emergencily's reviews
97 reviews

Finished in time for Halloween!

This is an antholgoy of short horror stories by 19 black authors,  edited by Jordan Peele. All kinds of different genres, writing styles, themes, and settings, but the overarching theme is the examination of black identity & experiences through horror. And of course, spoiler alert, the greatest horror of all is white supremacy. I liked how diverse the stories were in terms of genre & writing styles. Some were historical, some were futuristic sci-fi, some were dystopian & apocalyptical, some were spiritual or mythological.

I think the strongest stories seem to be concentrated in the start of the anthology, but the whole collection is worthwhile. Maybe 2 or 3 stories were just total misses for me, like the one that was basically just the plot of a Black Mirror episode where the protagonist realizes the dream life he's living is literally a dream. It was just a little bit too predictable and tropey. The one with the robots developing consciousness had potential but ended up feeling messy - it reminded me of the plot of Detroit Become Human, and not in a good way. I hate that game badly.

The thing is I think the collection would have benefitted from having a smaller number of stories (maybe like 12-15?) and letting each story run a couple pages longer to give them more space for pacing and development. I noticed that a number of stories had great and promising set-ups, but weren't able to follow through and had fumbled endings. E.g. the alien baby snatching story was super interesting, but ends all at once. And not even in a way that feels purposeful or meaningful, it just feels accidental like the author's electricity got turned off. And there's some kind of big reveal at the end, but it's so nonsensical I couldn't puzzle it out even after re-reading the story to figure it out.

Although it's marketed as horror, it wasn't very scary. Mostly mildly to medium creepy. A number of stories just read as regular sci-fi / dystopia, and didn't seem to fit the horror genre as well. I think one of the strongest stories was the one about the Igbo woman at her father's funeral.

A collection of short stories centered (mostly) on Chinese women across different times & places in history: in ancient China during the innovation of early writing systems, a pregnant woman during the gold rush in San Francisco hiding in her apartment during anti-Chinese riots, a Chinese woman in modern day USA coping with a stalker and her dismissive white partner, a rural village girl abandoned by her husband who rises to prominence in the Party in the city during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

I enjoyed a few of the stories a lot, but most I felt fairly lukewarm or neutral on. I liked the reoccuring theme through a lot of the stories examining language, linguistics & language barriers.

But honestly sometimes the stories would veer into trope-y, very quintessential tropes of ~Asian American diaspora literature~

A collection of short stories from the same author as Severance, which I read earlier in the year and was eerily prophetic of COVID lol.

I felt unsure about it at first because I didn't find the first two stories very interesting, but it really hit its stride afterwards. I loved the surrealism & magical realism present in a lot of the stories and the way the author plays around with perception, reality, and identity. She examines the experiences of Asian American women and how  they are perceived / how they self-perceive. Thankfully it largely avoids becoming trite & reductive like some AsAm diaspora lit can become.

One of my favourite stories was "G," about two AsAm best friends drifting apart after college who decide to have one last big blow out using their favoured recreational drug from their college days. The fictional drug "G" has the side effect of turning you invisible / into a ghost. The story has so much to unpack about women's friendships and the ways we re-enact cycles of patriarchal violence on each other. A lot in there about disordered eating and self-image (e.g. body checking each other as friends, as mother/daughter). Loved how the story interrogated the erasure of boundaries and separation of self/identity between these two friends as they melted into and consumed each other. Literally they were playing out that meme from Nana about 2 girl best friends with unspoken homoerotic & romantic tension until they have an inexplicably emotional and heartbreaking friendship breakup and never speak to each other again but are forever changed by the love and how they were once girls together.

Favourite passages from "G":

My other fave story was "Peking Duck." The protagonist is writing a story for her class about a racist incident her mother experienced while working as a nanny when she was still a child, and the tensions btwn her and mother regarding the telling of that story and their differing perceptions of the same experience. Her mother disagrees with her daughter's story and how it retells what happened to her, feeling that the mother character in her story feels like a miserable trope of victimization. On the other hand, her daughter feels that her mother is downplaying the incident, invalidating her daughter's feelings of witnessing the event, and brushing off her own feelings. Super interesting story because it raises so many questions about the authorship and ownership of stories. What does it mean when we retell someone else's story through our own lens? We may be our parent's children, but are we entitled to use their experiences as fodder for our own narratives? What does it mean when we retell their stories through our own lens -- does it distort? Whose story is real?

I'd love to give this 5 stars because the highs it hits with G and Peking Duck are so, so, so, good. But damn are some of the weaker stories boring as hell

I finished this so fast because I wanted to figure out what the hell was happening. Love a little mystery & obscurity.

Due to a recurring and disturbing dream, a seemingly ordinary Korean housewife suddenly develops an intense, obsessive, and self-destructive aversion to all meat and animal byproducts and becomes totally vegan. The seemingly mundane act of going vegan leads to the unfolding of an insane chain of events and the total transformation of her and her family's lives, and revelations about her family's dynamics and inner worlds. 

The book is pretty surreal and has horror tones. Interesting to see the physical manifestation of gendered violence & ableism through body horror and the deterioration of her body. Definitely strong warning for SA, disordered eating, body horror, suicide and abuse.

Loved how the book's themes are so open to personal interpretation. It touches on allegories for feminism, capitalism, environmentalism, and buddhism. A lot of reflection on the constraints of misogyny and the way women's bodily agency is casually violated and and control is asserted over our minds and bodies. The main character's veganism, self-destructive as it may be, is a kind of total revolt and rejection of this control. It's also very interesting the MC barely speaks through the whole book. Her story is told through other characters' narratives and their perceptions of her and her behaviours. We rarely get to see what is going on in her mind, as told by herself. 

Had been wanting to read this for a while because I remembered the book causing a huge controversy and violently misogynistic, anti-feminist backlash when it came out in Korea. It was to the point that a female celebrity seen reading the book was harassed en masse, and the actress who played the MC in the film adaption had a hate campaign launched against her.

The book tells the story of an ordinary Korean woman and the everyday misogyny she faces in her day to day life in multiple settings: her childhood, at school, in the workplace, as a mother and wife, in the medical system. It's not 100% fictional because it also throws in some actual facts and statistics at times about things like the Korean population's imbalanced gender ratio due to son preference and abortion of female fetuses, the gender wage gap in Korea, sexual harassment rates, spycam crimes, etc. The book's chapter on Korean workplace culture & spycam sexual violence was particularly harrowing. It's such a perverse & voyeuristic violation of privacy & bodily autonomy.

Frankly in terms of feminist analysis it really doesn't go very deep or critical, but that's what makes the context of the book's controversy even crazier. Making the most basic statements such as "there is a gender wage gap," "women are disproportionately victimized by sexual violence" was enough to cause such a national uproar and backlash. 

A fun fact I learned about the book is that "Kim Jiyoung" is one of the most common names for women in Korea, chosen by the author to represent that the MC could be any Korean woman, and that her experiences are the same as regular Korean women.

Historical fiction novel set during Japanese colonization & occupation of Korea spanning multiple decades, through the aftermath of WWII.

The book follows a few different characters' lives, with a central focus on two. One is a young girl sent to train in a courtesan house by her impoverished family. The other is the young son of a hunter from Pyongyang. Because the book weaves so many characters' stories together, it can sometimes feel all over the place and disjointed, especially so in the first half of the book. By the end, the author does a great job connecting everything in ways you wouldn't expect. Throughout the book, the author is setting up these connections. I loved the concept of "inyeon" in the book -- the threads that tie us to people in explicable ways over the course of our lives, and keep drawing us together in unexpected ways.

I also liked how the book engaged so strongly with the politics of the time period and focused so much on the Korean independence movement and resistance against colonization. It pays attention to the multiple different actors across political divisions: communists & leftists, Korean collaborators with the colonial government, rightists clamoring for American intervention. The scene where people come pouring out into the streets cheering when the Japanese surrender and finally begin to leave Korea moved me to tears.

It reminded me a bit of Pachinko because of the multi-decade, multi-character narratives and the similar time period.

The book is about a Taiwanese American PhD student with a white boyfriend who is struggling to finish her thesis on a fictional Chinese-American poet, who in the book is a celebrated part of the AsAm literary canon. She has a lot of issues with internalized racism & misogyny that makes you want to scream "PLEASE STAND UP." You see her slow and gradual emotional & political growth over the book. It's a relief when she finally begins to  confront the unsettling feelings she gets from her white BF and finally admits he's a creep with yellow fever. The main plot is her discovering that the AsAm poet she's writing her thesis on is actually a white guy who's been masquerading in yellowface for decades, and has built a career off of it.

 Honestly the plot wasn't that interesting. It felt really contrived sometimes and way too on the nose. Like I get the point the author wanted to make, but does it have to be so literal? It felt like being bludgeoned over the head with a lecture sometimes. All the points made about Asian women and their treatment & identity & experiences were pretty basic and not very subversive. It was like critical race studies 101. The book made me laugh a couple times, so kudos for that. But about halfway through I felt bored.  The book is satirical and it works at first with the author nailing a lot of the archetypes & experiences of AsAm women. Like some of the girls in this book, I've known girls like that IRL (and god have I mourned them and prayed for them to open their eyes). But by the second half it feels like the author is smacking you over the head yelling "this is the message I am trying to convey." 

A wild ride of a book -  I feel like it scooped my brains out. 

About a North Vietnamese communist mole in the South Vietnamese army during the war, starting with the fall of Saigon and following his migration to America. A really long book but I appreciated its explicit and uncompromising criticism of US imperialism and warmongering. I appreciated the humour and satire in it as well.

Have to warn that while there's graphic war, torture and violence throughout, the SA scene at the end is particularly explicit and terrible to read. Which makes sense, considering its alluded to ominously throughout the book as part of the protag's repressed memories.

Just finished speeding thru this in like 3 hours and cried so hard I got sweaty and choked a bit on my spit. 

Historical fiction following the life of a spoiled rich son who gambles away his family's hereditary fortune, and follows him and his family's life as they live through the Japanese invasion of China, the civil struggle btwn the communists and nationalists, the cultural revolution, and the great leap forward and the famine. 

Halfway thru I was like this isn't that sad why did every online review wax on about how tragic it was. Then everything started hitting one after the other. Every time I thought "my god this is sad," it would find a way to get sadder.

I think the saddest part was recognizing some elements from my mom's own stories about her childhood and the stories her own parents told her about their lives. For example during the famine when people start eating leaves & bark out of desperation, and dig everything in the dirt out looking desperately for even a seed or piece of plant root to eat -- my mother told me about how her parents told her stories about that time. 

But in the end the book is never pessimistic, despite its telling of human suffering, class struggle, war, trauma, and mass hysteria. It always remains hopeful and oriented towards the future. It tells us unequivocally to live, even if it's just to live an ordinary life. As long as we lived and had people we loved and can cherish our memories, long after we are gone.

 

Favourite passage that made me put it down and laugh for a long time: