American Born Chinese: Your Very Own War Against The Decepticons

"It's easy to become anything you wish...so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul."

An herbalist's wife tells a nine year old Chinese boy this, when he tells her he wants to be a Transformer when he grows up. Jin Wang is the American-Born Chinese of the title, and he wants to be a transformer. Especially when he moves to a new school and realises he's the only Chinese person in his class.

The Monkey King doesn't like who he is either. He doesn't want to be a monkey. He wants to be a god. Jin Wang's story is familiar because a lot of us lived it. The Monkey King story is taken from one of the most famous novels of classical Chinese literature, called Journey to the West. (The abridged translation I read was just called Monkey, and is highly recommended.)

Danny likes who he is, more or less. But he really hates who his cousin is, since his cousin is an amalgamation of the most appalling Chinese stereotypes you can think of, and named nothing less than Chin-Kee. Chin-Kee visits Danny every year, and follows him to school, making his life a living hell, so that Danny ends up transferring schools after each annual visit.

These stories are all thematically unified, but Gene Luen Yang goes a step further to unify the three plots as well, and does so in a very satisfying manner. This book is incredibly insightful and a great read. The main message about not turning your back on your cultural identity is clear without being preachy, particularly because it paints a very sympathetic picture of just how difficult it is to sort out your identity as an ABC (or a CBC in this country). The characters' choices, even the bad ones, are very understandable attempts to cope with the fact that so much of your conception of who you are, particularly when you're young, comes from the way in which other people see you. So what do you do when anybody who looks at you can tell that you're not Caucasian, but everyone around you is? What if you don't want to be their Chin-Kee-esque stereotype of a Chinese person?

Read this book. Then you can find out how Jin works out how to become the person he wants to be (without forfeiting his soul).

Black Swan Green, or, why it sucks to be thirteen

The back of Black Swan Green has an excerpt from a Publisher's Weekly review which says that this novel "captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom." I don't think this reviewer and I read the same book. Don't get me wrong - I agree that the book was a great read. But it sure wasn't about capturing the pleasure of adolescence. It was about the fact that being thirteen is a matter of navigating a dynamic and deeply complex caste system which nobody will explain to you (and asking about it would ensure you a place smack at the bottom). There's no floating down any rivers on any bloody rafts. There's getting teased, being ostracised, and desperately, desperately, hoping that whatever just came out of your mouth was not the Wrong Thing. I am, to this day, convinced that the best way to navigate your way through this system without internalising it (and then perpetuating it) is to have a best friend with whom you can make up your own elaborate rules which are at least transparent to you.

The sheer awkwardness of these years is captured rather nicely by the narrator's general confusion about how to go from meeting a girl somewhere and speaking to her, to having a girlfriend you can snog. Because you couldn't ask anyone how that works, right? And certainly there's no handbook. He concludes that either everybody knows all about it, but nobody's telling, or nobody knows anything at all, and it's all an elaborate hoax. I am fairly sure I had the same thought myself, but having less native self-confidence, I was convinced that there was some great secret I was missing out on. Now, at twice that age, the elaborate hoax theory is gaining some ground. But I digress.

The story itself is fairly mundane, but that's not the point. The point is that Mitchell writes a great coming-of-age story which you're supposed to read as an adult who can look back at their own coming-of-age time, and think about the characters, "My God. I knew you. I hated you, you bastard." And then realise that you can look back on it and know how absurd the whole thing really was.

But let me tell you - if this is what it's like to be a thirteen year old boy, it's not half as complicated as it is to be a thirteen year old girl.

Twilight

Twilight is the best book I have read in years. I absolutely loved loved loved it, and even better, it has a sequel that's just as good. Stephenie Meyer has written a gripping vampire romance that catches 18 year old Bella on the cusp of adulthood. Bella moves from sunny Phoenix, where she lived with her mom, to the perpetually rainy town of Forks, WA. On the surface, it's just another teen vampire romance; girl goes to new school, meets uncannily pale boy and strange family, falls in love, gets into mortal peril, and is rescued by vampire using his supernatural powers. But oh, it's so much more than that.

Something about the writing in this book just grabbed me and sucked me in emotionally. It helps that Bella is cool, but not too cool; her actions and reactions are absolutely believable, and her incredulity when faced with Edward's nature is perfectly balanced by her I-dont-care-I-love-you teen attitude. This is a book that never even strays into discussing the physical side of teen love, but nevertheless gives you goosebumps as you read about Edward and Bella's first (and supremely dangerous) touch and kiss. The dismal, overcast atmosphere of Forks and environs comes through loud and clear, and it picks up the bittersweet, haunting tone of the writing.

The entire 500 plus pages keeps you trembling on the precipice of first love; I really felt like it was me falling in love for the first time, and that's such an amazing feeling. Somewhere just past the midpoint, Twilight switches its focus from romance to thriller/adventure, and this is where the time spent on developing the characters really pays off. The hunt at the end is certainly well written and executed, but it's impact is made far greater because of the supremely involving (and semi-tragic) love story.

Definitely, absolutely read this book. I could not put it down (even when Rob begged, badgered, and eventually got mad) and when I had binge read its sequel, New Moon, I went out and bought both books and started reading them again. Go NOW and reserve it at the library.

Emmy Noether

This post has a lot less boob than the previous post. I suppose Hilary Duff is doing her part to make young girls dumber and more superficial. I wish Emmy Noether (1882-1935) were around to make young girls smarter and more mathematical. I've been reading various mathematical biographies of Noether, since in a lot of ways, she's the intellectual successor of Dedekind, who is the other Richard in my life, being the star figure of my PhD dissertation.

Since this is at least nominally a womens' day themed post, and not only an excuse for me to talk publically about how great I think Noether is, I might mention that the biographies I chose to read were the ones written by mathematicians, or at least, where the mathematical work was discussed by the mathematicians. Van der Waerden's obituary is particularly touching, and does a great job of highlighting interesting aspects of her research. He was one of her students at Gottingen. The main reason I picked mathematicians' writing about her to read is that they at least talk about the importance and algebraic character of her actual work, instead of her physical appearance.

It seems to be the standard for mathematical histories to make a point of how distinctly unfeminine Noether was. Even Hermann Weyl, a mathematician himself, says things like this:

She was heavy of build and loud of voice, and it was often not easy for one to get the floor in competition with her. [...] No one could contend that the Graces had stood by her cradle; but if we in Gottingen often chaffingly referred to her as "der Noether" (with the masculine article), it was done with a respectful recognition of her power as a creative thinker who seemed to have broken through the barrier of sex.

But to what extent did Noether really break through that barrier? In recognition by her colleagues, true. But in obtaining a university position? Not really. She had only a Privatdozent's position in Gottingen, and that was because Hilbert and Klein argued so vehemently for it. The story goes that Hilbert's retort when told that it was ridiculous that a woman be accorded that position, since it meant membership in the University Senate was, "Gentlemen, the Senate is not a bathhouse, so I do not see why a woman cannot enter it!" We love you, Hilbert.

But still, there always seems to be as much attention paid, if not more, to what her qualifications are as a woman, than her qualifications as one of the most important figures in algebra in the 20th century. That is - I don't understand why Noether is a great woman mathematician, and not just a great mathematician. It's not as though she wouldn't be great by those standards as well. Why the extra adjective, people? When asked if Noether was a great woman mathematician, Landau apparently replied, "I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear." You go over there and stand with Larry Summers, Landau. I'll be over here reading about abstract algebra and not fixing my makeup.

Hangin' with Hilary Du(h)ff (actually a rant)

C'mon little girls, Hilary Duff is here (courtesy of Scholastic Books) to teach you all about being a ho! Although the book talks the talk about how smart/hardworking/morally upstanding Hilary is, it wrecks the whole thing by splashing pix of a scantily clad Hilary on almost every page. And O MY GOD this book is PINK!! There's a whole lot o' pinkness going on here girls, and if you want to be just like Hilary (which is the subtext of this whole book) then you should get your mom to drive you to the mall right now so that you can buy some pink belly tops and chaps (oops, that was Christina Aguilera).

Now, I wouldn't be so adamantly opposed to this book if it were published and marketed as the drivel that it is. However, the publisher is Scholastic. Hmmm...Scholastic...makes you think of education, right? Learning, freedom to make choices and be who you want, freedom from stereotypes of hot pink big breasted prepubescent skankiness...hmm. Not quite what we have here, folks. Score one for false advertising.

And worst, the way most little girls will access this book is through School Book Fairs. that's right, some dipshit elementary school librarian is going to sell out her school to Scholastic so that she can get a few extra bucks for *real* books for her library. Let's analyse this transaction. Teacher invites the devil (Scholastic) into school...parents give kids money because after all, the books are from *scholastic*, and must promote learning...little girls buy ho-in-training manuals so that they can become an army of skanks...teacher gets maybe $100 dollars from fair, which will purchase maybe 10 books, max...kids refuse to read good literature because they are happy with the trash taht they bought. Who benefits here? That's right! The Devil! The moral? I hate biographies. If I have to suffer, so do you.

note: picture from amazon is not quite as per our cover. Our cover has more boob.

Theme Suggestion: IWD

Apparently today is International Womens' Day (http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp). I'm going to simultaneously suggest that we occasionally adopt some kind of reviewing theme, and that the first one be this.

No real time limit, but we can use this post to pick something to blog about related to the theme and have that be our next post. I'm going to pick the biography of Emmy Noether that I've been reading, since she's one of my favourite mathematicians, and I'm planning on starting to do some work on her at some point. Maybe I can post about her this weekend, if I finish my marking in time.

Hal Clement!

Since I took this quiz, and am apparently Hal Clement...

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I thought I'd better read one of his books. So I read Mission of Gravity.

And oddly enough, this really was exactly the kind of science fiction book I would write if I wrote science fiction. The plot and characters weren't all that compelling, but the ideas were nifty. Basically, he built the whole book around a planet he'd come up with whose gravity worked in a strange and non-standard way. And the plot just involved these aliens traveling to retrieve something. Basically, problem-solving due to the harsh conditions. It was all really just an excuse to mess around with physics equations and figure out what a world satisfying those equations would look like.

Anyway, it reminded me that these years in academia have only ruined my ability to write creatively, and also that at heart I'm really just a big math nerd. Are the results of this quiz as revealing about you?