memory, and it does feel as though Mitchell intended Cloud Atlas to provoke questions along those lines. Yet if he had any coherent statement to make, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Perhaps that’s fine. Perhaps it’s enough that the book was well-made and engaging. Not every piece of art has to be about something in order to be worthwhile. Still, I can’t help feeling that there was something I missed here. If you figure it out, let me know.

Started: 2015-09-07 | Finished: 2015-09-23

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2015 has been, for me, something of a watershed year in terms of race. Not only in how I think about and engage with race and identity and representation, but also in terms of the availability and visibility of diverse art and entertainment. This was the year of Between the World and Me, of Fresh Off the Boat, of #ActualAsianPoet and #WeNeedDiverseBooks. It was the year that I realized that despite the fact that I've read hundreds of books since I started this blog, precious few were written by people of color.

I had all that in mind when I picked up a copy of Ken Liu's debut novel, The Grace of Kings. Now, if a desire to read more diverse fiction brings you to this book, as it did for me, that's fine. But it's not the only, nor even the main reason that you should read it. You should read it because it's interesting and well-written, a compelling, different take on epic fantasy.

The overwhelming majority of fantasy stories, particularly epic fantasy, can trace their roots back to the European medieval romance traditions. Springing from Malory's Morte d'Arthur and filtered through Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, we've seen all manner of iterations and variations, refinements of and reactions to these concepts, and, to be sure, there have been some real gems produced in the genre. But it's nevertheless refreshing to read a story that clearly has a different cultural basis.

From what I have been able to gather, The Grace of Kings is largely a retelling of the history and legends of the founding of China's Han dynasty in the late third century BCE. As the story opens, the aging Emperor Mapidere is touring the sprawling empire he forged through conquest. Though Mapidere is able to maintain control through reputation and force of arms, the constituent kingdoms he subjugated chafe under his rule, and after his death things fall apart again as his former subjects vie for power. In this context, we're introduced to Kuni Garu, a low-born but charismatic gambler and bandit, and Mata Zyndu, the last son of one of the noble families brought down by Mapidere's wars. At first separately and then together, the two men rise up and lead their followers to overthrow the empire, only to find themselves enemies when it comes time to decide how to establish a new order.

The book has drawn many comparisons to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but as I haven't read Luo Guanzhong's classic (yet) I can't comment on whether the analogy is apt. What I will say is that the style and structure of The Grace of Kings makes it feel more like a fable than a modern novel. Rather than utilizing the close third-person perspective that we've become accustomed to, Liu keeps everything more distant, resulting in a story that feels more narrated than immediate. That may not sound like high praise given the familiar admonishment "show, don't tell" but consider that highly influential texts from Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales to Gabriel García Márquez's novels to the Bible all have a similar feel. Here, it works wonderfully, heightening the legendary quality of the story and characters.

This is the first book of an expected trilogy, and here the comparisons to Romance of the Three Kingdoms bring up some interesting possibilities. As I mentioned, The Grace of Kings mirrors the beginnings of the Han dynasty, but Romance of the Three Kingdoms—a book I've long wanted to read but still haven't gotten around to—is set in the end of that period of Chinese history. It may be that Ken Liu has plans to diverge from his historical inspirations, but if not, he's got plenty to work with. I'm certainly curious to find out.

Started: 2015-08-28 | Finished: 2015-09-04

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There's a well-known psychological phenomenon where people tend to give more weight to arguments and evidence that supports their beliefs, and tend to discount or even forget information that contradicts those beliefs. This is called "confirmation bias." The reason I bring this up is because Joseph Stiglitz's book The Price of Inequality so strongly supports my beliefs about social and economic justice that I can't help but question whether my reaction to it might be the product of just such a bias.

Over the course of 360-some pages, Stiglitz—far as I can tell—completely dismantles the prevailing myths of both the inevitability of our current economic situation and the idea that supply-side policies are the answer. If I might be allowed to sum up his argument, it would go like so:

1. The United States currently has an extremely high level of economic inequality, both in comparison with other contemporary developed countries and with its own history.
2. The current level of inequality cannot be justified by any sort of meritocracy, nor can it be attributed to inevitable, natural events.
3. Rather, the current level of inequality is largely the result of a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top, and that transfer is largely due to the manipulation of both market conditions and government policies by the wealthy elite.
4. Furthermore, the current level of inequality is unsustainable because
   1. inequality lowers economic growth and efficiency,
   2. inequality undermines democratic government, and
   3. the conditions driving the current levels of inequality are damaging to the environment.

Not only does Stiglitz base his arguments on data (and he provides copious references to the studies he cites), but he also directly responds to just about every criticism of his position that I've ever encountered. Indeed, after finishing this book, I was so thoroughly convinced that I immediately became skeptical of myself. I spent an hour or so sifting through Google results to try to find a coherent rebuttal to Stiglitz's points, but everything I found boiled down to either name-calling or a flat insistence that he simply couldn't be right.

Rather than simply ending with an analysis of how we came to be where we are, or even an explanation of the results should we continue on this course, Stiglitz goes further and provides a number of concrete recommendations for how we could improve the situation. Granted, it's a long shot that a jaded (or forcibly disenfranchised) constituency and a captured government would be able to implement any of the policies Stiglitz describes, but things are not irreversibly bad.

In this country, the discourse around the proper role of government often seems to be preoccupied with the possibility of future tyranny, and the necessity of structuring government so as to protect the people from itself. But in my view—and I think that Stiglitz would likely agree—a government that does not also protect weaker individuals (which is to say, less wealthy individuals) from the rapacities of those who would take advantage of them, is merely subsituting one form of tyranny for another. We can do better. I don't know if we will, and often when contemplating that possibility my cynicism gets the better of me. But there is a way forward if we choose to take it, and Joseph Stiglitz might just be able to show it to us.

Started: 2015-08-11 | Finished: 2015-08-27

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Dear Eva,

For the past two weeks you’ve been counting down the days to your birthday, and now we’re finally here. As I write this, you are about ten feet away from me, staring up at the lighted fireworks design on the wall above your hotel bed. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we are going to Disneyland, and you are very excited.

Every new year brings lots of new experiences, and this one is no different. You became a big sister this year, and you are great at it. You and Jason have been taking care of your baby sister since the very beginning; you have loved singing to her and showing books to her. On the drive tonight I discovered that you and she have a new favorite game, where she shrieks to make you laugh.

You’re getting to be such a big girl now, doing so many things on your own. Your mom and I talk a lot about how smart you are. You started a new preschool this year and I know you are going to learn a lot. So far mornings haven’t always been easy for you—you’re a late sleeper by nature, like me—but you’ve surprised me by getting out of bed without too much fuss when I come to wake you.

I love you so much, my girl, and I’m looking forward to spending the day with you. Happy birthday, Eva.

I saw a ghost walking down the street
today It wore the face
of a man who was my father almost
thirty years ago
when we lived
by the path that walked below
the Bixby Bridge
This apparition had fifteen years
too many to be the callused hands I knew
and fifteen years too few to have yet become
yellowed and brittle fallen
by the creekside like the cottonwood leaves
A memory's memories must be
holed and creased and worn like
old sandpaper
so if it did not know me well
I was a child then and now
I am not
Looking back
the likeness faded
into a pot belly and glasses
rounded shoulders and a tucked-in polo
I never saw him after all

"Little Bear," I said,
"that is a tiger, not a hat."
It perches
precariously for a moment, then
slides down to the floor.
Little Bear, enraged,
shakes her fists, throws the tiger
across the room where
it lies in a heap, patient
for her return,
for this is the way
of little girls.
Little Bear, undaunted,
crawls and nods
and puts the hat back on her head.

I’ve had ample opportunity to think about race and racism in my life. Growing up with an Asian face in a mostly-white town, my otherness was something that was consistently reinforced by my classmates, whether it was the revulsion I heard about the nori in my lunch as a kindergartener or the beatings I took in high school from kids who called me a chink. By the time I reached adulthood I had a lot of opinions about race and racism, and I thought I had good reasons for them. I thought I understood these phenomena. I was wrong.

The most insidious deception that life shows us is that, having lived, we know what life is like, that we understand the world. But this is a lie. The truth is that the world is big and life is varied, and in our short, narrow existences we see only a very small part of it. Experience, the thing that is supposed to bring us wisdom, the kind of knowledge that most of us exalt above all others, is a trap. It lulls you with the supremacy of your own story, but does not and cannot show you the things to which you are blind.

Over the past year or so I have been revisiting many of my thoughts and assumptions about race (and gender and class and privilege and bias of all sorts), poking at the edges to try to find where I am limited, considering the core to try to see how strong it really is. What I’ve come to is this: the single greatest barrier to social, political, and economic justice is the essential solitude of human existence, the fact that we do not and cannot truly know the living of someone else’s life.

But if we are incapable of literally seeing through another person’s eyes, we nevertheless have the opportunity to come close by means of communication. Through writing, speech, art, one person can show herself to another, and by opening ourselves to the possibility, we have the chance at something like communion. This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates does with his remarkable book Between the World and Me.

Between the World and Me is written as a letter from Coates to his son, Samori, one in which he lays out his hopes and fears for the kind of man that his son will be, and in which he tells the story of his own journey to manhood, growing up as a black boy in Baltimore. Taken solely on this level, the book is still powerful, because the impulse to teach one’s children and to be known to them, to have them see how you became the person you are and have them understand, surely this must be universal. As compelling as that narrative is, though, the true impact of this book comes from its ability to show Coates’ world to the rest of us.

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom of Virginia Commonwealth University pointed out in one of her reviews of this book that the struggles that Coates describes, ones which I found so viscerally gripping, are ones that are hardly unfamiliar, let alone shocking, to most black people in America. In many ways, she says, this book is really written for a white audience. Or, to put it as Coates so often does: people who believe themselves to be white.

And here is the most dismaying thing about this book: that the people who would most benefit from reading it most likely will not do so. Or, reading it, will reject it. It is impossible to read this book as anything but an indictment of an America that is blind to both the historical scale of its racism and the ways in which that racism continues to be perpetuated to this day. The most natural thing to do in the face of criticism—especially unexpected criticism, or criticism that feels undeserved—is to defend oneself. I have spent so much of my life examining and re-examining myself and my beliefs, constantly digging and scratching to try to discover my own foibles, and yet often in the course of reading Between the World and Me I found myself automatically beginning to argue with Coates, to try to find the holes in his reasoning. But it was wrong of me to do that.

Partially it was wrong because much of the book is Coates describing his own life, which is to say, the things that he experienced and how they affected him; how can I meaningfully argue that he didn’t experience what he says he did? But more than that, it was wrong because the only reason I really had to argue was that it would allow me to feel good about myself. This is important: if the only time we will accept an argument is if it makes us look good, it means that we hold ourselves completely immune from criticism, encased in the armor of our own ignorance. This isn’t to say that we must accept any criticism without challenge, but I believe that it is our responsibility to always begin by asking, honestly, whether this criticism may be valid.

Coates, himself, knows this sort of reaction well enough:

But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.

Think about the lengths to which we all go to be able to think of ourselves as good people. Listen to the parents’ voices in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s revelatory recent episode of This American Life . “This is not a race issue,” one mother shouts. But if it is not a race issue, then what is it? The word “racist” has become so evil in our minds, so tied to images of lynch mobs and burning crosses, of the slaveholder’s whip and of fire hoses turned on peaceful protesters, that most people will twist and contort themselves to avoid having that label applied to themselves. But what is the difference between racism and something that just “happens” to be functionally identical to racism, to have the exact same outcome as racism? There is no difference, and we are all complicit. As Coates puts it:

Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream.

That last phrase, “the Dream,” is something to which Coates refers over and over again throughout Between the World and Me. In America, of course, when we speak of dreams it’s hard not to think of the “American Dream,” the aspiration to be found in the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger. But Coates isn’t talking about goals or the future. When he speaks of a Dream, he’s talking about a fantasy which does not reflect reality. Something in which we can only live by keeping ourselves insensate to the waking world.

It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all of the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

The Dream is safety. It is the belief that hard work always pays off. That any of us pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, unhelped and unbeholden to anyone who came before or after. That we are the unconquerable masters of our fates, captains of our souls. “People who believe they are white” can live in this Dream; people who are told they are black may not.

(I wondered, at times, whether Coates would think I believe myself white. I do not, nor do white people, and yet I grew up believing I could get ahead by my own efforts. I believed so because I was told so by the adults in my life, some of whom had, in their youths, had their livelihoods confiscated and their bodies imprisoned by a government that assumed they must be enemy sympathizers. Do I believe myself white? No, but who is to say that one day people who look like me won’t do so? As Gene Demby wrote last year for NPR’s Code Switch blog, the definition of “white” at one time didn’t include Jews or Italians or Germans or Irish. Perhaps some day it will include Asians.)

Coates offers no easy answers, no happy endings. He rejects comforting platitudes and myths. He refuses to speak about abstractions like rights or souls; racism is not merely wrong because of ideals, but because of the effect it has on the body. The body is fragile and breakable, and most importantly, it is singular. He implores his son to remember that each of us has only one life, and when it ends, a universe ends:

You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. That is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.

Ultimately, though he finds nobility in the struggle to understand, to see, to live both unencumbered and unshielded by any Dream, Coates cannot offer his son any hope that through their own efforts, black people might achieve equality. For that to happen, the Dreamers would have to awaken to the real world, to reckon with the true scope of what racism has wrought in this country, what it continues to create. Each of us has to choose to open our eyes, to be willing to challenge our assumptions, to confess our sins, and then translate that awareness into action. I don’t know how to make the world a better place, what policies must be enacted or what reparations might be made. But if, as I suspect, it is blindness that keeps us from acting, then one place to start might be to read this book.

Started: 2015-07-30 | Finished: 2015-08-10

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