a_t_rain

Back from my mom’s city! Phew. There are many good things there, but nothing like being HOME.

This summer I was able to go back to the adult ESOL classes where I volunteered last year; same teacher, and a few of the same students were still there too, two or three older Chinese women who greeted me with big hugs and fed me zongzi. Most of the other students were Spanish-speaking, apart from one Russian woman (a doctor in her thirties, always exquisitely made-up, who mentioned in passing having escaped from Russia and gone through four countries before coming to the US); some with graduate degrees in their own countries, some who hadn’t finished high school and wanted more English in order to talk to their grandchildren, an eloquent Venezuelan yoga instructor with two-colored eyes, a gay Peruvian beautician with ultra-fancy fingernails, a Cantonese-speaking church secretary with a new granddaughter, two forty-ish women nicknamed “the hermanas” because they looked so alike, my stubborn jiejie from last year who makes you coax her into getting the work done and loves it—you name it, all devoted to the class. I miss them already.
Relatedly, I made a surprising discovery. When my mom was in college, in the early 1960s, her grandfather wrote her a series of autobiographical letters which she typed up and kept and showed me this summer; the one about coming to America—in 1895, when he was ten years old—says in part “I was not ready for the public schools since I could not speak a word of English. I was sent to a school called the [redacted1] School, located on [street]. It was called the [redacted2], I think it still exists as a settlement house.” It indeed still existed in 1961 and it still exists under the same name on the same street now: it’s the place that hosts the ESOL classes where I go to volunteer.

Some apartment buildings in my mom’s city have their tenants’ names outside in a list by the door, which I always enjoy reading because I have a thing about names and also it’s demographically interesting. I ran across one with some striking surnames. Andy Super may possibly be Andy the superintendent rather than Mr. Super, but C. Suds, V. Corpus and B. Gotcher among them—though individually normal—en masse sound like the cast of a murder mystery.
I also passed a church with a sign outside it reading “POST NO BILLS, Penal Law No. 555,” with the handwritten addition “Including Martin Luther.”

I think, although God knows it’s still not what it should be, my Chinese listening has actually improved. Source for this: the farmboys’ show features various languages, including Uyghur, at least two dialects of Tibetan, a little Kazakh, and of course Cantonese as well as assorted regional dialects of Mandarin (and that’s not counting their unique dialect of English). Everything is subtitled in Mandarin (including the English…), and I’ve been noticing that obviously when someone is speaking Tibetan or Cantonese I have to be glued to the subtitles, but when the spoken language is standard Mandarin (and not highly technical or heavily accented), I can kind of just glance at the subtitles and pick the rest up by ear.

A couple of neat Chinese words. 列文虎克, lièwénhǔkè, is the transliteration for Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope (I have more trouble spelling the Dutch than the pinyin), and has apparently come to mean, by association, “sharp-eyed, quick to pick up on things” in slang as well. Also something from my Chinese teacher, 既来之则安之, which literally means something like “since I’m here I’ll be calm about it,” kind of a positive version of “it is what it is.”
For work I ran across the unfamiliar word 総花的 (Japanese, not Chinese) and had to look it up; turns out it means basically “comprehensive, all-around,” but the computer tried to translate it according to the actual characters and produced “totally flowery,” which is adorable.

I wrote a fic for the opera Turandot a while back, and recently someone was inspired by it to draw a beautiful f/f comic, to be found here (linked with permission). Apart from the gorgeous art, I’m delighted by the mixture of Italian lyrics and manga sound-effects in the background…
And in musical experiences beginning with Turan-, I was reminded how much I enjoy Messiaen’s Turangalila-symphony. Some of it is better suited to background music, but the last movement in particular is a goddamn delight.

New (to me) book notes, part 3.

Recommended by somebody:
H.G. Parry, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door: Lancashire farmer’s daughter goes to elite magical university to find a cure for her brother, who has a magical wound he got in WWI. She and her friends make some inevitable bad decisions, have a dramatic split, and are reunited several years later by the ultimate results of their bad decisions; bittersweet ending. I enjoyed this well enough, but I did not respect it a whole lot. The plotline in general felt cookie-cutterish, ticking off boxes one by one, and while the writing is competent it never really clicked for me. The characters all felt…constructed to serve the plot rather than because they _had_ to be who they were. I thought it would have been more fun with rotating POVs, giving us a chance to see what Alden and Hero and Eddie looked like inside their own heads, maybe even Matthew too, but with only Clover’s voice the others never really came to life, and neither did the settings. Also, while I can’t think of much offhand that seemed obviously anachronistic, it never really felt in-period to me either. The author cites Vera Brittain in her acknowledgments, but given the context I should have felt transported into the latter part of Testament of Youth, and I did not. (Now I wish someone would actually write Vera and Winifred et al. but with fantasy; that I’d read with enthusiasm.) That said, I may well go back to reread it and maybe I’ll think more of it a second time?

Old friends of the family (not literally):
Penelope Fitzgerald, Letters: Not a real overview of Fitzgerald’s life, which is not the fault of the editor (her son-in-law) since so many of her letters were lost along the way. Very entertaining tour of her voice in (mostly) later life, often funny and relatable. From letters to various publishers, etc.: “I’m sorry I said quadratic instead of simultaneous equations when trying to explain the routine work on Enigma—I don’t wonder that as a mathematician you shrink away in disgust—my only excuse is that I’d been trying most of the day to explain the difference between irony and satire to my VI form—” “The trouble is that it’s rather difficult to shake the people off when the book is written, and to return to yourself. They’re not to be gotten rid of so easily.” “…on the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.” She also remarks “I’ll never forget first reading Where the Wild Things Are,” not a combination of authors I would have expected, but entertaining. The only problem is that the letters are organized by correspondent instead of chronologically overall, which makes it very difficult to keep track of what was going on in her life at any given moment. The editor’s intent was most likely to give a sense of her relationships with each person, which might have been harder to grasp if the letters were scattered, but it didn’t work for me. Still, that’s what we have the Hermione Lee biography for.
William Helmreich, The Bronx Nobody Knows: I forget if I’ve written about this guy before; he made it his business to walk every street in New York City, and wrote a series of quasi-guidebooks about what he found there, one for each borough. There’s a little section for each neighborhood and they’re both interesting—delving into the history and sociology of the people who have lived there—and very soothing. He does have an elderly-white-guy perspective, but also knows that not everyone shares it and does his best. This time I picked up the one for the Bronx, enjoying a few asides: “By the entrance [to a little park], there’s a sign with the usual admonishments to the public—no littering, no drinking, no loud noise, no cooking, and no monopolizing. What does this last prohibition mean, I wonder. No monopolizing of space? Of conversations? No financial monopolies? No Monopoly games? Who knows?”

Bookstore shelf at random:
Portia Elan, Homebound: I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen people talking about this one anywhere on DW. Hard to describe: a thread that starts with a 1980s college student coming to terms with her uncle’s death by finishing the computer game he started, and runs by means of the game itself through to a little group of lonely twenty-fifth century voyagers, including an AI with a long memory, sad and hopeful. Coming to terms with loss, and with being queer, are themes all the way through, and almost everyone is Jewish.
Jane Pek, The Verifiers and The Rivals: These are so good. Murder mysteries which, although set in more-or-less modern-day New York, have a hint of a science-fiction feel. The protagonist, Claudia Lin (a wonderful first-person voice, up there with Peter Grant, with whom she would probably hit it off), is herself a murder-mystery nut, a Taiwanese-American lesbian ex-English major who has found her perfect job at a tiny company which investigates matches on dating sites. Each book has its own mystery to solve, but there's an overarching plot which is not even slightly finished, please keep working on book three and beyond, Jane Pek!). The detective-story meta is funny (I kind of want somebody to write fic about the nonexistent “Inspector Yuan” mystery series Claudia loves), and the (as yet unresolved) slow burn with one of Claudia’s colleagues is very good, along with her complicated relationships with her family, especially her driven but troubled older brother (what can I say, I’m soft for anyone who gets called da-ge).
Angela Mi Young Hur, The Loom Tree: This is the other “girl from ordinary background goes to magical college and encounters dramatic events with a bittersweet ending” novel, and I will say it’s in no danger of being formulaic; it’s wild and lavish and more than a little incoherent, but satisfying just for that. The framing story starts when Korean-American high schooler V- discovers her single mother Sharon’s magical journal from college days. Most of the novel is Sharon’s perspective on her one eventful term being magic, learning about and becoming various fairy tales and origin stories, and meeting a wild array of characters from within the stories (a terrible description, but I don’t think I’ve retained the niceties of the plot well enough to describe them clearly). The one character who is not an archetype but an ordinary mundane college student is also the most vivid, and made the book for me, tiny kind motormouth ruthless Ruth Huang-with-a-u.
Dorothy Roberts, The Mixed Marriage Project: Half memoir of Roberts’ Chicago childhood with a Black mother and white father, half an account of her father’s endlessly unfinished sociological/oral history research on Black/white couples. Beautifully, engagingly and occasionally brutally written, bringing everyone she writes about to life and adding perspective and analysis to her father’s interviews without ever falling into dry academicism, while giving me a lot to think about.

Photos, just a few: something blue, some elegant stripy eggplants, some fire escapes.

Be safe and well.