The making of an Asian Anglophile-Europhile

I'm known for being an avid traveler, although I've often scolded myself for focusing only on England, Europe and the U.S., and failing to include Asia in my travels at all thus far (apart from a few return trips to Southern Taiwan, where I was born and still have family). I suppose even those that fancy themselves passionate about traveling can be allowed their favorite destinations, but being from Asia, I've always considered it a bit of a failing. Now that I am getting around to planning a visit to Japan and Hong Kong, I can put that all behind me.

Why is it that my interests have gone this way? I have two theories:

First, my Anglophile-Europhile tendencies in travel are due to the fact that they are "exotic" to me in the way that Asia is exotic to the Western world. I have a perceived familiarity with Asia because I was born there and my family is Asian. The cultural elements (food, language, faces, landscape) of Asia emphasized in novels, movies, television shows, etc., are fundamentally familiar to me. Thus the Asian cultural scene, while widely varying among the different Asian cultures and exotic to Westerners, has always been fundamentally un-exotic to me. British and European histories/cultures, on the other hand, fascinate me to no end.

Second, having spent most of my life living in the U.S., I know less about the history, geography and politics of Asian countries than I do England and Europe. I certainly learned less about it in school, and so am less familiar with Asia in the academic sense. So in fact it is a learned familiarity and knowledge of England and Europe that has bred my desire to spend more time there.

There you have it: a gloss on how the life of a Taiwanese-American immigrant has unconsciously shaped her travels (and probably also why I majored in English literature and have a very special spot for Henry James). I am sure there are deeper issues here that would make for great Asian-Am thesis material. More importantly to me, I am finally going to travel to Asia for something other than seeing extended family, and I am unbelievably excited (as I am before every big trip) to add these destinations to my roster of experiences.

I am what I read

However much I love reading, I'm not an indiscriminate reader. I learned to love reading pretty much from the moment I learned to read. I thought as a child that I would love to read anything, although I allowed that I would find certain types of texts generally more enjoyable than others. For instance, as a child I preferred novels over newspapers because fiction was more "fun" (a bookworm's rebellion against parents that thought NY Times articles more worthy of reading than Judy Bloom novels).

What I have become more aware of, as I grow older and the stages of my life begin to take shape, is that such a general view of what I enjoy reading doesn't hold - I have become quite enamored with the NY Times, particularly certain political columnists and travel series, and have been known to find other non-fiction quite engaging as well. Instead, what I choose to read, and actually enjoy, is a symptom of my mental state at that given time. It is tied to my mental capacity, maturity level and preoccupation at a particular time in my life. This is why I have discarded books after a few pages only to devour them years later, and also why I re-read certain favorites (the ones that resonate deeply with my soul) at various stages of my life, each time gleaning new meaning and renewed pleasure (don't we all?). As such, my life's reading list is my life's soundtrack, the tone and subject matter providing a fitting accompaniment to my life and thoughts as I live and think.

It has been said and written many times before: "you are what you read." I always knew this to mean that you are shaped by what you read, which I am. I now know that it also means that I am drawn to reading what my mind and soul crave.

Good movies from bad fiction: a case study

I've enjoyed all of the movies made based on Nick Hornby novels, and so I set out to read the novels that have not yet been made into movies. I've finished two - the award winners A Long Way Down and How To Be Good - and I'm not motivated to continue with the rest. While there are innumerable reasons why people deem novels to be great, I cannot reason on my own why critics have found these two novels worthy of awards. The motif that stood out to me immediately in both books is his juxtaposition of the ridiculous with the everyday, and more precisely, the placement of people that we might normally know - single mothers, wannabe rock stars, struggling small business owners, columnist for a local paper and married doctor with two children - in ridiculous situations. I grant that these things could happen to ordinary people - anything is possible - but they're so unlikely I would categorize them as "too silly to dream up."

I'll use examples from How To Be Good since they are most fresh in my mind: It is ridiculous that a columnist for a local paper who prides himself as the most cynical person in England, or at least in his "postal code," would visit a spiritual healer just to spite his wife, and then become an immediate and total convert. It is ridiculous that his wife, however guilty she felt about having an affair, would agree to allow said homeless spiritual healer to live with them (and their two children) in their home. It is ridiculous that his wife's lover, who wasn't particularly interested in her real feelings and clearly made it a habit to philander with married women, would show up at her house to confront her husband in an attempt to convince her to leave with him. It is ridiculous and superfluous to include a conversation where a slow, suspicious patient asks a doctor, in all earnestness, whether he can assist her with her surgeries, of which she has none to perform. The list goes on.

While I find Hornby's casual writing style unchallenging and easy to digest, his novels are not particularly engaging or fulfilling. The novels I've read, and now that I reflect on it, the movies as well, lack cleverly-constructed plots or deeply nuanced characters, two attributes I usually associate with good fiction. The ridiculous situations aren't constructed into a plot with a climax and a resolution (not really). You just end up somewhere in the lives of the characters chronologically later than where you began. And the characters never end up far (morally or emotionally) from where they started. It's as if he wants to point out how ordinary people in real life don't really change, at least not much, even when forced to experience ridiculous (aka dramatic) situations. Maybe some who praised these novels thought this was worth saying, and maybe my narrow intellect lacks a fine-tuned appreciation for the ridiculous. Nonetheless, I finished each book thinking he could have done so much more with the subject matters he took on, and wondering what he was trying to accomplish with the preceding 300+ pages.

I might still be entertained and somewhat fulfilled if he offered obscure information (which always fascinates me and from which I could learn something), but he doesn't.

And yet, as I mentioned at the outset, I find all of the films based on his novels entertaining, if not really all that fulfilling, and am sure I would find films based on these novels just as entertaining. Query why I can separate entertainment value from the story's merit in movies, but not in novels (a topic for another day).

Season's Ending

Every year after the new year begins, I look for the end to the holiday season. Is it January 2 or later? Maybe the Monday after? I feel strange displaying holiday lights after New Year's Day, so even if we haven't taken everything down (you know how it is, sometimes those lights stay up weeks or months into the new year), I stop turning the lights on in the evening . But every year, I see others do it. It seems the more extravagant the light display, the longer it stays up. I appreciate having the beautiful lights to look at on the way home, but not as much as I did up through December 31. It just doesn't feel a bit stale, as folks start back at work and hunker down for the post-holiday winter quarter.

Speaking of the post-holiday winter quarter, since I have a few months of freedom, I've been looking for something to punctuate my days. So I started a regime on my new Wii Fit, one of the holiday gifts I received this season. Today was my first day, and considering I've never kept to a New Year's Resolution for more than two straight months and my fitness goal requires a 3-month long commitment, I'm hoping to make this new habit last a bit longer.

I'm also committed to finishing at least a book a week. I somehow whiled away December without finishing a second book (easy to do when your sister needs babysitting 3 afternoons a week, you commit to throwing 3 parties in that many weeks, and you take a 3-night vacation in Las Vegas). I've also indulged in a bit of reading ADD - allowing myself to jump back and forth between books - so I'll have to be more disciplined. As an English Lit graduate of Cal, I'm ashamed to admit it, and so hopefully motivated enough to exceed my (relatively conservative, unless my list includes Finnegan's Wake or Paradise Lost) goal.

Even though I won't have work to distract me from these goals, it won't be easy to do. Like with any good sabbatical, I'm making travel plans. Los Angeles in February, Japan and Hong Kong in March, and more if I can help it (New York in May?). Just listing off the cities is getting me excited.

I best go and help my husband take down the Christmas tree now.

Inner Voice

CJ's Inner Voice might be an alternative name for this blog, and so I thought it an appropriate topic for the blog's first entry. I always thought that if I started to write again, it would be in a journal (private) or it would be a novel (private until you've finished the volume and convinced someone to publish it, and then out-of-your-control public). However, having been granted a few months of leisure, I'm becoming acutely aware of my inner voice, and its need of an outlet. And so I am resorting to this - a blog (immediately public, but really only as public as you want it to be).

I have rarely found a reason to read someone else's blog, and when referred to one, almost always wonder why someone would go through the trouble of publishing those thoughts at all. So you can imagine my skepticism about starting one. Who would want to read what I have to say?

I have clearly gotten past that skepticism out of necessity. I am grateful for my newfound leisure time, but one by-product is that my inner voice runs rampant with no place to go, and thus no rest. When I was wasting almost all of my mental energy on solving other people's problems using too many words in overly-formal written instruments, I had little to no energy left to remark on anything else. I certainly had no time or energy to express any of the meager remarks that did come to mind, save briefly at lunch to a co-worker (I would have let some loose at dinner, too, but found most of those thoughts unworthy of dinner conversation). I now have much better material for dinner conversation, but dinner lasts only so long. So I'm putting my thoughts here.

I'm still skeptical about whether any of it will be worth reading, but I'm beginning to realize that isn't the point of blogging, or at least not all blogs. I just want to send these thoughts into the void. Good day, dear void.