dispatches from tour

tired and wired and exploding with thoughts

Dear readers,

This is one of those weeks where I feel like space and time have no meaning anymore. I keep getting blasted with news - that NYT profile, YELLOWFACE’s book birthday, the British Book Awards, the Nebula, four stops done on tour and seven more to go - and I’ll be living out of my suitcase until September. I have no regular eating or sleeping schedule. Sometimes I dry-heave for no reason! I feel like I’m going to shatter into a million pieces at every given moment and it takes all my concentration to reconstitute myself as a social subject. If you see a bedraggled Asian woman at your local airport please let her wolf down her room temperature Chobani in peace.

I was telling a new friend last night (Helen Laser, the absolutely brilliant narrator of the YELLOWFACE audiobook) that although I’m falling apart and barely keeping myself together, I’m treasuring every second of this wild week. Hiding in bed at home is nice but it’s also cool to live the full range of human emotions. Most of the time life isn’t this exciting; most of the time I’m just sitting in the campus library blinking at Zotero.

Here’s some attempt at recording all the directions my mind is going in right now.

• I like hand held mics better than clip-in mics.

• Sometimes y’all bring me fan-art and little gifts in the signing line, and I appreciate it so much. But why did someone bring me a box of matzo ball soup?

• I wish I knew how to celebrate my wins better. I don’t know why but good news never makes me happy; it makes me deeply anxious and terrified about when the other shoe will drop. I feel guilty when people congratulate me and my face assumes this pinched, vague terror. Everyone keeps telling me to savor the moment and I keep wishing the ground would swallow me whole.

• Perhaps I should stop eating so much airport sushi.

• The connection I get to make with you at events is magical. No matter how stressed and anxious I am, no matter how many times I dry-heaved before I went up on stage, no matter that I’ve just wailed “NO ONE PERCEIVE ME” at my fiance over the phone and hid under my blankets just the hour before - all that melts away when I sit down at the signing table. Your kind words and smiles mean everything. They’re getting me through this month. Thank you.

• I’ve been getting a few audience questions about how I feel when readers interpret my work in ways I didn’t intend, or ways I actively disagree with. I imagine this comes from some wildly different responses folks have had to Babel. I’m still trying to work through my thoughts on this. I think, like most writers, I deeply resent being an object of analysis and I resent it even more when I think the analysis is B+ at best. But you’ve just got to let it all go. The text is out there and it doesn’t belong to you anymore and you’ve got to let readers have their space. Maybe it’s best to pretend that the author is already dead, even if the author is very much alive and far too reachable through social media. In any case, rolling over and playing dead might be the only way to keep the quiet and focus you need to work on the next thing.

• Possible to eat asparagus soup without spoiling your lipstick. You just have to use your teeth to scrape the sludge into your mouth.

• Deeply grateful for good friends. Last night after the Brooklyn launch we ended up at a restaurant next door to the pub we meant to go to because it was the only table outdoors where we could hear each other, and we spent hours talking about dogs and regional accents and voice-acting studio set-ups and everything except publishing. And then we were all home and showered and in bed before midnight. I love my friends. I love being old.

What I’m reading:

• It’s Long Book Summer. (See my friend Tochi’s brilliant essay on why doorstoppers rule). I’m a third of the way through Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I loved this article about various Dostoyevsky translations and why the P&V ones are so special, which goes on a long tangent in the middle about my eternal crusty favorite, Vladimir Nabokov. Imagine cabling the editor of an outlet that’s just printed a bad review of your work: “Please reserve space in next issue for my thunder.”

• David Henry Hwang’s play Yellow Face. I avoided reading this the entire time Yellowface was in production because I didn’t want to lift any part of it, intentionally or unintentionally. Now I’ve had a chance to read it through and it is so clever and hilarious. I love this passage, and I’ll be thinking about this for a long time:

  • “DHH: Okay. Years ago, I discovered a face—one I could live better and more fully than anything I’d ever tried. But as the years went by, my face became my mask. And I became just another actor—running around in yellow face. (Pause) That’s where you came in. To take words like “Asian” and “American,” like “race” and “nation,” mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean anymore. Cuz that was Dad’s dream: a world where he could be Jimmy Stewart. And a white guy—can even be an Asian.”

• This NYT piece by Connie Wang on all the Asian girls named Connie after Connie Chung. Beautifully written, moving reflection on what representation can do and what it can’t. I loved this part:

  • “I’ve long had a fraught relationship with the idea of representation. Seeing ourselves — or rather, the wealthiest, best resourced, most assimilated among us — on magazine covers and television screens is the smallest symbol of our status as Americans, and comes with its own forms of exclusion and bigotry. When headlines celebrating Asian American films with Asian American casts run next to articles about Asian American disenfranchisement and poverty, representation can feel particularly empty. I know all that — but I also know its power: how a single person can become a vehicle for so many others' most personal hopes; how they can find, in her, a sense of belonging that’s otherwise in short supply.”

• Books for my qualifying exams reading list…next year I have to pass my QEs, which involves mastery of about 150-180 texts across three subfields. I’m being examined in Modern Chinese Literature, Asian American Literature, and Asian American History. If of interest I can publish my lists when they’re final. This reminds me that I owe one of my examiners an updated draft, so this newsletter ends here.

Love,

Rebecca