What would you like for Christmas?

I'd like a roly poly Chinaman for Christmas. It wouldn't be too hard to find at this time of the year. You could probably find one in one of those strange shops tucked away somewhere in the red sign district of the city, you know, the streets with the lucky fertility red awnings elegantly gouged with what you would call a foreign language, now, I'm sure you must know what I'm talking about, those street shops that sell just about anything--no restrictions required--they sell anything from cheap, affordable, hardly durable sweat labouring goods to fresh, rotten produce and bile churning salt fish, raw squid, slippery slimy eel, eew. Walk down another row and you'll be forced to gaze at crunchy swine carcasses and glistening, glowing Peking ducks hanging on hooks in steamy display windows inbetween exotic restaurants, Karaoke bars, bubble tea shops, and the only store front window signs you'll be able to read in English: Electronics, CDs, DVDs, VCDs, LCDs. In the midst of all this sensory overload, in this celestial pool of swarming sights and sounds and stinks and smacking masticating lips, haphazardly you will walk upon a hushed silence, the kind only a library preserves, a reprieve from the din, and the clang, and the clong of foreign rise and falls cut short by your sudden awareness of your awful massive presence, rudely out of place, under surveillance for threatening (read the sign: if you break, you pay), for towering, overshadowing the fragile porcelain delicate serene faces lined up in the room, a terra cotta army of peace: laughing Buddha faces, squinty eyes, chubby rosy cheeks, ruby red lips, and rambunctiously giddy children clambering jolly bellies, gripping fat man tits out of pure elation. Now who wouldn't want one of those for Christmas?

Sketching Mona

I was talking to Shar about Mona yesterday on the Go train after having spent a whole day with Marxist-Foucaultian-Anti-Racist-Anti-Colonialist Feminists. I was excited about writing Mona again--the protaganist for my novella project. I haven't had time to be excited about my creative writing in a long time. I have been thinking lately to abandon the whole classic Hollywood cinephile thing, where she works in a video store and is a classic Hollywood fan-girl. The whole point with that angle was that she would uncover the Charlie Chan series and become a politicized anti-racist chick of th 70s as a result of it. But again, that angle never really excited me. If anything, it felt a bit didactic.

Before the Himani Bannerji celebration conference yesterday, I have been thinking a lot lately about community. I have been thinking about how I've never really belonged to a community, especially a politicized community. Everytime I hear about people like Larissa Lai belonging to an activist movement in the 70s, I feel envious. I feel lonely. I feel absolute loneliness when writers like Larissa have a community of writers that read her work and help nurture her work. I link this loneliness to the romanticized loneliness I feel when I remember the coalition building between Asian American activists and academics with the Black Panther movement. Lately, in my academic work, I write about coalitional possibilities and solidarity building in literature. I'm beginning to realize that I focus on this stuff not just b/c it is important in this neoliberal day and age but b/c I feel lonely, I lack a politicized community. Unlike those scholars of colour who have been influenced by each other through the scholarly works and countless conversations they've shared with one another over the years, I don't belong to a group of scholars of colour who read each other's works and nurture each other's thinking. Academically and creatively, I feel lonely. I don't really belong.

I think I can funnel this loneliness to Mona. She can be, as Himani Bannerji declared proudly yesterday, "a foster child of the Black community!" But with a twist. I want to get at the loneliness, the loneliness that I feel ever so palpably in Larissa Lai's work. I want Mona to feel set adrift after her grandmother's death. I want her to be an aspiring Marxist-Anti-Racist-Anti-Colonialist Feminist. I want her to look to the African American and Asian American movement with lonely longings to belong. Maybe she shouldn't be a Vancouver-rite after all. Maybe she should be an Edmontonian. I think that's what it boils down to--Edmonton has nurtured my lack of cosmopolitanism that Asha and Phanuel exude, my lack of belonging, my lack of politics growing up and belonging to an ethnic community, to be sure, but a community depoliticized nonetheless. She can travel to Vancouver to visit the archives and be surprised at the amount of Asians and notice the palpable loneliness in her soul. Plus, if her grandmother and great aunts were adopted by white Methodist Missionary folks, her loneliness would be more stark than mine. With her ethnic grandmother gone, with only her assimilated devout Methodist almost white extended family (b/c they married white) left behind, Mona will be like the last Chinawoman standing, which parallels her search for her great-grandmother, the first Chinawoman, the infamous sex worker, the shameful secret no one in her family wants to acknowledge.

This project excites me b/c it will come out of my feelings of futility and frustration with the managerial state encompassing every aspect of our lives and the control of public discourse by right-wing ideologies, the incursion of the right and the fashionable anti-leftist and dehistoricized tendencies amongst my colleagues, or for that matter, in the university of the 21st century.

Salman Rushdie: The Oral Narrative

In an interview in 1985, Rushdie talks about the techniques he used in Midnight's Children as his attempt to reproduce the traditional techniques of the Indian oral narrative tradition:

"Listening to this man (a famous story teller in Baroda) reminded me of the shape of the oral narrative. It's not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again, sometimes summarises itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story teller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative...

"So that's what Midnight's Children was, I think, and I think everything about Laurence Sterne, Garcia Marquez, and all that, comes a long way behind that, and that was the thing that I felt when writing it that I was trying to do."

Enlightenment

Everything I know
about Buddhism
I know
because of you.

I was only a child
then--I believed in you
I believed, I believed
in every word
you said.

One night I sat, cross-legged
and prayed, in front of
the altar because
you
told me to.

That night
instead of going to bed
that night because
you
told me to

I chanted
I chanted
a thousand
and one prayers:

Quan The Am Bo Tat...
Quan The Am Bo Tat...
Quan The Am Bo Tat...

I was too young
to understand
the journey.

I have lost my way since
the night you left me
the night
Quan Am passed me by.

Why I am cheating on you, notebook...

That's right, notebook. I am having an affair...with my new blog. I can't help it. I'm only human. This blog is so pretty, so public, so new. You, on the other hand, have always been so private, so primitive, so likely to expire. The idea of a writer traversing fields and ponds with her leather bound notebook in tow is so passe, so a romantic impossibility belonging only to the realm of writerly images. I was never able to bound you in cow skin. You abhorred it; I could barely afford it. And where are these fields and ponds that supposedly generate great characters for the next-great-Canadian-novels? I am still looking for that one tree you once promised me, that little moss covered nook at the base of a trunk, that deep contemplative shade away from the hazy summer sun. Hhmph. More writerly images.

I'm sorry, notebook. But I do think it's time we try other connections. I'll come back to you every once in a while. Will you be there for me in moments of crisis? moments of severe self-doubt? moments of unbearable loneliness? I'm sure my new blog is not equipped for containing such abysses. But you are. You have always been my most faithful crevasse.