Hey, I won a book award for once!
Thanks to C&R Press and the Independent Publishing Book Award for enjoying my little novel. AND CONGRATS TO THE REST OF THE WINNERS!
NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN on this #readinglist by @vanessa_hua @electriclit – “10 Books About Model Minorities Behaving Badly” – Get Them All! #writingcommunity
“Q. What’s an Asian F?
A. An A-.
Q. What’s the Asian Triple threat?
A. Medical doctor, researcher, and professor
When people have asked me about my short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, I’ve joked it’s about “model minorities behaving badly.” My characters—immigrants and the children of immigrants—attempt to fake it until they make it, to hold together their family and their identity. The secrets and lies are a mechanism not only for harmony, but also for survival.
Model minorities are said to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than average. For decades, white conservatives have used the perceived success of Asian Americans as a racial wedge, to minimize the impact of structural racism on blacks and Latinos. See: Harvard admissions lawsuit. See: admissions to elite public high schools in New York.
The myth also turns Asian Americans into a monolith, masking huge variations in language, culture, and educational and economic status within the community. ”
My collection—now reissued with additional new stories—subverts these stereotypes and expectations. What follows here are books that shatter such myths in ways poignant and funny, dark and light.”
Check out Vanessa Hua’s reading list at Electric Literature.
“Comedy as Coping Mechanism” @alex_behr and me talk over @propellermag #interview #novel #comedy #indie #publishing #writingcommunity
“MY GOOD FRIEND Leland Cheuk named his Brooklyn-based indie publishing company, 7.13 Books, after an auspicious day in 2014. That year he’d been struggling against a potentially lethal form of pre-leukemia that had landed him in an isolation ward in New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I’d met him in a writing class in 2001 and liked him instantly. I visited him on July 4, 2014, sterilizing my hands, making small talk through a mask with him and his wife, Jessi, and feeling all our actions and words had a physical and mental scrim in this disease land that shouldn’t be his land. We knew without stating it that my brief visit could be the last. But he still made jokes—always. In an essay about his illness in Salon he writes: “My wife tried to shave my head, and we laughed at her tentativeness with the clippers. She had never shorn anyone before. She left the back of my head mostly untouched, which made me look like I was trying to grow a chemo mullet.” Fortunately, on July 13, after a bone marrow transplant, his red blood cell counts moved up. The transplant saved his life. And later that day he got an email announcing a book deal for his first novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong.
Leland has been to many prestigious residencies, including MacDowell, taught at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and elsewhere, has two novels and a short story collection published, is working on another novel and collection, and has written numerous reviews, essays, and short fiction. Leland is generous, not only with the authors he’s published, but also with close friends. (At his wedding dinner party in 2009, piles of books formed centerpieces down the tables as party gifts; I snagged Out Stealing Horses.) His take on life can be dry and cutting; it’s informed and perceptive, but not pretentious. He’s clear about what he can—and can’t—do for his authors. (In 2018, he published my debut collection of short stories.) I’ve fewer friends as honest as he.
As the white adoptive mother of a child born in China, I can tell Leland things I would tell few others. At a bar, in texts, or on the phone, he’s always willing to listen when I talk to him about my son’s experiences with racism, both as recipient and—sometimes—as perpetrator. Despite our efforts, my son has internalized some negative stereotypes, much like the anti-hero protagonist in Leland’s second novel, No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press). The book is in the form of a confessional letter by Sirius Lee—a Chinese American comic and film star—to his young daughter. NGVBA dives into stereotypes and codes we ascribe to people unlike us, and culturally determined roles we inhabit to our detriment. Sirius Lee copes with bullying and the vicissitudes of fame, addiction, abandonment, infidelity, chronic illness, glass ceilings based on bigotry, Hollywood’s fickleness, and parental grief. So go out and buy it already. —Alex Behr”