Pssst. Hey, you. Come a little closer because I have a secret to tell you. I fucking hate Amy Tan. Shocking, I know, but I cannot stand the bitch. OK, OK, to be fair, that’s not exactly true. I don’t hate Amy Tan herself (partly because I don’t even know her), but I hate the trend that she has spawned. Do you remember back in the day when The Joy Luck Club (the novel) was released and became a sensation? It was released in 1989, and the movie was made in 1993. The book became a smash and everyone was reading it. I read it after I discovered I was Asian American and a woman to boot (you remember the drill of how I was was a blonde skinny bitch wannabe early in my misbegotten youth) simply because I had read so few Asian American women before, and I was thrilled to find that we did exist in the literary mainstream. I found it easy enough to read, but I was disappointed by how the characters weren’t fleshed out and how all the women were long-suffering at the hands of evil men. It seemed like if the women weren’t suffering, then they weren’t really living. I didn’t like the book very much, and I put it aside. I was done with it, or so I thought. Unfortunately, America’s obsession with Amy Tan wouldn’t let me be done with the damn book. I remember one woman gushing to me about how, after reading the book, she knew what it was like to be a Chinese woman in America. I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, “I don’t even know what it’s like to be a Chinese woman in America (I’m Taiwanese), so how the fuck can you?” I dismissed her as a typical guilty liberal, and I moved on with my life. Yeah, whatever. Amy Tan. She would have her flash-in-the-pan moment and then disappear into the night. Oh, how young and stupid I was.
Little did I know that The Joy Luck Club would kick off the genre I like to refer to as the heavily-oprressed, intergenerational Asian women genre. I would throw Maxine Hong Kingston’s Warrior Woman into the mix as well, but that didn’t reach nearly the lofty heights that The Joy Luck Club did. In this genre, the characters were Fresh off the Boat (FOB) Asian. They spoke with thick accents, lived in Chinatown or equivalent neighborhoods, stuck to their own, and worked long hours in a laundry or restaurant. For many years after The Joy Luck Club hit its peak, any female Asian American author had to follow the standard boilerplate of working class FOB Asian women who got oppressed or beaten or abused by the men in their life. I don’t blame the women who wrote these books; I blame America’s insistence in putting the ‘other’ in a palatable box.
Hello. I have not blogged for the past few days for several reasons. One, I am fucking sick and tired of political bullshit, and it’s one of my bailiwicks. Two, I’ve been busy with work and shit, damn it. Three, I’m mulling something over in my mind that I don’t really want to blog about, but I do. But I don’t. But I do.
We lost a good man today. Well, yesterday, but I woke up to the news today. Senator Ted Kennedy, the last of the fabled Kennedy boys, has left this world. He has been in serious decline for the last year or so, so I can’t say it was a shock to wake up to the sad news this morning. I can say, however, that it was still startling to lose him right now. I feel an ineffable sadness that I can’t explain. The assassinations of JFK and RFK were before my time, so their impacts on me weren’t as immediate as they would have been if I’d been alive at the time.
I am blogging tipsy again, and I have reached my limit with the sheer stupidity that is the GOP party right now (as well as the asswipes from the so-called liberal media who are nothing but a bunch of apologetic whores for the right). The birthers, the deathers (or, as Keith Olbermann calls them, the death-eaters. Heh heh), the death panels, the death books, and now the circumcisers. When the fuck will it end?
First of all, 
I just found out some news that really pisses me off, but since it’s of the least importance, I will save it for later.